Ravenswing

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You just have to make a slightly larger "leap of abstraction" between the in-game and in-character realities for the anti-hero than for the hero.

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And an even larger one, to the point of ignoring the levelling process entirely, for an anti-hero in CoV (which is what the OP is actually referring to, not anti-heroes in CoH). At which point, what's the point in creating the character.

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SO I'm afraid it will be just me on my own, looking like a slightly, podgier version of the CoH Eddie Munt, though any ladies wearing short skirts is always welcome.... <ducks Katana blade from Niall>

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Hey, any young ladies turning up in short skirts is fine by me. I may not be as much of a leg man as Crow, but I'm not going to look a gift skirt in the leg... or something.

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Actually, Nevermore killed two kids, of about 10 years old, in the Orbis plot.

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Doesn't count, that was either accidental, or engineered by Orbis to give Nevermore a hard time.

As for him not killing anyone, no, but he still operates because the cops can't catch him, or don't try. If he became too much of a problem for some reason (as happens in the plotlines of most anti-hero comics) heroes would be dispatched to take Nevermore down. Generally, the plot would run to the truth (that it was all a villainous plot) being discovered by the heroes before they had to take him down.

Put Nevermore in the Rogue Isles and every villain in the neighbourhood would be after him within the week.

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This char views himself as a hero, his goals are the same but his methods have changed, and he firmly beleives that he is above normal laws and morals hence why he can do what ever he wants..


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Sorry mate but all you've done is point out that your character is in fact a villain, not an anti-hero. :-)

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Actually, the text as written above fairly accurately describes Nevermore, who is a hero. Though in the eyes of the law he's a criminal, an unlicensed vigilante. However, Nevermore is a CoH character, not a CoV character. As I said, 'anti-heroes' fit better into CoH (where they can, at least, be heroic), but they don't really fit into either game.

Okay, two points.

First, anti-heroes aren't the same as 'fallen heroes'. Wordmaker has created a character for CoV, and we were discussing it over the weekend. He hadn't decided on the backstory completely, and I was pushing him toward certain choices to make his character fit better into the mold. I pushed him toward 'fallen hero' rather than anti-hero.

A fallen hero is there because he's gone bad, or made a mistake. He's probably in prison, he's a criminal, in the eyes of the law if not his own. He has a good, solid reason for being in the Rogue Isles. Quite a few of the 'evil villains' in CoV probably don't see themselves as evil, it's kind of like all those people in prison who swear they didn't murder whoever (despite being caught red-handed).

Anti-heroes don't actually fit in either game, sorry to say. (I do mean sorry. I really wish anti-heroes fitted into CoH, but really they don't. The entire contact structure is based on the idea that you're basically a deputised police officer. Few of these people would actually talk to a rogue.) That said, they fit better into CoH than CoV. In CoV you will, rapidly be following story arcs where you spend your time defeating Longbow and Wyvern attempts to infiltrate the Rogue Isles, you will be working for contacts who tend to follow the more classical view of evil. The outcome of your actions does nothing to destabilise Arachnos or any other criminal group.

On this basis, you would have to treat levelling as totally different from roleplay. I don't really have an issue with that, and you could probably fudge missions for RP purposes if you wished. And as long as you didn't RP with other characters of a more normal persuasion, then there's nothing really to stop you.

If you do roleplay with other people though, you run into a basic problem: you're asking people to accept that (when they discover they have a hero in their midst) they can do more or less nothing about it. When that happens around GG, people scream 'God-mode'.


The second point is 'why bother?' You are going to have to take the entire levelling process as OOC. The missions do not fit the profile of someone doing good by bad means. You can't roleplay with others unless it's totally within a like-minded SG (in which case, go ahead, just don't take it outside the group).

So, basically, you've created a game toon and you've created a backstory which says they have nothing to do with the environment they exits in. I honestly don't see the point. When I created War Crow, I'd have liked him to be a Stalker, that was the character design concept, stealthy and deadly. Best I could do was a Scrapper with Stealth. However, I do not feel a desire to create War Crow as a Stalker in CoV, because then he wouldn't be a hero, he'd be a villain and I'd be constantly assassinating people that Crow wouldn't kill. Then I'd be ignoring that so I could make believe I'm playing a hero. Doesn't make sense to me.

To put it simply: why buy and play a game when you actually want to be playing a totally different game?

Agreeing here with Aisla, on both counts. The subject was being dropped, otherwise I'd have commented last night, and, fundamentally, this is worse than the issues we had around Rafius. He was accused (and sometimes rightly so) of god-mode RP, but at least Rafius was a hero turned bad. This would be starting out to play a hero in a villain setting. Frankly, you'd be unable to RP with any of those outside your SG.

I also don't see the point, quite frankly. I don't see the point of playing a villain in CoH, nor do I see the point of playing a hero in CoV. The games aren't designed for it, you're ignoring the entire game concept so you can play a good-guy Stalker (or whatever). If you have to subvert the game setting so much to justify your character I'd assert that there's no point in doing it.

