PaxArcana

You know, you could just try what I suggested: either don't respond (that includes making a big public deal of it like this), or just say something like "I no longer wish to continue this discussion, please do not message me again". It really isn't that difficult ... is it? Alternately, if just behaving like a grownup is too difficult for you, and you're on a desktop ... hover over my name, right here. In the little box that pops up, to the bottom, is an "Ignore User" link. Whatever floats your boat.

I don't recall where I read the specific percentage - it was something in a very early class on law (at one point I was contemplating a career in law, whether as an attorney or a paralegal I didn't yet know), over fifteen years ago. A reference to one or another precedent, IIRC, regarding whether or not a derivative work was considered infringing, or not. Your comments about leaving off tademarked symbols and such, is where the whole "how much is X% of the original work" grey area comes in, as I recall.

(Emphasis mine) I find this extremely hard to believe. What system are you using?

Having the attacks have a stronger Debuff element would work, IMO. If it was good enough, I might actually take attacks of my own when playing an MM. 🙂 ((I haven't, since five days into i6 ...))

With Narrative, but no Mechanics, you don't have a game at all. You have a book, or a movie. With Mechanics, but no Narrative, you have a game - just, a mindless one. Probably a shooty-arcade-y thing. With BOTH ... you have a role-playing game. Like CoX.

Because the 50's black-and-white serial had that as the Narrative Scale. That Superman couldn't push the moon out of orbit. Kingdom Come Superman could. 50's Serial Superman couldn't have taken a nuclear missile to the face and lived through it. Kingdom Come Superman DID. ... Two different stories, and effectively, two different versions of Superman. Comics or Movies, not games. Which makes it "apples and oranges". Different genre, with different matchup of Power scale to Narrative scale. Joker or Lex Luthor would likely have turned Bond into so much ground meat. Before page two of the first issue.

Comic books are not games. Games need rules, to provide a structure external to the participants because no one of them is in absolute control, and because ... ... when you were a small child, did you ever play "cops and robbers" ...? or "war", or "guns" ...? Young kids running around with toy guns, yelling "pew-pew-pew" and whatever to shoot each other? If you did ... do you remember the arguments that went: "I shot you, you're dead!" "Nu-uh!" "Yeah-huh!" "Nu-uh!" "Yeah-huh!" "Nu-uh!" "Yeah-huh!" "Nu-uh!" "Yeah-huh!" (et cetera ... ad infinitum, ad absurdum) ... rules exist to prevent that. Instead, it's: "I rolled a 17 to hit, for 23 fire damage." "I have a Defense Rating of 15, and +4 versus fire. Your shot was deflected off my energy shield." "Damnit, I need to roll better." Well, game mechanics exist largely for that reason: to provide an objective judge of success or failure. "Level", in those systems that use it, is intended to directly model "amount of raw power/potential/ability". A 15th level character is always going to be much, much more powerful than a 5th level character. Always .... it's an inevitable component of that sort of game design. None of which applies to a novel, or a comic book. Because in that, you don't have someone who is personally and directly invested in "Thanos wins", nor do you have anyone personally and directly invested in "Squirrel Girl wins". What you have is a single narrator-voice (even if it's a team of people, they're all rowing in the same direction for the same goals), whose goal is to entertain the readers ... by any means. If Squirrel Girl handing Thanos his kiester without breaking a sweat is what will entertain the readers? She does. OTOH, if Squirrel Girl "doing a Coulsen" and getting stomped into very dead pink mush by an arrogantly confident Thanos in order to inspire the other heroes to redouble their efforts to defeat Thanos is what the readers would be more entertained by? That is what happens. No mechanics. No "Hmm, but Squirrel Girl has a Defense class if 23 due to her agility, and Thanos only has a +8 attacl this round". In a story, Narrative is everything. But in a game, it has to share the spotlight with mechanics .... including, the impact that differing Levels have on the outcome of contested actions - whatever those Levels might be called.

