McSpazz

Wohhh! Someone pointed me at this post and there's a TON to go through! First of all, there are some things about your initial post that I want to address. Not true! First, while as far as the game is concerned you are on the path to become an incarnate, there are two major things you forget. The first is that MOST people are not and never will be incarnates regardless of how naturally strong you might be. As far as we are made aware, the Well of the Furies responds to "Strength"...but we don't really know much more than that. What draws its attention to you? Is it just pure raw physical strength? Strength in the form of wit and intelligence? We don't know. If there were a huge number of incarnates compared to normal heroes (ie: incarnates are inevitable), the Praetorian invasion would have been far easier won. They wouldn't need to haul you from Kings Row to Steel Canyon during the invasion because, if they were in great number, every district could be afforded a squad of incarnates. Heck, we should remember that, in the canon, there ARE gods! There are Fae! If all it took was strength, why isn't the world crawling with Incarnates? Put simply: it's not inevitable. And ALL of that is ignoring the fact that, back on live, you couldn't even participate with incarnate content unless you were a subscriber (or perhaps if you had a high enough vet level but I don't remember exactly). If it really was inevitable, it sure as heck wasn't on live. And now we get into the second part of that initial sentence. One of the most powerful beings to exist. I mean...yes? But you're looking at the ultimate end result. Incarnates are more powerful than they might be without that incarnate influence, but the only way you start as an incarnate being one of the most powerful beings in existence is by diving head first into the well and effectively losing your free will to it. While the slow method exists, quite frankly, we don't know what a fully powered slow-growth Incarnate looks like because...we never got there. Hybrid, if I remember correctly, was the last incarnate slot to be finalized before sunset and was only half way to the top. What I'm saying is that, in canon, we weren't Statesman yet. Who knows if we ever would have been. So! With those two things in mind, it kind of...negates the entirety of what follows. If a character is already powerful out of the gate, that does not necessitate they become an Incarnate. If anything, the issue you are concerned with here is not the strength of a character but instead power creep. This drive to just keep making a character stronger and stronger with each advancing roleplay plot. Excellent questions! Well, on the offset, figuring out why your character is getting involved is a legitimate question one should ask themselves. If anything, it is also a concern characters likely have. The question of "why are they getting involved" was likely asked in reverse to Statesman who then had to explain to people that he has bigger threats to battle; all the while they look on as the pain of the crimes done to them weighs on their minds. It's a very Superman sort of dilemma. In fact, it might very well have been something Paragon Studios could have explored with future incarnate content! Something that might escape people's notice is that, as the game progresses, you are actively working alongside NPC heroes less and less until, once you're in Peregrine Island, you're mostly working alongside people like Penny Yin or Manticore. You've become a big boi and now you play big boi games. By the time you get into Dark Astoria, you aren't even fighting alongside the big names anymore. Your only equals are your fellow Incarnates and Incarnate level threats. HOWEVER! This is where I have to slam my foot on the brakes because you seem to be missing the point of levels. Your character's level only mechanically determines how strong you are to your enemies. This is because this is an MMO made in the mid 2000's and the idea of an MMO without a simple level progression system had barely been considered (CoH was released months before WoW to put that one into perspective). Your level, as a matter of fact, is not actually how strong you are. It determines your capability of taking on a certain level of threat. This isn't as clear now, but back in the day it made it very clear that your level blue side was your "security" level where as red side had a "threat" level. Basically, as you leveled up, you were proving that you could handle bigger threats. We might not be fighting Skulls at high levels, but your question of explaining why an ultra-powerful ancient evil dragon struggling against a level 2 skull gets kind of confusing when you consider enemy groups like the Snakes exist at very low levels, disappear for a while, then are a threat again in Grandville arcs at level 50. And that question itself begs the question of "why is your ultra-powerful incarnate struggling against non-incarnate scalies?" And NONE of this is getting into getting leveled down for taskforces. Why is your Incarnate getting wrecked by Vhazolok in that Positron TF? Like...let's separate IC story from OOC mechanics for a second here. You're asking legitimate questions about why certain characters are getting involved with certain threats, but bringing game mechanics does not accomplish much beyond muddying the waters. I'm going to come off as a little cold here, but while you did certainly clarify later that you are not saying that all gods/vampires/fae/etc are cringe and that you were absolutely focused on powergaming, your original post not only cast an immensely large net, but the snippet above puts off the tone of someone not asking a genuine question but someone that already has their answer and probably has a bias against general concepts that people enjoy playing (ie: dragon/vampire/etc). You want to know why so many overpowered characters are gods/vampires/fae/etc? It's because bad actors have an easier time breaking them and hand waving away how powerful they are to people that don't know better than to take offense. You want to know why people like to play powerful characters? Power fantasy, out of necessity (to make the concept make sense), being unaware how powerful their character is in the grand scheme of things, and definitely more. Why do people powergame and play characters that are so powerful they are unstoppable? This post is already long enough that you don't want me to get into that too deeply, but... Basically this. Presuming they don't have some sort of narcissistic or otherwise toxic personality? It's usually just looking to have some agency in life...even if it's all virtual. Sad, but that's at the core of it. I don't think your post was malicious. I don't think you just assume people that don't fit your mold of RP are bad roleplayers. I just think you worded things very poorly in such a way that gave the appearance of writing the worst into people's intentions, people took you to be hostile, and then all of the above hit. I hope this post helps clear some things up.

Sunk Cost Age - 26

It has been two decades since the first Rikti invasion. On May 23rd, 2022, it will be the 20th anniversary of the nail biting six months humanity stared into the brink of oblivion. Even as the Batallion are an ever looming threat, we are at the point where there are now adults who have no memory of that first invasion. Everything they know about the invasion comes not from first hand experience but, instead, stories passed down from those that were there. Your character encounters a young person asking about what it was like to live through it. Maybe it's on an online forum or maybe it's in person. What does your character say about it?

While I hereby give you my blessing to carry on the name of Nanite Hacker Lord, I demand that your post always include comments of how hard I am trying to stop this from continuing (assuming you ever do any more of these). This was glorious.

This is glorious. It's like you carefully read every single one of my posts and did the exact opposite. Which is...exactly what you did, I think XD But I shall reward you for this abomination of advice! I'm actually going to answer one of your questions here! Where did my name McSpazz come from? Well, back in high school, my nickname was Screwbucket and that's mostly what I went by...except in one place. @Willowgust, my sister, was the first to start playing City of Heroes and as her first character was McClove, that's what the account's global was. Since the game was entirely subscription based back in the day, we shared the account which meant that we both had the same global. Over time, however, I grew more attached than my sister...that or I just hogged the account more. One or the other. She eventually went back to World of Warcraft while I kept playing the game. Thus, McClove ended up becoming my identifier alone... But uh...it wasn't really mine. So I wanted to make it mine. But I was afraid that if I changed it too much, my global friends wouldn't recognize it. A friend was regularly (but affectionately) calling me Spazz, so I figured why not combine the two? Thus, McSpazz was born! Thank you so very much for writing this. I'm sure it took a while and it seriously made my day. ❤️

My bubble on the Zig has mostly been popped, but I will hold on just a wee bit longer. I still feel like that even if the zone wasn't built around the Zig being there (Warwalls included), what I brought up would still make escapes extremely difficult.