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We shall most likely accomodate Jen, Paul and Gid with rides, as we have a comfortable big car, so count Niall and myself in as well. :-)

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I'll just point out that Jen and I in the front seats will be comfortable. Paul, Gid and Stef in the back may be a little more cramped.

And we can plan three months in advance because otherwise we never get anywhere.

Point.

And if the slightly mousy one with weak psychic powers suddenly over-exerts herself...

PHOENIX!

Depends on the complexion.

Red heads are either sassy and strong, or sickly and freckled.

Both will likely lose out to the blonde, but the sassy ones are more likely to win than the brunette.

Now re-read what I said and think about whether it actually says you do?

Look, I'm the one that's ill, not you.

OTOH, it's the only Resistance you'll get as a /regen.

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view more lovecraft

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Can't go with that. At no point did the highly educated hero of the story hang about despite huge amounts of evidence that something really, really bad was going to happen to him... and then have something really, really bad happen by which we deduce that the universe is a harsh place and we are but maggots to be crushed beneath the feet of giants. Lovecraft's heroes are so increadibly stupid.

I'd have done that exactly the other way around. If you're going to have a GC channel for an SG, it should be OOC. It's connecting the players, not the characters who are actually in the SG.

If you want to run something IC over it, then you mark those conversations as being IC.

That's just my thought on it though. And I also think two channels is overkill, especially when there's a limit to the number you can join. I suspect SGs that do that don't have many members with a lot of active alts.

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What about Snap cards then?

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RC, that was either fairly stupid, or you need to start using smilies to indicate when you're joking.

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But what would Eddie be? I didn't see a card for miserable SOB?

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Hmm, perhaps that's it. Instead of doing standard Tarot, we go ahead and create our own cards!

The Miserable Old Man: Eddie Munt.
The Redeemed Vaillain: Walsers.
The Enormous Flirt: Any female coming within 5 yards of Doc T.

Good writing. A few clumsy sentences, generally pretty good.

I'd tend to argue about a logical issue: with "Paragon's Hero population either dead, incarcerated or in hiding", I can't see Longbow existing to drop a nuke on the island.

However. Interesting. Terribly bleak. Why is it everyone always goes for the nihilist solution?

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Your job as the GM is to make the world fun for the players.

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True, but your 'job' as GM is also to have fun yourself. If you have a load of players who like doing things which you don't like providing, then you need to get yourself different players. Otherwise, the GM will take a walk from boredom.

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"I'm the kid who bullied Max in school"

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Shouldn't that continue with "...and after 20 years, I can walk again?"

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No, actually it's:

"Man wakes up after 20 year coma, after bullying Max at school."

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Yes, I am an evil DM.

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Isn't "evil DM" a pleonasm?

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If it was, Syra wouldn't have started the discussion.

(Yes, I had to look-up what a pleonasm was. For those who don't know it's using more words than necessary to get an idea across.)

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It depends on the game and the genre. In games such as Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia! the world is supposed to be stacked against the party.

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Paranoia! definately.

CoC, yes, but there's still no point in creating a scenario that the PCs actually cannot solve. The whole point of CoC is to have them discover the Ultimate Horror (tm) and go insane.

If you have a known group of PCs, I'd say you tailor the scenario to the group to the extent that they can crack it. It may not be possible to have everyone shine in every scenario, but the limelight needs to be shared out over time.

The main problem with a very open setting, like GG or any other 'large community' RP setting, is that you can't really do that. There's too much variety of types of character there. If you cater for everyone, no one really gets to 'shine' at all.

As an example, the recent hospital robbery plot currently has no real use for magically oriented characters. All the magical 'detective work' has been done and yielded nothing, it's down to the more normal detectives. Now, this is partially so that the plot team's characters can't really do anything apart from wait until there's something to hit, but it's also because we've had a load of magic plots and wanted something different.

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"War Crow in 3 in bed romp?"

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Only three? I'm insulted.

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See your Head of Vecna, and raise you a Deck of Many Things , let the party kill itself.

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They introduced a Deck of Many Things into Neverwinter Nights. This resulted in delightful and wacky events such as dragons appearing in the OOC room (dragons had the bad habit of inducing enormous, server-wide lag because of such lovely powers as wing buffet doing vast amounts of knockback).

I nerfed the deck so that wyrmlings appeared instead of dragons and I added one or two really nasty cards. Yes, I am an evil DM.

Fair enough, I read it wrong.

You can find the original article at he bottom of here, by the way, along with the new one at the top.

Stargazer in pole dancing scandle?

I'll help if I can come up with stuff to write.

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To you RPing n00bs

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Okay, I'm amazed I was the one to do it, but I do not intend to come up with a reasoned reply to that one. I just reported it to the moderators.

I'm considering Harvik to settle nicely into the category for which one of my favourite forum rules applies, and I suggest others consider these words when replying.

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Please, do not feed the trolls.

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