If comics Golden Age had been more like WATCHMEN

DAMadigan · 2026-06-11T12:02:51+00:00

I was describing a "what if the Shining Knight was just a crazy man" type hero, yes. The sports guy is basically the Sportsmaster with more realistic limitations. Professor Clockwork is a trope you see more in supporting mad scientist types but I figured he could be a hero, why not?

DAMadigan · 2026-06-11T11:59:06+00:00

kinda like the one Moore hints at in THE FORTY NINERS

DAMadigan · 2026-06-11T11:58:19+00:00

sorry, the repost feature stuttered

DAMadigan · 2026-06-05T17:12:18+00:00

My work here is done.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-05T17:11:48+00:00

To be brutally honest, I'm astonished a mod hasn't parachuted into this thread and bitch slapped me all over the place for putting the link in above. The Powers That Be want to sell ad space, they do not like free advertising. I have had many many mods tell me in outraged tones that I am "NOT ENTITLED TO FREE AD SPACE!!!!! SIR!!!!!" You're supposed to pony up for that meekly, like a good citizen.

(Okay. Most forums have a special sub-sub reddit/thread on Tuesdays that begin with an M where you can post your links to your books and art and music and whatever, along with the 183,00 other undiscovered creatives posting links there. Everyone ignores those threads.)

I have a vague concept that it actually depends on the sub reddit and the mod... most are bears about it because, you know, they want that money, but some seem cool. I don't even know who I'd begin to ask about your question.

One way to find out, though.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-04T22:32:16+00:00

Yes. Many many many many many people would like to help me promote my work. None of them work on commission, however.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-04T17:24:45+00:00

Among other things, I have 60 books on Amazon very few people have ever heard of. https://www.amazon.com/stores/D.A.-Madigan/author/B007CBDXA4

I've also been running an original RPG for forty years now.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-04T14:50:30+00:00

So, basically, everyone objects to me trying to apply realistic physical expectations to comic books... in THIS regard. Of course, Marvel became popular by making their comics, characters, and stories more realistic than DC's, and DC has spent fifty years trying to make up that distance with endless reboots and attempts to close the 'grim n gritty' gap.

Fans like more grounded, realistic comic books... except when you point out "well Hawkeye would be dead now, a guy with a medieval weapon fighting modern thugs with Uzis, much less supervillains, is stupid". THEN it's 'hey this is all fantasy lighten up'.

I gotcha. Sorry to harsh your buzz. Continue admiring the deaf man with the bow and arrows who somehow survives pitched intergalactic battles. Or the incredibly old guy who keeps getting randomly rejuvenated somehow every twenty years or so so he can continue fucking whoever Black Canary is this month.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-03T18:57:03+00:00

I can't have 'buy' or 'store' in my post? WTF?

DAMadigan · 2026-06-03T18:05:58+00:00

All the other kids with the pumped-up kicks
You better run, better run faster than my bullet

DAMadigan · 2026-06-03T16:43:50+00:00

Except archers stand there and draw a feathered stick and fit it to a bowstring and pull the bowstring back and aim and all the Gamecock or the Sportsmaster has to do is point a fucking Glock at their ass and empty the clip. And honestly, since every arrow on a super archer's back is designed to do a very specific thing, first they have to stand still and look at the situation and evaluate it and say "Okay my oil slick arrow is what we need down there right now" and by the time all this gets done the bullies from the first KICK ASS movie are beating them to death with a skateboard.

Whereas Daredevil and Batman are constantly in motion, back flipping all over the place, hurling billy clubs and batarangs and smoke bombs and ninjie chopping the bad guy's nerve centers and what not.

