I ask this because I'm curious as to your 'how' and 'why' behind character creation. So, the question is how did you utilize character creation? Did you create a series of independent (or even loosely related) characters with their own stories? Did you have any characters linked by backstory? Or did you just make characters for the sake of being a super hero/villain?
All of my characters were connected by a universe I developed independent of CoH's lore. CoH seemed open enough for that, and the character creation process facilitated it beautifully. At least... better than I could ever write. Their relationships would change, which usually entailed deleting and remaking them. I can't count the number of "Kaylee Lockhart"s I made.
/gotopicgo
Some of my characters had backstories, but many of them were just the embodiment of a concept with no explanation. On one occasion I tried to make a villain that was tied to one of my heroes, but I couldn't get a power combination and look that fit the particular villain. On another occasion I tried to make a hero that was tied to that same character, but couldn't achieve the look I wanted again.
I tend to be quite proud of many of the concept characters I came up with for City of Heroes simply because of the fact I loved playing in the generator for times on end. I remember that even my first character on Triumph had a backstory despite the fact I had yet to discover roleplaying. All of my characters from my time on Virtue had at least one thing about them that made them unique in my eyes, that would make me smile as I played them.
I'm technically supposed to be a poet, but I got so involved in the creation of these superheroes-- all the nitpicky details of who they are and what their powers were-- that it basically became my primary form of expression as time went on, and I regret that a little.
I was even supposed to be putting together a book, dammit!
Nearly all of my characters had back stories and connections to one another somehow.
Energy Master(Energy/energy blaster) was a disposed emperor of an elitist space faring empire called the Corelordians who was nearly assassinated but not only survived his near death but gained the abilities he posssed aftwards.
Crimson Azure(Empathy/Dark Blast Defender), his father was an exiled Corelordian and his mother was of the realm of Newystic, thanks to his duel heritage he gain both light(Empathy) and dark(Dark Blast) Powers.
Cryfire(electric/electric blaster) was the son of two heroes, Unison and Solaray who both disappeared during the first Rikti Invasion. All he had left was his grandfather, a hero from the 40s knock as Captain Attack. To make a long story short, both his parents turned up alive, Unison was now a Peacebringer and Solaray had somehow been thrown into the future, with no memories of the past 5 years that had passed. His kindly old grandfather turned out to be a villain who had tried to kill both Cryfire's parents in order to turn Cryfire into a villain but it never happened and Mindterror as he was really known as fled to the Royge Islands rather than be defeated and locked away.
Empress Schism(Illusion/Force Field controller) was not only Crimson Azure's sister but Cryfire's grandmother. She always acted and schemed like a villain but was always trying to do good in the long run.
Guardian Kyphris(Storm/plant controlled) and Kyphris(Duel blade/regen scrapper) are the twin sons of Schism, Kyphris' real name was Cyphris and he followed Sxchism to Earth first and took his brother's name just in case aanyone knew who Cyphris really was, spy and assassin to Empress Schism herself.
And it goes on and on, had 37 alts just on Liberty, another 130 more on other servers.
The character always came first and then the powers for me.
As a heavy roleplayer, just about every aspect was a bit of expression. Costuming, power customization, backstory, playstyle...
I know its dull to say so, but EVERYTHING was how I expressed myself.
Sarah introduced herself to villains in instances. Her costume expressed her desire to be a "shining star of hope in the dark night's sky" and helped her project confidence that she didnt always have. It was strong but feminine, and it had details like her star brooch that shouted that it was hers.
Her powers were white/gray, in keeping with her skin/hair, showing the way her powers had affected her. She was chipper and cheery and always nice and helpful.
She was fun. I miss her a lot.
Most of my characters were tied into the overall story for my main character Thor's Assassin. Full biography can be read here - http://peacekeepers.wikia.com/wiki/Thor%27s_Assassin
Soon to be transferred to my website thorsassassin.com
Though I did have the odd character I just created to take advantage of the other things City of Heroes offered. Though I got to be honest there were characters from the Shadow Syndicate that didn't translate well using the character creator. Mostly I had everything I needed and the combinations to make em come alive.