We've come a long way, haven't we? If you read my other tutorial posts, you have gone through a small novella of tips and tricks. Maybe you're ready to go and want to paint the town red. But the real thing you are left wondering is...how? Now that you have your character all put together, how do you actually get started? Well, that's what we're here to talk about today. This is going to be a little less structured than my other posts, so do bear with me here. 1. Location Location Location It can be daunting when entering a new space to try and find where roleplay actually happens. While it would be easy to just tell you where to look in City of Heroes, I feel like that don't really address the bigger issue here. Different MMO's have different locations where people meet up. If I just tell you where to look in CoH, I feel like I'm doing you a disservice. So let's kind of go over the steps here. The first thing to look into is if the game has an environment that really only exists for the purposes of socialization. Pocket D (CoH), Club Caprice (Champions Online), etc. These locations are generally only good for bar/club roleplay, but it's a great means of networking and meeting new people. The text crawl can be a pain, but I do encourage going there once in a while to meet new people. It can also help flesh out your character's personality to roleplay them in a more casual setting like a bar or club. But maybe those sorts of settings aren't your thing. While there are very few games with this feature, private bases run by guilds/clans/etc can serve similar purposes. City of Heroes, for example, has a multitude of privately run clubs that run weekly events. These, like Pocket D, are fairly casual and can open a lot of doors when it comes to forging new friendships and connections. While joining a clan or guild that is explicitly for roleplaying is an obvious choice, you don't necessarily need to make anything so formal. Groups of people can come together and create informal SG's of sorts that allow for frequent and consistent collaboration without the baggage that might come with an SG. If you find yourself among a group of people that frequently roleplay together, it might be worth seeing if there's any interest in creating a group chat in something like Discord so you can all keep in touch more easily. Lastly, if you have a specific style of play you want to play that doesn't yet exist, remember: if you build it, they will come. Even if people don't do exactly what you wanted, if you introduce something that is fun to interact with, people are going to want to check it out. Scheduled in character task forces, bounties that can yield additional rewards built out of the AE, you name it. Heck, the daily Rikti Warzone Mothership Raids didn't just come out of nowhere. People started hosting them and, over time, it became almost expected that it would happen every day. Sometimes, all it takes is for someone to bring together like minded people who can do what you can't and go, "Hey. Let's do a thing." Is it easy? No. But it can be super rewarding. 2. The Approach So let's say you've found some roleplay and are getting it going. While I can by no means dictate your style, there are some things you should do to ensure everyone is having fun. I have already mentioned some of these in other posts, but I might as well repeat myself to ensure they really stick. Hook Them In As this is all collaborative, every other one of your posts if not every post should be something of an invitation for someone else to respond. Imagine roleplay as an adventurer swinging along a series of vines. A single vine will only carry them for so long until they need to leap to a new line. Your posts are those vines. You need to give ideas or concepts that other players can look at and find something to respond to. For example, let's say you have two criminals talking. One mentions to the other that they have done a ton of robberies. You either need to make something about that comment worthy of asking for more information or throw a bone to the other roleplayer (such as asking how many the other character has done). Even simple responses with complex emotional reactions can be a lot to build off of. Basically, you don't want to be in a situation where one person explains a concept, throws the ball into the other person's ballpark, and they just say, "That's niiiice." The Roleplay Doesn't Start When You Do If you are joining an ongoing roleplay, be it in a team or at the side of a bar, remember that you are just arriving. Don't look for the first opportunity to move the roleplay into something you find interesting. See if you can't find fun in what's already present and, hey, you might get an organic opportunity to insert something you find cool into the mix. If that's just not happening, everyone is better off if you just find a reason to duck out. This is for fun, after all, and if you aren't having fun, you don't have to stay. Likewise, forcing a conversation to focus on you or your ideas out of nowhere is likely going to be more annoying than productive. Likewise, consider the tone of the scene you are walking into and consider, realistically, how a person if not your character would enter that. If some people are hanging out at a bar and joking around, is it really going to settle well if your character barges in and goes "My parents are deeeaaad!" No, it's going to kill the mood. If somebody asks how your character is doing and the answer would spoil the mood, it pays to do what an actual reasonable person would in the real world: lie or say not well but add some kind of subtle warning that you don't want to kill everyone else's buzz. Walls of Text I get that you might be super excited about your lore, but if you start spending a solid 5-10 minutes straight explaining your concept ICly, people are going to tune out. As cool as your lore is, people didn't come to roleplay with you to get a lecture on the intricacies of the governments found among the Mole People. If you feel inspired or feel there's a good reason to go over this, involve the audience. Give them things to react to within your descriptions, ask questions of them, compare your new concepts to things the other character would be aware of. If the only thing people have to react with is, "that's interesting," you need to reconsider your approach. Likewise, if you find that you are the only one making posts, try and give more things for the other person to respond to. Beware the Lone Wolf You might be playing a character that is super anti-social and doesn't like talking to people. That's fine, but you have suddenly written yourself into something of a problem. A character that hates talking to people is going to hate socializing. Characters that hate socializing are not going to be very fun to socialize with. If you want to make your character anti-social, consider how they show that off or you are going to find that few people want to interact with you. A character that sits off in a corner and /e walllean's all day while everyone else is talking and having fun is probably not going to take off very well unless a particularly outgoing character drags them along. Not Everything Is Work Don't just focus on roleplay where your character is going about their profession (ie: villain/hero) or, worse, only talks about their profession. Unless you are fully intentionally making your character an unhealthy workaholic, try and find other things to talk about with other characters. It doesn't even have to be small talk. Questions Are Your Friend Not sure what to say? Don't know how to respond to what someone just posted? Ask questions! Not only is this good if you don't know what to say, but this is ESPECIALLY useful if you are making most of the posts and get the feeling the other person doesn't know how to respond. Questions don't just help everyone better understand what's going on, it also is one of the most effective ways of hooking people in. Circles are EVIL In a relaxed setting, roleplayers often tend to create circles with those they are roleplaying with. This can be fine...but the issue with circles is that they give the distinct impression of a closed session. If you have a solid circle of six people all facing one another, you'll find that far fewer people will try and join compared to if it was a more relaxed set up like two lines of people or a row. Likewise, closed off circles also results in a lot of wasted space in the center and will require reshuffling once new people are invited to join in (especially in City of Heroes where we have giant hitboxes to leave room for Jesus). Your Presentation Might Not Match Reality If you are trying to present your character one way but find characters are treating them as if they were something completely different, remember that the problem might not be them. We sometimes get an idea of how our characters act in our heads, but the way we are presenting them isn't actually matching that. A common example might be the "asshole with the heart of gold", in reality, just being an asshole. If you find that people are consistently not reacting to your character the way you'd expect, reach out OOCly and bring up your concerns. If it turns out you're totally screwing up your attempts to pull off the concept, it's only really possible to fix if you are actually aware there is a problem to begin with. IC is not OOC It can sometimes be easy to read into another character's behavior towards your own and get the feeling that you, the player, might have done something wrong (especially if you are anxiety prone). If you get the sense that might be happening, take a deep breath and just keep your eyes open for any behavior that is unnecessarily hostile in response to one of your posts. At that point, instead of asking if you did something wrong, instead ask if the other person is alright. There's nothing wrong with verifying that what is currently happening is not bad IRL emotions bleeding in. Just don't overdo your concern. Ask once and, if they confirm it's all IC, rest easy. Likewise, you should do whatever you can to avoid doing this the other way around. If you feel too emotionally distressed to roleplay, don't. If you don't think you can keep your IRL emotions from seeping into roleplay because you are too stressed over them, then don't roleplay. Find another means of relaxing and decompressing. While roleplay can be fun and serve as a means of letting off steam, not only can your own current issues come out as negative posts from your character, but it can also make you feel worse when other characters don't validate your character's abnormal feelings. Just Because You Aren't Having Fun Doesn't Mean Other's Aren't as Well Lastly, remember that roleplay comes in many different flavors and styles. Don't like spooky roleplay? Don't participate in spooky roleplay. Don't like school settings and think they're stupid? Then don't participate in them. Think roleplay in Pocket D is stale and pointless? That's a fine opinion, but other people clearly disagree. There are very few forms of roleplay that one could call objectionable by its nature. If you don't enjoy a form of roleplay, don't bash others for doing it. Just let them do it and find circles you enjoy. 3. Aftercare Wow! That was fun! Now what? Well, after the RP is done, you are likely going to want to follow that up with more roleplay at a later time. But it's not enough to just add those people to your global friends list and call it a day! Be proactive! Reach out and, if not to initiate roleplay, just find out how they're doing. Repeat the cycle and keep that ball rolling! I know this section is a little short, but, hey. I just wanted to emphasize it. I know this was a bit of a shorter one, but I really wanted to get this one out there like...now. But I also have a head cold that is haunting my life. If you have other suggestions for how you should go about initiating and carrying a roleplay on, please post them below! I'd be happy to add quotes to them above! This is part of a series of tutorials regarding roleplay! You can find the full list of tutorials here!

Added one more headcanon I like it. >.>;

Many of the story arcs done by Portal Corp employees involves investigating stuff like that as far as I remember.

I like to think that they canceled the project ages ago and just forgot to tell the workers who still show up and touch up what they've done so far while they wait for more materials.

