Sister_Twelve

I'm not sure what the Venture Brothers is. I've used OSI (the Office of Scientific Intelligence) in a lot of my tabletop games since about 1988. The organization, (at least my version of it... there actually WAS an Office of Scientific Intelligence, but it probably bore little resemblence to what I've morphed it into), has its creative roots in King's The Shop, a secretive government entity involved in all manner of evil stuff. In King, the organization probably featured most prominently in Firestarter, which was also a movie with Drew Barrymore, during her child actress days in 1983-4, and David Keith.

My OSI probably draws some inspiration from shows like The X-Files and Dark Skies, as well as roleplaying games like Dark Conspiracy. None of these are detail types of inspirations though... more a mood and a general perception of what this agency is to be. I suppose you call also draw some parallells to The Malta Group in the game, which the distinction that The Malta Group doesn't have the legitimacy and government sanction that OSI does, nor does it have OSI's emphasis on the weird and the paranormal.

In the original book by Mary Shelley, Dr. Frankenstein did not have an assistant. In the various movie versions, the assistant character has alternately been called 'Igor' and 'Egor depending on what version you are watching. If Savage had watched just the right one, he might have referred to Symons as 'Fritz,' although that one isn't nearly as much a part of the collective unconscious of the culture as the other two.

I honestly have no idea how to do this.

This is a valid critique and a good idea. I implemented this change and it strengthened the mission.

I intended to do this, but ran out of space. I will probably re-edit this section once I finished the overhaul of mission 4.

I'm honestly not sure. An agency like OSI would probably use whichever version is easier to hide, since they don't really want to be found out to be providing an expense account for a known villain at this point in the relationship. I used a debit card because it seemed to me that it would be tied to a bank account somewhere that could be opened up under anyone's name and be relatively anonymous, but a credit card would perhaps be less secure, but I honestly don't know enough about the financial world to claim that is true.

Well, the only assumption I am making about the player's character is that he/she is choosing to work with OSI for SOME REASON. The commentaries like this one regarding things of this nature... the fact that he/she is doing the very same things he/she was doing last week can be read in several different ways... anger at the truth of it, sardonic amusement at the truth of it, world weariness and self-satisfaction that the 'legit people' do as much evil stuff as he/she ever did... etc.

Eventually, simply by the nature of the way COH arcs work, the character will make the choice to stay. I can't completely avoid pushing some actions onto the player. The player, if he/she wants to finish the arc, will enter the final mission. That very thing implies that he/she is going to stay with OSI. But whether the motivation for that is because he/she really wants to go straight or not is completely up to the player.

Like I said, I am trying to avoid the phenomenon of writing in motivations for your characters. All I am assuming is that in this moment in your character's personal journey, he/she has a compelling enough reason to listen to OSI and start down this particular path in life.

Mission four is being completely overhauled. To be honest, I was never particularly fond of this mission. In a later arc, I might explore the political aspects of OSI in greater depth, but it seemed out of place to me that they would trust a complete freelancer with something this vital to the agency's continued existence. Removing this mission and replacing it with something stronger might help the entire arc bind together more cohesively.

Believe it or not, I've spent more time tweaking the Heatherford Home cast than anything else in the creation process. They were too weak, then they were too strong, then they kicked my brute's tail, then they were too vanilla... etc... trying to build what are essentially 'normal people with a lot of hand-to-hand training' is very difficult to balance in this game.

Logically the orphan matrons should not be able to challenge the sweeper that OSI sends in. I agree with that. But unfortunately, the few powersets that can simulate the 'trained fighter' rather than the 'superhuman' seem to deal inordinate amounts of damage.

I will continue to tweak.

Hopefully, the revamp of mission four will go far in dealing with the disconnect between the individual plot threads and the throughline of the arc. It is difficult to balance certain things, because there are obviously a lot of things going on that an agency like OSI just flat out would NEVER tell a freelancer.

On that level, I have to be careful about balancing annoying the player by creating an arc that looks like just a jumble of seemingly disconnected missions and having my organizations of scientific super-agents be dumb-dumb enough to blab to this passing stranger why they've hired him/her to these things.

Like I said, I have no idea how to do this within the MA interface.


Thanks again for playing the arc and for your feedback.

I can't speak intelligently about what tools were available back in March versus what tools are available now simply because I wasn't actively playing when it was launched, so I don't know what is availible to me now that wasn't available then. However, I can dispute that there's I somehow have 'more knowledge' when writing my first arc now, versus what I would have know had I written it back then.

Are you seriously trying to tell me that you believe that an arc that's been available for nearly 8 months now has NOT had greater opportunity for consumption and review than an arc that's been available for a week?

Or that an arc that was produced in a time period when, say, 1500 people were actively playing AE missions all the time and rating them, will not have had greater OPPORTUNITY to get seen than one produced in, say, a time period when, say, 150 people are actively playing and reviewing AE missions.

Because if you are, then I really have no idea how to convince you otherwise.

I speaking specifically to the potential for an arc to get played. If you see an arc with a low id number, that means that the arc was written during a period of time when a lot more players were excited about MA and, thus, was involved in the invariable rush that occurred to play player-written arcs when it first came out. In addition, that arc has had literally months of time for high ratings to dilute the damaging effects of low ratings.

An arc with a high id # has been written probably within the last week or so. If that arc is rated with a 1 or a 2, the effects on it are far more devastating than for an arc that has 250 reviews because it has been around for a long time.

Basically, if you consider that 4 stars is pretty much the point at which most people will consider playing an AE arc, (not all, but most people), it requires 2 5 star ratings to counteract every 2 star rating. All that I am saying is that an arc with a lower id # has had a great deal more time and potential for playtesting to reach a genuine distribution of ratings.

And that if the first reviewers rate an arc low now that the shiny of AE has sort of worn off, a newer arc probably will never get the chance to get that distribution because it will be in the dustbin before it ever really gets played.

Ummmm... not so much.

A lot of people may be experiencing a phenomenon called "extended childhood" these days, but I doubt you'll find a single psychologist that would categorize a 28-year-old as 'adolescent.'

In fact, like the author of the article suggests, it's because adolescent boys AREN'T buying comics that the industry is in real danger. We already see comic books dealing heavily with 'real world' issues like terrorism and the politics of the day in crossovers like Marvel's Civil War.

You'll know that comic books have reached their death knell when Spider-Man begins to address issues that are topical to 50-year-old men in order to remain releveant to the reading audience.

This may be my faulty memory because it's been quite awhile since I've run the generator mission, but I seem to remember Silver Mantis BEING an optional objective. Back when I used to run the RWZ arcs quite a bit because the Dark Watcher one especially gave loads and loads of prestige, (back when comm officer portals gave huge amounts), I seem to remember just ignoring Silver Mantis and she'd go away without causing the mission to fail. In fact, the only time I ever actually failed it was when I engaged her instead of saving the generators to start with.

I remember finishing the mission with all the generators still alive soloing with a rad/rad corruptor. They must have seriously changed something in the interim.

I don't regard the leave the general at the front door tactic a cheat. That's just your character slipping and falling into a pile of sense.

"No. You are NOT a superhuman. You CANNOT come with me. What you CAN do is stay here, not move and stay ALIVE."

The way you have to accomplish it is cheesy, yes, but keeping an old, overconfident blowhard from attacking things that have howitzers on their arms when he's nothing but an old, overconfident blowhard isn't cheating. It's smart.