Venture

Titan Weapon...definitely.

Don't like it -> don't buy it.

Ridinkulous!

From my horribly out of date character pages, characters that might be considered to take liberties:

Eva Knight/Champion -- references Knives of Artemis (character rerolled w. similar origin)
Iphigenia/Freedom -- references Skulls. "The Tsoo Shenannigans" arc
Mr. Pagliacci/Freedom -- references Carnies (retconned; Virtue version rerolled but retains this origin)
The Laughing Gnome/Justice -- references Croatoa, Redcaps
Master Shadowscale/Liberty -- ancient history
Exergia/Protector -- related to Luminary
Ion Lash/Protector -- Dr. Aeon, Bat'zul, Lanaruu

Yeah, those jerks who think spelling and grammar are important in writing, like, you know, employers.

No. If your work consistently includes "technical mistakes" it tells people who read it that you can't write and you can't think.

The problem is what's in the info box isn't your story. It's the blurb on the inside of the dust jacket that's supposed to get people interested in the story.

And in City, it doesn't need to be any bigger than the current space allows.

As it turns out, an argument isn't true or false depending on how many people agree with it.

Which isn't very good. Consider, for instance:

There is just as much "story rationales, lore and precedents" to establish that death is often permanent as there is to the contrary. You just choose not to see it that way. We didn't have this kind of outrage when (e.g.) Sefu Tendaji was killed off (arguably fridged). People pretty much took it in stride that we arrived on the scene too late to ressurect, etc.

What do you think citing Jean Grey is going to do?

Yes, if the game lasts long enough for the Big Pointy Hat to get passed off to someone else, or if the current wearer just changes his mind, then Statesman's death is subject to turning out to be less final than originally stated. That's neither here nor there.

Complaints about the sappy cutscene, the obvious trap, etc., are one thing. My personal favorite is that "who will die?" turned out to be a character that wasn't actually in the freaking story. It's like you're reading a Batman comic and suddenly Superman flies into shot in one panel then gets hit by a kryptonite laser and dies in the next, leaving you going "...the hell?" Arguing that the death itself requires some extraordinary justification simply because sometimes characters haven't stayed dead is just nerdrage.

You haven't. What you have done is demonstrate in great detail that you are going to be unreasonable about this.

The devs don't have to fill out a form in triplicate to declare a death as final and beyond resurrection. There has been no shortage of such in the game, going as far back as Captain Indomitable in i0. Actually, given that finality is the default state for death, it is the cases where the death is not final that are the exceptions, not the rule. Who Will Die? commits a litany of sins, but this is not one of them.

Happens all the time -- most deaths in hospitals take place because a decision is made to allow the patient to die.

We understand just fine. You're just wrong.

And...this would be...bad...how?

Because you didn't do your due diligence and then complained about the results.

Yes, the store should do a better job of showing you what you're buying, but since there is a method of previewing a purchase available the store's design flaws don't absolve you of your failure.

Most people already don't know who your hero is.

The government is not going to give a license to serve as a state actor in law enforcement to someone it can't identify. Not. Going. To. Happen. Anything such a "hero" did would be thrown out of court.

Madonna is Louise Ciccone. Prince, IIRC, is Roger Nelson. I didn't have to Google either.

Which, as noted above, has nothing to do with the point.

Which gets us back to, "it is implausible that every hero or villain has infallible means of confounding every exotic method of inquiry". You cast spells to screw with magical scrying, the enemy uses a technological scanner instead, or hires a better mage to break your spells.

No one is saying everyone is going to know who your hero is. This has been made very, very clear repeatedly. The point is that anyone who really wants to will be able to break a secret identity, one way or another. Hell, IIRC back in a 80s Spectacular Spider-Man story some college kids trying to prank Spidey almost broke his secret ID just by logging his movements around the city.

It is implausible that any given character would have infallible countermeasures to every single exotic means of inquiry. It's something a GM or world designer might get away with once but that's it.

The real world is short on working crystal balls, too.

There is a fine line between a genre convention and a dead-horse cliche, and secret identities pole-vault over it. Back in the early days when superheroes lived in their own comic books and not in "universes" or "continuities" it merely strained disbelief that, e.g., Lex Luthor could be smart enough to build a death ray out of two tin cans, three rubber bands and a blender but wasn't smart enough to figure out Superman was Clark Kent. Once heroes started living in entire worlds filled with magic and psychics and Star Trek style super-sensors, the plausibility level of secret identities went into negative numbers.

This is even more true in a role-playing game, which has to make sense as a world and has to account for the players' actions. They have access to all that magic and whatnot too, and they're not going to put it aside when they want to know who the villains are under their masks. That's less of a concern here where player choices are sharply curtailed but it's still a factor and one City deals with reasonably well. There aren't too many in-game stories where establishing the identity of a character is critical.

Again, this doesn't mean your characters' real names are on the tip of everyone's tongues. It just means the ultra-paranoid and borderline god-mode attitude NO ONE KNOWS MY CHARACTER'S SECRET IDENTITY!!!1!1!!1 is untenable. If someone really, really wants to know a hero's "secret identity" they'll find it, and comics have pretty much gone that way for a while now.

Another satisfied customer!

I'm not. N.b. that Twinshot knows who "Justin Sinclair" is, and she's a relative nobody. Real names of canon characters are bandied about without much fanfare. Again, the average schlub on the street probably doesn't know who "Jessica Megan Duncan" is, but anyone with a cape probably does, and Malta can tell you what color panties she's wearing today.

Really? I'm being a little disingenuous there as the character's identity was eventually outed in my own personal canon, but still. Most of my characters do have some kind of "secret identity" (it does not make sense for some, e.g. the robots, demons, etc.). I'm just not going to have a freak-out if someone I'm RPing with happens to mention a real name, having read the (horribly out of date) web page or in-game bio.

Yeah, it's called "sign here".

In City, secret identities are more like stage names than matters of national security. The FBSA knows who you are, and in a world with working psychics, x-ray vision and ouija boards, so does anyone else who really wants to.

Fixed.