_Kai_

Willpower fail, I nabbed Stray Voltage

So the sad thing? I was sure there would have to be a duck in between the two faces of that sign, I think I spent like 15min on the day off looking in every nook and cranny and if I had only panned out slightly I might have caught it much earlier! 🤣 Despite the frustration it was super, super fun and Upside will get some use by my alts for sure! Thanks for the base and the contest @Wravis!

Wravis told me to post the screenshot here and be official, so there's the elusive and evil yellow duckie 🙂 My global is @Kai

...okay vindication for breaking the game a bit and giving myself a timeout, I found the yellow duckie and THAT IS EVIL! EDIT: I'm not posting the screenshot here because I found a bonus/extra thing before Wravis was ready, so in case they want the yellow duckie award go to someone else for more graffiti not spoiling it 🙂

It's all good to get into the deep nitty gritty of why, how much, and should its of heroes vs villains, but the actual fundamental issue of lack of RP conflict is that everyone wants to be the protagonist. Forget the labels of 'hero' or 'villain' or 'moral' or 'psychopath' or 'mercenary', in the end everyone who wants to tell a story want to be that story's protagonist and desires other people to be antagonists. Antagonists, to make the story work, have to lose in the end, for whatever value of 'lose' the protagonist wants. You are, by definition, not the star of the show, you are secondary and your every relevance to the story is to be viewed as an obstacle for the protagonist to overcome. It's human nature to make up stories that entertain us and make us feel good. Even stories that involve sacrifice, death, if they are not just straight up dry historical these happenings are framed as 'a price to pay' or 'what lit the fuse' and encompassed in a story that ends up Some Good Result in the mind of the story creator. That is so much easier a task when the character you pose as protagonist has the same morals, ethics, etc valuations of 'good' as you as a functional person in society do, hence the overwhelming amount of protagonists in this game that are coded as heroes. Not blueside, this is an important distinction, but heroes. Characters who are in Arachnos for the dental plan and keeping their family safe? Heroes. The Orenbegans who just want to live their undead life? Heroes in the moral/ethical/etc sense. Does that mean there are no true villains? Of course not, but those players have to work ten times harder to make an engaging story where the definition of A Good Ending does not match the moral/ethical/etc values of the player, and it fundamentally feels bad to many many people to have the character that does match their values, lose. Which, as an antagonist in those stories, is their purpose. So the scale is skewed already, no matter the genre. The genre itself and the conceits of the setting weigh heavily on it though precisely because of the language used in the terms 'hero' and 'villain'. You may want to write something from the perspective of someone abused and abandoned in the Etoile, doing what they can to survive in the slums, and these costumed people kicking you down just for that, and thematically they are the hero and protagonist of that story but everything from the terms to the setting to the colors to the music hammer in You Are A Villain. As a player you might want that story to go 'well so I need a hero to come in and bust up this kidnapping, only none of these guys are evil, they just were paid to guard someone and your fighting and how fast they go down galvanizes my character to train up and be a real threat' and that's perfectly fine, but is going to be a hard sell to find a player willing to put their character that both they and the game prop up as A Hero to be that antagonist.

I love this garden! I admit I'm mostly here for the home neighborhood love(Brickstown represent) and can see so many cool options for RP already!

More art! These from RaoNoir on deviantArt, Lithium from here and one of my FF14 characters I'sobe (why yes I do like playing catboys, why do you ask...)

Virtueverse is very much in the state it was in when Live shutdown, with some people adding new pages/content and deleting old characters, and some leaving them there, so its a questionably working site with eight years of content that hasn't been touched in ten years and a small fraction of relevant 'current' stuff so it definitely would feel weird to someone who just got into it with Homecoming. I don't posts 'lists of characters' here or elsewhere because frankly that sort of thing is overwhelming, a firehose of information often way, way too detailed for anyone curious enough to stop in. I haven't used FBSA only because I was _religious_ about keeping my Virtueverse pages up to date back in the day and there is still an undercurrent of Signing Up For A Huge Time Commitment when I think of 'character wiki' so I just....haven't gone over there. I hang out on a couple of Discords, the main HC one and City of Roleplay, because I was always a fan of IRC and I make connections far, far better to people over characters, and that OOC friendship can then lead to IC interactions. I have not made use of the Seeking Connections channels there in a long while, but I did early on when attempting to pull together a late night Pacific RP channel/group, and do still keep an eye on them for anyone who seems like a fun character of mine to meet just because I know it's hard to get started with RP that isn't hoping to stumble into a decent conversation at Pocket D when you have time to be on.

