Sister_Twelve

The only magical origin character I have is Bianca Tallin. She was only 12 years old during the Rikti invasion of 2002 and the events of that night were pivotal in her origin stories, which are still posted on VirtueVerse.

It's hard to tell what she would have done. At the time, she was a non-powered child, but the answer to the question largely depends on what period of time during her development you are talking about.

Are you talking about the bitter, spiteful girl who blamed Statesman for the death of her family and would have done anything to kill him?

Or are you talking about the girl who saw the ultimate future that her poisonous obsession would cause?

Or are you talking about the woman who literally spent years using Oroborous to travel through time so that she could learn the counterspells and magic necessary to stop herself from causing that very future from happening?

Early on, there is no way she would have gone. After she matured and witness the sobering thing she witnessed, she would have, even though the world still believes her to be a villain.

I would assume that up until the point of the deadline, all changes are fair to give every contestant equal time to submit a finished product and that they wouldn't start playing until after entries are closed.

Arc: The Union of the Mask
Arc ID: 352400
You will face: Time limits in every mission, AV/EB's, Defeat Alls, Quite a bit of reading
Morality: Heroic
Level Range: 45-54

Description: Your hero discovers the existence of a threat to the way of life of every hero in Paragon. Salvation arrives in the most unlikely of sources. In the end, the hero must discover exactly what he will do to preserve the world as it is.


Obviously, I would have liked to have had more time to get a few beta plays for this arc before turning it in, but stuck between having to move and working 50 hour weeks while doing so, I was up against it to even finish before the deadline. I honestly haven't even had the time to do much playtesting of my own, so if anyone gets to it before tomorrow... well, I'm not sure how many problems you will find.

I suspect with the amount of text, there will be quite a few and I hate turning in something so rough, but unfortunately if I am going to enter at all, I need to go ahead and do it now.

I replace the CoT AV with a custom, because I forgot how much resistance the CoT AV in the level range had.

The arc is designed to be fairly hard.

If anyone gets to it, there are a few things:

1.) I wanted the hero to always feel under the gun. But at the same time, the player needs the time to actually read the text. Is the time limit on the missions balanced in that regard? Ie, do you ever feel pressured to finish or is 30 minutes a mission too long to apply the pressure?

2.) 4/5 AVs are customs. If they hit like a ton of bricks, which they are likely to because they are customs, tell me and I'll try to fix it.

3.) The last mission is designed to be particularly hard and failable, but if there's just too much there and the AV is impossible to find in the time given, let me know.

4.) Hope you have some fun with it.

Tonight I ran "Task Force Mutternacht " by Twelfth.

There is a distinct possibility that I allowed my irritation with game mechanics of these missions interfere with an objective analysis of the narrative here, but I really did not enjoy this arc. This had a lot to do with spending upwards of an hour searching for an objective in a Council Cave and then realizing that after having wandered around the place for an hour, the objective then chained onto another objective, which meant more time in a place I did not enjoy, then another objective... so you see. I very nearly quit... which I almost never do, especially when I am evaluating someone else's work.

I did, however, finally complete the council cave mission and the arc itself.

Essentially, you are asked to conceal a secret in this arc. In the process, you destroy another hero and compromise your own ethics. On that level, it meets the challenge put forth by Dr. Aeon for his competition. It is highly debatable whether what you accomplish is worth this, but that really isn't for me to decide. I would say that outside the constraints of playing the mission to completion, I doubt if any of my characters, heroic or villainous, would view the secret that you protect as worth your integrity to do so. The scales just wouldn't balance for any of them.

My thoughts:

- I think you attempt to be a little too complex with the storytelling here. Every mission in the arc has chained objectives. Unless your maps are very small, (which these really weren't), or really linear, what happens when you chain objectives is this...

"Okay, I'm following the story so far..."

"Hmm... where is this one..."

"..."

"..."

"..."

"-sigh-"

"Okay, finally found it... now what were we talking about 15 minutes ago before I started looking for that?"

"Another objective... okay, now where is this one?"

"Hmmm..."

"..."

And repeat.

In other words, the arc never really builds up a lot of narrative flow, because a lot of the play time is actually devoted to wandering an empty map looking for the next objective in the chain.

- Mr. Inquiry. -mutters-

Okay, this dude is a boss, right? Not an AV/EB. This is the way the fights went. I approach. He does 900 points of damage. I start chowing down on purple. He hits again. I wake up in the hospital. I go back. Treat him like an EB/AV and pop 3 purples. 900 points. I pop elude. He drops me again. I finally build some momentum against him. 900 points.

Repeat.

And since you fight him 3 out of the 4 missions, this guy quickly gets old. Especially when Statesman, supposedly the top gun of this shared world, drops like a stone within 20 seconds against Ariadne without the three npcs because I lost in the hunt for States.

In other words, whatever sympathy I might have otherwise had for Inquiry's plight or the denouement of the story were vastly outweighed by the fact that he is so grossly overpowered that it saps all feeling I might have had for him.

