Enantiodromos

[ QUOTE ]
Not that either, and in any case, we really really should not have to parse statements like this finer than Jesuits would to arrive a an interpretation.

[/ QUOTE ]

The difference is, States is a guy (a natural origin, no less), and falliable, whereas the Jesuits work with the revealed word of God.

That's a joke, BTW. (As far as I'm concerned.)

I suppose it's possible States is as fundamentally ignorant of his game as some suggest. OTOH, I'm still skeptical of that. And based on that skepticism, supposing that States actually thinks every single mission debreifing says "By the way, this mission, like every other, contains one or more bosses," still seems silly enough to make looking for the real meaning of what he said a legitimate exercise.

Ok, I still think it's obvious that States was responding to the issue: people's inability to solo a mission.

There are many missions you can complete solo withOUT defeating the bosses in the missions. If you can complete a mission solo, the mission is soloable.

Until HE says to the contrary, I'm remaining convinced that he meant that every mission that *requires* you to beat the boss *to finish the mission* mentions the presence of a boss.

IOW: The issue isn't undocumented bosses, because you don't need to beat those to be able to solo.

And, at this time, I believe all missions that require you to defeat a boss do list the presence of a boss, with one exception.

(That exception is, there are a certain number of missions that have hidden defeat-all conditions (which would include unlisted bosses), which is a major bug that I have been bugging, complaining about, and summoning GMs over repeatedly for (it seems like, at least) six months now.)

Personally, I think it's pretty evident that missions all contain, or can contain, bosses (except perhaps some of the ones in the first 12 levels?).

I'd really like to see a clarification, though, of what you mean, Statesman, when you say a mission will always indicate if it contains a boss.

My assumption was, you were speaking to the soloability of missions and therefore speaking to mission *objectives*, and meant that if a mission contains a defeat-a-boss requirement, the mission will say so.

I'm reasonably sure I've never seen anything to the contrary, too, excepting the fact that there's that 2% of the missions that have buggy, inappropriately hidden defeat all conditions.

BTW-- so far, I'm very pleased with the net effect of the HP/XP/Damage buff on MObs. And I don't mean that in a completely selfless way-- +1 bosses are still now effortlessly safe with me around, and I'm pretty sure, more rewarding per hour, too. They are nowhere near as safe, now, without me around, from what I gather both in games and on the boards.

I feel like a hero. Possibly for the first time.

Dr. M. is 47 now, and he's never had a major travel power-- like others who've posted here, he just has swift, sprint, and hurdle. Have sprint four-slotted for running, too (I'm not absolutely certain the last one does anything).

It's easy to call on people to use their imagination, and as it happens, I'm natively a tabletop RPGer, not an MMOer, and moreover, I have imagination.

The game is substantially a visual escapade, however. I have hasten, and all four fitness powers, and could readily replace swift with SS. Moving that fast, with no visual cue other than sparkly ground, is just pushing suspension of disbelief too far, because the game's so visual. Sure I could tell people "it's my motorcycle, vroom vroom," but I doubt I have to add any more vrooms to make it apparent how distractingly silly that is. Not to mention disappointing when in fact a visible motorcycle is EXACTLY what I want.

Anyway, yeah, it's not that big a hassle, and I move pretty darned fast, all things considered.

Another great thing about it is, it weeds out a few folks who're the charge-ahead-at-any-cost type players-- debt magnets who's "playstyle" is so dangerous and hard to control for that I really just don't want to play with them anyhow.

Don't believe the critics. Characters without SS/SJ/Fly/TP are fine.

Ok, I've been thinking my sarcasm above may not have expressed my view very clearly.

I find it wildly bizarre that people would care in the slightest what the gender of the player is. But that's because I make one assumption that's second nature to veteran RPGers.

You are not your character.

Folks that are still struggling with that distinction are going to have ALL KINDS of trouble, well beyond the scope of finding player/character sex difference.

