The requirements of getting a superhero license in Paragon is to register ones self with the FBSA (Federal Bureau for Super-powered Affairs). I think that's it.
According to the wiki, yes, they are the team of people that are constantly monitoring and reporting activities by individuals of interest, personally registered or no.
For villains, with the Fateweavers basically being able to forsee the future and manipulate fate (and along with the FBSA if you catch their interest) monitor and report activities of those in the Rogue Isles and the activities of those who conceal their plans under Recluse's dictatorship.
As a game mechanic, I don't consider security level as the amount of power or capability of a character, merely how famous/infamous a character is and the magnitude of the deeds they're known for. This falls purely on concept if a character is strong, weak or omnipotent.
All you actually have to do is pass a multiple choice heroism exam and pay a $86 renewal fee each year. A sample question:
You're in a burning building. Do you:
A) Run to the farthest room on the top floor, beat up the suspicious looking gentleman therein, and teleport away.
B) Look for trapped citizens, defeat their captors and allow them to show themselves out through the billowing smoke and flames.
C) Immediately find the fuse box and shut down all of the elevators for safety.
D) Assist trained PCFD firefighters in handling the situation.
Some people think the test is too easy but the consignment house lobby steadfastly opposes any and all efforts to reform hero licensing.
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A.
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
All you actually have to do is pass a multiple choice heroism exam and pay a $86 renewal fee each year. A sample question:
You're in a burning building. Do you: A) Run to the farthest room on the top floor, beat up the suspicious looking gentleman therein, and teleport away. B) Look for trapped citizens, defeat their captors and allow them to show themselves out through the billowing smoke and flames. C) Immediately find the fuse box and shut down all of the elevators for safety. D) Assist trained PCFD firefighters in handling the situation. Some people think the test is too easy but the consignment house lobby steadfastly opposes any and all efforts to reform hero licensing. |
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E. Stand outside and shoot a fire extinguisher. And miss, somehow.
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
All you actually have to do is pass a multiple choice heroism exam and pay a $86 renewal fee each year. A sample question:
You're in a burning building. Do you: A) Run to the farthest room on the top floor, beat up the suspicious looking gentleman therein, and teleport away. B) Look for trapped citizens, defeat their captors and allow them to show themselves out through the billowing smoke and flames. C) Immediately find the fuse box and shut down all of the elevators for safety. D) Assist trained PCFD firefighters in handling the situation. Some people think the test is too easy but the consignment house lobby steadfastly opposes any and all efforts to reform hero licensing. |
Goodbye. Not to the game, but the players. Goodbye. Everyone, remember to have fun. That's all I can say.
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B with the exception that I keep losing the people I save because they can't follow for pancake.
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
All you actually have to do is pass a multiple choice heroism exam and pay a $86 renewal fee each year. A sample question:
You're in a burning building. Do you: A) Run to the farthest room on the top floor, beat up the suspicious looking gentleman therein, and teleport away. B) Look for trapped citizens, defeat their captors and allow them to show themselves out through the billowing smoke and flames. C) Immediately find the fuse box and shut down all of the elevators for safety. D) Assist trained PCFD firefighters in handling the situation. Some people think the test is too easy but the consignment house lobby steadfastly opposes any and all efforts to reform hero licensing. |
Cancel the kitchen scraps for widows and lepers, no more merciful beheadings and call off christmas!
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F. In the ultimate irony - now that I've earned the official title of Fire Chief, I can no longer be bothered to put out fires.
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Originally Posted by Bullet Barrage
E. Stand outside and shoot a fire extinguisher. And miss, somehow.
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(Sometimes, I wish there could be a Dev thumbs up button for quality posts, because you pretty much nailed it.) -- Ghost Falcon
You register with a federal bureau to get licensed as a hero (I think Captain America fought against that)
Security Level was just the degree of trust that was put into a hero due to their deeds (levels) that gave them a higher security rating. The Vanguard don't want somebody that doesn't have a history of anything but beating up a few Skulls going off to fight the Rikti since rookies will just get in the way, for example.
Arachnos just has the fateweavers and arbiters keep track of the Destined Ones and your villainous rep spreads by word of mouth. Semi-villainous rep. Good at beating up Arachnos, at least.
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
All you actually have to do is pass a multiple choice heroism exam and pay a $86 renewal fee each year. A sample question:
You're in a burning building. Do you: A) Run to the farthest room on the top floor, beat up the suspicious looking gentleman therein, and teleport away. B) Look for trapped citizens, defeat their captors and allow them to show themselves out through the billowing smoke and flames. C) Immediately find the fuse box and shut down all of the elevators for safety. D) Assist trained PCFD firefighters in handling the situation. Some people think the test is too easy but the consignment house lobby steadfastly opposes any and all efforts to reform hero licensing. |
B - Theres a badge involved that some of my alts just cant get!
@Damz Find me on the global channel Union Chat. One of the best "chat channels" ingame!
