Origins Pack - Natural Auras and Capes

You hang with some fussy people.

My youngest brother was 11 when he started. He had no problems at all with the enhancement system, even though it was radicaly different than the item systems form the games he was used to. And his first language isn't even English.

I still think most people don't care as much as you seem to think.

If they read the manual and know about enhancement colours and enhancement borders, then there should be no "confusion" to speak of. You look at the border, you look at the colour and if you're unsure, you check the right-click info. It's what I did when I first joined City of Heroes, and I started with a Science origin character. I didn't make a mutation character for nearly two years, and I never had a problem with enhancement stores. And I'm pretty sure we can all agree I'm not some kind of genius. Not by a long shot.

If your nephews is 10 and playing a PG13 game, then you really don't get to complain about problems he may be having with the game. I'm not about to persecute you for letting a minor into a PG13 game, but by the same token, I don't want the game changed to accommodate people who are too young for it. If you bend the rules, you don't get to complain.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That gets back to the core of what I said in my very first post in this thread. You're ignoring that, in the City universe, a Natural human being is able to find something in themselves that lets them do just that sort of absolutely inhumanly possible thing. What the Origin of Power mini-arc tells us is that, though it's a lot tougher, somehow, some people who ought to be completely physically incapable of that level of super human feat find a way to do it. They can punch a hole in giant robot or survive a salvo of rockets. How? Who knows! There's no "real" explanation for why someone with a mutant gene should be able to do something like that. It's pure suspension of disbelief.

No. Stop, right there. No, no, no, no. It does not cover Superboy. Superboy has his powers by birthright. If he never trained a day in his life he'd be able to fly and punch holes in walls (at least when under a yellow sun's effect). Think back to the original Superman movie, to the scene where the Kents find baby Kal-El in his meteor/spaceship. One of the first things he does on Earth as a tiny infant is lift their pickup truck over his head. He did not train to do that.

A lot of people would consider Punisher to be Natural origin. There's significant conceptual overlap in the Natural and Technology Origins, because we can get to levels of technology that people no longer consider "super". The Punisher is squarely in that area of overlap. Also, in City terms, he's probably a very low-level character, no matter which origin you put him in. I think it's fine that there would be overlap in the Natural and proposed Alien origins. It gives people flexability.

It's an aside, but Doom is really a mix of Technology and Magic that we have no way to replicate using CoH's Origin system. I get that you were likely focusing on his power armor, which I would agree is Technology (as far as I've read.)

Um. I don't think I know anyone who would agree they should share an origin if their origins were explained. Sorry, that just seems like a bad example to me.

You're playing word games there. I don't know anyone who knows what, say, the Marvel comics definition of "mutant" is in the X-Man sense who agrees that someone who takes a mutagen is a mutant in the X-Man sense. If you pick some Joe off the street who has no context, then yes, I agree they would see "mutant" and "mutagen" and be confused.

I agree on the God origin thing. Then again, based on the Incarnate lore we have (publicly, at least), we may be getting a God origin. I disagree on the robot thing. I do not see a "robot" origin as reasonable.

Ditto. They could let people pick the little origin power they want if they went this route.

So...what about Incarnates?

It could, if people wanted it to. It wouldn't have to, though any more than Technology and Natural force someone like Green Arrow into one side or the other.

And being born on some other planet (where everyone has super powers relative to a human baseline) would fit in that.

They'd only be authorial decree if they were written as word of god narration, they're not. By saying it through one of the characters, they made it that character's opinion which can be wrong and some of it is contradicted by other canon.

Both Giovanna Scaldi (born at the end of the 17th century) and Sister Psyche (born July 13, 1920) prove that assertion wrong.

When Doctor Brainstorm tries to claim that heroes couldn't use certain powers, such as plant control, prior to his experiment one only has to point to Zenflower to prove him wrong.

