Leif_Roar

[ QUOTE ]
Nice, well written piece. I like the Icon bit. I always suspected thats what Serge was thinking when I went in.

[/ QUOTE ]

Either that or, for return customers, "What have they done to my lovely costume?! They've bled on it! Oooh, I'm so going to overcharge them on the clean-up."

[ QUOTE ]
How come the killer ants episode is always the one Macgiver people remember?

[/ QUOTE ]

Because that's the only MacGuyver episode with a well-played villain?


[ QUOTE ]
Loved all 3 stories. Play less - write more

[/ QUOTE ]

Ack. Then I'd never see another level. Glad you enjoyed it.

[ QUOTE ]
Great background and I want to know more about this other persona she has come to the truce with.

[/ QUOTE ]

Now that would be telling. (Besides, I don't know more about them yet.)

[ QUOTE ]
Nice, well written piece. I like the Icon bit. I always suspected thats what Serge was thinking when I went in.

[/ QUOTE ]

Either that or, for return customers, "What have they done to my lovely costume?! They've bled on it! Oooh, I'm so going to overcharge them on the clean-up."

[ QUOTE ]
How come the killer ants episode is always the one Macgiver people remember?

[/ QUOTE ]

Because that's the only MacGuyver episode with a well-played villain?


[ QUOTE ]
Loved all 3 stories. Play less - write more

[/ QUOTE ]

Ack. Then I'd never see another level. Glad you enjoyed it.

[ QUOTE ]
Great background and I want to know more about this other persona she has come to the truce with.

[/ QUOTE ]

Now that would be telling. (Besides, I don't know more about them yet.)

Threw together a temporary icon for the Galaxy Girl Wiki; it can be found on the graphics page. It's (meant to be) based on the pattern of the archetype / origins icons.

Anyone of you with a graphical bent who can do it better, please do. (And consider doing an icon for the various groups at GG too while you're at it too.)

[ QUOTE ]
Well, filled in me alts section. Boy, that was a lot of typing.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, you do have one or two alts more than most people, after all. *offers band-aids for bleeding fingers*

[ QUOTE ]
We're curretly looking for such a forum in the two other communities (de/en) to give ourself example of what other players we don't really know are doing with their little magic fingers (or pencil, pen, drawing tablet, photoshop,...).

[/ QUOTE ]

Are you looking for a City of Heroes specific creative forum, or just creative fora in general? If the former, then ... well, this is a City of Heroes specific creative forum, I guess.

[ QUOTE ]
True, but I always feel the Minds have more sense than to want more than they can have.

[/ QUOTE ]

True. ... Well, maybe with the exception of the ROUs. They always struck me as a little ... narrow-minded. Very good at their speciality, of course -- but maybe not the best lateral thinkers.

(For a similar style of sci-fi, I recommend Neal Asher, although Banks is the heavy hitter of the two.)

[ QUOTE ]
I could write a story featuring faster-than-light starships powered by steam engines. Complete with coal bunkers and people shovelling the stuff into furnaces.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'd read it. (For a story with steam-powered cybernetics, check out Perdido Street Station.)

[ QUOTE ]
Leif, if you haven't, I suggest you read Iain M Banks' sci-fi novels.

[/ QUOTE ]

Read 'em all, and they're very, very good. I'm not saying that an advanced society must have money, but that an advanced society must not not have money. (My comment on it not making sense was specific to Star Trek and the way it's been presented there, and shouldn't be seen as a general attack on moneyfree utopias in Sci-fi.)

Besides, I think part of why The Culture works as an utopia is the scale. It's just so big, and the Minds so advanced and numerous that any reasonable desire any human has can be filled without any real strain on the system. I'm not sure the same necessarily is true for any reasonable desire of a Minds. A reasonable desire for a GSV is not going to be the same as a reasonable desire of a 6' man.

