McSpazz

In an MMO, it's basically entirely up to the player to actually follow through on the flaw. That's why flaws that exist on paper but are never actually utilized are a problem in an MMO setting. How you go about it can vary wildly. While it is certainly up to others to determine how they react to a flaw, they cannot react if you do not present it. Looking to your example, if a character had a drug addiction but the negative consequences of said addiction never surfaced, other players would have little to work off of. That's why I said that flaws need to both have an impact and be present. It's not enough for you to just have a flaw, you have to remember to utilize it.

Oh, totally. Day jobs can accomplish a ton of different things. Everything from leveling criticism at how heroes are compensated to fleshing out your own character and more. Even if this lies behind a secret identity, it still holds a lot of utility. Generally, the only day jobs that people might frown upon or cringe at are ones that make your character overly important in the world. A world famous movie star, the owner of a tech firm that has a place in every household, etc. You can still go that route, but not everyone is going to take you as seriously.

After I made my post on Mediporters and Teleportation, I thought I'd give Pocket D a stab. As far as subjects that roleplayers in the community argue over, it's weirdly one of the more common ones. Yeah, that's right. Star Wars has who shot first, FFXIV has how to handle house claims, and City of Heroes has...an extra-dimensional dance club. What a world, huh? Why the debate? Well, put simply, for a zone of the game roleplayers spend so much time in, there's not that much lore out there outlining what it is, who DJ Zero is, what he can do, so on and so on. As a result, it's an area where people can slam one another's heads into frequently. Why make this a tangent post rather than a fully fledged one? Well, put simply, there's not much meat on these bones and the conclusion is, unfortunately, one entirely based on my opinion. It's based in the lore, but outside of that? We're stepping into Head Cannon. 1. Context Yes, this is gonna have a short context post to set up the environment the game was set up in. I'm POSITIVE most people reading this know this, but it is kind of necessary to lay the groundwork for what's coming later. When the game first came out, there was no red side. It was City of Heroes all the way down. For whatever reason, be it madness or a desire to throw a bone to the weird nerds that like to pretend they're a superhero in their free time, the devs added a club to the game. No, it wasn't Pocket D. Paragon Dance Party was the name and it used to be the only place to wear down those dancing shoes. They removed the ability to go there after City of Villains came out, but Homecoming has re-opened it for business. And it is certainly...a location! Look, if you want to check it out yourself, there are doors in Talos and Steel Canyon. You really aren't missing much though. You know that big area that's in some warehouse maps where you go up a big ramp, pass through a break room, and enter what looks like a large docking bay? Yeah, it's that but with neon lights and flashing colors. If my memory serves correctly, however, Galaxy City was actually a more frequently utilized hub for chilling out. After the Galaxy Incident left it a crater covered mess, I remember many vets at the time remarking on the now bitter sweet memories of their time spent in the zone. That was before my time, but I'm certain someone who was around to see it will chime in the comments. As I said, though, after CoV was released, Paragon Dance Party was closed. Why? Well, while I have no solid evidence of this, the devs likely wanted a zone for two things: wacky seasonal events that they couldn't just cram into the game world AND somewhere that both heroes AND villains could go so they didn't have to make two identical zones to house those events in for no reason. Thus, Pocket D was born. A zone accessible to both Heroes AND Villains. It's important to remember, though, that this wasn't being done in a vacuum. At the same time this was going on, World of Warcraft was a growing powerhouse and one of their biggest marketing gimmicks was Horde versus Alliance. While the PvP zones are fairly devoid of life in servers that doesn't have a large PvP player base now, back on live, they got a fair amount of play and the division between heroes and villains was pretty heavily reinforced. Which led to an issue. How do you make a neutral zone where heroes and villains can coexist without a ballroom blitz breaking out? Much like mediporters mostly existing to explain what happens after defeat, I strongly believe that Pocket D's neutrality rules and restrictions primarily exist to explain why heroes and villains can't engage in open hostilities and to separate it from the vast majority of the game where, if you saw someone from the other city running around, it meant you were about to shoot or get shot. For a very long time after its release, Pocket D was basically the only location heroes and villains could both coexist. 2. The LOOOORE...contradicts a bit Yeah, there's not much. I mean, there is and there isn't. What we know for certain is that DJ Zero created Pocket D and is effectively the god there. Not a god, THE god. His primary interest lies not in power, however, and is instead entirely focused on making sure everyone has a good time. He "strictly enforces" the rules that make Pocket D a neutral territory and rules with an iron glove covered in disco vibed glitter. The rest of the lore is very scattershot. Based on the Snaptooth story arc, DJ Zero appears to have the ability to open portals to his club literally anywhere he wants should he desire. Which does make some sense. A static portal location would just make it easier for THE MAN to shut him down. While the in-game doors to Pocket D are static, it's easy to chalk that up to game limitations and/or quality of life considerations. And here's where the lore starts to get weird. DJ Zero forbids violence, but Back Alley Brawler got banned from the club after he punched someone through a wall. He's all powerful and wants to keep people from killing one another, but he still has mediporters. He's beyond any mortal legal system, and yet he appears to use Ziggersky prisoners as sound technicians. What's more, according to the City of Heroes Top Cow comic #18 (yes, there were comics), there is a power suppression field which is seemingly only ever mentioned in a singular panel in that singular comic and never in game. There's also the case of Red Widow. According to what I've heard echoed from the Homecoming dev team, her resurrection as a direct action taken by DJ Zero contradicted the lore and was going to get retconned to originate from someone else. Of course, her resurrection is rarely understood to be related to Pocket D at all because it was a consequence of a long since forgotten Valentine's Day event. Speaking of that contradiction, did you know that DJ Zero is barred from interfering with the continuity of reality outside of his club? No? Neither did I! The only reason I know about it is because I was given the reasoning for the retconn by one of the devs. To put it simply, what lore exists is sparse, hard to find, and not all of it really lines up. 3. The Rub The primary point of disagreement that people have comes down to how much violence is permitted and what type. If you take the "neutral zone" to its far extremes, you can't even have a shouting match if you run into the mugger who killed your parents and turned you into Clown Man (because people fear clowns and not the night). On the other hand, clearly SOME level of intervention is needed as "strict enforcement" implies just that. Strict enforcement. It doesn't even end there. Some people believe it's impossible to die in Pocket D while others believe that if you try and punch someone, you'll be teleported out before the blow lands. Except for that one time which might mean DJ Zero apparently wanted to see how hard Back Alley Brawler could shove through a wall, I guess? Pocket D was never meant to be that deep. It's a dance club in another dimension where you go to relax and not fight bad guys. However, because it's become the defacto hub for roleplay in City of Heroes, the issues created by the combination of what is and isn't said kind of grows out of control until everyone has their own solutions to the problem. It begs too many questions and provides no answers. The only thing that is CERTAIN is that you cannot directly attack someone in the club without their consent (ie: sparring). What happens if that rule is broken and if they only step in after it reaches a certain point is something everyone has their own answers to. Despite the stated rules of the club though, for the sake of dramaaa and story, allowing some amount of conflict to occur between club goers is kind of essential not just to tell a good story but also to maintain a fun conflict between the heroes and villains that share the space. The only issue is that no one can agree where to draw the line. 4. My Opinion Here it is! The part that's prolly going to be debated in the comments if anything at all! There's three things I believe we need to keep in mind when considering what is and isn't allowed in the club: the context the club was added to the game (which I already went over), why DJ Zero opened the club to begin with, and the practical implications of running a club like this at all. First, the context. The reason I think it's important to keep that in mind is that when the game talks about this being "neutral ground", this was expressly when City of Villains was released and, at that time, there were NO cooperative zones between red and blue side. There were no scenarios a hero and villain would work together, and no mechanical gray areas (like vigilante/rogue). That comes with the implicit implication that, if you're in the club, you have to play nice. Second, why DJ Zero opened the club at all. As I said, he REALLY wanted an awesome place where everyone could set aside all of their worries and just have fun. A place apart from the fear and dangers of the world. He wasn't looking to solve world hunger or save anyone's life, it began and ended with making a great club that anyone could use. And, finally, the implications of both of the above points as to how he would have to run the club. If he wanted Villains to feel comfortable coming over, he'd need to ensure that they could not be arrested there nor forcibly interrogated. Few villains would want to hang out at a place that law enforcement felt like they could use to monitor bad guys without their consent. If he wanted Heroes and even random civilians to feel comfortable going there, he'd need to ensure that villains could not kidnap guests or do anything, shall we say, extreme. If you slammed a hero's boyfriend's finger onto the counter and threatened to kill him if your demands weren't met, you probably wouldn't be welcome to return to the club Some amount of animosity is likely to happen at some point and maybe even the rare brawl might be allowed to happen once in a while. However, if DJ Zero intends to keep the club a neutral no-fire zone, simply drawing the line at no physical assault kind of misses the point. If you aren't leaving your baggage at the door and are going in explicitly to antagonize someone, you aren't using his space as a neutral no-fire zone. You're using it to retain a level of diplomatic immunity. If either villains or heroes abused that too often, the other side would find somewhere else to party. And that's just no fun. If DJ Zero was going to run a club like this, he'd need to be more strict than just, "no killing each other." It's a practical necessity. Why are there mediporters if you can't be harmed in the zone? Why can you self-destruct there? Could you die of natural causes there? Why is the only mention of any power suppression in the comics? I dunno. The lore I mentioned above is basically the only stuff I was able to dig up and, in the end, I too am mostly left with more questions than answers. For me, personally, going by what I said above, figuring out what is and isn't acceptable is kind of a know it when I see it kind of situation. It sucks, but with so little to go on, everything's just kind of down to vibes. Until and unless a new bit of story is released expanding on Pocket D, vibes is kind of all we got. What does feel certain to me, however, is that if you actively do something in Pocket D that would stand a good chance of chasing away club goes just minding their own business and not wanting to get caught up in whatever weird and/or violent shit you're wading in? The bouncers might just not let you walk into that elevator next time you hop into a portal. If the portal lets you in at all. 6. Other Points of Contention These are somewhat smaller bits of contention people might have with Pocket D that I'm going to briefly touch upon The club is probably actually very clean. Yes, there is a sapient ooze coming out of the bathroom, but what I mean is that you are unlikely to get sick from anything you encounter in Pocket D. The club maintains a certain grungy aesthetic for the most part, but that isn't true for the entire club. The ski chalet and tiki lounge both seem far better kept. If you have the kinds of powers DJ Zero has, you can literally get something aesthetically dirty without letting it actually be dirty. It seems unlikely that you can use Pocket D as a means of going places you cannot go normally or use it as a means of bypassing travel and regulations (ie: smuggling). I already touched on this in my post talking about teleportation, but there's another element I didn't mention there for the sake of brevity. Ziggurskey inmates are actively employed doing...something at the central dancefloor. I think the simplest reason is that this is a job that inmates can take as part of serving their sentence. If that were the case, since there are no guards hanging around to keep a prisoner from just fleeing to the red side elevator, being restricted by where you can reasonably be outside of the club is the simplest solution. As DJ Zero wants this to be a club and not a shipping route, that would also prevent you from smuggling goods through Pocket D. For most other contentions people might have about behavior being in Pocket D, a pretty safe assumption is just this: would allowing that behavior make running the club as a fun space for all harder? You can't satisfy everyone, but there are definitely some behaviors that would scare off the average party goer. Just because you aren't in Rhode Island jurisdiction anymore doesn't mean the bartenders will just happily serve a 13 year old a bourbon on the rocks. 7. Conclusion Basically, we don't know much about Pocket D or its god-like host. However, as it's a neutral RP hub, allowing for some butting of heads between people is kind of necessary. There's few other open world locations you can go to where it doesn't feel like you aren't just setting up a playdate with your arch rival. It's not amazing that the only thing we have to go on are vibes and minimal lore, but that's kind of where we're stuck. I don't actually encourage people to police other people's self imposed rules on Pocket D unless it gets ridiculous (such as openly attacking or shooting at someone). In the end, the club is pretty much just casual roleplay and, for the most part, most of the roleplay most important to your character isn't going to be conducted there. This post is tangentially part of my series talking about roleplaying! You can see the full list of posts Here!