All of them were independent; the actual priority - character concept or story - varied between them.
Two of them were from my own fiction ideas (which I notoriously fail at committing to text), though slightly modified for the setting. Ghostslinger was originally the main character in a story titled Humanity: Optional - I've already had two Tech origin characters, so I decided to modify her background to Magic (it worked).
Booster Angel was part of the protagonist group in Chrome Dawn (quite similar to Bubblegum Crisis, with stronger influences from Blade Runner and Super Sentai); the character design is nearly the same (http://fifth-horseman.deviantart.com/art/quot-Athena-quot-battlesuit-v3-134320886?), the personality is not.
I probably should post their full backstory one day, but as said above - my writing isn't very high quality and is full of cliches. :)
Quote from: The Fifth Horseman on December 06, 2012, 12:03:09 PM
Two of them were from my own fiction ideas (which I notoriously fail at committing to text), though slightly modified for the setting.
Oh how I feel you there. I could never get out a decent bio in their 1,024 character limit. A couple of times it worked, but most the time (and for none of my mains) it did not. I'd like to post them sometime as well.
Quote from: emu265 on December 06, 2012, 08:19:27 AM
I ask this because I'm curious as to your 'how' and 'why' behind character creation. So, the question is how did you utilize character creation? Did you create a series of independent (or even loosely related) characters with their own stories? Did you have any characters linked by backstory? Or did you just make characters for the sake of being a super hero/villain?
All of my characters were connected by a universe I developed independent of CoH's lore. CoH seemed open enough for that, and the character creation process facilitated it beautifully. At least... better than I could ever write. Their relationships would change, which usually entailed deleting and remaking them. I can't count the number of "Kaylee Lockhart"s I made.
/gotopicgo
Yes, most of my character's had not only toon biographies but backstory, often interconnected. My global name toon, Kristoff von Gelmini, was created at my friend's suggestion that we use our decades old tabletop characters (liked well enough to be in a couple of different tabletop campaigns.) It was simply a matter of finding the ATs and powersets that best fitted each, then claiming some cataclysm had occurred which propelled them into Paragon City and the Rogue Isle.
As I played, some characters were stand alone creations but increasingly I used CoH lore for their backgrounds. I'd created a themed Science Fiction SG called "Earth's Last Chance" so named for the crashed starship which was their SG base (always under reconstruction and repair of course). They were from the 24th Century of a parallel universe where the Rikti had won and thus committed to saving this version of Primal Earth from a similar fate. The themed SG's were a lot of fun! :)
Other characters were simply for fun; e.g. my pal created Ann Warbucks a tech empowered a grown up version of Little Orphan Annie whose bind to say "Leaping Lizards! It's $target" never failed to make me laugh. He even did the voice. His main villain was an MM named Hal "Big Oil" Burton whose thug minions would blow off steam by breaking into a "YMCA" routine he did via a macro, which always made me laugh (and you don't want to know what he named his minions save that most were named for those in the Bush Administration). His "dirty bird" corruptor Felonious Finch was made after he'd studied numerous pictures of finches. RocketBoard inspired him to create the Peppermint Surfer and his backstory with arch-chocolatier Godivus. Lots of fun and creativity, but I'm digressing.
As with other RP games, at times I'd look first to powerset combo's that looked fun, then come up with a backstory that justified it.
Aha! so
you are Kaylee Lockhart! I don't think we teamed often but that name sure rings a bell. 8)
Quote from: johnrobey on December 06, 2012, 01:38:53 PM
Aha! so you are Kaylee Lockhart! I don't think we teamed often but that name sure rings a bell. 8)
Someone knows me! Yes, she has lived on many servers in many forms. Once a Peacebringer, many times a Scrapper, the occasional Tanker, her Beta version was a Dominator and her final and highest level incarnation was a Defender. How I miss Kaylee, she was my excuse to try out damn near any set I wanted.
