XU Reboot

[Nailah Weaver]

Just to keep everyone who wasn't in the channel at the time in the loop, we've decided to reboot the boards. The premise (mutant university in the UK) is going to stay the same but we decided to try and see if a fresh start revitalizes things. It'll also help potential new people to not be scared off by years of pre-existing history and character relationships that are set in stone. If anyone has any questions or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them here.

The new board will likely start up on Monday, June 1st, right here under the same URL.

[Haley Crusek]

University only or still the high school, university combo?

[Theresa McMasters]

University only, I believe, but one of the mods can correct me if I'm wrong.

[Nailah Weaver]

University only, yes. We have few enough people that splitting the population would be a bit risky. If we get enough returning/new players we might reconsider but for now it's only college-aged characters.

[Haley Crusek]

Ah....okay :-/

[Nailah Weaver]

Sorry!

[Will Stanton]

Trev, you thinking about bringing Haley back?

[Haley Crusek]

Possibly. At the moment she was the most interesting of my characters to me and the one I had the most somewhat planned out for. Seeing her advance but still have the potential to utterly fail when plot demanded was fun for me--for that reason and others, in general I've always preferred the high school setting to uni.

That said I know we need to do something to shake things up and attract new blood, so there's certainly no sour grapes here.

I'll start working on a revised bio for someone at the very least, if not a whole new character.

[Will Stanton]

Plus, hey, a freshman in college can still suck at things

[Nailah Weaver]

Yeah, just because they're two years older doesn't mean they can no longer fail.

Everyone is going to have a dip in power anyway from not having years of experience anymore and I don't see a reason why 18 year-olds can't horribly screw up when the plot or hilarity demands it. I'd encourage you to just age Haley up a bit and otherwise change very little. Have her "thing" be that she commands a lot of raw power but in turn it's harder to actually control. Either way I'm glad to still have you on board!

[Will Stanton]

I did not edit the original post. Nope.

[Will Stanton]

So, I'm going to stick this here, because I'm hoping to get some opinion on what is and is not interesting.

I'm strongly going back and forth about Will's status. He's changed a lot in the 7(!) years since the board started, and going through all that work again to get him back to where he is now is a rather...terrifying and treacherous prospect. At the same time, I can't exactly have him just move over to the new boards in the same place as he is now, both because that's too powerful and many of the characters he was with and helped develop him won't be around anymore.

I'm trying to think of what bits of Will's power development and whatnot was interesting to other players, so I have a starting point of what could even be done with him at this point. Throwing away seven years sucks, so I'm just desperately trying to think of how to salvage anything.

[Haley Crusek]

re. Will:
As someone who played for a hot minute near the start of the boards, I've got somewhat limited background on where he started, and even once I was back, I was never all that good at reading through threads I wasn't a part of.

I will say the Phoenix threads never did much for me--I've never been especially fond of this being of cosmic power just deciding to hang out on earth. That goes for the comics as well as the boards. So the few times Will got screwed with by the Phoenix weren't interesting.

The mindscape threads were fun--getting into people's heads makes for fun writing and reading.

Re. Haley:
I'm strongly considering doing just that--aging her up a bit, but giving her some issues with control.

Re. Any of my other legacy characters:
Same question as will. What's interesting? What's not?

[Theresa McMasters]

Re: Will
Seconding the mindscape stuff here. I love Will's mindscape. I came in way late, so I'm not really sure where he started, so it's hard for me to say with regards to actual power development.

[Nailah Weaver]

Altamira
I liked the Phoenix when she was Altamira, but that's a whole other set of stuff and I don't have time for writing that out. Will knows how I feel about her for the most part.

Will
What I liked the most about Will was, well, Will. The shifting is part of that but I see most powers and mutations as things that set off character interactions. Sara absorbing Will was fun not because of the action itself but because of the interactions it triggered, the problems it caused, etc. Personally I think (hope?) that even just redoing Will would result in different accidents, different interactions. I totally get feeling anxious about dumping so many years of development but I hope we can make the journey the interesting part without having it feel like you have to "get back" to where he is now.

As for specifics, I like Mindscape stuff, I like stuff going wrong. I don't so much like Will being "used" like Mira turning him into a flying carpet. Less because of Mira, but because I have a hard time wrapping my head around why Will would be remotely okay with that. I guess if someone goes against his consent I prefer that to be the central conflict as opposed to just being the cause of whatever happens. I always preferred Will getting himself into a pickle more, whatever shape that may have taken (hurr), messing around with Sara and getting absorbed, future Will pushing himself too hard or pushing his past self too hard, Bizarro Will being freaky and twisting himself around for Bizarro Sara.

But ultimately, if you brought Will over at a reduced power level what I would be most interested in seeing would be how it plays out. If he can "only" turn into inanimate, non-mechanical objects that'd still interest me. Maybe this time he learns how to do mechanical parts first cause he gets sucked into a machine, maybe he gets cut in half and starts exploring "being several people" right away. I never saw Will's power as a natural progression from one level to the next. He starts in the middle and almost any direction feels like a reasonable path to take to explore.



Haley
I like Haley because she's bubbly and adds a certain character archetype to the mix first and foremost. She's nice but has a temper that gets in her way and I think her power reflects that. Her exploring the Astral never felt like it really clicked and partially that's my fault for only giving her awful nightmare-scapes, but she seems more grounded in reality. She doesn't "get" the metaphorical nature because she's more down-to-earth than, say, Nailah. Her telepathy always felt somewhat secondary to her telekinesis to me and I thought that was good. She has a bit of Carrie in her and I like that. She tries to be nice but she (and other people, by way of messing with her) get in her way of that sometimes.