Just because you have failed to convince me, does not mean I am not paying attention. Don't fall into that trap. As convinced I am that you are completely dead wrong about the feasibility ofwhat you suggest, I am also equally convinced that you are intelligent. So ... stop, take a step back. Instead of assuming that I just don't "get" your Universal Truth, instead of assuming I'm just not "paying attention" to the wisdom you are dispensing ... step back, and try to see if maybe, just maybe, I am correct and your suggestion is unworkable in the way you insist on it being. ::sigh:: That. Is. Not. How. Level. Based. RPG. Mechanics. Have. Ever. Worked. Game level = Power. Narrative Scale (the entire "street" versus "cosmic" debate, and any intermediate steps one might posit) is dependent primarily on the magnitude of threat the villain(s), and their plot, pose. On a (distantly) secondary level, Narrative Scale also refers to ... for wont of a better term, "the size of the stage". "Street level" scale stories don't threaten, say, "the entire U.S. eastern seaboard"; that would be a Regional or National scale story. They don't threaten the entire planet, that would be a Global scale story. They don't threaten multiple solar systems, a galaxy, or even (borrowing from the MCU for a moment) "half of all living things in the entire universe". That's where the Cosmic scale of story comes in. ... for a villain, and their plot, to operate within one of the above scales, they must have: Enough power, personally or by proxy, to actually post a significant threat on the scale selected - Joker cannot credibly threaten the entire Green Lantern Corps all by himself (not even with Harley along for the ride); Not so much power that, when faced with heroes who operate on the selected scale, they are undefeatable. Power Pack isn't going to be able to stop Galactus from eatign the Earth by themselves. ... So: Robin (any of them) cannot, himself and unsupported, operate on the same scale - protect people from the same kinds of threats - that Superman does. He wouldn't stand a chance, no matter how lucky he got, against someone like Darkseid. Robin is a Street-scale character, Darkseid is a Cosmic-scale villain. In City of Heroes terms, Robin is a level 15 or 20-ish Scrapper. Probably Street Justice / Ninjitsu, thinking about it. (Well ... Damian Wayne might be a Ninja/Ninja Stalker, instead. League of Shadows training, and all.) He faces The Family, Council, maybe some Tsoo and Freakshow here and there. Darkseid would be a Level 50+4 Archvillain. He could SNEEZE, and a dozen Robins would fall over dead from clear across the zone. He is faced by the entire Justice League .... not middle- and high-school-aged sidekicks like Robin (or Kid Flash, or Beast Boy, or ...). ... But you're insisting that Robin should be as able to go mano-a-mano with Darkseid, as Superman can. Because you keep insisting that Robin should not have to stop short of the level cap "just" to stay a Street-scale hero. Which means, Robin has to be at least level 50. Maybe 50-plus-something, himself. And you're right about one thing: at that point, he's no longer Robin. Indeed, he's probably no longer Nightwing, either. (Remember, the original Robin, Dick Grayson, outlevelled the Boy Wonder sidekick role; he grew up, and adopted an adult persona of his own. He went from Street scale, to a Regional, National, or similar scale of story. His comics issues would no longer be about a teenaged boy trying to balance crimefighting, homework, and maybe asking that new girl out on a date; they would be about ... wait for it ... bigger things. That growth, is what is modelled with Levels, in an RPG. Yes, it does. In forty years of people desperately trying to come up with something different, no-one has ever even partially succeeded in doing what you want: having characters of the same power level operate at differing narrative scales. Every single character with, say, Green Lantern's level of power, is at least concerned with planet-wide threats. Not "hey I should go stop that gang-war six blocks over". ... You are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. And no matter how hard you hammer on it, that peg is just not going to fit.

You could. But I suspect you'd fail in that argument. X-23 is Wolverine head to toe, "but female" (and not Canadian, and doesn't call people "bub", and doesn't have a weird love-triangle going with Scott and Jean). And the majority of outfits I see when searching Google for her, are leather jacket, leather halter top, and leather pants, all in black. Her spandex outfit was directly Wolverines, in blue-and-yellow - not a pattern-reversed grey and yellow. Honey Badger would be only as close to X-23, as she is to Wolverine. Which is to say, "about halfway". 🙂 And halfway, is safely an homage. I can find exactly zero reference to any "female alternate-universe version" of Wolverine, though. And not for wont of trying.

