Premonitions

Aim is such an odd power to "miss" in any case, because it's standardized across most sets and is married to the mechanics of City.

Ehhh, no, The "Energy melee" powersets were based on established concepts in numerous works of fiction. Cryptic/Paragon didn't invent the concept. People weren't "Trained" to expect energy melee powers by City of Heroes.

If I could get Kinetic melee, some very specific inherent typed defenses(fire, energy, psychic, and maybe negative energy) active dodge mechanics, and a few gravity-type powers in City of Heroes, my main would be perfect.

Currently he's a Km/Ea brute, but if Paragon had been able to release the "Kinetic assault" powerset talked about, I'd most likely re-roll him as a Grav/KM Dom.

My point here being I'm actually more at odds with the hardiness of my character than the fact that he uses energy powers in close combat.

That's a thing that makes him feel more unique. Instead of a hard line between shooting energy and punching, there's the fun middle ground.

In fact I'm pretty sure that for most people, if they're "kludging" energy/fire/ice/darkness/kinetic melee powers as anything, it's other energy-type melee powers that aren't specifically in-game.

I hate that all my melee characters in this game are naturally tough and none of them can defend themselves in other, more unique ways while still being basically defenseless otherwise. None of them parry with their swords or brace with their shields or throw up stone walls to hide behind. This is, of course an engine limitation, that doesn't mean it's not a flaw, just an unavoidable one.

"Defense" Vs. "resist" as a metagame thing is a big perpetrator.

Defense as a concept represents attacks not hitting you, something often achieved via action on the part of the target, but it's a passive effect in City.
Resist is fine as a passive effect, things still hit you, you just don't care as much for whatever reason is appropriate to you.

Having defense achieved from a purely "behind the veil" numbers calculation feels less like you are dodging attacks and more like enemies all just have completely terrible aim. Super Reflexes doesn't feel like having Super reflexes, it feels like having super luck.

I like the "blocking" mechanic in Champions for this specific reason. Although it's using different calculations and functions more like Resist than defense, it still represents action taken to defend oneself.


It's just a different, and smaller, box, Sam.

Really, my biggest issue with Champions is how rigidly they define broad concepts. Fire is always used in one way, Ice, Darkness, Energy, e.t.c.

In City I'd have to answer two questions when creating a character:

1. What kind of powers do you want
2. How do you want them to work?

If the answer to the first question was "Fire" I'd then have to figure out exactly how my character used fire to answer the second question, which helps me flesh out their concept more(when designing characters within the confines of the game, anyway) and make it more unique and fun.

In Champions I'd only get to answer one question:

• What kind of power do you want?

And then the game would tell me what that was.

Every single powerset in Champions has a few powers designed to fill an essential role, Energy Builder, Self-heal, block, passive, energy unlock e.t.c. Many of these are actually pulled from the same framework, so certain sets don't even have a unique expression of these.

The rest of the set is geared towards a very specific type(or not, if that's the set's primary gimmick) In Champions, fire is all ranged blast powers. Want Fire-control? Tough. Fire melee? Sucks to be you. The trade-off is that you can select from multiple groups and mix-and match, but being able to have a fire blast and a punch as two separate things doesn't mean I have a "fire punch", it means I have a Punch and a Fire blast as two separate things.

This could be easily solved by having Melee and Ranged versions of each Power Set's energy builder, at the least.


Ugh, fine, but if it's more of your "I can't imagine my characters having any kind of weaknesses or having unique or interesting powersets or being creative, or doing anything but being the strongest ever" again, I'll flip a table
not make Dark melee/assault/manip characters?


The oddest part about this is Melee archetypes actually do have ranged energy blast abilities.
and you definitely seem to adhere to the "as long as I have one blast, it counts" mentality, so, I'm not seeing the problem, unless the late availability of ancillaries bothers you that much.

And, again, you don't have any more options there than you do here. If anything you have less because now you can't define your Energy powers as anything but ranged blasts and a few explosions. Powers you may or may not have used are now more narrowly defined. Instead of five(or seven, if you include kinetic) nine-power powersets for energy powers, you have one fourteen-power one.

This is that ridiculous "no difference between a punch and a laser punch" thing you're afflicted by again, isn't it?

