Altmania!

Katherine made up another character on Guardian (Get it? We’re her guardians, so we play with her on Guardian? It was Margie’s clever idea), Storm Ice Girl, which is not very catchy, but pretty much describes what kind of Controller she is (Ice primary, Storm secondary). She loves to blow people away with the gust of wind …
She’s not adept at the mouse yet, which I man, but she handles the nav keys and the fire keys for the powers. Oh, and she bounces a lot.
And as long as she only wants to wear that Metal Witchblade Bikini in-game, I have no problem with it.
Meanwhile, I have, as Margie gleefully puts it, caught scrapperitis, characterized by the need to build and run scrappers. To that end, I’ve sadly dropped Suzy Atom (who was really an energy tanker I was trying to run as a scrapper), and built the goth “problem child” Lynn Calodo, a Dark/Invuln scrapper with a bad attitude.
Doyce, at least, will get the joke.
Pictures to follow.
LC is intended (for a while at least) to be an afternoon “solo” character, on those occasions between my getting home/off work with Kitten and Margie getting home. I don’t really have many other good solo characters — I think Scrappers lend themselves best to that, and OFFICER is still having power problems.
And, hell, I’ve fallen in love with the Dark Scrapper powers (but intentionally avoided the Dark/Regen and Dark/Dark pairings that Margie has already “staked out”). Kittenyboo is a Dark/SR, but I don’t play her that much, for obvious reasons.
We’ll see how she does.
UPDATE: Oh, so true …

Voices

One of the biggest challenges of the multi-alt world I play in is keeping up different character voices, particularly in the comm channel chatter. (It’s important on teams, too, but since Margie and I duo so much — subject for another thread — it’s a bit less so. I’m afraid we don’t get into that much roleplay with each other …)
Anyway, what I’ve noticed:

  1. Quiet, reticent, and/or brooding characters are a lot of fun to write about (and tend, amazingly enough, to be what I write), but are a lot more difficult to play. This is true in F2F RPGs, of course, but it’s even more true when most RP comes about through conversation on the comm channels. If you don’t speak, you aren’t visible; that’s probably a rule for life, too. You need to find something to talk about. Which leads us to …
  2. Humor is always good for a quick tell. Which is difficult if you’re playing a quiet, reticent, and/or brooding character, as noted above. So …
  3. Come up with a character voice: something to talk about, visual distinctions of voice, and a sense of humor.

So, for my characters …

  • Velvet: Jokes about most stuff, distinctive accent (or spelling, at least). Always chatty, and generally friendly, if a bit touchy at times. The easiest character I have to RP on the comms.
  • Psi-clone: Speaks much more formally. Dry wit, and a love of wordplay. Always willing to blather at length. Second-easiest for me to play, assisted by the fact that he’s an exagerration (I hope) of myself, so I just have to ask what I would say if I were a hero.
  • Torchielle: Friendly, but I don’t have her “voice” yet. Makes references to her family a lot. A fair amount of tentative stammering (“um”) to make her comms distinct. Not sure about her sense of humor, which is a problem. Need to play her more.
  • Honeygun: Strong, sarcastic sense of humor. Pretty easy to play, though she seems to have been off the comms for a while …
  • Truly Unstable: Fun and easy to play — just (a) act Daffy Duck crazy, and (b) mix contemporary slang with Rennfaire-like pronouncements. Toss in the occasional dark-and-angsty lament just for spice and to throw people off. Need to do more with him …
  • OFFICER: Haven’t gotten on the comms yet with him. No sense of humor, but may start developing on. Problem is, there’s any number of “I am not human, but, like Data, am trying to learn how to behave like one” folks out there on the com lines, which makes him a lot less distinct of a character. Visually, though, since half his words are in all-CAPS, it may work. We’ll see. I’m not 100% happy with the power set at the moment, so he may be dropped some time soon.
  • Sister Chinook: My problems with her last night provoked this post. I don’t have a good voice for her yet. She’s cynical and a bit sarcastic, but also one of those “quiet” characters. Since she’s Canadian, I need to remember to throw in an “eh?” here and there, for visual distinction. Or, if I can, spell some of my “-or” words as “-our”. Stuff like that.
  • Suzy Atom: She was easy (announcement coming). Wide-eyed, enthusiastic naif, a combo Silver Age Supergirl (cough) with season 1 Mary Richards. Openly friendly, prone to saying “gee” a lot. Never long on enough to make that much of an impression, I fear (most of my RP with her was actually at the Consortium party).

