Classifying In-game content.

Companion to the Thread in the Mission Architect Forum

I've been thinking about classifying the Contacts, Storylines, Missions, and other story elements in-game for players who want their characters to do things more their speed. This of course requires me to create some classifications.

The purpose of this is to allow players to create their character snad tailor their play experience more to the type of career they'd want that character to have, instead of the current system of starting out small, and growing in power.

They could start out small time and stay that way, having big wins on their own scale instead of trying to have Daredevil save the world from Cthulu. Conversely they could start out as a massive, world destroying villain/ world Saving Hero and keot it up throughout their career.

Obviously this would facilitate the need for the same classifications in AE as there's little world-shattering content at the early levels, and similarly few small scale content in the end game. This would result in a mix of AE and Dev Content play.

These classifications are designed to address what your character does 70-90% of the time. Since 70-90% of your play experience would be in missions and such, this would apply most directly to mission and TFs/SFs, and mission related content, Contacts, enemy groups, and all of that. Obvious allowances are made for zone events and GIant Monsters as heroes/villains occaisionally step up, down, or to the side of their usual "norm".

Origin:
These would be the origins Set in the game
Natural
Mutant
Science
Technology
Magic

Character scale:
This is where it gets somewhat complicated.

To give an example, let's examine our friendly neighborhood Spider-man

Spider-man would be classified as Crime Fighter scale

Roughly 40% of his Super-Heroing time is spent figting small crime. The other 40% is fighting Small time thugs who happen to have super-powers(Sandman, Shocker, Rhino) Villains who have a specific vendetta against him (Venom) or plain old crazy villains (Green Goblin)

Sure, Spidey occaisionally gets embroiled in Marvel's big- giant, who gives a crap Multi Comic crossover event, but that's an exception, rather than his standard.

And while some of his villains occaisionally get too big for their britches, Doc Ock is a big perpetrator of this, most of them fall into one of the three aformentioned Catagories.


This specifically deals with the type of character you're making, Obviously a low level criminal would'nt be taking over the world, and a hero determined to protect their neighborhood would'nt have the firepower to stop them if they did. So here are the classifications I've devised (so far)

Heroes:

• Cosmic Defender:
  You save the world. All the time. Sometimes you even save the whole universe. It's your specific duty to tackle the big, world threatening problems.
  
  -Examples:
  Superman
  The Justice League
  The Avengers
  Doctor Strange
  Silver Surfer
  Green Lantern
  
  
  
• Crime fighter:
  You fight crime. You're in the trenches, on the streets. You may not stop meteors from smashing into earth, but you help keep earth running every day.
  
  -Examples:
  Daredevil
  Spider-man
  Moon Knight
  Batman(except when he's in the justice league)
  Punisher
  The Question
  
  
  
• Hunter
  You've made it your life's work to attend to what you consider a major threat. Nothing will distract you from taking down your enemy.
  
  -Examples:
  Blade
  Punisher(these can fit multiple characters)
  Hellboy
  
  
  
• Hero For Hire
  You work for a benevolent organization. The pay you rather well to eliminate specific problems and then to go home.
  
  -Examples:
  Luke Cage
  Ironfist
  Misty Knight
  X-men

• Criminal
  You're a common criminal. You'd be happy having you own gang, maybe a nice little place somewhere with lax extradition laws. you don't need to take over the world.
  
  -Examples:
  Shocker
  Sandman
  Killer Croc
  
  
  
• Super-Villain
  You'll show them. One day the world will be YOURS(or at least the dark gods you serve) Through your evil mcahinations you seek to control everything and reform it in your image
  
  -Examples:
  Doctor Doom
  Lex Luthor
  Baron Mordu
  Moleman
  Magneto
  Dr. Octopus
  
  
  
• Mercenary
  You don't care what the job is, you just want the money.You'll do whatever anyone pays you to do...
  
  -Examples:
  ...any assassin
  Bullseye
  The Enforcers
  
  
  
• Destroyer
  You're crazy. It's hard to put it any clearer. You just want to destroy anything you can. You do everything for the sake of doing it.
  
  -Examples:
  the Joker
  
  
  
• Arch-Nemesis
  You exist purely to make someone else personally miserable. The hate you feel for them burns ith such intensity, it threatens to consume you.
  
