Shadowe

Thanks for the advice, everyone! Excellent idea to use League chat. Though I expect this to be small enough, at least to start with, that we'll be just a single team, but we'll bear that in mind.

Thanks for the responses, folks.

My original thought was to make this a weekly event, but I'm also well aware that fixing a day and time for it makes it seem contrived. I have no objection to mixing things up.

So, to grab the proverbial bull by the horns (and to give people at least a little notice) I'm going to tentatively propose Thursday of this week. Start time is a little trickier, since I can't personally guarantee when I'll get online, but 8.30 is usually a safe bet.

So, to kick this proposal off, and get people into the groove, Thursday, 8.30, meet up at FF station, and I'm going to start off light with planning to run two definite missions (I don't care what missions, where or what level) with an option to continue depending on time and willingness.

This is zero pressure for achieving success, and my personal emphasis is on RP, not XP. Feel free to swap out toons, whatever, and for the chronology, consider it to have taken place "some time on Thursday". IC reasons to end up in missions are down to personal choice, but odds are I'll be going for "got a call from X, asking me to check out Y, because Z" and just rolling from there.

Hey, all.

I've recently been thinking about something, and after discussing it a bit with various people, I thought I'd write something up to introduce the concept and idea to the everyone.

The Background:

The Founders Falls 9pm RP meet is the longest-running regular roleplaying meeting on Union server. In that time there have been highs and lows, laughter and fury, love and hate. The experience has run the whole gamut of possible RP situations, with occassional IC missions used to drive plots.
One trend that I've observed as a result of this is that many of the heroes who attend have spent very little time going out and actually being heroes. People will occassionally mention a scrap with some group or another, but there's very little depth to it. This is only natural, as unless someone is actively writing a story or plot with a purpose, the path of least resistance is to say "we fought, I won" and leave it at that.

And there is nothing wrong with that.

What I'm hoping to do, though, is to get a bit more substance to the heroic acts of the undoubtedly heroic community. Rather than "I beat up a pile of Council in one of their bases", doesn't "well, we went into a council base, and Ultraman split off from the rest of us, the gloryhound, but bit off more than he could chew, so we had to rescue him from the jail cells. Man, that was tough - who'd have thought they'd need that many guards for one prisoner!" sound both more realistic and more useful for expanding on the characters involved?

I'm kind of hoping that people say "yes" to that question.

Anyway, I thought I'd come up with some "guidelines" (definitely not rules) about how I think something like this should work. Feel free to debate, discuss, lambast or whatever, but each of these has been put in for a reason, which I'll try to explain, so I'd appreciate constructive disagreement if any is applicable.

1) Any level, any toon, any mission. I don't want this to turn into L50 all the time, so if someone with a L21 toon has a mission that they want to do, that is just as viable as battering Praetorians in a 45-50 arc. If people want to do a Safeguard mission at L10, or a radio mission at 40, or if someone wants to make an AE arc, it doesn't matter. We have a game with so much flexibility for teaming that it's almost unreal. So using it is never a bad idea.

2) We're in control, not the mission text. If someone wants to "borrow" a normal mission or story arc, ignore the clue text and detail of the objectives, that's fine. As long as the enemy group makes sense, and as long as objectives (rescue, glowies, defeat boss, etc) roughly match the player's background to the mission, that's fine.

3) Faceplant =/= Dead. I know pretty much everyone uses this anyway, but being damaged (and being dropped to 0 HP) doesn't mean injury or death. It's up to the player in question what it means for their toon. Yes, it should mean "something" (maybe knocked out? Stunned? Doesn't really matter), but the game mechanic of faceplanting doesn't automatically mean the character is significantly injured.

4) "I am THOR! God of THUNDER!" Don't feel required to play like a good little team member. The point of IC mishing is for the team to undertake an encounter together, not to stick together and waltz through the content like a perfectly oiled machine of destruction. If your stalker would race ahead, do so. If you notice a side-passage that everyone else has ignored and want to see what's down there, go for it, perhaps with a comment in local that you're going to do so. Playing IC doesn't just mean talking IC - it also means *behaving* IC.

You can create a new game account within your master account. I think there's some sort of "link to existing master account" button somewhere in CoH itself, but I'm not absolutely sure.