To my memory, there is only one place where teleport arrests are mentioned: the PPD Drones. The drones that are outside of points of interest say in their description that they teleport criminals straight to jail. However, there is clearly a difference between these drones and the drones you sometimes encounter as a villain. As Andreah mentioned, many people do RP teleporting defeated enemies to jails. However, as I mentioned above, it is possible to intercept mediporter frequencies. Thus, since it is assumed that Destined Ones have mediporters, it's reasonable to assume that's how you're ending up in jail. Still, my best estimate is that police drones that don't go anywhere are basically putting all of their power towards charging their teleporters. Maybe the only reason defeated foes can be teleported is because they're not moving.

Ahh, I see what you mean now! I definitely could do a walkthrough of the travel powers and what they could be used as, but that feels more like something that'd be better suited for players to work out themselves for their theater of the mind. I'll definitely consider it though and see if I can think of what I do for a whole post about that, though.

I did try and make the second part of this post focus on just that: How to portray teleportation in roleplay. I can elaborate further, I suppose, but there's not a TON of lore regarding the various transportation systems in game. The two tram systems (yellow and green) used to be entirely disconnected due to bickering between the agencies that ran them and were only connected relatively recently. Not much more to say about it. TUNNEL kind of appeared without much warning and the only real information we have are who operates them (Vanguard, Arachnos, and Carnival of Light). The black helicopters are literally just Arachnos operated transport that bring Destined Ones (unlikely just ANYONE who asks considering they are often located in military bases) about Etoile. Beyond what I said in my OP, I'm not sure how to expand on how to portray teleportation. Because there's such little information to go on, it's one of the areas of the game that kind of demands people use headcannon to fill it in outside of the few areas that are established (such as teleportation suppression). The best implementation of teleportation falls in line with my post talking about power levels and how to best manage them. Regardless of how you go about it, you should try and keep it balanced with your intended power level and avoid making declarations with it that force lore on others. As far as I know, there's nothing in the game that indicates to teleporters where they can teleport to safely, but it's a great headcannon and it does make a lot of sense. Is that necessary for long range teleportation? It depends on your implementation. Also, yeah, I've been maintaining that list for ages. I even added a link to it at the end of every Overly Long post. You're more than welcome to share it both here on the forums and in game! I really enjoy seeing traffic on these posts because it can lead to pretty major improvements to the OP when I miss mentioning something. Yes, even on posts that haven't been replied to in over a year.