For those interested in enhancements being a bit clearer, check out the Enhancement Standardization mode in my sig, or check out Neo Shadowdreams if you don't like Corva_NA's shiny pogs.

Which makes all that 'origin of power' and 'power diversification' crap even worse. It's not even consistent with the game's own canon.

Except in the cases I cited there's only a problem if you assume the Devs meant the characters to be infallible.

The inconsistencies predominently stem from the fact that the characters understandably don't know as much CoH lore as we the players do. It's only through word of god that we know Giovanna Scaldi is a mutant, offical histories probably records her as being a witch. And in all honesty, who really thought that we were suppose to take a mad scientists views on reality serious?

We have to be careful, though. Which one is really "canon"? If we dislike the Origin of Power stuff, it's easy to use that as an excuse to dismiss it when it conflicts with other lore. But what's valid canon is assigned by fiat, not our preferences. The story devs might view Zenflower as the story anomaly, not what Brainstorm said.

Just because the NPC exists in contradiction to what another NPC said isn't clear proof that what the NPC said is supposed to be wrong. It's could be simple inconsistency by the writers/editors.

My point is really that we just don't know. Until someone comes along and gives us the skinny, we have to pick and choose based on our preferences.

Even "word of god" can be suspect. If I recall correctly, we were given "word of god" that Brainstorm knew what was going on as part of the promotional info for I9. That could mean his words are valid canon, or it could mean that we can't trust the "word of god" either.

I recall the promotional piece being an in character press release/news article, but my point was more that its wrong assume an apparent contradiction is an accidental inconsistency when it could be explained as a representation of the characters opinion based on imperfect information.

Definitely possible. Sadly, we really have no way to know. Most of our information is given to us either as in-game NPC dialog or as text from clues, some of which are also in-character dialog, but others of which are supposed to be written info or descriptions of seemingly factual findings. Only a small part of what we think of as game canon is given to us in what seems to me as honest-to-goodness omniscient third-person narrative.

Examples would be the info on the game website, like the "know your enemies stuff", and some of the in-interface descriptions like the origins and powers descriptions. We also have the stuff that Manticore told us in the canon clarification/Q&A thread.

...

You sound like a comic book writer.

Sorry, but explenations like this aren't any better than the actual offensive content.

Of course it's simple inconsistency by the writers. That's what I hate about it. I really, really dislike sloppy writing, especially when it breaks the consistency of, and thus my immersion in, the world/story.

Things that existed first are official canon. If you want to change the official canon, then go and actually change it, don't leave a trace of it. Don't shoehorn in some half-cocked lore that completely contradicts existing lore and leave it to sit side by side. That's just sloppy and unprofessional.

I honestly feel that's splitting hairs, if you want to insist on this interpretation. There comes a point in the power curve where defining someone as human loses all of its meaning if you let that human just kind of train long enough and hard enough to fly and shoot kamehamehas around. Yes, there are certain concepts which can be used to explain things just like that, but most of those are really the same one concept repeated many times over, and that one concept is basically Dragonball Z: Redux.

Basically... I GUESS you could try to rename the Natural origin to a Human origin, but once you give these humans the same powers as aliens, why are we drawing a line to begin with? Is it really THAT important whether the character was born in Brooklyn or Zeta Reticuli? Does it really matter whether the character is white, black or hot purple? Once you allow humans to "just sort of have" powers that aren't in the slightest human, you essentially turn them into aliens in all but name. It just seems like splitting hairs at that point, especially in an origins system that's drawn up with a paint roller.

Well, unless you want to claim that Superman would never benefit from any training, discipline, technique or mastery and is instead a dumb brick who just hits things with nary a thought through his head. And I may not know much about comic books, but I don't think he is.

Consider me - a non-comic-book person. I see one guy in a goblin mask flying around on a glider and throwing around pumpkins. I see another guy in a goblin mask flying around on the same glider throwing around the same pumpkins. I would assume that if they're not the same guy, they are at least very much alike, when they really aren't.

