Opt-Out of Incarnate

[Frostweaver]

Bleah. Street level is an attitude, not a power level.

In my M&M game, I have flipping terrorists that are PL 15. Sure, an assault rifle is only 8 damage, but they hit rank 15 with powers like 'sniper' and 'autofire burst' that give them an extra 7 ranks of damage to compete with the 'big boys' without having a single 'super power'.

You want a street level incarnate? just don't bother slotting your Judgement. Or slot it and explain it as 'electric disks' like the street-level Character, Black Widow, uses to fight Aliens invading the streets of New york. The rest of it? Who cares what the power is CALLED. If you are street-level, the power is a street-level skill.

I have a rad/fire brute. You know, Radiation kills people, and Fire burns them alive... You don't 'arrest' people by dosing them with rads and burning them alive. Guess what? My description says I am surrounded by a cloud of fire-like Nanites that sap the strength from my opponents. A little aura-work and they tend to clump into cubelike structures, a quick recolor and BOOM! I am now a nanite manipulating powersuit character. To hell with what the 'buttons' say, they are metagame anyway... your real character isn't running around with a bunch of Macros stuck on her chest (unless she is, some superheroes are weird and meta like deadpool)

Spider-man beat Firelord. Squirrel-girl beat Thanos. The fantastic 4 regularly beat Doctor Doom and Galactus. Starlord beat Ego. Heck, Daredevil beat the BEYONDER. Street level characters facing world-class threats, and defeating them, is a core concept in comic books.

The problem is not the incarnate system. The problem is your lack of imagination. Try thinking outside the box. Or maybe taking on Crimson's mission chain... these Malta guys are street level MERCS and anti-superhero religious fanatics... and except for the occasional bit of 'superhero current' era technology, like big robots, they use guns and knives like other street-level enemies... Sappers are one of the most feared enemies in the game, and they are ABSOLUTELY as street level as you get. AND they can be level 50.

Power man got kicked into a coma by a shotgun blast under his chin. That invisible guy with the diamond skin got a bit of c4 stuffed up his butt and exploded by a bunch of dudes that aren't even very good fighters, let alone 'street level' supers. Street level is a description, not a power level. If you don't want to be connected to the well of power, just don't do the quest... Those extra abilities? Who cares what the game labels them, they are just the natural result of your training and experience, and are absolutely street level if you want to call them that.

 

 

Edited August 16, 2019 by Frostweaver
To make it less offensive.

[Yoru-hime]

36 minutes ago, Steampunkette said:

Personally I wouldn't want that. I feel like it creates too much of a gameplay divide in order to reinforce a narrative divide. 

 

I think most players would just take the "Train to 50" and then feel cheated or jilted at level 20+1 'cause their powers got shelved. Meanwhile a "Dedicated Street" hero who gets to 20+30 or whatever nomenclature we create is still going to have to get to level 50 in order to participate in any form of End-Game system or content (Unless the Devs split their 'End Game Design Time' across all the tree branches.

 

It just makes more sense to me to decouple level from narrative and have different "Game Mechanicy" moments crop up than what we currently get.

Probably P2W because they've already got the Opt-Out on Salvage drops and stuff on those.

Likewise, I just don't think I can get behind the idea that Joker's handgun wielding minions are somehow "equal" to Darkseid's armies at level 45 just "because the author willed it so". It just creates a logical dissonance to me that makes level seem very empty and meaningless. Yes, it's all just spreadsheets and arbitrary in the end, but at some point, if level doesn't at least somewhat consistently imply "X > Y", then what is it communicating to the player? "Narrative intent" doesn't feel like a very satisfying answer to that question.

 

So I suppose, do you need enemy levels? Seriously, would your ideas work in a game without standard levels? If story-wise you've reached the Joker and the Joker scales to be strong enough to give you a challenge (that you can tweak to taste) the numbers next to the name just don't matter much anyway, so do we need set levels? We were most of the way there with super-sidekicking anyway in CoH.

 

There would still have to be advancement to keep the game engaging, but if level numbers are the hang-up, perhaps there are alternatives to pursue.

 

Just tossing ideas around.

[PaxArcana]

1 hour ago, Steampunkette said:

And you wonder how I know you're not paying attention...

Just because you have failed to convince me, does not mean I am not paying attention.  Don't fall into that trap.  As convinced I am that you are completely dead wrong about the feasibility ofwhat you suggest, I am also equally convinced that you are intelligent.  So ... stop, take a step back.  Instead of assuming that I just don't "get" your Universal Truth, instead of assuming I'm just not "paying attention" to the wisdom you are dispensing ... step back, and try to see if maybe, just maybe, I am correct and your suggestion is unworkable in the way you insist on it being.