Trev
I never "got" Trev. He was funny as a butt-monkey but at times it felt like it got too much. He got too many being-kicked-moments and not enough nice-things-happening, but obviously that's up to you. If anything, wiping out his past mistakes leaves him open to be a goof again without being weighted down by "Oh man, remember all those other million times he was an idiot", I'd just give him a little bit less of that. He was also way overdue for a power-upgrade because he was being outclassed by miles by Haley the highschooler. ;D


Steph
I'm not sure I ever saw Steph develop much. I liked her in the Kraven plot but other than that I think she suffered a bit from being in charge of the XI kids and getting to do very little of her own. The werewolf stuff got promising but that suffered from lots of interruptions and stalling so it never quite managed to get anywhere.



If anybody has any critiques or insight about mine, now's the time to throw them out there.

[Theresa McMasters]

Trying hard to make sure to make sure I'm being constructive, but hard to tell if I succeed in text, so feel free to tell me I'm full of shit. It's okay. Some of this is also a bit through the lens of how my characters interacted with them, so bear that in mind.

Nailah:
I liked the early interactions between Miranda and Nailah. To be honest, I think the 'kid' thing got in the way of that because it got in the way of what was building as a good dynamic. Given the way the reboot is set up, that's really more of an observation than a critique, but I just wanted to say "Thanks for putting up with Miranda" to you (and to everyone else).

Jennifer:
I don't quite understand Jennifer and never have. That's probably because every time I had a chance to observe her in main continuity, it felt as though she existed to be antagonistic and that kind of killed any desire to dig any deeper.

ASHLIE:
I liked ASHLIE, even when I didn't quite get her or know how to interact with her. Even then, it always felt natural to play off of her either as Theresa or Allison. I actually had visions at some point in the past of Dee, Allison, and ASHLIE going on some sort of rampage.

Haley:
I like Haley, even if she gets on my nerves like a little sister on occasion.

Trev:
Basically what Barrin said, except I understand Trev. I felt like his relationship with Gemma was starting to turn him around a bit on the "always-kicked" thing, but even then he occasionally felt a bit clingy in that respect.

Stephanie:
Pretty much what Barrin said.

At this point, I'm not really sure any of my characters are coming back except in bits and pieces as new people. I'm aware I have issues with disengagement and so I'll be watching for that, but if anyone has any other helpful commentary, I'll try to put my big boy pants on and listen to it.

[Nailah Weaver]

Also, if anybody wants to get a head-start in registering an account, posting an app or just generally wants to give input into what I'm putting together, the current, temporary URL for the new boards is:

http://xaviersnew.bigdamnheroes.net/index.php

[Haley Crusek]

Alright, awesome. Haley was exactly what I intended her to be, if that's how you guys saw her--that's comforting. The telepathy was always her weaker link, and the astral stuff scared her because so much weird shit happened. Getting her less afraid of that was one of my development goals.

Trev did suffer from being too inept--partially because I liked using him for that, partially because he didn't come out to play that much. I'll take that into consideration for the future.

Steph...yeah. I can see all of that. I think if she comes back it would be as someone much less in control. She started off from a vehemently anti-mutant family, and then got werewolfy and struggled with control, becoming something she had hated and learning to deal with that, and dealing with going from a fairly straight-laced, uptight girl into a wild animal with barely controllable urges, and she'd lost most of that so there wasn't much to develop.

[Nailah Weaver]

I think Steph did much of her developing before XU even. That's the problem with legacy characters. On one hand they have all this rich backstory and that's great, on the other hand I often feel that leaves less room to explore that character. It all has it's pros and cons.

[Haley Crusek]

She did--a lot of that happened in the past.

Re your characters Barrin...

ASHLIE I enjoy a lot--I like her exploring humanity.

Nailah was always intriguing to me, but the perhaps ill-advised Trev shenanigans with her sort of scared him away from interacting very well. I think Haley and her worked well together also--not always seeing eye to eye in game, but Nailah was generally concerned for her well-being even if she was a scary mean teacher and Haley did at the end of the day respect her :-p

All of that is more an observation since all that relationship stuff would change anyway, but tl;dr no feedback here, wouldn't change anything--the powers lend really themselves well to having some of the mysticism in there, making it feel less tacked on than "I'm a mutant, but I'm *also* a wizard!"

I'll echo WWP and say Jen sometimes was maybe a bit *too* antagonistic. I think I sort of get where she was coming from, and Haley and her were like oil and water almost by design, but it was hard to dig deeper sometimes. I really enjoyed seeing her a bit differently in the x world threads.

The more I think about this the happier I am about it and the more excited I am as well

[Will Stanton]

Alright, so it looks like the things I enjoyed with Will are not the things other people enjoyed. Fair enough, I'll leave him sidelined.

[Theresa McMasters]

So, obviously not bringing someone across whole cloth, but if I were bringing the essence of a previous character over (possibly under the same name), who would you like to see? I make no guarantees, I'm just curious.

[Nailah Weaver]

Theresa, Nate or Natalya (since I know you're already mulling over an idea for Gemma). I suppose the later would kind of collide with Nate, so Theresa and Natalya it is.

The former had drive and ambitions and I think that'd be a good fit for a new generation of X-Men taking up the mantle and forming a team. The later we never saw a lot of, but the Russian background has some potential (I know that Mad has some interest in that too, so maybe there'd be something there to built upon or have something show up in an Issue). And I like ice-related stuff. It makes for good power/personality combinations.