Creativity Tropes and Favs

[Snarky]

I have a gew tropes i run with endlessly. Robots and undead and can slam almost any AT and powerset into them

 

right now i am creating an AR / devices Blaster. I decided to go magic ghost to explain the disappearing weapons and endless ammi. It is inspired by the Sarge in Frighteners. 
 

what are sime of your favorite tropes and solutions?

[Leogunner]

Tropes for repeated characters? 

 

Iron man suit versions mixed with magical girl like powers. And magic robots/androids that are trying to duplicate Tinmage's original. They're all named "some material"-Mage usually linked to what power they have like how silver is conductive electricity or nickel's capacity to conduct heat or quartz's use in clocks. 

[jubakumbi]

I find the backstory for most of my characters I keep ends up being some form of 'forced into being a hero with super powers'.

As in, none of them really 'signed up' to come and protect Paragon and most of them got thier powers thrust at them or an accident, etc.

 

Beyond that, Electricity.

This game just does Electric the 'right way' for me, I just love it, more than any of the other elements in the game.

[biostem]

I tend to use the "person with unstable powers trapped in a suit to control/focus them" angle a lot.  I'll often employ the "person from another planet/dimension whose powers are 'natural' to them" approach a good bit.

[DougGraves]

I don't have a standard backstory.   They all have a unique background and look.  Trollkin Recruiter is green and mutated from taking a drug at a rave.  Outcast Recruiter is blue and just a normal mutant.  Warrior Recruiter is just a normal who is very good with a sword.  Freakshow Recruiter was just a rich woman who decided to try cybernetic implants that control electricity.

[The_Warpact]

Gods, mythological things, and weird stuff fringe, multiverse, alternate universe, etc.

Example alternate Captain America from a magic world, born natural he is considered "invisible " not affected by magic and hence a powerful villain. Only those with magic no matter how depraved or evil are considered good while the invisible are inherently evil. 

Edited February 22, 2020 by The_Warpact

[Twisted Toon]

8 hours ago, Snarky said:

I have a gew tropes i run with endlessly. Robots and undead and can slam almost any AT and powerset into them

 

right now i am creating an AR / devices Blaster. I decided to go magic ghost to explain the disappearing weapons and endless ammi. It is inspired by the Sarge in Frighteners. 
 

what are sime of your favorite tropes and solutions?

Back in the day, I had an AR/Dev Blaster that explained away the disappearing weapons with a pocket dimension. She'd reach over her shoulder and pull a Frankenrifle out of the pocket dimension.

[Clave Dark 5]

This here guy/gal got magical somehow!"

 

Seriously.  I once planned a character who got a rash and got magical powers from it for no good reason, but never made him because "ManWithAMagicRash" wouldn't fit.  I have had a few techie characters (back from the future, developed an electricity storage method which allows this one to shoot lightning, etc.) but the magic thing is an easy crutch, along the lines of "a wizard did it."

[Snarky]

44 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

This here guy/gal got magical somehow!"

 

Seriously.  I once planned a character who got a rash and got magical powers from it for no good reason, but never made him because "ManWithAMagicRash" wouldn't fit.  I have had a few techie characters (back from the future, developed an electricity storage method which allows this one to shoot lightning, etc.) but the magic thing is an easy crutch, along the lines of "a wizard did it."

I use the old "at a certain level technology and science are indistinguishable from a fungus....or magic for that matter"  to explain various mashups.  Like the Brain in the jar on a robot body with ice powers created by a time lord using science so advanced it is basically magic.

[ZorkNemesis]

I'm usually a fan of either powered armor/suits for my tech supers or science accidents for my sciencey types.  Classic tropes with plenty of variety.

[biostem]

19 minutes ago, ZorkNemesis said:

I'm usually a fan of either powered armor/suits for my tech supers or science accidents for my sciencey types.

I have to say - the costume creator definitely lends itself more toward tech-type outfits than perhaps any other category, so I'm with you on this...

[Heraclea]

Messengers from or avatars of various deities.  Mythological creatures and descendents of heroes.  Historical figures.  Alchemy.  Raised by wild animals.  Amazon training and discipline.  Just another soldier who learned the ways of a weapon. 

Edited February 22, 2020 by Heraclea

[Oubliette_Red]

Mine are all over the place and not really based on any tropes, that I know of anyway. I look into mythology more often than anything else I guess, that and plants. ^.^

 

My current favourite is the embodiment of a virus, not sure if it was ever a person to begin with or just some mad experiment gone wrong. Along with Poison's heal and Antidote, it also has Medicine pool's Injection and the Vitalize temp heal.

 

One of my friends once asked my why I even had those, to which I responded "Can't kill off the carriers too quickly, they must live long enough to spread the contagion."

