Zhym

Anyone who's been watching this forum is probably aware of @TerroirNoir's long, detailed, and entertaining play-through of story arcs by @Ankylosaur, @cranebump, and @Darmian. But partly because the play-through posts are so detailed and full of screenshots, and partly because some people interrupt the program by jumping in and kibitzing about costume design, spawn hunts, and other fool-headed reactions (ahem), the threads can be hard to navigate. So, for those who want to follow along with each of the "channels" in order—or jump to a specific "episode"—here's a program guide linking to each post. I've also added arc IDs in brackets for those who want to play along. Channel 1: @Ankylosaur's "All that Glitters" and "All that Glimmers" All that Glitters 1.1: Missing in Mercy [35842] All that Glitters 1.2: Piracy in Port Oakes [35355] All that Glitters 1.3: Capitalism in Cap Au Diable [36056] All that Glitters 2.1.: Boom Time in Boomtown [34715] All that Glitters 2.2: Fortunes in Faultline [37097] All that Glitters 2.3: Terawatts in Terra Volta [34947] All that Glitters 3.1: Extractions in Eden [35058] All that Glitters 3.2: Suspicious Maneuvers in St. Martial [37948] All that Glitters 3.3: Calamity in Kallisti Wharf [36693] All that Glitters 4.1: Risky War g4m3Z in the Rikti War Zone (post 1) (post 2) [37513] All that Glitters 4.2: Privateers in Praetoria [37754] All that Glitters 4.3: Grand Designs in Grandville [38278] All that Glimmers 1.1: Death in Light Astoria [41592] All that Glimmers 1.2: Drowning In The Vigilant Isles [41906] All that Glimmers 1.3: Destruction in the Shadow Shard [42073] All That Glimmers 2.1: Shunting in Croatoa [42423] All That Glimmers 2.2: Banished in the Spirit Realm [42621] All That Glimmers 2.3: Incursion in Oranbega [42735] All That Glimmers 3.1: Summonings in Nerva Archipelago [43022] All That Glimmers 3.2: Ninjas in the Wind [40394] - Stay Tuned! Channel 2: @cranebump's "Ordinary People," "Leviathan," "Mobius," and More Ordinary People 1: Standard Operating Procedure [31902] Ordinary People 2: Hope and Bullets [31903] Ordinary People 3: The Last Full Measure [25396] Leviathan 1: Hollow Pursuit [37663] Leviathan 2: Hollow Ring [37990] Leviathan 3: Hollow Victory [38876] Leviathan 4: Origin [39090] Leviathan 5: Mantle [39744] Mobius 1: Full Circle [original: 52446, republished: 52954] Mobius 2: Much Madness [52203] Mobius 3: The Sign of the Five [53036] Mobius 4: Dempsey's Hard 8 [53047] Mobius 5: Auguries of Fate and Time [53480] The Bleed 1: Insecurity Measures [46658] The Bleed 2: De Pulvis Rediit (From the Dust Returned) [46891] The Bleed 3: Wave, Landing [47103] Potter's Field [55466] Noble Mettle Part 1: The Colossus of Rose [54705] Noble Mettle Part 2: The Hollow Crown [54786] Channel 3: @Darmian's "Dark Deeds" Series and More Dark Deeds in Galaxy City: Part One [26756] Dark Deeds in Galaxy City: Part Two [26952] Dark Deeds in Galaxy City: Part Three [27233] Darker Deeds: Part One [28374] Darker Deeds: Part Two [28536] Darker Deeds: Part Three [29252] Darkest Before Dawn: Part One [29891] Darkest Before Dawn: Part Two [30210] Darkest Before Dawn: Part Three [30560] The Meteors [42079] Bridge of Forever (Imperial Power, Ch. 6) [36642] The Cassini Division (Imperial Power, Ch. 7) [37104] The House of Gaunt Saints (Imperial Power, Ch. 8) [37489] The Spark of the Blind (Neutropolis Warden, Ch. 5) [40403] Damnatio Memoriae (Neutropolis Warden, Ch. 6) [41140] The Eve of War (Neutropolis Warden, Ch. 7) [41583] Spirals: Part One (Imperial Crusader, Ch. 6) [55109] Spirals: Part Two (Imperial Crusader, Ch. 7) [55358] Spirals: Part Three (Imperial Crusaser, Ch. 8) [57197] - Stay Tuned! Engineria's Holiday Specials! The Christmas Contagion [34661] by @Shocktacular The Yule Lads [34619] by @CurlyJim (@B'Hed) Secret Christmas S.O.S. [34930] by @aekolm Murder on 34th Street [45294] by @Charlie The Dance-Off that Saved Christmas! [44962] by @Clave Dark 5 The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year [45220] by @Defeat All Snakes (@boilinghands) I Hate Christmas Music [44913] by @Police Woman (@PW) Pandora's Gift Box [35033] by @Aranatta (@Optimus Time) Christmas Comes to Oranbega by @Takel (@TakelGryph) I'll try to keep this updated.

I blame (Praetorian) Percy Winkley. Come to think of it, the pillar in the Primal Midnighter's Club only goes to Cimerora. Would what a Praetorian Cimerora look like, do you suppose? The same?

It didn't seem empty to me—or at least not inappropriately empty. It's a pocket dimension secretly holding The One Macguffin (or not). It makes sense that it wouldn't be teeming with people. And to the extent it was sparsely populated, that made searching for the Key Holders less difficult.

I wouldn't, personally. I find some of the Oranbega maps to be annoying—not on the level of the layer cake cave or the Council pool room, but they can get hard to navigate. Plus, my character always seems to get stuck on those damned torches. Falling-into-oblivion issues aside, I think that map works really well. And using the "Herald of Zoria" to mark where Zoria spawned was really helpful, too.