When roleplaying, something that you should always try and avoid is over utilizing deus ex machinas. Literally translating to 'god from the machine', this is a plot device where some aspect of a story is solved by an unlikely or unexpected event that is more so a means of solving a problem rather than wrapping up a story beat nicely. While there are a nearly infinite number of ways to do this, I'd like to focus on something I have seen brought up in just about every roleplay where the building is crumbling around you or someone is bleeding out on the floor. Medi-porters and teleportation. Abusing these in either frequency or effectiveness can cut out potentially interesting story beats and even make it harder for people to run events with high stakes. So rather than making a tangent post where I rant exclusively on how these systems can be abused, I'm instead going to use this as an opportunity to break down ways you can utilize these systems in a way to prevent just fixing things with a snap of the fingers. I'm also going to rant, but, you know. This is called Overly Long for a reason. 1. What are medi-porters I'm going to start with medi-porters since there's a bit of preamble to go over before the real meat of the discussion around what medi-porters can and can't do. The ultimate reality of medi-porters is that they only really exist because the developers needed some way of explaining what happens to your character after you're defeated; not unlike World of Warcraft's use of graveyards. Medi-porters are specialized teleportation devices that were developed after the first Rikti Invasion and based on Rikti technology. It monitors your vitals and, if you're defeated, will send you to a hospital for treatment. There appears to be a means of jamming or diverting the signal based on the fact that, sometimes, medi-portering in a mission will send you to an in mission jail cell rather than a hospital. For most of the game's existence, medi-porters were, as far as I have been able to tell, never mentioned or explained in much detail. What I said above was the extent of what was known. I could lay out everything mentioned on the wiki, but that feels a little redundant. Instead, I'm going to direct you to that page and focus on... 2. Medi-porter Limitations Just in case you don't want to open an extra tab, there are a few major points I want to make, both directly mentioned on the wiki page and also not mentioned. The first are its technical limitations. Aside from jamming and diverting, as stated on the wiki, there appears to be a limit on the number of people the system can handle at any one time. The exact reason for this isn't exactly obvious, but this does explain why you can't just medi-porter around like some kind of taxi service. It's an emergency service that, at capacity, cannot transfer injured heroes to safety. To avoid abuse, this likely means that medi-porters are explicitly designed to not teleport someone unless they are defeated or manually activated on a person who needs medical attention. The second is that, realistically, the MediCom network likely utilizes something similar to Rikti Pylons in order to provide full coverage over the city. The ability for authorities to intercept these signals also makes it unlikely that you can easily utilize the network outside of where you are granted access. Just as an example, if Manticore is attacking the Rogue Isles, he's going to be reliant on both not being within range of an interceptor AND within range of a friendly MediCom network. It doesn't fully explain missions where you can attack Etoile or Paragon and not get sent to jail, but, as I said, medi-porters were a mechanical explanation for returning from defeat before they were a story beat. Third, not all medi-porters are created equal. In Field Agent Keith Nance's storyline, you are chasing an evil clone after they utilized a 5th Column medi-porter. Citadel outright states that, "5th's medi-porter technology is very faulty," and that the porter couldn't be used again for several hours. That means that offbrand mediporters, even by villain groups who explicitly dabble in high tech endeavors, aren't necessarily as good as the real deal. What's more, when SG mediporters were still mechanically functional, they did not restore you to full health which could either be interpreted as anything between SG bases not being given the same level of access as established hospitals to just a mechanical restriction from the long defunct SG base raids. There's also some logistical limitations. Mainly, most people don't have access to medi-porters. The only people certainly confirmed to be using medi-porters (or at least non-bootleg versions of it) are registered heroes, the elderly, and the disabled. It could be realistically implied that the PPD have restricted usage following the Praetorian war, though there might be political hurdles with that given the violent blowback rogue members of the PPD had in Roy Cooling's storyline. Access is likely far more relaxed in the Rogue Isles. Though, as Arachnos are certainly the ones maintaining the network there (directly or indirectly through Aeon Corp), enemies of Arachnos are unlikely to have access and continued access to medi-porters would be an excellent way of maintaining control over the metahuman population. There's also the fact that mediporters are based on Rikti technology which is, canonically, heavily restricted. Medi-Corp probably operates with heavy governmental oversight not unlike how Portal Corp is set up. While the receivers (where you get teleported to) might be open to companies making alternatives (such as Crey), the stuff you see in hospitals are probably only manufactured by Medi-Corp and Arachnos. This could also help explain why the receivers in SG bases aren't as good as the ones in hospitals. 3. Why all of the restrictions on medi-porters? In short: Drama is the key to a good story. The longer version is that mediporters operating without any restrictions lowers the stake of any hostile encounter. You never have to worry about where you're fighting, what preparations you have to make ahead of time beyond the obvious, and the inevitable injuries that follow. Mediporters serve primarily as a technology that transports and stabilizes the injured, but the fact they are also prone to interception and jamming helps ensure that threats keep mattering. Plus, if mediporters just teleported and healed you just like that, why would there still be hospitals? Even if the teleportation aspect was restricted, I see no reason why immediately and fully healing someone couldn't be separated from the teleporter and used to treat patients that come in on foot. It's rather silly that you would have full sized hospitals at that point and not just hole in the wall kiosks. The restrictions, especially preventing them being used as a means of easy transport, also help limit how easily it can be abused in writing and, more importantly, place extra emphasis on the struggles one faces when trying to operate against the government (as a villain in Paragon or a hero in Etoile). 4. Suggested Mediporter Workarounds At this point, you might be asking how to best utilize medi-porters in your stories. Well, the answer is kind of simple. Just look at the restrictions. For example, one major way you could get around many of these restrictions is to have your own mediporter network. It likely wouldn't have the same range or efficiency of the main network, but having your own network would let you determine your own requirements and specifications. I'd urge you to not make it "better" than the existing network, however, as that really comes off as just trying to powergame your way past what should in all likelihood be the best out there. Another consideration? Mobile mediporter networks. There are certainly no networks available to heroes in Grandville, and yet the Longbow carrier ship you arrive on has mediporters available to use should you fall in combat. This is speculation, but mobile, dedicated mediporter relays might be more resistant against jamming and redirecting which could very well help explain why you used non-standard mediporter points during the Praetorian Invasion task forces. There's also probably a secondary market for mediporter networks operated by corporations like Crey with some of them potentially trying to lobby to open up the primary network so they can exert control over heroes in their weakest moments. Just keep good headcanon practice in mind: avoid headcanon that conflicts with the canon lore, would impose unfair demands on other players, and has an explanation as to why said headcanon might not be well known. 