SlickRiptide

That was an interesting take on the invasion. I'm not sure I follow about the missing memories. Is that based on canon lore somehow or is it something you made up for some purpose?

Ultimately, I think you just have to embrace that idea that having a tehnologically assisted travel power does not somehow negate the character's natural origin.

Manticore teleports by hacking the mediport network. That doesn't make him a technology hero any more than riding a motorcycle to get someplace or flying in an airplane to get someplace would make him a technology hero. Heck, his trick arrows don't make him a technology hero. His power is his uncanny ability to shoot an arrow. That's what makes him a hero.

Our characters can already run at something like 14MPH and leap over seven-foot fences from day one. There's nothing "natural" about that. Getting around is just something you need to do. Don't sweat how you do it. Your mode of travel doesn't define your character.

If you really must be "all natural" then just take fitness and triple-slot swift for run speed. By the time you get SO's or higher, you'll be at almost base superspeed anyway. Wave your hands and say that your hero is a natural sprinter. Done.

So, pick what you like.

Superjump? D.A.T.A has a new anti-gravity belt and your hero is a beta-tester.

Superspeed? You saved a mysterious old man from a beating by Skulls, and he insisted on giving you a charm inscribed with a mysterious glowing rune. That also explains the fire shooting out of your feet...

Teleport? You ran into a Rikti Guardian during an invasion, defeated him, and appropriated the portal summoning device that the Guardians use to summon reinforcements. After some tinkering, either by your character or by a super-smart friend or acquaintance, you were able to use the portal to push yourself along instead of pulling things to you.

In other words, travel powers is small stuff. Don't sweat the small stuff.

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Commander Lightning


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Considering what the costume creator gives you to work with, that's a pretty decent Commando Cody/Rocket Man helmet.

Didn't see THAT coming! Ha!

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And don't forget the original Liberty, Maiden Justice. Mother and grandmother to the other two, and wife of Statesman.


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Fixed that for you.

Villain backstory - Villains have to travel to the nineties and drive Hero Corps out of town. There's a reason that the storm troopers that destroyed the Hero Corps office complex were an unknown villain group. If you want to make it competitive, heroes have to go back and neutralize the false evidence that implicates the Freedom Phalanx (though neutralizing it never fully removes the suspicion for some people).

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Okay, I have to admit that I've never even HEARD of Brass Monday. Could someone give some context for this, please?



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Brass Monday

The end of beta event was just a big free for all with the Rikti. It wasn't really meant to have any story impact that I'm aware of.

It was presaged by the Rikti Mother Ships doing fly-overs of the city. As far I know, the mother ships have never flown over the live game.

One thing I'd want from time travel arcs is less involvement in the actual events. That is, I don't want to get into this habit of creating arcs where the good guys are messing with a historical event one way (say, helping Atlas succeed) while the villains are messing with it another (helping Atlas fail).

If we're going to witness history, I'd rather be working on the outskirts, trying to "fix" small things that went wrong; maybe small things that add up to big things further down the timestream.

Actually, what I'd REALLY like is to do something like what Guild Wars did with their story pack - Put you in the shoes of the hero from the past and live out his/her story. I'd like to become Atlas and fight as a giant monster, trying to hold off the invaders until the reinforcements arrive. I'd like to fight as Statesman taking on the Reichsman and his army.

I'd like to walk into the library, click on a book, and learn about that history by living through it as one of the main characters.

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The Split of Marshall Blitz's Forces Away From Arachnos: The results of which are visible in Warburg.

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I'm still suspicious that Marshall Blitz is ultimately nothing more than a ploy to give Recluse control of the rockets while retaining plausible deniability.

I mentioned this in suggestions a few days ago, but it fits here, so I'll mention it again:

We've got the Historian badge that relates the events that lead to the creation of the United Nations Special Council on Superhuman Activities. The catalyst was a terrorist act by unknown forces that struck against a cell of the Midnight Squad; 40-some people who were undercover in Terra Volta, pursuing some unknown goal.

We also have a Midnight Club with an Aspect of the Pillar and a leader who can retain his reality despite changes in the timestream.

This seems like a natural setup for a story that involves exploring what those Midnighters were doing, why they were hiding, what happened, and what the consequences of interfering in the event might be. (If the U.N. Special Council never formed, what else might not exist?)

Feedback is a rare thing, it's true. I take it as a compliment when someone takes the time, even if they're being critical.

Part of that comes from so many stories here being serial in nature. You don't actually get to the end until some indeterminate time in the future, and some never really end. Comments in the thread get intermixed into the story and break the rhythm, which sort of trains people to NOT give feedback.

Ultimately, though, I'd consider this - it's the opinion of many professional writers that a "writer" is someone who writes because they must. The fact that they're also able to be paid money for it is a nice bonus, but those stories would have been written regardless.

If you're looking for assurances that you can quit your day job and write a novel, well, one of my favorite sci-fi authors is very popular, been somewhat prolific at times, and is currently filing for bankruptcy. The Steven King's and J.K. Rolling's of the world are few and far between.

The way to get the assurance you're looking for is not to wait for random readers of a forum to take the time to comment. It's to write something and convince an agent to represent you or sell it to a publisher (a real publisher, not a vanity publisher). Even then, I wouldn't quit my day job right away.

In any case, if you're a "writer" then it's because writing has some kind of value to YOU. If it also turns out to have some value to others, that's icing on the cake. Don't base your own desire to continue writing on whether "enough" people say they like it.

You might want to check out the City of Heroes Writer's Guild. Tropic, the proprietor, posts semi-regularly about updates when they happen.

Wait a minute. I'm confused.