WHY ARE WE YELLING?

You're always my favorite dance partner, after all. You'll learn to tango eventually, Sam. It would help if you actually listened to the music.

haha, no.

The rules of what guns can and cannot do within reality are different from those of fiction. Said rules are clearly documented. If you are arguing that guns and swords should operate less upon the rules that fiction has established over the course of history, and more towards what you believe(often wrongly, but let's ignore that for a second) they should do, based upon a desire for these things to be treated in a way that fosters more "believability", you are arguing in favor of more "realism". If you are arguing that these things be treated with more "gravitas", that the consequences of such things should be handled more severely, for the sake of the style of the narrative, you are asking for an overall darkening of the tone, AKA "Grittiness" The fact that you are arguing for both simultaneously is you arguing for more "Gritty Realness"

okay.
It happens because it's a superhero story. Or an action movie. Or even just a work of fiction and works of fiction do this all the time. Tropes are not bad, Sam.

You're using a very odd use of the phrase "dramatic storytelling" if you think characters not dying makes it impossible

Okay? unrelated entirely.


Hypothetically, yes. In practice, no. Life tends to be a lot crappier and less stylized than fiction. Any attempt to ground something in reality will deal with the realistic ramifications of the actions people take. Which can get depressing, I.e. "gritty"

Yup. This is mostly out of a desire to cater to a specific audience or evoke a specific response via stylistic means.

they tend to overlap due to life being kinda gritty. Particularly in any story dealing with physical conflict.
This is kind of a grey(hah) area. For instance, is a story that explores the consequences of a Hero's murder of a "bad guy" on others that serves to make said character seem less "clean" "Gritty" for it's darkness and moral ambiguity, or "real" for it's accurate handling of the consequences of murder and the after effects of death, as well as the complicated nature of conflict?
You're going to need to come back to some common ground for me, there.
I could, and probably will, google it, but you need to actually talk about what you're using as an example if you're going to use it as an example.

It works perfectly well within the established confines of the genre. The fact that you want to talk about super heroes while ignoring the ones you don't personally like is pretty arbitrary indeed.



All of them are armed with potentially lethal weapons, is my point. The only thing you want is for certain things to have a certain stylistic storytelling element(death and dismemberment) automatically assigned to them.

If a super power is some how inherently less dangerous than a gun, it isn't very "super" at all, now is it?

You could always want to kill monsters as efficiently or cheaply as possible and be willing to be more careful when dealing with people. Really, you're hamstringing the idea that every single human being(or other thing) in a Setting has access to the same exact resources, skills, intentions e.t.c. when you make this argument.

Soooo, every character, then?

Kay.

We don't suffer them, our fictional avatars do, within a world that has different standards(dictated by the genre) than our own.

I'll stop doing it when you come up with a good reason why your opinion matters. Or is accurate. Or is based in a logical progression instead of just "how I feel" At the end, you're saying "I just don't like it" and that's fine so long as you realize that. That's not based in something you ca accurately defend in any way. We're both wrong. You just like to tell people what they can and cannot do.

There's also the thing where you choose to ignore wide swathes of precedent and pretty much just do not seem to like or know much about superheroes at all but feel the need to discuss them.

Here it comes..

That is what you are supposed to do.

Does not matter in the slightest.
Okay, this is going in a circle. The point here is. Your argument looks like. Sounds like. And Seems to be in every way, shape and form, the exact same argument of "That's not what would really happen, this needs more murder" You're a 90's comic writer defending.. well... 90's comics. You fail the duck test, Sam.


Or exist in this game, by your logic.
I can queue up a melee attack and have it animate and "kill" an enemy even as they are miles away from the actual end of my sword.

The Visuals of the powers are to be interpreted at the whims of the players, as the game cannot, and should not, explicitly dictate what they are "doing" as that would be far too limiting. For one thing, it would have to decide on a particular cause and effect. Muscles tensing as you heft your titan weapon, for instance. Even if your character has no physical body. You say your character is actually a haunted axe? Nope. Human, See/hear the muscles?