Originally, I made a few ye olde characters from the days when RPGs didn't have stories and you just slapped something together and put gear on it. As time went on, however, I started pulling characters increasingly out of stories I've written or planned to write, or spinning them off other characters' own lore. To me, a "character" is a story first and foremost, and that character's look, powers and personality are expressions of that story. If the idea wouldn't interest me on face value, the character wouldn't survive past the teens. I've had a fair number of those, actually, who fizzled out with no story. I will always remember Insane Rick precisely for having nothing worth remembering about him.
As you'll see me going back-and-forth in the Phoenix Project artwork section, I don't think in pictures, I think in psychological concepts, which I then try to frame with visuals that "exude" them. It's difficult to do by myself with the costume creator and it's always a pain in the ass for any artist to work with me, as Alex Dai and now Yellow Gold will attest, I'm sure :) However, the results I value the most are the stories that inspire and engage. It's why I don't feel anything of what I had has been taken away with the closure of City of Heroes - you cannot take these characters from me because they're ideas and concepts. Those are non-tradable. Sure, I can no longer see them and play around with them, so I've lost a rich avenue of inspiration, but that hampers my future creations. It does not undo my current ones.
City of Heroes, to me, was hands-down the most impressive game ever in terms of self-expression. Sure, there's always stuff like MineCraft, the Sims or Little Big Planet and... Spore, I guess. But those are kind of like painting programmes to me - you make a piece, you show it, that's it. City of Heroes was a game which took my creations and then actually made them matter. To me, that's like someone making a movie out of a story I've written - it's a step beyond me telling stories about me for me. It's another entity entirely taking a spin on it and creating something new for me to enjoy. It's this feedback loop that feeds my imagination, and I'm happy to say that the entirety of the Phoenix Project has been entirely like this! :)
*edit*
Speaking of Alex Dai, he has my eternal gratitude for making Xanta look more awesome than I ever could:
(https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v711/nero_orog/Xanta00-Photobucket.jpg)
All of my characters had their powers and their backstories and their looks relate. Characters that didn't have that, usually ended up as just some alt that rarely ever got played.....some mystery character that randomly shows up every now and then, lol.
I loved putting good background stories to them, it made playing them much more entertaining. The wife loved it and got jealous of all my good backstories for my characters and gave me the job to do the same for all her characters, lol. So that I did. And it ended up all of our characters being that of a "Super Group" together in what ends up being an awesome basis for a comic series, and really magnified the enjoyment of the game 100X fold. Our two first 50s were the leaders and husband and wife of course, bf/gf scenarios, outsiders with good stories that joined forces, couple of the younger characters were offspring, family trees....heck a friend of mine was so excited when legendary names came out on swtor and I'm like - whatever, I did that on my own with all of our characters already on CoH. Old news. LOL.
I found it was very important to making you keep coming back (aside from the fun factor of the game). The characters had to mean something, have that background to them....that makes the powers they have make sense, etc. At least I did.
My first toon was just because. She was awesome and I loved playing her but then the friend who introduced me to CoH was talking about this awesome power set he had been reading about, the Titan weapons set. That got me thinking, Hmmmm... Titan weapons? I am a huge fan of Greek mythology and when I hear Titans I think of the group before the Greek gods(ie Kronos, Rhea, Atlas ect) So this led to thinking about who would of forged the Titan's weapons and the answer of course was the three titan cyclops who also forged Zeus's lightening bolt, Poseidon's trident and Hades's helm. After a bit of research I discovered the names of those three cyclopes Brontes(essence of thunder), Arges(bright) and of course Steropes(essence of lightening). After looking at the available secondary sets I decided that he had to be a titan/electric aura. I tried to make all of the powers I took some how fit into the theme of what the essence of lightening would be. He was the most awesome toon ever. I miss him everyday. Long live Steropes and Athene Parthenos!!