Hey everyone! Thought I'd take another break from the super serious posts and make something a bit more on the silly side. These are some of my headcannons for the game world. You don't have to take them seriously. Like. At all. This is just some ideas I've had about how the world works. 1. Most of the Rogue Isles population doesn't own a car. I'm going to explain my reasoning zone by zone. Mercy Island The vast majority of the zone is made up of slums (Darwin's Landing) that would probably allow a car to go unmolested for about 15 minutes at most. Mercy City itself is barely large enough to justify a moped. More importantly, however, is that there is literally no way to get your car from the raised fortress to the ferry below. So even if you somehow managed to get a car delivered into Mercy, you're going to have a hard time getting it anywhere else. Port Oakes This is actually one of two exceptions to my headcanon. It has plenty of roads and places to drive to. In fact, this is one of only two zones red side that actually has cars driving around the map. Interestingly enough, the tunnel connecting Port Oakes to Cap au Diable was actually destroyed after a turf war went explosive and has literally just been sitting there despite people actively petitioning Arachnos to repair it. Speaking of... Cap au Diable You know what I noticed about Cap? There's not really anywhere to park a car in most of the city. In fact, the only place you can find non-industrial cars parked is at the two ferry ports in the north and south. If you move around the industrial area, you'll see a lot of trucks parked, but none actually going around the city. In fact, because of the power grid built around in Cap au Diable (the PTS), most of the streets are completely inaccessible in the south. My theory is that Aeon was so focused on building his magnum opus that he failed to consider the infrastructural difficulties that would result from taking the fastest, potentially cheapest method possible. If he had dug the pipes into the ground, all of the roads would still be accessible. Instead, they are just built over the existing roads (since there was no room anywhere else) and just left it at that. The only place there's any room to drive, really, is New Haven which could be argued is the "nice" part of town (which is exactly the kind of place that would have the influence to insist on smarter deployment of the system). But as there is really no room to drive in Aeon City, the only place you can really drive is to the ferry. So the only people who would probably have a car either frequently travel on the ferry to other islands where driving is actually a useful thing to do or are using the car as more of a status symbol that they never actually use. If anything, the fact the island is extremely difficult to navigate with a full sized car might be part of the reason the tunnel between Cap and Oakes was never rebuilt. Sharkhead Isle Now, hold on, I bet you're saying. Sharkhead has plenty of roads! Plenty of places to park and drive! Why would you say few residents here own cars? Well, quite simply, the island is a company town. Cage Consortium basically owns the whole bloody island. I dare you to find a single (functional) land based vehicle on Sharkhead that isn't a truck. Those trucks aren't owned by the residents, they're owned by the company. Besides, the vast majority of the island is under Cage's thumb and likely don't make a ton of money. How could they afford to even buy a car, let alone maintain it? Nerva Archipelago You know what most residents here likely own? Small motor boats or even rowboats. You know what they couldn't drive around on in a city with literally no roads. intended for anything but pedestrian traffic. Not even Crey uses cars here. Much like Mercy, even if you owned a car here, you'd have nowhere to bring it. St. Martial This is my second exception to the rule. Not much to say here. The roads are (mostly) functional and there are actual cars driving around. Nothing really to add here, but it's still an exception. Grandville This one shouldn't need much explaining. The upper levels of the city are most definitely not designed for vehicle traffic. The lower levels of the city, while they could have supported vehicles at some point, clearly can no longer as the entire city has been segmented off and blocked off with checkpoints. It's little surprise that an organization that emphasizes control over its subjects would limit their mobility as well. And just to make this a complete... Warburg It's a literal warzone that is under constant attack. The only vehicles driven around here are likely the heavily armored kind. Bloody Bay While there are still civilians that live here, they likely go out of their way to not draw attention to themselves. Not only can no cars be seen driving around, but the fact there are literal alien invaders filled with the desecrated corpses of former residents probably encourages people to travel, at most, on a quiet bike. The Abyss Lol no. TL;DR: The only place people are going to own their own car is going to be in St. Martial or Port Oakes. 2. The Zig isn't the prison. Brickstown is. Those that read my post on lore and headcanon already know my stance on the Zig. However, because of how many people disagree with me on it, I came up with a headcanon to explain why the Zig is still utilized. Strap in because I have a lot of logic behind this. First, let's start with the obvious. The zone is surrounded by War Walls. That means that there are only five ways of getting out of the zone. The first is by air which is not something a prisoner is likely going to be able to do on their own. I don't think it's even possible to fly past the war walls if you simply fly high enough...it would defeat the purpose of the walls to begin with. So you would need some kind of sponsor to get out this way (like Arachnos). The second way out is on foot through the tunnel which seems very improbable. What are the chances they don't have some kind of checkpoint to prevent something like that from happening within the tunnel itself? There's also the tram which is literally guarded by robots that are extremely effective at arresting people so that's another no go. You could try your luck with the sewer system, but even if we discount the fact that there is no way that we as players can access the sewer system of Brickstown via the main network that connects much of the city, the sewers are absolutely filled with people that might attack you on sight. Lastly, there's the exit into Crey's Folly which...I mean, even if you could press past the security checkpoint there, I don't think surviving the trek through Crey's Folly out to the Rikti Warzone is going to be an easy trek. So we've established that, even after escaping the Zig, you're going to have a hard time escaping. Not only would this explain the prisoner mobs that are only really found in Brickstown itself, but it would also explain something else found around the zone. If you aren't interesting to any other major criminal organization that can extract you from Brickstown, do you know who would most certainly be interested in somebody who has everything to lose? Crey Industries who, if you look around the zone, can be seen negotiating with prisoners. What better location to get cheap labor (or even test subjects) that you can keep off the books than Brickstown? All of this would also explain why it took a massive military force like Arachnos to not just assault the Zig but extract a ton of high value prisoners. There's a reason I wanted to open with how hard it is to break out of the zone because there's another layer here. The actual layout of the city places its tallest buildings not just farthest from the prison but also closest to the most obvious points of extraction: the tram, the tunnel going to Independence Port, and the checkpoint to Crey's Folly. These tall buildings, in the event of a large scale prison break, could be used as sniper/lookout posts. They are effectively covert watch towers. What's more, the zone is, for the most part, extremely flat. There are very few points that are elevated outside of the buildings themselves. That is, with one major exception: The heavily industrialized zone in the north. A place that would likely have plenty of things a prisoner could use as an improvised weapon has major choke points and can be easily sealed off. It's not perfect, mind you, but the general design of Brickstown does make containing escapes far more feasible. Which finally brings us to the districts in the the city. To the far north and around most of the prison, we have industrial buildings and warehouses with the heavy industrial buildings being sunk into the ground and easy to seal off and the smaller scale industrial buildings and warehouses almost all being fenced off. We have residential and shopping districts located to the west with the industrial areas acting as a buffer with a few scattered around the east and south but, as we have established, the only route of egress there is maybe the sewers and it isn't something you'd be keen to use. Office spaces that could house the administration of the prison are located to the far north and north west, making the life of any prisoner trying to get access to there to get access to prison documents all the more harder. But all of these different districts brings more to my mind than simply providing buffer zones, though. Everything the prison needs to operate save perhaps for power generation exists within the city itself. Where do the employees live? Residential district. Where do they shop for goods? Within Brickstown. Where does the prison get its processed materials (be it food or building equipment)? The northern industrial sector. Where does it store its raw and processed goods? The warehouses within the zone itself. Literally everything the prison and its employees need to survive can all be found within the zone itself. Shipments into the city would mainly be raw goods and very little needs to be shipped out. This last point is vital for this headcanon to function because it provides a massive blow to any escape plan involving sneaking out with shipments or getting something smuggled in. It's all a little convoluted but...I rather like it. "Okay. Congrats. You broke out of the Zig. Now what?" 3. Portal Corp isn't Open House I think a lot of people take Portal Corps for granted. As super heroes, you're going to have far easier access. But I think the full extent of what Portal Corp has found and is capable of is kept pretty close to their chest. Nevermind the security checkpoint in their front lobby, the actual means of traveling to other dimensions, even known to the world, is likely not really possible by the vast majority of the world; including the metahuman community. My justification for this? Their list of dimensional coordinates appears to be strictly confidential and something of a holy grail among the villain community. In the Dr. Aeon Strike Force, one of the places High Roller shunts you to involves attacking a Vanguard Base. To avoid major spoilers, there is a means you can do this that would give you the opportunity to get Portal Corps full list of dimensional coordinates. When that assault concludes, however, you not only don't get that list, it's given the air that not being given that list is a huge disappointment. This makes sense, when you think about it. The risk of outside influences interfering with scientific endeavors that rely on fragile ecosystems aside, there's also the risk that someone who doesn't know any better could stumble into a dimension you have marked as extremely dangerous and accidentally spread a threat from that dimension to here. The technology of dimensional travel and the restrictions on the coordinates is so great that, as far as I can tell, the only other canon group to accomplish this to the same level as Portal Corp is Arachnos and Dr. Aeon. This isn't a huge surprise, but it does set the bar pretty high. 4. The Rogue Isles Have Free Public Schools Funded by Arachnos This might, initially, seem odd to you. Why the hell would Arachnos pay to educate children? Well, it's not as selfless as it sounds. To start, we already know that Arachnos is willing to fund public welfare programs as a means of advancing their own goals. The orphanage in Grandville is a great example of this (do NOT play that arc unless you want to feel like a horrible person). However, one need to look no further than the real world to see why this would be appealing. The first is pretty obvious. Indoctrination. Ideologies picked up and held by children into adulthood are by its nature going to be extremely difficult to remove. In case it isn't obvious, there's a lot of things that Recluse would want to teach to his people as young as possible. Respect for authority, distrust of outsiders, the list goes on. In fact, at this point in time, people who were children when City of Villains first came out are now old enough to serve him as loyal soldiers (feeling old yet?) and, as time goes on, he can only get more of them. What's more, I seem to remember that the primary religion in the Rogue Isles literally is worshiping Recluse as a god king. What better place to reinforce how awesome he is compared to everyone else than in a setting you are told that everything presented is truth? But it goes deeper than that. The far larger thing that Recluse needs to avoid is brain drain. One of the biggest reasons public schools were created, made mandatory, and made widely accessible in the united states was not a desire to enrich the youth but, instead, to futureproof the working class. Industrialists realized that advancing technology was requiring more and more that those operating them have some level of basic education. They ended up spending time teaching adults things as simple as reading, writing, and basic arithmetic. So, what did they do? Lobby the government to create public schools. That way the burden of teaching these skills was taken off of their own shoulders and, instead, put onto society at large. If you've ever heard that schools are more focused on making you learn to memorize and listen to orders instead of using critical thinking, that's why. But why bring all of that up? Even people who only have an interest in profit see a value in ensuring the population is educated and prepared to work once they come of age. This would not only definitely be a thing Recluse would make note of, but would also address brain drain. To those that don't know, brain drain is when a region begins to struggle to maintain a workforce because the youth are moving away to find greener pastures, are unable to educate people to the same standard as those that came before them, are incapable of attracting skilled laborers to the region (see the shortage of medical professionals in the United States), or a mixture of the three. Let's be real, living in the Rogue Isles probably sucks to anyone who doesn't know of any other life or isn't internationally wanted elsewhere. At this point, natives to the Rogue Isles who were there before Recluse took over are dying off. The number of people moving into the Isles is likely a trickle at best. His plans absolutely require an extremely well educated working force and he can't just kidnap all of them from other countries. It's not sustainable. The number of people you would need to kidnap at a minimum for Recluse to keep the Isles operating and under his control is huge. Never mind his soldiers, he also needs doctors and engineers. The more he relies on private interests like Crey, Aeon, the Family, etc to handle keeping things running, the less of an importance Arachnos would appear to have on the islands. Appearing to be less important than the people maintaining your roads is not something he could tolerate. Put simply: The strong rise to the top...but they must be taught to hold a sword first. If he doesn't cultivate his own people with opportunities to climb their way up through education, his rule isn't going to last another generation. Those are probably my top 4 picks. I have one kind'a brewing around Ouroborus, but it's way more speculative than anything else. What does everyone think? Am I making valid points here, or is this just another case of trying to find Pepe Sylvia? This post is tangentially part of my series talking about roleplaying! You can see the full list of posts Here!

I feel like this one is missing something in terms of content. If you have any subjects around building a character's persona or personality that you think I should have touched on but didn't, please post them below! 🙂