Re: influence, cash, and fame,

We really ought to regard influence as an undifferentiated sum of cash, social connections, fame, etc. Enhancements aren't actually objects you can take to a pawnshop, much of the time. Training and natural techniques are after all, skill. And magic is, like, posession/blessing by supernatural entities, as I understand it. None of those things has an easy, clean translation into cash the way a pawnshop translates "Explosive Ammo" or "Nectanebo's Coin" into cash.

Personally, I think some of the Natural Origin enhances should have been reputation themed, e.g., the fear, taunt, and confuse.

Ok, sorry for threadjacking.

IT'S TERRIBLE!

^_^

It's just as bad as when a male author (like, say, Frank Herbert) writes dialogue for a female character (like, say, the Rev. Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam). It makes me fairly sure Herbert was confused about his own sexuality.

You know, one of the best things I've ever seen on character development, and it's directly applicable to RPing characters, is D.V. Swain's book "Creating Characters."

A close second is L.N. Edelstein's "Character Traits."

Just my 2 cents.

Lotta great ones! I particularly liked "Pain fades, shame does not." and "I'm getting too old for this."

Doc Maningzhoue:
"Take your medicine!" (I use this as a victory cry, mostly.)

Oak Tree:
"No more fire, axes, or YOU!"

Giraffe:
"I'm bigger than you!"

Wisp Outlaw:
"Your evil is weak! Rularuu!"

Doctor Maningzhoue is an M.D. Internal Medicine, Ph.D. Clinical Psychology, IAAP Licensed Psychotherapist. He's emergency on-call surgeon for PCH, and gives lectures in pharmacology and Criminal Psychology at PU. He also does consulting and occasionally field work for Paragon SWAT. He has half a dozen folks in once-a-week analysis sessions, including Clamor herself. He serves on the board for Paragon City Heroic Works, chairing a comittee charged with an ongoing evaluation of superhuman rehabilitation and incarceration. And he does a lot of expert testimony in trials where his medical, psychological, and crimfighting credentials are crucial to convicting the guilty and exonerating the innocent. Needless to say, doc has no social life.

Oak Tree photosynthesizes.

/e frustrated$$cc 3

(Costume 3 is costume 0 with the psychotic evil face instead of the psychotic happy face.)

To some extent I disagree with SweetThang (I mean, come on. Let's not all just agree! That's so weak!)

When RPing in proximity, I RP in local and do OOC in tells. I'll also RP phonecalls in tells, and RP in team channel when on missions.

Moreover, I definitely apply the assumption that people are basically interested in RP, since this is an MMORPG.

Mind you, I'm not about to harangue somebody with RP who's not into it, and I'm not so dense that they have to come out and tell me to quit RPing at them, normally.

However, it would be wildly unreasonable to ask someone to stop RPing in local, or to have an expectation that it won't be done. I would be more reasonable by far to object to people making clearly OOC remarks in local.

MentalStorm pulls quite a trick; took me a second to figure out whether to post that I totally disagree with him, or totally agree.

What he describes is, primarily, moronic. It's such bad roleplay that calling or examining it as roleplay is just mistaken in the first place, the same way discussing the ford pinto as a performance car is mistaken.

Also, it's just flat out wrong to suppose that all or even most RP is like that. Anecdote proves nothing, but speaking of soldiers, I know a guy who RPs an immortal roman legionnaire, another who RPs a mentally defective semihuman mutant with a twisted childhood, and I myself RP, among some of the sheer stand-out-ish characters I have, a manic-depressive antiwar German expatriate intellectual newspaper columnist based on a character by Herman Hesse (whose estate will be suing cryptic momentarily), a mystical tree-spirit (real creative, I know), a cranky modern girl-teenager-esque rebel from Rularuu Wisp society... and, I dunno. Tons of others. Altitis, is bad.

Oh, one other thing.

That opinions and tastes differ somewhat does not mean they differ infinitely, nor does it mean that we should tolerate people using words to mean anything they want, nor that someone who defends playing Poker as "roleplaying" in a conversation about what is expected out of RP in a game like CoH shouldn't be dismissed (with prejudice).

