On the Shoulders of Giants - Which superheroes have influenced your character creation?

[Doc_Scorpion]

My one character who is inspired by any media is actually anime inspired...

[VileTerror]

Lard knows this game probably has no small number of players who came to it because it was JUST close enough to anime-esque that the comic book angle wasn't even on their radar.

[Oubliette_Red]

Here are my characters that were influences my comic book heroes/villains:

 

-

 

 

What I always liked most about CoH is that I could make my own characters, not have to play Spider-Man or Dr. Strange or etc.

[Doc_Scorpion]

2 hours ago, VileTerror said:

Lard knows this game probably has no small number of players who came to it because it was JUST close enough to anime-esque that the comic book angle wasn't even on their radar.

Frankly, I came to this game (originally) after playing UO and YPP!...  and then I happened to see the original trailer, and when the guy flew I knew this was the game for me.  Superheroes were certainly part of the draw but mostly I wanted to fly.  (I wouldn't end up getting into anime until after the Snap.)

[Carnifax]

I'd like to think I'm totally original but I think most of my recent characters have been subconsciously affected by watching The Tick. I mean a Troll raver and part-time DJ who is big time into Glow Sticks (Active-808), a mom who raises the dead (Mombie),  a scottish sterotype fuelled by a regional soft drink (Iron Brew) and a cue wielding robot with a cue ball for a head (Snookered). 

[RikOz]

13 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

Frankly, I came to this game (originally) after playing UO and YPP!...  and then I happened to see the original trailer, and when the guy flew I knew this was the game for me.  Superheroes were certainly part of the draw but mostly I wanted to fly.  (I wouldn't end up getting into anime until after the Snap.)

The 7- 8-year-old comments on that video are hilarious 😄

[Troo]

13 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

after playing UO

that's a big leap game feel wise. Being able to just use the travel powers in CoX was super powered.

 

[Charistoph]

40 minutes ago, Troo said:

that's a big leap game feel wise. Being able to just use the travel powers in CoX was super powered.

 

Yeah, the closest I can remember before then is getting on a horse to travel between towns on Dark Age of Camelot.  WoW did have mounts, but that came out later, were ground-based, and took forever to access when it launched.

Though, one did have warp drive on Earth & Beyond to speed travel up, but that was a spaceship game, so rather understood.

[Yomo Kimyata]

My namesake was a mashup of Lobo and the main villain from a D&D campaign in the late 80s.  But mostly my inspirations are either from literature, or really bad puns.

[RikOz]

9 minutes ago, Charistoph said:

Yeah, the closest I can remember before then is getting on a horse to travel between towns on Dark Age of Camelot.  WoW did have mounts, but that came out later, were ground-based, and took forever to access when it launched.

Indeed. You had to be level 40 (out of 60) to access ground mounts in the early days of WoW. Flying mounts weren't introduced until the first expansion, and then you had to be level 70, but still couldn't fly in the pre-expansion zones (mostly because those zones were never designed with flight in mind, so would look terrible from the air)

 

When I started playing in 2008, with the launch of the second expansion, ground mount access had been lowered to level 30. With the third expansion, ground mounts were lowered to level 20, you could now fly in the "old world" due to it being remodeled, but you still had to wait until 60 to fly. Those access levels remain at 20 and 60 to this day.

[Doc_Scorpion]

47 minutes ago, Charistoph said:

Yeah, the closest I can remember before then is getting on a horse to travel between towns on Dark Age of Camelot.  WoW did have mounts, but that came out later, were ground-based, and took forever to access when it launched.

UO had mounts (the common one  were useable by anyone), and they were useful and MUCH faster than walking or running on your own.  But where UO really shined for travel powers was the Recall and Gate spells - both of which let you teleport directly from pretty much any arbitrary point to any pre-marked point.  Many players maintained a library of rune books in their house filled with desireable pre-marked points. (You didn't even need to have your own library, every shard had at least one player maintained public library.)  Most players had a runebook in their backpack with their most used pre-marked points. (Their home, the entrance to their favorite dungeon(s), favorite vendor houses, near a bank...)  All it took was 10 points (out of 600 available) in your Magic skill and you were set.

They could also be used for griefing (inducing a player to teleport into a PvP zone or a dangerous area), so eventually the dev's set it up so that the runes were colored by the type of destination.

Edited February 18, 2020 by Doc_Scorpion

[RikOz]

I forgot to mention my inspiration for my main, who is a fire/fire blaster.

 

I came to CoH (live) straight from WoW. In WoW, my two main characters were Eilyssana, a human female retribution paladin, and Svelexi, a draenei female fire mage. In games that give me the option, my first character is pretty much always a redheaded female. So when I created Flaminatrix, I made her a redhead and made her look as much like Eilysanna the paladin as I could. However, I don't think Titan Weapons was available yet, and I couldn't make her a 2-handed weapon melee character like my paladin (Katana wasn't quite the same concept), so I based her powers on those of my fire mage. Thus, her "inspiration" was a combination of my two main WoW characters.

