Looking for feedback: Multiverse Champion Arc

I've recently created my first MA arc, and I was hoping to get some outside feedback. It's called "Destined Champion of the Multiverse", and it's based on a pen & paper RPG campaign I ran. While it was designed with the people who played in the campaign as its primary audience, I tried to make it understandable and fun in general.

The arc is five missions long, and would probably take 1-3 hours to play through. I have run a couple different character groups through it and tweaked the maps and enemies to make it more fun. It probably works best for group play, though more solo-oriented characters probably can go it alone.

The theme isn't about superheroes; rather your character has been summoned to fight in multiple dimensions to investigate and combat a threat to the multiverse. Each mission takes place in a different world, and you fight alongside allies from those worlds.

The flaws I do see (and maybe I'm just being my own harshest critic):

1) I need to go through the dialogue, and trim/tweak some of the language. I have a tendency to be a bit long-winded and some of my phrasings may be a bit awkward. That being said, I have made at least one editing pass, so things should at least be halfway decent.
2) I don't know how well the story works. The pacing might be off, and ending may feel a bit abrupt. Part of it was just me trying to cram a ton of story into a 5-mission arc. I do have some sequel plans in mind, including continuing the story, and expanding some of the missions into their own multiple mission arcs.

So, mainly my goal is to see what the thoughts are of people who weren't involved in the RPG campaign on which it was based. I do plan on incorporating player feedback as appropriate. Hopefully whoever plays it enjoys it.

Arc ID: 128476
Title: Destined Champion of the Multiverse

I had this same idea myself but couldn't get it to work so I'll make sure to play this soon and see how you did it.

I just made some changes to my arc. I tweaked some enemy power sets based on playtesting and patch changes. I've added text to the mission intro dialogs to better explain what is happening, especially for people who aren't the team lead and thus don't see the story normally. I've shrunk a map that was too long.

I've gotten a review on my arc in the Mission Arc Critiquing Thread:

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This was a good arc, I give it 5 stars! Interesting story.

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I played through the arc with some friends today with a 4-person group at around level 10. The blue mage bosses killed us quite a few times with their fire control powers. One of our controllers kept getting more-or-less one-shotted this way. The conclusion was that enemy controllers are probably a bit too tough in MA, especially on random bosses.

I should note that our group was far from optimized, and really could have used a tank. We had two controllers, a defender without any heals, and a scrapper. That being said, I still do think they were still too powerful, as we at least shouldn't have been killed as quickly as we were. I have thus changed them from fire control to fire blast. I haven't had a chance to *test* this change yet, so I don't know whether this fixes the problem.

The main reason I haven't run across this problem before is that I don't often run with a group large enough to cause the bosses to spawn. That or our groups were highly optimized, so the mages didn't pose too much of a threat.

I'll see whether this was a good change through further playtesting.

Bubbawheat just posted an excellent in-depth review of my arc: Bubbawheat's review

I have some changes I plan on making to my arc based on his review that I think will make things better. I'll post when the changes are implemented.

I saw your thread today and thought the arc looked interesting! I've played a lot of tabletop RPGs and so I wanted to see all the different homages. I gave it a try with my level 50 scrapper, katana/regen. She is my 'main' alt and my default for soloing things that might be tricky.

I didn't have too much difficulty soloing the arc with this build. I thought the arc was pretty Ok - I gave it 4 stars. There are a few things I think I would do to make it better.

First of all, I noticed that a lot of your NPCs seem to refer to me as if I were not soloing the arc; they call me "You guys" and so-on. I would avoid this kind of thing since I think a lot of people don't do AE with teams. I don't like to do it with a team if I want to check out the story since I don't like missing text; at most I'll duo with my husband. I'd make that language more neutral throughout. I'd probably avoid calling the heroes "Champions" especially. I assumed that might've been the game system you used to run the original tabletop, but I hear tell there may be some other MMO that uses it, just sayin'.

(The rest of my comments are spoilers for people who want to do the arc so stop reading if you don't want to be spoiled.)

