Coyotedancer

Nice!

Agreed. I'm really fond of them... but then I don't try Superspeeding through them, so that probably makes a difference. ( "Dammit! Who left this torch here?!" 🤣 )

The layer-cake purple mines room can go die in an earthquake... But I'm okay with the mine tunnels in general. It's just that one room that should be shot straight into the sun.

My plan? Send some Aether to my other account and then go buy Aspic the Shivan his big blue-green gummy bear costume. 🤣

I don't remember the entire text of the prompt... It was extensive... But I'm pretty sure I asked it specifically for a watercolored drawing rather than just "watercolor".

There aren't enough /jrangers in the WORLD to express how bad an idea I think it would be to *ever* tie any badge to public judgement... Opinions on costumes are very subjective, and that's a Bad Thing when it comes to completionist-prone collectible items. So,,, no. Bad idea.

I've been playing around with Bing's image generator for awhile now, and have had good fun with it... But I went in a somewhat different direction re: my City characters. Back-in-the-day, I had a lot of winged "Bird Things"... and versions of most of them have ended up being pulled into our tabletop 13th Age game as NPCs. I've been using the image generator to make pics of those fantasy RPG re-imaginings. This is the version of Grey Kestrel, my DB Scrapper, that you'd find wandering around the city of Horizon's version of the Chantry... The only one of the current, Homecoming original characters that I've tried to do that "fantasy RPG covnersion" on is my favorite Thorn Wielder Broadsword Brute, Semnai. It did a pretty good job, I think, although it has NO CLUE... not one... what a proper Oranbegan Thorn Blade looks like. Poor Xhelethe. 🤣 Sem looks properly "Elmore-esque" for a stabby chick in leather not-exactly-armor. (Her City version spends most of her time in a very Emma Peel-inspired black leather cat-suit, so... yeah. I can totally imagine her wearing this outfit, too. ) I really wish it had picked a consistant style for the tats, though. City-Sem's work better there.

You *can* perma an awful lot of powers if you're really committed to that kind of build... Even some with ridiculously long native recharge times. My favorite Dual Blade/Willpower Stalker back in the retail days (Who I've rebuilt here as a Scrap-) had/has a perma-summoned Mu Adept partner from her Patron pool. I managed to stack enough recharge on Kestrel to resummon her floating sidekick as soon as he despawned, with a little time to spare. It's a ludicrous thing, cost a bloody fortune back-in-the-day (and was still pricey here in comparison to some of my other builds-) and it was done strictly for roleplay reasons rather than for gameist purposes on top of all that... But it was fun just to see if I could do it. You have to really commit to Recharge-Is-All for a silly trick like that, though, which usually means trading off other goals, like soft-capped Defenses.

You'd have to be careful what mobs were targeted in some zones or neighborhoods... There are multiple TF/SFs and arc filler missions that require street-hunting, and the mobs those ask for would need to be avoided. New Hunt NPC: "Hey, y'all! This week I want you to murder all the Carnies in PI!" Person with the 'Hunt 50 Carnies in PI" mission from Harvey: "*sighs* As if this wasn't going to take a dog's age already...." .... Or "X [critters] in the Misty Wood" .... Or "X Council in Steel Canyon" ... Or any of probably a hundred other examples at this point in the game's life

I'm just wondering when my Widow is going to get her Control powers... I mean, if the idea is to tell potential teammates that hers is a Control AT and you want to reward me somehow for playing her that way... shouldn't she have some stout Control-focused powers? Rather than being a really stabby ninja-thing with a nifty smoke bomb? (Yeah, I'm being a little bit of a snarktopus here... But having the VEAT Widow listed as a Control AT really does highlight the problem with the current pigeonholes. It's just awkward and not a real reflection of the way the game plays.)

Honestly? It might make an interesting movie. It could also be a total disaster, depending on how it was written, but that's true of anything. If someone really wants to buck expectations and cast any of those guys as T'Challa, (and they manage to pitch a solid enough proposal to actually get a studio to finance the project-) ... I say why not let them try? They'll have an uphill road with it because none of those actors really suit the character regardless of color, but they might still end up with something entertaining. Different, certainly. Apt to be roasted by critics, no doubt. But it's not impossible. (Movies that are "*SO BAD* they're good" are A Thing, after all.) The gay, black Nazi film likewise, though they'd have to tread very, very carefully there. With the right writer and cast, and in spite of a ton of historical baggage, it's not absolutely impossible that it might work out. But, like I said in that first post, the context is still going to matter and their odds of overcoming people's doubts wouldn't be great. History, like it or not, has more weight than a comic book. The subject-matter means that it'll be taken more seriously by its potential audience. Still... It's interesting to think about. Who in the world would direct it?

I'm American, Ex. I never said you were. As for the question. Yes... Historical context is the meat of it. There's a whole lot less historical baggage involved in making the Ancient One a woman than there would be in casting Nazi soldiers as gay and black. Again, this is something you know. You're not as obtuse as you're pretending to be, here. But yeah... if ANYONE could actually pull that off, it would probably be Denzel Washington. The guy is brilliant... But no matter how well he did it, there would still be raised eyebrows because the history of Nazi Germany is what it is. They were utter racist bastards and the whole world knows it. That's a lot harder to act around or write out of our collective cultural memory than rather a background comic book character is male or female.