[skoryy]

Phantom Lass is your basic Golden Age heroine, Phantom Lady with a beat stick and a fondness for purple.

 

T-34 is the Clockwork Mythbuster, the Six Million Ruble Nerd- er- man.

 

Agent Trinity is parts Men In Black - more K than J - and parts She-Hulk, of course.

 

Sunbow is John Woo's Sailor Moon, a Stan Lee and Buzz Dixon production.

[Charistoph]

1 hour ago, RikOz said:

When I started playing in 2008, with the launch of the second expansion, ground mount access had been lowered to level 30. With the third expansion, ground mounts were lowered to level 20, you could now fly in the "old world" due to it being remodeled, but you still had to wait until 60 to fly. Those access levels remain at 20 and 60 to this day.

In a way.  If you have enough heirlooms unlocked, you can have mount access right away.  Well, a chauffeured motorcycle with your character in the side seat.

 

Still, no flight as early as 14 (now 4) like CoH.

[RikOz]

7 minutes ago, Charistoph said:

In a way.  If you have enough heirlooms unlocked, you can have mount access right away.  Well, a chauffeured motorcycle with your character in the side seat.

 

Still, no flight as early as 14 (now 4) like CoH.

Yeah, I had the motorcycle, but a new player won't have access to that.

[Lines]

I take a few prompts from a bunch of characters for most part, who have become their own things in their own ways, but my main Tanker, SENTRYMAN is a pretty direct Superman influence. Only, where DC have wrestled with Supes to try to keep him relevant, Sentryman totally leans into the irrelevancy. He's an outdated, washed up relic of golden age superheroes, still fighting the cold war and completely out of touch with modern life.

 

 

[The_Warpact]

Warpact my namesake is Ultron.

Ukkonen/Pyrune are inspired by mythological thunder gods.

Moose Knuckle I based on Ed Gein, Joker, AND Ted Bundy.

Larker is based on the Comedian. 

Black Grail is a alternate multiverse Steve Roger's from a magic based world.

Frozen Vegetables is a magic bag of....frozen vegetables. 

I either make my toons very serious or seriously humorous at least to me. 

 

[Hablaguy287]

I mainly think that Spider-Man has a huge impact to me ever since I was a baby (yeah we go way back there) since he's my number 1 favorite hero. When I for the first time played City of Heroes, I immediately thought to myself to create a superhero influenced to my favorite superhero.

 

Now, I have a character called Bug-Bite who's obviously influenced by the very hero I idolizes towards to.

Edited February 25, 2020 by Hablaguy287

[Dreamboat]

1 minute ago, Hablaguy287 said:

Now, I have a character called Bug-Bite who's obviously influenced by the very hero I idolizes towards to.

I've seen Bug-Bite around when I'm out and about I always get a big kick out of the costume, really nice work!

[Hablaguy287]

Just now, Dreamboat said:

I've seen Bug-Bite around when I'm out and about I always get a big kick out of the costume, really nice work!

Thanks! The credit goes to First Player! He's really talented.

[roleki]

I wouldn't say they are "inspired by" or "cribbed from" any of the various incarnations of it, but I intentionally design and name all of my characters as if I expect to run into The Tick and Arthur at some point while I patrol The City.

 

It amuses me to be on a PuG full of "DeathmanX" and whatnot with my diminutive smirking Tootboy, whose backpack emits occasional puffs of "smoke" vented out of his containment suit.

[ZorkNemesis]

I try to avoid going full-on reference material, but I do have at least one who would fit the "very much inspired by" category.  A Blaster by the name of "Commander Voltage" who is Electric Blast/Martial Combat with Super Speed and I tend to play him as a speedy pugilist who derives most of his speed powers from his electricity.  He's one part The Flash, one part Synapse.

 

Of course, I also have costumes inspired by other media, usually games, that don't necessarily match the inspiree's abilities.  Some examples include a Staff Scrapper who resembles Lunais from Timespinner, a Necro MM who resembles Plague Knight, a DB Brute that looks similar to Vyse from Skies of Arcadia, a DP Corrupter who looks like the protagonist from Red Steel 2 (think cowboy samurai type), and another Staff Scrapper who resembles a Final Fantasy Dragoon.

Edited February 25, 2020 by ZorkNemesis

[Without_Pause]

I more recently in the past few years accepted I was more into superhero lore versus a specific super hero. While I certainly like various heroes, I don't need them. I played the Marvel RPG back in the day and near the end we just started creating characters, grabbing two per player, and having slugfests between two players. Some of my favorite heroes are the ones in my head. The closest I have gotten is taking the idea of Hulk and building it around being faith based versus anger with bio related powers. He could as an example heal someone while taking on the injury and then regen. He uses his powers to achieve various physical feats and more so under the right condition, but he also uses them outside of that doing good works. Closest thing in CoH would be SS/wp brute although I would rather play StJ/wp.