5. Teleporters, Rapid Transit, And YOU Unlike teleporters, I don't believe there's a ton of lore talking about teleportation and how it operates. While this does keep things very open for players to come up with their own ideas, it's led to a slight issue. Namely, people have gotten so used to how quickly you can move between zones that simply teleporting out of a location has become something of an afterthought. There's been a bit of feature creep at play here. Back on live, base teleporters were far more of a challenge to implement. Entire rooms would have to be set up to house them, time had to be set aside to unlock locations and earn the prestige to build them, and if you left the SG, you also left the portals behind. Ouroboros was really the only consistent fast travel option with TUNNEL only being added at the very tail end of the game's lifespan and there were two different TUNNEL networks (for red and blue side). Moving between red and blue side also used to be far more of a pain not just because of fewer entry points but also because you had to spend a minimum of two days to become a vigilante or rogue with heroes and villains, as they are now, entirely incapable of doing so. Now there are a huge number of ways you can just jump between zones. On top of being able to enter any SG base with a code (ZONE-888 is literally just a utility hub with shops and portals), you now have long range teleport available to everyone (which used to be an end tier teleport pool power), an expanded TUNNEL destination selection, and, of course, with moving between alignments being easier than ever, Ouroboros and Pocket D remain just as effective as ever. The fact that having base portals to every available location was a major selling point for an SG on live should give you an idea of just how far things have come. This is all, of course, mechanical. The issue with taking full advantage of all of these in your writing is less of a lore issue (with three exceptions) and more of a matter of good practice. Just like with mediporters potentially draining the danger of dying out of any conflict, so too can simply being able to go somewhere without issue. After all, if you can teleport anywhere, it could lead you to start questioning how anyone could stop you from just going somewhere you probably shouldn't be. Why can't a hero just teleport into Grandville and raid the tower at will? Why can't villains just teleport into the middle of Paragon and cause havoc? The most immediate answer would be War Walls, but I feel that answer misses the point of why you should always strive to NOT make it so easy to just travel places at will. I'll get to some suggestions of how to accomplish that in a moment, but there are three notable examples of rapid transit people use that should, honestly, be considered more restrictive or exclusive than people consider. Ouroboros is the first and most obvious scenario. I'm not sure why, but people often forget that Oroboros is highly secretive. The badge that unlocks your access to the zone is literally "Entrusted With the Secret." Mechanically, the only ways to get access to the zone are to either complete a story arc that involves time travel, go to Cimeroa, or have another player literally open the door for you. Even if you were granted access to Ouroboros, they likely wouldn't take kindly to someone abusing their access for personal gain unrelated to their mission. The same applies to the Midnighters and their club, though very few people utilize the Midnighters Mansion to move between zones quickly. Let's not forget that you used to have to complete an entire story arc to enter their mansion at all. The second is Pocket D. Literally anyone can go there and, to my understanding, while the portals that go to Pocket D are mechanically static, in lore DJ Zero can literally move them at will. Which brings to question: why can't people use the club to flee Etoile or smuggle things into and out of Paragon? I don't think it's outright stated, but I think there are enough clues to say that it's because DJ Zero demands people leave their baggage at the door. You can only use the club to enter and leave locations you can realistically go and if you aren't coming to the club to party, you aren't coming to the club at all. He'd also likely not take kindly to people using the exits of his club as ambush points, so, if he suspected an exit point was being monitored, he'd literally just move it or shunt the person leaving the club who was being hunted to a safer location. The third is dimensional travel or things bordering on that (such as TUNNEL). As far as the lore is concerned, there are very few groups capable of dimensional travel and even fewer with a large record of various destinations you can go to. I forget the exact mission, but I distinctly recall a mission where someone is trying to steal Portal's database of dimensional coordinates. That likely means that unless you have the specific coordinates, you can't just jump to that alternate dimension. That's also setting aside the infrastructure required to get much of this stuff to work. TUNNEL itself is also operated by very specific groups and, as such, if your character could not normally reach the intended destination (such as a hero going to Cap au Diable), you could not get the TUNNEL to take you there. 6. Tips to Restrict Rampant Teleportation The most obvious solution is, of course, some kind of jammer, barrier, or field that blocks teleportation. War Walls serve this function and there are multiple locations, such as the insides of jail cells, that prevents teleportation out of them. Less obvious are infrastructure restrictions. Most people can't just teleport at will and it can easily be inferred that long range teleportation without an established portal isn't something that can be done on a regular basis by most people. Just because you can teleport somewhere quickly doesn't mean you can teleport immediately after. There's few if any clear examples in the lore I can think of, but the amount of magic and/or power and/or tech you need to run in order to keep a portal to some distant location stable and running consistently is unlikely to be minor. The fact that helicopters and boats are still used to transport people to remote locations also suggests that there's probably some kind of naturalistic restriction. Why would you need planes if you could just build a portal and drive trucks through it? Why would you need to take a boat or submarine to Striga if you could just teleport there? The exact explanation is kind of down to your own headcanon. Base teleporters are, of course, a major elephant in the room here. As previously mentioned, they weren't always so easy to get your hands on. With them being so easy to get now and able to take you to just about every zone of the game. Restrictions you could place on those could easily fall under the above mentioned infrastructure constraints, but you could just as easily make it far harder to go back the way you came in. Base portals did not use to be in every zone and were mainly added in as a quality of life feature. Maybe your base can only be entered by going to the physical location or maybe only specific locations with base portals are valid entry points. The possibilities of how you can elaborate on how teleportation works are pretty much endless but will, of course, be headcanon. Just like what I said with mediporters: avoid making your headcanon overly intrusive. When it comes to avoiding making your headcanon conflict with other people's, it's far easier to explain how your situation works than to explain how teleportation as a whole works. 7. Conclusion I always try to urge people to avoid using story beats that simply and immediately solves a problem. We're trying to tell a story here! Indulge in the drama and suspense of it all. Just as you shouldn't just instantly heal an injury with a twiddle of your thumbs, you shouldn't nullify the potential story beats that could come into play when trying to simply get somewhere. While it's perfectly fine to handwave away the process of travel if it's unimportant to the story or simply boring, throwing it aside entirely is potentially throwing away a really interesting bit of story. This is part of a series of tutorials regarding roleplay! You can find the full list of tutorials here!