Some of my characters had linked backstories. My two main characters were twin brother and sister so their origins were tightly connected. Most of my characters didn't know each other until they joined the same SG.
I mostly expressed myself in City through the Mission Architect, until it was kneecapped by the filter.
I pretended I was making a huge comicbook multiverse.
Quote from: emu265 on December 06, 2012, 08:19:27 AMI ask this because I'm curious as to your 'how' and 'why' behind character creation. So, the question is how did you utilize character creation? Did you create a series of independent (or even loosely related) characters with their own stories? Did you have any characters linked by backstory? Or did you just make characters for the sake of being a super hero/villain?
I went off on a kick with most of my characters as the result of an accident. I'd created a Fire/Rad Controller named 'Yadernii Ogon' ('Nuclear Fire' in Russian), with a background of having been the mutated child of a woman exposed to radiation during the Chernobyl accident (who was
technically naked in-game, my taking the 'Chitin' costume pieces and coloring them to look like chitin plates over exposed muscle; I had a bind for her for replying to 'nice costume' comments with "This isn't a costume; this is my body -- a 'gift' of 'glorious Soviet technology'." -- she had issues with her childhood). I was playing her in Peregrine Island one day when I saw another character saying "для" appear in my local chat window. This intrigued me, and I did some tests; City of Heroes supported Unicode input (which, in retrospect, it would have had to do in order to support Korean-language input, but when I asked one of the developers, they said that Unicode support had always been in the game).
So I took it and ran with it, creating characters with foreign backgrounds, mostly from Russia or the old Soviet Union. First, to take advantage of foreign-language names to avoid name-collision issues -- 'Lightning Strike' would be likely to be taken, but 'Zabastovka Molniy' (an Electric Armor/Titan Weapons Tanker) would be much less so. 'Frostfire' was an NPC in game, but 'Ogon Moroza' (a Fire/Ice Blaster) was available. I could redo the stock binds -- 'Ready!' became 'Готовый!' in the same color and with the thumbs-up emote, with chat binds for 'Hello', 'Welcome', 'Yes', 'No', 'Congratulations', 'Thanks', 'Good work', etc. in the same vein. When it came to the character backgrounds, I invented heroes, villains, and organizations out of whole cloth -- the state-sponsored hero group 'Народная Армия' ('People's Army'), the villain group 'Красный Угроза' ('Red Menace'), the villain 'Генерал Зима' ('General Winter'), etc. Then, to add some linkage to real-world activities, I dug up actual research facilities in Russia, and built origins around events linked to them -- the I.M. Sechenov Institute for Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry, the Institute for High Energy Physics, and others.
I did the same thing to a lesser degree with other foreign-origin characters -- Baldr, Dunkelkalte, Kuro-Gouka, Krypteia, Machinator Magicus -- but it was the characters with Russian backgrounds that I built more backstory around, sometimes checking back and forth between characters to make sure I was keeping organizations and off-screen heroes/villains straight. There were only a few that actually had linked backgrounds -- Brigadyr (bots/dark MM) was an experimental robotic director for combat robots from a Soviet military research program that became self-aware, being shut down and abandoned as a result, KOMANDYR (bots/dark MM) was an attempt to recreate Brigadyr without the self-awareness that got 'contaminated' by a backup of Brigadyr's program, and Deva Stryelki (arch/TA corr) was an
Убийца-class infiltration robot from Brigadyr's original 'arsenal' in the research program whose crate had been stolen from the bunker where it had been stored.
Some of my characters had linked bios, some didn't. Depended on who they were. Most had some sort of link or connection to the real world friends I had that played, but not always. I did have a tendency to create characters on different servers using the same names but changing their backgrounds and powers slightly.
