Venture
-
Posts
2357 -
Joined
-
Perhaps someone at Warners noticed that Zach Snyder actually can't make movies?
-
A New Positron Task Force
One of the first ideas I had was for a Positron TF replacement that would play off of the then fairly-recent "interview" with the character in the Top Cow comic. It would have started with "student agitators" attacking the Steel Canyon university campus armed with military weapons and, essentially, Vials of Bees. The next act would take the players to the base the weapons were traced to, only to find the place destroyed and being scavenged by Clockwork (for metal) and Vahzilok (for bodies). The players would find the base had been used to store some supernatural items used by the military, which would lead to the Circle of Thorns, thus keeping all the factions from the original TF tangentially involved. Ultimately the players would find it was a Devouring Earth plot to sucker in Positron so one of their Devoured could use some magical "sunflowers" to steal Positron's powers for himself. The final fight would require the players to keep the charged-up Devoured occupied while destroying the sunflowers. This one wasn't done because the AE tech doesn't even begin to offer the necessary tools.
In the Land of The Pigs
Inspired by a Jim Steinman song, this would have been a sequel to "Two Households Alike", dealing with the new dynamic between the Bianchi and Poletti families and a power struggle in the Bianchis. It would have ended on a bit of a twist as the player learns this time "in the land of the pigs the butcher is queen": Katrina kills Vittorio and takes over the family (and gets away with it). Not done due to being out of slots and motivation.
Seize the Night
Also loosely inspired by a Steinman number, this would have been a horror/comedy about the original vampires trying to take back their cultural identity from the 5th Council, Anne Rice, Stephanie Meyer and any number of their fellow travelers, including numerous heroes and villains. Suffered from the same problems as the foregoing, plus I never really had a handle on it.
Summer Blockbuster
I never even had a satisfactory title for this one, though I did start working on it on Test when whatever issue made Giant Monsters available in AE was in closed testing. Around this time I had seen a trailer for a movie about "The Guardians of Ga'hoole", about young owls looking for the titular warriors to save them from evil etc. etc. It was fairly vague and it seemed to me that the story would have the owls get to the guardians fortress/sanctuary/etc. only to find the guardians long dead or gone, forcing them to become the guardians. I found out later the actual story was much more typical and less interesting.
The arc I was working on would have had the player wake up after a mediport gone awry to find himself in a stock fantasy kingdom about to be stomped by some Titans (repurposed Giant Monsters). The first two acts would have been told in flashback, with the Contact being the monolith the player ultimately found at the nearby ruins where he'd been told a Champion could be summoned to defeat the returning Titans. Except, of course, the monolith would reveal that whoever found it was the Champion, and now had to choose to either return to his own world (quit the arc) or stay and fight the Titans. If the player saw it through, the souvenir would relate how he'd followed up on what happened to him with Portal Corp, only to find they'd traced his teleport to thousands of years in the past of a nearby world, whose culture still had depictions of the player in its mythology. Abandoned for numerous technical reasons, chief among them discovering that GMs used in AE do not scale down to EB level for soloists, and I never really had a good handle on it anyway.
-
With luck, all of 'em. More likely, none.
-
Quote:Arguably this was already done with the Destined One storyline. I'd like to think the devs learned from that mistake, but the whole Incarnate system has repeated the mistakes of the Patron Power pools, so I'm not optimistic.
So you think the only available Incarnate path has been designed to punish players further down the line? -
Quote:...it says here. Right next to "the check is in the mail".
Statesman was only like that because he took all his power at once - we're doing it a bit at a time, which means the Well can't control us.
The character has no reason to take these assurances at face value. Butane points out the Well could be controlling Gray but really it's even worse than that. The only assurance the character is given that accessing the Well can ever be safe comes from a character that in universe is notorious for secrecy. We really don't know who Lady Gray is, or where she comes from, or the source of her powers, her motivations or agenda, etc. The new dialog for Prometheus just makes things worse, since it's made pretty clear that he isn't being straight with the PCs, either.
This is the point. Good writing in an RPG scenario encourages buy-in: the characters are presented with reasons to stay on the rails because doing so works for them in some way. Bad writing, which is what we're getting, encourages opt-out. There is no reason for the characters to want to touch Incarnate-hood with someone else's hand, But Thou Must if you want to play. The player shouldn't feel that the only way to win is not to play. -
Quote:It's bad writing. Good writing would not have tried to shoehorn every character in the game into a one-size-fits-none pseudo-explanation. This is the kind of thing I used to see in late 1970's GMing.
Well to be fair, I expect it's suppossed to be a given. 
Saying it's not and needs to be made clearer is being nit picky, as anyone should be smart enough to know, the devs aren't going to surprise you with "HAHA! Your character is now an NPC sucker!"
I mean really, come on. It should just be a given that the character knows this is true OR has done the leg work to know it to be true.
It is literally the case that no explanation at all would have been better than the one we were given.
As previously noted, this is just sticking your fingers in your ears and humming real loud, or as I've said in the past, treating all text in the game as "click here to fight mobs".Quote:Luckily, the seeking it out is actually a non point now imo, as you can gain the incarnate abilities without actually seeking it out now, with the ability to open the alpha slot through a voucher or through just joining the iTrials. -
Quote:Our characters have no reason to believe this is true. The idea that "a little won't hurt" is the basic principle behind corruption.
Indirect is the method our characters are using, its much slower but by absorbing small bits of power gradually over time, you never have a direct link to The Well and so avoid the control issue.
Which text is this?Quote:Anyhow, thats what I got from reading the text.
