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There we hit upon the difference between the character being an #@$hole and the player being an #@$hole.
A very big part of not being an #@$hole as a player, yet playing an #@$hole as a character, is being willing to lose, or be shouted down in an argument, or be made to look like a fool. Nobody who is a sore loser should even try to play an #@$holeish character, as it will lead to OOC conflict and drama.
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I always tell people new to RP in tabletop PnP games that all it takes to be a good RPer is to have a decent imagination and not be afraid to look like a complete idiot in front of everyone else at the table. If you can manage those two things, you'll do great! -
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Theres a difference between what the PLAYER knows, and what the CHARACTER knows. You're saying take knowlage the player knows, how hero X is trying to pull a prank, and use it to influence the character's actions, aka metagaming.
IRL, if someone put a spider on your shoulder, you'd have no idea if it was for a prank or otherwise, and if you were afraid of spiders, you'd freak out too.
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IC Conflict = OOC Collaberation.
If our characters come into conflict for any reason, then that means you and I are collaberating together to make an interesting story. That doesn't mean the character has OOC knowledge to work with, but you absolutely should, as a player, try to direct your RP in a collaberative way to make the RP interesting.
The door swings both ways: just like OOC knowledge isn't the same as IC knowledge, similarly IC conflict isn't the same as OOC conflict. My character being angry because someone put a spider on their shoulder should not make ME, the player angry. Rather I should be thinking how I can collaberate with the other player to make this interesting for us both.
Role Playing is a social activity, it's not something you do in a vacuum, it's interactive. While our characters may come into conflict, we should both be behind the scenes engineering that conflict to maximize our collective enjoyment, I should not be trying to "punish" the other player so my character can "win".
RPing situations like this are improv: each participant needs to accept another player's actions and then build on them. "Yes, and...". Then we're collaberating, we're improving, we're working together.
"I put a spider on your shoulder!"
"Yes, and I give a start and swat it off my shoulder! I say 'Don't ever do that to me again if you want to keep breathing!'"
Or you can use "Yes, but..." instead of "Yes, and.."
"Yes, but while it's still in your hand, I swat your hand, along with the spider, away and fix you with an evil glare".
or
The important thing is to acknowledge the other person's action and then respond to it in a way that advances the action.
If someone does something that you absolutely do not like, then in the spirit of collaberation, send them a tell saying something like "that last thing you did made me uncomfortable, can we please pretend that didn't happen?" or "I have a great idea, would you mind if we rewind that last action?"
Work WITH the other player to build on a conflict and you'll find those conflicts more fun to play. After all, in order for a story to happen, conflict needs to occur. Conflict is FUN! So don't shut someone down when they do something to initiate it. Instead, say "Yes, but..." or "Yes, and..." then build on it. -
The number one way I meet RPers is I recruit for teams (or ask for a team) in broadcast while In Character. Then, once on a team, I roleplay my character in the mission amongst my teammates.
When you broadcast for a team in character, all the other RPers in the zone perk up. When you RP on the team, the RPers on your team will join in.
Then once you've found those people, Friend them. -
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I've dealt with everything from a tank in one SG saying it was her RP style to play and build the tank like a scrapper with terminal scrapper lock (repeatedly wiping her teams)
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"I am just playing my character" is never an excuse for poor behavior involving other actual PLAYERS. RPing your character as someone who flies into a battle rage is fine... up to the point where your reckless behavior gets your team killed. That's NOT fine. -
This was posted in the forums of a former guild of mine in another game. I consider it THE golden rules of roleplaying.
Three Rules of Good Roleplay:
1. No character concept survives contact with play.
Roleplaying is, at its heart, an interactive process. No matter how artfully my character's background might be constructed, it is inevitably going to be less influential on my character than the play he actually experiences. Of course he is defined by the events of his background. But at the same time, play is what we're here to do. The play is what makes this a group activity. And the play is what forces us to adapt, change, and redefine. After all, every character background is, in truth, an experiment. I'm putting elements together that I think work together in a very interesting way. But it takes practical application - actual play - to see if the experiment is a success. And if it isn't good enough, then more often than not, it's the background that I need to tweak - not the play.
2. Where my character is going is far more interesting than who my character is.
Well, if character backgrounds don't retain integrity in the face of play, how do I create a concept that has pre-existing definition and pathos but can move forward interestingly? I have to understand that motion is more interesting than stasis. Even at the early stages of creating a character, my thinking generally revolves around the question 'what is this character's journey?' Of course, he might never complete that journey. Or his journey might change radically. But there should still be a sense of what that character's arc is. Is he poised for a tragic fall? Perhaps he's positioned to ascend from mediocrity. Or his story is going to involve navigating the strange network of his insane family. Maybe he's a bitter man who will learn to love, or a loving man who will grow embittered. In every story, it is the journey of the character - not the essence of the character - that is most important.
