So Rodney gave Hego a slap of reality?
More like a Orbital Drop of reality
This is an unsubtle nudge from the writers that we are poorly managing one of our heroes just shy of flat out telling us in authorial text that we're fucking up and need to correct our behavior.
Last turn, Hego was locked into perhaps one of the best chances he's ever had. He had a 60% shot to get a +40!!!! modifier to the roll this turn. and he completely flubbed it.
Dennis, on the other hand, made the cut for our hand-picked home-defense team, because he regularly pulls off ridiculous feats when we give him an inch. Heck, he even got a high roll on being present!
Exactly. Theres a certain level of Dice acquiesce required to achieve character development that's meaningful. Janna and Dennis are all over that juice, to a lesser extent Kitsune and *$%@ ( Max has had a couple okay roles, but also some real bad ones). Janna even improved one of her biggest maluses, her lazy trait, changing it to not ever cause a complete action waste, and give permanent DC reductions, which is hella valuable. Hego just doesn't have the rolls he needs. Even in this update, with his massive disadvantages, he rolled a 3 on that apprehend roll. Even if that -27 was a +27 he wouldn't have won this fight.
 
"You don't. You bash your head against a brick wall over and over again, thinking that if you just bash that brick wall hard enough, it'll turn into a door. That Golden Age you look up to so much wasn't cut and dry. Oh sure, more people back then had a sense of honor. You didn't get those costumed psychos who killed a dozen orphans for breakfast. But people died. Lotta em to cape-related accidents. But some of them were heroes dying to villains after they got cocky. A few of 'em were even villains dying to heroes who got sick of them escaping jail one too many times. There were rules, but they were only followed because they made the whole thing easier. It wasn't this make-believe namby-pamby FCLORP fantasy that you seem so hellbent on bringing back, even though it never actually happened!"
I didn't expect a Gravity Falls reference in the middle of the Reason You Suck Speech. Nice touch.
 
Dennis, on the other hand, made the cut for our hand-picked home-defense team, because he regularly pulls off ridiculous feats when we give him an inch. Heck, he even got a high roll on being present!
That never ceases to surprise me. I mean Janna at least had a solid intrigue stat and the coveted Occult stat.

Dennis was a joke, he even had a negative stat. It's astounding he's even still here never mind a go to character.
 
Honestly I'm sick of Janna, Tobe and Dennis getting all the good rolls and attention from the thread.
I mean, Dennis doesn't get that much, does he? He got mentions as an example in this interlude, sure, but he certainly hasn't been as big an offender as Tobe or Janna.

I'm also pretty ok with Tobe since while he does get a lot of attention, he's consistently a fun character. And more importantly, I've never seen the thread kowtow to Tobe.

The only one of the three I do really get tired of is Janna, since while Tobe gets attention just for doing his own actions well, Janna has been sucking other characters like Lizzy and Kitsune into a weird sphere of influence that the thread becomes completely unwilling to compromise. That said it's sort of understandable, we have a dearth of real Occult options and difficulty hitting those DCs so it isn't surprising she'd get a lot of attention.
 
Honestly I'm sick of Janna, Tobe and Dennis getting all the good rolls and attention from the thread.
Them's the die, dude.

I mean, Dennis doesn't get that much, does he? He got mentions as an example in this interlude, sure, but he certainly hasn't been as big an offender as Tobe or Janna.
Dennis gets it relative to his station, since he was supposed to be almost entirely useless going just by his starter stats. He often sneaks his way into actions a lot more high-profile than he really has any business doing, and acquits himself surprisingly well in them, like earning that ridiculous set of crits on Tobe's training trip, and also I'm pretty sure he's the one who actually found Feldrake. Don't quote me on this, but I think in terms of sheer stat growth he's our #1 Hero Unit, with a +9 in Martial and a +12 in Intrigue from where he started.

The only one of the three I do really get tired of is Janna, since while Tobe gets attention just for doing his own actions well, Janna has been sucking other characters like Lizzy and Kitsune into a weird sphere of influence that the thread becomes completely unwilling to compromise. That said it's sort of understandable, we have a dearth of real Occult options and difficulty hitting those DCs so it isn't surprising she'd get a lot of attention.
I do get tired of people just keeping Lizzy as a satellite character to Janna when she has such a great set of personals she could be doing, but hey, it's been paying off so far, so I'm not complaining.
 
Last edited:
"Roddy!" Hego gasped. "You're behind all this?"

"Okay." Roddy said resignedly. "We're doing this now."
And here...we...go.
Approximately two seconds after moving forwards, Hego depressed a pressure plate in the floor of the room, and found his leg sinking up to the knee in a viscous black goo that expanded and then rapidly solidified around his leg. Around him a series of launchers sprung from the walls and aimed directly at the super, but only one managed to fire a burst of the sticky black substance before they stood down. A pair of manacles descended from the ceiling on metallic strands, locking around Hego's arms.