Hello again, roleplayers! In this post, I'm going to break down how to go about building a character's persona. Before I go any further, however, you might be wondering why I am doing this separately from the subject of lore, flaws, and power levels. While the latter two were done separately for the sake of how long they would make the write-up, keeping it separate from the subject of lore was very, very intentional. In short, I always suggest that people design characters divorced from the lore first so that they can stand on their own. Why? Let's get into that. 1. What is this even about? And what about lore? What do I even mean by "building a character's persona"? Well, the goal here is to help you get inspired to make a character! Unlike my suggestions in lore, however, the goal here isn't to make a character background. Instead, the goal is to make a character's essence. What makes a character who they are. What skills do they have, what are their interests, how do they react to things, and so on. But why do this before talking about their history? Isn't a person made up of everything that has ever happened to them? Yes, this is true, but the reason I suggest doing this is two fold. First, it allows you to more easily work a character into any setting you want. Think of this as building a template that just requires you to retool small aspects to fit it in. That's not to say you can't make a character who could only work in one setting or another, but even if that is your intent, doing this can help you avoid falling into another trap that is my second reason for doing this. A character should be the result of everything that has happened to them, not the entirety. Characters that are little more than description of events can be very difficult to build into an interesting character. For example, let's say you started with a character who escaped Galaxy City and then came up with aspects of the character after the fact. It would be very easy to come up with character traits that resulted from the disaster without considering what character traits came before the disaster. In other words, instead of considering how the disaster changed the character into what they are now, you end up with the event almost being like the point they began to exist. This is my own personal style, however. If you don't want to start coming up with a character before figuring out both their own history and how they fit into the world, you can refer to my post on lore for more context and then come back here. While this will be dipping some into building a character's history, it wont be the absolute focus. 2. Personality: Nature versus Demeanor Coming up with a character's personality isn't necessarily hard. It becomes more of a question of how you want them to interact with others at its core. Do you want them to be abrasive? Cunning? Friendly and approachable? From there, you just need to expand from there and figure out how they might react to certain situations. However, this isn't where you should stop. It is said that we all have different faces we put on at different times. One face for when you're in public, one for in private. While it might be easy to imagine someone acting the same way no matter what setting they are in, remember that it's not hard for someone to unconsciously act differently if there's a minor change. Just the addition of cameras can make someone behave totally differently. What I am saying is that, more often than not, people have a way they see the world internally and another way they act externally. For the keen eyed of you out there, yes, this concept was ripped out of World of Darkness. Because I rather like it. Let me have this. But let's focus on the topic at hand. Let's say you have an evil character who is rotten to the core. Your nature is that of an absolute monster. You see the world as your plaything and as something to control. However, your demeanor, how you present yourself to the world, is that of a kindly Mr. Rogers. You speak softly as you shoot a man in the head for failing you. While someone meeting you for the first time might think you're a really swell guy, deep down, you're anything but. On the other hand, maybe you are playing someone who is outwardly very nice but very broken inside. Much like the previous one, they outwardly act very kindly and are genuinely trying to do what's best. However, in private, they are struggling with trauma and seeking a means of fixing it. The trick here, ultimately, is that you generally don't want a character that wears literally everything on their sleeve. Giving people something to learn or understand about your character that goes farther than skin deep can really drive up engagement and give you more to play with. 3. Hobbies and Secondary Skills Your character should be capable of more than just punching faces if you aren't making the character exclusively around the idea that all they are really good at is punching in faces. That's why it's important to consider what your character is not only good at which could help with their profession, but also what they do in their free time. Remember when I said we will be dipping a tiny bit into history and lore? This is where that can come into play. Different settings have different expectations. While a hacker might make sense in City of Heroes, it would make far less sense in Neverwinter Nights. That being said, there are two approaches you can take here. The first is that you figure out what a character does after you know what setting they're in. The second is to have a general vibe and then fill in that vibe once you've set yourself on a certain setting. By "vibe", I mean a general theme such as a craftsman, a gambler, a peacekeeper, etc. However, as I said, you should always remember that people are generally good at something besides their primary profession. For example, while I myself am a software developer, I play video games in my off time. Do video games help me program? Not really, no, but it's still part of who I am as a person. Many people, both new and veterans, can fall into the trap of not considering what a character does when they aren't out fighting crime. Besides maybe hanging out in Pocket D, but that's rarely a hobby in of itself. I encourage you to think outside of the box here. I'm reminded of Gibs from NCIS. He's a seasoned law enforcement officer, no nonsense, gruff, and, in his free time....he builds boats. By hand. No power tools. It's not what you might expect given his presentation, but it makes sense once introduced. Sometimes, having an unusual hobby can be a great hook. 4. Primary Powers and Abilities So what about what your character does in combat? Well, it might not be hard to come up with an idea for what their powers might be, also consider how you want their abilities to make them look. For example, a grizzled soldier wielding dual pistols and performing full on gun kata is going to have a very different feel than a Southern Belle in a yellow summer dress doing the exact same thing. You should also be cautious as the way a character is portrayed could also conflict with their abilities as presented. You're going to need to find a way to make your true blue American hero appear just as lawful as he would be if you didn't also make him a necromancer who raises the dead. One of the most important parts of this stage of character creation is, of course, discerning how powerful they are. This could be in the form of how physically strong they are, but could also be how skilled or intelligent they are. This has a lot of factors I won't be going over here, but you can read this write-up for a full rundown of what goes into it. However, what I don't go into there is how a character's power level impacts their presentation. For example, if you want a character to be a street level mutant, you should take steps to ensure they don't start out with powers that could turn them into a one man army. Likewise, if you are more focused on a character that is super intelligent and isn't interested in fighting, you should consider how they would fight if you intent to bring them to a mission team ICly. I want to really stress that making a character overly powerful, even if it's entirely kosher, can completely defeat the initial aim of the character. For example, if you make a character with the intention of them being a street level scrapper, you need to remember, in the back of your head, that giving them more power is going to pull them away from that initial concept. If you intend to keep them at a certain power level, you should take steps to ensure they don't stray too far from it. Likewise, if a character is supposed to be an underdog, making them too powerful will sort of defeat the purpose of making them an underdog. The little guy rising to power doesn't really make sense if they were always that powerful to begin with. 5. Motivations What drives your character? Why are they doing what they're doing? Even if you don't have the deepest grasp of the lore, you can still get a vague idea of what they are seeking. Avenging a loved one, rediscovering lost memories, and trying to cure something are all fairly common tropes that serve as good examples. You want something that is a long term goal. Something with an arc to it that isn't likely to end abruptly. One of the biggest mistakes people often make with new characters is giving them weak or short term motivations as what drives their core. This becomes an issue because once you start playing the character, if their core issue is easily resolvable, you might not have had enough interactions with others to build up a new core motivation to follow it up. This can make it difficult to continue playing a character simply because you find yourself not knowing what to do with them. What's more, you should try and make your motivations not easy for other people to fix for you. For example, a deaf character trying to find a way of hearing again is fairly weak because even if they lack the means of doing so, it's pretty trivial for certain other characters to fix it be it with magic or technology. Hell, not only do we currently have the means of directly streaming sound to the brain in real life, we're getting pretty close to being able to do it with vision! That's why any motivation you give your character should be other-people proofed to some extent. By that I mean that your character's motivations should have some aspect to them that makes it so other people can't just swoop in and fix it for you be it with their piles of money or expertise. For example, maybe your deaf character trying to find a treatment for their affliction has additional elements to them that makes currently available treatments non-workable. Maybe your character from another dimension who is trying to get home can't just ask Portal Corp to open the way up because of some weird aspect of your dimension that makes standard means of travel impossible. If someone does try and fix your character, you have every right to OOCly tell them to stop and explain why. Just keep in mind that some things aren't going to be reasonable to claim shouldn't be an easy fix. For example, if your character has some body trait that makes getting clothes for them normally impossible, it's going to be a stretch to claim that another character with the means of custom making you clothing can't. Hell, it would be a stretch to say you couldn't get something from Icon even if it came at a hefty price. At some point, you have to roll with the punches and let stuff happen. That isn't to say you can't add caveats to the fix being applied, but not all problems are meant to last forever. 6. Not For the Sake of It! I also mention this in my post on making headcanon, but I want to seriously elaborate here to better make my case: do not make a character for the sake of making a character. If you are inspired, great! If you have a concept you want to play with, awesome! But I always encourage people to start with a concept they seriously want to play with before trying to make a character. It can be very tempting to make characters on a whim. This is especially true if a friend is like, "hey, I need someone to play my character's sibling! Wanna do it?" The mistake people make is that by making the sibling without a concept in mind, their concept is effectively "the sibling". The new powerset that was just released is a ton of fun, but making a new character with only the new powerset in mind is going to result in a lot of cut corners and weak motivations. Find something that inspires you before anything else. Remember: this character needs to exist for the long haul. Not just until a single concept wears out its welcome. 7. Exaggeration This is part of a series of tutorials regarding roleplay! You can find the full list of tutorials here!

Also, as a note, if other people write RP tutorials, I plan on adding them to my list. :3

.........you are correct and I apologize to the internets.

I'm not sure I agree that is a huge problem. Galactus levels of power, that is. Even insane levels of influence on the world isn't overly common. The biggest issue I've seen are characters that are super "jaded", so they have very casual reactions to really huge events because they've seen it all or something. This is more of an issue with power levels than lore/canon, though.