Also, this: Game Level = POWER Level And in the Superhero genre, Narrative Scope flows from the character's level of personal power. "Street level" heroes in the CoX universe are not 50th level. Nor 40th level. Nor even 30th level. They're in their teens, maybe edging into the low 20s. Because those are the power levels appropriate for a "street level" Narrative Scope. Superman doesn't spend his time stopping muggers. Oh, he WILL, if he comes across one. But he doesn't patrol every alley of Metropolis looking for them specifically and especially. Because his personal power is so great, that it is best spent on threats only he, or those like him, can deal with. Spiderman, OTOH? Especially soon after a reboot? Mostly looks after his own neighborhood, and the surrounding city. He absolutely DOES patrol the streets and alleys specifically looking for muggers and similar low-level criminals. Because that is what is most appropriate for his level of power, at that stage in his career. He's not going to be taking down Galactus on his own - that's a job for the Fantastic Four. He, instead, is going to be handling Kingpin and Sandman so that the FF can focus on those bigger threats[/i[, without being distracted by the low-grade riff-raff stealing purses and such. Early-career Spiderman is level 10-20. At that point, the FF are level 35+. That's just how levels work in a game, Steam.

No, you aren't. You're outlining a pipe-dream, "why can't we" scenario. But you haven't explained how the systems, the parts "under the hood", would work. IN YOUR SYSTEM, Rorschabee is on her own, playing solo. And sees a bunch of alien-looking dudes she's never encountered before. They show up as being her level .... so, how does she know she can't possibly fight them because they're meant for Winvincible to find fairly challenging? Meanwhile, in the next zone over, Winvincible sees a bunch of Freakshow-looking villains - and he's never faced anything like them, he's been busting alien heads for fifty levels. They show up as being his level .... so how does he know that they are worth no XP or IN for him, because they might as well be baby ducklings getting pushed into an alligator pond, compared to his power level? And, hey, then there are the PvP zones. What happens with Rorschabee runs across a villain PC in Siren's Call; it LOOKS like they are the same level. How does she know if that's a fellow-street-level PC, or a Cosmic PC? If there's no difference "because PvP zone" .... how does that work? Are all the Cosmic heroes nerfed into being feeble kittens compared to their usual power level? (I bet they'd LOVE that! [/sarcasm]) Or do the Street Heroes suddenly become Ultra-heroes/villains, able to juggle moons, instead? (And, I bet they'd love that just as little.) In a human-run game with multiple groups, each playing in a different real-world space at a different real-world time ... the sort of varied-power-level stuff you keep describing can be done (though it'd be a TON of work for the human GMs). In a computer-run game, with everyone playing at the same time, in the same (virual) space ... and with everyone having the exact same advancement scheme and everyone reacing the level cap in whichever tier/scale/whatever they chose .... it can't be done. No, I've been using those terms, because they are shared between us. We both know how City of Heroes/Villains works. Terms that refer to systems in the game, are terms that we both understand in the same way. There's no need for me to re-invent the wheel, when there's already a stack of perfectly good ones sitting right next to me. Specifically, look again at how you did not understand (or refused to accept) that within that rules set, Power Levels are a completely OBJECTIVE scale, and you absolutely could not have PL16 "street level" heroes and run a remotely plausible game. So, yes. I fell back on commonly understood terms from a mutually-known source. Sue me. Look at how badly my attempt to use a not-CoX example, DCA5 and/or M&M3, went.

There is actually a legal standard (which is far stricter than anything that Cryptic or Paragon were required to adhere to): Derivative Copyright. Anything that has 30% difference, or less, is considered infringing. The "no hard rule" comes into play when one starts trying to decide "if the guy picked BLUE instead of green, how much % difference is that from the Hulk?", or "Are HALK and HULK different enough, or too close?" ... You absolutely can make a Claws/Regen Scrapper (or Brute, for that matter), that is clearly a Wolverine homage .... with with strategically-chosen differences that should add up to that magic "more than 30%" for any reasonable reviewer. For example .... start off making them a woman, because instead of "Wolverine", their name is "Honey Badger" (an equally scary, ferocious, tenacious small furry beast). Give her as close a knockoff to Wolverine's classic "yellow spandex" costume ... but reverse the color scheme. And maybe use a medium-dark grey instead of blue-black. She can still be Canadian, still call people "bub", and even mutter darkly about "Scott" and "Jean" and "the Professor" when RPing. She is clearly an homage to Wolverine. But she is also clearly different enough not to be derivative - and yet deliberately similar enough to potentially qualify as parody (a protected kind of work). ... See, it's hard to say "X will be a copycat", but it is NOT hard to say "Y would not be a copycat".