Angevin wasn't even with me when the endurance-sapping horde jumped me. The issue is more that my toon is an incarnate blaster who is fully equipped with the latest and best IO sets the market has to offer, so he does lots of damage and has good defense and resistances. What he doesn't have are heals or buffs to keep squishier NPCs alive (and most NPCs are squishier than he is). So while x4 makes it interesting, it also means NPCs don't last long. That's not just in AE—when I end up in one of those "keep the NPC with a death wish from getting killed" missions, I usually have to turn the mission settings down to +0/x1 to have any chance.

This is good advice. If for no other reason: the toon you like to play is the toon that will get badges. My badger is a blaster—DP/MC, to be precise, but the particular powerset choice isn't as important as being able to do lots of damage to lots of mobs all at once. The defeat badges happen a lot more quickly that way. But there are ways to get the all the badges with any AT—for example, the badges for healing others can be gotten by standing in a spot in Mercy Island with lots of Arachnos troops and auto-firing the Rebirth incarnate power. So mostly, just play a toon you enjoy. If you're trying to get badges, you'll be playing that toon a lot.

Hi! It's your friendly neighborhood big-opn-map-hunt-hating curmudgeon here! And this one...didn't bother me as much for some reason. Even though it is a big damn opn map and there are lots of nooks and crannies everywhere. I think it's that the keymasters—er, holders—have a story reason to be hard to find. Plus, this mission has a climactic feel to it (or at least it did until Mission 5 came along...), so running around the map to kill everything while hunting for the spawns felt more natural somehow. And it's a cool map that I don't see often (the only other mission I can think of that uses it is in Scirocco's arc). Fun story—well, okay, boring story, but fun to experience: I forgot to check my threat level and started Mission 1 at x8. That was painful. The Captains hit hard. And at least one of them had Return to Battle or some other rez power that made him invulnerable when he came back. Nasty. Anyway, I turned it down to x4 for the rest of the arc, and that was about right to keep things interesting but not overpowering. Then this happened: Yeah, that. Except instead of running, 70s Man's first impulse is to try to shoot everyone until there's no one left to attack him. It's usually a pretty good tactic, but this time it...didn't work. That was quite a rapid ass-kicking I received. Ow. BTW, Angevin's force fields were really handy. But at x4, he didn't last that long, alas. Nor did any of my other allies. Oh well.

That would at least solve the issue I had of not knowing whether "Check in with the PPD" meant I was looking for anyone in particular. And if it's Westbrook who's on the overpass...

First Ward and Night Ward really are great. So many little Easter eggs like that. It's kind of a shame there's not more reason to go to either place. They're good settings for the Level 20-40 Praetorian arcs, but after that there's not much reason to go back other than exploration. And "Recently Deceased Milkman" sounds kind of like a Monty Python sketch.

Ahhhh! Yes, that makes sense.

A question about this for @Darmian (more spoiler tags, because I think some of this might be reflected in the next arc):

That would get tiring if used in every sentence, very tiring. ;) In this case, though, "a long way" also emphasizes the irony of what he's saying. But yeah, text limits are a thing. As for Sinclair vs. Chimera, I checked Mr. G's text in the official arcs, and he never calls Sinclair "Chimera." I'm not sure why that would seem out of character for Mr. G to me—maybe because "Chimera" implies some level of respect that's not really there? Or "Sinclair" implies a greater level of familiarity? I don't know.

Great reference to game lore, @Darmian. "Chimera and I go back a long way" is a heck of an understatement, a heck of an understatement. (Although to truly sound like Mr. G, maybe he should say, "Sinclair and I go back a long way, a long way.")

I really liked this aspect of these arcs. You'd think Tyrant and his Praetors would start to notice all those Powers disappearing—although, given that they all seem to disappear once they reach a certain level of power, maybe each of the Praetors suspects the others of "disappearing" people once they start looking like they might get powerful enough to be a threat. Something else I liked (but can't remember if @TerroirNoir has gotten there yet, so I'll spoiler it):

The hunt is easy, or adding the escort trick is easy? Because I did spend quite a while looking for the spawns. Part of the confusion was that the initial objective was something about checking in with the PPD and there were two groups of PPD who didn’t respond in any way. I spent a lot of time hopping around wondering what I was missing. (Oh, and I rescued a couple of civilians while I was at it. I’m a hero. It’s what I do.) Eventually, I realized I was thinking two-dimensionally on a three-dimensional map. Up top, I found Westbrush up one of Skyway’s namesake roadways. I cleared his “captors” then had to fight Vider…but I had to find him first. More scanning the map. I finally locate him, shoot arrest his Viking butt, and get someone else I need to find. Another hunt, and (eventually) another butt-kicking. That gets me one more thing to find—this time, the spike. By this point, I’ve cleared the map so my target shows up on my minimap, so yay. Shoot it and its guards, boom, mission over. I wasn’t annoyed by it or anything, but the spawns may be harder to find on that map than you think (unless you treat it as a defeat-all mission).

I'm now in the opening mission of Mobius 2, which is another outdoor spawn hunt (mercifully, without a timer this time). @cranebump, I'd suggest giving this escort/target trick a try. It may be just the thing you need for these outdoor missions.

I ran the first mission (won't have time to do the rest until after election day), and it's definitely less frustrating. I'll admit, though, that it feels a little less clearly "end of the world" than the original version. But there's only so much that can be done within AE, and the story changes to support the new map work, IMO.

I did rather enjoy the mission where HvH said, basically, that he's just a guy with a bow & arrows and that who we really needed was Axios. And my character, of course.

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?