Samantha Lore is the quivering lump of humanity who's mooching off of her high school friend and currently hiding under a desk in a bank as it's being robbed, isn't she?

Where did we jump from that to Samantha being a successful super-villain with a soft heart and a missing mother?

Heck, where did we transition from being a burgeoning hero in denial to a villain of any stripe?

While I'm no professional writer, it's my understanding that spending thousands of hours is how you get good at it...

Good work! The concept and the execution are both well done. I liked the twist with Jason turning out to be the cause of Rafe's downfall and that Rafe believed in him despite the appearances.

It's an interesting take on the fallen hero origin story that does a good job of explaining why someone with an heroic bent, but who's not a goody-two-shoes, would end up on the "wrong side of the tracks".

Lady Hesperus

L. Hesperus is a species of Black Widow spider. The female Black Widow will sometimes eat the male once they've mated. Only the original Lord Hesperus left a grave behind. No-one knows what happened to the other eleven husbands' bodies...

Ha ha ha! No. My judging anything around here is a bad idea for the time being.

You gathered 'em up. You judge 'em.

For some reason, this thread didn't show up as updated for me until just now.

Give it a couple of days. It's hard to take an abstract concept and embody it in a costume, unless you've just deliberately made it easy by choosing Patriotism or something.

Layout 1. It has a resume feel to it, which is sort of what you've described using it for.

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I'll see if uncommenting helps. Eventually, I plan on creating an external stylesheet and linking all the pages to it. Maybe now's a good time to implement it.

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Doing it early is always better than doing it later. You've already managed to avoid building a bad habit of using inline styles everywhere, so you might as well work on the good habits now. *heh*

A bit of advice - A significant number of CSS-related "bugs" (I might even say most of them) can be solved by asking "What is the browser assuming about my document?" The more you specify, the less room there is for the browser to do something unexpected.

If you want to be inspired and see some awesome stuff that clever people can do by separating styles from content and changing only the stylesheet (and supporting graphics), check out the CSS Zen Garden.

*heh* Sky Wolf is a character that's been kicking around a couple of story ideas I've been mulling over. For whatever reason, I used that pallete to visualize him. I'd actually intended to use the yellow/gold as the primary color, so I was surprised when he turned out the way he did. I wouldn't be surprised about Air Wolf being in use already, though. As it was, I had to create the in-game character as "Sky-Wolf".

As for the palletes, you might generate more interest if the pallete has some more variety built into it. Chocolate was not too far from monochrome in a lot of ways. Bats'n'Belfries is kind of similar. Lots of dark blues/grays with one contrasting color.

Something like one of the watermelon palletes, that's basically ALL contrasting colors, might be fun.

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So, are Freespecs dead?



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Check the dev tracker. Positron has already posted to the effect that all normal avenues for a respec, including freespecs, will remain available.

The specific reason that was given for not offering a freespec about the Gaussian thing is that there were about 1000 CHARACTERS, not accounts, that were affected. Consider how alt-happy some folks are, that could easily amount to only a few hundred players out of some 135,000.

So, when does the Thor's Assassin VS. set come out?

For some reason, I find it very amusing that there are players who think that the demand for respecs is so high that NCNC set the pricepoint for maximum profit and are actually expecting to earn a significant profit from selling respecs.

I'm no mind reader, but my crystal ball is telling me that $10 is a price that is just high enough that you'll think twice about buying it; that is, it discourages you from doing so. This fits with the goal of "earn it by playing the game" rather more nicely than it fits with the goal of "scam the players out of a bunch of money".

If you just have no other options or simply cannot wait, then $10 is still priced low enough that you can rationalize it once. "I'll brownbag it for lunch a couple of times."

Seriously, the idea that NCSoft is hoping to turn respecs into a profit center is pretty ridiculous, given that the available supply of them increases the longer you play.

I'm not even going to touch the idea that they'd take respecs out of the game and make them available ONLY by purchasing them.

*edit* Just to be completely unsubtle here - Yes, I am suggesting that NCSoft deliberately priced it "high" to try and discourage you from buying it. If you really, really, really, really have to have one, there it is. Otherwise, find a way to get it for free in the game. At least if you DO break down and buy it, you're paying NCSoft instead of a RMT'er.

Delivering on a serial adventure ought to be the last thing on her mind about now. As long as someone gets the skull dug out of his head eventually, we're good here.

Huh?

They're not?

But it's called...

'Cause the Skulls took...?

Oh!

Well, uh, Get Well Soon! We'll be here!

So much for technical discussions.

Sky-Wolf

Funky. I usually use dot-format and CLASS= myself so I'll have to chalk that up to something I never knew or instantly forgot.

Anyway, I actually saved your page locally and did some editting on it instead of just looking at it. The problem became pretty obvious at that point - Your width, which you had actually specified at one point and then removed from the current page.

Right now, the container block has a width of 100%. Uncomment your width attribute and you should be good.

Change

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>&lt;div id="container"&gt;
&lt;div id="palette"&gt;</pre><hr />
to

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>&lt;div class="container"&gt;
&lt;div class="palette"&gt;</pre><hr />

*edit*

Ditto this for the contestant's class. When you specify something like #heroic { width:100px; height:100px}, that's a style class. It's a set of styles that's meant to apply to any number of elements as opposed to, say, just paragraphs. You use the CLASS="heroic" attribute to assign it to an element.

ID="heroic", by contrast, just says that the current element is referenced by the name "heroic", so that if I wanted to get the value of that block, I could do something like call getElementByID("heroic") in a javascript and then manipulate the contents of the block that has that ID.

ID="heroic" doesn't apply any styling.