IIRC, NC Europe set the EU (£ and €) prices, not anyone in the US. They just charge what they're told to.

This issue should be passed to NC Europe to adjudicate.

One would hope you don't have to.

Taking the original released powers for each Incarnate Ability (4 of each), then it's reasonable to assume that, on average, 25% of players on a League will have a given ability at one Tier or another.

You can then design content based around "semi-optimal choices", by which I mean that if the League acts as a cohesive unit (by utilising rolling Destiny buffs, say) then as a designer you can say "at any given time, the hypothetical League running this trial will have these levels of protection". That then sets your bare minimum difficulty level. Next up is "mostly optimal choices" which sets the requirements for additional perks (Astral merits), which are granted when the League demonstrates the ability to act cohesively, and finally should come "tailored optimal choices" wherein the League utilises precisely the correct abilities for the task at hand (such as Clarion on the UG trial), which then sets your requirements for actual overall success (to get your lovely Emyrean merits).

The thing is, the trials reward cohesive action, and they severely punish independent behaviour (well, with the possible exception of the BAF). This is not a bad design choice in itself. The potentially "bad" choice is to have set the size of Leagues so high that unless everyone knows what they're doing, it can become an exercise in herding cats.

However, to a certain extent, the iTrials can be successfully run by any group of players who know what they are doing - which can be as simple as having run the trial in question a few times, even with vastly different groups - and that plays to the PuG nature of CoH as a whole, but the negative side of it is that there existed so few trials in the game prior to the iTrials that people have become used to a very binary experience when playing the game: team wins, or team needs more dakka before team wins.

The trials, however, have several points of failure (or objectives which, if not met, cause failure later on), which can't be overcome simply with more firepower. This distinction is what makes the iTrials such a point of controversy, really.

I personally think that the developers made the right choice with the design of iTrials, overall, but until the player base as a whole becomes used to running them as cohesive units, they will be more difficult than they need to be.

On the other hand, I think that solo- and single-team-content for incarnates is absolutely essential. I would hope that it serves as a middle-ground in terms of design philosophy, a way to point players towards the idea that making more-optimal choices improves the odds of success.

Also, the NCLauncher has an annoying tendency to install CoH in the NCsoft folder, even if you already have a copy somewhere else on the computer. Check there.

I'm clearly waaaaay too used to typos.

My first thought on reading the subject header was "Umm, gather a team, do missions, and go to Thorn Isle in Nerva..."

On the actual subject, though, a good villain makes the story, a weak one makes the story fail. Whether I find them engaging, or I just love to hate them and want to see them fail, I can be sold on the story if the villain is believable.

Ah, Roleplaying Theory at its finest.

I'm going to take a stab at first elabourating on some points, but without putting my own personal slant on things (though I may define some terms), and then giving my own thoughts and feelings on the matter. Please note, I'm starting this at 9.00am local time, and I am at work, so it may take me a while.

The most fundamental point worth mentioning is that the OP is attempting to emulate what I will term "self-contained episodic storytelling", wherein the events of a single "adventure" have effectively zero impact on the characters involved, and the world "resets" at the start of each adventure.

This particular device is well-known to many people, though it has become far less common today than it was a few decades ago. This does not in any way detract from its use as a storytelling device - to take the single most iconic character of the superhero genre (open to debate), you could confidently predict that no matter what happened to Lois Lane and Clark Kent/Superman in the Golden Age, by the next story, they would be back to being friendly, Lois would be adventuresome and clueless regarding Superman's secret identity, and Clark would be wearing a hat. Nor would the previous adventure's events even be referenced.

Each adventure tells a story of its own, with the characters automatically reverting to a base state of existence in between.

I am a fan of this kind of storytelling in certain media - comic books and cartoons spring to mind.

Now for my personal feelings on this method of storytelling in the context of Roleplaying (not even touching on CoH for the moment).

It is a perfectly reasonable, feasible idea. It requires a bit more groundwork than simply creating a character and a plot, because everyone that's involved must also buy into the idea that character progression is effectively zero when the next adventure rolls around. Not only this, but it requires that everyone define the base-line level of their character, and it will take a certain amount of work to maintain the resets consistently.

And therein lies the problem, in a single word: work.