(Now, in my opinion, the really fun thing about Culture is how all its high ideals and pure ethicts are only made possible by the buffer of concentrated hypocrisy that is Special Circumstances.)

[ QUOTE ]
Of course, I'm reminded of Mars Attacks! "They are, clearly, highly intelligent and, therefore, peaceful." Yeah, right.

[/ QUOTE ]

"We come in peace! Do not run. We are your friends."

... Now I want to make an alien alt in CoH with that as his battle-cry.

[ QUOTE ]
Simple leif, they have an near perfect energy/matter cnverter, after you hav ethat, everything is easy to produce, in what ever qunitys you need.

[/ QUOTE ]

Except that they keep running out of stuff! How many times have one of the Enterprises been shuttling some mysterious goods from one place or another, or that they've needed some McGuffin to fix the techno-babble problem of the hour? How come they couldn't simply massively overpower their enemies in the various wars the federation has been involved in?

[ QUOTE ]
Money exists because shortages exists. Shortages exists because manufacturing capability is limited. If a machine society can't provide itself with a manufacutring infrastructure so good that shortages are almost unheard of then it's not very advanced.

[/ QUOTE ]

Manufacturing capacity is only one factor limiting the availability of goods. Raw resources and energy, transportation capacity, people's time and even waste disposal capacity are other limiting factors. No matter how advanced a society becomes there will always be limitations.


[ QUOTE ]
See above, but additionally, we're talking about senient machines with thousands of years behind them. No economic system we would recognise would be required because of the sophistication of the network.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's a bold statement to make about another person's imaginary society. Just consider all the things a stone-age man would recognise in our own society: "You still need to eat? To sleep? You're still using knives? You still use rope? I thought you were advanced!"

[ QUOTE ]
If the society has these things but its citizens still have to go out an earn a crust then it's not a very advanced society.

[/ QUOTE ]

A Roman citizen would probably say the same about our society.

[ QUOTE ]
And remember, we're TOLD they'd advanced further than human imagined they would.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, but not in what ways. Technologically advanced? Philospohically advanced? Religiously? Political? Ethically?

[ QUOTE ]
Humans train to build up and reinforce neural pathways. We do this because it's the only way to condition the human brain. A machine brain wouldn't suffer from that limitation.

[/ QUOTE ]

A machine brain might not suffer from that limitation.

[ QUOTE ]
Once one robot had learned a task it could instantly share that knowledge with any other robot it chose.

[/ QUOTE ]

Theoretically; in the same way that we can theoretically exchange text documents between computers without problems.

EBCDIC-ASCII conversion anyone? Ever tried opening an old Word document in a newer version? Latin-1 or Latin-8? Right-to-left or right-to-left? Carriage Return, Line Feed or both?

[ QUOTE ]
Robots would indeed still need to learn but they would do so at many thousands of times the speed of a human.

[/ QUOTE ]

Why? If a sentient robot brain is as complex as a human brain (which we can assume as it is sentient), training the robot brain might take just as much work as training the human brain. Just because it's artifical doesn't mean it's simple.

[ QUOTE ]
What were these robots doing in a field. What was there for them to learn - especially after 1000 years of life.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm sure that after 1000 years of life a sentient robot would have come to the realisation that there is a difference between theory and practice. Simulations can only take you so far, after all.

[ QUOTE ]
Remember to a sentient machine 1000 years could be the equivalent of many billions years worth of human experience.

[/ QUOTE ]

You're making a biiig unwarranted assumption there. Why must a sentient brain be greatly more efficent than a human brain? We don't know what limitations sentience and self-awareness operate under; nor is it a given that this robotic society had been formed around a form of robotic brain that was anywhere near optimal.

[ QUOTE ]
Was Star-Trek's Data motivated by cash?

[/ QUOTE ]

Nope, but then nobody else in Starfleet was either -- as the confederation was a money-free utopia. (No, that never made much sense to me either.)

[ QUOTE ]
Could the Terminator be bought off?