Edit: Oh, and:
The Tsoo are primarily Hmong. The Hmong hail from (IIRC) primarily Cambodia and Laos. They're very much a "displaced people" though. You'll find them all over the south Pacific and a fair number of them have settled in the US (in real life).Quote:While I'd love to have the background detailed more. For instance, the Tsoo being Korean based (at least mostly) would be nice to get that info out there, instead of people thinking it's the Chinese Mafia. -
Quote:This point in particular is the deal breaker. It is made perfectly clear that the Well is offering a classic Faustian bargain. No sane, ethical being would have anything to do with the Well once this revelation is made, except perhaps to try to destroy it if that were possible, even at the expense of destroying all superhumans or removing all superpowers.
Your hero's first introduction to the Well involves said entity possessing Statesman and rendering him into a helpless sock puppet for the purposes of conversation. I don't know about anybody else, but that right there is a good enough reason for most of my chars to avoid touching it with a ten-foot pole. -
Quote:When do they intend to start?
They will continue to give us fun and interesting stories -
Quote:This pretty much sums up my feelings as well. Whoever is writing the lore over there now needs to stop.
I'm torn between wanting more lore and the fear that such lore will be as unutterably stupid as the Origin of Power arc and the official story of Architect Entertainment. Stuff that I'll just end up having to ignore anyway, for the sake of my suspension of disbelief and/or sanity.
I could not possibly care less about another level 25 zone, regardless of what new shinies they have stuffed in it. It's even worse that it's in Praetoria, not just because it's a cliche-ridden forgettable goatee universe suffering from Darkness Induced Audience Apathy, but because I expect in order to get anything out of First Ward you'll need to have leveled the character in Praetoria, and leveling characters in Praetoria is for suckers.Quote:The Furies will get more of a mention in First Ward
Oh yeah, falls directly into "don't crap a crapper" territory. Any good tabletop GM will recognize the same moves they used when caught flatfooted. The difference being that many of us, myself included, used them successfully.Quote:In the devs' minds they may see this as some grand coalescence of threads they've been carefully been laying. To my eyes it looks more like they've been floundering for several years about the Coming Storm and are mashing Praetoria in all it's retcon'ed "glory" into it at the last minute and claiming they planned it all along. -
Quote:Maybe in issue #1. It's been progressively less true in every issue since.
The REASON that CoH's storyline is so scarce is, when it plays out in the course of a story arc it makes you feel like you're actually important in this world. -
Quote:I read about ten times faster than people talk. Sitting through one of these "live chats" is excrutiatingly boring.
They're also recorded, so you can watch them anytime -
Quote:Hamidon wants to Kill All Humans. If he was controlling Cole he'd have won. It's more likely to be the other way around.Originally Posted by Scythus
I'm going with the theory that Cole has become some kind of mind-controlled puppet for the Hamidon. -
Actually, at the time a friend with connections at DC said Hawk and Dove were specifically thrown under the bus (following the Captain Atom fiasco) as a Take That to the title's author, who had just left the company with bad blood. Take it for what it's worth.
-
No Babylon 5 = epic fail.
-
Ghost Widow's remains are part of Scirocco's betrayal arc, where it is said that they are kept by Arachnos to ensure they are not used against her. There's either a Critical Research Failure or They Just Didn't Care moment in the works, but either way it would appear that whatever is stashed in Galaxy City isn't really her remains.
Of course, the MAGI vault is in Galaxy City. Perhaps we'll be lucky and the guy who is actually responsible for it will have let everything get stolen before the zone goes pear-shaped. -
NPC allies should only be present when the story demands. Adding them to compensate for Nintendo Hard gameplay means you've made two mistakes instead of one.
-
Quote:
There's not enough facepalm in the universe for this situation. 
-
Hated it, way too tedious.
-
My best arc "Splintered Shields" is down partly because of this. (And, IIRC, it doesn't like the name "Victor Praetorius", which is funny because it's one of my PCs.)
-
I'm not changing my arcs affected by the filter either. They can take up space until the sun explodes; there's nothing infringing or offensive in any of them.
-
Quote:Yeah, and here's how that fight should have gone:
Spider-Man beat down a freaking Herald of Galactus.
Firelord: YOU DARE STRIKE...
Spidey: *dodges, hits Firelord*
Firelord: YOU DARE STRIKE...
Spidey: *dodges, hits Firelord*
Firelord: YOU DARE STRIKE...
Spidey: *dodges, hits Firelord*
Firelord: CUT THAT OUT!
Spidey: *dodges, hits Firelord*
Firelord: RIGHT, DODGE THIS!
Spidey: *spider-sense goes to 11* Oh cra....
*Manhattan Island explodes*
Firelord: Got 'em.
Fights in comics are determined by the whim of the writers, not by any reasonable estimation of the characters in question. Spider-Man should not even have been able to hurt Firelord, a character that could solo entire fleets of starships. MMOs operate under an entirely different set of assumptions. Their designers are perfectly within their rights to design encounters that absolutely require more than one character to defeat If it should turn out that said encounters can actually be defeated by smaller teams they are also within their rights to redesign the encounter and/or nerf character abilities accordingly.
My complaint with the Incarnate Trials isn't that they require groups, it's that the alleged "solo option" is such an abominable grind as to insult our intelligence. Either solidly lock the rewards behind group content or provide a viable solo alternative. -
IIRC, the mob in that mission is actually an ally that just stands there while you beat it to death. Probably not what's needed here. What is needed is, to the best of my knowledge, not available.
-
Recluse has always been an Anti Sue. Now he's just being put in his proper place: the nearly-inconsequential generalissimo of a pirate's den that only continues to exist because it's not really dangerous enough to be worth the effort of crushing.
-