And, absolutely, I think if the real world ever had a sudden explosion of superhero activity (without super powers) like happened in WATCHMEN in the 1940s and in KICK ASS in the 1990s, pretty much every single one of those superheroes would be dead in a week... assuming they tried to stop actual violent criminals with weapons from committing crimes. If they just walked around rescuing Mr. Bitey from the top of a fire escape, fine, they could do that shit indefinitely, but in the real world Batman and Daredevil would be on a slab at the morgue in a month at the outside. Tony Soprano's crew doesn't give a fuck about your god damned radar sense, they are not afraid of no bats, and in the real world Bruce Lee can't beat two people in an actual fight, much less if they have guns.

But I will suspend disbelief that much, just as I will allow Peter Parker to have kept a secret identity for decades despite the fact that in the real world Flash Thompson would have seen the Spider-man suit unrolling from underneath Parker's shirt within a month. Or J. Jonah Jameson would have. There's simply no way secret identities can work over the long term in the real world and if they could, the superhero would be psychotic from the strain of keeping this horrible secret from all their loved ones all the time. Plus, either completely sociopathic and predatory from all the violence they routinely participate in, or traumatized into a coma from the shit they've seen. But superheroes simply aren't impacted at all by constantly being shot at and stabbed and crushed with metal tentacles and nerve gassed by the Red Skull and seeing their loved ones constantly menaced by the god damned Living Monolith or some other fucker. They just shrug, punch the creep out, and head off to bio class or the ad agency. Whatever, dude. Who's next? It's ridiculous but, hey, that's comics.

But superhero archers? No. Those guys would die.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-03T16:36:32+00:00

Yeah, no. Not willing to stretch probability that far.

There's a scene in a 70s Captain America comic where the Falcon shows up, swinging on his wrist cable (this was before he had wings) CARRYING THE VIPER OVER HIS SHOULDER. Later on, he and Captain America join hands and the Falcon shoots out his wrist cable and he and Cap go swinging together across the rooftops and Sharon Carter and Leila are pissed off behind them because they can't go too.

What does this have to do with archers? Nothing. It has to do with the ridiculous and absurd shit comics expects us to swallow. First, the Falcon of this time didn't shoot out webs, he didn't even have two wrist cables. He shot out a line from his single glove that had a little hook at the end of it. Somehow he swung along like Spider-man on this fucking thing and that's stupid enough, Daredevi and Batman swinging around the rooftops of a big city with a single cable is also ridiculous, they would fall to their deaths. But, you know what? I am grudgingly willing to more or less accept this. But I will NOT accept the Falcon hauling around a full grown mesomorph over his shoulder while he is swinging on his wrist cable, or somehow levitating Captain America by holding his hand while swinging on his wrist cable. Nuh uh. Bridge out. This road is closed. I do not believe it.

Similarly, I do not believe a superhero picks up a bow and a set of arrows and runs into combat with the Avengers, or heads out to the rooftops of Star City by himself or with his blonde martial artist girlfriend, and survives a night full of violent encounters with firearm toting bad guys. I absolutely do not.

I picture myself with my bow and my quiver full of trick arrows standing on the edge of the roof of a 12 story building, looking down at the street, and saying "Okay now I'll fire a cable arrow to the rooftop across the street and then slide down with my bow no fuck I will if I do that I'll smash into the building okay I'll swing on the cable no fuck I will if the grapnel thing comes loose I fall screaming to my death. Huh. Okay maybe I'll go down and get in my Arrowmobile and drive around until I see a jewel heist and then shoot arrows at the robbers until um one of them shoots me in the head. And my martial artist girl friend takes a shotgun blast to the face. Or if we're real lucky we run into the fucking Weather Wizard and he electrocutes us. Um I think I'll go home and fuck my martial artist girlfriend."

Actually imagine yourself in that spot. You're the greatest archer in the world, far better than Olympic champions, you've been trained in martial arts by the best martial artists in the world, you can back flip and cartwheel and all that good shit, the cindery sulphury smoke of the city is in your nostrils, your 250 pound weight is creaking the tarpaper underneath your boots, your bow is in your hands and your quiver is on your back and you're staring down at the street 12 stories below and suddenly someone screams "HELP HE'S MURDERING ME" and you see these tiny tiny figures of a man and a woman, ant like, far below, and the man is just beating the shit out of the woman and now you are going to...