 

He was one of the first characters I made back in June and is in no way inspired by the current epidemic.

[Lines]

I like my characters to feel humble and in the background, filling some small niche in Paragon City or the Rogue Islands rather than taking centre stage or engaging with everything. I often explore with my characters while I haven't fleshed them out and I'll look for their place. Even my main is just a Black Marketeer. They're flies on the wall for everything outside their realms.

 

I often find the character is nebulous until I've defined their fatal flaw. That seems to be when their personality spirals to life and their costume and bio follows. Even little things like 'melancholy', 'out of touch' or 'over-eager' changes the way the character looks and feels.

 

I seem to keep making heroes with insect names but no insect related powers. Only noticed the other day.

[SaintD]

I like being a woman, because....I like being a woman. The running theme, however, is they're all barefoot.

 

I'm interested in the psychology of things, and it's interesting what you can do by just playing around with what people consider normal and expected, in relation to why those things are normal and expected (so just doing lolrandom nonsense doesn't do it). For example, I weightlift in the gym and I know exactly why me and any other dude is working the trapezius.....it's not because we need to carry a lot of shopping, it's to look huge. Trying to get this stubborn asshole of a muscle to grow is otherwise entirely pointless, you don't NEED it for much. Getting massive traps has a disproportionate effect on making people think you're huge because it breaks up the regular human shape, you have those two big lumps of muscle there instead which immediately stand out to people and hits their subconscious "Holy shit" trigger. Meanwhile all the people who go to the gym a lot and consider this a normal enough shape don't give a damn.

So why are my ladies all barefoot? First, because it makes you look super naked. People expect footwear, especially outside. They expect at least a miniskirt. Have the Lebeaux leotard bottoms and no footwear so people can see all the way up and down the legs and all of a sudden you seem way, way more openly nude even if your top half is all the enormous Black Knight pieces, simply because you're doing something highly unusual that stands out as such - you're walking around normal places (not an expected place like a beachfront) without any kind of footwear. If you want that kind of effect, it's especially important because this is a comic book setting and every woman having massive boobs as much on show as possible is par for the course. Everyone expects it, showing off like that isn't showing off anymore, it's just normal.

Second, it shows that you don't give a damn. Not just in a "confident in my body, I don't care about your expectations" kind of way, but in the Doctor Manhattan way. You don't do normal things like wearing footwear because you don't need to. And if I don't need to do it, why should I? It presents a level of disconnection to the basic expectations of being human itself - you don't have normal human concerns; weather, dirt, sickness, getting hurt just stepping on a rock....it's irrelevant, it doesn't happen to you.

Being barefoot all the time (and looking basically like a normal human, as well) immediately makes you stick out like a sore thumb for all sorts of reasons that people probably don't consciously realize, but their subconscious does.

Edited February 22, 2020 by SaintD

[EmmySky]

I make most of my girls 'natural' origin because it makes my head hurt to try to figure out the differences between natural and mutation or technology and science.

 

That being said, my stories are all over the place.  If I am forced to add Sky to a name (because otherwise its taken) then that character becomes an alternate form of EmmySky (time travelling or alternate dimension or something).  

 

I guess I usually lean on something happening to the character that made them powerful and/or catapulted them into heroism as a career/hobby.  But even at that, its all over the place lol

[DestinyPlayer]

Whenever I'm bored and have no other inspiration, I inevitably end up making a variation on the Evil Overlord from the Overlord series of games. And over half of them are female for some reason.

[MTeague]

Every blueside character I make has a redside nemesis.  Typically a different but related AT.   Scrapper/Stalker, Tank/Brute, Defender/Corruptor, etc. 

Backstories / origins are different for each, but just under half of my characters backstories involve one of my other characters (and usually NOT their red/blue opposite).

 

I have a headcanon where my Mind/Kin has been orchastrating the forces of Light from behind the scenes for a few thousand years. 

 

My redside Sentinel is kind of my own personal Doctor Doom, just he's also a being of living steel and fire who used to be a materials engineer rather than a Baron. But he's the one who organizes and directs most of my other redside characters.  My spines/regen stalker is the Unkillable Man, and the wild card of the bunch, and much of the final outcome of my clash-of-characters would depend on his choice between darkness and light. 

 

I also like involving "Evil Crey Corp" in my characters backgrounds. They're just a love-to-hate-them faction.

[gurugeorge]

As far as my faves go, I do put a little bit of thought into my characters and try to make them unique, but tropes I've used more than once are:-

 

Arcane researcher/archaeologist who discovers something in the course of researches.

Chosen or favoured by superpowered beings/gods/demons

Mutant (easy peasy, goes for anything - if you can't think of an origin or a story, and can't be bothered trying to think one up on the spot, mutant origin is the one to go for)

Person lost (e.g. plane crash) stumbles on something (e.g. kung fu monks in the mountains, etc.)

