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[Mass Effect: Legacy] OOC and Comment Thread


SalmonMax

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Tooooootally.

If anyone sees a word or term they want in the glossary, post it here and I'll throw it in. Soon there'll even be, you know, definitions and explanations there, so it will actually serve its intended purpose. :)

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Yep! My little paragraph explains that what I have so far is a work in progress. Point values of templates and mechanical breakdowns so you can see how they were built will be forthcoming. I'm getting stuff organized first, then I'll pry into the details.

It's still way too soon for actual point builds yet. The game, and characters, are still in concept-phase.

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Humans are the default setting. :)

That's something that should be in the overview for racial templates, along with the observation that I'm not including adjustments to ability scores in templates. We can discuss whether or not that's a good idea, but I didn't want people to feel pigeonholed by a racial choice into a particular choice of profession. If I give Salarians a boost to their mental stats, for example, it means people will feel like they -have- to play characters that emphasize those traits. Instead I plan to give them a small bonus to a selection of broadly applicable skills...the kind of thing that could be useful in a variety of small ways.

Same reason I don't just say "all asari have biotics." For one, it's not true...asari have the potential to be biotic, but still have to learn how to harness and use that potential, and not all do. For another, I don't want the choice of race to 'equate' to a choice of other things too.

My goal is to make race a fun piece of flavor, not a dominant choice of character creation. My target point value for these templates is just a handful of points. Ideally no more than 5.

The only exception MIGHT be krogan, who's physical abilities are kind of wrapped up in the entire concept for the race. I'm still pondering how I want to handle them.

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In a setting where cybernetic and genetic augmentations exist, benchmarks are less useful. I do want to give some idea of what a 'normal' range is for different species, but the decisions of a player in making a character should be driven by concept more than those guidelines.

In short, if you want to play a really strong human, it's possible. There are reasons in the game lore that it's possible. More specifically, it's possible because you guys are being picked for this mission because you're NOT average, run of the mill people. You guys aren't the rule, you're the exceptions.

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+0 is average (human) in M&M, thus you always start at average, any racial template will likewise take that into account.

If a Krogan gets a +2 str on its template and you wanted to play a scrawny weak Krogan you'd actually need to effectively sell back some of that gain.

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Well, right now everyone starts from average and builds from there.

Remember, a template doesn't give you free toys. A +1 Strength from a template still costs 2pts. You don't get a cost break.

So ultimately building a Krogan with Str 10 costs 20 pts either way. The only question is whether or not I force ALL krogans to have more Str than other races. Are there such thing as physically weak krogan? Maaaaaaaybe.

My bias is therefore only to include things in racial templates that are absolutely endemic to the race in question. I might give a player making a member of that race suggestions for other things, based on culture and temperament, but that wouldn't be in the template.

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heheheh, that would actually make for a fun way to introduce a character into a game in progress...

"As you search a shadow passes over the area. Looking up you see a figure dangling from a parachute, slowly descending from above..."

Oh wait ... didn't they kinda do that on Lost??

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  • 2 weeks later...

I never formalized my idea, so here it is:

The turian hierarchy on Earth's main advantage is the resident Primarch, Victus - popular with the troops and fond of out-of-the-box thinking. Trapped on a world where there is nothing they can consume due to their dextro-amino based DNA, many other races would have fallen apart, but Victus immediately struck alliances with the quarians to expand liveship capability to the turian heavy cruisers, which were retrofitted to the task. Victus made a comment about "literal swords into ploughshares" that he learnt from his time working alongside the other Coalition races.

Still, life has been difficult, and accidental sickness from inhaling microscopic flora and fauna is not uncommon. One innovation threshold even Victus has proven unwilling to cross is the notion of extensive genetic modification to allow turian biology to thrive more readily on Earth. Instead, Victus has pooled his resources towards the Excalibur project, and it looks like his gambit is about to pay off.

As part of the political horse-trading that typifies any collaboration between societies, Victus has insisted on the Excalibur being fully stocked for dextro-aminolife support and that it contain several turian crew members. One such crew member is the ship's doctor and utility man, Arcticus.

Arcticus is a young turian, born on Earth, and has struggled all his life with various health problems. One of the rare turian biotics, he has had to adapt to implants and training never intended for turians, and as a dextro-based life form on Earth he has had several accidental exposures to lavo-amino based tissues. Consequently he has all but grown up in hospitals, and this combined with a startlingly gifted intellect has made him a natural doctor. He is trained in combat medicine, using a combination of an enhanced omnitool's kinetic barrier with his own natural biotic force fields to ensure his protection as he tends to the wounded - and in a world full of shortages and strife, he never wants for combat. He is technically gifted enough to use his omnitool for informational warfare attacks, but his true gift is medicine.

Arcticus was hand-picked by Victus and treats it with the honor it deserves. He's grown up on an entire world where the message sent by every scrap of food outside a sterile environment , every tree, every leaf and blade of grass, and nearly every person he is surrounded by, is "you don't belong here." He's never seen it, but Arcticus is ready to go home. Whether home will have him, of course, is another matter...

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Very cool background! I just want to throw out there that Turian biotics, while rare, aren't unheard of. The instructor at Earth's first biotic school was turien (according to Kaiden).

That said, nothing needs to be changed. Great stuff.

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Very cool background! I just want to throw out there that Turian biotics, while rare, aren't unheard of. The instructor at Earth's first biotic school was turien (according to Kaiden).

That said, nothing needs to be changed. Great stuff.

Saren Arterius had them too. ... so maybe not an auspicious group.

