Kitsune9tails

Just want to ensure that I continue to have at least one character with each powerset in the game.

[redacted]

If one was going to sell the suit, how would they go about it?

1: Prospective buyers that are willing to pay more than a few hundred are going to want to see a demonstration. What would you set up?

2: How would you test the suit before selling it? Would you?

3: How to perform the handoff? Do you think a doublecross unlikely?

...

If you are going to use the suit to go after criminals, how do you go about it?

1: Do you just kick down the door of the nearest suspected drug house? What do you do about any noncombatants that may be present?

2: How do you go to and from your house? Just leap away under cover of night wearing the suit, or do you set up some kind of base?

3: Do you try to beat the authorities to crimes via the scanner (and risk encountering them at the scene) or go after criminals by some investigatory means (trusting your detective skills)?

A package arrives at your house with no return address, delivered while you are not home.

It contains a bright and colorful skintight suit made of a spandex-like material, along with a high tech bracelet/watch/smartphone kind of thing and a helmet. The suit is designed to cover every inch of the wearer's body.

Activating the bracelet causes it to announce that it has calibrated to your specifications and will now only work for you. A menu that you can access via it lists super powers the rig is supposed to allow you to use while it is worn.

- The suit is supposedly armored: it should allow you to stand up to bullets, hot flames, and the like without harm but with possibly considerable discomfort.

- The rig is an exoskeleton and should multiply your physical strength by up to a factor of 100, based on voice commands.

- The bracelet can fire a laser/taser that via voice command can have an effect ranging from a mild shock or cigarette lighter up to that of a 50 caliber bullet.

- Besides acting as a smartphone, the bracelet is a police/radar/military scanner and can easily spoof phone/internet accounts.

- The helmet is fully integrated with the bracelet, with an HUD, and along with the suit functions as CBR gear (thus helping keep you from leaving forensic evidence at a scene). It can function as a rebreather for 12 hours or so.

What would you do at this point?

1: Call the authorities and let them have the suit?
2: Repackage it and leave it on someone else's doorstep?
3: Start trying to test/reverse engineer the suit?
4: Ebay baby!
5: Start working out/taking kung fu classes so you'll look better while leaping from rooftop to rooftop wearing it?
6: Something else?

If your answer is 5, please consider the following...

Crime or anti-crime? Both?
Who would you tell about the suit?
Is there someone you know that really deserves a good punch in the jaw from an anonymous superbeing?

This is a perspective on game design that I had not deeply considered. Thank you.

You bring an interesting perspective to the 'cosmetic' decision-making process. I had always thought that without consequences, a decision was often equal to coin flipping (NOT in my personal case, since I tend to RP these decisions myself).

When a decision has a consequence, and you choose the less advantageous (by whatever metric) consequence purely because "that's the decision x would make", to me, that is the epitome of role playing.

But the idea that a decision having little or no mechanical consequence making it MORE indicative of a character's personality? That seems newish and rare to me.

My hope is that newer missions offer more of these dialogue choices, so that more 'character voices' can be served.

Being able to decide between:

- By your command.
- Eh, whatever, okay.
- Only because it serves my purposes.
- On it!

In a lot of situations would be fun and great to me, whether or not it loaded points onto some invisible 'relationship meter'.

If I could wave a magic wand and make it happen, a lot of 'The Sims' and perhaps The Elder Scrolls would end up in City of in terms of ways you can interact with NPCs.

In most media, I like there to be a Core of the familiar, surrounded by as many flights of wierd fancy as possible.

Here is what I mean:

I love the fact that in City of... you have a basic 'generic hero world' that resembles DC and Marvel just enough that the comic book geek in me feels right at home...yet i am not restricted to only making four-color spandex types. There was enough wiggle room provided in the storyline and fluff that I can play someone outside that genre, like characters based on horror movies, anime, history, or whatever.

When I pick up a series of novels or watch a television show, I prefer the kind where there is an "over arc" dealing with the nature of the world, or the history of the main character, but it is not 'locked into' that story so deeply that the individual stories can't also be 'problems of the week' or wander off into bizarre territory.

