I don’t think your premise is correct. From memory, and scanning a couple episodes illegally uploaded to YouTube, it doesn’t look like Captain Planet flies away at the end. Usually, the scene just transitions to later after he’s gone, but the few times we see it, he dissolves into light, presumably returning the rings powers to the planeteers and disincorporating. He doesn’t go anywhere, he bodily ceases to be.

Where does his mind go? I think he’s a spirit. Where does team spirit go after the football game is over and everyone goes to bed? It still exists, but it’s not… here. It has to be activated to be tangible.

Chesterton’s fence applies here.

You ever have an image of something like fire or mist or galaxies and stars or whatever taken with a black or white background, and you want to make it a transparent background instead? Color to alpha keeps the translucent elements intact at the appropriate translucency while removing the background color. Super useful for compositing images together.

GIMP isn’t quite as feature rich and useful as photoshop… except GIMP has the “Color to Alpha” function which I’ve still yet to learn how to imitate in photoshop, and I’m not sure it even can. And I use that function all the freaking time.

Yes and yes. I followed the rules as a kid. I played the games with the full rules multiple times even, in defiance of everyone saying that everyone only does so once.

Looking at YouTube playthroughs for nostalgia, it looks like the game rules today have the trap set up to start? When I played, the rules were that you had to build it up slowly over the course of the game, one piece at a time, and only once it was built could it be activated. Yes, I played that way.

Just let anyone scrape it all for any reason. It’s science. Let it be free.

“Oh please don’t throw me into the briar patch Mr. Fox! Anything but the briar patch!” -Br’er Rabbit, who was born and raised in the briar patch, and knows Mr. Fox can’t follow.

Person A quietly swipes a pen off your desk.

Person B robs a bank at gunpoint, and it goes bad, murdering 12 people in the process, including kids.

“Obviously both sides must be talked about with the same weight of seriousness.” “That was my favorite pen, how dare he!!!” “They’re both thieves, and there’s no difference between them.” “They’re both the same.”

Fuck that.

I don’t know that stealing is morally wrong no matter what. My rabbi taught that if a man steals to survive, the crime is not his, but of his community because they did not save him from poverty. That teaching really stuck with me. Yes, stealing indicates something is seriously wrong in the world, but there’s a big difference in where the evil lies— is it in the thief, or in the society?

If you want to make them think a little differently, try a blackjack-esq dc. Set a RANGE they have to hit with their collective skill checks (that add together). If they roll below the range, or above it, either way the control doesn’t quite work— maybe a different consequence for too low or too high. Let them also choose whether to increase the sum or decrease it with their skill check, in the case of overshooting.

And make a variety of skills they can use to control the godling, so that they can strategically try to use the most appropriate bonus to get them where they need. Maybe using certain skills requires doing something on the battlefield too, like standing in a certain spot relative to the godling or some such. Or perhaps doing that sort of tactical movement can let you manipulate the roll or take 10.

That’ll get them thinking different! But if you make it fiddly like this you’ll need to make the payoff for successful control powerful enough to make it worth it.

In the end, using your idea will only work if you really know your players. With an arbitrary random group, I figure the result would be either 100% success rate (they all agree with each other and coordinate perfectly) or a close to 0% success rate (they rarely cooperate). Neither situation is what you want.

Luckily, when you want a certain percentage of success, that’s exactly what dice are for! Now, my group tends to be one of those “cooperators” so I’d tend to want to balance it assuming the party will always agree on what they want the godling to do. Then, maybe use a combination of religion, arcana, and diplomacy checks across the party to determine whether their characters are able to successfully pull off coordinating themselves to control the nigh-uncontrollable thing. I’d still use the “they have to agree on the action it will take” thing but then use the dice to add uncertainty.

If, on the other hand, you expect a lot less agreement amongst your players, you can still use dice, but this time, make the skill check determine whose commands get followed, with close results or consistently low results across the whole party leading to no one’s commands being obeyed and it doing something random and chaotic instead.

In the case of a cooperative party, we’re using dice to lower the success rate. In the bickering party, we’re using dice to increase the success rate. But in both cases, we have in mind a certain target success rate, and it is dice that will get us there.

Let’s say they were organizing using telephones instead. Would you want the telephone providers to proactively listen in on their conversations and cut them off based on content? No. You get the police or FBI to investigate and hunt down the people, possibly with warrants obtaining information from the telephone companies, and target the people doing the crimes.

I feel it should be exactly the same with ISPs. The ISP shouldn’t be doing the policing, the police should be doing the policing. The ISP’s job should be passing bits from MAC address A to MAC address B, nothing more.