Voidus

Yep agreed, without the freeze ray that's within normal limits. The issue with the freeze ray is that it completely circumvents any character who relies on healing to avoid damage, which is usually quite a few characters. It depends on which mod, I would say there isn't an obligation to score a character until they're actually able to be a character but if we have time available we may still score it. Personally I'm ok with pre-scoring characters and discussing if they need to be toned down, etc.

Should easily make it, power will be 30 points, and powers being stronger at their Rending is a common occurrence for Epics so the backstory works fine. If Mac rates the weakness as -45 then I think she'll technically be in the negative points total, plenty of room to grow. Total: 30 M - 45 W = -15

Depends a bit on the specifics but probably like an 80? They mentioned a freeze-ray, that alone is really powerful.

Well, shucks. Now I'm all red. Of course that might just be the blood from my most recent experiments, but still! Thanks @Fatebreaker for all your support over the years. Personally I'm really not sure how to rate the equipment, if I was rating that as an Epic it'd be significantly higher than 50 points. I'll let one of the other mods have the final say on this one when they can get around to it. @MacThorstenson, @Lord Meeker, @Kidpen, @Nohadon could one of you let us know what you think when you get a free sec?

Laurelai led Lita back through the Alleys, she took a longer route, avoiding any particularly dangerous or secret Alleys as they wen, but a short time later they stood in a large, sanitized room which somehow still seemed dark in spite of the bright fluorescent lights overhead. A number of sealed metal crates were stacked in corners, most of them with a small tag attached to them. As they entered, a blue-skinned humanoid wearing a traditional white labcoat and what seemed to be vestigial horns growing from his forehead looked up with a somewhat distracted look. "R&D." He said plainly. "What do you need?" Laurelai hadn't seen this particular member before but most people who worked in R&D were a little... different. Mac's department of Counter Intelligence was mostly staffed with people who could pass as normal in the Alleycity, the R&D department had decidedly abandoned any hopes of passing as normal and liberally experimented with the limits of Hemalurgy. "Morning/" Laurelai replied, though she wasn't even sure if this Alley was temporal so they might not have mornings. "New recruit, wanted to get her set up and see if you guys had anything new and interesting." The blue-skinned man nodded with a wide smile. "Everything in R&D is new and exciting." He said, continuing to grin. "Come! Come! Lots of new things to see." He spun around, labcoat twirling in the air behind him and emitting a steady stream of smoke from one of its pockets, though he hadn't seemed to notice yet. He proceeded to march through a nearby door, into a room stacked with thousands upon thousands of crates. "So!" He barked out from inside as he steadied a column of boxes with one hand, and with the other quickly yanked one of the crates out from the middle of it, barely managing to avoid the entire pile from collapsing on top of him. "What kinds of new things?" @ZincAboutIt

Voidus strode into the hall, a little haggard looking but nonetheless smiling. "Glad to see you back, your Majesty." He said, sweeping a practiced, shallow bow towards her. "We weren't sure when to arrive so some of the set up may be delayed but our catering and party divisions should be here in force shortly." He snagged a double chocolate-chip cookie from a nearby platter, eyes crinkling in enjoyment as he bit into it. A small rent in space appeared a short distance away, and leaping out of it were dozens of colorfully-clad entertainers, jugglers, bards, fire-spitters and tumblers. Following after them, still more DA Acolytes began carrying tables into the room, laden with mysterious boxes, each of which had a tag reading 'Please open me, one per guest please.'

Thousands of party poppers exploded, showering the room with confetti. A number of acolytes from the DA began moving into the hall, carrying platters of baked goods.

