Important Announcement for Babel

[Johnathan]

Here's a semi important, but not immediately relevant announcement for Babel. It goes more towards planning and what to expect.

The balance of power between factions in Babel is essentially going to be the same no matter what at the start: The Tower having an overwhelming advantage of power and force. However, my plans for emphasizing that are a bit eschew atm due to poor foresight on my part. Basically, in the beginning before taking anything else into account, my plan was to have for the Ascended level individuals be the initial hurtle/inspiration/signal of "shit getting real" for various events happening around Babel. That was thrown out once the trend for characters became overwhelmingly weighted towards people making Ascended level characters, so I need to shift how things work a bit for it to make sense in context of the universe.

For example I have mentioned in the past that the levels of response by the Tower will upgrade in tiers from Enforcers, to Anti Supernatural Entities, and then to the Rounds/Inquisitors (This being the "Oh shit, time to get the fuck out" tier) This looses it's impact when most of the Resistance or otherwise opposite aligned individuals are Ascended so I need to make up for that. Atm, the way I'm leaning in order to compensate for the problem while still making sense in the context of the universe is to make up for the disparity in numbers. So, before where the oh shit moment was the Ascended Round showing up, now it would be: The Ascended Round showed up.....with several of their Ascended level family members.....and a dozen specially selected Anti Supernatural Entities selected from the Tower to best counter the force present.

Feel free to make comments or suggestions on this topic or any other angles I could take to resolve the potential issue. The only thing set in stone at the moment is the Tower's sizable advantage at the start. How things proceed and evolve from there will be based on in character actions, decisions and plans.

[Johnathan]

I would also like to mention that this would slightly shift my assessment of important characters in the following way. Individuals such as Mikhail, Malthior, and Ptolemy would have initially been held to the same standards as player characters in that the combined threat posed by their entire combat forces (Undead, Constructs, Chess Pieces) would have been reflected by their overall power level. Instead, with my suggested system, they would have an allotment of available force, comparable to a group deployment of say, Jiayi, some members of her family, and some entities selected from the Tower.

This means, instead of having others deployed with them to be commanded, Malthior's puppets, Mikhail's "pieces" and Ptolemy's undead will have separate power level rankings, the sum total of the combined force equal to that of the alternative method of force deployment.

Just something to think about.

[Sabata]

Hmmmmmmmmm, I feel slightly responsible for this with the way I planned the Golden Wind.

Sorry for throwing a wrench into things and making you rework the way the system works.

[Johnathan]

Not to worry, that was only the plan I had come up with before considering what everyone else would have the most fun doing. This way will probably end up working out better anyway. I'll probably assign Attrition numbers to each round, the Enforcers, the Darkthornes, the Resistance etc, to give people an idea of whether or not they're making progress.

(Attrition numbers being: We start out at 200 combatants and each time one gets killed off in a battle the number decreases.)

[Horo]

Hum... Maybe we could also return to the TOTF way of only having one initially uber Player character, while leaving plot NPCs to be powerful?

[Stein]

Horo, everyone only has one character above 'inhuman' I think (except John), or is inhuman still too powerful?

It's kinda complicated because no one on this site it 'human' so almost no one's using the 'human' scale-area. I can think of Alice and Faerydae who are on the human scale...

[Horo]

Hummm, That's a good point Stein.

It's hard to categorize players into scales like this... Maybe we could do something like D&D where we have a specific amount of points for allocation that create our stats? And after obtaining a post count interval you gain another stat point? (since characters have their own post counts)

[Johnathan]

I was considering that but it would be more of an average thing (like what you did with your sample character) and not a strict system at that. It would just needlessly complicate things otherwise. For now, I think the best way to balance it by taking the conditions of the city into consideration is with the number of combatants available. The Tower has the clear advantage there.