City of Heroes: A Cheerful Campaign
May. 2nd, 2019 08:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlToday over in City of Heroes, I ran Positron's first task force with a group.
Let's back up and examine that from a few different angles.
What's a Positron?
Positron's one of the in-game "Signature" heroes, the personal characters of the developers. He's really big in the storyline, but his major claim to fame is when he coined the "You con gray" meme, explaining why his in-game avatar doesn't step down off the podium he stands on 24/7 and actually fight some crime here today.
The real reason of course is that if he got off his little pedestal and ran away to punch bad guys he wouldn't be available to get you to start the Positron Task Force, in which he, uh, TASKS you to run around the city stopping crime and also to pick him up some robot parts if you have a minute.
Somebody here is making out like a bandit on this "city full of heroes" thing and it isn't the new blood, y'know?
What's a Task Force, then?
A task force is when some big-shot hero or villain charges between three to eight of you little baby hero/villains with doing their clean/dirty work. Typically task forces are where you'll see the major players show up: Your archvillains, your fated legendary heroes, your big schemes and major moves. If your personal comic book contains the basic gameplay stuff you do daily, a Task Force is a crossover event that brings a bunch of dudes together to do something bigger than all of them.
Not quite a dungeon crawl, not quite a raid, it's a linked series of missions that's usually pretty enemy-dense and story-dense, although only the leader gets to read all the text. (Which is and has always been kind of dumb, but what can you do?)
Positron's Task Force USED to be like 11 uninterrupted missions long, making it the least popular thing in the entire game aside from maybe Perez Park. (More on that later.) Eventually they broke it into two pieces and cliffhangered the ending (spoilers, yo) of the first one. Which is what I ran tonight.
Okay, what happened in this thing?
Quite a bit actually. Okay here goes:
Our team makeup was KIND OF WEIRD, to start with. City of Heroes isn't the kind of game that subscribes to a "holy trinity" Tank/Heals/Damage model. So this team was totally viable, but weird as heck.
We had a Brute, which is a kind of sorta-tank that does more damage the more damage it takes. We had three Controllers, including me. Controllers are group control, we weaken lock stuff down so it can't hit back so much. We had a single Mastermind, who can't do much on his own but did bring the power of killer robots to the group. Unfortunately, he left early.
Backed with this, we also had a Scrapper (pure melee punch festival, I think this one was using arm-wavy kung fu and regeneration powers) and a Kheldian. ...
What a Kheldian is, is beyond the scope of this entry. Suffice to say we had a dude who chose to bond with a space jellyfish and become pure energy. As one does.
The Kheldian's role in the group was kind of undetermined but everyone loves to see them show up because they bring lots of buffs and stuff. I think everyone on the team had some sort of healing ability, personal or group.
So there we were, with Positron calling us Task Force Tunguska, because your task force gets randomly dubbed whatever word pops into the head of the contact. We were there because a whole bunch of different villain groups were doing The Bads and they needed to be punched/shot/set on fire/subjected to killer robots/gravity-crushed/whatever the other guys were doing.
First we went off into the sewers, because the first thing you do in Paragon City when evil is afoot is yank up a manhole cover and check to see what's going on down there. The entire sewer system is just awash with green sludge and/or danger. Surprise, we found a dude called "Epidural" down there, affiliated with the zombie-raising evil doctor group called "The Vahzilok".
That went okay.
Then, oh no, Clockwork have invaded a building and they just keep making more of themselves. The little self-reproducing robots have an infurating habit of corroding away to nothing when captured, so Positron was like "Let's send these six or seven randos off to see if THEY can recover a piece."
We could not, but we COULD tromp all over them without much effort. Smug, proud heroes we were, we grabbed our gear and headed off to Oranbega next, because one of the other local heroes had a Mystical Vision that we should probably do that and Positron was like "Okay cool, they're on the clock anyway, let's send them to a mystical tangled hellhole full of endless buildings and portals and portals to buildings."
We got our ass kicked repeatedly by the Circle of Thorns. Demon-summoning mages kept pulling up ghosts and the ghosts kept shooting dark energy and let's be real, nobody on our team was very strong against GHOST BEAMS. I don't even know how you get strong to that. Also the Circle kept sending in reenforcements, so we'd be clomping up some stairs or figuring out where a portal went and suddenly OH NO YOU GOT WIZARDS UP YOUR BUTT.