  -Examples:
  THE MONARCH!
  Green Goblin
  Lex Luthor (like heroes, villains can fit for multiple roles)

Well I'm too disorganized to be of any help but I can say I would use something like that. I have one character who doesn't consider herself so much as a super powered hero who can protect the world so much as just someone with a bit of power whose willing to protect her neighbors... Frankly the big name villians scare the crap out of her... So far

actually what I would love to see would be the ability to level entirely against one group... Or at least similar groups. To be able to have a hero who spent their entire career (1-50) fighting the skulls and hellions, or fighting the family. Fenian's backstory is all about how she has a hate on for the family... Another alt, Daybreaker Alpha, would pass up many more noble deeds for a chance to put the hurt on Crey...

But a resource that would help me keep them at least within the power levels I see them having would be cool....

This is a real sweet thread actually - I forget my characters at the moment, so will edit this post after I check my signature....


Here we go. Was thinking, some characters are on quests and are searching for something - and often go into the Vigilante/Rogue zone, because they don't really help or kill anyone, just do what's needed to get to their goal.. Could that be another type?


Midnight Guard is a Super-Villain.. Flammenklinge, Mercenary. Zenodorus, Mercenary. Modos, Destroyer. Battler, Destroyer. Obsidian Dusk, Arch-Nemesis. Karokage, Arch-Nemesis. Darkspire, Mercenary. Calaenia, Mercenary. Van Death, Mercenary.

Choshu, Tsuchiro, Otonashi and Honoka are Cosmic Defenders. Holly Good, Crime Fighter. Omniwalker, Cosmic Defender. Ex Nihilo, Cosmic Defender. Scintillatus, Hunter. Musurana, Crime Fighter. Panoply, Crime Fighter.

This is fun.

I have always wanted a way to map my mission types to suit my Origin.

It would all be opinion-based, but by consensus agreement, this could be a very interesting project. I would love to be able to hit the player-guides section of the Wiki and find a classification of the various missions and contacts, as you've portrayed them.

This is an excellent idea, and well thought out - I agree with MG that its fun to classify your characters in this way.

I like it!

Classifying your character by theme and trying to stay within that theme is fine, and has the potential to be a lot of fun. I wouldn't want the theme to become a straightjacket, however; comics are full of heroes taking on threats that are outside their weight-class, and villains with goals too grandiose for their actual powers--that's part of the fun. To borrow an argument from Batman, "Those monsters you don't fight? They tend to step on little guys." In the end, though, it's up to the individual player--if you don't want your character getting dragged into something bigger, that's your choice.

I rather like the idea of categorizing AE arcs this way, since you can actually follow the theme all the way through a character's career that way--if you avoid all the really earth-shaking stuff in the main high-level content, you're going to end up short on stuff to do, and if you're looking for cosmic threats at low levels, you're going to come up empty. I'm not sure how you'd handle the categorization of that much stuff, though. The easiest way would be to have a set of threads in the Player Guides section, one for each category, and ask people to post arc ID and title of AE arcs that fit the category. Then you'd periodically update the OP with a list of the arcs by level. It would likely be very messy, though.

For the dev-created arcs, on the other hand, it could be as simple as updating the wiki entry for each arc to include a list of categories the arc fits. Still time-consuming, but not the bottomless pit that an AE classification project would be.

Once you're 50, you're a cosmic defender by default

Well the Punisher did manage to kill the whole Marvel Universe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punishe...arvel_Universe

I mean, yeah, there's always fluctuations and flukes, but these Scale classifications are more to the effect of
"what my character(his enemies) do 80-90% percent of their heroing/villainy time"
Take Spidey as an example
50% of the time, Spider-man is fighting simple crooks. And when he's not doin that he's fighting
Criminal-Scale Villains:
Shocker
Scorpion
Sandman
Kingpin
Hammerhead
Silvermane
Nemesis type villains
Green Goblin
Venom
or Destroyer type villains
Green Goblin
Carnage
so even though 10% of the time he gets swept up in Marvel's current big cross-continuity crossover blahblah event, pretty much all his time is spent dealing with smaller scale threats and crime.
so Spider-man would be Scaled as Crime-Fighter Hero.

So... noone wants to help?
Obviously I'll start work soon, but I'd like some kind of help, maybe one person per Origin, and I'll divide it into the proper scales
also..

This is a cool idea. As a purely practical manner, I can see it being more useful for AE than regular gameplay, since even once your character has attained "cosmic level" power you still get handed FedEx and minor thug missions.

Well, you could always choose not to take the mishes in-game that don't fit your character, and there's a suplementary thread in the AE section.

I think there needs to be something between Cosmic Defender and Crime Fighter. I say this due to the X-Men since you need a group who's goals seem firmly halfway between the two extremes yet can easily step up or down to accomodate various threats.