Yeah, the mods are here to intervene if there is any intra-player conflicts that can't be resolved between the two. If you feel that someone is playing an NPC unrealistically then mods are available to mediate that dispute. Ideally this isn't used to give NPCs plot armour, just because it is within the realms of feasibility for an NPC to dodge a bullet doesn't necessarily mean that not dodging a bullet is unrealistic, they might try to dodge but fail. But it's also not an excuse for other players to godmod NPCs into doing completely unrealistic things, like a TUBA NPC suddenly defecting to the DA and giving up all of TUBAs secrets, that would be incredibly unreasonable. If you set the thread in a different setting then yes the characters in there won't count. But from my understanding this was pretty intertwined with the Alleycity setting.

My suggestion would be to play charaters like that as NPCs in the CDS, that way they can't be killed by people godmodding them but can still provide backstory to your character. Bringing supporting characters into a combat situation is just going to be dangerous, my suggestion would be to talk to the people involved beforehand if you have a particular attachment to some NPCs.There's also just going to be a certain level of trust that needs to be involved, if you make it clear that you want to keep an NPC around for story purposes I think it's unlikely that anyone is going to kill them, outside of sticking them in an active warzone and having them try to survive. But you will need to accept the small risk involved. Risk breeds tension and tension is the life blood of good stories. There's not a lot of tension in a bunch of immortal characters endlessly hurling magic at each other, the tension comes from what they might lose during the fight. I'd also hope that things like that cause people to be a little more cautious before just jumping into melee with every other character they meet, but that's more of a personal opinion And if a player was making a habit of murdering NPCs just because they can then we'll likely be speaking to that player. Resolving conflicts like that is one of the reasons we have mods.

I'd put that at a -20 weakness, but I'm still a little unsure how I feel about the equipment so I'll leave sign off to one of the other mods. I have actually just seen the backstory as well, not sure if that was always there but I have two concerns on that. 1. Stealing a shard? Assuming you mean a literal Shard and not a Shardblade/Shardplate then that's definitely a no-go 2. Calamity using them as an assassin. Calamity didn't tend to get personally involved with many Epics, not sure that I'd be ok with making that a part of a characters backstory. We generally try to avoid interaction with canonical characters because it makes things awkward.

If you feel that we've missed something then you're more than welcome to bring it up. We were aware that this was going to impact some people negatively and are open to discussing solutions to problems that may arise from this ruling. But simply arguing or disagreeing is unlikely to result in a change to the decision.

In future I'd prefer if you just mentioned any limitations that you've already thought about up front. It saves us needing to ask the question and wait for a response, re-evaluate, look for more limitations that are needed, etc. I'll be honest that's probably not one of the questions I would have asked. The velocity of them would have been one of my first questions but when you talk about the spikes coming out of his skin I'd assume the natural limitation on size would be body sized. I also wouldn't ask what the mass of the spikes were, that doesn't mean that the character is allowed to create spikes so dense that they become black holes. It's not necessarily an oversight if a question isn't asked, we just don't ask for every conceivable limitation because that would expand the already long wait time for character approvals out to infinity. We place trust in players to keep powers to a reasonable limit without needing to explicitly state every detail.

In order to approve characters within a reasonable amount of time we make a lot of assumptions. If you have a specific trait of a power in mind and explicitly don't mention it in the bio then that is a lie by omission and your character will be banned if you try to use that as a loophole to get an OP character approved. For the same reason that if a characters power begins to creep beyond the scope of what their points dictate then we will be talking to the player and asking them to keep it within bounds. Otherwise any Elsecallers could say they Soulcast the entire planet into smoke with the justification 'I didn't say they couldn't Soulcast something that big', if you want something outside the normal then it needs to be in your profile. Character approval and character limits are there to make the game fair for everyone, if you're trying to deliberately sneak overpowered characters through without letting people know then you are acting against the spirit of why they exist. This is a really serious matter, if someone was caught repeatedly doing this then I would potentially be asking them to not participate in the Alleyverse. This is a collaborative RP, if you're going into it with the mindset of trying to trick everyone so you can have the biggest, baddest character and use rules lawyering to keep them then this may not be the appropriate place for you to be playing. I'm still reading through my usual morning slog but I saw this and wanted to immediately address it.