Many people might presume that the most important aspect of roleplay is your ability to improvise or even tell a story. This is no true. In fact, you could be absolutely horrible at writing stories and still not be the worst roleplayer out there. In fact, the most important aspect of roleplay lies in two parts: communication and storytelling. These are so important, in fact, that the in game roleplay workshop @CrystalDragon and I run starts with this from the very beginning. 1. Why Are These So Important? The most obvious reason consent and communication are so vital is because roleplay is a cooperative activity. You won't get very far with anything that requires collaboration between peers if people aren't playing fairly or with their fellows in mind. However, roleplaying in an MMO setting actually makes the necessity of these two things even more important than a tabletop or IRL setting. In a tabletop or LARP (live action roleplay) setting, you, more than likely, aren't just speaking to one another with your own voice (or over voice chat for virtual outings), but there are often set rules at play that keep things manageable and/or someone to lay down the law and make final rulings (like a dungeon master). In an MMO, everyone is the arbiter of their own character and you have only text replies to rely on to judge motivation and intent. Yeah, this can get very tricky, very quickly. In my time roleplaying (most of which has been in MMO's), the vast majority of drama I have seen erupt was either a misunderstanding that was rooted in a failure to communicate something at the right moment or someone (or even multiple people) ignoring the necessity of consent when interacting with other characters. I have also heard from non-roleplayers that have to moderate roleplayer spaces that we are far more prone to stupid drama that sounds like it came straight out of high school. Why is that? I think the core of the issue is that roleplayers can get extremely invested into their hobby. It's not just a creative outlet, it's also a form of escape and exploration. When something comes across that threatens that, it can lead to confusion and irrational thinking. There are also some special considerations I will get into later, but I really do feel that the fact that we often put our hearts into the hobby can lead to us not acting as we normally would when faced with conflict. If roleplayers as a whole got better with consent and communication, I honestly think we'd see far fewer explosions of drama in our communities. So let's talk about that. 2. Special Considerations I by no means have hard and fast statistics on this, but from my experience, roleplay communities often contain a disproportionate number of people who are neurodivergant, from marginalized communities, or have some form of psychological trauma/disability in relation to the overall population of the game's community. I'm not entirely sure why this is outside of maybe creative types often being born out of groups like this. However, regardless of the why, what is far more important is the "so what". When interacting with others, you should be cognizant that you don't know what's going on with the person on the other side of the screen. You don't know their age, gender, life experience, or much of anything really. Not unless they tell you and, even then, it can be difficult to know for sure. Many people carry burdens that they seek levity from in their roleplay or even just gaming experience. Some just want to have fun, but still carry difficulties from their problems be they physical or psychological. We're going to get into things such as trigger warnings and the like later on, but I wanted to establish early why content warnings as well as giving others allowances are important. Just as an example, I have severe ADHD and, for a while, thought I just sucked at tabletop roleplay. A 4th edition game I ran in for a long time regularly made me think so, in large part, because my DM made no consideration for my disability and would sometimes penalize me for it. It wasn't until my current Pathfinder game where my DM has gone out of her way to learn about my condition and how to help me navigate it as we play that I realized that I just wasn't being given the tools to deal with the problem. Another very common issue are people with autism not realizing that there was a problem because everyone else thought that it was enough to drop "hints". I could give a ton of examples, but there's not so much point of saying them all. The point is that you should be considerate that you don't know what struggles the people you are playing with have and, in addition, be considerate if they share their difficulties and try to be accommodating. This is a two way street, however. If you are struggling because of an IRL problem (be it physical or mental), you need to make it clear to others, offer ways they can help you navigate those struggles, and, this is important, take steps yourself to not make it entirely everyone else's problem. What I mean by that is that while others should be willing to accommodate you, the world does not revolve around you and you should try and make your issues as non-intrusive to others as possible. Requesting someone use trigger warnings is a fair request, but demanding someone not do a story arc is not. Requesting people try to clearly communicate issues they have with you is reasonable, not being willing to listen to those issues if they come up is not. Using myself as an example, my ADHD was leading me to lose focus on plans I myself came up with and jumping to new ideas which weren't as well thought out. While my DM was willing to accommodate me, we had to find a way for me to keep better track of plans. After some discussion, we agreed that I'd keep a game planner that, while the DM is willing to help me populate and remind me to use, it's ultimately my responsibility to maintain it. In short: If someone needs accommodations, provide them. If someone provides accommodations, use them and work on your own to try and help uplift yourself. 3. Communication No, I'm not going to sit you all down and carefully break down some dictionary definition of what communication is. Instead, I'm going to express how communication often breaks down in roleplay circles and how to avoid falling into the same pitfalls. The first failure often comes down to assumptions that are never verified. Hunches that someone gets from what someone does ICly, out of context comments made in totally separate conversations, presuming to understand someone's situation based on generalizations and stereotypes without realizing that they are just that, and/or cases of mistaken identity. Basically, it's a Pepe Sylvia wall of guesses and accusations with little basis in reality. People with severe depression or anxiety can often fall into this as they read way too far into people's reactions and presume someone's opinion of them (most often negative) based on the way they think the message is being said to them. I should know, my anxiety has made me fear someone was angry at me for something many times in the past because of what they did or didn't say and not based on them actually expressing they were upset with me. The second failure tends to be a game of telephone that is born from someone not being willing to come to the table themselves or not coming to the table in any capacity and just spreading gossip. Basically, let's say that @Bunga has a problem with @ChungaWumpa as a result of something that happened in roleplay. Instead of speaking to @ChungaWumpa about it directly, @Bunga gets a friend to go to @ChungaWumpa to speak on their behalf. While this can occasionally yield good results, if @Bunga didn't do a good job of fully expressing their concerns, @ChungaWumpa might get the wrong impression and, even if @Bunga did do a good job, @ChungaWumpa might not appreciate the fact that someone else was brought in to speak for them when they would have been perfectly happy to resolve things amicably. Alternatively, maybe @Bunga didn't want to address it at all so they, instead, start venting about the situation to anyone who will listen. Now, suddenly, any entire community is involved in what is, at its heart, likely a simple interpersonal dilemma. That's not to say that bringing a community into a situation is always a bad idea, but it generally has to be an issue that actually involves the whole community. Recognizing when something is a personal problem and not something that involves you is pretty important to consider. The third and final failure of communication I'll be talking about here is passive aggression. This can show itself in many forms, but within roleplay communities, it often shows itself when a roleplayer inserts their OOC opinion of a subject into a character's IC dialog. Basically, while the point of contention is brought up to the intended target, it's done so in a round about way that could charitably be interpreted as an attempt to get the target to figure it out themselves. Look, people can be very dense. I know, I am one of those people. If you have an issue, don't beat around the bush. So what are some tips to effectively communicate with others? GLAD YOU ASKED! Express your concerns clearly and concisely. If you don't believe you are understood, elaborate and, if necessary, try to give examples of what you mean. Discern what the other person wants to get out of the conversation. If you can't tell, ask. Likewise, for our purposes, if you are discussing doing a scene, figure out what they want to get out of it if anything and, if you believe it could have negative consequences, be sure the other person is aware of them. If you are too stressed or cannot put concerns into words, take a moment and formulate what you want to say. Don't force yourself to say what you want to say when you aren't ready to say it. If you absolutely need another person to bounce ideas off of for a private conflict, be sure they understand you're speaking in confidence. [More as I think of them/they are mentioned in the comments] 4. Consent I'm sure a lot of people have heard of consent before, but informed consent is just as important for roleplayers. If your consent is informed, not only do you agree to what is occurring to you and your character, but you understand. If I tell you that my character is going to cast a spell on you to fix some illness, you agree, then I suddenly reveal to you that I made you into a zombie thus curing the illness, that wasn't informed consent. Surprise isn't always a bad thing, but remember what I said earlier. A lot of drama is rooted in how invested people can get into their characters and what happens to them. The amount of surprise most people are willing to accept of their character without prompting depends on how much control of their situation they are willing to relinquish at the start. In a tabletop game, you are relinquishing a lot of your autonomy to the dungeon master and their word is law. While a good DM will ensure that what happens to you are the inevitable consequences of your (or your party's) actions, you are entering this situation with the understanding that things are going to happen to your character that are out of your control. But in an MMO environment, all of that changes. There are no final arbiters, meaning the default situation you are entering with is full and total control over your character with zero control over others. You are your own character's or characters' ultimate DM and nobody else. Then how do you interact with others? You can do one of two things. Request permission to do an action or take an action leaving room for the other person to react to it the way that makes sense to their character. By doing this, you also allow for other people to be able to have a chance to impact the scene without forcing it along yourself. In the end, consent in roleplay really is about ensuring that everyone maintains control of their character and can contribute to the scene at large. Respecting people in this way is at the absolute core of what we do here. This is a later edit and it pains me that I have to make this clear: someone consenting to be in a place does not consent to them participating in something if they don't even know what that thing is. If you invite someone to your base, that does not mean they consent to literally anything you do in there. 5. Violations of Consent [WARNING: While the following concepts are generally accepted bad in all roleplay communities, the definitions can be different if not merged into a single definition. Definitions given here are a means of differentiating bad behavior.] What does it mean to win at roleplay? In truth, this is a nonsense question because you can't win at roleplay. The purpose of roleplay lies in the experience and not with the end result. Unfortunately, not everyone understands or agrees with this and, as a result, they go into roleplay with ulterior motives. Be it a power fantasy or wish fulfillment, bad actors will go into roleplay seeking to have their own fun even if it comes at the cost of the fun of others. Unsurprisingly, this can lead to very bad roleplay that can easily escalate into out of character strife. Don't view every negative action taken as intentional, however. As we are going to discuss, new or inexperienced roleplayers can fall into some of these traps without intending to ruin everyone else's day. Seek restoration well before retribution. It will go a long way to breed more talented roleplayers in your wake. While there are many ways a roleplay can be conducted that, purposefully or not, there are four main ways your consent in a roleplay setting can be violated outside of the obvious (gaslighting, manipulation, guilt tripping, etc) which might not be obvious to you. Just be aware that these aren't always applicable. If someone is doing behavior as described here but was given permission to do so, it doesn't qualify because, as implied by the start of this section, this is about violating consent. Corrupting Implication Let's say that you want to have a character stow away on my airship and be discovered after some time of them being there and I agree. So far, no harm no fowl. You want to influence something I alone have control over, have presented the action, and I have agreed to it. Then, once the roleplay gets going, smack dab in the middle you reveal that you had been on my advanced airship for multiple months without any detection and bypassing all of my security with ease. There wasn't even any indication that, after months, there might be someone else aboard. Now, this aspect of stowing away wasn't part of the initial agreement. "Some time" is fairly vague and while you might have presented that as being months, I might have presumed a week or two. The real heart of the issue here, however, is the implication of you stowing away for all of this time without detection. While it does speak to your character's skill, it also speaks some to my character's incompetence. After all, if you were able to bypass all of my security, doesn't that imply that my security is kind of shit? While this violation is fairly subtle, it's still important to try and avoid. If anything, sometimes the implications to other characters that come from your posts can be more damaging than anything directly said. This can happen with both player controlled characters as well as canon groups, but it is only especially a problem when your content is resulting in unwanted implications towards other characters. As this can be done entirely unintentionally, you should both be very upfront and polite with the other person as to those implications and, should you be approached, seriously be considerate to the other person's issue. Metagaming Translated literally to mean "beyond the game", metagaming is when you utilize information your character shouldn't have access to based on information that you yourself know as a player without authorization. The reason I say without authorization is that, theoretically, you can come up with any reason for your character to know something you only just found out out of character. What makes this metagaming is when you are using information about another character without verifying you would even have access to it based on things only you as a player could know. For example, let's say your character "Gun Monkee" walked into my bar. They are a Dual Pistol/Super Reflexes Sentinel and the moment you come up to the counter, I demand you hand your guns over for safe keeping and also inform you that super reflexes are blocked from functioning in this bar. For added measure, I call you by name despite having never met you before. You, of course, did not tell me any of this in character nor did you tell me out of character I could do this. No matter what justification I give for knowing all of this, the reason my character knows these things is because I, the player, read your description and then clicked on the powers tab. Common post-hoc explanations are often related to a character being an information broker, some kind of scanning technology, or undefined magical powers. However, much like corrupting implication, this is very easy (if not easier) to do accidentally; ESPECIALLY if you have more than one character. Imagine that example again, but this time I have met your character on one of my alternate characters and totally forgot which character I met you on. It's also a common mistake for newbies to make as they might assume that everything in your character description is public knowledge unless otherwise stated/implied (instead of the other way around). If someone metagames you, speak up immediately (as to avoid roleplay continuing based on faulty information) and correct the player or find out how their character knows this. If they give a justification you don't believe is acceptable, you have every right to tell them so and just not accept it. After all, it's your character information. It's not free for anyone to mess with just because it's not somehow literally attached to your character model. Likewise, if someone accuses you of metagaming, stay calm and either correct yourself or provide your justification. If that justification isn't good enough, don't argue too much and move on. Godmodding/Puppeteering While the concept here is simple, the way it plays out isn't always. Godmodding or Puppeterring is when you perform actions, write reactions, or enforce results to your actions onto other characters you do not have permission to control. It's the difference between, "I stab you," and, "I attempt to stab you," or, put another way, this is your reaction versus this is what you need to react to. As mentioned, part of what needs to be remembered in an MMO setting while roleplaying is that you don't actually have authority over other characters unless you are told that you do. That's what makes godmodding so frustrating to deal with. While this can be done as directly as just saying how your character reacts, another method is to more indirectly make your actions for you. This is generally done by controlling NPC's to present ideas to other players about the godmodded character that would necessitate a "reasonable response". An example might be pre-empting an interaction with this character with 15 minutes of an NPC saying how amazing and good hearted their character is and how they should be respected. Godmodding generally is done because the modder has a specific idea in mind for how they want the scene to go come hell or high water. Unsurprisingly, the reaction they get when you don't give the reaction they were expecting is generally shock and offense. If you encounter this, the best course of action is to have your character react as they normally would given the set-up and just ignore aspects of their action that they wrote in for you. For example, if I say, "I stab you," you say, "I dodge." Or, in the more underhanded situation, as I implied, if their character is built up to be one way and your character gets the opposite impression, go off of your character's impression. If they get angry you didn't react to how they said your character was affected, then you can start a dialog and work something out. While more often malicious than the other two previous examples, this isn't uncommon for new roleplayers to do as they come to understand how consent plays out in the space. Powergaming This is usually the first thing people think of when you say that you, "encountered a bad roleplayer." Powergaming is when, pre-emptively or mid-roleplay, a character is given abilities or traits that are perfect, uncounterable, and/or generally designed to ensure that they have the spotlight by simply making them da best. I go into more detail on my write-up regarding power levels, but a character should not be so powerful as to basically control the entire scene. If you enter a scene and are able to basically overcome any obsticle set before you, you are probably powergaming. Likewise, if your character was designed from the start to have immense power that is basically a swiss army knife in utility, you are probably power gaming. An example a friend once told me was of another character cutting through three inch thick impervium armor with a quarter swing of a steel katana. Much like godmodding, powergaming is, at its core, the desire to "win" at roleplay. To be the most useful, the most impactful, to yield the most success. People powergaming often implement really weak flaws that make their character more "manageable" or balanced when, in fact, the flaws barely make any real impact at all. The more justifications and excuses built into a character who's powergamed to hell and back, the less likely this was not done intentionally. While someone could get overly excited over a concept and didn't include enough drawbacks to help even out a character, you can usually tell when someone knows they're just living out a power fantasy at the expense of others when it's clear the flaws were designed to be nothing more than paper tigers. If you are going to accuse someone of powergaming, it is imperative that you have well thought out criticisms and examples to work off of that are going to be difficult to talk their way out of. If someone truly is acting in bad faith, the goal is less to convince them that they need to reconsider/modify their concept but to prove to yourself that you aren't seeing shadows. I highly recommend not just reading my post on power levels but also my write-up on character flaws to give you a better idea of what to look for if you are going to attempt to do this. However, if you are already convinced and don't want to/don't see a reason to confront them, you don't have to roleplay with them. Remember: the choice is yours, not theirs, to make. I want to be clear here that I do not point out these bad behaviors because I see them come up a lot in my own roleplay nor that they are even common. Instead, I bring them up because, if you roleplay long enough, you will encounter at least one of these behaviors in some capacity. It's far better you are aware of the ways people can abuse consent in the hobby than to just gloss over the concepts and move on. This is part of a series of tutorials regarding roleplay! You can find the full list of tutorials here!