Not that I preserved for years, no. But, for myself ... yes, absolutely. See, I sometimes came across copycats. And I would send them a /tell, politely, telling them I thought they were waaaaay too copycat, and that if a GM saw them, they'd get generic'd, losing costume and name alike. A few said "oh, really? I didn't kow that was a rule", and I'd talk to them about ways they could tweak their copy into being just an homage; everyone would still know what character they meant, but it'd be different enough to keep the rabid lawyers at bay. A few told me, in no uncertain terms, to f__k off. Those guys? I reported, on the spot. And also added them to my /friends list. So that I could see, a couple days later,t hat they had turned from (say) "xXx1NCR3D1BL3HALKxXx" ... to, say, "GenericHero14227".

There is no thin line. There is no exact, razor-edged point dividing "homage" from "copycat". The simple rule is, the closer you get to being a direct copy, the greater the risk that you get TOO close." And just like trying to "thread the needle" between obstacles with a high-speed drone ... you won't know you were too close, until you clip one of those obstacles with a wingtip or rotor and plummet to the ground in pieces. IOW, until it's too late. A properly made homage, will look for something significant to specifically be able to point to, and say "I made a good faith effort to differentiate my homage from the original-source character". Just because many other people are doing something wrong, does not make it become not-wrong. And just because it is easy to follow suit yourself, also does not make it suddenly okay. Is he bare-chested and barefoot? Is he played as a simple-minded rage machine / berzerker? Does he have just a wild hairdo (in green) ...? If the answers to both of those are "yes", then it's definitely not okay, and is a copycat. If, OTOH, the character is green, has purple pants, wears a white tank-top and combat boots, has a white mohawk, and his backstory is a carefully-crafted "not quite the same but you get what I'm hinting at" thing? Then he's okay, and is an homage.

No, you obviously don't get my "perspective". CoX is a game, first and foremost. Not a comic, not a novel. And there are just some things that cannot be done within a multiplayer gamespace - no matter how cool the stories would be. No matter how hard anyone might wish otherwise. I have. Very well. You want the game to support stories where a character never grows above "street level" heroism, and also support stories where characters grow to be solar-system-saving paragons. And you aren't willing to use the tools already provided for that very thing, in the form of turning off XP before the "street level" hero's power outgrows the setting you want him to remain in. What I've been trying, repeatedly, to tell you is: it just is not possible. You might as well stare at a stream (in real life) and beg it to flow uphill; your results will be about the same. And, again I tell you: this is physically impossible in an MMO. You would need to have multiple separate games, sharing the setting but not the actual playspace. Cosmic heroes and Street heroes would not be passing each other in the same zone, each headed for their own personal-narrative-scale missions. Wish for it all you want, but IT JUST CANNOT BE DONE. Again, water, uphill, same results. The Tigers in Pandaria are a good forty or fifty levels higher than the Tigers in Stranglethorn. What happen is, Rorchbee sidekicks up to Winvncible's level. Because Winvincible has been levelling up steadily all along, and recently ding'd 50. But Rorschabee's player wanted less Superman, and more Batman, so SHE TURNED OFF HER XP AT LEVEL 20. It really is just that simple, Steam.

Yes, they most certainly did enforce known trademarks .... when they became aware of an infringement (meaning, when another player reported the offending character). Including Costume and Name? Especially the Costume, mind.