I am aware. That means that you have 32k tokens to try and establish the context and characters. Every qualifier, every detail, every single one takes up tokens. The more characters, the less it has to work with. Incidental NPC's still take up tokens and potentially memory or, alternatively, they don't and any important details they mentioned are completely forgotten and you have to literally remind the AI as to the reality of things. The more you establish ahead of time, the fewer tokens and the less flexibility it really has. None of this changes my criticisms of AI's propensity to forget details, hallucinate, and just generally use stilted dialogue and struggle with concepts that are well outside of its training data. If you train the model using lore from CoH, it will remember that lore very well. However, if, in the course of an RP, you somehow do something that interferes with that training data, it will begin to struggle to retain that the longer you go on. As I said, the only thing that matters is the training data and the prompt. Generative AI, as of now, cannot adaptively learn things as the information it has to balance is altered. Put simply, the current technology does not allow for clean, consistent dialogue. I'm not interested in arguing what generative AI can become because I'm trying to advise people on where AI is right now. Put simply, based on how things are currently looking, I would be astonished if generative AI is capable of becoming any NPC with a given set of training data and world info due to the root data used for training starting to run thin and barely able to support what is currently cutting edge. I mean. Okay. But you would still have the exact same issues with generative AI that exists single player. Again, I've tested this out and found that I can flat out say: "X is true", get it to confirm X is true, and then some time later it says that X is not true and never has been. You could run a freeform Discord text RP with several friends set in City of Heroes and use generative AI to spit out descriptions for areas already in game (if that happens to be part of your training data). Sure, you'd have to write the NPC's, but they'd probably be more interesting and sensical than what a generative AI could randomly spit out.