For what it's worth, examples that I give of mistakes made in roleplay are put into the context of City of Heroes because that's the game we are in. Literally every MMO I have ever been in has at least one example of every mistake I put forward. They exist in different amounts, but they happen all the same. I've actually found the Homecoming roleplay community to be extremely high quality overall.

I don't think the idea of superhero fiction is too out there. In the real world, we have fiction about everything from space to war which are all based on modern understandings of science and technology. They would likely be considered less nerdy in the old days than they were in the real world, but I don't see it being totally out of the bounds of reality. And, yes, magic is a HUGE can of worms I might address later. But consider for a moment that ANY concept that goes beyond what is accessible in the real world has the same issue as magic. How do advanced nanites function? What rules do they follow? There's a very limited amount we could say about them based on our current understanding. A better example would probably be quantum computing. I saw people roleplaying concepts around the subject since 2010ish and, all these years later, even as we have a better grasp of what it can do, you're still probably not going to be accurate unless you have a super solid understanding of the subject which is...pretty unlikely. The biggest issue with subjects like this isn't necessarily the headcanon aspect. So long as you follow what I said about giving other characters an "out" as to explain why your headcanon does not apply, you'll be fine. The bigger issue is balancing power and keeping it from being the ultimate Swiss army knife. While I address that in my post on power levels, if I write an article on utilizing magic in roleplay, it'll go into special considerations for magic.

True, but as I mentioned a bit later, there is very little reason narratively to see or go to the zig, interior or otherwise, when there isn't a disaster you need to mend. While I can accept that breaches aren't the least common thing in the world, it's the revolving door nature of the prison I take issue with. Basically, the only news we are likely to hear of the Zig is going to be bad news, so that's the majority of what we know about it. But as I said, that section was VERY opinion based. Unfortunately, because many of the issues that come with trying to interpret a game world rely on what the game developers show us, we don't get to see what the Zig is like on a good day because that might not be fun gameplay material. This is to the point that I have an entire headcanon explaining how the entirety of Brickstown serves as the prison and not just the Zig since leaving an area surrounded by War Walls with very few points of egress without authorization would be extremely difficult without the assistance of one of the major villain orgs (Arachnos, Council, Crey, etc). But I didn't go into that because while that's my headcanon and something I feel has a lot of support, it's still just my own headcanon.

A very good point! I actually advise people to come up with a character concept before integrating their character into the world itself. Not only does it let the character stand more on their own, but it also allows you to use the character in other similar settings. I plan on touching on this once I write on making a character concept in the near future.

Hey everyone! In case you haven't noticed, I've started writing up detailed write-ups going over things we discuss in the roleplay workshops. I figured it's about time to post a list containing them all. My Roleplay Tutorials Consent and Communication - An Overly Long Post Talking About Consent and Communication (TM) Creating a Character's Personality and Soul - An Overly Long Post Talking About Building a Character's Persona (TM) How to Properly Use Flaws - An Overly Long Post Talking About Character Flaws (TM) How to Manage Power Levels - An Overly Long Post Talking About Power Levels (TM) What is Lore and Canon - An Overly Long Post Talking about Lore, Canon, and Headcanon (TM) How to Approach New Roleplay - An Overly Long Post Talking About How to Approach New Roleplay (TM) My "AP Classes". These are more advanced topics you don't necessarily need to know to roleplay but might be handy for advanced uses. Managing Power Levels AFTER Character Creation - An Overly Long Post Talking About Balancing Character Power with Character History (TM) Handling In Character Relationships - An Overly Long Post Talking About In Character Relationships (TM) Conducting IC Character VS Character Combat - An Overly Long Post Talking About Combat Roleplay(TM) MRP, Dark RP, and How to Do It Safely - An Overly Long Post Talking About "Mature Roleplay" (TM) How to DM - TO DO (Might need help on this...) How to run a story arc - TO DO Architect Entertainment and YOU - TO DO How to collaborate with other players/merge concepts - TO DO Effectively Utilizing the Language and Slang- TO DO Cliques and How to Avoid Getting Suck in One - TO DO And these are tangent posts I've made semi-related to the tutorial series but not directly on topic What is Hacking REALLY? - An Overly Long Tangent Talking About Hacking (TM) What is Programming REALLY? - An Overly Long Tangent Talking About Programming and How to Use It In Roleplay (TM) Spazzy's Examples of Some Headcanons - An Overly Long Tangent Talking About Spazzy's Headcanons (TM) Why does drama seem more common with us? - An Overly Long Tangent Talking About Why Drama Appears More Common in Online RP Communities (TM) Why Being Jaded to Everything is BAD Actually - An Overly Long Tangent Talking About The Issues With Being Overly Jaded (TM) Tutorials made by other people! A description guide by @CrystalDragon - The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Writing Descriptions A guide on how to DM in MMO's (and especially CoH) by @Crystal Dragon - The overly long post talking about DMing in the game for RP; how to narrate without imposing on player agency. (TM) How to break into RP communities by @chase - An Overly Long Theft of Someone Else's Schtick on Breaking Into A Roleplaying Scene Do you have a subject you want me to cover that's not listed here? Post below! I'll get to it! EVENTUALLY (TM)! An overly short URL to this list! - https://tinyurl.com/Roleplay-Tutorial