There's a corollary to this rule and it is thus: If the journey is the important thing, starting my character on top is a dangerous and bold choice. Once I'm on top, there are few directions for my journey that are not down.
3. You cannot make your own character cool. You can only make other players' characters cool.
It is functionally impossible for me to go around trying very hard to convince people that my character is cool. It's self-defeating. Because the harder I try, well, the less cool I'm going to seem.
In any story, we have a tendency to see characters not just through our own eyes but from the perspective of other characters within the setting. If a character tells us constantly that he is the most dangerous of men - but every single secondary character treats him like he's as dangerous as a puppy dog, well, we're not going to believe it.
The same thing applies to roleplay. It's not my job to make my own character cool. It's my job to make YOUR character cool. I need to pay that forward. Whenever possible, wherever it makes for good play, I should make an effort to help you get your coolness into the scene. And I'm counting on you to do the same for me. That's the trust relationship of generous play.
The corollary to rule 3 is: While it is your job to make my character cool, it is my job to make my character interesting. If you don't think my character's interesting then it's really very unlikely that you're going to want to buy into my story. And vice versa. -
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Eh, I guess herd isn't the correct word to use, so sorry if I confused people. I just charge right into the middle of a mob and wait for them to all come within melee range and then start the AoEs.
And the problem is I have never seen a good MM. Honestly, how CAN they be good I guess is what I'm getting at? All they can do is attack or not attack, they have almost no control over what their pets do
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This is not at all true. A MM can get very specific with pet tactics. The petcom orders are very granular. Not that it usually comes to that, given that a good MM can steamroll anything in their path. But if it's needed, it's there. -
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There is no human culture on the planet where the men, as a culture, simply DO NOT EVEN NOTICE the female form.
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must ... resist... bad ... politically incorrect....
...San Francisco. Darn. Sorry.
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You obviously stopped reading where I mentioned the forebrain thing.
And do not understand the word "culture".
Homosexuality is not imparted via culture (there's no "gay tradition" that teaches men to find women unattractive). Suggesting that it is would imply that homosexuality is a matter of learned preference. I don't think you meant to imply that.
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The point of your post was lost on me. The point of mine was that the theory that breasts are an evolutionary replacement of the butt is hogwash. Your point appears to be the same, so what are we arguing about?
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My point is that the breasts are for sexual signaling, as they do not need to be that size to accomodate infant feeding outside of pregnancy (see, for example, virtually every other mammal on the planet).
Most primates use the buttocks as sexual signaling and sexual attraction (as, in fact, so do humans of both genders).
Are the breasts "replacements" for the buttocks? No, at best they're a supplement, sexually speaking. But they serve much the same purpose in humans as do buttocks in other primates (including humans), by providing a sexual signal.
For the breasts to be a REPLACEMENT for the buttocks, there'd have to be some evidence that human mating is more successful face-to-face than in other positions, and as far as I know no such evidence exists. But to suggest that the breasts do not serve as a sexual signaling mechanism in the human animal is frankly wrong. -
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Because I'm a misanthrope. Now, any other questions, dirtbag?
All kidding aside, I rarely lead teams because I feel like a cruise director when I do. I'm probably overreacting, but I worry if the team members are satisfied with the XP, the choice of missions, the general pace, etc. I like things done right, and I'm not confident to in my ability to lead properly.
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When leading in CoX, less is more. Just pick a mission from whichever player you want. I generally do mostly mine, but then randomly pick ones from other teammates as long as their CL is set high enough (or I say "we can do one of yours, if you don't mind bumping your difficulty up"). Then switch back to mine. Then switch to theirs. Etc.
If people stick with the team, they're happy. If not (or if they have something else to do) they move on.
Generally, most people don't care which missions they do. They will be happy with anything white or harder. The one thing they generally want to do is keep moving. Long delays make them impatient, but even then they'll usually start without you and keep mowing down foes.
Leading a team means "being the guy to recruit when no one else feels like it". Beyond that, it's just a clerical job of clicking on the next mission. -
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I dont know if a tech pool would work so well, techy stuff runs on electricity, and electricity and water . . . I dunno.
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http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3033/...9e9b3b4d9d.jpg -
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"These freaking trains are always broke down."
(This went on for about three months prior to her asking) She proceeded to tell me that was impossible. Then pointed out that I was always trying to enter the exit.
Boy did I feel like an idiot!
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LOL been there done that and i felt the same way and i had two 50s at that time, never played heros always villains at that point.
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I struggled with that for about 30 minutes the first time I played a hero. I, too, usually play villains and was used to the "run up into the ferry, and go" routine. I was standing there, trying to run in, click on the doors... some players would pop out of the doors and while the doors were open, I'd try to dash in.