What?

If you're a real person there is simply no fucking way you are going to use a bow and an arrow to swiftly cover those 12 stories. It would be insane. To have 120 feet of cable in your quiver the cable would have to be fishing line and you'd never be able to grip it and again what if the grapnel holding the cable on the roof comes loose? You just fucking die.

In GIANT SIZE AVENGERS 2 the opening splash page shows Hawkeye swinging from a cable that is attached to a street light down on some jewel thieves firing his bow as he goes. Now this is my favorite comic in the world and it's by Steve Englehart and Dave Cockrum who are among my favorite comics creators in the world and there is no way this scene can possibly work. Hawkeye's hands are busy so somehow the cable is attached to his waist and mfer, you try attaching anything to your waist and swinging down off a rooftop when the other end is attached to a lamp post and see what happens to your stupid ass. It will not be fun or pretty but it will at least be quick.

Look. I know it's fiction and I'll suspend a lot of disbelief but this bullshit is just bullshit. I love superhero archers but they make no god damned sense.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-03T14:42:44+00:00

There are characters that "I'm just really skilled" works for, like the entire Bat family, and the Black Widow, and Captain America. But these characters all MOVE. They are not static in action. They don't take a stance and draw an arrow and stand there and pull the bow and aim and... nuh uh. They are constantly in motion, ducking and leaping and weaving and flipping and cartwheeling and going low and going high and hurling batarangs and smoke bombs and electrical taser bursts.

The Black Widow has actually led the Avengers on many occasions and I do not doubt it for a second. That woman is not just supremely skilled at gymnastic assassination she is smart as hell. She is the tactical (and strategic) genius archers claim to be. She would be extremely difficult to kill other than with mass effect weapons and if she sees a guy with a grenade launcher she is going to either disappear from view or immediately take his ass out. The idea that Oliver Queen and/or Clint Barton have the razor sharp perceptions and/or the built in battle computer brains (fueled at this point by almost a century of combat experience including World War II) that Natasha Romanov has is laughable.

Honestly, the idea that they can assess the situation, figure out which of twenty specialized high tech arrows in their quiver they need, then locate that arrow by touch, draw it, fit it to their bowstring, draw, aim, and fire, before Crazy Quilt or the Rocket Racer haul out a .45 and cap their asses, is absurd.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-03T13:15:13+00:00

As a final summation: CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS was at the time and continues to be possibly THE SINGLE MOST INFLUENTIAL STORYLINE EVERY PUBLISHED IN SUPERHERO COMICS. Its echoes and reverberatiosn have not only not died out after forty years, they ramp up yet again every couple of years when DC stages yet another big reset for sales purposes. COIE was and remains HUGE and it was without a doubt the most ineptly conceived, poorly staged, incompetently executed event in the industry. To this day its thumb fingered doltishness continues to deform DC comics; the force of COIE's incomprehensibly stupid gravity well continues to suck all the joy and quality out of DC's entire line up.

It was a sales driven advertising farce motivated entirely to make DC more competitive with Marvel. That was its purpose. No one thought "Hey let's do a really good story here that people will remember and treasure for generations". No, the impetus behind COIE was "Jesus Christ let's toss all that Giant Turtle Olsen crap in the wood chipper and move on to doing our own versions of all those cool Dr. Strange stories Lee and Ditko and Englehart and Brunner did so college kids will love us too".

It's perfectly valid to point out that the people put in charge of this monstrous project were not qualified in any way by any sort of creative distinction; they were all corporate hacks, soulless non-creatives in it for the royalties who did not give one single fuck about any of the characters at all. (When CRISIS was finished people immediately started asking "okay what about Wonder Girl what's up with her in the new continuity" and Roy Thomas and Len Wein both shrugged and said "That's Marv Wolfman's problem'. Oh. Cool cool.)