One problem I have to watch is the non-verbal stuff. While I don’t keep my cross-dressing multi-alt gameplay a secret (see Google), I also don’t broadcast it, even in OOC comms. If people think my alts are run by completely different (and infrequently present) players, I’d be delighted, though it’s not worth to me a huge amount of effort make it so. To that end, though, I have to be careful about always using the same verbal tells between characters — like, “Heh.” Or how I flag OOC material. Or, it occurs to me, always giving an /em wave when I run across people.
(I also try to usually have a gap between when my character says hello/goodbye on the coalition chat and when Margie’s does.)
Actually, how you enter/leave the comms (or great/farewell other characters) is another signature. Velvet tends towards a “Howdy”/”Hey, kids, what’s shakin?” sort. PC tends toward more formality and jovial bonhomie (“Greetings, all. How goes the war?”). Others do more curt addressing folks by names — but, again, curtness is hard to pull off since it usually goes hand in hand with, well, not talking. And when you don’t talk, you’re not visible.
Anyway, enough blather of my own here. Just stray thoughts to put down.

Sisters are doin’ it for themselves

Decided to go with the alts last night, so we dug out Sister Chinook and Toxic Sister and put them through their Level 10 paces.
Must … get … travel … powers … sooooooon …
Actually, it was hard going at first. Deaths. Many (or more than usual, even discounting the recent grey-bop-fest) deaths. Scrapper deaths are not uncommon. Controller deaths, not so much so.
SC seems a lot squishier than PC, even though both are controllers (with Empathy) with single-target focuses. Or maybe TS isn’t quite as shock-and-awe-inspiring as Amorpha (yet). Or maybe it was just the plethora of toxic vomit.
That began to turn-around mid-evening, as SC dinged to 10, and I contemplated my new power. I’d been planning on getting Resurrection (always popular at/in parties), but I did some quick flipping through my file folder on SC and …
… hmmmm … maybe …
Oh. Yeah. Shiver. Very broad cone, decent range, minimal endurance, quick recharge, serious opponent slowing.
Suddenly, folks are running away. Or charging me. Or fleeing TS’s spines. And suddenly the fire rate of the baddies goes way down.
And it stacks. Between the slows of my other ice attacks, and TS’s toxins, those folks were hitting whatever slow cap there was.
Much, much easier time of it. Still died once (squishy, close quarters, too many obstacles blocking my LoS and powers, Shiver in particular), but more than made up for it.
We went from struggling through Kings Row-level sewer mishes to street hunting around Steel Canyon. Felt much better by the end of the evening.

Clean-up work

So, according to Margie’s exhaustive research, you can only have three open defined story arcs going on at a time. Various assignments from various contacts can be one-off sorts of things, or they can (and usually do?) lead to story arcs.
(A story arc is a series of encounters — sort of a like a TF over time — that lead to a final big encounter. Frostfire is the climax of a story arc. Dr. Vahz is the climax of a story arc. Etc.)
Again, it seems you can have only three of these open at a time. If your pool of three is full, contacts simply won’t introduce new story arc assignments, which, obviously, impedes your access to content. You can still usually get contacts, and assignments, but they won’t be the “big” ones (unless you tag along with others).
So what Margie and I have been doing for the past couple of days with our main pairs — Amorpha, Psi-clone, Velvet, P-siren — is clean up all the old, outstanding story arcs we had hanging fire. This was initially provoked by P-siren not being able to get the Stephanie Peebles story arc (wedding ring, I believe). We went to each contact that we had an incomplete bar on their display and pinged them for any ongoing missions. If we still got one (which, if it was just generic, we wouldn’t have gotten at our levels), we took it.
It’s dull, boring, grinding work (for CoH play, that is). I mean, it’s fun — for a while — to one-shot or two-shot baddies, or just waltz past grey clocks and vahz to get to the bosses. But when you get a “defeat all” mish in there, it’s a pain. And there’s no XP or Influence to be had, only, at the end of some arcs, an aging DO.
And, to be honest, after you’ve graduated from bopping Tsoo, beating up on them hour after hour is like sitting through driving school …
Some of it we did solo, others we teamed (just for efficiency on defeat-all, since only Amorpha’s a fast damage-dealer of that group, though it was amusing conjuring up Phantom Army in the middle of a group and have them actually taking folks out in a shot or two).
But … it’s done. So now we can go on to some new stuff. Yay!
(Memo to self: go through this routine with all characters as they get around level 20. And finish arcs as you go ….)