[/ QUOTE ]

No, but he was neither sentient nor free-willed, so I don't think it makes sense to talk about him being "motivated" at all. (In the first movie, which I personally consider to be the only canon one, he couldn't even be said to be self-aware.)

What about Bender's motivations?

[ QUOTE ]
Then can I point out that you've got these android who've been evolving for thousands of years. Yet aparently still have eyelids (I can forgive that one)[ money, (why would robots use cash?) and require "training". Why would any robot ever need to train?!?

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually, eyelids -- or equivalent protection for fragile optical sensors -- make a lot of sense. And why wouldn't sentient robots use money?

Even a robotic society needs goods and since they need goods they need an economic system to distribute the goods through. Money works, so why not use it?

As for training, a lot of contemporary robot research is actually based on training robots to do tasks. A multi-purpose robot can't be programmed for all eventualities so it will need to be able to learn -- training is just another word for learning, after all.

[ QUOTE ]
[Cures are] usually found in laboratories after much in the way of hard work and little in the way of adventuring.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not in four-colour comic books they're not!

[Here we go; the final parts of Swallowtail's origin story. The earlier parts can be read here: Part 1 and Part 2]

-- Part 3 --

Nothing on TV. Well, her alarm clock claimed it was 3 am, so that figured. Catherine gave up the channel slalom with a frustrated sigh and turned off the TV. She rolled back onto her back and stared at her roof. It could have done with a new coat of paint. Didn't dad have some old buckets of paint in the basement closet?

Catherine was halfway out of her bed before she realised that starting to paint her room at three o'clock in the morning was not on the right side of the sane/insane divide.

"God. What is wrong with me?" She flopped back onto the bed with a groan. Ever since she came back from Europe she'd been restless; she hardly even slept. It didn't help that all her friends were either on vacation or working or, damn them, still getting study credits from helping out on the Normandy dig.

She grabbed the remote and turned on the TV again. Nothing but infomercials and re-runs of old soaps. Oh great. A MacGuyver marathon. Getting up to paint the roof was looking more and more alluring.

Catherine sighed and rubbed absentmindedly at the spot between her breasts where the arrow had hit her. She didn't care what that geek over at MAGI thought, or what the x-rays had shown. Someone had shot her with an arrow -- a real one. Okay, so it had been some kind of freaky magic arrow or something, but it had been a real freaky arrow. She could still feel a lump where the arrow-head had stuck -- and the x-rays be damned.

On the TV, MacGuyver was fighting against an army of killer ants with a silver dollar and a piece of string. Catherine turned it off in disgust and glanced to her alarm clock. A quarter past three. Oh sod it! She rolled out of bed and rummaged through her closet for some training clothes. There was a night-open gym a few blocks away. Maybe if she burnt off some energy on the treadmill she could finally get some sleep. Besides, anything had to better than spending the night watching Mullet-Man on the TV.

Walking home from the gym, Catherine's arms and chest were lead. She didn't know what had gotten into her but after the treadmill she had hit the swimming pool and after the swimming pool she had hit the weights. She'd spent forever with the dumbbells and the barbells; she'd even done four sets of repetitions with a kettle-bell. Her muscles felt like silly-putty that had been crumbled up into marbles and slapped roughly back together again -- and she still wasn't the least bit sleepy.

She glanced up from her muscle-weary study of the pavement and noticed that the Champion Sports shop on her block had already opened. Had she really spent that long at the gym? On an impulse she crossed the street and went inside. She'd gotten money on her travel insurance just the other day, and while she fully intended to spend most of it on clothes, aybe she could pick up a cheap set of weights to have in her room.

Catherine dumped her purchases onto her bed and stood watching the load for a moment, confused and a little scared. Why had she bought all that stuff? Extra string, nocking points, a wrist release, bracers, not to mention all the stuff just for the arrows: arrow heads, arrow shafts, arrow nocks, arrow wanes and lining tape to fasten the wanes with. Oh, and the bow of course; a forty pound Martin X-200 recurve that the guy at Champion had said was a good choice. She didn't even want to think about what it all had cost; her dad was going to have a total cow when he found out.

