Zhym

Ah, yes. Makes sense—I know my character's voice, thoughts, and reactions better than a story author does, and it can be jarring when a mission gets it wrong.

I think you're right about that. The big open maps work well with glowies because the glowies are visible from quite a ways away. Open maps can actually be better for glowy hunts than indoor maps. And outdoor maps aren't completely awful for "defeat the boss" missions because you can still tab-target until you find the boss. They're horrible for rescue missions, though, or any other mission where you have to find a non-hostile, because you can't tab-target the non-hostiles and they appear in groups of mobs that aren't easily distinguishable from other groups of mobs. Basically, if a mission has a narrative structure within the mission (defeat this, then talk to that, then do X), an open map isn't going to work well in AE. I'm not familiar with this. What's the ocelot rule?

Not just that—I care more about the Meteors than I do about the Freedom Phalanx or the Vindicators. Mid-level supergroups ("B-list" my ass, Liberty!) are better for story purposes anyway. They're a lot easier to identify with. And with the "top tier" groups, there's the problem of justifying why they should be considered top tier—which IMO never happened with the Freedom Phalanx.

Thanks; I think that all makes sense. That map is really cool, but it works better in developer missions like the LRSF where the author can place mobs in exact locations. In AE, where the author is at the mercy of random placement, that map isn't well suited to a "find the spawn, then find the next spawn" mission. It's not that the map itself is huge, it's just that it's unstructured and hard to search. The expectations we've built in regular missions—i.e., that the boss will be at the end of the map, or that spawns will be somewhere around the ruins of City Hall—don't hold. One suggestion on this point: maybe include a warning that the next mission is timed before the player accepts the mission? I've usually seen that as in-character text—for example, in some of Unai Kemen's missions, he tells you that you'll only have 90 minutes because the dimension is unstable, the portal can only be held open that long, or whatever. But you could also include an OOC warning at the bottom of the pre-acceptance mission text. Anything that tells the player that "you'd better hurry" isn't just flavor text and now would be a good time to do anything that needs to get done in the next 10/15/30 minutes.

To put it another way: is there anything about the first mission that makes running out of time an in-story plot element (or tells the player/character why time is a constraint)? For example, having 10 minutes to disarm the Megamaguffin Bomb or the world ends makes story sense—the player knows why there's a timer and why not getting the thing done in time means mission failure. But I didn't see anything about the mission that seemed time-sensitive other than the clock ticking down in my nav window. And since the main time sink is hunting for spawns on the map, "The world ended because you couldn't figure out where the heck Baron Zoria was on the big map" is...well, it's not a great way to start a story arc IMO. Your story, of course; write it the way you want. But for my part, I found that opening mission off-putting enough that I didn't really feel like continuing on with the rest of the arc.

For me, it wasn't unsettling, just frustrating. The time constraints are almost entirely due to the difficulty of finding spawns on a large open map. I spent very little of the allotted 10 minutes doing anything other than hopping/flying around the map trying to figure out where Positron, Zoria, or the Dagons were. That's not fun, it's not really story related, it's not unsettling, and it doesn't add tension. It's just a frustrating artifact of random placement of spawns on a large open map. And if it's clear that it's a no win scenario, that's one thing (although I don't think that's necessary for this mission—there are ways to complete a mission in a way that isn't really a "win" without getting the "Mission Failed!" message). That wasn't clear to me in this mission. And it's not always about "winning," the mission, either. I'm sort of a completist; I want to see what happens if I defeat all the goals. I think that atmosphere of that setting is more than enough to set up what you want to set up without having to "fail" the mission too. IMO, the end of the world is already unsettling; it doesn't need a timer. My chat window displays all NPC text. I didn't get any NPC text from Positron until I was right on top of him. The NPC text didn't help me figure out what I was supposed to do at all.