For example, Halo Jones on Liberty was Angelica Jones, a scientist and former Crey Employee that was burned by one of her company rivals. She was the subject of some weird Rikti technology experiments before being rescued by Back Alley Brawler and the Regulators. She was an Nrg/Nrg Blaster.
Halo Jones on Virtue was the same Angelica Jones, but after graduating MIT she went to work for Firebase Zulu and the Portal Corp, instead of Crey. Caught in a weird storm wave out of the deep umbra, she was lost for two years of 'real time' but five years of her personal time. During this time she was somehow bonded with her experimental suit as well as the bizarre forces of the zone. This version was a Gravity/Time Manipulation Controller.
...and so on.
Due to the limits of the Character Bio space (which was still more than most other MMOs, so that is not a complaint but rather a realization of the limits of the medium) I liked to put in "RP Notes" and a link to an external website that provided more space for Bios.
Crey Industries Database was (I think) the first one.
http://www.creyindustries.com/login.php
Always kind'a hoped they would link into the Titan Network.
Then there were the sites people here are probably more familiar with.
Ouroboros Portal
http://ouroportal.com/wiki/Main_Page
and
Virtueverse
http://www.virtueverse.net/wiki/Main_Page
So mostly my Character Bios would read something along these lines:
(For Further Info See)
http://www.virtueverse.net/wiki/Absinthe_Rose
AE Mission ARC "Every Rose Has it's Thorns"
Surrounded by constant telepathic buzz : Abby is an untrained and unrestrained telepath with low level abilities who disturbs the local 'telepathic signal' like someone with a CB radio that has a stuck broadcast key.
Mob Connections : Related by Blood to Emil Marcone; Abby grew up in the Family, knows and is known by many of it's members and still has connections throughout. Any character with Mob connections is likely to know her, or at least know of her. Any character with FBI connections has probably read their file on her.
Pocket D Drug Connection : Abby sells toned down versions of the drugs that activated her powers throughout the Rogue Isles and distributes them via Pocket D connections to the Skyraiders and Council in Independence Port. Any characters involved with those areas, or Pocket D regulars, have likely seen her handing out samples or making deals.
As myself, but with superpowers :P
Something I forgot to mention was that I do have a collective name for my character roster (the
Q-Verse, after the forum name I held on mainboard). At the same time, my characters weren't explicitly made to be connected to one another for the most part.
Quote from: Kistulot on December 06, 2012, 11:56:47 AM
As a heavy roleplayer, just about every aspect was a bit of expression. Costuming, power customization, backstory, playstyle...
I know its dull to say so, but EVERYTHING was how I expressed myself.
This.
I started with my AT and Powers, then the Backstory that put it all in Context.
1) Tank
2) Magic
3) Stone Melee & Invulnerability
A Young Girl remembers a Hero, Wielding a Mighty Stone Hammer who none stood against for long.
"Sometimes, even a Hero Falls"
Our Heroine finds that this Hero was her Uncle who was granted a Mystic Ring to Defend the Innocent.
She pledges to Take Up the Ring to Save Paragon City and pay Honor to her Uncle.
How I made a character varied. I have to say, a large chunk of my hero characters originally started as pen and paper RPG characters (which is why I had so many "non-standard" heroes).
Usually I started with a character concept, picked the powers, wrote her bio (sorry, I really don't like how the guy bodies look :P), picked her main outfit, then found a way to link her in to the supergroup (which quite frequently was just my main character saying "Yay! More friends!" and not being too picky about what her friends are like).
I had one or two where I started with the powers. I will admit I started two completely based on the costume bundle (barbarian and wild west). But mainly I was concept first.
All my characters except 2 were made pulled from my 3 binders of heroes and villains fro. The '80s & 90's. All of thier stories were tweaked,of course, but not too much really. Costumes were very close to original because of the superb creator. Some even looked better than original.
Of the 2 that were not old, one was based on a British band and the other was a play on his name Android turned into a cross between Booster Gold and Cap. America. Oh the possibilities....