For a moment she considered calling that Gregor guy at MAGI. He had told her to call if anything weird happened, after all. No, on second thought what was the use? He'd just brush her off and claim the she'd never really been shot with an arrow at all, just like he had before. Anyway, he'd probably been talking about her starting to see dead people or moving stuff with her mind or other freaky stuff, not a major bout of impulse shopping. After all, it wasn't like this was the first time she'd bought expensive stuff she didn't need.

Catherine put her concerns away next to her guilt. She would deal with her dad's reaction when he actually reacted and not in advance. Might as well enjoy the goods in peace first. She unwrapped the bow and spent a moment just enjoying the shiny newness of it, then struggled for a while before she managed to string it; her muscles weren't going to forgive her their abuse anytime soon, that was certain. She raised the bow and pulled the string to her cheek with a quick, fluid movement, aiming an imaginary arrow out her window.

"Nice." Catherine grinned and slowly relaxed the string back up. It was a nice bow. In spite of her protesting arms and shoulders she had been able to hold it surprisingly steady at full pull and she loved how the strength of the bow seemed to perfectly match her own.

This was going to be fun. She search the web to find a nearby archery range to shoot at. There was bound to be one; Paragon City had one of everything nearby. But that would have to wait. First she had a roof to paint.

-- Part 4 --

What was she doing outside? Catherine blinked and tried to shake the cobwebs from her head. The last she could remembered was going sleep after spending half the night fletching arrows. Maybe the paint-fumes had made her sleep-walk or something. Could paint-fumes do that?

God. She was even carrying her bow and one of the quivers. Those fumes must have really gotten her high. At least the fresh air had brought her back to her senses while she was only a couple of blocks from her house. Hopefully she could make it home without anyone seeing her and calling the police. She had no idea how to even start explain what she was doing outside at this time of night with a lethal weapon.

Luckily the street seemed deserted. No, not quite. There some teenager came on his paper-round, pulling a squeaky trolley after him. Without a moment's thought Catherine stepped back into the shadows at the mouth of an alley. In a single movement drew and nocked an arrow, raised the bow and pulled back, aiming the arrow at the kid's chest.

"That one." The words hung suddenly in her mind, clear and decisive.

"No!" In her confusion, Catherine almost released the arrow before she realised what she was doing and with a horror-driven effort of will she wrenched the bow away and down.

The kid stopped and looked up in astonishment at her outburst. He hadn't noticed her till then and didn't know how close he had come to being murdered. For a heartbeat they looked at each other; he surprised, she horrified, then Catherine panicked and ran off down the alley.

A man with a beer-gut stood silhouetted against the light in a second floor window. Even as she was running Catherine aimed and pulled back on the bow. "That one" the words in her mind demanded, but she shook her head in refusal and then she'd run past, the chance of a shot gone.

She left the alley at a flat sprint, scaring the daylights out of a worn-looking ****** who had been leaning against a lamp-post near the mouth of the alley.

"That one!" The words were angry now, indignant, but the ****** was already behind her and Catherine batted away the impulse to turn and raise her bow.

She stopped at the mouth of the alley to catch her breath. She had been running in the wrong direction, almost straight away from her home. The logical thing to do would be to turn around and backtrack along the way she had run but that meant going past the people she'd almost shot at once. Catherine wasn't sure if she'd be able to keep fighting it back.

As she stood in the alley debating what to do, two sharp bangs as from firecrackers sounded from across the street, and the door to a convenience store further down slammed open. A large man waring ski mask stormed out and came running straight towards her, a large, black gun in his hand. Someone was screaming.

"That one!"

"Yes," Catherine allowed. This time she didn't fight the impulse to raise the bow, "That one."