In literally every forum on the internet that has any level of effective moderation at all, the NUMBER ONE RULE is and always has been, "do not publicly discuss moderation actions." And trust me, I've had waaaaaaaay more experience than I should have with being on the bad side of forum moderators in my twenty-plus years online. So when I say "always" about this sort of thing, you really should take it as gospel truth. You should have made your suggestion in a private message, not here in the open. And at this point, you should just drop it, or you'll only be eating yet more Warnings. Or maybe worse, if you keep at it long enough.

No, in this case it meant that you quoted my entire moderately-long post, including the image, to fire off a half-paragraph worth of response. EVERY game. Look, I don't know how much experience you have with level-based RPGs, but I'd been part of that hobby for some forty or so years now - including playtests (think "in beta") with NDAs, while on a first-name basis with the people designing them. In all of them, ALL of them, a difference in level means a difference in power. And in every single last one of them, any two players (of the same class, archetype, role, or equivalent if the system has those) who is at the same level, has roughly the same degree of power. In systems without levels, that used a point-build system, significant differences in point totals mean significant differences in power. A 100-point GURPS Super is nowhere near the power of a 300-point GURPS Super. A Shadowrun Street Samurai fresh out of character creation is no match for a Street Samurai with a career total of 300 Karma earned. EVERY. SINGLE. SYSTEM. that includes any form of advancement at all .... more advancement means more power. Two characters with the same advancement, generally have the same power. Minecraft does not have levels. You are not "a level 15 miner" or "a level 8 carpenter". Even with the later addition of pseudo-RPG progression, it's a serious case of apples-and-apricots to compare it to CoX's level advancement system. No, it'd be more than that. To appropriately challenge, say, a 40th level character .... the NPC mobs have to be 38th to 43rd level. A generic Freakshow thug, or a Rikti foot soldier - if they're both 41st level, they are the same power level. The Cosmic-scale "storyline" hero would fare no better against the Freakshow thug than against the Rikti foot soldier. Even though, in a logical narrative, that Rikti soldier would wipe the floor with any DOZEN Freakshow mooks - and therefor, a Hero that regularly faces dozens of Rikti soldiers, would have to face a hundred or more of the mooks to even get near to breaking a sweat. Which means, "40th level" would have to mean different things for the Cosmic hero, than it does for the Street hero. That means an entirely separate advancement track, and a separate combat-effectiveness scale ... and a way to SHOW the Street level player that "yeah, those Rikti guys are only 40th level, but they con so purple to you, you should be losing HP just being in the same zone as them". That's more than just having separate storylines. ... If you want to stick with the "only a problem in this neighborhood/city/etc" storylines, then you need to turn off XP at a level where that sort of thing still happens. Doing otherwise just is not workable. It's not merely impractical, it's physically impossible. To return to M&M: you'd be talking about a meta-campaign, with multiple groups in a single shared world. Some of them are playing PL 7 or 8 teenaged heroes in High School or even Middle School. some are playing PL 11 or 12 characters, the adult mentors to those teen sidekicks. Some of them are playing PL 15 or 16 heroes, the ones who go off into space, other dimensions, and so forth. It can work, just fine, yes. But, here's the trick: if you play for a while? Those teenagers will increase to PL 9, then PL 10 ... eventually, all the way to PL 15. Inevitably, just as a consequence of playing the game. So, the character who was once a 13 or 14 year old green-as-grass newbie sidekick nervously taking on muggers, armed robbers, and the occasional drug dealer in his neighborhood, will eventually be one of "Earth's Mightiest Guardians", calmly handling extradimensional incursions and alien invasions around the entire world, and possibly beyond. One thing they will not do, is stay Power Level 7 and 8. Another thing they will not do, is still be dealing primarily with petty criminals at Power Level 15. You are still mistaking "the size of the stage" with "the power of the opposition (and the heroes who rise to meet it)".

That's an awful signal-to-noise ratio you have going there, Steampunkette. Anyway: my use of M&M/DCA was solely to illustrate how levels work. CoX has those - 50 of them, pre-Incarnate. Build/Slotting aside, a Level 50 character is always going to have the power of a Level 50 character. And that power is not, nor never will be, "street level". NOR CAN IT BE. Whether you're Batman Manticore, or Superman Statesman ... level 50 is level 50 is level 50 (Incarnate stuff totally aside). And it needs to be that way, for CoX to function as a multiplayer game. This would entail essentially developing the same game multiple times in parallel. It would also doom the game to inevitable failure, as players got upset, forty-plus levels down the road, that they picked "the wrong scale" and now they're stuck with it. Many of them would leave, and w/o enough players, MMOs die.