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Trick answer! Elevators automatically shut down if the fire alarm goes off. Trust me on this, I know this from my day job badge. |
Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
C) Immediately find the fuse box and shut down all of the elevators for safety.
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That's because the fire is +6 |
Originally Posted by Bullet Barrage
E. Stand outside and shoot a fire extinguisher. And miss, somehow.
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Just so you know, to-hit buffs will improve your odds to hit.|
Originally Posted by Bullet Barrage
E. Stand outside and shoot a fire extinguisher. And miss, somehow.
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Hasten will improve the extinguisher recharge.
Sadly, you can't boost the 'damage'.
Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
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G. Look for a place to hide my flamethower and find a convenient place to lie down on the floor and wait for rescue.
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
All you actually have to do is pass a multiple choice heroism exam and pay a $86 renewal fee each year. A sample question:
You're in a burning building. Do you: A) Run to the farthest room on the top floor, beat up the suspicious looking gentleman therein, and teleport away. B) Look for trapped citizens, defeat their captors and allow them to show themselves out through the billowing smoke and flames. C) Immediately find the fuse box and shut down all of the elevators for safety. D) Assist trained PCFD firefighters in handling the situation. Some people think the test is too easy but the consignment house lobby steadfastly opposes any and all efforts to reform hero licensing. |
Writer of In-Game fiction: Just Completed: My Summer Vacation. My older things are now being archived at Fanfiction.net http://www.fanfiction.net/~jwbullfrog until I come up with a better solution.
The way I see it, there must be some kind of mechanic in place for the FBSA to be able to verify the identity of the person wearing the costume who has registered.
Easiest would be revelaing your secret identity to them, but I assume there are more anonymous ways to register, like providing a DNA sample for them to cross reference for verification purposes.
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Yeah, it's called "sign here".| The way I see it, there must be some kind of mechanic in place for the FBSA to be able to verify the identity of the person wearing the costume who has registered. |
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| Easiest would be revelaing your secret identity to them, but I assume there are more anonymous ways to register, like providing a DNA sample for them to cross reference for verification purposes. |
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
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This kind of irritates me, actually. The only way I can have a guy with a secret identity, which is a staple of the genre, is if I make him absurdly powerful with methods of circumventing a vast array of detection methods from the very beginning.
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Originally Posted by Venture
In City, secret identities are more like stage names than matters of national security. The FBSA knows who you are, and in a world with working psychics, x-ray vision and ouija boards, so does anyone else who really wants to.
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There is a fine line between a genre convention and a dead-horse cliche, and secret identities pole-vault over it. Back in the early days when superheroes lived in their own comic books and not in "universes" or "continuities" it merely strained disbelief that, e.g., Lex Luthor could be smart enough to build a death ray out of two tin cans, three rubber bands and a blender but wasn't smart enough to figure out Superman was Clark Kent. Once heroes started living in entire worlds filled with magic and psychics and Star Trek style super-sensors, the plausibility level of secret identities went into negative numbers.| This kind of irritates me, actually. The only way I can have a guy with a secret identity, which is a staple of the genre, is if I make him absurdly powerful with methods of circumventing a vast array of detection methods from the very beginning. |
This is even more true in a role-playing game, which has to make sense as a world and has to account for the players' actions. They have access to all that magic and whatnot too, and they're not going to put it aside when they want to know who the villains are under their masks. That's less of a concern here where player choices are sharply curtailed but it's still a factor and one City deals with reasonably well. There aren't too many in-game stories where establishing the identity of a character is critical.
Again, this doesn't mean your characters' real names are on the tip of everyone's tongues. It just means the ultra-paranoid and borderline god-mode attitude NO ONE KNOWS MY CHARACTER'S SECRET IDENTITY!!!1!1!!1 is untenable. If someone really, really wants to know a hero's "secret identity" they'll find it, and comics have pretty much gone that way for a while now.
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Originally Posted by Justice League
J'onn: [The Thanagarians] are looking for the Justice League. Without our costumes, we are merely ordinary citizens.
Wally: Hold on a second here. What about the whole "secret identity" thing? I mean, I trust you guys, but I'm not sure I'm ready to Batman: (impatiently) John Stewart. Wally West. Clark Kent. (yanks off his own mask) Bruce Wayne. Flash: (muttering) Show-off... |
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| Last time you did this, I got really disappointed and felt like my parade had been thoroughly drenched. |
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| Since then I've realized that you are totally making this up as you go along. |
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| Many of my super heroes have secret identities. How do you like that? Sucks that none of yours do. |
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
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This is pretty much my feeling on how it "should" be, too. You can have a secret identity by not telling anybody, but basic secrecy can be plausibly broken even by mundane means. Some characters will have more exotic identities and/or methods of protecting them - time travelers who never give their real name nor era of origin are mostly safe from other time travelers killing them in their cribs, learning an alien visitor's real (alien) name isn't very useful, and a great mage might give out his name left and right, safe in the knowledge that his "true name" is well-guarded by both secrecy and spell. But even things like this don't give total protection: a psychic could read the time traveler's mind, an alien name could be useful to another alien, or a clever thief might sneak into the mage's sanctum and peek in his spellbook.|
Originally Posted by Venture
Again, this doesn't mean your characters' real names are on the tip of everyone's tongues. It just means the ultra-paranoid and borderline god-mode attitude NO ONE KNOWS MY CHARACTER'S SECRET IDENTITY!!!1!1!!1 is untenable. If someone really, really wants to know a hero's "secret identity" they'll find it, and comics have pretty much gone that way for a while now.