- There are some map types I hate multiple glowie hunts on. Council maps along with big wide outdoor maps tend to top the list. I literally spent an hour in the council map before I finally reached the point where Inquiry showed up to smack me for 900 again.

- Played it on my Widow at 2/+2/Boss/No AV. It was... ummmm... humbling, to say the least.

Sorry for the mostly negative reaction. I try not to let outside factors interfere in my evaluation of arcs and I hope I haven't done so in this case. This one was just... grinding to me.


I generally don't do this, because I think it's generally best for a creator to come up with his/her own solutions to the problems I see, (if the creator really agrees that they are problems), but my suggestions to streamline this arc and make it more playable:

- You have the heart of a good story, but you go much bigger than it needs to be. If the goal is to protect Maiden Justice's reputation, make the preservation of that reputation somehow personally important to the hero. The 'greater good' doesn't necessarily have to translate to... 'if everyone see this, the concept of heroism will be shaken to its very foundations.' The 'greater good' could translate to something as simple as... 'if this gets out, my family will suffer.' Not necessarily the hero's family... perhaps the contact's family, (which would probably assume the contact isn't Indigo), perhaps the contact could be Statesman himself asking you to do these things, which would add another level to this.

That's probably too specific a suggestion though. What I mean in general terms is that this is at heart an emotional story... but you have it lost in large plot trappings. Any way that you could reduce the scale and up the personal factor would strengthen this.

- One of two things here... either lose the chained objectives or choose linear maps to accomplish them on so there aren't a bunch of huge delays in the narrative. The smooth cave map would work just as well as the council map for mission three because this story isn't about where it's set. It's about what is happening. Anything that creates artificial delays in the player experiencing those things weakenes the narrative.

- Tone the man down. I don't really care if I get full experience for Inquiry. Probably most people who have experienced the massive burst damage he deals would agree with me. 900 points is way too much for a boss, especially when he deals it consistently and almost never misses with it. As I understand it, Inquiry is intended to be a detective type hero, right? Well, what you have right now is a guy with the detective skills of Batman and the power level of Superman.

I would care more about him and what happens to him if I wasn't on the receiving end of quite so much "ow" throughout the story.

- Don't overplot. The heart of the story is good. Just bring it home in as clear a way as you can.

Those are my best suggestions. I hope they helped a bit.

- S12

My thoughts will be in my One a Day thread.

So tonight, in keeping with what I wanted to do over the weekend, I ran another of the arcs for Dr. Aeon's challenge.

"When the Bough Breaks" by PsychoPez.


I haven't done as many of these as I wanted to, but real life is interfering. I am in the midst of preparing to move this weekend, working and working on my own entry for the challenge. There hasn't been a lot of time for spare plays with all of that going on. As I did with the others, I'll consider the arc on its own merits first and then discuss it in relationship to the challenge at the end.

The basic premise of the arc is that the Rikti war is finally grinding down and that humanity has all but won it. So much so that, like many powers that find themselves on the losing end of a conflict, the Rikti have been reduced to grasping at scientific straws at this point, hoping for a breakthrough that will swing it back into their favor. This concept certainly has precedence in humanity's wars in the past. Toward the end of WWII, the German high command was engaged in similar types of hail mary activity.

Now whether canon supports this notion... that humanity has beaten the Rikti so badly that the Rikti are forced into this sort of desperation... is debatable and I don't think the developers have indicated anything of the like. But it is a concept that I am willing to accept at face value for the duration of the mission arc.

So the Rikti's desperate ploy is essentially to use the children of an enclave of civilian Rikti who are stranded on Earth for the purposes of genetically engineering them to become the equivalent of Rikti super soldiers... and to make the threat immediate, the process they are using ages the infant Rikti in a week's time... a device used by the author to make the threat more immediate.

Again, I am willing to go along with this for the sake of the arc, but the question that immediately sprang to mind was, "Civilian Rikti? How did they manage to find themselves in the middle of an invading vanguard force to get stranded on Earth?"

The second question was, "The Rikti have babies? I thought Riktification was a process inflicted on other races..."

But I might be wrong about that.

So anyway, we soon reach the crux of the matter. Are you willing to destroy these nascent living weapons before they can reproduce and become the equivalent of the Rikti master race, thereby lengthening and chance losing a war that humanity has basically already won?

I wasn't particularly wild about the choice, nor how it was executed. The third question that sprang to mind was, "Okay, if the baby Rikti supersoldiers are guarded by only one Rikti Nanny apiece, why can't I just kill the 5 nannies and carry the Rikti babies off to the Vanguard base to be rehabilitated when they grow up in a week's time? Or return them to their parents for that matter?"

I think at the very least, there needs to be a compelling reason why such an obvious 'out' isn't possible. There might have been one. If there was, I just missed it and I'm sorry.

My Thoughts:

- The contact's voice is good, but you have a tendency to over-colloquialize. By this, I mean that when we are writing someone who doesn't speak 'basic English' in a narrative, the voice of that character is very clear in our own minds, but the reader doesn't hear that voice at the outset. Which means we have a tendency to write things that cause the reader to take a double take or a triple take before he/she finally figures out what the guy just said. That happened a couple of times throughout.