Hey again! It’s me! McSpazz! Here with another breakdown of an important roleplay concept. Today we are going to be discussing LORE! Fair warning: This is going to be long. Very, very long. I know I have said this before, but it’s long enough that I started writing this in Google Docs so I could edit it more easily. If you are new to roleplay in an MMO, this is VERY vital information, so please keep that in mind before you click off. 1. What is Lore and Canon? Lore is everything in a fictional world. No, I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean everything. Every explanation of the purpose of a ritual, every mountain, every blade of grass, the name of the store merchant that appeared for a single page and was never mentioned again, all of it. Lore makes up the backbone of any good story or setting. Of course, there’s only one real lore about any one setting. The world cannot both be flat and found. That’s where canon comes in. Canon isn’t just lore, it’s the established lore as designated by the author or whoever has the authority to make decisions about the game’s lore with the greatest authority landing with whoever owns the property. For example, while there are many comics about Spiderman, Marvel has the ultimate say on what is real and not authors who previously worked on the project. But, as that might imply, that does mean that canon is not set in stone after publication. New media or announcements can dramatically change the context, meaning, or even the exact contents of a setting’s lore. The most dramatic example I can think of is Star Wars. While the third trilogy was in development, it was announced that the vast majority of the Star Wars expanded universe was no longer canon. This was huge as there was a LOT of media published using the Star Wars setting after the second trilogy was completed and all of it was no longer considered part of the official canon. They weren’t disavowed or anything, but they no longer were considered to have actually happened. More importantly for our uses, canon, retconned or otherwise, is extremely important because it’s something we can all agree has or is happening. There is no debate as to who the Rikti are, where they come from, that they have staged two full scale invasions, and still have a presence on Earth. 2. Headcanon But we’re roleplayers. Our goal isn’t to just read lore, our goal is to be part of lore! Obviously, what we make isn’t canon. In fact, literally nothing a roleplayer produces as a result of their hobby is canon (unless you seriously impress the owner, I guess). Instead, what we deal in is headcanon. Headcanon is any lore created by someone without authority over a property that explains, alters, or adds to established canon. This can range from fanfiction to fan theories (I see you, MatPat!) and everything in between. It’s a pretty easy concept, right? Headcanon is just the stuff you read into the world. Like your theory as to why Sherlock and Dr. Who would make an amazing couple. But there’s a problem with headcanon. There’s nobody enforcing headcanon as being good, bad, invalid, or just flat out contradictory. This isn’t a problem for all situations where the canon is being altered for the enjoyment of multiple people. If you don’t like headcanon in a fanfiction or fan theory, you can just ignore it. In a tabletop setting, while the DM might alter the established canon in the source, the owners of the property aren’t going to care and the normal players in that tabletop game are sort of at the mercy of the dungeon master. Heck, in freeform RP with a select group of friends, while there may or may not be an arbiter of truth, it’s not hard to cooperate together to create a unified understanding of the world. What makes MMO roleplay difficult as far as headcanon is concerned is that it requires interaction with other players, has no arbiter to dictate what is true or not, and no universally accepted standard as to how one should go about writing headcanon. This can lead to a lot of conflicts between character stories and a lot of headaches. While canon might be something we can all agree upon, obviously, your own personal changes to the lore aren’t. So how do you go about putting together a character’s story and your headcanon for the world? Let’s get into that. 3. Canon Reliability Not all canon is created equal. When we, as fans of a property, examine lore to determine how useful it is to our purposes, we need to recognize that the source of what we believe is canon isn’t actually very useful. So before we talk about how you can utilize canon to make your headcanon for roleplay, it’s important we talk about the three arbitrary types of canon that I made up for the purposes of this write-up. Standard Canon This type of canon is very readily available, apparent, not hard to find, and/or is easy to look up via search engine. This is easily the best canon to work with; especially if you are new to a setting. The more grounded your headcanon is in canon that can easily be found, the more quickly others will pick up what you’re offering and know exactly what you are talking about. Examples might be Statesman and what he’s up to these days (not much), names of important groups like Arachnos or Longbow, the name of the guy depicted with the statue in Atlas Park, and the contents of frequently run story arcs or missions such as the purpose of the web like structure in Grandville. Obscure Canon This type of canon is not as easily available, obscure, out of the way, and/or requires some digging using a search engine. It might not even be spelled out in the game’s wiki! While obscure canon is still very useful and helps add additional depth to the game, too much reliance on it can confuse new players or force you to dig up relevant materials to show you know what you’re talking about. While NPCs are frequently not obscure, this mainly applies to big name NPCs or NPCs you will without a doubt come across in your gameplay. For example, to avoid spoilers, there’s an orphanage in Grandville that serves a secret purpose. The person who runs the orphanage and the ulterior purpose of the orphanage is probably not known to everyone. While Penny Yin is very well known, as Faultline is not frequently traveled, the storyline that introduced her as well as her grandfather likely isn’t. That’s the real rub with obscure canon. Even if it isn’t hard to find, it could become obscure if people just don’t go to it. Another less obvious form of obscure canon is media that exists outside of what you are currently looking at. For example, did you know that City of Heroes has SEVERAL comics that are fully canon? They, not any in-game mission, detail why Positron is able to take off his helmet now. In short: Feel free to use more obscure canon, but be aware that it might not be fair to expect everyone else to know it as well. Questionably Canon This type of canon is extremely difficult to access, barely known by anyone, not in any official published media, and/or requires knowing exactly where to look. I have seen some very cool ideas be born from this kind of canon, but I always highly discourage people from over utilizing it. Examples might be leaked documents, AMA’s with people involved in the project, unverified documents floating around online, and stuff that a friend assures you is canon but you can find absolutely no evidence of. Don’t get me wrong, AMA’s and confirmed leak documents could very well say what is actually going on in the world. However, until it has actually been published, there are a lot of things that can change. Different writers, realizations of continuity, changed minds, you name it. Leaked documents in particular are especially unreliable as, even if you can absolutely confirm it was leaked, there’s no guarantee as to how old it is or if they had even decided if they were going to follow through on it. Even more dangerous to use, however, are unverified leaks or hearsay that you cannot verify. As mentioned, canon’s ultimate utility to a roleplayer is that it’s something that all parties can agree upon as existing. Even if the way in universe groups view it as different, that event and those different views all exist without a doubt. Once you get into something that is so removed from what can be provably true in the world, you start to encounter the exact same problems you have with headcanon. While things that are questionably canon are fine to play with, you should generally treat it as headcanon. 4. Making It Without Breaking It So you have a general idea of what you want to do. How do you create your headcanon in such a way that it doesn’t interfere with other players? The trick lies in canon. As mentioned, canon is really the only arbiter you have to rely on and, thus, the primary thing roleplayers utilize to ground their characters in reality. There are three ways you can address canon to bring your headcanon into reality. IGNORE IT Jees, I thought Spazzy just said that canon should be respected and followed! What gives? Well, many people hunger for that freedom that tabletop and especially freeform RP provides while still playing within the MMO itself. So instead of trying to make headcanon make sense in the world, this method focuses on just having fun and doing what you want to do. While this is an entirely valid way of going about things, it’s not very useful for when you want to do roleplay outside of your select circle (be it friends or an SG). After all, how are you supposed to explain some dramatic character change that involved killing Lord Recluse with your bare hands outside of the circle that happened with when the guy is still standing around Grandville? Sure, it’s possible to have an alternate explanation for when you roleplay with others, but you can see where the complications start. Work With the Lore This method, while more restrictive than the others, yields characters that are not just easier for other players to understand, but also more resistant to newly introduced lore (outside of retcons). The idea is to craft character traits and history that line up with what is detailed in the official canon. Examples might include having a character that escaped from the Galaxy City disaster, is employed by the PPD, is most known for patrolling the Hollows, or all of the above at the same time! References to existing elements in lore lets you place your character on a solid foundation within the game world and introduce new elements to the world without making unnecessary, drastic changes. Work Around the Lore This strikes a middle ground between 1 and 2. Instead of doing whatever you want or only working with what has been established, this seeks to build off of what is unspoken while still maintaining the general theme of the setting. While City of Heroes has made it clear aliens exist, they make no mention of what form they might take. While the canon might only show certain Ouroborus menders standing around, there’s nothing that says those are the only menders that exist. So why wouldn’t you be able to make a mender that is also an alien? After all, such a thing wouldn’t violate the game’s themes or tone at all. Likewise, you can also take advantage of implication. Portal Corp exists, as do a theoretical infinite number of dimensions. So could you make a character that’s from a dimension that is effectively World of Warcraft? Sure! You can even introduce complications that prevent your character from going back or bringing anything else from there! Just remember that whatever you introduce should fit the tone of the game and not go too far beyond what has been established. While City of Heroes has a great deal of time travel and jumping between alternate dimensions, Guild Wars 2 doesn’t which would make a dimension hopper stick out far more aggressively and be far less welcome by the community. For best results, I recommend utilizing both 2 and 3 together in varying amounts. Work around the lore to explore your creativity and work with the lore to help ground it into what already exists within the world. Together, they can help really give you a solid foundation to build off of. But there is one other thing to consider when making headcanon that doesn’t break the canon of the world. Put simply? Why haven’t I heard about it? When putting together headcanon, it is entirely possible to make headcanon that is so massive, have such importance, other people are forced to ask, “why hasn’t my character heard about this,” or, “why hasn’t this had a huge impact on the world?” Since the goal of headcanon in an MMO roleplay setting is to set up a character that doesn’t conflict with the canon or other characters, introducing elements that would have drastic implications on the world at large are potentially canon breaking if its visible existence/appearance contradicts what you are saying or, alternatively, if it is something that should really be addressed by the developers (more on that in the next section). 5. Utilizing Canon Characters and Locations While using locations and characters that are easily recognizable to other players might be a tool, they should be approached carefully and with a great deal of tact. Friends in High Places Canon characters are everywhere in an MMO. What’s more, they are all easily recognizable and their involvement in any story can make it stand out. It’s all fun and games until Arbiter Daos asks to see you. But there is something that should be avoided heavily and that’s integrating an NPC into your character’s story in such a way that they had an active role in your character’s life if not still do. For example, it would be one thing to say that you had worked alongside Statesman before his passing. After all, many people did. It wouldn’t even be a stretch to say you might have managed to save his skin and he appreciated your hard work. However, after the character was killed off, it wasn’t uncommon for characters to claim that they were good friends with him. It doesn’t end there of course. Sons or daughters of Manticore, ex-lovers of Ghost Widow, or, dare I say, the secret lover of HORB! The core issue with making a canon character too involved in your character is that you don’t actually have the right to make decisions for that character. They aren’t yours. As they are NPC characters, it’s fine to make some educated guess as to how they would react to something. However, remember what I said earlier. Canon characters are what everyone can agree with. We all agree Ghost Widow exists. But if she exists, who is her true ex-lover? When Statesman was alive, which stories of heartfelt Statesman friendship moments really happened? Can we all really agree that Manticore kicked that guy’s puppy thus turning them evil? No. We can’t. We can agree that Manticore is an edgy edge boi who makes edgy choices, but kicking someone’s dog for no reason is a big claim that has no real basis in the canon. As a matter of fact, while some GM’s are willing to step into the shoes of an NPC and participate in roleplay upon request (such as @GM Kal), they are very much in agreement on this and will only have a character act in ways that make sense to the character and will likely go out of their way to prevent you from doing things like making Ghost Widow your waifu. It’s The End of the City as We Know It (again?) Many people want story arcs to be big, grand, and have a real impact on the overall world. But there’s a bit of a problem going overboard. As we mentioned before when discussing making headcanon without breaking the lore, presenting events in roleplay that did not occur in canon but would have very visible ramifications in the world at large can not just break everyone else’s immersion but make actually using that lore cumbersome. Messing with locations not accessible by normal play is one thing. After all, if you say that the Sears Tower (NOT WILLIS FAK YOU) had a massive fire and blew out most of its windows, people are far more likely to play along and might mention they heard about that happening or show surprise. If you were to say that Paragon’s City Hall was razed to the ground and is still undergoing repairs, however, people are going to push back on that. Not just because City Hall is still very much in the game and a place you can at any moment visit and see is doing just fine. Even if Atlas gets attacked by big enemy groups once in a while, you would expect news that it was totally torn down and is being rebuilt would get around a little bit more. Especially to a character that might work in City Hall. When using a location that exists within the canon of the game (ESPECIALLY if you can actually go see it), consider the ramifications of what you are doing and how realistic it would be for someone to have heard of it, but not necessarily demand that they have had a reaction to it yesterday. If you want to do big events that actually could if not do level a city, consider utilizing a part of Paragon not accessible to other players (ie: homebrew your own section of the city) or use a different location entirely. Remember: AE is your friend! Use it! Didn’t know we had a king! Well. I didn’t vote for you. There’s a lot of ways you can go about involving yourself in canon organizations! You could join the PPD! Enlist with the Longbow! Rise through the ranks of Arachnos! What no one will appreciate, however, is you proclaiming that you won the presidency with a 90% majority. They also probably wouldn’t appreciate you claiming that your ragtag group of mercenaries have successfully toppled the Australian government. Much like my previous point, the issue here is, effectively, inserting yourself into the canon or doing something within the canon that would have such a significant impact on the world at large that should really only be in the hands of those with the metaphorical keys to the world (ie: the developers). This can be mitigated by finding reasons other people might not have heard about it or limiting the scope of your awesome big event, but people generally aren’t very impressed with impressive stories when they force your own ideas into the world at large. 