Silver Gale

You will note that's under the "stat block" section. It means if your bio contains a stat block, like this:

Eye: blue
Hair: blonde
Weight: not tellin :P
Orientation: straight
Status: married (sorry fellas

And it doesn't specifically say anywhere that you don't ERP, I would assume you ERP.

And then the first RPer throws a fit about the other Ruritanian's player being a dirty metagamer, and puts them on ignore.

Like I said, I'm not trying to force anyone into some platonic ideal of character description, but if you're going to trawl for random RP, it's good to consider these things.

There was a long and rambly intro to this that I ended up not posting, but that basically explained this is a guide for the specific situation of fishing for some new RP in the D.

You've only got 1024 characters to make a first impression. There's no point in wasting those characters writing out "he is secretly a ninja/a vampire/heir to the throne of Ruritania, BUT DON'T YOU DARE KNOW THAT."

Your first instict might be "that is a terrible bio". No character description, no background, nothing that even hints at the character being a superhero/supervillain, which is what the game is supposed to be *about*. The player didn't even bother with a capital letter.

But if you think about it, that bio actually carries a whole lot of information about the sort of RP the player is interested in.

1) They want to play Uno, with a particular set of house rules.
2) They would like to get to the Uno playing as soon as possible.
3) They do not want to give the character any more depth beyond what is required to play Uno.
4) They do not particularly care about correct spelling or grammar.

So, an RPer who likes the same style of play (we all know those exist, and there's really nothing wrong with it) immediately knows this is someone they would like to RP with. Morever, people who are *not* interested in that sort of RP immediately know this is someone they can safely ignore. From the point of view of finding someone to RP with, this is an *excellent* bio.

That's why I've compiled this guide, not in the form of "what to do" and "what not to do", but in the form of "if your bio says" then "you will get". Now, even if I don't consider it wrong to have a bio riddled with typos or lore errors or declaring the character to be the King Of Everything Ever, some things are going to draw derisive comments (private or public) from other players, and I've tried to note those where necessary. I personally never do that, if there's something I don't like about someone's bio, I just don't RP with them.

Part 1. What's your flavour?

The most basic thing your bio needs to convey is that you're interested in RP in the first place. The second thing is the particular flavor of RP you enjoy. If you're looking for a particular sort of story for your character (relationship/romance, fall to the Dark Side, an SG to take them in), consider adding that to the bio.

If Your Bio Contains: ((RP)) or [RPer] or (RP Character)

You are a roleplayer! Other players know they can adress your character IC if they wish, and you will respond in kind. Not much to say here.

If Your Bio Contains: ((MRP))

This could mean that RP with your character will explore some more mature themes, or it could mean you like playing Uno. If you're getting too many unwanted invitations to play Uno, consider clarifying with "MRP, no ERP" or "rated M for violence and dark themes", or something like that.

If Your Bio Contains: ((ERP))

You would like to play Uno. Not much to say here, either. Depending on the house rules you want, you could clarify with "Romantic storylines/ERP", or "dark ERP", or by any mentions of the character being dominant or submissive.

If Your Bio Contains: ((All RP))

You're interested in a wide variety of RP. People who do not wish to play Uno can RP with you safely. People who wish to play Uno can try chatting you up once they've exhausted their supply of characters marked ERP.

If Your Bio Contains: Literate/advanced/elite RPer

As far as I can tell, the expressions "literate RP" and "advanced literate RP" come from Gaia, where they're ostensibly meant to distinguish those RPers who insist on good spelling and grammar, but in practice come down to writing multiple paragraphs of needlessly elaborate descriptions, replacing normal words with "fancier" sounding ones (eyes -> "oculars", legs -> "pillars", hair -> "tresses". I am not making this up), and putting the entire thing in very small font and various interesting colors. If that's not your idea of good RP, consider using "proper English" or "good grammar & spelling" instead.

If Your Bio Contains: "WoD RPer", or any of the various V:tM clan names

Your character is a vampire. You are interested in playing a particular kind of vampire story, which includes the assumption that there exist a worldwide consipracy that keeps the existence of vampires secret from the common man. Leaving aside the discussion of how much this makes sense in the CoH setting, it basically means you don't want your character to be recognised as a vampire on sight, except by other vampires. You'll find fellow WoD players quite easily, but people playing under non-WoD systems (vampires, hunters or neither) may loudly declare you to be a vampire, or go "avampiresayswhat?", or make constant references to Twilight. (See also part 4.)

Part 2. Sir Not Appearing In This Bio

The things that are *not* in your bio speak as loudly as the things that are.