 

1 hour ago, Steampunkette said:

Because those Alien Looking dudes are her level Rorshabee can fight them.

::sigh::

That.  Is.  Not.  How.  Level.  Based.  RPG.  Mechanics.  Have.  Ever. Worked.

 

Game level = Power.

Narrative Scale (the entire "street" versus "cosmic" debate, and any intermediate steps one might posit) is dependent primarily on the magnitude of threat the villain(s), and their plot, pose.  On a (distantly) secondary level, Narrative Scale also refers to ... for wont of a better term, "the size of the stage".

 

"Street level" scale stories don't threaten, say, "the entire U.S. eastern seaboard"; that would be a Regional or National scale story.

 

They don't threaten the entire planet, that would be a Global scale story.

 

They don't threaten multiple solar systems, a galaxy, or even (borrowing from the MCU for a moment) "half of all living things in the entire universe".  That's where the Cosmic scale of story comes in.

... for a villain, and their plot, to operate within one of the above scales, they must have:

1. Enough power, personally or by proxy, to actually post a significant threat on the scale selected - Joker cannot credibly threaten the entire Green Lantern Corps all by himself (not even with Harley along for the ride);
2. Not so much power that, when faced with heroes who operate on the selected scale, they are undefeatable.  Power Pack isn't going to be able to stop Galactus from eatign the Earth by themselves.

...

So: Robin (any of them) cannot, himself and unsupported, operate on the same scale - protect people from the same kinds of threats - that Superman does.  He wouldn't stand a chance, no matter how lucky he got, against someone like Darkseid.  Robin is a Street-scale character, Darkseid is a Cosmic-scale villain.

 

In City of Heroes terms, Robin is a level 15 or 20-ish Scrapper.  Probably Street Justice / Ninjitsu, thinking about it.  (Well ... Damian Wayne might be a Ninja/Ninja Stalker, instead.  League of Shadows training, and all.)  He faces The Family, Council, maybe some Tsoo and Freakshow here and there.

 

Darkseid would be a Level 50+4 Archvillain.  He could SNEEZE, and a dozen Robins would fall over dead from clear across the zone.  He is faced by the entire Justice League .... not middle- and high-school-aged sidekicks like Robin (or Kid Flash, or Beast Boy, or ...).

 

...

 

But you're insisting that Robin should be as able to go mano-a-mano with Darkseid, as Superman can.  Because you keep insisting that Robin should not have to stop short of the level cap "just" to stay a Street-scale hero.  Which means, Robin has to be at least level 50.  Maybe 50-plus-something, himself.  And you're right about one thing: at that point, he's no longer Robin.

Indeed, he's probably no longer Nightwing, either.  (Remember, the original Robin, Dick Grayson, outlevelled the Boy Wonder sidekick role; he grew up, and adopted an adult persona of his own.  He went from Street scale, to a Regional, National, or similar scale of story.  His comics issues would no longer be about a teenaged boy trying to balance crimefighting, homework, and maybe asking that new girl out on a date; they would be about ... wait for it ... bigger things.

 

That growth, is what is modelled with Levels, in an RPG.

1 hour ago, Steampunkette said:

The Gameplay level = Narrative level thing is how it works in -this- game. It's how it works in a lot of games. But it doesn't -have- to.

Yes, it does.  In forty years of people desperately trying to come up with something different, no-one has ever even partially succeeded in doing what you want: having characters of the same power level operate at differing narrative scales.

Every single character with, say, Green Lantern's level of power, is at least concerned with planet-wide threats.  Not "hey I should go stop that gang-war six blocks over".

 

...

 

You are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.  And no matter how hard you hammer on it, that peg is just not going to fit.

[Frostweaver]

Nonsense. I specifically recall superman tangling with thugs VERY frequently in the 50's serial. And sometimes, narratively, they were a real and credible threat.
And again, spider-man (street level) vs. Firelord (world scale threat). Starlord (a couple of blaster pistols and jet boots) Vs. Ego (Universe scale threat)
Yes, sometimes their power gets temporarily 'boosted' to match the threats, and usually it is their cleverness and creativity that win the day, but even James Bond used to face off against world-scale threats on a regular basis with nothing more than a toy pistol and a few gimmicks and the superpower of seducing just about every girl that crossed his path.

My pistol blaster is extremely street level. and often he faces off against world-class threats by sneaking into a mission, through the lines of powerful henchmen, and then sneakily shooting the boss in his vulnerable areas... That giant suit of power armor? well, my bullets find a weak point in the left knee and go whanging around inside, tearing up the circuits and critically injuring the runt inside giving orders.