Not sure if I understand your suggestion here. 5 characters max but others can still be approved? Assuming you mean they can be approved but not used until another character is removed then yes, that's also fine. I don't mind pre-approving characters and if they're not active characters then there's not a rush for approval which means less pressure on mods and less of an impact when all our mods are busy for a while.

The ability to die and the inevitability of death are not the same thing. And if someone kills an NPC then that's organic story development, which I would argue is kind of a good thing. I don't make characters just to fill a role. But also, that's not why this is happening it's just a point that that is an obvious choice given that it is happening. Voidus isn't god, and is also not defined by his powers, his entire story is primarily about avoiding any use of his power. If it's moved to a different setting then yeah that's fine as mentioned.

I think someone slipped it in as a joke at some point and then we kind of accidentally added it to the official template. The Alleyverse is a weird place. Please try to remember to be respectful when discussing these things. I get that this is going to be difficult for some people but discussing things logically and respectfully is going to move things along a lot faster and going to help your points be clearer to us. We have a limit on the number of mods we can have for the Alleyverse and that's not the only reason that this is happening. No one is making you get rid of anything, you can keep characters around as NPCs, but 3 players owning nearly half the characters in the Alleyverse was getting a little ridiculous. Not getting enough activity in a thread is exactly the issue, if you want to develop a plot yourself, write all the characters yourself, have full control over all the characters, settings and plot development yourself then what you want is fanfiction not FFRP. There are plenty of threads to RP in at the moment, if your problem is that you already have characters in all of them then that's kind of the point. These are not great reasons to create a character. Characters should be more than just a powerset to you. This is also not a great reason to have a character. If you're literally only creating a character to be a rep so that you can still be a rep, you may want to consider that you should let someone else from TUBA be the rep. If all characters exist and stay within the setting of the other side of the world, not affecting the Alleycity side or related threads, then yes. You're also welcome to move them to any of the other settings which are being established, if they're appropriate for that setting, which may help you with your issue of having no main plot. I appreciate that thanks. But just to clarify: This is not motivated solely by the time it now takes for character approvals, we could resolve that simply by not approving new characters. The issue is that a few players are dominating a large number of plots and given that we already have issues with too many characters in the setting it doesn't seem fair that a large amount of the virtual space is devoted to a small number of players. It really limits the room that new players have to fit in if the same players continue to try to lead and drive plots in every single thread. I understand that this is upsetting to those it affects, this issue should have been caught sooner so that we didn't need to remove existing characters but unfortunately the only time you really notice a problem is after it becomes a problem. I do apologize that this is what needs to happen, but I would appreciate it if those involved could try to work with us instead of just blanket rejecting this, insulting the moderators and complaining. There are more constructive ways to voice their concerns. Again, this really highlights one of my chief concerns, a player should not have to counter themselves in a plot where they play both sides and dictate all actions. That's really a better fit for a story than an RP, if you don't want other players to have control over your plots then you might want to try a format that doesn't have other players. The Shard does have numerous threads for sharing fanfiction, we have an entire subforum for it.

Again, really not helping yourself here. Already having more characters is the reason we are now needing to implement this limit, not applying it to the characters that caused the issue wouldn't really make sense.

*Considers all of these to be very recent developments* *Now feels very, very old*

Calling someone a tyrant is not a great way to convince them of your point. This is an administration and moderation motivated decision, not content related. That's why this was not put up for community polls. Arbitrarily allowing some people to have more characters than the limit would be unfair to anyone else who wants the same number of characters.

EDIT: Moved here from the other character thread, which as mentioned should be reserved purely for character bios and responses at this point.

Wasn't a difficult one here, just an index lookup and estimating the weaknesses. Total comes out to 105 points I feel like that's conservative, so should be fine here. Will add to the list.

I blame the parents. You can't call your child this and expect them to be anything other than an incredibly obnoxious brat.

Yes.