If Your Bio Contains: Nothing, or a "work in progress" note, or just "RP to find out"...

You're not giving other people a whole lot to work with. They have a name and a costume, and that's about it. You're not even giving them a "hook" to start a conversation on. Why should their character be interested in yours? Some will give it a whirl just to see if your characters click, others will avoid you. You'll get a very mixed bag of RP.

I'd also avoid things like "If you want to know about him, RP it out" or "There isn't a novel attached to my chest". In real life, there's a lot of information you can glean from a person, the way they sit, the quality of their clothes, the way they seek out or avoid eye contact. You don't need to give me your character's entire life story, but at least tell me what makes them *interesting*.

If Your Bio Contains: Poor spelling and grammar

You're saying that you don't particularly care about poses in RP being written well. This is good news for those people who don't care themselves. They know they can RP with you and you won't spend time nitpicking their typos. On the other hand, people who value correct English know to avoid playing with you if they want to spare themselves a headache. You may get messaged corrections.

If Your Bio Contains: Things that don't fit in the lore

The game is just a background for you to play your character in. You'll drop a canon name here or there, but you care more about playing the character you like than making them fit into the lore. People who similarly don't care about the lore will chat your character up, whereas players who insist on basing everything in lore will either avoid you or send you OOC messages explaining how you can't be a "princess of a Warshade planet" or a "former queen of the Crey".

Part 3. The dreaded stat block

Section: Stat block
Labels: random
Descriptions: short
Saves: space
Resembles: Rikti speak

If Your Bio Contains: Eye color

A good idea. Skin and hair color are pretty obvious from the character model, so there's no real point in putting them in the bio as well. Eye color, on the other hand, is not very visible, and sometimes the face that's ideal for the character has the wrong eye color. Use the right face, describe the eye color in the bio.

If Your Bio Contains: Weight and Height

Those are only really necessary if they give some additional information - if you have a really clear idea of what the character's body looks like, but can't represent it using the ingame sliders. Make sure you check the Photographic height/weight chart and see that the numbers you use correspond to the figure you have in mind.

These two fields are not mandatory. If you don't want to give your character a specific height and weight, just don't use them. Putting in something like "Height: as tall as she looks Weight: none of your damn business :P" is just kind of pointless.

If Your Bio Contains: Orientation and status (single/taken/engaged/married)

You will be assumed to be an ERPer unless stated otherwise. You will get invites to play Uno. Yes, even if your character's married.

If Your Bio Contains: Measurements or cup size

*Really* going to be assumed ERP unless stated otherwise.

If Your Bio Contains: A themesong

Personally, themesongs don't tell me anything, but then, I'm not very well-versed in music. It's entirely possible someone will look at the line "TS: 'I hate Mondays' - The Thrashing Gnoberts" and go "Wow, I love that song! This seems like a character I'd like to RP with!". I have no idea.

Part 4. Information and special abilities

I've lumped these two together, because there's a close relationship between important information about your character that you may or may not want to keep secret ("she's actually a vampire", "he pretends to be a hero but is actually a villain in disguise") and special abilities that aren't covered by the ingame powersets ("he's a vampire hunter who can tell who's a vampire", "she can read minds and discover who people really are").

In general, whether your character's abilities will figure into the RP is 100% up to the other player to decide.

A lot of special abilities seem to be a precautionnary measure against the sort of RP you don't want, for example giving your character complete immunity to mind control because you're not interested in mind control plots. This works well, but it also gives the impression you don't want your character to lose or be threatened in *any* way, and discourage people from coming up to you with *any* sort of conflict plot, not just mind-control. If the main reason you're giving your character mind-control immunity is to not let them be mind-controlled, consider just using an OOC note about "no mind control plots". Likewise, instead of "can sense demons and vampires, no matter how well-disguised", try "not interested in 'gotcha! I'm actually a demon/vampire!' type RP".

Remember that you are always within your rights to stop an RP if you don't like the way it's going. Trying to resolve a mind-control attempt IC with "blocks" or "it doesn't work on him" can spiral into mutual god-modding accusations. Just saying OOC "I'm not playing anymore, mind control is not fun" lets you establish your boundaries without escalating the conflict.

If Your Bio Contains: A description of special abilities

The stronger you make the abilities, the fewer people will want to RP with you and acknowledge them. If you are the strongest, the richest, or the smartest man in the world, any character who is strong, rich or smart will either have to acknowledge your character's superiority, or get into an imaginary one-upmanship match. *Very* few people in the D will want to acknowledge your character's superiority, especially if the trait is a key one for their characters.