I mean, okay. But at that point, you aren't roleplaying in the collaborative sense. You aren't participating in roleplay in the sense that people in CoH do. What you're doing reminds me of people who play RPG's and write their own little head cannon of what's happening in the game in their head. That's fine and it is, in a sense, kind of roleplay. But I think the vast majority of people here who have issues with AI in roleplay aren't thinking about roleplaying with literally nobody else and just a chat bot. We're talking about the collaborative practice of roleplay. The kind that generally requires a person on the other end. The kind where the quality of your own writing is just as important to your own experience as it is everyone else. If you find an AI chat bot preferrable to the company of other people, I shudder to imagine what kind of drama you've been through to make a soulless bot preferential to the potential of conflict.

I think what Greycat was getting at is that the responses usually have some weird qualities that stand out the longer you use the bot. The responses are all based on the training data and patterns and the more organic you want a character to sound, the more processing power and memory it requires to work out. The result is that, more often than not, the options most people have available for AI text generation is going to, like Crystal said, sound canned.

I just want to reiterate something after Crys' post. My issue with AI is not, in of itself, its usage. Again, ethical concerns aside (for which there are many), I can see many uses in roleplay. Acting as a springboard for ideas, helping form a foundation for a concept, describing scenarios that are unimportant to the core scenario, and so on. My concern, if you want to boil it down to its absolute core, is that AI is insufficient as a long term solution to making up for a roleplayer's own deficiencies and can prevent a roleplayer from attempting to improve in where they need the most work. Just as an example, part of what makes hands so difficult to draw isn't just their multi-jointed construction but also how even small errors in establishing depth can entirely bork their presentation. Roleplay isn't just a creative medium, it is also one that doesn't allow for long pauses (at least where MMO RP is concerned). MMO roleplay, in terms of how quickly you can access and utilize your skillset, is unmatched. Tabletop game roleplay might be immediate, but there is generally more allowances given given the physical presence or simulated presence at play. MMO roleplay hits kind of a sweet spot of having time to consider how you are going to reply and also not having time to spare to write out your answer. That's why substituting AI in roleplay is so hazardous and why I am being so insistent on people learning as much as they can without assistance from AI. The skills you can learn from roleplaying without AI are invaluable for a creative writer and are often essential to a roleplayer's development. If you have no interest in improving as a writer in every respect you are capable, I struggle to understand what draws you to the hobby of MMO RP in the first place.

AI has existed for, what, two years now? Literally, not long ago, if you did not like doing something in art, you either did not do it or you tried to get better at it. That was it. If you sucked at drawing hands, you either got better at it or got creative and found ways around not drawing hands. If you hated giving NPC's backstories, you could limit the number of NPC's you created and focus on making a few really good ones. On and on. You improvised, you found ways to adapt to your limitations, you got better. All of this improved more than just your skill in one thing. Learning to do things you don't like doing can improve your ability to do things you do enjoy. And if you couldn't do that, you literally did what you could do. If you only like to paint trees, you paint trees. Hell, I myself fall under one of your examples. I struggle with making and balancing NPCs. I don't fault people for using AI to make up for their deficiencies, but I think something is missed if you do. Learning to overcome those weak points, be it by getting better, finding work arounds, or simply finding ways to avoid them all together, are all important aspects of improving as an artist. Which is what you are. Roleplayers are artists. Roleplaying is a form of creative writing and even improvisational acting, both of which are artistic disciplines. Which is why I find the argument that this is just a hobby and just for fun so weak. Because, yeah, it is, but who the hell does a hobby or does something for fun but not actually fully participate in it? Something I've seen brought up time and time again so far is that the problem is when AI takes the place of the creative process and your own input, but that's what I've been arguing from the start. If tracing images is a tool for artists, why do artists get angry when an artist is revealed to have traced everything? It's because they weren't really participating in their art. Because, after a certain point, just tracing images doesn't really teach you that much and you aren't developing your own style. The same applies to roleplay and simply using AI to bypass having to learn to do things you don't like means that you are actively doing things to bypass the entire learning process. My line for AI in roleplay is filling in things that aren't overly important or completing overly repetitive tasks. Is the janitor's closet an important room for you to describe from ceiling to floor? No, probably not. I'd be fine with AI being used for that. The office of the big bad guy? The details in that room will actually matter and that's when it's important that a roleplayer knows how to describe a room. If you don't know how to describe a room well, how can you know when an AI does it poorly? How do you handle hallucinations or misunderstandings? We aren't talking about a sewing machine replacing seamster. We're talking about people using a technology to try and replace the need to utilize their own creativity. Something you can only enhance if you actively express and challenge yourself. Utilizing AI for writing in RP is actively going to hinder your ability to get better at. I've seen the kind of stuff AI can generate when someone tries to use it to make up for their own shortcomings rather than improve on them. It's really obvious and, honestly, I'd prefer they tried and sucked than give me something I can tell they barely even edited if not barely read.

