Mandatory Pool Powers

yes.

So what do you call it when it's both? Let's say I have some extraordinary skill with a sword, head of my class and whatnot. Now, that's not good enough because a regular sword doesn't just cut through robots. So I get a cool glowing sword that's either magic or tech enhanced to be extra sharp, or give me extra strength or whatever.

I think most of our weapon wielding characters fit in that category. We're really cool, but we've also got really cool weapons.

Are you asking which origin you're choosing?

Is this character always using this cool glowing sword? Does this character not care if he's using a robot-chopping axe on a regular human body so only has this glowing sword for every costume? Did they develop this sword themselves or just find it/was gifted it?

I was just trying to come up with a generic situation. Better than average skill and a better than average weapon. At what point does the skill stop being natural and become tech/magic?

In some ways this is more a power level issue than anything else. A highly skilled marksman will be more effective if he's carrying a Callahan full-bore auto-lock with a customized trigger, and double cartridge thorough gauge than if he's carrying a basic over the counter weapon. Conversely it doesn't matter how good the gun is if the guy wielding it cannot hit the broad side of a barn.

Personally my view on this situation (and similar cases where a character has multiple possible origins) is which one is more important to the character's power level as a whole. If the character is an expert weapon user who happens to use an excellent sword then he's probably whatever origin gave him his awesome skill (generally natural). If he's a decent weapon user who happens to have a really, really cool weapon then his origin is his weapon's origin (generally magic or tech).

I think there is a lot of grey area between the different origins so in many cases I feel it simply comes down to picking the origin that the character themselves would pick if asked. Do they consider their skill or their gear to be more important?

You get into long, boring "debates" about whether Batman would be Natural or Tech.

Still need utility belt secondary for scrappers.

<sigh> You call it navel gazing.
Origin doesn't affect character performance. Pick the one that floats your boat.

For me personally, the question comes down to something simple: at what point did I believe my character become a hero or villain? Was the addition of the magic sword the moment when the character was "born?" If so, magic origin. If my character was a hero first, and then got a magic sword, natural.

Take Batman from the Nolan movies. Bruce Wayne becomes the Batman through natural training and skill. The Batman *uses* technology. But the Batman was created by Bruce Wayne through natural skill. So to me, Batman is natural origin. I consider origin to be what created the character, not what the character uses after origin.

The real glitch in CoH is the assumption that what created you is what also sustains you. So what created you will be what enhances you. The Nolan Batman is clearly a natural origin character. But his "enhancements" so to speak are mostly tech, because that's how he develops his abilities beyond his original skill. In City of Heroes, origin and enhancement are considered to have the same basis, and its actually that connection that is most at odds with how superheroes and villains work in comic books. Spiderman is science origin, but then enhances himself with technology (web shooters). Cyclops is given optic beams, but naturally learns the skill to harness them (with some minor technology). What first gives you your powers and what you do to leverage or enhance them are often completely different in comic books. In the case of Magic or Technology characters, the most common way to improve is with more magic or more technology. But science characters far less often continue to experiment on themselves, and mutants continue to mutate less often. Natural characters tend to both continue to enhance themselves with natural methods and seek out supplements such as technology.

This dichotomy is the thing City of Heroes handwaves away, and causes the most issues with the concepts of origin and ability source.

I believe it's been said by multiple developers that "origin" stands for the origin of your powers, not necessarily the origin of your character, nor necessarily the nature of his powers. The latest I hear was in regards to Demon Summoning, where I think it was BABs who explained that a character could have acquired the ability to summon demons through magical, technological, scientific or any other means and that would be perfectly acceptable, but what the actual demons are remains the same, at least in regards to powerset thematics. So a technological character who has scanned the Demon Prince dimension and developed a mental override projector which could control demons remotely would still be stuck using magical demons requiring summoning rituals, but his origin could still be Technology. Mostly, this was said to explain the summoning runes.

Less broadly, the reason I keep bringing my namesake Samuel Tow is because he's very relevant to the topic of weapons and the borders between origins. When someone asked "well, what if you're both," I instantly knew that that's my case in a nutshell. I made Samuel a Science character, because the source of his greatest power is genetic alteration too complicated to explain here. It allows him to act fast, think fast and perceive the world with inhuman clarity. However, how these powers actually enact with the world, as I have conceived the character, is through the use of a rather large collection of gadgets and weapons, not all of which I've put down in direct narrative. Among them, I have:

*A sword which could cut through any known substance. If I can't think of enough technobabble to explain a material blade, I always have the option of swapping to an energy blade.

*A pair of pistols capable of firing a variety of ammunition that they can swap in real time, including VERY high-calibre rapid-fire rounds. I recall a fictional pistol mentioned as firing ".90 calibre armour-piercing concussive rounds" which could fire in auto bursts. Ouch.

*A "hard light" cape which can be used as a shield against energy weapons and projectiles and directed beyond the physics of real materials.

*An inertial impulse device which allows him to both jump incredibly high and far and also switch directions mid-jump if necessary, as well as land without injury when falling from great heights.

Those, and a few others I may be forgetting. So while the character's most commonly-depicted power is his ability to dodge bullets and close in on enemies before they can react, his arsenal of technology makes him far, far, FAR more dangerous than just speed and reaction time would normally permit.

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 approach. I just pick the one which feels right for the character, even if technically it could be called 'wrong' if one wanted to really analyse the characters backstory.

That or just go by types of enhancements.