For instance, I like shows like "the 4400", "Heroes" and "Dexter" that have a main character or few, but also strong side characters and side stories that were tangental to the main story but also fascinating. Shows that get too deep into a single story to the point that they become an eternal miniseries dealing with one subject or pure problem-of-the week fluff ("Psyche") turn me off.

This also extends to things like individual characters.

I like to be able to encapsulate a character in my mind quickly and easily "Inara is a classy courtesan with a heart of gold", and yet know/beleive that the character is also much deeper and more complex than that. Things like Inara's training in various combat arts and her complex (borderline abusive) relationship with Mal (when it was clear she didn't need him in any financial or physical sense) in Firefly really made her fascinating.

You can apply the same to settings (I loved the fact that Deep Space 9 was essentially a captured enemy station with potential secrets of its' own), themes...the list goes on.

Give me more of the same, but with more and more optional twists as things progress.

Would I want City of... to force me to play a driving minigame? No. Would I love the option to play a driving minigame inside City of...? Yes!

The tech we are getting that allows us to make meaningless but fun conversational choices in missions? LOVE IT! I'll love it more when those choices more often lead to alternate story options and resolutions.

There should always be a 'standard progression path', but there should also be side paths to take.

Okay, let's set some terms.

The Marine Expeditionary Unit has access to any and all supplies that are standard issue for it and which it can transport using standard vehicles through a large gateway back to Ancient Rome. They don't get sattelites, air support, extra bodies and whatnot, but they are 'fully supplied' with bullets, bandages and what not. The gateway will not be operable during the exercise: they begin 'fully supplied' but do not get to resupply.

The Roman Empire consists of the capital city and one half mile in each direction, cut off from any support outside that radius, but able to draw upon any and all support within that radius, including slaves and citizens. They do not have access to supernatural figures and implements such as the Spear of Destiny, Christ, or various gods.

Each side is informed as to the terms of the engagement one half hour before it begins: the romans have been told to expect a small force ot technologically superior foes to invade, but not the direction of the invasion or details about modern tech or tactics.

The Marines' time displacement device is in a closed steel container 20 feet per side one mile from the edge of the city in a non-buried location they choose. They 'lose' if they lose 50% of their personnel, or if this device (witht 20 tons not including container) is moved 100 feet from its' location. The Romans are informed of this victory/loss condition, but not the location of the device.

Rome loses if a Marine Officer sits on the imperial throne.

No special forces units or legendary commanders on either side.

Both units are psychologically prepared to fight to the death within reason: they are under orders to take the hill "at all costs", but they have incentive to live to return to family back home, etc.

We will assume Rome is at the height of its' technological/military power, so just before Nero's reign?

annnnd....GO!

This should clear up the confusion about regenerations... Part 1 of 4...

Actually, I could go for Stratego and Milles Bournes, because they could basically just be a good period war movie and a good racing movie.

A Magic the Gathering movie I could actually see as well, the game has a lot of good stories that the expansions were built around.

Battleship could have been just a good WWII period piece about fogbound bombers or something. Not Battleship: From Space! With a romance and manchild-earns-respect story tacked on.

My answer is that this game does it right in that there is a variety.

You can pick powersets that give you different varying effective battle speeds/reaction times, and in some cases, seek out different enemies that do the same. For instance, I find battles against Malta to pace very differently than battles against similar-level Carnies.

I don't think the game should force the same reaction times on all players. I like being able to vary my needed twitch level to some extent with my mood and current degree of caffienation/sleep deprivation.

The hard part, from a design point of view, would seem to go back to the idea of one of your other threads: keeping challenge consistent between slow and fast play. But I think this game does a fair job of that as well.

Maybe somewhere, like on an official wiki, they could label the various enemy groups to indicate the design-intended twitch levels. Something like "these guys require fast reaction times" or "these guys are fairly slow, but hit hard."

I got your battleship right here.

Human Torch, perhaps?

Maybe Husk?

I'd say that to qualify as a "Great Actor", you have to have shown some range. At least one role that made you go, "That was him in that? Really?"

