Police Woman

Yeah, there are some in game, but as mentioned above I think they are usually NPC hostages. They look something like this:

Is there any chance of adding one of the female PPD officers as a costume option? (For admittedly selfish reasons.)

I write a lot of low level arcs and I agree that custom characters are often too hard for characters under level 20 - especially when the arc has factions that are entirely custom characters. But custom characters are a big part of the fun of Mission Architect, so I try to use a few to give a story arc more flavor. For a low level arc I'll try to make the custom character's powers fairly weak; avoid giving them two attack sets, or defensive powers giving high perception. I also try to use a mix of custom characters and low level standard characters to make missions more balanced. A technique I like to use is to make a custom character that's member of a standard enemy group, then treat the custom character as a "boss" objective, like this: This spawns exactly 4 "Vahzilok Bride" enemies (and despite being a "Boss" objective they are still only "minion" difficulty); they're optional objectives, so the player doesn't have to track down every single one, but there's enough that the player will definitely see them. They are surrounded by regular Vahzilok so the player character doesn't get overwhelmed by the custom characters. This can also let you give your NPC fewer powers that award less than 100% xp without it being too noticeable, since the standard mobs will still award full xp. Another trick I use is to construct a "custom group" out of mostly recolored/renamed standard NPCs, like this: These Corrupted LARPers are actually a mix of Luddites, Warriors and Circle of Thorns. Since they are canon NPCs, they are already balanced against their respective level ranges, and award full xp. The major downside is that most NPCs are very recognizable as belonging to a particular faction, so it may be hard to get the exact look that you want by doing this. Hope that helps, and happy architecting!

So I really liked @ZamuelNow's suggestion to link the mediporter mission with Roy Cooling's arc, and I made some changes to incorporate that idea. Changes based on feedback: Thanks for the play-through and the ideas!

I've noticed this too. It does not seem like you can select a renamed/recolored standard character from a custom group as a boss. On my "Efficiency Council" arc, when I wanted to reuse a Council boss I had to select a "Council" Vortex Cor Leonis Archon as a boss and apply the customizations directly to that objective (renaming the boss and its group).

I guess it depends on whether you see the other players sitting around looking for farms as a noisy nuisance or an opportunity to lure them into a story focused arc. 🙂

Because I play CoH instead of going to therapy, I present for your consideration, ripped from the headlines: Content warnings: real life has made me want to beat up fascists in CoH, so this arc has a strong political slant. I marked it "Ideal for Teams" since I'm trying to make a story arc that would be interesting to do on a team - there's a couple AVs, there's lots of Council to stomp, and I'm experimenting with the "no clues" style suggested on this forum, to see if that helps the flow. However, there are NPC allies to help against AVs, and a decent soloer can certainly do this arc. I'd be interested in any feedback to make this story arc better, more fun, or more topical. Thanks in advance!

Most weekends I'm tied up in the daytime, but I stopped by the RWZ AE at 330pm Eastern last Sunday; I know it was way past the event time but I was hoping to catch anyone who was still running story arcs. Maybe another time!

How are people enjoying the "no clues" style? Is it making for better gameplay or do you feel like something is missing? I was pondering trying the "no clues" style in an upcoming story arc, but would be interested in peoples' reactions.

I noticed that my "Manticore Task Force" custom group had gotten broken, so I made some updates and republished this arc. Check it out if you like workplace comedy!

My current idea is that, because people like joining AE farms ... make something that looks like a farm, but sneak an actual story into it. It would basically be a Trojan horse story arc. It would need visually interesting custom characters, lots of stuff to kill for xp, have few or no clues, all story information revealed in NPC dialog that everyone can see. Not sure if this would work, but I'm thinking about trying it.

Thanks very much for this bug report! I was not aware that these arcs had gotten broken, and the root cause was as you suspected, a standard Warriors mob I had included in custom groups used by these story arcs had gotten invalidated. I tested all my other published arcs and found one other arc that was broken (although the third arc was broken due to a custom character somehow getting invalidated, I think because they changed the robotics powerset). FIXED: Talos Vice (arc #1337) Two Tickets to Westerly (arc #1678) Attack of the 50 Foot Villain (arc #46840) Thanks again and let me know if you notice any other problems!

Scenes from the MA team running Bricked Electronics:

Most of the AE story arcs I've played are heavy on mission briefing text, clues and linked objectives, all of which are pretty hard to follow when on a team, so story focused mission architect has seemed more like a solo activity to me. I'm not afraid to start teams, but the only (non-MA) story arcs I really go out of my way to start a team for are Tina McIntyre, Maria Jenkins and Flux's story arcs (because everyone loves beating up Praetorian arch villains, and everyone loves beating up Frostfire). So for solo SFMA content, I mostly post here on this forum to promote it. It's not a great way to reach new people though, because a player reading this forum is presumably already interested in Mission Architect. For team based SFMA content, not sure? What makes a good SFMA story arc for a team? I love doing the Frostfire mission on a big team, but it's closer to a farm (hordes of mobs to kill, lots of exp and levels) than a story (barely any text to read; I guess we have a cut scene where Frostfire tells you he's not just a regular villain, he's actually very Complicated?).