Friends, you do not want wizards up your butt. They got big staffs with pointy tops.
So eventually we beat up all the wizards and swore at them for good measure and then we took their magic book and some blueprints for the Paragon City Dam and went home to give the magic book to a magic mage named Azuria on our side so she could do magic to it, I don't know, what do you want from me, my character's a scientist, not a sorcerer.
This is where the Mastermind left.
One more "beat up the Vahz" mission later, a call came in from City Hall. It was the Circle! They were attacking, looking for the book!
Oops.
Off to City Hall, where Circle of Thorns dudes were SWARMING. It looked like the magic version of a rock festival. When we got near the doors to City Hall they swung open and at least a couple hundred of the bastards came POURING OUT, it was like they'd replaced City Hall with a wizard-themed CLOWN CAR. Happily with our Great Wall of Controller Power we basically froze them in front of the doors and let our beatsticks go a-beating.
Inside we faced... shadow clones of the entire group! Including that Mastermind who bailed, which is rude. Even outnumbered they were kinda wimpy and I'm just sad I didn't get a chance to snap a screenshot of everyone tearing each other's shadow clones apart.
Then we took mystic mage Azuria to the hospital. The Thorns have their magic book again, and Positron had figured out what all three evil villain plots had in common: The Paragon City Dam. The Circle wanted to power something called "The Lance of Storms" with hydroelectricity, the Clockwork wanted to blow it up for reasons unclear, and the Vahz wanted to put mutating chemicals in the water supply because they're huge dicks.
Could anyone save the dam?! Find out in PART TWO of this exciting story...!
Which I might, actually. Positron Task Force 2 -does- sound like a fun way to spend a couple hours.
Running in a group was a real fun time and everyone I played with was deeply nostalgic for how horrible Oranbega was and how much the Clockwork were a pushover when they're debuffed all to hell and back. At the end of the night we all exchanged invites to each other's friends lists, and I have no doubt I'll see some of those people and run missions with them again.
Crossover plots are what superheroes do best, after all.
Let's back up and examine that from a few different angles.
What's a Positron?
Positron's one of the in-game "Signature" heroes, the personal characters of the developers. He's really big in the storyline, but his major claim to fame is when he coined the "You con gray" meme, explaining why his in-game avatar doesn't step down off the podium he stands on 24/7 and actually fight some crime here today.
The real reason of course is that if he got off his little pedestal and ran away to punch bad guys he wouldn't be available to get you to start the Positron Task Force, in which he, uh, TASKS you to run around the city stopping crime and also to pick him up some robot parts if you have a minute.
Somebody here is making out like a bandit on this "city full of heroes" thing and it isn't the new blood, y'know?
What's a Task Force, then?
A task force is when some big-shot hero or villain charges between three to eight of you little baby hero/villains with doing their clean/dirty work. Typically task forces are where you'll see the major players show up: Your archvillains, your fated legendary heroes, your big schemes and major moves. If your personal comic book contains the basic gameplay stuff you do daily, a Task Force is a crossover event that brings a bunch of dudes together to do something bigger than all of them.
Not quite a dungeon crawl, not quite a raid, it's a linked series of missions that's usually pretty enemy-dense and story-dense, although only the leader gets to read all the text. (Which is and has always been kind of dumb, but what can you do?)
Positron's Task Force USED to be like 11 uninterrupted missions long, making it the least popular thing in the entire game aside from maybe Perez Park. (More on that later.) Eventually they broke it into two pieces and cliffhangered the ending (spoilers, yo) of the first one. Which is what I ran tonight.
Okay, what happened in this thing?
Quite a bit actually. Okay here goes:
Our team makeup was KIND OF WEIRD, to start with. City of Heroes isn't the kind of game that subscribes to a "holy trinity" Tank/Heals/Damage model. So this team was totally viable, but weird as heck.
We had a Brute, which is a kind of sorta-tank that does more damage the more damage it takes. We had three Controllers, including me. Controllers are group control, we weaken lock stuff down so it can't hit back so much. We had a single Mastermind, who can't do much on his own but did bring the power of killer robots to the group. Unfortunately, he left early.