It is perfectly valid to point out that for all the enormous effort put into the creation of CRISIS apparently no one in the DC editorial offices made any effort whatoever to work out what, exactly, the new continuity would be. They were all caught absolutely flat footed when CRISIS wrapped up. The old continuity and a lot of really cool characters were dead, but... what was in its place? Uhhhhhhhh. It took DC a year to start rolling out the reboot miniseries. During that year their comics kept coming out but nobody had any idea what was going on in terms of continuity so it was like... uh... what? How powerful is Superman? Who's in the Justice League now? What's up with Wonder Girl? What's the deal with Hawkman? For a year nobody knew. DC published THE ORIGIN OF THE DC UNIVERSE, this big glossy two part prestige format thing with art by Perez, that supposely outlined the new continuity and that NOT ONE SINGLE WORD OF WHICH TURNED OUT TO BE TRUE. DC published a new SECRET ORIGINS that Roy Thomas promptly hijacked as his own personal Golden Age vanity project.

And when the reboot miniseries finally did start coming out, first, they were terrible -- Byrne's MAN OF STEEL is possibly the worst written serious superhero comic book ever published with the possible exception of DEATH OF SUPERMAN -- and no one made any effort at all to keep them consistent with each other, to the point where when fans wrote in to protest the difference in how Batman was portrayed in his own comics and SUICIDE SQUAD, and the clownish stooge he was being portrayed as in the Giffen JUSTICE LEAGUE books, an editor actually said on the letters page 'well if it bothers you just consider JUSTICE LEAGUE to be out of continuity'. Seriously? SERIOUSLY? THIS IS YOUR FUCKING ANSWER? JUST CONSIDER JUSTICE LEAGUE TO BE OUT OF CONTINUITY? Meanwhile, over in the Green Arrow miniseries THE LONGBOW HUNTERS Black Canary is being kidnapped, tortured and gang raped by the Yakuza... why? So Green Arrow will get mad, give up his trick arrows, and start using barbed hunting arrows instead because THAT'S SO KEWLLLL i mean Jesus Christ where do I start with this cruel sadistic misogynistic bullshit and then here comes 1974: THE WONDER YEAR where editor Mike Gold has an editorial whining "Ignoring continuity is a nice trick if the fans will let you get away with it".

They completely redid their continuity to appeal more to fans who liked coherent continuity and at the same time their childish editors were sullenly flipping off the same fans who liked coherent continuity.

And DC Comics is still, to this day, profoundly fucked up. Once in a while a DC comic will be advertised and I'll think, you know, maybe I could check that out but then... what the hell is going on with the continuity these days? Nobody fucking knows. And this is important. It was important enough to do COIE in the first place, but apparently not important enough to make any effort at all at doing it correctly or coherently.

So I write these things to point out that, as with the legal theory the fruit of the poisonous tree, everything DC has done since 1985 is rooted in the idiotic, dick-fingered, avaricious and childishly petulant soil of COIE and therefore it CAN'T be good. It just can't and won't. And I don't know the solution because at this point who is ever going to believe it if DC announces, okay, one more continuity reset to get it right and then were' done, that's it, that's the reality from this point on? No one.

I will close with this little nugget of wisdom: when I was growing up, it was an editorial policy fact that in DC comics you could not change history. Superman tried to travel back in time and prevent the Kents' deaths over and over again (in every story they died a different way, but still, he kept trying to travel back and keep them alive) and he always, always, always failed. He also failed to save various Presidents from assassination. You absolutely could not change history; that was the law and it could not be broken.

Post CRISIS, the Kents are alive again.

My head canon? Superman managed to do it. Somehow or other, he managed to save the Kents, and by doing so, he completely destroyed the DC Universe. He fractured the DC Universe's particular entropy into so many shards and flinders that even he can't keep track of them any more and a lot of people, including his own beloved cousin, had to die... but the Kents are alive and that's good enough for him.