-- Epilogue --

"Ummm... Excuse me?"

Serge glanced up from the Milanese fashion magazine he was studying and considered the outfit of the girl in front of him with a critical and not a little disdainful eye. Amateurs just shouldn't try for fashion -- they always failed. That shirt for instance? A horrible match with the quiver.

"Yes, can I help you?" he asked with all the professional courtesy he could muster. Of course he could help her, that was obvious.

"I need a costume." the girl blurted out, apparently feeling out of place among the bright halogen lights and understated Italian furniture at the Icon shop. It was not an uncommon reaction.

Serge placed his left hand against his chin, index-finger resting along his jaw, and gave the girl a long, appraising look.

"Why, of course you do," he agreed, "What name or alias should I put on the order?"

Catherine was silent for a moment, a far-away look to her eyes.

"Swallowtail," she said after a moment and raised her head to meet Serge's look of polite inquisitiveness, "You can call us Swallowtail."

Added a help-page on how to use graphics in the Wiki,

[ QUOTE ]
Okay, I -have- been holding back on the feedback at part one, but I shan't now, as you requested it. ;-)

I'm intrigued, very intrigued... and if part 3 isn't finished by Sunday evening, I shall personally track you down in Norway and make you write it!

Good writing, a gripping style as per usual with the other stories I've seen from you and most of all; originality. Keep up the good work, Leif!

[/ QUOTE ]

Thank you very much for the comment, and I know the third party is late, but I am working on it so there's no need to book a flight to Norway yet.

[ QUOTE ]
[...]thousands of years of philosophical debate have yet to resolve the question of what is 'right' and what is 'wrong' - and probably never will.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, but imagine the attention Co[VH] would garner if we managed to finally resolve that question here in this forum. You can't but that kind of publicity for money! :-P

[ QUOTE ]
Oh, Leif, I adjusted your definition of when GG is to make it more technically accurate and also so the Scots and Welsh won't be around your house with clubs.

[/ QUOTE ]

Great. Another sinister plot foiled. Do you know how long I've been itching for a reason to try my Albion-made Oakenshott Type XVII, preferrably against angry people armed only with clubs and other blunt weapons?

Hmm. Things look a little plain. Anyone with graphical acumen who feel like making some GG icons? Just something to add some colour to the pages.

[ QUOTE ]
Ica't figure out how to add mine. *Sniff*

Okay, I should perhaps add that Liz's technophobia isn't too far from her player's mindset on it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Go to the page you want to add something on. At the very bottom there's a link "EditText." Experiment.

[ QUOTE ]
Already added my first article!

[/ QUOTE ]

But can I add the Zortel seal of approval to the Wiki? :-P

Well, I've set up a Galaxy Girl Wiki for you all to use. I've put up some suggested structure, but don't mean that to be the final or only structure but just a starting point.

I've put online some of the graphics from the CoH Fansite kit (link can be found on the wiki) which can be used on the pages. Anything else you want up, just holler my way and I'll see about it (as long as it isn't obscenely large in terms of file-size it shouldn't be a problem.)

Well, as there seems to be interest, I'll set one up. More news when they're made.

Is there any interest in a Wiki (user-editable web pages) for the Galaxy Girl meetings? I suppose the main use of such a wiki would be as a repository of character backgrounds, stories, plot summaries and so on.

I recently bought a share on a web-hotel for other stuff, so I could set one up in an instant if there's any interest in it.

[The first part of this story can be found here. The third and final part should, God willing and the Creek don't rise, be finished sometime this weekend.]


Professor Kastner and Doctor Eversley stood at the back of the hospital's waiting room, discussing Catherine's case in hushed tones.

"So you think it's the arrowhead?" Kastner asked and stared glumly down into his cup of what allegedly was coffee.

"Well the doctor's can't find what's causing her catatonia." Eversley replied, absently watching a patient buy a chocolate from the vending machine on the other side of the room, "And swallowtail heads were used for hunting large game, not warfare. It's an arrowhead the owner would collect and use again and again."