[Mister Mass]

Most of my inspiration comes from comic books, although other genres have contributed to some conceptions over the years.  I grew up with superheroes, being old enough to have watched the 60's Batman TV series in its original run.  (My bedtime was actually half-way through the show, but my parents always conveniently didn't notice that I was hiding under the coffee table watching the TV 😉)  Between Batman, the syndicated Superman show from the 50's, & the plethora of superhero cartoons in the 60's, I got a lot of exposure to the genre from a young age.  And I was reading comics from before I could really read.  (I knew that the word "invulnerable" meant that Superman couldn't be hurt long before I learned the meaning of many much shorter & more common words.)  The (mostly) DC comics I was reading in the early 70's were an amalgam of Silver Age & early Bronze Age material & concepts, but often included reprints from the Golden Age.  I particularly enjoyed the Justice Society of America, which co-starred with the modern Justice League of America every summer in a JLA-JSA teamup - which was always an anticipated highlight of the summer.  There was something about the Golden Age heroes that resonated with me from a young age, & they have remained an inspiration to me 50 years later.

 

When I got exposed to roleplaying games at college in the early 80's, I rejoiced in the opportunity to pay homage to my comic book inspirations.  My first Champions campaign was a melange of the Marvel & DC Universes (which I dubbed "Earth-M" natch 😎) for the PCs to rummage around in.  But that experience taught me something - that direct steals were unsatisfying, as my duplicates could never really be the originals.  Also, as a GM, I realized that the players needed to be the center of the campaign & have agency, which was difficult in a world populated by well-known, popular established superheroes, who tended to end up as GM's pets.  So I retooled the world, filed off the serial numbers on the copies & began reimagining the characters, taking inspiration from the source material, but trying to give each character its own life.

 

When I started playing CoH, most of my early characters were adaptations of concepts from the revised Champions campaign - Mister Wonderful (a tongue-in-cheek Golden Age Superman), Doc Willpower (Indiana Jones gets the power of Green Lantern), American Aegis (a legacy Captain America - & everyone's second favorite shield-slinging sentinel of Liberty!), Buck-Eye (Green Arrow/Hawkeye as the descendant of Natty Bumppo), the Grim Grey Ghost (the Spectre/the Gay Ghost), the Whizzz Kid (Flash/Kid Flash), & Baron Wonder (Black Adam/Baron Blitzkrieg) for example.  Only the Baron has been recreated on Homecoming thus far.

 

Mister Mass was originally designed in the mid-80's for a player in a Champions campaign I was expecting to GM.  Since the player & his wife were uncomfortable with building their own characters in the Champions system, they asked me to come up with something for them.  But they made it clear that roleplaying a husband & wife (or potential couple) team was "boring", so I opted to make them twins.  I found inspiration in the 60's DC Hawk & Dove team, who would join the Teen Titans when their own title folded.  I based Mister Mass on the conservative, aggressive, & hot-tempered Hawk, & his sister Aura on the liberal, pacifistic, & thoughtful Dove.  The anticipated dynamic was the Mass would think with his fists & tend to get in over his head, while Aura would creatively use her powers to bail him out, which tended to capture the way that this husband & wife tended to play in our various D&D & Champions campaigns. 😉

 

Oddly enough, my reimagining of Hawk & Dove as a male & female team predated DC's revamp of the duo by a few years.  (The original team were both males, with older brother Hank as Hawk, & younger brother Don as Dove.)  Anyway, after building the characters, the husband decided to GM rather than play, & I ended up running Mister Mass.  Roleplaying the character as designed, I played directly & aggressively, which tended to draw the GM's ire.  Mister Mass would taunt the GM's villains as weak & unworthy, which would (predictably) result in the GM pummeling Mass into the pavement, leaving the rest of the team free to work up a viable solution to taking the villain out.  While I had intentionally designed Mass to be able to take a ton of punishment, I had unintentionally prefigured the "tank & spank" style of play in this campaign. 😛

 

Anyway, I would end up playing variations of Mister Mass in several campaigns over the years.  When I joined CoH in 2005 at the 1 year anniversary, Mass immediately became my main, with his primary costume being a homage to the Golden Age Hour-Man.  During the Snap, I played a version of Mass on DCUO - but it never felt quite right.  When I joined Homecoming last year, Mass was first out of the gate & my first 50.  Incorporating the elements from various campaigns over the years into his backstory for Homecoming was fun.  Most importantly, it felt like home. 😎

Edited February 26, 2020 by Mister Mass

[subbacultchas]

None as far as comic books, or books, or movies or anything. When I first started playing years ago, a lot of my characters were influenced by mythological and religious figures. I did have one or two movie based ones, Father Kane from Poltergeist II and Thunder from Big Trouble in Little China, but those were exceptions. Not I think any that are influenced are fairly rare, I mostly just kind of do my own thing and more make characters that resemble archetypal things (a vampire, energy being contained by a suit, bug who got superpowers).

Mostly, I did make a trio of Gorgons just because I liked the idea.

Edited February 26, 2020 by subbacultchas