- The new Rikti bosses are pretty cool. They hit fairly hard, but they don't seem grossly overpowered.

- The objective in mission 4 spawned in an odd location. All of the map sizes are small, so the arc is short to run, but for some reason, the guy I was supposed to find was located off the beaten path and I had to traverse the map a few times before I found him.

- There are a few typos littered throughout.

- Played on Ariadne, (my Widow - as part of her ongoing contribution to the war effort in hopes of getting people to sympathize with the plight of the poor and oppressed of the Rogue Isles), at 2/+2/Boss/No Av. If you can handle Rikti, you can handle this arc. Basically that's all there is in it... which is a good thing. I think a lot of authors get hung up on putting 'variety' in, which occasionally detracts from otherwise conceptually clean arcs.


Overall, even with the moments where I was like, "hmmmm... I don't know," I think this is a strong arc. It has a clean, linear narrative and the core concept of it is compelling. I think the ending could probably be stronger, especially since, as I noted, I am not entirely sure it is necessary to either do a or b, when option c seems immediately available to the character.


As far as the contest goes, I think this arc seems to do a bit of an end-around on it. I'm seeing a few authors go this route. That is, to me, Dr. Aeon said, "write an arc where a hero MUST do something evil for the greater good." To me, that implied that the onus was on the author to write a situation that necessitated that action, not to write a situation where the character actually has a choice at the end to do it or not do it. It is relatively easy to write a moral quandary... all of us face those every day.

It is much more difficult to create a scenario where evil for the sake of good is absolutely necessary.

I will post my thoughts in my One a Day thread.

Submitted mine.

The Long Road Back
Arc ID: 340454
Length: Very Long (5)
Morality: Villainous
Level Range: 10-20
Groups: Vahzilok, Outcasts, Arachnos, Custom


@Sister_Twelve

Cool. Ariadne liked the Firecracker Kid, even though he seemed to think that because she's a Communist, she comes from the Soviet Union. No matter how many times she told him differently, he would look at her with deep suspicion, as though she was about toe break out the hammer and sickle.

... any images of Marshal Blitz anywhere? I know the general back story on the character from the various wikis and so forth... enough to work with anyway, but I want to include him in an arc and I need an image to work with to start with the create to custom character.

PW, I'd like to see what you think of my arc after the revisions and so forth. You don't have a baseline to compare it with. because I don't think you've been through it before, but I'd like to see if your impressions are similar to others who have played it.

The Long Road Back
ID: 340454

I have no problem with someone joining my team. But then again, I spend about 80% of my time in-game working on MA arcs, so it's usually sort of boring for whoever joins me.

"I'm working on mission 2... could you go back and proofread mission 1 for typos?"

Well, I am sorry if what I said annoyed you. Just remember, all I am really doing here is playing the role of the Beta Reader. My ideas are worth nothing more than anyone else's. If you are happy with your arc, that is what is most important.

But at the same time, my reaction to it is what it is. I could easily pat everyone on the back and tell them how wonderful their stuff is, but I don't think I'd be doing anyone any favors by doing that. I don't star anything I don't think is ready to be starred and I didn't star your arc for that very reason.

I don't like to be the reason that someone's work doesn't get played and low-starring an unplayed arc is the quickest way to consign it to the 'never-played' bin.

One person's reaction alone is probably never enough to worry about. If you get several plays and the consensus of opinion is similar, then I would consider what might be causing players to react that way and adapt.

I'd probably shell out the $10 for some decent hair for an African American male. I'm tired of Sullivan Washington walking around looking like either:

a.) Shaft
b.) A late's 80's rapper
c.) A 70's disco king

or

d.) like he just used 6 tubes of activator.

- S12

(Or alternatively like his barber has absolutely no idea how to do cornrows properly, I suppose.)

I've never seen your work before today. I just watched all of the videos at your site. You really are quite extraordinary.

- S12

Changes of lqte:

Based on Airhead's feedback...

- Changed the map of mission four and the spawn placement of the glowies and Symons, so that the player will not have to do a lot of traipsing back and forth and going from floor to floor. He noted that this bogged down the story element, (which is what mission four is supposed to be about), and I agreed.

- Still trying to work out why one of the glowies in mission 3 will not start to glow and blink until after the escort that triggers it is fully completed. I can find the glowie and interact with it, but it doesn't glow, blink, or make the 'I'm-a-glowie' noise until after the escort has been taken all the way to her destination.

- Changed the composition of the custom faction for end mission to increase the reward given for defeating them.

Yah, I wish they'd at least let us trade one for another one. One of the standard powers for superstrength is hurl. When you are trying to create that 'this group is just a bunch of normal people' faction, the ss jab is okay. The normal guy picking up the large chunk of concrete and chucking it at someone sort of... um... breaks immersion.

To put it lightly.

Hrm... not sure which way to go then. The customs now are set on standard/standard and I really don't want players just to get annihilated by these guys. That really isn't the point of the arc. And setting MA on hard means the customs will lead with some very hard hitting powers.