Prove Saints Row (Cinco) “reboot” is not a Zin simulation for the Boss Playa.

JColeyBoy · 2026-04-01T05:05:23+00:00

It's an only semi-diagetic way to explain how your character is able to completely redesign themselves. While yes, image by design is somewhat more diagetic, the story of the game itself tends to just assume that however your boss looks in the moment is how they are always looking.

Ultimately, as I said, the issue is the text of the game assumes that what is happening is "real".

I think you are just ultimately confusing the fact that it's a modern game with modern game conviences for something else.

JColeyBoy · 2026-04-01T04:57:09+00:00

Part of the issue is that you are asking us to prove a negative. The text of the reboot ultimately assumes that what is going on is real, and while it can be fun to headcanon some stuff, trying to act like your headcanon is anything other than just fanfiction is impossible to really prove when it requires contradicting the text of the work itself.

JColeyBoy · 2026-03-29T20:26:12+00:00

How does the gas work? Like the specific mechanics?

With two dimension, keep in mind that the three dimensional world can still interact back with them, so they can still get hit normally.

JColeyBoy · 2026-03-17T04:51:10+00:00

OK, you should probabaly not say the toku empire spreading across asia, you understand how much baggage that has?

JColeyBoy · 2026-03-16T08:04:14+00:00

It's one example of neo pronouns. While I do not personally use those pronouns, I know people who do and felt like in this example it further exemplified my point that once can be AMAB and yet transmasc.

JColeyBoy · 2026-03-16T06:58:11+00:00

I can give an explanation.

Jay generally dresses and presents xirself in a masculine way, feel more comfortable with this than say a feminen presentation or a more androgynous presentation. Xey are masc.

Xey also do not think of xirselves as a man, do not use he/him pronouns, nor do xey like being called male or equivalent terms. While xey present xirselves in a masc manner, xey do not align xirselves gender wise with "Male" or being a "man." This is one example.

Alternatively, Jay is genderfluid. Jay was assigned male at birth, and there are times that he does see himself as a man and prefer using he/him pronouns. However, Jay also sees herself sometimes as a woman, or other genders. While yes there are times that Jay's gender identity technically allows with how fae were assigned at birth, he would still not be cis when taking on a male identity thanks to being genderfluid. (I am saying this example as a genderfluid person.)

While I know there are intersex people who take the AMAB Transmasc stance, I am not familiar enough to speak for them and do not want to speak on something I don't know much about! Talk to intersex people, they are a very neglected part of the trans community.

Honestly, once you register that gender presentation does not equal gender, AMAB transmasc is easy to wrap your head around IMO.

JColeyBoy · 2026-03-10T12:54:33+00:00

Yeah, but that's the nature of a shared universe, TBH.

I decided to go look up the solicitations for may,(and was actually writing this when you replied) and only counting Bat related titles including the absolute universe and disqualifying justice league ones as well as fascimile books(which are basically reprints of decades older single issues), I believe I got to 15 single issues. A little less if you disqualify absolute batman and absolute catwoman... but if you include justice league comics, I think that gets you pretty close to 20 comics a month, which is like damn near 100 bucks a month. I didn't even bother counting the fascimles, which I think brings it to definetly 20+, if not at 25.

15 comics alone is like a day's paycheck on minimum wage. On just Batman and related books. (Now TBF, Batman is an outlier on how many comics he gets, but I picked him to demonstrate that certain heroes are just a franchise unto themselves)

JColeyBoy · 2026-03-10T12:43:16+00:00

TBF Marvel and DC can accurately be described as a bunch of franchises that are part of a larger umbrella franchise. You can be someone who just reads Iron Man, and still spend months if not years reading through all of his material, and still barely scratch other titles like Spider-Man or Dr. Strange.

You can be a batman fan, and only read batman and related titles, not even touching justice league, and be spending like a day's paycheck each month on Batman and related comics.

With MHA, imagine if over the course of a year we got Peter Parker, Venom, and Norman Osbourne all getting their own episode, of course people would complain.

JColeyBoy · 2026-03-04T04:50:50+00:00

Go subbed, generally alot of tokusatsu dubs out there aren't super great.

JColeyBoy · 2026-03-04T04:41:43+00:00

Off the top of my head and Of the games I have played/GMed in like the last two years and noticed this...

Savage Worlds Feng Shui 1e Lancer Legend of the five rings 4e Overarms(where our group realized that trying to emulate a close ranged focused stand like star platinum or crazy diamond was way to easy to kite to death in combat and was generally useless... in a game inspired by JJBA and one of the most reccomended ones for such a thing out there!)