Edited August 16, 2019 by Frostweaver

[PaxArcana]

19 minutes ago, Frostweaver said:

Spider-man beat Firelord. Squirrel-girl beat Thanos. The fantastic 4 regularly beat Doctor Doom and Galactus. Starlord beat Ego. Heck, Daredevil beat the BEYONDER. Street level characters facing world-class threats, and defeating them, is a core concept in comic books.

Comic books are not games.

Games need rules, to provide a structure external to the participants because no one of them is in absolute control, and because ...

 

... when you were a small child, did you ever play "cops and robbers" ...?  or "war", or "guns" ...?  Young kids running around with toy guns, yelling "pew-pew-pew" and whatever to shoot each other?  If you did ... do you remember the arguments that went:

"I shot you, you're dead!"
"Nu-uh!"
"Yeah-huh!"
"Nu-uh!"
"Yeah-huh!"
"Nu-uh!"
"Yeah-huh!"
"Nu-uh!"
"Yeah-huh!"
(et cetera ... ad infinitum, ad absurdum)
 

... rules exist to prevent that.  Instead, it's:

"I rolled a 17 to hit, for 23 fire damage."
"I have a Defense Rating of 15, and +4 versus fire.  Your shot was deflected off my energy shield."
"Damnit, I need to roll better."

 

Well, game mechanics exist largely for that reason: to provide an objective judge of success or failure.

 

"Level", in those systems that use it, is intended to directly model "amount of raw power/potential/ability".  A 15th level character is always going to be much, much more powerful than a 5th level character.  Always .... it's an inevitable component of that sort of game design.

 

None of which applies to a novel, or a comic book.  Because in that, you don't have someone who is personally and directly invested in "Thanos wins", nor do you have anyone personally and directly invested in "Squirrel Girl wins".  What you have is a single narrator-voice (even if it's a team of people, they're all rowing in the same direction for the same goals), whose goal is to entertain the readers ... by any means.  If Squirrel Girl handing Thanos his kiester without breaking a sweat is what will entertain the readers?  She does.

OTOH, if Squirrel Girl "doing a Coulsen" and getting stomped into very dead pink mush by an arrogantly confident Thanos in order to inspire the other heroes to redouble their efforts to defeat Thanos is what the readers would be more entertained by?  That is what happens.

 

No mechanics.  No "Hmm, but Squirrel Girl has a Defense class if 23 due to her agility, and Thanos only has a +8 attacl this round".

 

In a story, Narrative is everything.

But in a game, it has to share the spotlight with mechanics .... including, the impact that differing Levels have on the outcome of contested actions - whatever those Levels might be called.

[PaxArcana]

3 minutes ago, Frostweaver said:

Nonsense. I specifically recall superman tangling with thugs VERY frequently in the 50's serial. And sometimes, narratively, they were a real and credible threat.

Because the 50's black-and-white serial had that as the Narrative Scale.  That Superman couldn't push the moon out of orbit.

 

Kingdom Come Superman could.

50's Serial Superman couldn't have taken a nuclear missile to the face and lived through it.

Kingdom Come Superman DID.

...

 

Two different stories, and effectively, two different versions of Superman.

5 minutes ago, Frostweaver said:

And again, spider-man (street level) vs. Firelord (world scale threat). Starlord (a couple of blaster pistols and jet boots) Vs. Ego (Universe scale threat)

Comics or Movies, not games.

 

Which makes it "apples and oranges".

5 minutes ago, Frostweaver said:

James Bond

Different genre, with different matchup of Power scale to Narrative scale.

 

Joker or Lex Luthor would likely have turned Bond into so much ground meat.  Before page two of the first issue.

[Frostweaver]

Stop trying to explain mechanics. I develop video games, I know full well concept has to take a backseat to mechanics sometimes.

I am talking about narrative. And Narrative is why your character looks like a guy in a costume, instead of a text $ symbol in the middle of a square on the screen made up of aascii # symbols. Narrative engages the Player's imagination, and imagination is why many people spend hours and hours in the costume creator for a character they may never take past level 5.
Narratively, a minor exercise of your imagination makes your pistol blaster taking on Hamidon make complete and utter sense.

And about superman? Prove that 50's serial superman was less powerful than modern superman. He was just as immune to bullets, He flew with those funky noises, just because 50's serial superman never TRIED to knock the moon out of orbit doesn't 'prove' that he was incapable of it.

Narrative threats have ZERO relation to power level. They may have some relation to power 'versatility' but a character with enough versatility to trivialise a vastly higher narrative threat is 'taking advantage of an exploit'

Edited August 16, 2019 by Frostweaver

[PaxArcana]

With Narrative, but no Mechanics, you don't have a game at all.  You have a book, or a movie.

