Zombra

Because we tend to think that blasts of radiation that can incapacitate a person in less than 1 second might be the dangerous kind.

Anybody else remember the time before ragdolling in COH? Weird to think about. OK, derail finished.

Yeah. I feel like this thread has kind of run its course, but I'm happy to answer again. Bullets and fire are bad, but don't leave invisible death behind that can render an innocent looking place a deathtrap for the next thousand years. It's a different kind of danger.

I love all this. Thank you so much. I can make my new Blaster without guilt now 😄 I just looked it up, there's a term for people like me. "Radiophobic" - thinking that radioactive contamination is dangerous. 😄

You tried to tell me what words I already knew mean, and I explained to you that there are different kinds of words. You're welcome.

Yes, smart guy, I'm aware that 'radiation' the English word can mean anything that radiates any kind of energy, such as visible light (or the energy emitted by a rotting banana, as was pointed out above). What I'm talking about is the game City of Heroes, in which powers such as Radiation Blast, that's a game term not an English word, constantly spray around a particular type of radiation; that is, a kind harmful enough to instantly incapacitate people. It's easy to handwave away the high lethality rate radiation that strong would have on its immediate targets, because all enemies in the game have some sort of super powers. What is harder to handwave away is the huge amount of invisible and lethal residue that would be left behind, rendering the city completely uninhabitable for hundreds of years at best.

My issue is that residual contamination from radiation is invisible. Citizens know what to do when their house is on fire, but if their neighborhood is contaminated with harmful radiation they might not even know it. And if they did know it, would they know what to do about it? I suppose if we can handwave that Fire Blasters haven't burned down the city, we can handwave that all that harmful material scattered everywhere a Radiation Blaster goes gets cleaned up by somebody. I hope safety inspectors are well paid in this universe.

I'm trying to make sense of a new hero concept of mine, and I want to use Radiation powers, but it just seems completely insane to go around shooting dangerous radiation everywhere. How is it possible that Paragon City is even livable with this happening every day in every neighborhood? Is there any common consensus as to why this is fine? What's your headcanon that makes Radiation Heroes just as safe and helpful as an all-natural environmentally approved martial artist? I'd rather have 100 Fire Blasters and Demon Summoners go through my neighborhood than a single Radiation Defender.

This is it. It's a huge deal, very cleverly done to give you a very easy option to headcanon it any way you want. Yes the ragdolls get out of hand sometimes, but this is just nitpicking. Honestly (in my head) very few of my characters are mass murderers, even redside. Remember that even Hellions have super powers. Just like your own characters, enemies in the game can take a beating and be fine, if you choose to look at it that way. My unarmored natural martial artist has been shot with enough bullets to supply all the wars of history, not even mentioning getting blown up with rocket launchers, but he's still fine. If you can roll with that, you can roll with anything.

Different game.

I just got suckered by this mission and I hate it a lot. Not only does the ambush appear out of thin air right on top of you with no explanation, it's the kind of ambush that are 100% aggroed on you no matter what wherever you go. I was killed instantly by the alpha strike, knocked away so they couldn't see me, rezzed and they all instantly alphaed me again, no time to even pop inspirations (not that I had many left after the brutal 2x illusion warden guarding her), and then of course GW died in seconds. Some AV. In general the relentless bloodhound aggro mode is awful; compounded with a nuclear powered instantaneous ambush AND a failable mission, what you get is ....... not great. Why can't they at least run in from down the hall, like every other ambush in the game, to give the player a nonzero amount of time to respond? I carefully picked through this mission on high difficulty for over an hour, and then it gave me this gotcha failure, and then the contact chided me for being so weak. I don't talk back out loud to video games often but this elicited a heartfelt "Fuck you." Game design where you have no chance to succeed without prior knowledge is bad game design.

I still want this 🙂

Great. This makes the Superior Conditioning power much better than it appears at a glance.

Of course. I think that's true to some degree of all fictional creations everywhere - they reflect their authors in some way. Let me reframe the question. There are alignments in the game, including Alignment Missions that offer decisions to be made, which are meant to reflect player character (←important) worldviews. The writers on the development team were given parameters on how to shade the mission text. Without it needing to reflect on your personal opinions of right and wrong, can you speculate on the developer intent for approximately where the lines are between different alignments? For example, one recurring theme I see in most blueside Alignment Missions is that a Hero will (generally) not accept the loss of a single innocent life, even if it causes larger problems down the road. A Vigilante is more of a "big picture" person who will let one neighborhood be blown up for the "greater good" of stopping the bomb-maker from setting 10 more bombs tomorrow. I feel like this observation is evident without my personal upbringing coming into it. To the game, these are clear aspects of "Hero" and "Vigilante".

Exactly why I hope to see some different perspectives I might not have already thought of. Not trying to find the One True Answer here. So what do you think? ... based on your upbringing of course 😇