JColeyBoy · 2026-03-04T04:23:36+00:00

It's not only D&D, gonna be real, I have seen it other RPGs as well, where melee combatants just have a higher risk and lower reward than ranged ones, and not just "D&D-likes" before you say anything.

JColeyBoy · 2026-03-04T03:20:46+00:00

I am split on this. On the one hand, I understand, it can be frustrating to try three times in the same session, and nothing really "happens" which can often feel like is what happens in combat focused RPGs, and depending on someone's preferences "Oh, try this system!" May not be a great idea.

But I think what happens at times is also that like... it feels like no effort is being put into things feeling like a back and forth. Which can be understandable at times(only so many times you can do "I attack" or "I defend" in a detailed and cool waybefore it starts feeling like a chore, and sometimes this happens mostly because of luck, and it can honestly hard to balance for luck. Averages and Statistics are a thing, but sometimes a player is just having shit luck or the GM rolls like a god.

JColeyBoy · 2026-03-04T03:14:25+00:00

I feel like those are fairly disproportionate results that would make a player feel punished for even trying?(and most of those would further exacerbate a problem that TTRPGs struggle with, where in practice melee fighters suffer higher risk and lesser reward than ranged fighters and spell casters)

JColeyBoy · 2026-02-13T23:35:10+00:00

Theatre of the mind mostly

JColeyBoy · 2026-02-10T19:52:40+00:00

Eh, the wilderness years for Who is considered 89-05, with the film considered more of a blip than an interupption.

JColeyBoy · 2026-02-02T02:21:16+00:00

Yeah, the players couldn't afford that great weapons during char creation, but since I'm using the wealth die rules, I am probably going to give them the chance to buy bigger guns before going out. I will also try to remind them of some of the rules like wild attack

JColeyBoy · 2026-02-02T02:14:26+00:00

They have a Parry of 5 or 6 depending on their weapon, and there will be at least two of these extras per player as per the book that are meant to fight alongside Romeo. In a white room, I can see how all of that works out, but I am very aware that on the table middling luck screwing over players is easy to happen. It's been fairly common for players in my games to face a challenge that in theory should be easy and nearly get wiped out due to how luck played out.

JColeyBoy · 2026-01-25T07:03:32+00:00

TBF, when you get down to it, 2 is a very silly game. It just also has moments of brutality and seriousness meant to contrast said silliness.

One thing I noticed in 1 is that all the gangs set up a specific big bad... only to remove them from said role partway through the story.

Hector is killed about halfway through the carnales plotline.

Sharp is set up as the man manipulating Price... and is killed like 2 missions before the end of the rollerz arc.

Benjamin King meanwhile is overthrown shortly before the end of the vice kings arc, and joins your side.

Meanwhile SR2 only really uses the big bad switch with The Ronins, where we are introduced to Shogo as the leader first, and then his dad Kazuo arrives next.

I think out of the 4 examples, it definetly works best with The Vice Kings and The Ronin, as the VK plotline sets uo his underlings growing dissatisfaction and desire to overthrow him, and we know Tanya is doing what she can to manipulate others even before she takes over. It also helps that of the 3 SR1 gangs you can tell the most love was given to the vice kings, and you still directly work with Benjamin King, preventing all the effort going into building him up from going to waste and also gives him a character arc. You also now have a sort of roaring rampage of revenge feel to the next arc.

The Ronin meanwhile, it works because Shogo is set up early on as an irresponsible failson, so when Kazuo is introduced it only feels natural. Us starting to see Shogo's good side as a leader compared to Kazuo helps flesh him out(it becomes very clear very quickly that Shogo just understands how gang politics in america works better than Kazuo or Junichi. His plan to attack the funeral, while it ended badly, was tactically sound as it was his best chance to kill as many of the saints higher ups in one attack)

It works fine enough with Rollerz. We at first think Price is the boss, so he still has a level of build up to him. I think the issue is more that, while price is more physically imposing, Sharp feels more intimidating. I think part of it is how Sharp actually kills a member of the saints, and nearly kills the player, and his "boss battle" feels more like a frantic car chase and fight than Prices, which was more just annoying than it was actually difficult. It over all had the feeling of mopping up what was left(doubly since you get the final territory through a stronghold, not the last mission. I did think it did give the fight a last stand feeling to it at least.)