I posted this in @TerroirNoir's thread, but since there's a thread dedicated to this arc, here it is again: So, about that 10-minute timer, @cranebump... I'm guessing you're going for something sort of like the start of "The Reports of My Death Are Entirely Accurate" (which, you're right, is an excellent arc). But in that one, The first mission of Mobius 1, though—well, it sure seems like a no-win story opener. But the timer is just tight enough (or long enough) that maybe the player could win? I honestly couldn't tell—and that was kind of frustrating, to be honest. Now, maybe the mission is supposed to fail. And even if I'd "won," I'd have lost (shades of the "Rescue Comrade" mission, there). But if so, isn't the timer kind of unnecessary? That map has so much going on, and so much atmosphere, that putting a time limit on it is kind of a shame, IMO. And it's not like you're fighting time at the end of the world—the world's going to be ended for a long time. I get that it's all a dream, and dreams sort of have time limits, but time also works weirdly in dreams. So I don't think it needs to be there the way the timer in "The Reports of My Death" does. And if it seems like it's possible to win a mission, certain players are going to fixate on winning the mission even if that would have no effect on the story. Not that I know any players like that. Nope. So, maybe consider removing the timer from that mission?

I did! I found Positron after about three minutes or so, and only because I had your post to confirm that he was actually somewhere alive and not in one of the body bags. Baron Zoria was also alive, "friendly" and guarded by mobs, but clearly not my friend. When I defeated him, the next goal was to defeat five Dagons (whatever those were; I didn't have time to check their Info pages). Maybe there were even more objectives after that, and the idea was to have more objectives than the player will have time for? I don't know, but IMO it didn't quite work.

So, about that 10-minute timer, @cranebump... I'm guessing you're going for something sort of like the start of "The Reports of My Death Are Entirely Accurate" (which, you're right, is an excellent arc). But in that one, The first mission of Mobius 1, though—well, it sure seems like a no-win story opener. But the timer is just tight enough (or long enough) that maybe the player could win? I honestly couldn't tell—and that was kind of frustrating, to be honest. Now, maybe the mission is supposed to fail. And even if I'd "won," I'd have lost (shades of the "Rescue Comrade" mission, there). But if so, isn't the timer kind of unnecessary? That map has so much going on, and so much atmosphere, that putting a time limit on it is kind of a shame, IMO. And it's not like you're fighting time at the end of the world—the world's going to be ended for a long time. I get that it's all a dream, and dreams sort of have time limits, but time also works weirdly in dreams. So I don't think it needs to be there the way the timer in "The Reports of My Death" does. And if it seems like it's possible to win a mission, certain players are going to fixate on winning the mission even if that would have no effect on the story. Not that I know any players like that. Nope. So, maybe consider removing the timer from that mission?

Okay, it's bits like this that make these play-throughs worth reading. :)

Okay. That was cool. Surreal, weird, mind-bending...all in a good way. I don't think I've run anything quite like it. Bravo, @cranebump. One of the best stories I've run, in or out of AE. One note: the AE souvenir seems to be cut off:

Amazon®, Apple®, Oracle®, and Target® would all like a word. Not to mention Marvel®, who has indeed registered Bullseye® as a trademark. :) You may be thinking of "genericization"—that when a name of a particular product starts to become used as a generic term for all products of that type, it loses protection as a trademark. Some historical examples include Aspirin, Escalator, and Teleprompter—all of which used to be trademarked product names but eventually became generic terms. But there's no rule that dictionary words can't be trademarked. BTW, to bring this slightly on-topic, "Escalator" is available on Excelsior, but "Aspirin" and "Teleprompter" are taken (I figured that last one is way too good to still be available.) ETA: Please meet my newest character, the Purple Pedant. Battle cry: "Well, actually..."