Kickin’ butt and takin’ names

Finally, finally, back into the game yesterday. Did some prelim/placating work with Kitty Shoulder and Kitteniboo, then onto the main action with Amorpha and Psi-clone.
Blasted in parallel through a load of Striga content — including finishing up the Stephanie Peebles arc (Heracles? No prob), finding ourselves having outlevelled Long John, and on to Scary Contact Who Stands In The Middle Of The Cemetary.
Blasted through a couple of those mishes (easy hunts when it’s both of us with the mission), until we hit the Banished Pantheon and the Mausoleum. Amorpha’s version, as she’s managed to pull a level ahead of PC, was a bit spicier, and we ended up both eating mausoleum dirt once in the middle of way too many shamans, husks, and a purple Totem.
But by the time we were done with both our versions of the mish, we’d gotten out of debt, and were both over half-way to the next level.
I’m not sure how we’d do this arc without A’s massive damage, applied selectively around PC’s Group Invis and Deceive (“You are my friend, Mr. Totem, oh, yes, my friend”), but it would be a lot more difficult.
Felt nice.

Making life (or TFs) easier

Coming to the test server soon (if not already), and, one hopes, to the real servers shortly thereafter …

All Task Forces and Trials will now accept any player who has reached at least the minimum level of the Task Force or Trial to play it. Players above the maximum level of the Task Force or Trial will be auto-exemplared to the highest level of the Task Force or Trial. They will remained exemplared until they are no longer a member of the taskforce or trial.
This will make life a lot easier for people who have levelled beyond given TFs and Trials. No worries about exemplaring and/or losing the member you’re exemplared to. I have an odd sense that it might homogenize things a bit (no need to put together mixed parties — all your level 45s can just gang up and auto-exemp down to do Positron) — but I’m not sure that’s not a bad thing, just … different.
Still, I think it nets good.

CoH – The Next Generation

2005-06-12_kspk.jpgIntroducing the one, the only, the dire portent of Things to Come …
Kitty Shoulder!
Designed by Katherine. Named by Katherine. Bubbler/Energy Defender.
She’s the one on the left.
She likes to jump.
Too. Much. Fun.
And where would she be without her boon companion, the black cat scrapper, Kittenyboo? (She was to be Princess Kittenyboo, but that exceeded the name length restrictinons.) Katherine helped design her, too. She’s the one on the right.
Too. Much. More. Fun.
Katherine plays KS on Margie’s lap. Margie does the navagating, Katherine does the blasting. And bouncing.
On Guardian, naturally.
There’s even role-play, as Kittenyboo doesn’t like to go into water — but Katherine protests that even though Kittenyboo is a cat, she doesn’t have to be played like a cat all the time. On the other hand, Shoulder Kitty is half cat (or so we are told), and likes to swim in deep water.
And so it begins …

Alternatives

We’d gotten just started playing some Kazima/Torchielle teaming when Champion decided to take it’s normal 11 p.m. faceplant. Just as well, since I’d already died once, and almost twice (very little mob control, lots of aggro. Need to figure out some better tactics).
So we switched over to Triumph, and ran some with Molly Magpie (my grav controller) and Toxic Wasteland (Margie’s spine scrapper). That was a bit more succesful, and we both dinged (to 5 and 3, respectively) before calling it a night.