"The type of arrowhead that would gain special significance for its owner." Kastner replied with a reluctant nod of understanding.

"Precisely. Everything fits together. The region, the time period, the size and location of the building and the significance of the arrowhead."

"An archer-wizard's lodge," Kastner said, sounding unconvinced, "I know archer-wizards are mentioned in the Malleus Maleficarum, but the site dates to a hundred and fifty years before that was written."

"Written as a reaction, in Germany," Eversley pointed out, "von Digre has made a good case that the order of archer-wizards were founded in Wales during the Norman conquest. If we assume that, it stands to reason that they arrived in Normandy with the Hundred Years War."

Kastner scratched his neck doubtfully, but in the end deferred to Eversley's expertise on the subject.

"This was supposed to be a safe dig," he exclaimed angrily, eliciting a quick hushing from the taller man. More quietly he continued, "The Special Ministry cleared it for student participation. Two of their dowsers spent a week combing the
site for totems."

"It seems they missed one." Eversley replied drily.

Kastner stood for a moment staring irritated into his coffee, swirling it aimlessly around in the cup. After a moment he put the cup down unfinished and with a decisive air strode towards the door to the patient's wing.

"Come on." he told Eversley.

Perplexed, Eversley followed. "Where are we going?"

"To get Catherine out of here and on the first plane to Paragon."

"What?! Are you insane? Lucien, you know the procedure. We sit tight, call the national specialist body and wait for their experts to arrive. Please, Lucien. Think about your funding!" Eversley pleaded, but knew from the set of Kastner's shoulders that it wasn't much use.

"The only competent specialist in the French Ministry is Joseph Halévy, and he's currently in Yemen combing the desert for Minaean magic formulae." Kastner paused for a moment to orient himself at a branch in the corridor, then set off down the right branch at a determined pace.

"We'd be lucky if we even get Desnoyers down from Paris," he continued, "and I wouldn't let that ham-fisted rock-picker meddle with the mind of one of my students if the survival of the British Museum depended on it. No, we get her back to Paragon where they know how to deal with things like this. If need be, I can call in a favour from Gregor Richardson. He should be able to handle this; and if he isn't, he knows the people who are."

"Lucien..." Eversley pleaded, but to no use. Kastner marched up to the room Catherine was lying in, barged into it and a few moments later appeared back in the corridor with the catatonic girl in his arms. Despite her state she still held her right fist clenched to her chest.

From further down along the corridor a doctor came running towards them, probably alerted to the disturbance by a nurse. Eversley looked accusingly down at Kastner and asked rhetorically "Why do you always use an excavator and never a trowel?"

"What's going on here?!" the doctor demanded when he reached them, first in breathless French then again in English, more insistently.

"We're arranging medical transport for a foreign patient back to her country of origin." Kastner replied curtly.

"What? Who gave you permission for that?"

"Her insurance company." Kastner lied and set off briskly back down the corridor, the doctor and Eversley in tow.

"You can't just move a patient like this! Not without the paperwork." the doctor objected angrily.

Kastner stopped, looked at the red-faced doctor and then up at Eversley. "Robert, cut the red-tape, will you?" he asked and nodded towards the doctor. Eversley hid a sigh but nodded.

Kastner set off down the corridor again with the girl. When the doctor started to follow, Eversley stepped in front of him and when the doctor tried to angrily move around him, he placed a hand on the doctor's shoulder and leant down to stare him in the face.

"We'll do what we like," he told the doctor in a dangerously quiet voice, "because I'm six foot five and I eat punks like you for breakfast."

The doctor instinctively backed up a full three paces before his professional arrogance bristled up. "Are, are you threatening me?" he asked incredulously, his voice an equal mix of fear and outrage.

Eversley arched his eyebrows at the doctor and glanced behind him just in time to see Kastner disappear out the door to the waiting room.