Well, Hero for Hire and Hunter can go any way. Hunters are basically Heroes that focus on a specific threat. That threat could be cosmic or minor. and Heroes for Hire are designed specifically as belonging to an organization that tells them what to do.
So X-men Would count as Heroes for Hire purely by concept(as opposed to how they actually operate) and the Green Lanterns would be along the same lines, with touches of cosmic defenders. To go into Greater detail.
An Individual Green Lantern is A Cosmic Defender.
The Green Lantern Corps as a whole Are heroes for hire.
edit:
Plus, as I've stated before, this is more of a "what I do most of the time" type of thing.
By these standards. Anytime we take part in a zone event or Giant Monster fight we take a step up, down or to the side.

It's possible that I'm just nitpicking and forgive me for that, however

Quote:

Originally Posted by Premonitions By these standards. Anytime we take part in a zone event or Giant Monster fight we take a step up, down or to the side.

is sort of my issue. GMs and zone events are clearly above street level but often times they are not truly global/cosmic.

This is my point, these would be fan-made and agreed upon classifications for missions, events, and contacts. That way, people who had a character that was imagined as one of said classifications would'nt be spending the majority of their time stepping above or below their desired range because they could come to it, find contacts and such in their desired range, and run through all of those.
Quoting myself here

BTW, your list would be a bit more readable with bullet points or something similar. As of now it's in Wall of Text mode.

bI swear to god, I'm going to use another forum's Vbulletin interface to write up my planned revised edition for this and the AE section. Cause the lack of visible availanle tools is frustrating the CRAP out of me.

Try quoting this (to pull up the actual code) and copy/pasting this to see if it helps:

I've been thinking about classifiyng the Contacts, Storylines, Missions, and other story elements in-game for players who want their characters to do things more their speed. This of course requires me to create some classifications.
There are two Classification lines I had in mind and the first one should be obvious

Origin:
These would be the origins Set in the game
Natural
Mutant
Science
Technology
Magic

Character scale:
This is where it gets somewhat complicated.

This specifically deals with the type of character you're making, Obviously a low level criminal would'nt be taking over the world, and a hero determined to protect their neighborhood would'nt have the firepower to stop them if they did. so here are the classifications I've devised (so far)

Heroes:

• Cosmic Defender:
  You save the world. All the time. Sometimes you even save the whole universe. It's your specific duty to tackle the big, world threatening problems.
  
  -Examples:
  Superman
  The Justice League
  The Avengers
  Doctor Strange
  Silver Surfer
  Green Lantern
  
  
  
• Crime fighter:
  You fight crime. You're in the trenches, on the streets. You may not stop meteors from smashing into earth, but you help keep earth running every day.
  
  -Examples:
  Daredevil
  Spider-man
  Moon Knight
  Batman(except when he's in the justice league)
  Punisher
  The Question
  
  
  
• Hunter
  You've made it your life's work to attend to what you consider a major threat. Nothing will distract you from taking down your enemy.
  
  -Examples:
  Blade
  Punisher(these can fit multiple characters)
  Hellboy
  
  
  
• Hero For Hire
  You work for a benevolent organization. The pay you rather well to eliminate specific problems and then to go home.
  
  -Examples:
  Luke Cage
  Ironfist
  Misty Knight

• Criminal
  You're a common criminal. You'd be happy having you own gang, maybe a nice little place somewhere with lax extradition laws. you don't need to take over the world.
  
  -Examples:
  Shocker
  Sandman
  Killer Croc
  
  
  
• Super-Villain
  You'll show them. One day the world will be YOURS(or at least the dark gods you serve) Through your evil mcahinations you seek to control everything and reform it in your image
  
  -Examples:
  Doctor Doom
  Lex Luthor
  Baron Mordu
  Moleman
  Magneto
  Dr. Octopus
  
  
  
• Mercenary
  You don't care what the job is, you just want the money.You'll do whatever anyone pays you to do...
  
  -Examples:
  ...any assassin
  Bullseye
  The Enforcers
  
  
  
• Destroyer
  You're crazy. It's hard to put it any clearer. You just want to destroy anything you can. You do everything for the sake of doing it.
  
  -Examples:
  the Joker
  
  
  
• Arch-Nemesis
  You exist purely to make someone else personally miserable. The hate you feel for them burns ith such intensity, it threatens to consume you.
  
  -Examples:
  THE MONARCH!
  Green Goblin
  Lex Luthor (like heroes, villains can fit for multiple roles)