Thane of Fife

I believe that when you're really small, you have a very low cap on how much your popularity can increase per month (like a half a point per month or something). So if you're running a lot of shows per month, you're probably getting pretty much your full allotment of growth from the first show, and then the rest of them aren't doing anything for you (your company at least - your wrestlers may benefit from working more often).

That doesn't sound right to me. If you set tickets to free, you can get pop quite a bit faster than that, as I recall.

I guess that makes sense, though I've definitely seen some very unfair Faction Fights in other mods. Well, doing a little more messing around, I've managed to get it to the point where it can generate fights involving three of the twenty or so teams. I'll continue experimenting and see if I can get more of them working. Thanks, all.

I wouldn't think any of these should be an issue. My database has very few characters who are inactive (almost entirely alts of active characters) and minimal movement restrictions set up. I guess popularity plausibly could be, but I feel like I've got enough factions on both sides of the hero/villain divide that it should be able to find something. Maybe I'll try messing with popularity values and see if that's it. Thanks.

Anybody know the requirements for having a Faction Fight? I'm trying to test a mod and, even though the mod has a lot of factions that all seem to have a reasonable number of people, every time the game picks Faction Fight, it says that no content could be created. I've seen it work in other mods, so I'm not sure what's wrong with this one.

1. Each issue is randomly determined based on parameters set in the database. Sometimes, one will appear where a character attempts to claim an artifact. Similarly, I think it is possible for a storyline or event to award an artifact to a character. But (in-game) you can't tell a character to look for one deliberately. 2. Every character in the editor can be assigned schemes/quests from a list. So you might assign Green Goblin a Robbery scheme and a Nemesis Vendetta scheme, and you might assign Darth Maul a Civilian Kidnap scheme and Hero Vendetta scheme. Then you might have a generic Hoodlum character who doesn't have any schemes because he's just there as backup for other villains. Some of the schemes deal with retrieving artifacts, so to go back to your first question, you could sort of tell a character to search for artifacts by giving them only schemes or quests to do so, but you would still be depending on them being randomly selected to start an adventure.

Set tickets to Free. That increases popularity gains quite a bit, and it doesn't cost you much at small sizes because you don't have much attendance anyway.

Palladium Books used to publish a game called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, which I think was pretty close to what you're looking for. There's an actual play log of it here, if you're interested. I have seen praise for the game as being fun and having great character creation, but I have not played it myself. Palladium has lost the TMNT license since then, so while you can still find the book, it might be pricy. However, they also have a game called After the Bomb (that's a link to their website), which I believe is closely related (it may be the same game with the licensed material hacked off). You can get a pdf of that pretty cheaply on DriveThruRPG, or you can order a copy of the book from Palladium.

In general, I'd say that if you're trying to get popularity when at a small size, you should set tickets to free.

Just to find out, I just booked a 21st Century Wrestling show that consisted of Jeff Amazon giving a 30-minute promo to introduce himself, followed by a 90-minute "technical masterclass" against Gorilla Lee. The angle rated a 0 and the match rated a 4, and the show as a whole still rated a 1, so I feel like it would be bordering on impossible to accidentally get a show rated at 0.

I stopped watching when they left Twitch, but I think you can subscribe to their Youtube channel (which does have a price, but it was low last time I checked).

With NYCW (assuming the default product), I think most of your matches don't actually need to be 20 minutes (and probably shouldn't be). I believe that their ratings may be capped if they are less than 20 minutes, but they're not terribly likely to hit that cap anyway (especially since your workers don't sound like they're very good). You would probably be able to get fine ratings putting on four 10-minute matches, for example.

If you use the Talk to Worker option, I think you can ask them to put over a specific other worker. They won't always agree, but if they do, I think they'll agree to do it as long as it happens in the near future. I am not sure, but I think it's because it's two separate penalties. Anytime you run a storyline match, there is a penalty if the match quality is above the storyline quality, so that's one. I think that, for some products, matches need to have a good storyline or they get penalized, and so that would be the second.

I've been working on modding, and these are some powers that I feel would be useful. 1. Take Damage: The user just takes X points of unavoidable damage. This sounds kind of silly, but some characters can be represented as having different forms or power sets based on health level (for example, Beast Boy could be different animals per level, or Emma Frost could switch to/from diamond form), and being able to just take damage would allow for shifting between them. 2. Retaliate vs Melee/Ranged/Mental/Shockwave/Outsmart: This would be a power where, if the character with the power is missed by the appropriate type of attack power, this power tries to activate and then would deal damage to the attacker. This could represent something like Wonder Woman or a Jedi reflecting a ranged attack, a character being surrounded by flames or radiation or spikes that damage people who get to close to them in melee, or a character who is too insane to safely contact mentally. 3. Outsmart to Deal Damage: It is a staple of some characters that they trick enemies into doing things that hurt them. Mysterio, for example, or even Spider-Man. This would just be an Outsmart power that deals some amount of damage. Ideally, it would be type-less damage. 4. Avoid Stun: This would be a power that gives the character some chance to avoid being stunned when they otherwise would be. Could reflect a character like Juggernaut. It would be cool if it could separate between stuns caused by bodily and non-bodily attacks. 5. Remove Stun/Token Spend to Remove Stun: This would allow a stunned character to remove the stun currently affecting them, possibly by taking damage or spending a token. I don't really have a good genre example of this beyond maybe a character with a lot of rage or resolve, but from a game perspective, it would be neat if some characters had a chance to save themselves (possibly at a cost) from being stun-locked in the open and destroyed.

I just looked and the first description of Catti-Brie in the books is "tall and slender." 😋 If you're looking for D&D games, I have heard good things about Solasta, which is based on the D&D 5e rules, though I haven't played it.