I've been running @cranebump's stories (yeah, #%#@% timers and all—y'know ,sometimes people have to go to the bathroom, and at my age....anyway), and got to this one yesterday: I'd been running the missions at x3—nothing too insane, but enough extra mobs to keep things interesting. Hollow Point went down pretty quickly, and Comrade died about half a second after he got up. Maybe if I'd had a buffer/healer instead of a blaster, he'd have lived a few more seconds. Anyway, after I got the "Mission Failed!" message, I turned the difficulty down and ran it again to see if I could get Comrade out the door safely. And I did! Even though he was at about 10% health at one point, I got him to the door. Good thing there were no more ambushes. But I got the same reaction from Freitag, pissed that Comerade got killed. Huh? What the—is there a bug and my previous result is still holding? Oh, wait. There's a clue describing how Comrade got killed anyway. Because of course he did—it's AE and you can't do branching logic, so he's dead one way or another. Oh well. I'm not sure whether or not "saving" Comrade only to have him killed off-screen feels cheaper than just finding his corpse on the floor. There's definitely an aspect of "You win! Hah ha, no, just kidding, he's dead anyway, you lose," to the way it is now. One other question for @cranebump: At least one of the missions had "Janitors" and "Janiters." Was that intentional, or a typo?

Well, it would only end abruptly if you kill any of the lawyers. As long as you can make it through an office full of lawyers without killing any of them, the story would continue!

Too bad there's not a way to have branching logic in AE missions (is there?). Just imagine someone coming out of that mission after killing a bunch of the lawyers, and the next screen is something like:

The first thing to do is kill all the lawyers… (Also? That office is way too large and fancy for Chris Jenkins. Those are the offices of a big corporate defense firm. The Chris Jenkins law office should be on a strip mall or a shared office space in an industrial park.)

Not that I recall. They just followed me around like pets…or non-targetable Chris Jenkins law firm associates.

Impossible, right? But:

Hm. Let me try a test. Here's a large screenshot I took highlighting what looks like a bug in one of @Darmian's Praetorian missions: I'll check my quota then delete the image and see what happens. Edits: That's a 1.69MB file and my quota is currently at 12.48MB. Now l'll delete it...and, yup, back down to 10.79MB. You don't suppose that the other thread was somehow using the files you'd already uploaded here, do you? (And you're refreshing/reloading the "My Attachments" page after removing pictures, right?)

Are you sure you're deleting the attachments from the posts (at the bottom of the post, where it lists attachments), not just removing them from the bodies of the posts? When I replaced a couple of huge PNGs in this thread with smaller JPGs, it updated my quota usage right away.

You might want to check whether removing those threads (or posts) actually improves your quota. I believe it's impossible to "delete" posts on these forums, only hide them—which means if you just hide the threads instead of going through them and deleting those attachments manually, they'll still count against your quota. Although I think you can delete multiple attachments at once from the Attachments page. I assume that if you did that, they'd just disappear from the posts.

I can't remember whether I commented in the Box Set threads, but if so those would be lost as well. And removing those three threads only postpones the issue—it'll cut your quota usage in half, but you'll end up bumping into the quota again before long. And FWIW, I find the Box Sets much easier to read. Maybe those could be the repositories for the photos, and this thread could be edited to have links to the Box Set threads? BTW, while we're on the topic, the forums don't seem to handle the really long image-heavy posts all that well, at least on my browser. And they result in pages that are really really long. Have you thought about having one post per mission, instead of per AE story? You could use placeholder posts to keep the stories together (i.e., when you post the first mission in a story, immediately post four more placeholders that you can edit when you're able to get to the next missions).

Yikes! I wonder if the forum admins could increase your quota. Or maybe the screenshots could be hosted on another site and linked in the posts here? These play-throughs are great and I'd hate to lose them (or the Box Set threads, which IMO are easier to read through) because of that quota. It might at least be worth a PM to the forum admins to see if there's a solution.

FWIW, the forums have a ~100MB limit on attachments (which include images). So @TerroirNoir, you might want to check "My Attachments" (in the dropdown menu under your username in the menu bar at the top of the page) to see how much of your quota you've used so far. ETA: It looks like the few images I've uploaded have eaten into my quota because they're fairly huge PNGs, not JPGs. @TerroirNoir seems to be smarter about image file size, so hopefully 100MB will be plenty of room to watch Engineria go through all these long story arcs!

Not to spoil things (I hope), but there's one mission in the Praetorian stories where I'd really like to get a team together.