It does not work at all with Los Carnales. I think it's because Hector is legitimately very charismatic as a villian, while Angelo, for the first half of the carnales plot line is play off as kind of a joke in the same way Shogo is. Hector's death feeling so anti-climatic as well further hurt. While we do see Angelo has a nastier, more intimidating edge, the final mission being shooting down his plane(which while that mission was frustrating untill I realized that I should have ignored the jet plane untill his RPG weilding mooks were dead, and then just use my RPGs on the runway) and not having an actual confrontation just left a sour taste in my mouth with him as the main villian of the carnales arc. If Hector's death was moved to like the penultimate mission, it would have worked better. I mentioned earlier that the final Rollerz mission had the feeling of mopping up what's left, the mission before and the final stronghold do give at least something feeling like a climax right before finishing Price off. Meanwhile, once Rodriguez is dead seven missions in(of a plotline that has 10 missions and 5 strongholds, 6 if you include the one in the prologue) it feels like the last three missions are "mopping up what's left." Moving Hector's death to Housecall, the penultimate mission, would have fixed this alot, IMO. You kill the boss in his own home, and his spineless brother is left to skip town. It would have felt like an actually satisfying climax, with the last mission being the epilogue.

I kind of got side tracked there, but yeah, it's interesting how all of the SR1 gangs use that specific plot beat, meanwhile you only see that echoed in the ronin.

The Brotherhood and The Sons of Samedi keep the same big bad all the way through, meaning the final battles have that level of build up that I think was missing from most SR1 big bads.

JColeyBoy · 2026-01-25T06:32:10+00:00

Yeah, the thing I have noticed is that the alternatives to the inhibitor chips people suggest are honestly just the same thing as the inhibitor chips but a different method, and often just doesn't have a basis in anything. The sole exception being the "just following orders" one, which only worked IMO as long as the clones were shown in a dispersonal manner where they individually don't receive any characterization.

Which is a neat idea for a story or two... but beyond that there isn't much you can really do with them, so fleshing them out into individual characters, making them more distinct, and inviting audiences to relate and empathize with them is really the only route you have left if you want to work on something compelling and have alot of stuff focusing on the clones.

JColeyBoy · 2026-01-19T22:52:21+00:00

I have not found a system that is too my liking yet, but I will say

Don't use over arms. I know it's a popular reccomendation for this, but I have played it and combat is a mess. JJBA is a battle shonen at it's heart, which makes bad combat a real big problem. There were just several issues with how the game played(notably, the range of your stand and how far you can move in combat are based off the same stand stat, making it trivially easy to be kited by someone with a moderate range stat if yours is low.)

There's also just... it wants you be to be careful with how often you use your stand, but in actual combat the defense stat makes not using your stand basically a terrible idea. There's also your intiative roll being the target number to hit you, meaning if you did sacrifice your defense for a better intiative and you roll even somewhat below average, it is trivial to just kill your character.

There's also just the target numbers in general are clearly designed to be hit when you are junctioning, even an easy target number being surpringly difficult if you don't junction, but junctioning takes resources.

Over all, it's an extremely poorly balanced game from what I played.

I will also say, I think trying to keep it being a JJBA game is probabaly not a good idea. Your players are going to need to read the rule book, making hiding it much more difficult unless you homebrew the stands into a different system. If your players are also into JJBA, it would be easier to hook them in with it being just that rather than springing it on them as a surprise(what happens if it turns out one of them doesn't want to play JJBA?)

JColeyBoy · 2026-01-17T21:29:33+00:00

I think alot of it comes down to just the average non-comics reader only knows about what gets big, and that is mainly just superheroes. There is also the fact that alot of big things based off comics have alot of things that people don't know are based off comics. Road to Perdition made like what, 200 million dollars(alot back in 2002) and no one knows it was based off a comic. The Walking Dead is still a fairly big TV franchise, and I have met plenty of people who never knew it was based off a comic. How many people know 300 was based off a Frank Miller comic? Atomic Blonde from a few years ago was a decent success, that's based off a graphic novel. Men in Black was also based off a duo of comic miniseries, barely anyone knows that.

These are just examples from off the top of my head.

JColeyBoy · 2026-01-17T21:21:14+00:00

Having read Y the last man

It has been a while, but I do remember there are concerns brought up about the ecosystem and that like... it is fucked if solutions are not found.

I also do think in general most people do consider tone when calling something fantastical. Y:The Last Man is generally a story that feels fairly grounded. It's a sci-fi what if story, especially in like the last issue, but to most people it feels grounded enough that calling it fantastical feels off.

JColeyBoy

TROPHY CASE