CellyEl

Something being effective doesn't make it the intended gameplay pattern. That's an unintended consequence, not a deliberate design choice, and using a recent mechanical QoL change to justify calling it a deliberate archetype design intent from day 1 is absurd. For a while in FF14, monks spamming dragon kick and nothing else was top-grade DPS; this was not intentional, and neither is turning your Kheldian into a continuous barrage of the most horrible sounds mankind can listen to in the name of slightly outperforming a scrapper.

Whoof, I didn't expect 'the patch that barely touches Kheldians except by accident' to bring all the worst possible Kheldian design takes out of the woodwork. Edit: Clearly, the intended design of the class is 'horrid macro'd together pile of nonsense that continuously sounds like a zenith TV imploding, some kind of horrid 1983 banshee screaming itself to death'

I wanna know what name he had, tbh. See what bullshit he's dying on this hill over.

I have an adjacent, slightly absurd question: Does slotting recharge into autopowers affect proc rates? For example, say I've got a stamina-like power, auto, small recovery boost, and I throw a power transfer chance for heal in there, as one does. If I then put a Synapse's shock: Endmod/rech in there, would that in any meaningful way affect Power Transfer's chance for proc? Like, the sane answer is No, Of Course Not, There's No Recharge Value to alter and subsequently affect proc rates through. But. That's not a safe instinct to trust in CoH's code, now is it?

DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET Magnificence by @cranebump Did my usual Monday night menace RP AE arc, and digging through Rogue arcs, I saw Craney once more. Sure, this works out, I'm sure it'll be morally questionable- Nope, Seven Samurai. One of the better adaptations of the original material out there, not afraid to move around the narrative a bit while still capturing 'village barely hanging on forces back better armed opponent through dispossessed mercenaries' vibes. Obviously, in the 7 stack we ran with, some of the details are going to be speed bumps more than memorable encounters, but that's not a problem of the arc, just a problem with large groups, and I feel like the recruitment mission would have felt more meaningful if we weren't a brutal stack of rapidly exploding blasters and a werewolf. Spoilers: That said, it's one of the few 'and then you don't get paid, but learn a LESSON IN LIFE' arcs where the ending felt deserved and cozy for our pack of ne'er do wells instead of something to gripe about next time; between the soft job offer from Johnny Sonata and the question, "What good would it do to rough up some slummers," it manages to feel less like getting cheated, and more like it just didn't pan out this time. All told, a good time. Good customs, good story, good RP fodder, and never have I seen so many Wailer Lords in a mission.

Urgh, I need to check all my arcs then.

7) Yeah, we all made fun of Freitag for being old a little bit at that. I say keep it. I think that covers all of it! My usual go to when I want 'oh no a time limit' but don't want to put any pressure whatsoever on my players to not RP the shit out of it is 45 minutes. As is, we cleared it with 15 minutes to spare, so don't feel like it's a big imposition or a necessary change. (As we all know, the point of a time limit is not always to challenge your players; often, it is rather to place in them a sense of urgency.)

ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL The Lost Girls by @cranebump 5 Missions knocked out with light RP discussion in a team of 6, in about an hour and a half. The arc begins like any standard contact mission arc, quickly assigning a flavorful character to the Kings Row PPD that acts as your contact and sending you to fight the Lost, who seem to be stealing Fem&Ms. From there, the story takes some sharp turns, throwing you into (non-violent) conflict with Vanguard, into an alliance with Vanguard, and doing battle with a cavalcade of Intermediate Strangeness custom enemies, interspersed by Lost. I'd like to note that mixing some new units into an existing group is one of my favorite custom mob design tropes, because it dulls the intensity of any errant enemy mechanics and also firmly places them in the player's mind as part of that existing group. Ultimately, a fun, eminently RPable romp that suited my post-praetorian current-day sensibilities, and narratively answers a question that the Doyleist in me had written off as, 'well, budget tho'. PLAY IT IF: You're functional at level 25; You like feeling sorry for, but also punching the shit out of, the Lost; You want a good group AE RP mission without a long story investment; You have the elegant and wise opinion that Vanguard is presented as too squeaky clean, and want a story that pushes back on that. NITPICKY BULLSHIT: A lot of the post-mission debrief text doesn't paste neatly into CoH's chat field, and there were a couple formatting issues. That said, nothing that pushed me or my crew away. Edit: Managed to leave off the entire point of the first sentence.

Yeah, the intended use case for my creation of it was 'I have my phone, I am at work, there is standby time, write?' So I primarily needed formatting and charcount for individual blocks of info. Typically, it goes into fields in-game after I get a single mission done, which also lets me fuss with the format at home a little while I reset my document, set up the skeletal structure of the next mission, etc.

Cool! Thank you!

So basically, only useful for Kobayashi Maru-age on account of giant red feelbad text, ya figure. Damn.

As I'm sure you're all aware, failing a required objective in an AE mission shunts you out of the mission with 'mission failure' post-mission text. Is there a way to force this state, by spawning a 'defend object' and an enemy spawn in close proximity to each other once a certain objective is completed? Would the spawn immediately attack the object with any degree of reliability? Would they need player proximity to kick it off? I've tried it before and it worked, but is that reliable or did I get lucky? Why would I make my players feel bad like this? For a possible use case: writing an AE arc that takes place inside the Rikti ship in the RWZ 'while' a mothership raid goes on above, with the players 'force teleported' out like what happens to the raid participants once they finish their goals.

Honestly, the biggest issue I have is that I sure love to use Every Fucking Character in a field when writing, and notepad is... less than elegant when it comes to keeping track of string lengths, while spreadsheet programs tend to handle it like a champ.

S'goin alright

I've found that I have a prodigious amount of downtime at work, where I have access to a phone or anything I can drop on a moment's notice, but otherwise can't really be too distracted. I found myself wanting to fill this time constructively, or at least doing something besides doomscrolling. However, there's a dearth of external support for writing AE outside of game, that A) coherently counts string length, 2) can be copied from cleanly and accurately, and III) has a full list of what all categories you're writing for, with string length for each. Presumably, you could crack open the .storyarc files in an editor and have most of that functionality, but woofa doofa my two brain cells melted when I tried. As such, I pieced together this spreadsheet in google docs, which I'm sure can be opened in many spreadsheet-ey programs, containing templates for framing all the individual fields that make up every individual inputable bit of text in AE. Idea is you pop open a spread sheet, copy the objectives you want over, and have a coherent framing structure for writing all AE text outside of the game. The closest thing to complexity is the conditional formatting on the string length column. Anyway, if you think you might use it for your own writing, or you have really obvious suggestions that my tired work brain couldn't put together, lemme know! Mission ArchiText Objective Templates.xlsx