"Pathetic." Roddy complained, looking down on the captured Super. "I didn't even have to use the spike wall."
Oh Hego...if you go into a place that practically screams 'Supervilllain Lair', you should always be on guard for traps. Otherwise...well, that happens. It's Hero 101.
"The hero? In here, heroes are zeroes… but then, you've never really been a hero to begin with."

"What are you talking about! Of course I have!"

Roddy fixed Hego with a flat look. "Really. I'm sure you used to be a big shot in Go City, but what sort of fantastic heroics have you been up to lately?"
Let's see, he saved cats from trees...which certainly didn't work out for him. He's helped little old ladies, and then got drugged once. But otherwise...oh dear oh dear.
A look of disbelief, pity and derision mingled on Roddy's face. "And how about the guys dealing drugs? The muggings, the pickpockets, the grand theft auto, anything that couldn't have been handled by a mall cop on a segway? Hell, I cleared this place out myself a couple days before this all started."
Yeah, when you work with superheroes (and villains) closely, you tend to pick up a few things eventually. And, to nobody's surprise, Roddy is way more competent than Hego right now.
"THE DAMN DUCK DID MORE THAN YOU!" Roddy bellowed, pointing at Hego accusingly. "He, at least, got a trainer. He looked at himself, realized his deficiencies, and asked Genghis goddamn Khan to teach him to fight! And after that he just kept going! He's picked up every single tip and trick he could to get better, and it's all to find some stupid cartoon! And what were you doing in the meantime? Bench pressing cars in the Doofenshmirtz Megamart parking lot? Going for leisurely, supervillain funded strolls down the cleanest streets in the city, taking cats across the street and helping old ladies down from trees and calling it heroism? Staring at a poster of someone you pretend you could be? Heroism is about putting your life on the line, it's about making the hard choices, it's fighting the good fight against impossible odds. That requires you to be mentally capable of recognizing the odds are impossible! Heroism is what makes supervillainy worth doing, and seeing you playing at it like a snot-nosed five year old is an absolute disgrace to the men you look up to.
Well fucking said. Even though the 'good old days' had been hyped up through mass media, you have to realize by now that superheroing is a very dangerous job. People die, villains are less than honorable, and sometimes heroes need to make some very dark decisions to save the day. It's how the world works. Also of note, although Dennis can't match up to the thread favorites, he's certainly proven more useful than Hego through his quest hooks and opportunities gained from investing in him. Enough that his crappy stats doesn't detract much from his potential and any thought of firing him is not without some really serious thought.
Days later, when Roddy came to in front of an enormous dream-home he could barely remember building, he would feel bad about what he'd said to Hego.

But he wouldn't say a word of it was wrong.
Claps. Bravo Roddy, bravo. I certainly don't think any of it was wrong either. Some things just need to be said outright. I enjoyed reading this interlude a lot, and even though Hego will be reeling from this for quite a while...it is totally worth it in the end.
 
This is an unsubtle nudge from the writers that we are poorly managing one of our heroes just shy of flat out telling us in authorial text that we're fucking up and need to correct our behavior.
I'm honestly getting kind of frustrated about that, because I don't think we've been really skipping his character development or anything. It's just that we don't have a lot of buttons to push here, and the ones we have pushed, have just got us back to square one because of bad rolls.

The writers have total control over what options we even have to do anything with Hego, and almost total control over our incentive structure. They can, and do, make certain option choices very punishing, to the point where they sure as hell don't seem like something the writers are encouraging us to do.

To then be told that we're "poorly managing Hego" feels a bit too much like having someone grab your wrist, slap you with your own hand, and jeer "quit hitting yourself, quit hitting yourself."

I do get tired of people just keeping Lizzy as a satellite character to Janna when she has such a great set of personals she could be doing, but hey, it's been paying off so far, so I'm not complaining.
That's fair. Part of the problem is that the dynamics of building teams for quests create certain incentives- you want a certain amount of balance, and Lizzy balances out a major weakness in both Janna and a lot of her other friends, because she's a "tech" character where most people who work well with Janna are "magic" characters or "warrior" characters.
 
To be fair, a large part of Hego's failure has been his consistent poor rolls. We were certainly trying to encourage you to take risks, send Hego out and let him be a hero more often, but... then you did that. And he failed. There are only so many stories we can tell with him while still making that story impactful and in keeping with the mechanics.

That said, Roddy's speech here is not so much glancing off the players as it is off of Doof's own position in general. There a lot of options that you could potentially write-in that do not show up as automatic options because Doofenshmirtz would never think of them. He hasn't reached the necessary level of character development to see the world outside of the narrow conception he has of it.