If the game went so far as to give a Mortal Kombat style x-ray of each attack going through the flesh of each enemy you'd have a point. If attacks had to physically hit or miss like true action games and fighting games, instead of characters shooting numbers at each other, those numbers rolling dice at each other, and then animations playing, you'd have a point. But it doesn't, and they don't, and pretty much every character you've ever made benefits in terms of creative freedom from it.

The rules of what guns can and cannot do are bent the minute they enter most fictional universes as what they actually do tends to not be very entertaining to watch or read or do. Further, they often exceed or fail to match up to the average person's expectations of what they should do.

No one is bending the rules. You're ignoring them.
The rules are not bent until the narrative explicitly says so. Usually via the exact same means of explaining it. "This is being done because of super powers" until that point, everything functions within the realm of possibility and/or "Normality" of the narrative. Jump on top of a two story building from the ground? That's what people can do in this world. It's only "special" if the narrative says so.

Hole of what, exactly?

Why?(the point being there can only be one or two of such people, I'm assuming)
Are there many stories that have people being directly visibly shot in the head that don't also have those people dying without some type of powers?. Pretty sure when guns are used in non-lethal ways in fiction they tend to have non-lethal effects.
That is pretty much the most unremarkable aspect of both of those characters.
Not even in the slightest. Not even in the very best adaptations where they don't share the world with hundreds of other super-heroes.

The fact that your characters are or are not very traditionally "heroic" has nothing to do with this. Please stop bringing your emotional baggage with other people about tangentially related topics into discussions.

The real world is full of non-killers. Many of them even engage in direct physical conflict with each other on a regular basis.
In fact, not killing people is a pretty basic thing that everyone is more or less accepted and expected to do naturally.
Killing people is generally more the unique, impaction decision than not.
Ruroni Kenshin isn't really a good comparison simply because his sword actually has the blade on the wrong side, hence he's essentially using a tool that looks like a weapon as a weapon.

He's using a claw hammer, hammer side down.

You didn't bring it up, though so that's not really your fault.

No not really, I've just simplified your very long post in a way that offends you.

Your definition of what territory is "unavoidable" hinges on your interpretation of things which are, ultimately, a stylistic choice.

You are arguing for more "Realism" in stories that contain certain things. That the consequences of actions performed conform to your ideas of what "Should" happen.

If a gun is in the story it's more "real" (read "gritty") and must be handled as such, according to your argument. Even though the very nature of filmed combat of even the most "grounded" kind is so completely removed from what actual combat is like: Quick, Simple, Dirty, Confusing, and Unfun to watch, That your argument is drawing the same completely arbitrary line you yourself tend to draw at the idea of "unpowered" characters. Basically, what you're saying is "That's unbelievable" Well, so is the very idea that we can even understand what is going on, because fights aren't like that.

I'm going to assume we're talking about purely the action and, not, you know, the entire story being about a character's fighting methodology. Because that is ridiculous.

I don't really see the "problem" here of creating unique applications of ideas.
Shooting a guy? okay, cool.
Shooting a wall, ricocheting off three light fixtures, and hitting his gun? stylistically cool.

Having characters engage in violent confrontation and not having them constantly being harmed in the way normal people are actually harmed doesn't seem to make the story "awkward" in your mindset. People are neither as Fragile nor as Durable as you seem to think they are. I know of just as many people who've survived gunshots to the head as have died from a tumble down the stairs.
You're sort of vastly underestimating super strength there. It's actually a pretty common method to inject drama and/or pathos into Superman stories to show how very hard he has to try not to murder pretty much everyone he touches accidentally.
It's Showa-era Kamen rider Cliche that the Rider of the day will angst about his uncontrollable freakish strength every few episodes, usually while he tries to hug a puppy or child and inevitably wounds it.
When exactly are you going to grasp that the things you personally feel are neither facts nor genre/medium defining concepts?

If people aren't killed with said powers within the narrative than they aren't imminently lethal within the confines of the narrative.

People can kill each other with their bare, unpowered hands. They can do it accidentally even. You can be knocked unconscious and fall on someone smaller than you a certain way and smother them to death.

you really are
This is pretty much exactly what it looks like.

About the same number as the amount of stories of people murdering and maiming each other?

Death in writing is neither a positive or negative, it's simply a "thing". I'm not entirely sure what your point here is besides a call for more "gritty realism" or some such.