 

With Mechanics, but no Narrative, you have a game - just, a mindless one.  Probably a shooty-arcade-y thing.

 

With BOTH ... you have a role-playing game.  Like CoX.

[Frostweaver]

Yeah, the sky is blue, too. Oh, and sticking your hand in a blast furnace might hurt a little.
But please, keep missing the point. Narrative threat level and power threat level are completely unconnected. Case in point, the circle of Thorns in the Hollows are trying to take over the world. At level 40 I got a mission to protect a senator from Malta trying to stop a bill to help supers. Totally different power levels, vastly different narrative threat levels.

Street Level vs. Universe level threats are entirely, 100% narrative threat levels, and thus don't bear the slightest relation to what power level your character is. The ONLY cases where they may impact is when there is a mechanic in place which increases a character's VERSATILITY. For instance, doctor strange gets more and more different spells as he gets more powerful, and thus a larger and larger number of lower-narrative-level threats are no longer really a threat to him... because he has a magical answer to every possible scenario lower level narrative threats present.

But in a video game, that is very difficult to simulate, to the point where it's a mistake to even try. Thus a narrative threat can occur at ANY power level. Heck, the tutorial involves a planet-scale narrative threat at level 1, with the Galaxy city invasion.

I have been running a superhero RPG for almost 20 years. The same party contains a girl who is the galactic emperor's ex-fiancee, who is capable of literally ripping one of Jupiter's moons from orbit with her mind and rotating it around the earth for a superhero base, and a guy who regenerates and beats up bad guys with a pair of police batons. and despite their vast difference in narrative threat levels, they are the EXACT SAME power level. And they can coexist very nicely in the same supergroup. Their recent adventures include both an invasion of undead from a parallel dimension ruled by Cthulhu, and a group of ex-alphabet agency operatives running a superhero organ bootlegging operation. The Narrative level of the invasion was obviously world-scale, while the second was only the scale of a DNPC who was kidnapped and injected with a superherocreation drug specifically to be parted out for organs. The second adventure was VASTLY more challenging to the group despite it's far lower narrative threat level, because the power to turn the entire surface of the reath into a ruin doesn't necessarily make you immune to a government operative who can inject himself into your dreams can cause hallucinations.

Edited August 16, 2019 by Frostweaver

[Myrmidon]

2 hours ago, Steampunkette said:

Probably P2W because they've already got the Opt-Out on Salvage drops and stuff on those.

If it were to be P2W, hopefully people wouldn’t have to pay to opt out.

[PaxArcana]

4 hours ago, Frostweaver said:

I have been running a superhero RPG for almost 20 years. The same party contains a girl who is the galactic emperor's ex-fiancee, who is capable of literally ripping one of Jupiter's moons from orbit with her mind and rotating it around the earth for a superhero base, and a guy who regenerates and beats up bad guys with a pair of police batons. and despite their vast difference in narrative threat levels, they are the EXACT SAME power level.

(Emphasis mine)

 

I find this extremely hard to believe.  What system are you using?

[Megajoule]

So two things about the whole notion that "only Cosmic heroes can/should level all the way to 50":

 

One, that's wayyyy beyond the scope of what I was asking for at the start, and I have to think we're getting off track.

 

Two, you're saying that if I choose to limit my character's conceptual power level, I should also be satisfied with having (say) only one or two attacks, and a similar number of defenses or utility powers?  That because of the concept I've chosen, I should also be restricted to a much smaller number of powers?  And possibly giving up vital (under the current game design) tools like mez resist, or a self-heal?

 

Precedent suggests that every character, regardless of origin or player-imagined power level, can - as a matter of game mechanics - reach level 50.  Going beyond that is the exclusive province of Incarnates.

Edited August 17, 2019 by Megajoule

[Frostweaver]

5 minutes ago, PaxArcana said:

(Emphasis mine)

 

I find this extremely hard to believe.  What system are you using?

We have gone through several. Started out in Aberrant, translated to champions, translated again to Mutants and Masterminds, and then to Fudge.

The thing is, in narrative vs. power levels, non-combat threats are not considered part of the combat equation. Moving a small moon, (more of a giant asteroid really, it's one of Jupiter's thousands of junk moons) while it requires some flexibility, is not really much of a challenge in game terms....If you are capped at a Legendary+3 attack, it doesn't matter if that attack is a target pistol with lots of damage mods, or opening a singularity that's compressed to the size of a single person. And in the game system we are using, Legendary+3 damage is vastly more than enough to Kill a normal, unpowered human. Said baton-weilder could, in a straight fight, probably tromp her butt.