I have to admit that aside from an existing player within a social group alting over to play villain to the rest of the group as part of a plot, I have never once had a good experience with villains and heroes trying to organically just 'do' conflict in all the years of Live, or on HC. When no one really gets to know each other as players first, its very very easy to people to assume certain 'rules' or expectations and get upset or disappointed or hurt when the RP is based around one person/group antagonizing another. It's not even power or winning, it could be as little as someone expects a serious fairly realistic villain for their fresh out of sidekick training hero to have to stop and instead Pieface the Clown shows up with a water blast flower and ruins the scene for the hero's player. I think if that's something people want to see, it's likely something best organized either on the forums, or Discord, or some non-game space where expectations can be discussed at minimum, or, at maximum have one side plan out the kind of scene they want to run and do a 'casting call' for what kind of characters they want on the opposing side.

So, the Big Ugly Secret is that there is no 'general community', there are just many little pocket communities of SGs, or global channels, or type of roleplayers that hang out together and/or agree with each other on forums, any occasionally you can get a majority of them to agree to a thing, but 'which ones' and 'what thing' varies widely. I mean I can 100% guarantee someone read that you have one IC character with multiple ATs and rolled their eyes, muttered 'godmodder' and left the thread, for instance 🙂 I will say Pocket D has the most extremes going on, so you will find less 'out there' takes in SGs, but there are also SGs that you will violently disagree about the entire premise of, so it's sort of just a trial and error to find your people you're on the same wavelength as to play with and smile, nod, and disengage from people that annoy you in how they want to RP.

It was an extreme example, but it's less 'some bad apples' and 'lots of well intentioned enthusiastic apples that don't talk to each other and get mad when someone else does/writes/says something that contradicts/negates/makes useless what their own character did/planned/wanted to do' 🙂 Ultimately it does the opposite of providing opportunity, namely that sides are taken, people are excluded, people's feelings are hurt, etc and they choose to disengage and warn away others from engaging, and stories grind to a halt. That's not to say that doesn't happen when someone is directing the story, it happened to at least one of the Community Arcs from City of Roleplay Discord, but in general, if you throw a situation out there without any intent to guide it, invariably someone will come along and declare themselves to be 'in charge' or fixing it, and other people will not go along with it, and that forces everyone interested in it to pick a side, or, more than likely, just not engage because they don't need that kind of drama 🙂 I mean, if you feel like it, go for it? But don't be surprised if it erupts in drama and having people on your friends list who you like to RP with, but will never again RP with each other 🙂

And if the second person says 'I called the PPD, and together we arrested them all and saved the city!' then everyone who wanted to participate is left going 'well I guess that's over' or forced to contradict that other person, which, is very uncomfortable for a lot of people, and now that story is dead. That's why generally someone or ones has to be 'in charge' of the story to keep it open and fun for everyone 🙂

We have these in an SG I'm part of, and with less than 10 active participants, it takes, on average 5-8 months to go through a plot. I cannot imagine trying to scale that up to anything bigger personally, because you wouldn't be able to give people options for meaningful contributions by their character. I am in the process of getting one of those plots written up in a way that someone can pick it up and run it for a group, though, hopefully be done this month? We'll see.

Is it there? Yes. Is it easy? Harder than seeing it in the name, and definitely beyond a reasonable doubt someone is doing it on purpose if you petition the GMs for harassment. But I really am not going to argue the point to people who clearly already have made up their mind, it was just something I felt needed to be added as a reason that a fair number of people don't want their global extremely visible by default to everyone on the server.