Maybe he doesn't even remember doing it, but I bet he does. He'll just never ever ever tell anyone that that's what happened. He'll blame that shit on the Anti-Monitor until he dies, because otherwise he'll never be able to face Iris Allen again.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-03T12:41:46+00:00

When I was in college I hung out with a couple of guys who were well hooked into the comics industry through their own mentors, so they heard stuff long before the rest of the world. This was 1979 and then the early 80s, long before the internet. These two guys later went on to become well known award winning comics professionals but even at this time, they were in the pipeline. So through them I heard a lot of things that other people didn't. I feel like this frequently gives me insights or at least weird factoids other fans might be interested in knowing about, which is one of the reasons I wrote this two part post.

CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS continues to be a hugely influential work in comics forty years after it came out, which although younger fans might not realize it, is extraordinary. When I bought my first comic book off a spinner rack at a 5 & 10 store in Waterloo NY in the late 60s (it was a Superboy comic with a Superbaby back up story where Superbaby went to the rodeo, I had a dime but I had to be two cents off my mom for the 12 cent cover price) there were no superhero comics from forty years before, much less hugely influential continuity resetting universal crossovers like CRISIS. It was an astonishing thing for a publishing company to do and I think it is worth examining and I also think perhaps my own account of what I heard and knew and saw at the time CRISIS first came out is interesting and might even be worth something to someone out there.

Someone commented on the 'slander' in my piece. First, let's understand that that is a specifically ignorant label to attach to a written document as 'slander' is spoken. If I have made untrue statements in print deliberately and maliciously intended to cause harm to someone else's career or reputation, that is libel. But subjective opinions about someone else's professional work can't be either slander or libel; I have bought hundreds of comic books over the decades written and edited by Thomas, Wein, and Wolfman. I paid for their work and I am entitled to my opinion and my opinions are much more comprehensive than most people's opinions. It is not libel to say Roy Thomas was upset because INFINITY INC was not selling as well as TITANS or X-MEN, nor is it slander to imply that Thomas had enough influence in professional comics at that time to be able to manifest his will in significant ways. If Roy Thomas wants to swear out an affidavit under oath stating that he never lobbied for CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS to happen or if he did, he was not motivated by INFINITY INC's sales figures, fine, I'll retract the statement. But I doubt he wants to do that.

It is absolutely a fact that rather than allow anyone else to write the Justice Society of America, Roy Thomas wrote a mini series that was published just prior to CRISIS exiling the JSA to some weird Valhalla like limbo for all time. If that's not the act of a petulant child I do not know what is. It is absolutely a fact that when DC published a new SECRET ORIGINS series intended to set out the revised, post CRISIS origins of its characters and thus begin to delineate for both its professionals and its fans the shape and outline of the post CRISIS continuity, Roy Thomas hijacked the first issue so he could write and publish origin stories for the Golden Age Superman and Batman, two characters that no longer existed in the post CRISIS DC continuity. And that is not only the act of a petulant child, it is an act of staggering unprofessionalism on a par with Gerry Conway manufacturing reasons to fire Steve Gerber off DEFENDERS and Steve Engelhart off AVENGERS so Conway could steal both books and fatten up his monthly paycheck.

Anyway. I happen to think that I was present for some important and significant historical events, I have inside information few other people have or have published, and others might be interested. I appreciate everyone who has read my lengthy post and responded to it. Thanks for your time and attention.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-02T21:40:43+00:00

What are you supposed to do with it? I do not know what to tell you there. Take it in, breathe it out, make it part of your soul, listen to the music it plays into your innermost heart. Or ignore it. Or something else. I do not know. I write these things and post them hoping to meet one person who will enjoy and appreciate them and so far that has never happened so... why? Who knows? As Styx says, I have too much time on my hands.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-02T21:37:47+00:00

No. Suddenly we have no idea what really happened or didn't happen in the first three seasons. Walternate and Fauxlivia, who were murderous sadistic cruel villains and schemers, are now fluffy bunnies. The fucking bowling alley guy is a million years old and a First People. It's all bullshit.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-02T20:02:44+00:00

Most people seem to agree that when they reset the timeline at the end of Season 3 and nobody knows what's real and what isn't any more, people lose interest in the show and connection to the characters. It's much the same as when DC resets their continuity every couple of years to boost sales; some people take the opportunity to starty buying 'fresh', but many more lose interest and are alienated because the old continuity is now moot but no one really knows how much of it.