 

[srmalloy]

17 hours ago, DougGraves said:

I don't have a standard backstory.   They all have a unique background and look.  Trollkin Recruiter is green and mutated from taking a drug at a rave.  Outcast Recruiter is blue and just a normal mutant.  Warrior Recruiter is just a normal who is very good with a sword.  Freakshow Recruiter was just a rich woman who decided to try cybernetic implants that control electricity.

Ever since I saw someone say "для" in chat, discovering that CoH supported Unicode (which you would expect, given the regionalization that would have to occur for the flop that was the release of " 영웅의 도시 " in Korea), I created a variety of characters whose origin could be traced back to the old Soviet Union, using various real research institutions and a range of different situations, along with inventing state-sponsored hero groups like Народная Армия ('People's Army'), villain groups like Красная Угроза ('Red Menace') and individual heroes and villains, which I would reference across different characters' backgrounds to create a sort of common history that they all connected to, if only loosely. And many of the research institutes had names that could easily suggest that their programs included research into superpowers, like the I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry.

 

14 hours ago, Snarky said:

I use the old "at a certain level technology and science are indistinguishable from a fungus....or magic for that matter"  to explain various mashups.  Like the Brain in the jar on a robot body with ice powers created by a time lord using science so advanced it is basically magic.

I did this for one of my characters, Machinator Magickus, 'machinator' being taken from Kirk Mitchell's Germanicus trilogy, which applied the same -tor suffix to 'machinus', meaning 'someone who works with machines' -- essentially 'engineer' -- to make a character who'd been dropped into this universe from one that operated like Poul Anderson's Operation: Chaos stories, with magic replacing technology. For him, a sufficiently advanced magic is technology, and the various workarounds that people in this universe had to come up with because they never developed magic sufficiently are fascinating.

[Charistoph]

I don't rely on specific tropes for all my characters, thought most stem from different stories and inspirations.  My handle's original form was purely my version of min-maxing with the most robust Tanker armor around and the most satisfying recharge abilities, Stone/Energy (later was nerfed to be slower, dang it).  Mad him a mutant with stone powers who was injured in the Rikti invastion and had mechanical replacements to give him energy powers.  So I often use the desired powersets to create the character.

I have another that's completely St Patrick's Day inspired that's gone through many different forms, but I like his current version rather well.

I sometimes take cues from and massively alter up common concepts like a completely-did-not-work Negaduck who had a similar experience as Future Trunks and a poor janitor who got caught up with the nasty results of teleportation experiments in a certain New Mexico research facility which gave him electrical blast powers and his base suit is rather orange...  I also have 3 totally-not-Protoss tribe characters that I need to work on.

[MTeague]

4 minutes ago, Charistoph said:

I sometimes take cues from and massively alter up common concepts like a completely-did-not-work Negaduck who had a similar experience as Future Trunks and a poor janitor who got caught up with the nasty results of teleportation experiments in a certain New Mexico research facility which gave him electrical blast powers and his base suit is rather orange...

Half-Life 3: Confirmed

[Doc_Scorpion]

6 hours ago, srmalloy said:

I did this for one of my characters, Machinator Magickus, 'machinator' being taken from Kirk Mitchell's Germanicus trilogy, which applied the same -tor suffix to 'machinus', meaning 'someone who works with machines' -- essentially 'engineer'

My mind went from -tor to -inator, and now I want to build a bumbling super villain based on Dr Doofenschmirtz...

The other night I was playing the final mish of the Faultline arcs and my wife asked me what my hero was doing.  I couldn't remember "PsychoChronoMetron" (let alone how to pronounce it), so I just called it the "eff up the world inator".  She got it immediately.

[Clave Dark 5]

22 hours ago, biostem said:

I have to say - the costume creator definitely lends itself more toward tech-type outfits than perhaps any other category, so I'm with you on this...

This is one of my gripes about the system, actually - armor armor armor!  All the time, armor!  Past armor, modern day armor, futuristic armor!  Want some armor?  Of course you do!

[Lazarillo]

I don't think I really do this consciously, but this topic made me look over my stable, and when did, I realized, there is an oft-recurring theme of...I guess you could of control?  It doesn't apply to all of them, but a lot of my heroes in-character don't understand where their powers come from, or how they work, or in some cases, have the whole "they work just as much to keep their powers in check so they don't hurt people" thing going on.  Several of my villains are the sorts that sorta "gave in" to the corruption of their own powers, as well.  Probably a good 30% of the characters I've built and kept on Homecoming fall under that motif.

 

Weird how you don't see things, sometimes, until you look for them.