Independent agent

Only had a brief time to run with Margie tonight — between a late business dinner and Champion crashing for several minutes, not much time to do anything.
So Velvet — vying to get over 23 so that she can do the Terra Volta thang, went soloing, slowly, slowly, slowly, waiting for an invite …
… and, after about 20 minutes of nada, she got an unsolicited invite, a Coalition-based request for help, and an SG-based request for help. When it rains …
Ended up with the Coalition one, helping Vangarde (LF) and WillO’Wisp (FP). We were 23, 25, and 27, so I SKed to Will (the higher), which meant I could do the Tanky thing without too much problem. Will, as an Ice Controller, could lock down most crowds anyway, which meant that Van’s blaster fire didn’t have to hit every time.
Worked out well, if later than expected — but all three of us dinged.
So now Velvet has to figure out her level 24 power. I’d originally slotted Stamina there, since she’s now chronically running out of end (particularly if she has both Temp Invuln and Unyielding running). But Doyce asked the other evening about her having Invincibility, which was slotted for 26 — but is a kick-ass power.
Hmmmm.
I replaced one DR in each of those two toggles with a EndRedux, and that helped a bit, but not enough. Even with Will’s various kinetic hoohahs, my End was pretty dicy most of the evening.
So, short of having some great revelation about how to do it differently (I do have a respec in my pocket, after all, and plenty of infl to replace DOs), I’ll probably stick with the original plan — Stamina at 24, Invincibility at 26. But that’ll be lovely when I get it …

Signs of trouble

Sign of Trouble #1: When you go out to search for an additional team member, at the behest of the others (because your team is too weak to make solid headway against the baddies in the mish), the person you find accepts … and immediately starts up a chat, en route, about World of Warcraft.
Sign of Trouble #2: While you are busy searching, and having told the others that you are doing so (at their behest, mind you), they wander off, encounter bad guys, and run for their lives, past you, screaming for help. You, of course, are busy in search screens, and, since you were resting after the last hellish encounter, had your shields down.
Hilarity ensues.
Somehow, I managed to not get killed. Somehow, the others on the team got killed two or three times.
Trouble, indeed. Though it netted Velvet another bubble of XP.

Aaaaaaahhh …

Finally, finally, finally got back on, after a week of life in Faerie. Nice.
Is it my imagination, or have the graphics been spiffed up? I haven’t been following the boards in depth, either, but I don’t recall seeing anything about that.
Anyhoo, Amorpha and Psi-clone did the rounds, fiddling about with DOs (post-Synapse), and clearing off the last of our non-TI/IP mishes.
Which led to an end-of-story-arc adventure against a warehouse full of gray Clockwork (Leo’s Garage — nice window dressing!) and the two of us taking down an orange Dr Vahzilok and his gray minions.
No sweat.
Interestingly enough, when I completed Dr. Vahz, since it was my mission, I was offered (upon contacting my contact) a selection of DOs, explaining what they all meant. Not seen that before, but nice.
Not sure what level of play I’ll be having this week (I suspect Margie will be hitting the sack early, being the Single Parent, and I’ll be having business dinners each night one time zone away), but I look forward to at least a little bit more than I’ve had over the last week.

Expanding boundaries

Ran Kazima and Torchielle yesterday, while Honeygun sulked …
Did some light running around — cleared out a couple of old missions for Kazima, while we got our duoing up and working. Then Margie suggested we look at helping Dr. Awesome …
Ended up in a big group of 8 on the “find Patient Zero and the cure to the Vahzilok Plague” mish. Everyone was exemped down to 15-18 or so (K was at 15, T was at 16), and …
… lots of purple. A bit of red, but lots and lots and lots of purple. Masses of abominations, eidolons a-plenty. The dangers of 8-man teams.
Good teams, though. Cobalt, Healing Rayne, Granite Rock, the good Dr., a few others. In a battle like that, deaths were inevitable, but Torchielle managed to avoid it (Kazima did not). And there was lots, and lots, and lots of XP.
Kazima went from barely 15 to just into 16 for the evening. Torchy went from a half-a-bar-of-debt into 16 to a bubble short of 17.
Good fun, good play.
I’ve been noodling with ideas of how to do a decent rotation of characters, to make sure our “mains” get most of the exposure, but we get some time in with the others. Trouble is, we already had two pairs of mains. Now it looks like we might end up with three.
Regardless, I plan on keeping an eye out better on the chat lines for groups forming up. Duoing is fun, and our best pasttime, but the social aspect of larger groups and exemp/SK stuff is not to be dismissed.

