Ravenswing

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I'm not overly jarred by things such as this.

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I know that, Syra. You get jarred by almost nothing aside from people taking the background seriously.

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How many comments are self-referential, though?

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That makes two, which kind of makes my point for me. There's plenty of humour, and now they seem to be adding stuff which breaks the IC/OOC line.

You seem to have this concept that I don't like the game to be funny in places. I'm not sure where you've got that idea, did you simply not read my last post properly?

You also seem to have an idea that comedy needs to reference the game mechanics to be funny... except that obviously isn't your idea, because you start this post by pointing out how little self-referential humour there is in the game.

So, are you arguing for the sake of arguing, or can you genuinely not tell the difference between breaking IC/OOC lines and being funny?

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I just feel it's a bit odd to speak out against narrative because of game mechanics, and the very reason I prefer not to approach them from an IC viewpoint.

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Which is fine, except, as I've said twice now, the Zig clearly isn't secure, because prisoners do escape from it.

I don't care if, in a one off incident, Longbow are there trying to keep the villains inside while Arachnos raids the place. Under normal circumstances, Longbow are not there, and there are prisoners on the streets of Brickstown which the cops can do nothing about.

Now, in the above, I am ignoring the game mechanics and taking the background at face value, but still the Zig remains insecure.

Maybe, in the future, there will be Longbow on the streets of Brickstown and they may engage in trying to round up those escaped prisoners (they are certainly very busy kill-stealing all over Atlas and Galaxy currently). For now, they aren't there, the Zig leaks convicts, the evidence is right there if you go look on a street near the prison.

To Max and Syra,

Yes, I have bought and enjoyed self-referential comics. I am a great fan of Sluggy.com, which does it a lot. I still have the four issue Nightcrawler mini-series, complete with 'Wolverine' striking a match on the frame of the panel he's in.

However, those comics share one thing in common:

They are comedies.

They aren't meant to be taken seriously.

There are some great bits of comedy in CoX, and most of them, even when it is self-referential, manage not to actually break the difference between game mechanics and game reality. Comments which have NPCs referring specifically to game mechanics as if it was the real world break immersion. I don't even think this one was funny, it's basically a big bruiser demanding money with menaces.

In short, if you're right, then I'm happy to consider this game to be City of Comedy Heroes, and I'll go build myself a clown character.

Last night I was busy running about with my new blaster and I came across a Hellion demanding influence from someone. And I quote: "You owe me MORE influence."

How can you owe Inf?
It's supposed to be a representation of your ability to get favours. I know they keep eroding that concept with stupid design choices, butt his is finally it. Now, the people doing the dialogue for NPCs don't actually understand the setting design.

War Witch sure went down in my estimations last night.

(Aside from that, I love my blaster! )

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I consider it secure, as does my character. The Zig breakout would - "realistically" - have been one a time thing, Arch-Villains aside. As a Roleplayer, I feel it's just fighting a losing battle - as I said - to elaborate too much beyond that when the gameworld itself is against me.

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Syra, you spend a lot of time on these boards defending the background of CoX from people saying it's a police state, or illogical, or whatever. You tend to do so in a way that suggests that you aren't "putting forward arguments", you are "stating facts". You tend to ignore anything anyone says against your argument.

Your statement above appears to follow this line of thought. Basically, your character(s) consider the Zig a sound and solid prison. That only works if you ignore half the physical setting and never talk to another toon IC. If you did, you'd discover that (for example) they are currently hunting down the same Countess Crey you locked up forever two weeks ago. You'd also have to cope with never seeing a massive publicity campaign for Crey as they try to live down the discovery of massive improprieties carried out at the order of their (now jailed) founder.

I'd just like to point out that this whole issue has nothing to do with CoX per-se. It's an issue with MMOs. By their nature, they simply can't handle this kind of thing because, again by their nature, they must remain static. They are games designed to be played in groups, but which actually only work story-wise when played entirely solo.

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You must've missed the elite longbow and arachnos forces duking it out on the other side of the fence, probably to keep the worst threats inside while level 1 villains and inmates escape since they're less of a threat.

At least if you wanna declare game mechanics as IC, then I can do the same thing and trump you.

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What Level 1 inmates?
Have you actually been to Brickstown?
I'm talking about normal Brickstown, not Breakout. The place with the guys in orange suits? The guys in orange suits who start about level 30?

If you're going to trump me, use facts.

If the world wasn't static, this wouldn't be an issue. When you locked up mobs, they'd stay locked up and be replaced by someone else.

But it is static and in the real Brickstown, there are escaped prisoners. If they are being re-arrested by the security forces, then they obviously keep escaping, which suggests the Zig is insecure, no?