I do not personally have any problem with the idea in theory, but from a practical standpoint "re-setting" the campaign at the end of every adventure would be hard to do (but not impossible).

The hardest part, though, is that, unlike acting (which is nowhere near the same thing as roleplaying, even though the actor is playing a role), the characters are designed and created by the person playing them. It's quite rare for the author of a play, television series, or movie to also take on one of the starring roles. In fact, for the purposes of this discussion, plays and movies don't count (except for the rare extended movie franchise such as Lethal Weapon or the Star Wars saga), but television series' are a perfect comparison, and I'm not aware of any examples where the author also holds one of the starring roles (bit-parts, certainly, but not one of the main characters that is always in the show).

Roleplayers, on the other hand, create their own characters, decide on their personalities and traits, and play them. Many would find it almost nonsensical to effectively force them to avoid character growth. To have selective memories.

In practical terms, one way I thought of to make it effective would be to actually agree to delete and reroll the characters after every adventure, or stop XP once everyone has reached a pre-agreed level (before which the "campaign" hasn't begun, and sets up the background for the characters, in which their "baseline" is developed).

The problem, ultimately, comes back to "my character, my devlopment". The shared-storytelling experience that is allowed by a persistent world lends itself to continued character development more than it does to what the OP has termed "iconic" representation of characters, but it is not, by any means, impossible.

Well, last night I was more than a little distracted by two things. One, trying to figure out if my computer was going into meltdown after the night before (answer: no, but CoH runs it hotter than I'd like. I may have to invest in a new case). Two, keeping Pix and Baby Shad happy.

Sorry for vanishing, folks. To make up for it, I'm hoping to have fiction up at some point tomorrow, after it's been checked by my proofreaders/technical advisers. Any meanness that may result is actually my own doing.

Oh, that is NICE!

A way for Free players to access aspects of the game using in-game currencies. Fantastic move!

As an interesting point, how many other people did the hero side version of SSA 3 and blink at the mission send-off text for the final mission?

You know, the bit where the contact tells you that you'll have to go and rescue Alexis Cole-Duncan and defeat Malaise?

When I read it, I had to double-take, because Malaise hadn't cropped up in the arc at all before that (as far as I could tell), so I have no idea how the contact knew he was going to be there.

Been reading through your notes on some of the concept pieces, and I just want to point out that Bobcat is in Studio 55 (not 54, as your note says, David).

Also... Wow, loving these pieces!

Anecdote: earlier, I was answering questions on the Help channel on Union (legitimate questions get good answers, but things like "red sewers" are generally responded to by me with "purple chihuahuas"), and I happened to observe (on Help) that if all the people asking for sewer teams just queued using LFG, they would get on trials faster (honestly, when five people in the space of a minute ask if there are any blue side sewer teams forming, I have to wonder), and, naturally, I got shot down with "you queue for ages and don't get on a trial".

The mind boggles.

You are not over. LotG's are their own 'type' of bonus, and will stack with other (non-LotG) 7.5% recharge bonuses. It is therefore possible to get 10 on one toon.

Should it perhaps be "former"? Which makes more sense. Have we identified a typo?

I'm not going to argue that the storytelling could have been spoonfed to us a little better, considering that we're here discussing why she would or would not have a mediporter (hint to devs: this sort of thing needs to be explained so that we don't have these questions), but I fully stand by my point that if, for whatever reason, she was unable to mediport out, her death is, and should be, unrecoverable outside the timeframe of Numina's ability to resurrect people.

For anyone too lazy to clicky the linky: Synonymous with Exemplar, but usually only used Villain-side, "to mal" or "to malefactor" is to join a team running at a lower level than your character, where your combat level is reduced to that of the mission owner, and you lose access to powers you gained from 6+ levels higher than the mission holder.

We know that technology exists to subvert Mediports, we know that Arachnos have it (though the fact that they most commonly use it to teleport someone, fully healed, into a prison cell is a bit fudge-worthy), and we only know for sure that heroes are given free and unrestricted access to the Mediports network - she is no longer a hero. My counter-question is why would a civilian have a mediporter, and why would Arachnos let her use it when they don't have to?

Numina, as detailed in the comics, is severely time-limited on raising the dead. Even with Manticore frantically racing, she was too late to bring Statesman back without a more recently deceased soul to piggyback.