Likewise, hence the pinned channel, I have too many other commitments I'm in charge of to volunteer for more 🙂

Oh it shows when a message was last edited which is why I thought it would be fine 🙂 A 'curated' list has the same issue of 'is it valid' though on a forum, as literally what would have to happen is 1 - make a thread to get info from people 2 - Post a second topic with a list 3 - Periodically message every single person in the second topic and go 'is this still good?' and then make a call on what happens if there is no response, plus check the first topic for more responses 4 - Make a new post in the second topic and edit the previous post to be empty (Edit for the sake of seeing the timestamp)Oh, and only one person can do this so if they get bored/sick/leave etc the whole thing is useless

There is an existing #seeking-connections channel on the City of Roleplay Discord, but I think as far as I know that is the only existing resource, and several people in this thread in particular seem to be Discord adverse so I don't think having something here would be a duplication of effort, really. I don't know as it would need curation so much as just stickying as everyone can always go back and edit their own posts, much like advertising super groups.

Globals in character names is a terrible idea. Yeah yeah 'I want my name' yeah yeah 'it solves all the problems', no it actually creates a big problem where if someone's out to harass you they have all they need to do so no matter when, where, or on who you log into. Sure now you can get a global name, but unless the person agrees to be global friends you'd have to sit around and /getglobalname every character you see/can think of to stalk them. Running a release is not an automatic wipe. If anyone remembers from Live, when they did run it, it wasn't like all characters that fit the criteria suddenly became generic, it was that if someone tried to get the name and they created a character, only then would the previous character get genericed. So Dark Lord Darkness would probably still be there unless someone really wanted it 😉 Will it free up all the 'good' names? No. To do that you'd have to knock available character slots down to some reasonable number, like....30, and somehow restrict number of accounts. Is it worth doing? Yes, but only once. Nostalgia makes you remember only the good things, and not the bad. There was massive hype for the 'return of City of Heroes' and I'm sure a massive dropoff once people realized that all their friends aren't here, the game has lots of odd issues, and they are older and busier and its not the social hub it once was in their lives. Those people might peek in sometime, but realistically not really. They got their hit and left again. At three years since HC launch I think it would be appropriate to run a release on accounts that haven't logged in in 2 years for non 50s soley for the sheer number accounts/names/etc that were only here for the hype.

We have a Roleplaying category on the Homecoming forums, @Sarakitteh was referencing a completely other set of forums somewhere that had a specific topic called Making Connections that had a purpose of putting out information to connect with other people for and asking about something like that for Homecoming in this topic. I was referencing that we don't need a new Roleplaying category on the Homecoming forums because....we already have one. It could, but does not currently have, a specific Making Connections topic but I do not have the time to start that 🙂

😂 Sure... The Really Really Quick Version! The reflections are the split personalities Jace and X247 of an undercover Resistance spy in Powers Division, courtesy of Praetor Tilman The 'main' characters are the male and female version of Jax after many years of therapy and, not having them in Praetoria, not knowing better that when a genie offers to help you with your problem of deciding who you really are, it really isn't going to turn out anything like what you expected 🙂 The Slightly Longer Version involving why/how for the 3 or so people who want to know more

Definitely not to call you out or anything, but we do have that section, we're in it, it just isn't being used for that right now, but there is no reason a thread couldn't be made and we could get it stickied for Seeking Connections 🙂 And before anyone asks, no I'm not starting it because I haven't even managed to get back to Valerika for RP I owe so am not looking currently for more RP to get behind on and feel guilty about 😄

Personally? 1-3 characters per post, more than than and my attention is now elsewhere. PICTURE. Sometimes its just a cool costume that makes you think 'that might be a fun character to RP with'. HOOKS. Theme and tone are great but tell me 'works at Paragon U', 'hangs out at the Up and Away burger', 'sings bad karaoke at the bar every Friday night' Timezone/Availability is also important if you're looking for in game RP

Making connections type thread, works, the City of Roleplay Discord has a seeking-connections channel that I have met two cool people to RP with via. Community RP Events also can work, but, those kinds of things require more than one person to run, I tried to do several on my own in the early days and it just wasn't viable enough. I fully admit I don't have time to read all those topics but I suspect it boils down to not finding the right RP, with the right characters, in the right timezone, and hoping to stumble across things organically rather than organize something, because that works in a lot of games. Unfortunately I'm the type of person that ends up in RP more by making friends OOCly and then contriving characters to meet than following up on listings, but it _does_ work, and is worth doing here!

Plot has finally played out! Thank you @MysteryMouse for both the awesome art(done months ago!) and for being willing to not post it until it plot was done! 😄

Feel free! 😄