Instead, why not try "one of the strongest/richest/smartest people in the world"? Other strong/rich/smart characters no longer feel threatened, and may in fact recognise yours from a weight lifting competition/cocktail party/lecture.You've changed an obstacle to RP into a RP hook.

For similar reasons, being "the queen of all demons" or "the leader of all Kheldians" or "the commander of all Arachnos" will get you less RP and more angry /tells. Being the leader of a particular division (especially if that division is also the SG you're leading) will get you more RP and interested recruits.

If your character's power affects others (skin is covered in a deadly toxin, appearance changes depending on who's looking, anything to do with pheromones), you'll get best results if you describe the power's effect on a regular human, and let other players figure out how exactly the power will work on their character. Engaging other people's imaginations will make them more likely to try RPing with you. Telling them exactly how you want your character to affect theirs will drive many away, and some will RP with you and make their character be completely unaffacted, just to be contrary.

It should be pretty obvious that any ability that would require another player to stop RPing their character when it's used successfully (instakill poison, taking the soul of anyone they play Uno with) is not going to be successfully used very often. Consider a milder, non-permament version (sickness, draining away quite a lot of strength) that a good RPer can turn into a mini-storyline.

If Your Bio Contains: Something you want to keep a secret

This is useless to good RPers, and a goldmine to metagamers. I'd suggest not putting anything about your character in the bio that you wouldn't expect to come up during a casual interaction with another character. If they are secretly the lost heir of a small European country, which you are planning on revealing in a suitably dramatic fashion in an upcoming storyline? Don't put in the bio. The best thing that happens is that everyone who RPs with you will ignore it. The worst thing is that a character with connections in the international intelligence community will make a few phone calls and hack into a database, and announce their "discovery" to the entire bar.

The exception is those things that will directly impact storylines, even if characters would not be aware of them. If your charming rich guy with no day job is actually a demon looking for more slaves for his harem, you need to let the other player know OOC. If they use the knowledge ingame, well, that makes them the bad RPer. If you lead them on with a whole romantic dating and engagement storyline before springing the reveal on them, that makes *you* the bad RPer.

If Your Bio Contains: Special perception powers

Superhuman smell, psi powers, magic sense, access to classified databases - those are all ways people can find out more about your character, and they make *great* RP hooks. Writing down how your character would be percieved by various senses can be a great way of developping them, and encourage others to approach them for a chat. Putting in vague or elusive answers is no better than "RP to find out more". If you find it gets too wordy (curse that 1024 character limit...) put in "send tell to find out things using smell/psi/magic/research skills". It does add a barrier of entry to people who want to get a non-visual impression of your character, but it shows you're willing to hand out RP hooks.

Also note in your bio which perception powers your character has, and at what strength. For my own characters, I generally tend to go for one of psi/magic/smell/databases, or two at a weaker level (faint empathy and also a moderately good sense of smell, or low ability to percieve magic and a knack for looking through newspaper archives). Any more than that and you basically have no reason to RP with anyone since your character knows all about them already.

If Your Bio Contains: Invisibility

For some reason, you want your character to be invisible. Maybe you like spying on other characters. Or maybe you're a stalker and are just RPing your ability to go undetected by most enemies in the game. You'd also like for your character to be undetectable by other means, either pre-emtively, or as part of an ongoing arms race with people who want their character to know your character is there.

You don't need to spend several paragraphs explaining how exactly your character is able to go completely unnoticed in all situations. Just note that your character *can* become undetectable, and leave it at that. Some people like to run plots where an invisble spy overhears important information, and will happily work you into the plot without any need for making your character specifically undetectable to them. Other players want to give their characters some real privacy, for any reason, and those players do not want you there anyway, no matter how much you insist that your character *can* sneak by.

So my Defender can't be a hero because his power is called Cold Domination instead of Politely Persuading Cold To Help You Fight Bad Guys?

...okay?

And players don't have as much information as devs. A player doesn't know what a feature was supposed to accomplish, unless a dev happens to mention the process. A player doesn't know how the idea was developed from first concept to implementation, what approaches were considered, how much it cost to implement - again, unless a dev mentions it. A player only knows how much they themselves play, and how much their friends play, and has a vague idea of how many people are playing at the times they are on, on the server they're on. Devs have access to much more in-depth player stats, including how often specific content is played.

Bottom line: players have less data to go on.

Your original point was "if you want to know what failed, don't ask the Devs, ask the playerbase", but I maintain that all you can know from the playerbase is what they *don't like*, not what *failed*, and that's not the same thing.

The thing is, if you ask "the playerbase", then for every thing that was ever added to the game, there will be at least *one* person who thinks it is the worst ever.