History education may be poor, especially for Americans... but most people know enough about Nazi Germany to recognize that black Nazis would be strange. But then, you know that as well as I do. You're not as clueless as all that.

I'm not sure what sort of snarky "got'cha"-statement you expected that to be... but aside from some of the usual comic book grognard grumping you'd hear about ANY change made to an established character ("What?!? The Ancient One is a WOMAN?!? What?!? Nova Prime is a PERSON?!?!?!" And so on and so forth-) about the worst I recall hearing re: Fury's casting was some doubt about how Jackson would play him in terms of tone. But then, a black guy playing a spymaster character just wouldn't strike most people going to see a superhero action movie as all that off the wall. The black Nazis would.

Context matters, so some unexpected casting choices would just work better than others given those contextual differences.... Black actors playing German soldiers in a serious WW2 drama would be weird, yes. A black actor cast to play Don Pedro, or a white actor to play Othello? Not so much. (And yes, I could totally imagine a Hispanic guy playing Queen Elizabeth. Given the elaborate costuming and the half-inch thick layer of white makeup that the character would require to look at all like her portraits, any stage actor with experience cross-playing could probably pull that one off-) Like someone else mentioned up-thread, pop culture really is behind the curve here. That kind of thing just isn't seen as so unusual in theater. It's even more common in opera, where "trouser roles" (Male characters played by female singers. Octavian from Der Rosenkavalier, for instance, or Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro) are pretty common. There are quite a few traditional Shakespearian companies and kabuki troupes that are all-male as well, with guys routinely playing the female roles. In kabuki, it's even a trained specialty... Onnagata. When it comes to opera parts (and often musicals in general-), they're almost always cast for voice rather than for ethnicity, so basically anybody can end up playing a particular character... White Othello? Yep. Black Papageno? You bet'cha. South African Jean Valjean? Yeah. And he was awesome. The best Mimi (Le Boheme) I've ever heard was sung by an actress from Japan. So... yeah. Sometimes the historical or social context of a role is going to mean that the ethnicity of the actor is going to matter, but that's not universal and in those cases where it ISN'T all that important, there's nothing wrong with casting "outside the lines" so to speak. It works just fine on the stage and in the opera house. It can work in films and on TV.

Yep. It would be nice if all of the pets were pass-through... But at least with the Dark Servant and such they're usually singular per owner. Carrion Creepers are a whole patch of multiple flailing obstacles.

Beat me to it. I want the game to do something with those four. They seem like they could be interesting characters.

Like it says on the tin... FlyingCodeMonkey and I have been duoing a Plant Controller and a Tank recently, and there have been way too many times when I've found my stabby melee fella' stuck in a corner or against a wall by his partner's Evil Vines of Angriness. I've also been pushed away from targets and blocked in rooms by them. Can we please have these guys be pass-through for players like Mastermind pets are these days? These killer patches of kudzu aren't civilians after all. They have no business pushing player characters around like pedestrians do. 🤣

A few of my friends are lawyers... I read EVERYTHING.

It's lasted a fair bit longer than the OP's first thread on the subject did... That one got not just locked, but hidden in about half a heartbeat.

General Chat here is... well, like General Chat in *any* game. New People coming into the City have likely played other games prior to joining our community, so most of them will have had some experience with that sort of noise already. You don't need to clutch your proverbial pearls and demand to know why nobody will "think of the children"... Most newbies aren't pure, innocent little lambs who are going to be lured into moral ruin by questionable conversations they might see in an MMO. They've probably seen it all already. Also, you can reply to those conversations without acting like one of King Louis' crusaders sacking Avignon... Bringing your own faith or political views into it, particularly in an aggressive way that's likely to be as offensive to others as their opinions are to you, isn't likely to foster any understanding or good will towards your point of view. It's also a violation of the game's code of conduct itself. As you may have noticed, this is a pretty diverse community with a lot of differing perspectives, backgrounds and opinions. We're not all going to agree, and you shouldn't expect us to. So... yeah. If you find yourself getting offended, step back and take a minute to cool off. If you're really outraged and think rules are being broken, report the situation and let the mods have a look at it. And realize that yours is not necessarily the ONE TRUE OPINION to which all others must bow. I know that's not easy. It goes against a lot of cultural conditioning. But when you're dealing with people from a lot of different backgrounds from all over the world, you need to learn how to accept that. That's just reality.

I have wondered sometimes what the rhyme or reason is behind what can fly and what can't... My particular boggle are the winged Knives and Talons of Fury Incarnate Lore pets. Their "critter" versions can fly. They even have wings. But the Incarnate summons? Nope. 'Stuck on the ground. I even asked the old devs why that was, when they were in beta back-in-the-day. Intentional choice? Just an oversight? I never got an answer. 😅

You could always make a Mad Scientist... ("Mad Science is Best Science!" Vernon says-) A friend on Everlasting has a Magic-origin crafter who's an immortal blacksmith. 'Dude's been wandering around and tinkering with things since the Middle Ages. Powerset-wise they could be almost anything. My own Mad Scientist back in the retail days was a Rad Defender. That blacksmith is, IIRC, a Broadsword/WP Scrapper.

I have 79 alts in total, spread across three accounts... All but two are finished 50s, with completed IO set builds. #80 will come along when Page 7 goes live. He's going to be a Rad Defender Shivan.

Nope. They're just decorative these days, IIRC.