To the question, "What pairs best with _______", there is only one correct answer: What sounds like it'd be fun to play? :)

I want pets to have collision for enemy NPCs. It can be useful using pets to block off a doorway, and limit how many enemies can get LOS on my MM during an ambush, when playing solo ... 🙂

These, I would absolutely not argue with. 🙂 Especially since we can turn off XP at all before reaching level 50.

The problem here is, you are not the sole narrator of the CoX story. You're not the Game Master, running the game for the other players. As for your narrative holding to their standards of power ... let's look at Captain Marvel ("SHAZAM!" and all that). He's Power Level 15. His Strength score is 19; if he wants to pick something up, he just does, if it weighs up to 12,000 tons. Twelve. Thousand. Tons. To put that in scale, the U.S. Navy's latest ship class, the Zumwalt destroyer, has a displacement of 14,564 long tons, or about 16,312 short tons. That is just a little more than he can automatically lift, so he would have to use "Extra Effort", mark one Hero Point off as "used" for that adventure (it's not permanently gone, though - he'll get it back), upping his limit to 25,000 tons, and ..... whoosh, the Destroyer is lifted over his head. (He'll have to spend more Hero Points to KEEP it there, mind, so eventually he'll have to put it down. Or throw it at Black Adam, maybe ...) Shazam is a fairly TYPICAL "flying strong guy" for PL 15. And throwing navy destroyers at badguys is NOT Street-level! When playing M&M3 or DCA5, either your narrative conforms to their standards of power, or you need to choose a different game system. There is no Door #3 here. That's not how that game works. Literally, it's not possible for it to work that way. The various Power Levels are defined, explicitly, in the book. The image below is the examples they give. The game is mechanically set up for those definitions; you literally cannot say "my PL 16 story is a street-level game" - PL16 heroes would literally, and inevitably, be too powerful to stay "street-level" for more than five minutes of play time. The game provides a framework, and when you decide "I want Mystery Men, not Justice League" ... that means you want a PL 8 game. You cannot successfully shoe-horn a PL16 game into being Mystery Men. The characters would be too powerful .... because Power Level is literally how powerful a character is. Superman is PL 15. Superman is not a Street-level hero, because he is to street-level threats, as you are to a typical ant. Because Comics are not Games. In a GAME ...? Yes, they both actually do have to steadily increase in power. If you were to run "The Super-Friends" as a campaign of DC Adventures ....? As with CoX, as you play and foil villains, you gain new Hero Points. Which you then spend to increase your abilities. As you increase those abilities, your Power Level eventually increases. The default rule is, every 15 new points, is a +1 increase in Power Level. Typically, you gain 1 new point after each adventure (which should take about 4-6 hours of play on average). 2 is you faced off especially strong opponents. Adventures that are longer, and take multiple sessions, get these awards per session. And, possibly, 1 or 2 extra points if the heroes did especially well, above and beyond basic success. In CoX terms: after about fifteen door missions, maybe less if there's a tough boss in there ... +1 Power Level, congratulations.

It's funny you would accuse me of being "on a high horse", in response to a subthread of discussion about the defined systems of character levels and relative power within a multiplayer gamespace. Absolutely nothing I said was anything less than 100% objectively factual. Just because you don't like that it doesn't support your personal desires, does not mean I'm "on a high horse", nor anything even close to it. That is completely unrelated to what I was discussing, in that post you quoted to accuse me of "being on a high horse". I was discussing the idea of having the game be able to divide 50th level characters into street-level, global, and/or cosmic tiered heroes - the concept of having two 50th level characters, before enhancements and set bonusses, have wildly divergent levels of power. ... Which one of us is on an exceptionally-tall equine now, hmm?

Similar to "The Books of Swords" - "Old World" technology, even as simple a thing as a flashlight, is viewed as being essentially magic.