I got all the homages to tabletop games that you used. I got the "Shadowrun" vibe when I saw the NPC in the second mission. Unfortunately he spawned AFTER the boss did, so he wasn't actually available to help me and since he isn't in the navbar I had no idea there was help available in the mission. You might want to take a look at where your boss is spawning if you intend for Koji to help the player fight him.

The minion monster spawns in the third and fourth mission really seemed weird. I got after a second that mission three was supposed to be Grayhawk and monster spawns don't really have to make sense in Grayhawk, but at first it was a bit jarring seeing snowmen on that map! I think it works Ok for Grayhawk, but I'm not feeling using that same mismatched group for the "anime" level. I guess they were supposed to be like the weirdo bad guys that Sailor Moon fights and you were using stock mobs to save space, but the only way to get the anime vibe from that mission is the contact you have to rescue. This falls a little flat because it's not THAT unusual to see anime-neko-kawaii heroines in Paragon City to begin with. Neko-chan wasn't over the top enough to feel different or interesting from that perspective.

As an outsider, I would say the tabletop homages are the reason to do the arc, so you may as well do tabletop universe homages the whole way through instead of doing "magical girl anime" as a mission. Maybe some L5R? (I have a Blaster based on my old Mantis on Freedom... heh) I don't know how much room you have for custom mobs left in the arc, but it feels like you're trying to let the allies carry across the feel of the universe, and that works Ok for the Shadowrun area and less so for the anime one.

For that same reason, the lizard world at the beginning falls pretty flat... well, Ok, it falls flat for me in particular for two reasons: 1. There's that entire arc about the Lizard People that has a Dev's Choice/Hall of Fame and a lot of people might've played, so fighting bipedal lizards doesn't seem different now... 2. Sometimes people forget that anything you can make in the AE, you could also make as a character, and my scrapper happens to actually be a bipedal lizard. You can imagine that made the lizard people arc weird for me too, but I know I happen to be a special case at least in that regard. I think you should do something more interesting with the first mission, or... I think you could actually lose it altogether without hurting much, and save some room in your memory for stronger customs in the other universes.

Sometimes your Navbar text needs a little work, I noticed. In mission 5 it just says "Milon," and in mission 3: "Blue Robot Leader," not, "Defeat Blue Robot Leader" or something like that.

Also, this may be a personal thing, but I think "Blue Robots" is a dull name for a faction. This probably worked okay in tabletop because the players would just talk about the "mysterious blue robots," but it has no impact to see that when it's written in text format. I would give that race some kind of name, and maybe flesh them out a little more, adding a second minion type or something.

I hope this helped! Thanks for the arc.

Thanks for trying out my arc, and more thanks for the good feedback! I'll never know what can be improved until people tell me their experiences with it. I'm glad you enjoyed the RPG feel of it (or at least the couple of worlds based on RPGs).

As I mentioned, this mission started as an attempt to turn my tabletop RPG campaign into a mission that anyone could understand and enjoy, and it does still need some work in that respect. While I have let the story diverge a bit from the campaign to better suit the medium of MA, I think I could probably diverge a bit more and end up with a better mission because of it. Right now, the overall campaign plot is mostly intact: the different worlds all appeared in my campaign, as well as the NPCs you rescue in them.

Also, in case you're curious, the RPG system I used for my campaign was 3rd edition BESM.

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Originally Posted by Gemma_Alpha Unfortunately he spawned AFTER the boss did, so he wasn't actually available to help me and since he isn't in the navbar I had no idea there was help available in the mission. You might want to take a look at where your boss is spawning if you intend for Koji to help the player fight him.

Yeah, I have a couple of changes I intend to make with this one. First, Koji will appear in the nav bar, and you won't learn about the computers until you rescue him. And per your suggestion, I'll put Koji in the front of the mission, and the Cyberzombie in the middle or back. One thing that isn't obvious with the current version of the mission is that the Cyberzombie is an optional boss. I don't think I realized that I could have him not appear in the nav area by not putting nav text for him. So I intend to leave him in, but I'll be moving him further back, and either leave him out of the nav text and keep him as an optional surprise boss, or mention him explicitly as something you'll need to defeat.