The thing is, if the Picasso of RPing is on CoH, there's at most one of him, and I'm willing to let him suffer being misunderstood and dismissed, for the sake of preserving conventional RPing, which in any event the Picassoesque breakthrough will NOT widely and lastingly replace.

Because RPing doesn't mean "anything you want." RPing is about putting forward a coherent, believable illusion of a personality, in sync with accompanying events and setting. Some things are so necessary to that, for such a large majority of people, that nobody who cares about RPing would ignore them. Likewise, some things are so likely to ruin it for such a large majority of people, that nobody who cares about RPing would do them.

I realize most people won't want to talk that out long enough to arrive at which things are which.

I also realize that there're folks who think calling something "wrong" is simply out of the question. The real reason they say that is suspect, though-- it's an attempt to salvage people's feelings, not an effort to get at what what's workable or not. But people's feelings don't need that much salvaging, and these folks I'm talking about are, after all, wrong! ^_^

Ha! 5:30 AM diatribe! I've been playing too much CoH to write many such, lately.

Well, you know, once in a blue moon I do broach subjects in character like the crimnial justice system, and so on-- things that at least are serious relevant issues for superheroes. But for the most part, that part of "the scene" has not been set well enough for it to come up in conversation. (I posted something here about that once. Wonder if it's still up. Edit: yes it is: Citizens Crime Fighting Act )

Talking interior design is a weak alternative. But. :shrug: Presumably heroes do have conversations about it, at some point.

Comic book superheroes exist in a medium very unlike an ongoing-time enviornment of CoH. They're part of a planned story, and we don't waste frames on Heroes doing nothing but making sandwiches, with no Superheroic events close on the heels of the sandwich. Oh well.

Likewise, it's weird to stand around in a public place in spandex with a bunch of other people in spandex.

I can nearly see the rationale for the "under the Atlas statue" situation, if it were actually mostly RP. But seriously, the spot is for superheroes quite significant. It genuinely is in some ways, perhaps along with the safest zones of Paragon altogether, the Mecca for superheroes worldwide.

Anyway, that's the way I look at it IC.

Just like we might make allowances for Superspeed being a motorcycle, we make allowances for the absence of private superhero bases, etc etc.

It's a balancing act, I guess is my point. Superheroes in the comics tend to be less than three-D personalities at first glance, and exist in breif frame sequences that are carefully planned to make a certain impression and leave the rest to the imagiation.

That's just not to be had if you're gonna RP on CoH.

To belatedly second what others said, you were dealing with lousy roleplaying.

Lousy but unbroken RPing is worse than part-time, half-hearted RPing, to those of us who are serious RPers.

RPing extreme cliches isn't RPing. What it is, I'm not sure. Some lame form of comedy. But yeah, I'm an UBAR RPer, and I woulda dropped that group pretty fast, unless I was just somehow in a very silly and energetic mood.

So, some guys I game with regularly have a themed supergroup (Gatchaman is our primary inspiration, aka "Battle of the Planets" in the states-- our SG is "Science Ninja Team Paragon," though short form is "Team Sentai" [I still don't know what 'Sentai' is]).

And we have, basically, a common origin. Despite the fact that there's a mutant and a tech origin in our group in addition to 3 science.

The team requirements were a costume configuration *excluding* elemental (fire, ice, earth) and dark -based power sets.

Our blaster, energy/energy, was born a mutant with this fantastic ability to control.... I dunno. Plasma. Energy X. You know-- the white bubbly stuff.

Our mutant blaster was studied by a scientist, who uses what he learns from the mutant to alter three other people out of a large pool of volunteers-- me, invuln/energy tank, our MA/Regen scrapper, and our grav/emp controller. The scientist also builds an android with the same discoveries (our tech origin, a rad/rad defender).

We're still hammering all the background details out-- I think we want to make sure we don't miss the chance to be true to genre in some way.

