Why We Build

Share your thoughts here. Why do you build?

Originally I wrote this as the preamble to the essay portion of my Disaster Base entry, and realized that it was significantly longer than my description of the base itself, and should get a more proper posting.

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"Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race... every human thought has its page in that vast book"

-Victor Hugo

The architecture of a culture tells us a story. This is the story of their history, their civilization, and their lives. Every person who walked through the pages of those books, written in stone, brick, wood, mortar, or adobe, left their own small mark in the larger tale passed down to future generations. The lives and times of those people who lived, worked, and built those monuments, large and small, are recorded then in that which they chose to build.

For our part, we have our supergroup bases. In these we tell the story of our Heroes. These characters who take on their own lives do so in a world of our own making. In our bases we record who they were, what they were like, and what they sought to accomplish. Wether it be a base of pure function for a non-roleplay group to simply store salvage and use for transportation, or a richly detailed base to help inspire the detailed plot lines of an RPSG, the choice of how that base is built tell you more, in a momentary glance, about the Heroes who walk those halls than an hour of conversation.

Our heroes will come and go. Players join and leave the game and with them their characters will enter our circles and pass from them. The membership will grow, shrink, and hopefully grow again. Our heroes will die, be mourned, and be memorialized. We will savor our victories and learn from our defeats. These are the stories written in the pages of our bases.

We are poets who write not with words, but with cabinets, shelves, stairs, and desks. Our stanzas are rooms. Our sonnets are homes. These are our mighty epic poems, written piece by piece, word by word, over hundreds of hours of labor as painstaking as that of any author. All of this a mighty story not of one hero, but all of them.

We have stories to tell and tales to write. We have a burning desire to create. We have a need to take an idea and make it take form. Sometimes form follows function, and sometimes function follows form. Some times we get to expand our horizons and form follows Fun and then we build for the sheer joy of creating something new, fun, and exciting. But always, it comes down creation and the need to make.

This is why we build.

So, if we're poets, my spare bases must be the equivalent of the "Man from Nantucket" limericks right?

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

OP, I like the cut of your jib... maybe it's because I've been known to push the hyperbole a bit myself.

And now my friend... a warning. Beware. For the road ahead looks dark and dangerous. Unlike the hero's costume, which has grown and flourished in type and variety, the tools you use to build your bases have been declared a "legacy system". The functional value of your base is, by design, becoming obsolete. Sooner or later the resources you are draining (on servers, on instanced missions, and even the prestige burden on others) will be called into question. Beware!

THIS...this is why we build!

(warning...language)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmV13eB0fa0

Originaly i buiilt the personal base i have to just mess around and get used to how the system worked for usage with the Legion of Catgirls.

But then I decided that i would use it for storage.....which worked..but was kind of boring.

But then I decided... heck I want to see what i can do by myself.....and so i built and built

So at this point I have the largest base possible....I have made many rooms....and actualy have some i never did complete...

Made a race track....worked on many mutiple tier rooms....and made a portal room...made a library and hospital and a plethora of rooms.

I guess you could say the reason I build is to see if I can....and then show off what i do to others....
I hadnt expected this game to terminate....I had expected it to continue to go on and on and evolve....but now...not so sure that will happen..

So my base was built with the idea that someday it would be something legacy from way back when....to show what was possible.

This game has way too many things in it...that so many other games do not have ...and probably never will....

Its going to be sad...those new games are not going to even come close to what this game offers...they will try but fail miserably....and their developement teams will give ten trillion excuses for the reasons why they fail badly.