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Well, the thing is, the Zig needs an enormous amount of fudge applied to it - the 'Breakout' by Arachnos military is presumably a one-off event, but of course, since this is a game, it is in constant progress. I would say that it probably should be considered secure, as when one actually visits the Zig it seems completely locked down, with the Arachnos full military assault taking place some time in the past.

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I agree with this fellow.

The complaints I've seen aimed at the Zig - "there are so many villains on the streets", "I can arrest a group and five minutes they're back" - seem to be warping the game mechanics, rather than taking actual lore into account.

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I'm sorry... you guys have actually been there, right?
This is the same highly secure, locked down prison where the inmates, still wearing their nice orange jumpsuits (funny how you don't start CoV in one of those ) are charging around the entire zone. I'm not talking AVs here, I'm talking bog-standard, boring, mooks.

The zone itself says that the Zig is about as secure as a child's piggy bank. If you wish to ignore that evidence, then fine, but the evidence is there.

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If anyone wants breakfast, no, you can't have any

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(( You're just mean. ))

I posted something to the effect that I'd have liked to see the exact questions on some of them. I've learned that some people have an odd idea of what roleplaying is.

"Yeah, I RP. I talked to my contact twice today."

OTOH, the section on the Faces of Roleplay is brilliant. It should be required reading for beginning roleplayers.

This page has a breakdown of a survey on roleplaying in MMOs. I'd love to use it as evidence that roleplaying has more people interested in it than the various MMO companies realise... but I don't really trust the survey.

Ideas of what roleplay is seem to be very, very diverse. I suspect half the respondents said they regularly roleplay because they talk to the in-game NPCs.

I particularly like the "I have created a character background" question... I've seen some very meticulously created backgrounds that have nothing to do with roleplay.

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I could get the logs out, if you like, and tell you exactly how many people were left...

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Would be fun. It's always interesting to calibrate fuzzy memories against hard evidence.

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Damn you, lobster! Now I'll have to spend time actually finding the reevent log files and hunting through them.

There's a high percentage probability that this may take a while. I currently feel like I'm sitting in a hot bath while in my office, I have a house to sell, and stuff to do at home. And I don't have complete logs on my laptop.

Watch this space... <- This one here.

I could get the logs out, if you like, and tell you exactly how many people were left...

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I can understand that point of view, but I don't agree personally. If characters need or want to talk in private, I see nothing wrong with it. Not everyone plays with everyone and neither should they.

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Frankly, you don't know what I'm talking about.

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Teenage heroes wasn't so much the "in thing" as it was the "interesting idea" everybody wanted to try their hand at.

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Nope. It may have started as a fad. People thought Fusebox was cool and created other teens, but it very rapidly became a clique. An IC clique mostly, but a clique all the same.

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I also seem to recall, albeit vaguely, that part of the reason why the Rooftop generation found their rooftop was that GG was getting awfully busy , with the teenage angst threatening to drown out other plots and character interaction.

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Nope. When the RG left to go to their rooftop, there was nothing left at all since about 90% of the regulars had created teens so that they'd have someone to talk to.

I believe there were a few complaints about the RG "taking over GG" which may have prompted a move, but I don't think so. The initial idea was to go hunting together in King's Row, IIRC, and it became pretty much nightly. The reason given for doing it was that "the teens wanted to get away from the adults." The majority of the teens didn't talk to the adults at GG anyway (hence the clique formation).

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I just want somewhere where the teen Heroes & Sidekicks can go and be themselves with young people who think the same way

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*shrug* I got fed up of the attitude of various people in the Union roleplay community and I no longer roleplay there.

One of the attitudes I got fed up with was the "we should go roleplay somewhere private where we can be ourselves" attitude. I thought it was highly in character back when the RG did it, and I also thought it was devisive and uncaring of other people's feelings. Just because something is IC, doesn't mean it's a good idea. In fact, sometimes you need to rethink what your character is doing there when what they do spoils the fun of other participants.

There's a bigger RP community now and it's better able to support large groups going off by themselves. Also, it won't affect me because I barely ever log in.

So, do as you wish, but be prepared for the consequences.

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Nope. The teen heroes were created first, only after several weeks did we consider forming a group. We didn't create characters for the group, we made the group for the characters.

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You didn't, but others did. There was a period when being in the Rooftop Generation was "the in thing" and everyone started creating teens... except me and one or two others. This was the first case I can think of where GG was "going to fall apart due to a clique."

