Question about Doug's powers

[robkelk]

(if you know what I'm referring to )

I have absolutely no clue.

Big Jim Slade!

As to the original question, well... I don't think that's one we ever considered back when creating the character, nor have I (to the best of my recollection) ever chosen to us a song structured like that.  I guess the answer really depends on the context in which I'm answering it:

If it were in a game context, I'd be pushing for everything I could get.  <grin>

If it were for The Walk specifically, I'd probably go with whatever made the most dramatic sense. 

Thanks to everyone in the campaign scattering up and down the East Coast over the years, I'm at a point where I've been writing Doug for considerably longer than I ever played him, and consequently I've tended to think in terms of story needs rather than rules-lawyering for more than a decade.

But boiling down the original intent of the character, from the night I created him long long ago when Lisa was still Warriors GM and the other members of the campaign were still Rutgers and Stevens Tech students, the key was understanding the lyrics.  I know we wrote it down as "a language he understands", but really it's knowing what the lyrics mean.  As a GM, I'm sure that the other Warriors members would agree that simply memorizing a translation wouldn't do it -- because there is rarely a one-to-one correspondence between words in one language to another, especially the farther from each other the languages are.  Doug needs enough knowledge to understand individual word meanings and something of the grammar connecting of them. 

In the case of "Volare", well, "volare" and "cantare" in isolation are easily enough understood (without thought) as something to do with flying and singing respectively, but the big block of Italian in the middle of the song is impenetrable -- I can't, and Doug probably couldn't, find enough cognates to French or English to even make a guess at what it means even with the rest of the song providing context -- which in his case he has to do on the fly while his attention is likely on something else (like not dying in a fight).

I guess it boils down to, the easier it is for him to glark the meaning of a song without having to put thought into it, the more likely it is to be a candidate for a power.  (And yes, the implied corollary that a song ostensibly in English but which is sung so poorly that it is incomprehensible -- I'm lookin' at you, "Louie Louie" -- would do nothing for him is valid.)

Is that a satisfying answer, or does it just piss people off?

Sounds good to me.

So, there's probably not enough in "Volare" to give him a power. It isn't as if Doug doesn't have other songs that let him fly.