A list of Most Enjoyable Actors is a whole different beast, and that's what I think we are seeing here. I like seeing Keanu Reeves on screen from time to time, but I would never accuse him of being able to actually act.

Woody Harrelson can make me beleive him both as a vapid bartender and a cunning serial killer. That is acting.

On the other hand, as much as I love Jack Nicholson, his everyman Jack Torrance was just as scary as his Satan, and his Joker, even before the Overlook Hotel got it's hooks into the character. Even at his most lovable, Jack still seems like evil incarnate. Enjoyable, but not an indicator of range and depth.

Then you have Christian Slater, who despite seeming to be constantly attempting to impersonate Nicholson, manages to pull off a deep, conflicted but ultimately heroic teen in Pump up the Volume, and a mustache-twirling Magnificent ******* in Heathers.

In 1976, Statesman was "nearly killed' by a Soviet tactical nuclear missile while trying to rescue a downed American pilot".

First of all, is there any more info than this on the incident? Did the nuke hit him in the chest, or just impact near him, or did he even avoid it altogether?

More to the point though, what superheroes could get physically struck by circa '76 tac nuke and survive?

No need to mention Kryptonians, Daxamites, or incarnations of various concepts.

Wikipedia says that 'tactical' nuclear weapons range from a mere 10 tons of force, to up to hundreds of kilotons. For purposes of discussion, we will assume a yield equal to that of the Hiroshima bombing, 13 kilotons, which created a zone of total destruction roughly one mile in radius.

Another issue with VHS copies of broadcasts was the quality of the copies.

Once CDs came out and it became possible to sell copies of a product that were essentially identical to the original, the laws changed.

In any case, I think the essential questions have been answered:

Does a contract with Netflix impact the legality/morality of identical data obtained from another source?

No, it does not.

Does logic impact the legality of the situation?

No it does not.

There was a Superman video game that came out a while back, and while it was reportedly pretty bad overall, there was one concept that seemed perfect to me:

Superman did not have a life bar, but the city of Metropolis did.

That said, if you wanted to write a combat challenge for a Superman story, there are quite a few wells to go to:

- Magic. Although a magic sword will still bounce off his invulnerable skin, it is just as easy to hurt him with a voodoo doll as the next guy.

- He's just an alien. It is beleivable and established that there are other races out there that are as powerful as the Kryptonians: the Daxamites, the Martians, the New Gods, etc

- Cheaters. Some beings the laws of physics/science themselves don't apply to, such as extradimensional beings, like Mxyzptlk. Some of the beings in the Cthulhu Mythos could probably hand Supes his cape without realizing they'd done anything.

...also, Superman's understated but inherent arrogance makes him a lousy tactician. There are a lot of people that he could just fly up to at .9c, punch into unconsciousness, and drop them off at jail before they finish their gloating monologue...

...but he won't because he's Superman.

Not every mission should be challenging, but they should all be interesting and fun (also very subjective words).

When a mission presents itself as particularly challenging, and it doesn't send me to the hospital once, or at least make me think "hmmm...how to go about this...", then it's a bit disappointing.

"Cheating" doesn't bother me in this game. Not every fight is supposed to be Superman vs Doomsday. Most are Captain America versus A.I.M goons (Cap is not being challenged), and some are X-Men versus Magneto (Magneto cheats), with a few in-between.

Sure, a lot of missions should be mindless button pushing, but at least once per story I want to have that moment of "Here comes the tough part."

What the actual challenge IS should vary, but it's all on the table: Marathons against mountains of hp, attacks that can one-shot me, 'puzzle' attack and defense patterns...(just not all on the same guy in a solo mission, please)

The thing is:

- At all times I should feel like I CAN win if I do the right thing (and the right thing can be recruiting general assistance once in a while, but making me hunt down a specific build is a no-no), and
- At all times the foe's tactics, powers and cheats should fit the story

I think a lot of people forget that around 5-20% of the "solo" missions in the game are actually intended to be team content (and labled with the 'you should bring friends' disclaimer. And of course, any content that is labelled team content such as TFs should range from challenging to outright impossible to solo.