Sure enough after about a half hour I suddenly realize there's another whole SIDE to the station... -
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*The theory is that human breasts are supposed to resemble the curved shapes of the buttocks as a visual arousal trigger/cue since humans tend to mate face to face, unlike other mammals. No other mammals have an equivalent buildup of fatty tissue on the torso or mammary glands.
[/ QUOTE ]It's not really more than a hypothesis and not a theory, and one that is easy to disprove when you consider the natural shape of breasts look absolutely nothing like human buttocks at all. It takes fashion, and fashion with respect to preferred breast shape has been highly variable even between decades, not to mention over the span of thousands of years, and because of this would not have been a significant contributor to the passing on of mutations toward "front butt."
Indeed, that hypothesis is based on a very cultural bias that, through ethnocentrism, is believed to be shared by all humanity when that is not the case. The sexualization of breasts is not a universally human trait.
[/ QUOTE ]This post made me think, and look things up.
That's cool.
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Other species also mate facing each other and don't have bewbs.
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Which proves nothing. Show me other PRIMATES who mate face-to-face. And even then that doesn't really prove anything about humans, but it'd give you a leg to stand on.
This idea that human sexual dimorphism of physical characteristics contributing to sexual signaling for mating behaviors is based entirely on culture and not at all physical attributes is pop-psychobabble at it's worst.
People are people the world over, culture be damned, and there's a reason why there are pronounced physical differences between men and women. There is no human culture on the planet where the men, as a culture, simply DO NOT EVEN NOTICE the female form. It doesn't exist.
I read an article recently in Science News about how the brain is wired to find masculine male faces and feminine female faces more attractive then non-masculine/feminine faces (respectively). This preference is notable in both genders, towards both genders.
Human beings are simply put, big dumb apes. They respond to big dumb ape signals, be it through overt lust or gentle admiration. Female breasts are one (of many) of those big dumb ape signals, as undignified as that may make some people feel.
It's when you introduce these big fat over-analyzing forebrains of ours that you run into trouble. The fact that our big fat overanalyzing forebrains can screw up the underlying programming doesn't mean that things didn't evolve that way for a reason... a reason that still works most of the time the world over. -
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A strange thought occurred to me as I was laying in bed last night:
What if them letting everyone do this AE thing strictly to 50 is part of a larger idea?
What IF by playing in the ae you log in hours to their data mining software? and what IF they use that data to flag your CHARACTERS, not account, for certain things.
What if by allowing you to do this they are simply allowing you to dig yourself into a hole? What if by going from one to fifty strictly there's a consequence? Lets say a team was unhappy about how their masterpiece of an issue was turned into a laughable version of their "vision", then lets say instead of doing the standard UBER nerfing of it, they let you do it. Letting their modules mine whose doing WHAT, and how often.
They then use this data to flag specific characters in all your accounts to be rewarded different. No examples, just general thoughts..
Wouldn't THAT be a plan instead of getting huffy about things publicly and rather directly smacking people around for disrupting your vision?
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I have a character that I am well on my way to leveling to 50 via the MA almost entirely... and I haven't farmed even once. I've not even done the same story arc in the MA more than once so far.
So... would this great idea punish me too? -
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I don't start teams because I intensely dislike trying to pull my weight on a team while continually trying to recruit to the tune of dead silence [unanswered tells].
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Probably shouldn't be trying both of those at the same time. If I need to recruit I do it between missions, not during.
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I also dislike it because if the leader is not on highest difficulty, then everyone is outta there.
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Never a problem for me
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I dislike it currently because I am sick and tired of AE babies who have been in the game 5 minutes trying to tell me and entire teams how to do things.
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Haven't run into this yet. If I do, then <kick> -
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The best part is that being the team leader isn't even such a big deal. Essentially all you do is set the current mission and the team's good to go.
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Yup. This isn't the most tactics heavy game in the world. As long as you're playing with a group where *most* of them know how to play their AT, you'll do fine with just everyone sticking together and playing Follow The Brute/Tank. -
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(Also, we're supposed to still be on DOs, which requires a level spread of zero.)
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1.) lol wut? - you can have a level spread on DOs and do just fine. I've done it on Trainers!
2.) You can slot SOs at 23.
3.) I grabbed those levels out of my butt. I see this happen at all levels in every zone all the way up to G-Ville.
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Most things in the paper at this level are going to, ah, generate downtime
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Um.. what? -
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The answers she provided were interesting. But mostly boiled down to the fact that she didn't like to take responsibility for leading.
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Most people don't like to be in charge. They like to have someone else take initiative and lay out a path for them to follow. I'm a little like that, with the difference that, if no one else will step up to the plate, I'll man up and fill that role. I'm not entirely thrilled with it, but sometimes it's the shortest route to what I want to accomplish.
I was a pretty active warband leader in Warhammer simply because hardly anyone else was doing it (and doing it right) and I often put SF teams together when I really want to run a SF but no one else is organizing.