I agree with your comments related to AI being able to serve as a better Google in some instances but I take some issues here. If you want to get very literal, yes. Telling an AI to take two existing styles and blend them together does make a "new style". However, remember that AI is incapable of generating anything that it hasn't been given training data on. That's why I do not believe that this is, in anyway, similar to a human way's of thinking. Children come up with ideas from whole cloth all the time without any reference material and while people might say there's nothing original anymore, humans don't need to be trained to come up with new ideas. They just do it. The creativity of an AI model is entirely reliant on the data it is fed. I'm not even arguing that you can create beautiful images with AI. My original post was strictly talking about how AI works and what I believe to be its limitations as far as roleplay is concerned. I'm not here to argue if AI is art or if AI images are easy to create. In short, very strictly speaking, my issues with AI images for roleplay is that you are likely going to struggle to get an AI image to match your character design if they have an outlandish design and you are going to struggle to make any image of that character consistent between images; especially if they have an outlandish design.

@Latex: I largely agree with you. As I said, the issues I have with AI art generation are mainly related to ethics. To clarify: I don't think you should RELY on AI for coming up with ideas. As you said, the biggest issue is when you use it as a substitute rather than a jumping off point. Also, I encourage people to commission. Obviously, not everyone can afford it and I respect that. There are definitely utilities to AI and using it for translation is definitely way up there. As I said, if you are not good at something, getting AI to do it for you will not help you get any better at it. If you don't like to write long descriptive paragraphs explaining the environment, you CAN theoretically use AI, but that just kicks the underlying issue down the road. AI does serve as a shortcut to help bypass things you don't like to do or are not good at in roleplay, but that misses the point of my core complaints with using them in the first place. If you just need a quick description for something offhand, fine. Your reference to long office memos is a good example of where AI might be well suited. However, if they're important to the story, I feel my points still apply. And, again, relying on AI for the core of your writing basically ensures that those aspects of writing will remain blind spots. Artists usually hate drawing hands, but you can be sure that if they can just generate hands, they'll probably never get good at doing it themselves. For the life of me, I can not recall any point in more than a decade I have ever seen a character that had no backstory. I've seen characters with simple backstories and characters that had basically no backstory and built it up over time through organic roleplay, but no backstory? That'd be a new one to me. I don't think the alternative to not using AI to generate a backstory is no backstory, I think it's more likely going to be a simple one that you end up building up over time. If anything, I think that not entirely fleshing out your backstory if you don't have a clear idea of the finer details is a good thing because it means that, if you become inspired later, you can fill it in without retconning. You can ask an AI to write in the style of a specific author or the speech pattern of some nebulous person ONLY if the training model has been trained on data that matches the prompt. The AI does not know why something is styled a certain way or why certain patterns exist. It only knows that certain data associated with the prompt you have given it has certain patterns. The actual style that it expresses is solely based on its training data. It is not, as of now, capable of creating a new style as generative AI is generated off of its training data and its training data alone. In order for it to have any concept of style or an understanding of what flows well, it would need to have generalized intelligence which is not what's going on here. The exact same thing is going on with AI image generation. The AI generator has no idea what it means for something to be in the style of, say, Picasso. It doesn't understand his motivations for drawing things in certain ways and it can't generate any images in Picasso's style unless it has been fed a large number of images that are in Picasso's style and has a set of images that match the rest of the prompt you want the item to be created in using that style.