Backed with this, we also had a Scrapper (pure melee punch festival, I think this one was using arm-wavy kung fu and regeneration powers) and a Kheldian. ...
What a Kheldian is, is beyond the scope of this entry. Suffice to say we had a dude who chose to bond with a space jellyfish and become pure energy. As one does.
The Kheldian's role in the group was kind of undetermined but everyone loves to see them show up because they bring lots of buffs and stuff. I think everyone on the team had some sort of healing ability, personal or group.
So there we were, with Positron calling us Task Force Tunguska, because your task force gets randomly dubbed whatever word pops into the head of the contact. We were there because a whole bunch of different villain groups were doing The Bads and they needed to be punched/shot/set on fire/subjected to killer robots/gravity-crushed/whatever the other guys were doing.
First we went off into the sewers, because the first thing you do in Paragon City when evil is afoot is yank up a manhole cover and check to see what's going on down there. The entire sewer system is just awash with green sludge and/or danger. Surprise, we found a dude called "Epidural" down there, affiliated with the zombie-raising evil doctor group called "The Vahzilok".
That went okay.
Then, oh no, Clockwork have invaded a building and they just keep making more of themselves. The little self-reproducing robots have an infurating habit of corroding away to nothing when captured, so Positron was like "Let's send these six or seven randos off to see if THEY can recover a piece."
We could not, but we COULD tromp all over them without much effort. Smug, proud heroes we were, we grabbed our gear and headed off to Oranbega next, because one of the other local heroes had a Mystical Vision that we should probably do that and Positron was like "Okay cool, they're on the clock anyway, let's send them to a mystical tangled hellhole full of endless buildings and portals and portals to buildings."
We got our ass kicked repeatedly by the Circle of Thorns. Demon-summoning mages kept pulling up ghosts and the ghosts kept shooting dark energy and let's be real, nobody on our team was very strong against GHOST BEAMS. I don't even know how you get strong to that. Also the Circle kept sending in reenforcements, so we'd be clomping up some stairs or figuring out where a portal went and suddenly OH NO YOU GOT WIZARDS UP YOUR BUTT.
Friends, you do not want wizards up your butt. They got big staffs with pointy tops.
So eventually we beat up all the wizards and swore at them for good measure and then we took their magic book and some blueprints for the Paragon City Dam and went home to give the magic book to a magic mage named Azuria on our side so she could do magic to it, I don't know, what do you want from me, my character's a scientist, not a sorcerer.
This is where the Mastermind left.
One more "beat up the Vahz" mission later, a call came in from City Hall. It was the Circle! They were attacking, looking for the book!
Oops.
Off to City Hall, where Circle of Thorns dudes were SWARMING. It looked like the magic version of a rock festival. When we got near the doors to City Hall they swung open and at least a couple hundred of the bastards came POURING OUT, it was like they'd replaced City Hall with a wizard-themed CLOWN CAR. Happily with our Great Wall of Controller Power we basically froze them in front of the doors and let our beatsticks go a-beating.
Inside we faced... shadow clones of the entire group! Including that Mastermind who bailed, which is rude. Even outnumbered they were kinda wimpy and I'm just sad I didn't get a chance to snap a screenshot of everyone tearing each other's shadow clones apart.
Then we took mystic mage Azuria to the hospital. The Thorns have their magic book again, and Positron had figured out what all three evil villain plots had in common: The Paragon City Dam. The Circle wanted to power something called "The Lance of Storms" with hydroelectricity, the Clockwork wanted to blow it up for reasons unclear, and the Vahz wanted to put mutating chemicals in the water supply because they're huge dicks.
Could anyone save the dam?! Find out in PART TWO of this exciting story...!
Which I might, actually. Positron Task Force 2 -does- sound like a fun way to spend a couple hours.
Running in a group was a real fun time and everyone I played with was deeply nostalgic for how horrible Oranbega was and how much the Clockwork were a pushover when they're debuffed all to hell and back. At the end of the night we all exchanged invites to each other's friends lists, and I have no doubt I'll see some of those people and run missions with them again.
Crossover plots are what superheroes do best, after all.