I'm not playing word games at all. You've been on the forums long enough to have seen it. Every once in a while, someone will post their bios and origins and talk about how mutagen turned his character into mutants, hence the Mutation origin. They mutated, didn't they? Then we have to take turns to explain that the origin's name should not be taken literally, and that the mutation has to be innate for it to count, and that everything else is actually Science.

Then there are the people who grab your run-of-the-mill scientist who should obviously be of the Science origin, right? He's using science. Only Science actually applies to people who were exposed to chemicals, procedures and, yes, artificial mutations and somehow got changed. An MDK style scientist throwing around beakers of chemicals and wielding a nuclear toaster would not, much as language would suggest, be Science. He'd likely be Technology.

And I'm not making this up. These are arguments I've gotten into with people here on the forums. These are things people firmly believed.

Hence why these arguments tend to be fruitless. Origins are subject to personal opinion and interpretation, and have been since Launch. Unless we drop the pattern entirely, I don't think it's worth fiddling with.

I have no reason to believe those will come with their own origin. The "incarnate flag" will be set to people of all origins, such that you very much WILL end up with Technology Incarnate characters, regardless of how you parse that phrase.

On the one hand, I agree with you. The City of Heroes lore is a mess. Don't even get me started on the whole Council thing. But on the other hand, we have to base this off SOMETHING. Now, I have no problem with basing this off our own beliefs, opinions and preferences, but the problem with that is everyone's just going to pull in his own direction.

And where Lore contradicts itself, we can do as Kain suggested: It is the errant who are removed. Where a cool story is contradicted by a crappy story, we disregard the crappy story. Then we hope the developers give it the Maria Jenkins treatment.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

This is my one shining hope of decent writing with this story - that one day it turns out that all of these characters were full of crap and were spouting off complete nonsense, and the truth isn't nearly as stupid as they made it out to be. Of course, that's a vein hope, considering this crap has been written into the novels...

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The novels are only considered "secondary canon" and have some glaring inconsistent with not only the game and comics but each other as well.

Also I learned to blog by manually updating a page on my Geocities website, but I still welcome Wordpress and Livejournal and whatnot.

I see the question as more of whether it is too inconvenient. Not "can you figure it out" in the sense of ability, but more "do you want to bother figuring it out". While I know there will be accusations of "dumbing it down", I have to say I welcome further dumbing down, because it does make things easier for me as well.

I mean, I prefer the current system of D&D to, say, THAC0.

I never got why people had problems with THAC0 either

I'm not opposed to simplifying the whole enhancement system, but I'd rather the devs spend their resources and efforts elsewhere, because I really don't see the need for it.

Oh, I agree with you completely, if for no reason other than because some enhancement icon are so huge they obscure the circle colour. Simplifying the system and improving the shop interface (by getting the pop-up to work, say) is never something I'd be against.

However, it's a question of presentation, and it really gets my goat when people start beating their chests and citing statistics about how many new players left the game because they couldn't find the red enhancement with gears teeth on the outside. Yes, it's in need of improvement, but let's not exaggerate here. Pretty much everyone here who has a 2004 reg date learned how to use enhancements by doing, and we're still here.

Just to be clear, I want to see the shop interface improved. I don't necessarily want to see SOs and DOs renamed, but a column to show their "type" would be welcome. In fact, I wouldn't mind seeing their type replace their name when you're buying and selling.

While we're at it, I'd like to see the types cleared up a bit, because they're called a whole bunch of different things. Immobilize is also called Root and Snare in places, Recharge Reduction can be Attack Speed Increase and that's just off the top of my head. Do you know how long it took me to figure out that reducing my power's recharge and increasing my attack speed (attack speed NOT being a stat I'm aware of) was the same thing? YEARS!

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Well, I hope you're right, then. I'd really like to put all of this Origin of Powers nonsense behind us and move on with an actual storyline, rather than with author mandates trying to tell OUR backstories.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.