"No," he replied after a long pause, "Just stalling you."

Later, thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean,strapped to a stretcher behind a curtain on a commercial 747-400, Catherine could feel the arrow about to lose. In the first few hours it had seemed to be winning the deadly tug of war, millimeter by millimeter burrowing deeper into Catherine's chest despite her desperate grip on the ghostly shaft. It had managed to painstakingly force its way through her rib-bone, but slowly its strength had waned and Catherine had eventually been able to check it in place, its needle-sharp point only a millimetre from the heart it was seeking.

They were both exhausted from the day-long struggle but where Catherine had nourishment and water from an IV drip, the arrow had only had its internal stores of magic to draw on and now those stores were almost empty. With glacial slowness Catherine went on the offensive.

Her entire are was a knot of pain from the hours of gripping against the arrow, but she still found the strength and the will to move it. With a great effort she started to pull the arrow out. The razor sharp barbs dug into her rib-bone and anchored the arrow in place. Catherine's pull tugged on the whole rib, the bone on the verge of splintering.

The pain was unbearable. Catherine held out for a heartbeat, then her hand gave out and her fingers slipped. For a moment she had no hold on the arrow, but it was too weakened by the long fight to exploit the fleeting opportunity. As Catherine fastened her grip once more around the insubstantial shaft, she realised the struggle was killing them both.

"Truce." The word hung voiceless in Catherine's mind, tinged with defeat and desperation. Mentally and physically exhausted and seeing no other way
out of the deadlock, Catherine accepted. With a barely perceptible tingling the insubstantial shaft suddenly wafted away and her hand closed on nothing. She could still feel the arrowhead inside her but it was inert now, no longer pressing for her heart. Somehow she was aware of it knitting itself into her rib, binding itself in place, becoming part of her; but she had no energy left to worry about it.

The struggle over, Catherine fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.


[The third and final part is in the works, and should be posted Sometime Real Soon Now (r) (c) (patent pending), but you don't have to wait for that to leave feedback. Really.]

[ QUOTE ]
For the simple fact that the game is not built for that. It is City of Villains, not City of maybe-not-so-bad-baddies/fallen goodies. Sorry, but this isn't grey, it's black, or white, the way I see it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, strictly speaking, the game isn't built for roleplaying at all. Both game mechanics and aspects of the CoH world are ill suited to roleplaying -- it's difficult to get IC suspense when all the characters are effectively immortal, for instance; and how do you explain ICly that, not even five minutes after you've exited a building where you just defeated and arrested FrostFire, the team goes back in the very same door to ... defeat and arrest FrostFire. Why do the villains patiently wait in their base while the heroes are teleported to the hospital, stocks up on inspirations and jogs back to finish the job?

ICly, I completly ignore the details of the missions my contacts send me on and often the detail of the contacts themselves, for the simple reason that every other character has run through the very same missions. They've rescued the same people from the same villains, they've clicked on the same glowies, stopped the same summonings and so on.

With that in mind, I don't think there actually is much of a difference betwene roleplaying a hero in CoH and roleplaying an anti-hero. You just have to make a slightly larger "leap of abstraction" between the in-game and in-character realities for the anti-hero than for the hero.

That said, anti-heroes (and to a lesser degree fallen heroes) are very often poor choices for roleplay because they don't play well with others. While the characters can be very interesting and fun in themselves, and well suited for other types of fiction, it can be difficult to generate good roleplay with them. It's a shade of CEHAS: "Chaothic Evil Halfling Assassin Syndrome."

[ QUOTE ]
Personally, I think you should look more into RP. It's not easy. You think of COH RP as campy Batman series god moding like I expect many people do.

Which it is not.

[/ QUOTE ]

The Galaxy Girl roleplay is not that campy, but roleplay in general can be. The GG crowd tends towards one particular style of roleplay, and it's not going to be everybody's cup of tea.