Not entirely accurate. Cyclops actually needs his visor just to function normally, because he can't shut the optic beams off. Without the visor he'd have to live as a blind man, because the only things that can stop the beams are ruby quartz or his own eyelids.

I'd consider him Mutant/Tech, because his visor is a gadget that is necessary to control the beams, without it he wouldn't be able to be a hero due to the sheer amount of accidental destruction he would cause every time he opened his eyes. The only "natural" thing about him is he learned to aim his optic blasts, which is literally as simple as looking at something. He also has some hand to hand combat training, but it isn't anything your average Army Ranger wouldn't know.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

I'm a bit of a stickler when it comes to backstories and origins, but I'll admit that I usually do both of the above.

Heck, I specifically make characters that blend two or more origins (I've now got a stable of magic robots >_> made through scientific experimentation, some even formed from cyberizing mutants or using the souls of normal people).

In such cases, I tend to pick whatever I like. Do I want to see tech enhancements in their slots? Do I think I have too many mutant type characters? I don't have enough natural origin characters...

It'd be different if picking the origin actually mattered. You're basically just picking the icon next to their AT icon...

Actually, even his aiming is a partof his mutation: He's can instinctively do spatial calculations reall quickly (hence why he can bounce his punch-beams off stuff) it also makes him a very good pool-player.

And he wouldn't need the visor if it wasn't for damage suffered when he was little. He and Alex were strapped into a chute and pushed out of their plane by their father when they came under attack by the Shi'ar. He bonked his head when they landed and that broke his ability to control his blasts.

Excellent way of explaining it. Now we just need to figure out whether my two quantum physicist characters are Science or Tech origin - if your example hero with the magic sword is Magic-origin, that suggests a device user might be able to be Science as well under the right circumstances. When new, complicated, self-invented devices that alter electron spin, accelerate time, or pack photons into something more harmful than plain old light are involved, where do you draw the line? I mean, it's not like it's something so mundane as a freeze ray or a pair of rocket boots - there's a difference there, right?

We dropped Batman naked on Barsoom, and he came back at the head of an army of Tharks, and he _still_ thwarted your master plan. He's a Natural.

Cyclops needs *glasses* to function normally, and I don't normally consider glasses to be technology in this sense. The visor allows him to control when he emits the energy and how much of it with more precision, and that is a more functional piece of technology. But he's been shown to be able to use his optic blasts with just ruby quartz glasses with no mechanism.

And this thing about any power involving eyes just requiring "looking" is a double myth that needs to die. First of all, its *extremely difficult* to stare directly at an object. The eye tends not to fixate on a single direction as part of how vision works: it moves in various autonomic ways. Second, the presumption that all eye-based powers would emit perfectly in the direction of vision is an assumption and it has a problem: if your eye powers are visible and move in exactly precisely the same direction as your eyes look then as you activate your power you'd block your line of sight to the target.

In fact there are tests you can do with sensors that can project precisely where the eye is facing at any instant in time and even people asked to stare at one specific spot and believe they are doing so aren't. The brain censors out that motion, so the conscious mind usually can't even tell its happening. This makes the notion that aiming via line of sight is trivial basically not consistent with reality. Cyclops could definitely hit a target by looking at it with trivial effort, but without training he'd also randomly destroy a large orbit surrounding the target involuntarily. Even the conscious act of concentrating on not looking in a particular direction can cause the eyes to glance in that direction without any conscious control. Aiming with the sort of pin-point precision that Cyclops demonstrates in the comic books is not just non-trivial, but bordering on biologically impossible.

They would be a superposition of Science and Tech. But the act of observing them to create them in the character creator forces them to collapse into either Science or Tech at the moment you pick an origin.

Forget that. When I actually get around to making a Mastermind, he's definitely summoning Lab Rats, not demons, even if the lab rats are so horribly disfigured that they might appear to be demons to the untrained observer.

That's assuming the COH world follows some variation of the Copenhagen interpretation.

One could try to strike a blow for the Many Worlds Interpretation model by making a copy of the character on multiple servers, with a different origin each time.

I don't specifically recall a dev making that explicit distinction - origin of character as opposed to origin of powers - but BaB's statement doesn't address either in any case. The demons might be magical in origin, but it leaves open the question of whether the actual ability the players possess is magical in nature.

The alternate perspective is to look at the one element of gameplay that origin affects - specifically enhancements - and state that origin is the means by which player powers evolve. It nullifies the actual term origin, and implies its really a reference to "source" or "path" of power. The problem with this explanation is that while it aligns with gameplay, it does so by aligning with something we know to be a gameplay simplification - namely that all the important tools of a superpowered character will likely have the exact same nature as their intrinsic abilities. The Batman is the obvious counter example, but it goes a lot farther than that because the origins can be interpreted both as things and as modifiers. I might have a natural ability to defeat criminals, or I might have a natural ability to use technology to defeat criminals. That distinction has no reconciliation.

Because it doesn't have a reconciliation, my preference is to use the interpretation of origin that has the greatest chance of being singular without massive oversimplification. But this is one of the reasons why I think origin ended up being a mess, and Origin of Power was an even greater mess. Instead of admitting that origins were a gameplay simplification, like health bars, Origin of Power tries to make the case that the massive oversimplifcation actually represents something real, like as if a contact tried to explain there's an actual cosmic reason why higher conning things con purple, like their cosmic life force blue-shifts the light emitted from their bodies. You're left wondering why a contact is even talking about critter targeting information when they aren't supposed to be aware of its existence.