Or you'd find the majority says that "ED was the worst idea ever", because it was a highly visible change that affected everybody and required pretty much every character ever to change their slotting. But would any of the devs agree? No, because ED narrows down the gap between the best builds and the middle of the road ones, even accounting for Inventions and purples, making it much easier to balance the game.

Sure, you can ask the playerbase to see which feature was the most or least *popular*, but success is defined not only by "how many people like the feature". There's also "did we achieve the expected result", "how did this impact the health of the game" and "how much time and effort did we spend compared to the result". To gauge any of those things, you require knowledge that only a dev of the game has.

You probably won't believe me (since anyone who doesn't have your exact experience is apparently not a "real" introvert), but I do know how that feels. Social interaction *does* drain my reserves. After an evening of teaming up, even if it's just with my SG, I feel the need to go and solo for a bit, just to rest my nerves.

And yet I still manage to run TFs, get on pick-up groups, and get Alpha boosts on my various characters. And I have fun doing it. Yes, it's draining, but it's also fun. After I'm done getting my next component on one of my 50s, I can run some Tip missions or level one of my alts for a bit, to have some different fun that also recharges me.

It's perfectly understandable if you don't like team content enough to expend effort on it, if the "social energy drained" is not worth the "fun gained" for you. But I don't agree with your assertion that new team-focused content is a bad direction for the game to take.

Okay, so you don't dislike the Incarnate content because you're an introvert, you dislike it because you're not a very good player.

And, y'know, that's okay. People are going to have different abilities for a particular game task, and different tastes for what they find fun enough to learn and get better at.

But I really don't think all new content has to be aimed at the lowest common denominator.

If you ask the playerbase "what was the biggest failure in CoH?" the answer you'll get is "ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING EVER".

Crucible/Fort Trident work exactly the same as Reward Merit vendors. If you choose to buy a recipe (with 50-200 Reward Merits or 1-2 H/V Merits), you can set whatever level you want, as long as the recipe exists at that level.

If you choose to roll (20 Reward Merits for 1 recipe, or 1 H/V merit for 8 recipes), you get either a recipe of your level, or the highest one that exists. You can choose to roll in a particular level range, but that only affects what recipe you can get, not what level. (Ie. if you roll in the 25-29 range and get a recipe that goes from 10-30, you get it at 30. if you roll in the 10-14 range and get that same recipe, you get it at 30.)

AE rolls work the same as Reward Merit rolls, only with different drop pools. Bronze roll are the recipes that normally drop from enemies.

This is not true. At a University, Abandoned Lab, Portable Workbench or SG base Crafting station, you can buy common IO recipes at any level you want (if you have the inf and free Recipe slot).

This is obviously the work of flippers, selling IOs at 8x what they're worth to keep the casual player down.

Your son sounds like he'll be a goldmine to a good shrink someday.

"But daddy, I got the highest score in the class on the math test, and I won an essay contest, and I ran the fastest time on the racetrack..."

"Not good enough, son. You already did all those things last week. Better have the best score on the math test in the entire district, and paint a masterpiece in oils, or it's the box for you."

All that the Incarnate overview page says about the next slot is that it's called Judgement, it grants upgradeable AoE powers and that it's still to be unlocked. We don't know if it's in I20 or later.

Well, the people who are in I20 Closed Beta have probably seen things about the Incarnate system, but they're not allowed to tell because NDA and all.

We're not talking about the already available Common and Uncommon boosts, we're talking about the upcoming Rare and Very Rare ones. Just like it's much easier to get from 1 to 20 than from 20 to 40, the higher-tier boosts with the Level Shift will probably take more time.

Because one person's "X is a reward for playing Y constantly" is another person's "you are forced to grind Y if you want X".

If you take out the X, then it becomes "I like playing Y but it feels like I'm wasting my time" and "there is no point at all for Y to exist", respectively.

Doesn't look that way to me.



One common, two uncommon, four rare, two very rare.

Not really. In game, the lines leading up from the Rare row all combine into one line which branches off into two Very Rares. On the website, each Very Rare seems to connect to only two specific Rares, but every one of them has text saying "Ability cost: Any 2 Rare" (emphasis mine).

EDIT: I see where the confusion might come from. the line connecting the Rares goes *behind* the actual slots, so it's not very clear. It would be more helpful if it looked like this:

Hen-pecked = "does nice things for his wife sometimes"?

You can save costumes to a file now. You get piles of free costume change tokens from Vet rewards. There's no reason not to make a costume in advance, and there's no reason to reroll if all you want to change is the costume.