Not fully sold on the name Arcticus. I'll fiddle with it. Glad the rest of it is on the level.

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Parachutes are obsolete. Mass effect field generators can easily reduce falling speed. In conjunction with rocket boosters, they even enable flight on properly equipped suits.

And feel free to start anytime with non-crunch description/background/concept stuff. Ask any questions needed.

I will probably have a mid to high PL, but point levels are likely to be lower than usual per PL...just based on what I'm seeing so far in my explorations of rules and so on.

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Wouldn't the material/fuel needed for mass effect gear be in short supply after a crisis like this?

Just thinking out loud. Perhaps the tech for Mass Effect gear would not require much, or the supply of material/fuel on Earth would be in good supply?

Otherwise older tech might come in vogue.

Anyways I'll think of a background for Lucrezia Wilhelmina Anderson.

Seriously considering some changes, but only on some thematic things.

Is it possible to have a character that is a field medic with some S&R skills and some skill with firearms? It was pretty much what Lucy did most of her young life since she could hold a medkit for her folks.

I'm also thinking of moving her from the British Isles to Minnesota, where the skills she knows would be even more used (since Minnesota is mostly wilderness outside the populated areas and well... The Twin Cities should still exist up until the Reapers pretty much owned everything, and my character and her family worked on reclaiming the city to get it habitable again).

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Actually, with the number of ships that blew up in Earth orbit, element zero is...for once...NOT in short supply. :)

The reapers in particular had ridiculously huge eezo cores.

The mass effect core industry is having no problems with supply of material. Supply of personnel is more the issue. And the decimation of industrial facilities.

We can discuss her skills, but I don't see anything wrong with that combination off the cuff.

As for location on Earth, pretty much anything goes. The surviving population has been encouraged to coalesce in designated Reconstruction Projects...sites deemed to be priority reconstruction areas due to habitability of the area, and likelihood of salvageable material and technology from nearby urban centers. The Twin Cities could qualify due to their proximity to abundant surface fresh water and arable land. Winters are a bitch, but they'll manage. :)

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Hehe, well, it's true that there's a whole new generation of 'accidental biotics.' The cost of that is a whole new generation of babies that were not able to adapt to the contamination, and all the yucky, nasty things that implies.

There's screenings by game start, to determine the level of eezo contamination in a person's body...and a few experimental treatments to reduce it. Ironically, the data taken from Cerberus HQ, from hideous travesties like the process that created Subject Zero, are now helping people a LOT in dealing with the question of how to help the human body adjust to eezo rather than invoking a catastrophic immune response that winds up killing or deforming the baby.

There are some estimates that within a few generations, high percentages of human births will be functional biotics. Not the done deal that the asari are, but certainly a 'second place' trophy.

For now though, it's just one more hurdle in rebuilding what was lost.

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Actually, with the number of ships that blew up in Earth orbit, element zero is...for once...NOT in short supply. :)

The reapers in particular had ridiculously huge eezo cores.

The mass effect core industry is having no problems with supply of material. Supply of personnel is more the issue. And the decimation of industrial facilities.

We can discuss her skills, but I don't see anything wrong with that combination off the cuff.

As for location on Earth, pretty much anything goes. The surviving population has been encouraged to coalesce in designated Reconstruction Projects...sites deemed to be priority reconstruction areas due to habitability of the area, and likelihood of salvageable material and technology from nearby urban centers. The Twin Cities could qualify due to their proximity to abundant surface fresh water and arable land. Winters are a bitch, but they'll manage. :)

That nordic blood, Max. Winters are fun to true Minnesotans. She's a Anderson for cripes sake. That's as Minnesotan as lutefisk and everything on a stick! Then again emergency shelters help too. And MY character has roughed it in her early years so she's accustomed to having very little to work with and making a lot out of it. Should have seen her snow forts. :) I'll have a background to you in PM in the next week or so. I also have to assess if I can stomach one more character.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 4 weeks later...

As I work on the biotic and tech powers, I realized I'm being a bit too "this is Mass Effect" in my thinking. I needed to open things up a bit.

For example, I approached this from a perspective of "how do I do Pull? How do I do Throw?" Reasoning that the nature of biotic abilities limits them to those applications explicitly allowed in the game. Which a decent argument could be made in favor of.

But then I realized that it was silly to do so. For one, this isn't a computer game. The effects of biotics are limited in the game because of the limits of player control over a video game, especially a fast-paced action game like Mass Effect. You can't waste time trying to guide things around with blue glowing TK. You need to fire and forget and fire again. Hence, very pre-defined abilities.

A full RPG, lacking the limits on the imagination that a computer game imposes, should not strive to emulate those limits. That doesn't mean that biotic powers won't come in sort of pre-rendered packages, because the fiction really does support that they do, and more than that...it keeps super-powers under control and stops them from ruling on high (see: Star Wars (Jedi)). However, I am not going to faithfully reproduce every individual power. Instead of Throw and Pull and Slam and so on, there's just a power to move things around via mass effect fields. You can lift things up, throw them, crash them into things...whatever. No need to get so specific. Similarly, for Engineer drones and turrets, they're not separate powers. You can make either one. It's basically a Summon Minion power, and you can either make a drone (fragile, lightly armed, but mobile), or a turret (heavier, more powerful, but immobile).

Cutting out these pieces of clutter is one reason why it's been a bit more time consuming than I thought to get all this stuff ready.

Bear in mind too that stuff that goes up in the character creation thread can be discussed and commented on.

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