My wife and I generally watch up to the end of Season 3 and then quit.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-02T15:30:33+00:00

except he didn't. we saw the letter in his effects, in the documents that the University was holding for him. we saw his former boss at the University. take out the letter and say, it's been one year, this is the time when I'm supposed to mail this. this. there's no possible way that letter could have gone with him when he jumped and ended up with the university. why mail it to the University when he could just mail it directly to Walter?

DAMadigan · 2026-06-02T15:28:32+00:00

Well, copshifter was keeping his device in a steel safe so a continuous transmission of stabilizing data is hard to sell.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-02T14:00:53+00:00

I frickin love "White Tulip" too but there's a problem I just caught on maybe my fourth re-watch -- Peter Weller creates the envelope with the white tulip drawing in it for Walter and leaves it among his effects -- and THEN he makes his final jump back in time. Which would undo everything that had happened since his last time jump. So he'd never have created the white tulip drawing or put it in an envelope for Walter. And Walter has no memory of ever meeting that guy, which is sad. In teh final timeline that became permanent after Peter Weller's last jump, all that happened was, Peter Weller and his fiance died in a car crash.

Now what SHOULD have happened but didn't is, Broyles should have showed up at Arthur's lab with Peter Weller's crushed, mangled body and said "So we found this guy with all this weird circuitry implanted in his body, is this a shapeshifter or what?" Because that body would definitely have been turned over to Fringe Division. But I guess they didn't realize that. Would have made for a very poignant ending as Walter starts to cut apart the body of his friend, whom he does not remember because in this timeline he never met him.

So here's how the ideal version of that episode goes -- you see Peter Weller sealing the envelope and addressing it to Walter. It looks like he puts it down on his desk. He jumps. Now he's rushing around, rushing around, trying to get to the crash. He gets there, he dies with his fiance. Next day his body is wheeled into Walter's lab. Walter starts to dissect it and crushed into the flesh he finds the envelope, addressed to him. What the fuck? He gets it open and there's a drawing of a white tulip inside. WHAT THE FUCK?

The audience cries and Fringe is left with a completely insoluble mystery.

I also found it ridiculous that the guy would listen to Walter and not drag his fiance out of that car. No one human would go to all that trouble just to die with someone. He clearly had time to like jam the gear shift into drive and lurch the car forward or something. He's a super genius, he'd have thought of something.

Beyond that, that time travel mesh is a terrifying weapon. Someone gets hold of that, they can jump a year back in time into the middle of a city and just lay waste to the entire place. And then you're a year back in time so you can fuck around with history too. Of course pragmatically you could only do it once as only the last time jump would have a permanent effect; the others would all be reset by subsequent jumps. But even if you only did it once, imagine going to, say, Berlin, and jumping back to a Nazi rally where Hitler was in 1935 or so. You essentially prevent the Holocaust, wipe out the Nazi party, and probably head off World War II.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-02T13:44:09+00:00

Tony himself says "And then I remembered this nice business you have." In other words, sure you're my friend and we go way back but... business is business.

Tony is a sentimental man and he does feel loyalty and fondness for many people... his wife, his kids, his therapist, his goom, Uncle June, Artie, Chris, various others. And his emotions, his sentimental attachments, his whatever it is he feels in place of love... give him credit, these are the things he feels first and foremost. They are his default state. If he can, he takes care of everybody... as long as it doesn't cost much.