Anyhow, we're on victory, play on sundays.

Anyone else have common team origins?

So, I read here that in 1945, the Japanese invaded and occupied the then-french colony of Laos, with it's significant Hmong population. French paracommandos, other French, and Laotian royalty apparently hid out with the Hmong in the highlands, and later re-took the country, with the help of Hmong militia.

I also gather that Hmong in the U.S., many of whom are in non-east-coast states like Wisconsin and California, are refugees from wars in Laos and Vietnam, and were rather screwed when we pulled out of Vietnam. It looks like another complicated bit of important military and human rights history that academia and the media has never troubled itself to bring to my attention-- not that I'm trying to dodge being called lazy. But.

So anyway. The Hmong do have a history with the French, and some remote wisp of Japanese occupation. They are also traditionally animist, by and large, I gather.

It's suggested they had their own writing system that was eradicated, but semi-preserved in women's embroidery. I suspect the Ancestor Spirit face plates need revision.

Must. Learn. More.

Somebody wandering around amongst world-class villains at portal corps volunteered the info to me right away, last night. Go figure. Hmong, it is.

Ok. I spent a half hour interviewing people in Talos and Atlas today. Not a peep about Hmong. That is, people just aren't saying what they used to.

I thought about that. I suppose you could up the max-per-storyline from three to five, or whatever. I just think I expect storyarcs to closer to belonging to individuals.

So, seriously, we all know there are more city-class heroes (say, L35+) on every server than makes sense.

... ok. I suppose somebody will dispute that. But just, humor me.

The idea I toy with, for the sake of RPing with people, is to know who's done what. Very likely if you play at least occasionally with 20 other people, you know probably 19 superheroes who've independantly done each storyarc, and 16 people who've earned the badge for whacking all the bosses of each faction. That's slightly redundant, and it's hard to have fun distinctions beteen careers, in-character.

So, what I say is, pick out all the people you RP with regularly, and divvy up all the story arcs and badges between them. Allow some overlap, but not, say, more than two per storyarc or badge.

And, assume that your group did all the TFs together, at least including those who did the TF at all. Even if they didn't.

One good "grouping" to work this from would be the supergroup level. Of course, if you have a couple sister SGs, or a few miscellaneous players that frequently play with some of your SG, include them.

My weird scheme for getting it done:

1. Once you know your group, ask everybody to make a raw list prioritizing which storyarcs and enemy boss badges they want.

2. From there, go down all the lists in parallel, hand out each story arc and badge to the first three people who ask for it, preferring people who have fewer items so-far if there's a conflict, and then preferring people who're higher level if there's still a conflict.

3. Get web space somewhere, post a master who-did-what list, and then start taking submissions on embellished versions of the individual arcs that everybody involved with that arc has to approve, then it goes on the site, linked from the main list.

4. Going forward, experience a lot of difficulty sorting it out when different trios of in-group characters both do the same story arc.

This has been brainstorming. Any thoughts?

All superpowerful mutants please report in promptly to your local eugenics center for your assignments. ^_^

Ah, quite. I'm certain they're neither yakuza nor chinese, strictly speaking. Word on the street also says that the Tsoo beat out the tongs-- meaning simply, organized crime out of china. So.

I need to get back out on the street and verify this Hmong business. I'm nearly half "tsoo" myself, and I'm tellin' ya, it's embarassing to not know your own ethnicity! ^_^

[ QUOTE ]
Tsoo are gang members, not an ethnicity, simply because that's the name of the gang.

I know for sure that some NPCs say "Most Hmong are innocent, but the Tsoo give them a bad name!" Then again, you may have misread or seen an old/new NPC statement.

[/ QUOTE ]

Wow. Then they must have changed the NPC text, because I'm dead for sure they used to say it re: the Tsoo, with no mention of the Hmong, like, when I started playing, last may-june.

Gah. Now I have to retool a dozen uses of the word "Tsoo" on my website.