I think the biggest thing might be damage, especially for powerful characters. I think the conversion formula is something like: melee non-weapon attacks do 2, melee weapon attacks do 3, and ranged/explosive attacks do 1. This tends to lead to stuff like Superman and Daredevil doing the same amounts of damage (or even Daredevil doing more), and it feels wrong.

The editor gives you the option to provide a unique name for every quest or scheme set for a character, and the default database, as far as I can tell, provides a name for each one. I can only assume that that was a fair bit of work, and I think they provide some nice flavor to the various characters, so I think it's a bit of a shame that they aren't used more in the game - as far as I can tell, they're only displayed if you go to a character page and click on Schemes/Quests. It could be neat if they were displayed somewhere during an issue and/or in the post-issue summary.

If you go to Options, on the right side there is a button for Test Combat. You can use that to do what you describe.

I'm not really clear how hidden artifacts would help you because characters lose artifacts when they are knocked out. I imagine that's not what you're looking for. The easiest way to do what you're describing is to get rid of the powers (change the character back) at the end of the story. I feel like it's pretty common in media that a character invents something to help them win a fight but it doesn't end up becoming part of their standard arsenal. This would mean only one story can be in play involving a character at a time, but that seems reasonable. Batman is focused on fighting Clayface (or whomever), and then after the story, the exploding batarang goes into the Batcave with all the other things Batman has invented for one-off situations. I would also say that I'm not sure that that's going to be fun in the game. In a comic book, you can have a basic structure of "Hero meets villain but can't defeat him. Hero saves some people and then escapes, or maybe gets knocked out to little effect. Hero makes invention. Hero comes back to capture villain." In the game, I don't think that that's really going to work; if you have a villain that can't be defeated by a hero, any battle involving them is going to be a guaranteed loss. You might as well just send Robin in by himself and then surrender as soon as it starts. I think that the outsmart function in the game is basically there to represent that kind of thing. You would give Batman an outsmart power called Utility Belt, give Clayface (or whomever) a power that allows them to dodge or resist attacks, and then force Batman to outsmart the power (representing him finding something useful on his belt). If you really want to make it so that Clayface can't be beaten until a storyline event occurs, you could have a version of him where the power can't be outsmarted. If what you're aiming for is something with a bit more of an RPG experience, with characters changing in ability over time, another option would be a "Season" or "Rank" approach. For example, each of your characters might have only a few levels - Batman (Rookie), Batman (Experienced), Batman (Veteran). Then, have each of your storylines specific to one version of the characters involved (i.e. one storyline is Rookie Scarecrow vs Rookie Batman and another might be Veteran Scarecrow vs Veteran Batman). Then start and end the storyline with that baseline character. Once a character has ended some or all of their storylines at a given level, you can rank them up to the next tier and only then give them all of the powers that you think they should have earned from the various adventures in the previous tier.

I think you would do Beast Boy by using the health levels. For example, have four health levels called Bear, Tiger, Pterodactyl, and Rabbit (or whatever). Each has 2 hit points. Each one gets a completely unique set of powers. The top ones (the bear and the tiger) will naturally have more health (because they have to get knocked down through the others). In this way, Beast Boy would naturally shapeshift as he fights. If you want him to be able to shapeshift willingly, give him powers that allow him to heal or take damage. I'm less familiar with Vixen, but I thought she pretty much just called on animal powers as she needed them, so I would have thought just straight powers would work fine for that (e.g. an attack power based on an elephant-strength charge, a dodging power based on a mongoose, whatever). If you wanted to be more complex, I would agree with using tokens. Probably a power to gain two or three tokens each turn, and then a few other generic powers she can invest in ("Animal Strength" to boost melee attack, "Animal Speed" to boost melee defense, "Spit Poison" to make a ranged toxic attack, etc.). To the OP, what kind of stories are you trying to create that have so many character changes in them? I can imagine your Learning Man example coming up if you were trying to simulate Mega Man beating robot masters and gaining their weapons or something, but even there, I think it would be easier to represent that with some kind of "absorb powers on knockout/damage" power.

Don't ignore positioning. It's easy to forget about where your characters are or to feel that it doesn't make that much difference, but it really does. Try to keep your characters, even melee characters, out of the open as much as possible. The shadows aren't much better. There are a lot of nasty shockwave attacks, and if you're not in cover, they'll target you. Even worse, many such attacks will stun you, and once you're stunned, you're stuck. Likewise, track where your opponents are. A shockwave attack won't target characters in cover. A great tactic can be using melee characters to get enemies into the open and then hitting them all with a big shockwave. For example, Monkey Girl can use Boink! Boink! Boink! to target three people in ranged cover. She gets a bonus to close with them, and then even if her attack misses, you've still moved three enemies into position for the rest of your attacks.

Ok, that's about what I thought. Thanks.

What does Popularity actually do? Roughly speaking. In CBH, it was basically a measure of how powerful a character was, but in CBU, my impression was that Stars/Rating were supposed to do that. But the default database seems to strongly correlate them, and Factions still seem to use Popularity as a power metric. I'm trying to get a better idea as to how I should be setting it in a database. (My impression from the handbook is that a more popular character will be chosen to do stuff more often. So, all else being equal, a more popular character would be more likely to start a scheme or quest than a less popular character. Is that right?)

When you picked your character, at the bottom of the list of characters, there were two buttons - "Search" and "Avatars Only". If you click on the button that says "Avatars Only,"It will switch from showing the "User Characters" in the mod to showing all of the characters in the mod. This will allow you to pick from a much wider selection. I don't know what mod you're using, but the odds are good that you will see a lot more actual wrestling people on this second list.

That makes sense - I didn't consider that alternative. Thanks.