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In any case, you can still have a secret identity - street thugs and the civilians you save don't know who you are. It takes someone sufficiently determined, and with access to sufficient resources, to find out. Even the FBSA might not have every super on file, especially at the rate they crop up, but if you do something they need to investigate, they'll figure out a way to find you.
What if the ID has some sort of psychic power and magic in it that helps prevent reveals names coming out...
Also i would point out that while IDs are not known it is well known that in the real world we tend to keep identities relatively secret where possible to keep from retaliation on a personal level or as to allow them to become spies and such.
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It is implausible that any given character would have infallible countermeasures to every single exotic means of inquiry. It's something a GM or world designer might get away with once but that's it.| What if the ID has some sort of psychic power and magic in it that helps prevent reveals names coming out... |
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| Also i would point out that while IDs are not known it is well known that in the real world we tend to keep identities relatively secret where possible to keep from retaliation on a personal level or as to allow them to become spies and such. |
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
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Well, you could have that. If you really want to say that your character's secret identity really is a perfect secret, nobody can stop you, after all, much like we can't stop you from saying you're Ms Liberty's secret love-child with Lord Nemesis. But it wouldn't make much sense in the setting. Even handwaving away your secret identity as magically secret doesn't necessarily preclude someone else discovering it by using better magic, or cleverly finding a way around whatever protection you use.|
Originally Posted by Durakken
What if the ID has some sort of psychic power and magic in it that helps prevent reveals names coming out...
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So this would give you better protection than mere secrecy, but still not perfect protection, thus IMO it falls into the same category as the examples I already gave.
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| Also i would point out that while IDs are not known it is well known that in the real world we tend to keep identities relatively secret where possible to keep from retaliation on a personal level or as to allow them to become spies and such. |
Gotta agree with Venture. Your identity is safe in the sense that no one will really care who you actually are, and you can easily keep your identity secret from, say, some Skulls or Trolls or Outcasts. But if Arachnos, Longbow, or Nemesis really wanted to know who you were, it wouldn't be hard at all to hack into a database or two, read your mind, see through your disguise, etc. And you can pretty safely bet Malta already knows who you are, where you live, your favorite hobbies, and where you were born.
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Knowing that it might be an issue and knowing that there are ways to help with I think you could create IDs that incorporate magic and tech to prevent most people from learning a hero's ID. Not 100% but pretty close to it and the FBSA would issue them as one of the concession law makers made to get hero support for the laws.|
Originally Posted by Venture
It is implausible that any given character would have infallible countermeasures to every single exotic means of inquiry. It's something a GM or world designer might get away with once but that's it.
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| The real world is short on working crystal balls, too. |
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I find it unlikely that the FBSA would make something standard issue which specifically prevents them from doing their own job. And even if you managed to invent a perfect godmode macguffin that protects from every method of super-inquiry, and even prevents anyone from remembering your real name, a villain can still follow the hero home, write down their street address, and sell it to Malta.|
Originally Posted by Durakken
Knowing that it might be an issue and knowing that there are ways to help with I think you could create IDs that incorporate magic and tech to prevent most people from learning a hero's ID. Not 100% but pretty close to it and the FBSA would issue them as one of the concession law makers made to get hero support for the laws.
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Originally Posted by Durakken
So you know Madonna's or Prince's real names?
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It doesn't prevent them from doing their job. If magic and psychic powers existed and i had a way to help prevent my agents' mind from being scanned and their identities revealed I'd use it. There are little spells you could use to make the ID a charm that could prevent clear photography or something like that. I'd also make it so the ID could only be read using special devices that if you din't have them it would appear to be a blank piece of paper or something like that.|
Originally Posted by Hopeling
I find it unlikely that the FBSA would make something standard issue which specifically prevents them from doing their own job. And even if you managed to invent a perfect godmode macguffin that protects from every method of super-inquiry, and even prevents anyone from remembering your real name, a villain can still follow the hero home, write down their street address, and sell it to Malta.
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| I... don't see how that counters what he said about the real world being short on crystal balls, for one thing. Moreover, I don't personally know their names, no, but I'm quite sure some people do, and if I were a nefarious supervillain bent on their destruction, I could probably find out. |
>.>
What are the requirements for getting a Super Hero License, or whatever it is called, and, even though it is a game mechanic, how do heroes in lore gain security level? Is there are team of people who are constantly recording and writing reports of hero activity whenever a villain gets sent to prison or killed?
Anyone got any theories?