6. Terms of Service and Other Considerations Before we get into tips on how to actually put together your character's story, it needs to be mentioned that you should ALWAYS be cognizant of the terms of service of the game as well as its intended audience. While roleplayers are often given some degree of leniency for in character behavior, that doesn't mean you can post things that are inappropriate as far as the ToS is concerned. That extends not only to your posts, but also to character descriptions. Some games can let you get away with quite a lot. The Secret World, for example, is rated M. It carries many mature themes and images with very heavy implications and sexual themes. While it's likely many of its players are not actually old enough to be playing it, the general idea is that you should be 17 or older and capable of handling harsh material. Just because you enjoy a game that's rated lower doesn't mean you can post whatever you want. I doubt human sacrifice would fly in Club Penguin. City of Heroes is rated T for Teen and should be treated as such. I want to SERIOUSLY emphasize this because the moderators take this EXTREMELY seriously. While they aren't puritans, they aren't going to look kindly on open breaches of the ToS violation in public spaces and might even consider action on actions taken in private while in game. Even if your character description links to an external site, moderators might very well be willing to take that into consideration based on what they are investigating. Remember, no matter how old the game might be, we should respect that kids might be playing. A good rule of thumb is that if it exists in the game, it's safe to use yourself. That is with one final major consideration: triggers. No, you don't need to tailor your character's story to ensure that any sensitive content is removed and as sanitized as possible. Instead, subjects that are likely to trigger someone (excessive violence, assault, explicit descriptions of addiction, etc) should not be presented in the "foreground" of your character's presentation. That is to say that you shouldn't open with these kinds of sensitive subjects without a trigger warning or, alternatively, strictly imply these sensitive subjects and only go into more detail in private with some form of warning as to what's coming. Not only can this help you stay in line with the ToS, it can also give others the necessary warning they need to know if they need to duck out of an RP or ask to fade to black. 7. This is a Video Game What a strange name to title a section, I bet you’re thinking. WELL! (WARNING: WHAT PROCEEDS IS VERY MUCH SPAZZY’S OPINION AND CAN BE IGNORED…but it I’d appreciate if you didn’t uwu) Something I think a lot of roleplayers in an MMO forget is that we are playing a video game. I don’t mean that SUPER literally, but I more so mean that they forget certain things have to happen in order for this to function as a video game and, moreover, an MMO. One of the more common examples of this is equating power level to a character’s actual power level (which I go into in my write-up on power levels), but this also extends to how people perceive the world at large. For example, take Ziggursky Penitentiary. Every indication in the game is that it is one of the best places to detain meta-humans and that it is effectively the ultra-max security prisons of ulta-max security prisons. Given the actual prison’s actual design, it’s hard to not see that. However, if you were to listen to much of the community talk about it, you would walk away with the impression that it is a complete revolving door with terrible security and very frequent break-outs. Why do they get that impression? For one, for the vast majority of the game’s life span before sunset, the tutorial mission for villains was set to have Arachnos break you out of the Zig. So your very first experience playing a villain was breaking out of what was supposed to be max security. It was the equivalent of a nation state laying down military grade hardware and training against prison guards. Since that was your first impression of the prison as a literal level 1 villain, it was going to stick one way or another. It also doesn’t help that the zone is filled with the escaped prisoner faction, but that does bring me into another thing people often fail to consider: the developers needed to not just populate zones with enemies that made sense for the zone, but also with enough so that the city didn’t feel barren. This doesn’t just give the impression that Brickstown is under a constant jailbreak with prisoners swarming under every nook and cranny, but also that even supposedly safe places like Steel Canyon have an average of two grannies getting mugged per block. The reason for this is in large part due to the time when the game was released. Remember, this was when MMO’s were still trying to grow into a fully fledged genera and good game design for MMO’s wasn’t fully understood yet. World of Warcraft wasn’t due to be released for several months until CoH was first coming out and at launch it had something of the same struggle. How do you populate a zone with enough enemies to keep people occupied without making them look like they’re just standing around waiting to get shot up? This actually becomes very apparent when you view how mobs are placed about the city in City of Villains which came out some time later and even in Atlas Park which was revamped before sunset. Enemy groups that are milling about up to no good are used sparingly or are with groups that likely would just be milling about while everyone else is set up to be actively doing something within the environment. On the old maps? Randomly starting fires, mugging people, hanging out on street corners with bombs, etc. This does, of course, still exist to some extent in Atlas and the Rogue Isles. Just, from my experience, not as much. I think the idea for the original design was so that it always felt like you were being a big hero and stopping something important. Even if that meant having several people getting mugged within a few yards of one another. Though, this does bring me to my final point for this section: feeling like the hero. There are some missions that have you doing truly spectacular things that would normally be unthinkable because, for that moment, you are the hero of the story. This can, of course, give people the impression that they are always the hero of the story. A single mission where you raid Grandville to stop a Bane Spider from getting executed gives the player the impression that raiding Grandville isn’t a big deal or defeating Ms. Liberty and all of her allies under the statue of Atlas might give the impression that those capes are pushovers. Not only are the authors generally trying to make you feel like a mighty hero, but City of Heroes is pretty easy to break mechanically. If you throw enough money at a build, you can turn even faceplant prone blaster into an untouchable killing machine. In fact, it’s basically standard practice to build yourself up into such a character. Not only that, but groups that you outlevel don’t suddenly become less dangerous just because you are no longer security level 12. It’s not even as if lower level enemies are always less dangerous. The Snakes, an enemy group originally found in the Villain starting zone, are never seen again…up until level 50 at which point they are once again a viable threat to you. Basically, as far as the game world and lore are concerned, you should always pay more attention to the intention of the authors than limitations or expectations found in MMO’s. It will go a long way to help keep threats feeling like actual threats when dealing with them ICly. 8. Sharing Your Headcanon One last thing to go over before we discuss how to actually come up with how to go about making your headcanon and that is sharing it. I don’t mean how to go over everything point by point with others, however. I mean how do you present your headcanon in roleplay that will actually engage people. Here are some things to consider to do just that. Don’t Info Dump I know you are probably excited and want to share everything about your character’s super interesting life, but sharing literally everything about a character in one sitting can not just be time consuming but boring. Focus on delivering aspects of your character’s background or other headcanon when it’s appropriate and relevant. Involve the Audience Part of the reason info dumping can be so boring is that it often comes with walls and walls of text. The absolute least engaging way you can present headcanon is as a lecture. Instead, try and give other characters a moment to react to big points, ask questions of others, give other people a chance to ask you questions. Not only will other players enjoy hearing about whatever you have to share more, but they are more likely to remember details about it later. Remember to Emote I don’t mean you need to remember to use emotes. Your character is sharing something, likely of some importance to them. Don’t just write what your character is saying, but also add emotion to it! Facial expressions, hand movements, tone, and anything else that could help get across how this information impacts your character on a personal level. Consider the Audience Who is listening to what you’re sharing? What are they interested in? Depending on who you are sharing your stories with in character, you should consider what they would be most interested in hearing. After all, while fellow criminals would be more interested in hearing how much money you snagged, a cape would probably be more keen on hearing what you did to avoid hurting civilians. 9. Respecting the Creations of Others You know, I didn't think I'd have to make a section on this, but someone at one of the workshops said this was a growing problem. Soooo let's talk about it. The canon works we write our story around are at the heart of what we do as roleplayers. Part of the fun about roleplaying is sharing what you've come up with to others and then using your shared love of writing to create something new. An unusual mistake, however, is to presume that because you are roleplaying your concept, that makes it just as fair game to utilize as the canon of the world you are roleplaying in. A published work is intended to be read and enjoyed. For our purposes, a published work is also being shared with the intent of us crafting our own stories. However, the same cannot be said for concepts created in roleplay. When we create our characters, our custom groups, our custom concepts, we are doing so with the belief that we have control over it if not the expectation there of. If you wouldn't do things to a character without the player's permission, why would you do the same to their concepts? If you have a lot of interest in utilizing another player's headcanon and/or concept in your own creations, you MUST talk to them about it and get EXPLICIT permission. While there's no law nor ToS code that prevents you from doing so, not getting permission is a huge sign of disregard for the other player's creative control over their own ideas. If your headcanon is building directly off of another player's, you need to ask for permission before you show it off. Not all surprises are welcome ones. 10. How to Make Your Headcanon I’m not going to pretend I have all of the answers, least of all on this. The thing is, everyone has their own writing styles, everyone has their own interests, and, let’s be honest, you could violate just about everything I have brought up so far and still find an audience. So instead of giving any hard and fast rules here, I’m instead going to give you an idea on how to come up with ideas, put them together, and expand further on them. Reality is Stranger than Fiction If you look at the world at large, there are a lot of strange things that really sound like they were ripped straight from a movie. Conspiracies, crazy animal behavior, strange science, and more. If you need inspiration for a concept, sometimes you need only look out the window. Or through Google. There are few things as satisfying as implementing something in a story that actually exists and blowing people’s minds when you tell them that you didn’t make it up out of whole cloth. Keep It Simple Stupid! Or, should I say, keep it as simple as you can handle. Many new roleplayers really want to throw a ton of ideas into a single character and end up bloating their concept into oblivion. There’s no word count requirement or necessary level of complexity. Figure out the core of your character and don’t include too much more than you need to accomplish it well. While extra stuff can be fun, it often doesn’t serve much use and ends up being forgotten after it’s brought up once. What Kind of Story Do You Want to Tell? I’m sure we’ve all seen a movie, read a book, or played a game that didn’t know what it wanted to be. Some of the most confusing and garbage fire of media out there is bad, in part, because it was trying to do a ton of things at once. This is especially common when you have media designed by a committee which is trying to copy something popular without understanding why it is popular. So when you are making a character, ask yourself what kind of story you want to explore with them. What general narrative are you trying to accomplish? Is there a particular style you want to emulate? Really figure out the end goal of creating this character. Don’t Make a Character for the Sake of Making a Character One of the fastest ways a character can become less interesting is when they are made purely out of necessity or because you had a general concept and dove in before really exploring what you wanted to do with it. While it might be cool to make a character that’s related to a friend’s in some way, don’t do it just because they asked you to. If you make a character for roleplay, be sure that it’s something you actively want to play and not something you just like the idea of. If You Go Elaborate, Take Notes! How you go about it is up to you, but if you make a super complicated backstory or lore to go with your character, it can help to keep notes so you can keep your story straight. It isn't hard to go overboard and find yourself forgetting important elements of your background such as names, locations, and/or dates. There's no shame in taking notes and doing so can allow you to remember small tidbits to use later on This is part of a series of tutorials regarding roleplay! You can find the full list of tutorials here!

At the time, no. But there have been characters that, in hindsight, I found to have extremely distasteful qualities or were down right problematic. The two that come to mind are Cipher Yietra and Kieten Whiteflame. The former was an Asura I made in Guild Wars 2 and while I loved the character and still do use aspects of him in new characters, one thing that didn't age well was that he and everyone else in the family had some kind of mental illness that others in the family didn't. I didn't realize I basically created the seven dwarfs if those seven dwarfs all desperately needed to go on medication and see a therapist, but that's exactly what I did. When it was pointed out to me, I felt pretty shitty. It would be like making a character with the "defining trait" of autism. Very cringe, will not do again. The latter was my first ever roleplay character in CoX and...in hindsight, it was VERY clear that he was being played by an edgy high school freshmen. Reading off his backstory is like reading an elvish version of My Immortal with far more triggering elements thrown in because EDGY IS COOL. Again. Very very cringe. Will not repeat. Besides that, just in terms of character's who's morals were super dark/evil...I don't have many of them. The closest I had was a pretty messed up nightmare entity, but he kind of softened up as time went on. I have a really hard time playing evil characters because I find far more enjoyment taking down tyrants than being one (no shame to anyone who differs though!)