Venture
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:Sanity checks were the result of unusual influences on the character. (I only required them for actual supernatural critters and such, not for "mundane" shocks like finding a dead body.) Likewise for things like charm spells or mind control or such.
Without ever making a sanity check?
Because that's describing how your character feels. (in a fairly extreme way) -
Quote:That we need to never, ever, under any circumstances, play your missions.
What do you AE creators think? -
Quote:Take a number.Originally Posted by Megajoule
Potential which was promptly ignored in favor of farm after farm after farm.
Not That I'm Bitter. -
I'm pressed for time here, so I'll try to be brief.
I would take the WoW crafting system and interface over the Incarnate ones every day of the week and twice on Sundays. As for Vanguard, the only reason to harvest components is if you want to make something specific, and then it's easy to figure out what you need and go get it. If all you want to do is skill up you can get jobs from NPCs to do that and they give you the materials for them. You can get better rewards if you use "real" materials but you don't have to harvest to gain skill. -
Quote:Codswallop and poppycock. It doesn't require thought, it requires drawing up a list of what components you're going to want in advance. For every character you plan on taking through the Incarnate process.
But then we get down to the Serious Business of figuring out which ^%*&% piece of salvage we need to use to get what we want. That takes some time, and some... the word escapes me, you do it with your head-part... sometimes it hurts... ah yes, thinkerating!
That's not complexity. It's tedium masquerading as complexity. -
Quote:I ran a Call of Cthulhu campaign, along with any number of horror (sometimes Lovecraftian) themed scenarios in my ten year or so superhero campaign (run across three different rulesets) without doing this. It really is not that hard.
Edit: Just thought of a good example: Anyone here remember a little AD&D expansion called Ravenloft? If you could properly play even one session of that game without at least one time ascribing feelings to the characters, I will give you One Internets. -
Quote:Not unless the player's emotions were being controlled by an external agent.
Never Once? Seriously? You never once slipped and said something like, "This is the scariest thing you've ever seen," or "The scene fills your heart with joy and hope"? -
Quote:In my several decades of tabletop GMing I never once told a player what his character's emotional reaction to something was. Physical reaction, sure; if the character (e.g.) touches something hot "you burned your hand" is an appropriate response. But I never did anything like, oh, say, telling a player "you now consider Frostfire, the murdering scumbag who blew up an entire Longbow base, a hero".
Tabletop RPG's often use the second person when describing what a characters initial reaction is. This allows the Player to immerse themselves more into the game while maintaining a personal self separate from the game. -
I don't think I've succeeded at a Lambda with more than 8 people, and I've only been doing turnstile PUGs.
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Is this a question?
- There is no "story" to speak of. There are some weak themes in the 1-20 Praetorian content but they're dealt with in a clumsy ham-handed fashion. The Incarnate content itself is wrapped in a slightly glorified version of "go. hunt. kill skulls".
- The arc that introduces the player to the Incarnate system does so by casting the player as a 1976-vintage D&D munchkin: the kind of player that will do anything to get more power for his character regardless of the implications or consequences.
- The conclusion of the arc essentially commits the character to a Faustian bargain, accepting power at the potential cost of his individuality or soul. No sane, ethical person would have anything to do with the Well as portrayed, but our characters will catch the Idiot Ball and run with it.
- The actual tasks available in the Incarnate trials are far less impressive than ones undertaken in pre-Incarnate content. Pre-Incarnate heroes stop Lord Recluse from stealing all the powers of all the supers in the world and stand in front of a Rikti portal to stop a world-ending invasion. Incarnates...stop a prison breakout and trash a fort.
- The player is not engaged in the Incarnate trials. Some guy who calls himself a god (titan, whatever) just shows up and tells you where to go and what to do. The trials are just jobs. No reason is proferred as to why the character should particularly care about them, a problem particularly notable for villains.
- The central characters of the Incarnate/Praetorian content are goatee universe evil twins, rather than actual characters in their own right.
Just off the top of my head. -
I tweaked this arc again just a bit. I updated the Perseus and Theseus Titans with Praetorian Clockwork costume bits, replaced the random hostages in acts II and III with unique ones, moved act V to the Boomtown Construction map and used Gyrfalcon for Enigma Silver 2-0. It bugged me a bit that the regular Malta troops only had a Boss heading them up while the other two armies had AVs.
I tested the changes with my main, a 50 KM/SR, set on +1x2 with a secondary build using only SOs and no Incarnate abilities and Gyrfalcon wasn't too obnoxious. If I get complaints I'll change him back. -
I've hit 10 shards in one TF once, two days ago running the ITF with my Peacebringer. The previous run with my Scrapper netted two, three counting the converted component at the end. Fortunately three was exactly what I needed to finish his A4. 4-6 is much more typical in my experience.
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Dude: WHITE SPACE.
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Quote:Then you are making comparisons across a difference of kind, which is fallacious.
The market throws a lot of variables into the discussion that we have to ignore because the incarnate components cannot be bought on the market. -
Quote:Because he was just mindlessly grinding content. Whether or not he enjoys doing that is of no account. If the game requires the player (not the character, the player) to get punched in the face 50 times to earn a reward and someone says they enjoy getting punched in the face does that justify the design?
We've already seen bAss truthfully say he likes running TFs repeatedly with friends and we've already seen yourself and Venture claim he was just mindlessly grinding content. -
Quote:A time measured in hours on one side and months on the other IS unreasonable.
Conservatively it takes 50 shards to unlock a slot. Times 4 that's 200 shards. To slot a common takes 60 shards; an uncommon another 100. So to get uncommons in each slot takes 840 shards. Or about three months if you're converting every day (assuming you aren't sitting on any shards right now). Those uncommons get you the vast majority of the benefits of the four slots. You get a very strong nuke, good debuff, nice buff and a couple of pets. All the rares/very rares get you is bigger numbers.
For someone who refuses to EVER run a trial, that's not even nearly unreasonable to me. -
Quote:Or you go to the market and buy them.
It's been said before with IOs and purple IOs and PvP IOs and hami-Os. These things are very rare. They are specific rewards for specific things. If you want those rewards, you do those specific things. -
Quote:So you had already done months of grinding.
I had over 300 Shards before I20 was released. -
Quote:If you think future content is not going to be Incarnate oriented you are deluding yourself.
Why, will there be new Incarnate-only zones that require the first 5 slots to access them? -
Quote:As we have already had adequately demonstrated, the "shard runs" make such insignificant progress towards non-Alpha abilities as to consider them essentially worthless.
Mix things up people! Do trials when the opportunity presents itself, but not overboard. Do shard runs likewise. Neither burns you out then, and neither makes you feel abused.
You're basically saying "don't run the trials so much", but if people don't get on the hamster wheel now they're going to be left behind in the future. -
Quote:If this was on Virtue, I may have been there.
Last night, I was on one where we got all ten in the second phase, and only seven doors went down when we got back to the courtyard. Whoever had the acids either wasn't paying attention to the League chat, didn't know what to do with the power, or was actively trolling the team. We had to pop three more pods to compensate for the amount of Stupid in the league. 
(Vector Alpha, KM/SR.)
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Quote:It's not "slow". "Glacial" would be generous.
The "solo and convert way" is slow -
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Am I alone in this?
Far from it. You're going to have lots of company very soon, long before i21 gets here with a new hamster wheel or two. -
Nonsense. Eventually, all succumb to the will of Venture.
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Anyone attempting to create J/L/I/D abilities by collecting shards needs to have their head examined.