Getting back into the swing

After a long dry spell, we’ve finally gotten back into the swing of things with CoH — just in time to head off to California, alas.
Friday night was our Synapse TF for Psi-clone and Amorpha. Went pretty well — minimal character deaths (and most of those from not paying attention), Babbage went down pretty quickly, ditto CK. Ran about 4½ hours, and no real new lessons learned, except that a discussion of tactics beforehand is probably a good idea, and varying those tactics to keep interest up (esp. when each mish has the same foe and, often, the same map) is an even better one.
Saturday we (briefly) played with Amazonite and Truly Unstable. TU’s a hoot to do over the chat boards. And, in one of those “small world” bits, no sooner had I said, “I look forward to meeting you someday” to Liberty Bill, then he swooped past me as I was entering Perez and he was exiting.
(Blink.)
We chatted, then went on, but it was … odd.
Sunday night was for Velvet and P-siren. Did a Sky Raiders mish (Velvet’s), followed by our first Banished Pantheon mish (PS’s). An amusing contrast (and one of the plusses/minuses of running with a science/magic duo).
Margie’s been feeling less thrilled with PS of late, and so we decided to call in some help on a mission, just to give her additional bubbly goodness to try out.
Ended up running with Avocet (exemped down, until things got hot) and Enyxia (who was new to us, though we’d seen her in the coms for a bit). Timed Sky Raiders mish that turned out to be a bit hotter than expected, leading to at least one or two character deaths before we succeeded (Velvet couldn’t quite hold enough aggro, esp. with force fields up and Porters getting past me). Still, fun.
2005-05-22_skyraiders2.jpg
Margie enjoyed playing with another psychic.
Monday night was scheduled to be the Cavern of Transcendence trial — the last gasp attempt. Margie’s been feeling antsy about not running Kazima, and I have … ideas for Honeygun, so we were ready. Margie did all the planning and coordination of folks, we brought in a ringer to clear the troll caves, and …
Damn. One person we thought was 15 was actually 16, skewing the numbers on the TF so that we couldn’t actually run it. Since we started it late, to accomodate one player, it was even later by the time we determined that, and none of the higher-levels had sometihng in the 12-15 range.
So we had to call it a night. I’m seriously uncertain whether it’s going to actually happen; as much as the “Transcendent” badge would be perfect for Kazima, I think Margie wants to run her more. We’ll see.
2005-05-23_gmbot.jpgWe decided we needed some success for the evening, so Margie pulled out Amorpha, I Psi-clone, and we headed off to …
Oh. That annoying Skyway mish Amorpha had where the mission door was somewhere below the pavement, but we couldn’t find any sort of flood control tunnel or other method of getting down there. Margie’d done a bunch of searching in the sewers, and we’d even had Doyce/Hang Time come and help. Nada.
So Margie petitioned, and, within about 15 minutes, GM_RICHA appeared, a very polite Police Drone. He met us at the spot, and then he descended down through the pavement to the mission entrance. That made it very clear where the access point was — a drainage entrance multiple blocks away (which is kind of goofy).
The Drone was very nice, asked if we needed any other help, then left.
Old mish. Cleared it with no trouble (fortunately it was a Free Hostage, not Kill All).
Similarly old mish (we just did Synapse, so we’re higher than we were) against the Tsoo for me. Then we decided to do the “Board Train” mish that Amorpha had.
It’s the first of that type we’d done, and we were depositied in Omicron Park (hmmm — wonder where that is on the city map) to break up fights between Warriors and Tsoo. Which is fine, except that we got cocky against the whites/blues, and ran into trouble when we hit the worst group, which was large and had two yellow (and powered) leaders, leaving Amorpha dead.
Hrm.
I rezzed her, and we ended up clearing the rest of the park to get rid of the debt.

Details

2005-05-19_scts_ice.jpgI love the occasional detail you can see in this game when you get Really Close Up. As in this shot, where Sister Chinook was up against a wall, and so I got close-in enough that, when I did my various icy goodness, I could see both snowflakes and ice crystals forming in the air around me.
Neat.
(That’s Toxic Sister in the background, btw. We call ourselves the Death by DoT Sisters.)

That’s my Mom …

carey.jpgCarey, the Natural (?) Fire/Fire Tanker, as created and run by my Mom last weekend.
And, given the nature of Fire/Fire, a lot more visible in this picture than in any of the in-game action shots.
Mom opined that she thought that might not have been the best of powersets, given the difficulty in seeing what the heck was going on when all the flame armor was up.