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Originally Posted by Gemma_Alpha The minion monster spawns in the third and fourth mission really seemed weird. I got after a second that mission three was supposed to be Grayhawk and monster spawns don't really have to make sense in Grayhawk, but at first it was a bit jarring seeing snowmen on that map! I think it works Ok for Grayhawk, but I'm not feeling using that same mismatched group for the "anime" level.

The plot of the original campaign, as well as in this mission, was that Milon had managed to control the minds of a ton of various monsters from the D&D world. And being D&D, there's a ton of different random, varied, and generally nonsensical monsters that all exist in the same setting. Milon was using the monsters in attacks against the anime world, which I did communicate in the mission intro box.

That all being said, yeah, it might work better if I deviated from that plot and did something to give the world a more anime feel. I could try to have more anime-themed enemies instead. Or I could have some other anime-themed protectors of justice fighting these creatures attacking their world (a martial artist and a humanoid robot, or somesuch). The problem is I am almost completely out of room from all the custom enemies:
3 forms of blue robots, 3 forms of lizardmen, the cyberzombie, Koji, Wellby, Nekochan, and 2 versions of Milon. So, I'll have to be creative, as I'll probably have to cut some existing enemies if I want to add any more.

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Originally Posted by Gemma_Alpha As an outsider, I would say the tabletop homages are the reason to do the arc, so you may as well do tabletop universe homages the whole way through instead of doing "magical girl anime" as a mission. Maybe some L5R?

While that's a great idea, I think I'm plum out of RPGs that I've played that have memorable settings that I could use. Well, there's Star Wars, but that's known more as a highly-copyrighted movie franchise than an RPG setting. To be fair though, the anime world could be pretty much straight out of BESM (the setting I ran this campaign in). And I've never played L5R, so that would be pretty much out.

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Originally Posted by Gemma_Alpha For that same reason, the lizard world at the beginning falls pretty flat... well, Ok, it falls flat for me in particular for two reasons: 1. There's that entire arc about the Lizard People that has a Dev's Choice/Hall of Fame and a lot of people might've played, so fighting bipedal lizards doesn't seem different now.

I haven't done much playing of MA, so I was completely unaware of this. Also, I started this mission back in the Issue 14 Open Beta, so my lizards might even predate that arc. *shrug*

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Originally Posted by Gemma_Alpha I think you should do something more interesting with the first mission, or... I think you could actually lose it altogether without hurting much, and save some room in your memory for stronger customs in the other universes.

Yeah, I won't argue that it isn't one of the duller missions. As I mentioned before, the settings are pretty much copied from the campaign. Though the mission thing is one of the more loosely adapted part. In the actual RPG game, the party found themselves in a world populated by dinosaurs. Given that CoH is sorely lacking in non-humanoid-shaped foes, I improvised and came up with the lizard men.

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Originally Posted by Gemma_Alpha Also, this may be a personal thing, but I think "Blue Robots" is a dull name for a faction. This probably worked okay in tabletop because the players would just talk about the "mysterious blue robots," but it has no impact to see that when it's written in text format. I would give that race some kind of name, and maybe flesh them out a little more, adding a second minion type or something.

I got very similar feedback the other day, particularly about adding an additional enemy type. And I agree, it would make things more interesting, and something I intend to do if I can squeeze it in there. I'll see if I can come up with a better name for them that fits with the story.

Another thing that could spruce things up (and another diversion from the campaign to better adapt it to this medium) is to give the blue robots some dialogue. In the campaign, they were basically emotion-less, and only spoke when they had good cause to (i.e. when they had instructions to communicate with the PCs). And they communicated with each other via wireless network, so they had no reason to speak.

However, it might make the mission more interesting it I dropped that aspect of them, and made them speak to each other out loud. I could use that to give the players some clues as to what's going on, and what they're up to.

On another unrelated note, I'm thinking I should have made the NPCs in the SR & D&D worlds required objectives. I'm not sure if you even met Wellby, the halfling cleric in the D&D mission. You don't mention him, so I suspect you hadn't.

Again, thanks for playing and reviewing my arc, and all the great feedback. I'm glad you enjoyed it!