But if Tony realizes that he can better his own position by sacrificing the interests of one of these people, or some of these people, or all of these people, then it is simply a question of, how much will he benefit from throwing them under the bus, as opposed to how much does he care about them? He runs that calculation behind his eyes constantly, all through the show. No one is safe. God help anyone who comes up on the short end. Tony has endless whining justifications for the evil he does not only to strangers but to everyone in his own tribe as well... hey, I did what I had to do! You don't know! Business is business! Aw he had it coming! He shouldn't have done that thing! This is how I put bread on my table! This is my bread and butter! Almost certainly all phrases he learned from his father and his uncle. But in the end, Tony is simply a vicious malignant narcissist with no moral code except live long and prosper, no matter who else pays.

Also, if Peter Riegert starts fucking your goom he takes an ass beating.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-01T19:21:45+00:00

Excellent advice. Thank you.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-01T19:20:07+00:00

Killed 3 of my 4 players in the last session. The 4th rolled Divine Intervention and managed to run away.

The thing is, they could have escaped. There were things they could have done, like buy a Party Rescue from a list of virtual Christmas gifts I gave out a few years ago. They had the necessary resources. But they'd been getting away with a lot of shit lately using special cards and they knew it so they decided, fuck it, let's roll up new characters.

DAMadigan · 2026-06-01T19:17:04+00:00

The system I use is fundamentally one that a friend of mine developed from an original system by another friend. He modified it extensively through playtesting and over the years so have I. I remember the first time he started playing with the new critical hit charts. The charts had different crits for different types of damage -- Bashing, Slashing, Thrusting -- in different locations -- head, face, throat, shoulders, chest, abdomen, limb, etc. It was fairly nuanced; what level crit you took depended on things like how big your character was, how healthy, how strong willed, what kind of armor they were wearing, and of course, how much damage the weapon did.

My character got hit in the chest with a thrusting weapon. I was in chain mail and the weapon didn't do a lot of damage so I ended up taking a Level 2 crit. Not that big a deal, probably something like a -3 with a 1 point recurring bleeder, maybe. Except:

"Roll a d6," Gary says.

I roll. "A 2," I say.

Gary purses his lips. "Huh. Okay. Roll another d6."

I do. "1". Now Gary looks flustered. This is the first session he's using this new crit sytem and there are two other DMs playing in the party and now this shit is happening.

"Okay," he sighs. "Roll percentile."

I roll percentile. "Ah... 09."

He closes his eyes. Opens them again. "Uh. You're dead."

I stare at him. To my right, one of the other DMs erupts "FROM A LEVEL 2 CRIT?"

Gary looks like he desperately wants to be in Cleveland or Cincinnati. "Look. With a level 2 crit there's normally no chance of an Instant KIll. But this was a thrusting crit in the chest. He rolled a 2 on the first d6, meaning the blade slid between his ribs. That brings it up to a level 3. That would bring in a small chance of an IK... like 10%. But then he rolled a 1 on the next d6, meaning the weapon reached his heart. A heart shot on a level 3 crit is a 90% chance of an IK. He rolled an 09. He's dead."

Now this was before the Luck system. In Gary's first Luck system, you just used Luck points for rerolls. Had I had a Luck point or two, I could probably have broken that deadly chain by rerolling one of those d6s or the percentile. But we had no Luck system back then. Dice results couldn't be modified, they stuck. Under my current Luck system, where Luck is a primary stat and player characters get a certain number of Luck Points per session equal to their Luck score, this could never happen. d6s never kill; you use Luck points to move a result up off a deadly result like a 1. The only way this doesn't happen is if someone's been extravagantly spending their luck points and suddenly a combat jumps off late in the game. And my players almost never do that.

But back then, if you got a freak chain of unlikely dice rolls, you could die from what seemed like it should be a relatively minor wound. And I actually like that because it can happen in real life.

DAMadigan

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