CellyEl

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

Finished personal testing on this one yesterday. Solar Enrichment, AE 56540 'If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.' Knife once more gathers a superheroic cadre to save the world amidst a brewing international disaster that threatens millions of lives. Inspired by: Oppenheimer, Chinese myth, and rereading the baffling way Numina lost her body. Comment: Still right out of the gate, so I'm not sure entirely how it'll be received. A preponderance of rare damage types and -def does mean that the AV fights might spike an unwary group, especially the last one. It also felt a bit workmanlike when I was writing it, but I enjoyed my own result, and it didn't feel like a marathon to test. Which is why I'm sticking two more stages on later. An additional note I forgot to mention: In virtually all of these arcs, my partner in Crime is @Maris, who does most of the mob balance and design for custom enemy groups; she's truly excellent at purposeful enemy group building with the vaguest of direction*, and I cannot thank her enough, or plug her solo work Der Nachzehrer Kommt! (AE 55600; bring friends, she shows her fangs on this one) enough. *"MARISSSSS I need uhhhh russian mafia guys but they're also vampires" She whips up the entire back half of Prizren: SoS in a couple hours

It's come to my attention that I've never posted these publicly; given that they were written for an SG's internal 'something new to do' needs, it made sense not to spread them all over, but I suppose I don't see the harm in it. Most are written with the assumption that it's been around a decade since the fall of Praetoria, and many of them track the attendant cultural fallout thereof. They're all pretty playable with a small team of 3-6, some social mechanism of sharing mission briefings and ensuring clues are read, and a lighthearted approach to heavy subjects and serious genres. The arcs are, in initial publication order (Some required republishing to fix certain bugs), ISLAND of DEATH!! AE 45130. A rare and valuable MARTIAL ARTS MANUAL, a relic of the esoteric and DEADLY practices of the dimension of Praetoria, is up for grabs! Enter a team competition where there are no rules and the definition of MARTIAL ARTS gets stretched to the breaking point! The ISLAND of DEATH awaits! Inspired by: 80's Martial arts movies localized in the US, especially the ad copy. Comment: Honestly, probably my best. Make popcorn, bring your cheesiest martial artists (and one guy who like, shoots a gun, just for flavor), romp through it, and have a good time. MONTANA SMITH and the CARTHAGINIAN CASK, AE 56465 A security alarm at Salamanca's university campus quickly becomes much more. DELVE into the ancient mysteries of Carthage, long buried beneath myth, legend, and rumor. Uncover the secrets of the ancients, race against fiendish fascist foes, and speak the truth on a 2,200-year-old blood libel! Inspired by: Indiana Jones, and notably published originally before the post ITF mission arc from Not!Valkyrie. Comment: I like how it turned out, but it was probably a little too joke-heavy, all told. Prizren: Sarabande of Solitude, AE 49756 An investigation into a secession crisis in Kosovo shoes not only signs of paramilitary tampering, but supernatural tampering as well. Thrust into the center of a rapidly deteriorating coup, out heroes must fight to end a dangerous curse before it's too late. Inspired by: Castlevania Comment: Probably my weakest. It started my thought process on conveying clues more effectively for fast-moving groups, but not soon enough to benefit itself. Also, there's a few brick walls of difficulty in there; liz is tough for some people. True to inspiration, there's also a secret additional AE mini arc with a different, better ending, buried in the clues. WRATH of the CHIMERA, AE 50571 Alerted to a break-in at the offices of the Paragon City Comptroller, our heroes find themselves face to face with a foe that has nothing to lose! Dare you pit yourself against... THE WRATH OF THE CHIMERA? Inspiration: Ninja Gaiden (NES). Comment: Those games always started off with you fighting weirdos in a city alleyway, and ended with you killing a demon god in hell, and I sorta wanted to capture that absurd escalation in a story arc. Ultimately, I like how it went, even if I don't feel like Jaquio Jade Scorpion makes a lot of sense. In a way, this, too, is authentic to the Ninja Gaiden experience. 60 Seconds to Midnight, AE 51392 When a US black site in the arctic circle falls and there's no capes around, does anyone hear? Knife once more puts out the call to deal with high stakes geopolitical flashpoints before they reach the 'thousands dead' stage. Inspired by: Metal Gear Solid Comment: My most polished work, with a lot of approaches that I've since made standard. I like that it's playable and comprehensible with an 8 stack blitzing through it, but there's a plethora of little notes you'd only catch if you're taking a more leisurely pace. It's also the only one that REALLY WANTS you to have a team: the rest are fairly doable solo. All of them have been fairly well received at the Hero Corps Information Exchange.

Yeah, the war walls weren't built until 2002-2003 (using reverse-engineered Rikti tech), and the Zig itself is a lot older than that. While the risk of breakouts probably keeps property levels low, there's too much in Brickstown that's not related to the Zig for the zone to be just prison and prison accessories, I'm afraid.

So my assumption that some node is hosed between us and it seems likely, then? RIP RP event today. Oh well, thank you so much for sitting with us in our misery

Same boat. 😞

I've actually been having the same issue, just today, Swapping from tequila to the HC launcher didn't help, nor did turning off any firewalls. Windows 10, ISP is centurylink. Edit: Sorted! I mean, Centurylink still sucks here, but in the usual ways