From the outside looking in, it seemed that the SG was a relatively natural offshoot of what happened. A group of teens with powers forms. They start meeting around GG, and then (as any number of groups did then) decided to naff off to a rooftop somewhere (to better exclude the outsiders). They start doing some missions together. They form an SG based on missioning together.

The SG would actually make more sense these days when they could have set up a base, but SGs are easy to use when forming cliques (even non-exclusive cliques), and they will continue to be used in that way for a long time, I'm sure.

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Oh, and I took Vengefull, which is turning out to be un-roleplayable due to the fact that nothing so far has lived long enough for me to want to seek vengeance on it.


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*cough*Other party members*cough*

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Zortel's character is stealing things from them, mine has Loyalty as well, so it's unlikely he'll be deciding to knock off another PC because they breathed wrong in his direction.

Load of stuff got deleted, but basically, to reiterate, the reason we call it RP unfriendly is:

* Lack of emotes, chat controls, and other useful RP utilities.
* Lack of a consistent (even internally consistent) world background


Beyond that, I generally find Cryptic unfriendly to RP. Given any situation where there are equal cost options for implementing something where one option benefits RP, Cryptic appear to always pick the other option. They did it with the Arenas, they did it with bases. There's actually a red name quote somewhere (I think from Positron) which basically says that they never considered the social aspects of bases.

One can argue that roleplayers are a very insignificant percentage of the community, but unfortunately that doesn't stack with the effort put into PvP compared to the number of people who actually engage in it. I don't think the number of PvPers is much greater (if any) than the number of roleplayers (at least on Union), but PvP has taken up about 75% of the last three issues, and in that time, roleplayers got a couple of new emotes.

In short, the game background lacks a great deal of solidity, the game lacks a lot of useful widgets, and the game's producers tend to (actively?) discourage roleplayers. And that's why I say CoH is RP unfriendly.

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Jennybear rolled a 36 on a tracking roll in Deadlands. She then proceeded to learn the eyecolour of the beasts they were following, their hunger levels, their emotion and a variety of other things, including what they had for breakfast.

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She's now beaten that. She rolled a 44 in the wrap-up for last session. Wordy looked... well, perplexed. We figure she can dine out on that one for weeks...

Jen: "You remember back at that ritual site?"
Wordy: "Yes." *looking resigned*
Jen: "Well, you know the lead bad guy?"
Wordy: "Yes..."
Jen: "What was his grandmother's maiden name?"
Wordy: "...O'Reilly."

Meanwhile, I have a Doc Holliday-style huckster/gunfighter ("Take Merlin and add Doc Holliday", according to Wordy) and so he has Ailin' and is supposed to be all sickly. The only good rolls I seem able to make are on his initial Vigor roll... he's a very healthy sick man.

Oh, and I took Vengefull, which is turning out to be un-roleplayable due to the fact that nothing so far has lived long enough for me to want to seek vengeance on it. (Damn Gericko and his dynamite! )

I must point out that Bridger already commented that this thread has gone way off base and he deleted a load of stuff.

I have done as he asked and reported the post I found offensive using the appropriate button. When the thread is deleted, which I think it should be since it's just a source of flames, everyone will get to blame everyone else for it. I hope everyone's happy.

Maybe if this gets started over, we can attempt to ALL discuss it rationally without resorting to labels.

As an outsider...

Two immediate thoughts:

You are setting your group up to be automatically in conflict with some of the heroes you are going to associate with.

Perhaps more seriously, I don't think there's anything written down about what the government regulations on meta humans are!

Yeah, some people think that Doc T leads the GoD.
Some think it's a democracy.
Those in the know, know the actual history of leadership.

But those who are really in the know, know that the real leader of the GoD is Mina's Neuroses.

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It would help more, I think, if there was a kind of "Training Match", were you could actually earn something usefull to PvE.

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If it was worth doing, it would be exploitable. If it wasn't exploitable, it probably wouldn't be worth actually doing. Catch 22.

I'd still like to see the ability to set up training matches against chosen mobs. No xp, no gain, no debt, just the opportunity to try out tactics and powers against a variety of mobs. They could have introduced something like that rather than the rather pointless Gladiator system, but they didn't. Hey ho.

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A dictatorship CAN work (as with the Cirque), but only whilst it stays small.

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It works with very large groups, but you need a strong dictator and a population willing to go with it. Unfortunately, between changes in Jest er's personality, Ringmaster's new job keeping him away from the game during 'normal' hours, the need to hand out jobs to others (e.g. base building), and a less restrictive recruiting policy, the Cirque has become a little headless.

The Vigil went the same way to a large extent, though the participants will argue about the exact sequence of events, I'm sure.