After some consideration and some recent experiences, I've decided that it's worth tackling this hot button issue: AI generated content. Not only is it not not going anywhere, but the places it can and is being utilized in RP communities is only going to increase. I'm not going to get into the ethical debate about AI generated content here. Instead, I'm going to focus on three things: a very broad description of how it works, why utilizing it for RP is often not practical, and why I think you should generally avoid using it for anything you want to seriously attach to a character with those difficulties set aside. How it Works Before I can break down the hurdles of using AI generation in roleplay, it's important for me to explain what is actually going on here because a lot of what I am going to be describing later on is going to be very reliant on understanding the core of what's going on behind the scenes. AI generation, be it text or image, is, in very simple terms, pattern recognition. While it might be weird to imagine it this way given it is producing something rather than just reporting back patterns, that's, in effect, what is going on. It's just that the patterns are being saved in extremely complex data sets that are processed in less than obvious ways. It has a huge dataset, uses your prompts to figure out what data to use, then uses that filtered data to figure out an output that matches it. Text is a bit easier to grasp, so I'll start with that. Certain words are more likely to follow other words based on the subject at hand. The different tones you get when writing an email to a parent compared to writing an email to your boss is an example of a thin slice of what I mean by this. Certain patterns emerge when you look at text broadly and assigning certain text a label that describes that context can allow AI generation to group together patterns that match your prompt. A prompt focused on a movie description is more likely to include descriptions of excitement, glee, awe, and spectacle while a prompt for a eulogy is probably going to avoid those things. This is the reason why it is possible to do the process in reverse to determine the likelihood if a given set of text was generated by AI. The more the given text lines up with the highest probable to appear next word, the more likely it is AI. Images and even video are far more complex. With these, you aren't just looking at text but color, shapes, even art styles. The AI isn't storing an image so much as it's storing kind of an impression of what that image is with each image being associated with words that can then be compared to the text prompt. If you provided a prompt that included the tag "in a comic book style", it would utilize training data that has been associated with comic books. Why It Kind'a Sucks for Images I'm actually going to start with image generation here because, in broad strokes, it's more useful for roleplayers than text generation is. As I made clear at the beginning, I am setting ethical concerns aside for the sake of keeping the comments on this post from becoming a COMPLETE mess. However, even with ethical concerns aside, most AI image generation has a very critical flaw that is especially a problem for the wild world of City of Heroes. It only knows what it is trained on. AI image generation has no issues generating images of characters that fit standard designs or have common features, but it can start to really struggle once you start moving away from the norm. In fact, the stuff that it outputs can often really show the biases in the training data. Just as an example, an SG I was in was using AI image generation to make ID pictures of our characters and while the person doing it had no problems making a guy look really scruffy, it had a really hard time generating a woman with light scarring. That means that its ability to generate an image doesn't just change from one image generator to the next, but also between art styles within the same image generator. The more you struggle to get an image close to what you want, the more likely you will be unable to accurately recreate the character's appearance in another pose and/or setting. That means that when presenting these images, not only does it become fairly obvious you used AI generation, but it can lead to a very imprecise idea of what your character actually looks like which is generally the point of having the reference image/art created in the first place. Because of all of that, images you produce are likely going to struggle to maintain a cohesive vision in terms of style, fine details, or precise character design. Even small details in an image can lend itself to a certain feel or style. You can tell an AI to make something in the style of Tim Burton, but everything it gives you is going to be, in some way, based on existing images containing Tim Burton's style. It can't diverge from what exists which means that trying to implement your own twist won't be possible. However, as I said, it's not terrible at making reference images for characters. It's just that you're really not going to be able to keep the design consistent from one image to the next. Why It Really Sucks for Text The bigger issue I have and caution against in most circumstances, however, is text generation. As I explained earlier, all AI content is generated via pattern recognition. Each word that is chosen is determined not by any concept of style or understanding of flow but, rather, what the algorithm has determined to be the most likely to come next. This can produce text that, often, on the surface, looks totally fine. However, AI text often has quirks that make the output kind of weird to read or even entirely miss the point of your prompt. I could go over all of the smaller particulars of the AI generated text for fiction, but there are two that stand out. The first is that, as I said before, AI only "knows" what it is trained on. If you prompt it to write something that is extremely uncommon to exist in the written form, it's going to struggle. Just as an example, infecting someone with a virus to kill another virus but remain in the body afterwards and not actually cure them is a REALLY weird scenario. The vast majority of content the AI would pull from to write that kind of scene would be in medical settings and the idea of treating someone with a virus without curing them can end up confusing the AI, resulting in contradictory sentences. The second is that AI, at the time of writing, doesn't really have a memory. If it doesn't exist in the prompt and its training data doesn't have a clear idea of what to put next (such as when it is creating an explanation for something from Wikipedia), anything it generates may or may not be referenced at a later time in a way that makes sense. The longer the output the more likely this is to happen. AI cannot comprehend Chekolv's gun unless it was told to utilize it in the prompt. The prompt and the training data are all that matter. That means that the generated text can repeat itself, bring up concepts and then never use them again, or utilize far more detail than it needs to because it only recognizes patterns and humans sure seem to like their adjectives. Not having a real memory also makes it impossible to do any kind of follow-up story that makes full use of the story that came before and is entirely incapable of making all characters retain a consistent personality unless you are very careful about how you explain them in the prompt which can become next to impossible if other people's characters are involved. Why I Recommend Against It Even if you were able to overcome those major hurdles I explained above, there is a far deeper reason why I feel you should avoid using any AI generation for your roleplay. Again, even setting ethics aside, I don't feel it's in your best interest to get into the habit. Put simply: you cannot learn how to do something well if someone else is doing something for you. I know not everyone is an artist and some people just really, really want reference pictures for their characters. I still encourage people to learn to draw themselves or commission someone who can, but, as I see it, the only major arguments against ever using AI images aside from the issues I mentioned above are based around ethical considerations. However, text generation is another matter entirely. We are roleplaying in a text based medium and, as a result, the core of what we are doing is writing. Writing your own stories and text is important for the same reason that tracing images is frowned upon in the art world. You aren't really understanding why certain things are done and, also importantly, you aren't actually formulating your own style. Quirks for characters, little details about their possessions, what their home looks like that sets it apart from others, all of this can get totally missed if you just throw together prompts and literally rely on the more likely scenarios to carry you through. Lastly, of course, is that the discovery you are generating text for roleplay could be considered immensely insulting to everyone else involved. If you are not clear from the get go that you are generating and (hopefully) editing the text, it could appear that you aren't interested in fully engaging with the other players or are just doing the absolute minimum. Everyone else has shown up and are putting in the effort to try and build something together, why not you? In effect: why roleplay with me at all if you aren't going to be writing anything? Conclusion Look, I'm not your mom, dad, uncle, or even your boss. In all, I don't feel the time saved by generating text with an AI is worth the trade offs and you'd be better off saving up for a talented artist to draw your character to your specifications. All of this, once again, before we even get to the ethical considerations. If you insist on using AI, try and use it in a limited scope. Maybe use it to spitball ideas or, if necessary, help establish a starting point. Regardless, you'd still be better off as a writer and roleplayer to just do it yourself. Your ideas are worth more than the most likely scenario. This post is tangentially part of my series talking about roleplaying! You can see the full list of posts Here!