Not to mention, being able to scourge the surface of the Earth doesn't help you much if you are hunting a rogue Vampire through the Old Chicago steam tunnels. You could ABSOLUTELY create superman in Fudge or M&M as a low-level level character and have him do nearly every single thing that superman can do in the comic books, up to and including knocking moons out of orbit, flying fast enough to travel through time, and cut planets in half with laser-beam eyes.

Sometimes you do have to practice restraint, or simply tell the character you will not allow them to do something because it's stupid and would wreck your game. Like dropping a moon on the east coast. They either agree to do it or you eject them from the game. Obviously the latter option should not be necessary (especially if said character is your wife or best friend) but they are in the realm of 'narrative events' not dice pools.
What can do is make the character 'immune' to a limited number of special effects, because that is roleplaying, or narrative, Even in Mutants and masterminds, a level 1 character could buy 'immunity' to kinetic damage for 7 character points and still have 8 left to make his (otherwise rather unskilled) character concept. That will not protect him from a levin bolt fired by a master mage.

That's the thing about superheroes compared to almost any other hero Genre. Power Level does not connect to Narrative level in any meaningful matter, except for advancing the story.

 

[Tahliah]

I've always loved your posts, Megajoule, but I don't get this one. You're complaining that incarnate materials pile up in your storage but take no room from your usable storage and that you are seeing messages about incarnate stuff that you don't want to see?  Okay, so just ignore the stuff piling up in your storage that takes no space at all from your usable storage; you can even set your view so that you do not have to see the incarnate drops at all!  As to the messages, you can do several things: disable them, move them to a tab you infrequently view, or just minimize chat (except whatever chat window you need to keep your RP going, of course). 

 

In other words, I see this as a weird thing to complain about: "Something that doesn't affect me at all makes me want to request a change that will affect everyone else."  I don't get that.  So what if you have threads and shards you don't want to use?  There are many more of us who are happy to have them.  Delete them, trade them in for random recipes or salvage or whatever and make some influence on the market . . . or do what most people would do and simply ignore them.  Who knows, one day, you might want to make that toon incarnate.  If that day never comes, so what?  Just ignore the threads and shards.  You don't have to look at them. 

 

If you feel infringed on (or whatever) by messages about incarnate drops, change your chat so you aren't assailed by these unwelcome notifications.  It's not hard, just disable the notifications or if you're afraid you'll miss something, move them to a new tab where they won't interrupt your RP until you choose to view that tab. 

 

Generally:  I just don't get how we all went from gut-wrenching, heart-broken sorrow about COH being shuttered to griping about being forced to endure the horror of incarnate drops without our express permission.  /smh

Edited August 17, 2019 by Tahliah
grammar/teensy desnarking

[Megajoule]

You're right that, on the game mechanics side, it's a fairly minor thing either way.

I've tried to explain why it matters to me conceptually in this post.  I want to go back to having a clear bright line between characters of mine who are Incarnates, and those who are not.

[Frostweaver]

" Precedent suggests that every character, regardless of origin or player-imagined power level, can - as a matter of game mechanics - reach level 50.  Going beyond that is the exclusive province of Incarnates. "

No, going beyond that is the exclusive province of people who choose to do the...really really terribly written incarnate quest.
Mechanically you can go and get the incarnate powers, without ever bothering to 'link with the well' You can go beat up Marauder, and utterly choose to ignore the bad writing that is inherent in the concept of 'threads', shards, and empyrion merits... what the heck are empyrion merits anyway? What do they look like or taste like?

Incarnate is utterly Metagame that the writers tried to CROWBAR into having an in-game explanation The reality is, your character just gets a little bit better. The merits and stuff? That's just one more type of silly salvage to collect, and has nothing whatsoever to do with your character concept.

[Tahliah]

Just now, Megajoule said:

You're right that, on the game mechanics side, it's a fairly minor thing either way.

I've tried to explain why it matters to me conceptually in this post.  I want to go back to having a clear bright line between characters of mine who are Incarnates, and those who are not.

There is a clear bright line, though, Megajoule.  Your incarnate toons are . . . well, incarnate. 

 

I just don't get this at all.  But I think you're awesome.  :)

[GM Capocollo]

I'm closing this thread not because I disagree with the suggestion or don't want to see it come to fruition, but because the discussion about it's become non-productive.  The OP's clearly stated their case for why they want it, other people have disagreed, and I don't think there's anything to be gained by having even more people come in with the same handful of counterarguments.

Edited August 17, 2019 by GM Capocollo