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worrying about team balance or picking missions.
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Wait.... people worry about team balance?
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Meanwhile, I've had almost no difficulty in finding teams *if* I started them myself. It seems there is a plethora of players who will eagerly join you if you ask nicely and tell them the level range and type of missions we're doing.
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It's funny, this is based on actual messages I've seen in broadcast:
Player1: Level 23 brute, lft!
Player2: Level 24 corr, lft!
Player3: Level 24 MM, lft!
Me: Why don't you three all join up together?
Player1: Level 23 brute, lft!
Player2: Level 24 corr, lft!
Player3: Level 24 MM, lft!
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Has the game just become the City of Wallflowers?
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Short answer: Yes. -
I have no problem with marketeering.
Costume contests on the other hand...
I used to be glad I played on red side. It was something we could make fun of the heroes for: they're too busy holding costume contests to stop our evil ways. But then people started doing it red side too. Suddenly our (im)moral high ground of not being That Lame vanished in a big puff.
Although at least they're still infrequent and mercifully small by comparison.
But dammit all, how am I supposed to keep making fun of how silly heroes are, prancing around in their little fashion shows, if villains start doing the same thing!
Grrrr. -
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I actually ran a LRSF while high on ecstasy and mushrooms.
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One of my friends told me he had watched Star Trek - The Voyage Home while on mushrooms. When they traveled back in time, during the sequence with the odd sounds and the floating heads, he started screaming and the other people there had to talk him down.
Drugs are bad, m'kay?
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Oh come on. Same thing happened to me and I wasn't even on anything. -
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My favorite review was from Penny Arcade. It was a combo CoH WoW article that stated, "while WoW takes traditional MMOs and says, 'let me show you a better way', City of Heroes says, 'you know what? %#$@ dragons.'"
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That'd make a fine t-shirt. Except replace "dragons" with "elves". -
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It's the ultimate tool to keep you playing long hours!
LOL
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Ah Archie McPhee. Do you ever become less brilliant? -
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Personally I always thought the in game cut scenes in the first Kalinda and Burke arcs were wonderful and would make a great addition to the MA.
Gods no. Imagine the cutscenes in the Mary Sue arcs....
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Cut scenes are fine, as long as the user is given the option to hit the escape key to bypass...
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The devs have explained in the past that this is not currently possible. The cutscenes aren't a recording that's played. They are actually acted out by the actual models currently in the mission in their current place. Once they're started, the freeze everything else until the scene finishes. Skipping a cutscene is therefore not really easily supported currently.
They'd have to make a new cutscene mechanic or implement an overlay that allowed for players to skip them before they run their course. I don't know that doing this is a high priority development effort given the other things that more players want.
I.e. why would the devs implement a new cutscene system just so MA designers could add in content that most people will just skip? -
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Also Desdemona is so hot with a nice nice booty. she's built the way a woman should be...soft in all the right places
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It always creeps me out when people talk like this about cartoon characters.
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it's not like i said i want to have babies with her (which WAS said in this thread) Is it Really that bad to appriciate beauty where ever you find it? Would it be as bad in your eyes to look at a drawing or painting by picasso, rembrandt, or some guy painting on the street corner and make the same comment or is it that your unable to look past the fact that the topic of discussion is related to a video game? it's not like i or anyone else in this thread said that betty boop or lola bunny was hot
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There's a difference about saying "Thats a beautiful painting" or "That's a painting of a beautiful woman" and "That cartoon character has a sweet booteh, she's so hot! Look at those curves... mmmmmmhmmmm... she's my kind of woman! Sooooo soft" There's a definite line between those two ends of the spectrum, and I just find it creepy when someone feels the need to cross it. On one end it's an appreciation for a beautiful piece of artwork and on the other it's an expression of lust for a cartoon character. There's a definite difference there. She's every bit a cartoon character as betty boop, and yeah, that'd be creepy too. -
I'm surprised to learn that brutes are way out in front for me.
Brute: 8
Dominator: 6
Corruptor: 5
Master Mind: 4
Stalker: 2
SoA: 2
I don't really play hero side at all (my highest level hero is like level 10) -
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Also Desdemona is so hot with a nice nice booty. she's built the way a woman should be...soft in all the right places
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It always creeps me out when people talk like this about cartoon characters. -
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EDIT: Something I have to wonder, however, is this- If someone is deliberately for purposes of data collection antagonizing another and causing them mental distress by their actions, are they not then open to Mental Anguish lawsuits? Or at least, the institution which sanctioned his study?
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How about NCSoft's role in all of this? I'm willing to bet he didn't ask if he could use their service to do an experiment on their customers. While I understand that, in some experiments, you can't fully inform your subjects, I'm pretty sure if you decide to conduct that experiment on private property, you definitely need permissions of the property owner.