Yet.
 
To then be told that we're "poorly managing Hego" feels a bit too much like having someone grab your wrist, slap you with your own hand, and jeer "quit hitting yourself, quit hitting yourself."
To be fair, a large part of Hego's failure has been his consistent poor rolls. We were certainly trying to encourage you to take risks, send Hego out and let him be a hero more often, but... then you did that. And he failed. There are only so many stories we can tell with him while still making that story impactful and in keeping with the mechanics.
I was gonna say, it doesn't feel so much like telling "us" that we're using hego wrong, as the natural result of where he ended up. He tried but he has not gotten there, and there have to be consequences for that, and those aren't our "fault" even if they are our "responsibility" but we do have to pick where to go from here, once we pick up the pieces.
 
That's fair. Part of the problem is that the dynamics of building teams for quests create certain incentives- you want a certain amount of balance, and Lizzy balances out a major weakness in both Janna and a lot of her other friends, because she's a "tech" character where most people who work well with Janna are "magic" characters or "warrior" characters.
Yeah, but we've been burning personals of an Unit with competitive Learning and Martial scores and serviceable Intrigue on hanging out with Janna, meanwhile her multiple tech trees go ignored.
 
I do get tired of people just keeping Lizzy as a satellite character to Janna when she has such a great set of personals she could be doing, but hey, it's been paying off so far, so I'm not complaining.

Lizzy was a one diplomacy character, but she critted her first social personal and made friends with the one person that wouldn't mind the awkward bug lady.

Their personalities just seem to work together. I'm fine with them being in groups with each other a lot.

You absolutely have a point about Lizzys other personals but what she's done so far hasn't been at all bad.
 
Last edited:
I was gonna say, it doesn't feel so much like telling "us" that we're using hego wrong, as the natural result of where he ended up. He tried but he has not gotten there, and there have to be consequences for that, and those aren't our "fault" even if they are our "responsibility" but we do have to pick where to go from here, once we pick up the pieces.
See, I don't mind it so much when it's phrased that way.

I don't mind seeing what happens with Hego, even if it turns out to be disappointing. I just don't want to be told that the bad outcomes are all my fault when I don't control either the dice or the list of options that will or won't be available.
 
To add on Arathnorn's point: There's a couple of different ways you could have approached "developing" Hego, but if he rolled bad then he rolled bad. Like if he trained under Khan and rolled poorly, or got involved in more riskier actions and rolled poorly. Those could move things along faster than the generic "Do Good Deeds" action, though if the dice don't feel like giving you something, then they won't. I know C-Moon doesn't fudge results. Kataclysm occurred because of the unlikely event that your efforts to root out Kat before he was ready to set off his master plan kept failing. We figured we'd do something big to take advantage of the way the results were going.

In conclusion, please don't take Roddy's verbal dissection of Hego as an indictment of you all as players. We enjoyed writing it because we happened to have a moustache-twirling Roddy and a delusional Hego who needed a dose of reality at our disposal. If we had a serious issue with your choices, we'd make an aside post to discuss it.
 
So... will Shego kill him or thank him for this?

Cause this might make or break Hego and both seem bad for her
If Hego give up Heroism Shego have to put up with either an angsts or depressed Hego.
If make then the might go do something dangerous. Though it'll be interesting to see trainer Shego here.
 
So... will Shego kill him or thank him for this?

Cause this might make or break Hego and both seem bad for her
If Hego give up Heroism Shego have to put up with either an angsts or depressed Hego.
If make then the might go do something dangerous. Though it'll be interesting to see trainer Shego here.
Shego doesn't care. She really, really doesn't, and we've made it as clear as we could manage that she'll continue to not care as long as you aren't attempting to use Hego as some sort of ill-advised leverage to manipulate her. Which you thankfully haven't.
 
Last edited:
So... will Shego kill him or thank him for this?

Cause this might make or break Hego and both seem bad for her
If Hego give up Heroism Shego have to put up with either an angsts or depressed Hego.
If make then the might go do something dangerous. Though it'll be interesting to see trainer Shego here.
Shego isn't a good sister, she cares about family sure but she isn't a good person.
 
"Lesson's not over, sonny." Roddy said, face an inch from Hego's own. After a moment he withdrew, took a bite from his sandwich, and resumed pacing.

"You don't. You bash your head against a brick wall over and over again, thinking that if you just bash that brick wall hard enough, it'll turn into a door. That Golden Age you look up to so much wasn't cut and dry. Oh sure, more people back then had a sense of honor. You didn't get those costumed psychos who killed a dozen orphans for breakfast. But people died. Lotta em to cape-related accidents. But some of them were heroes dying to villains after they got cocky. A few of 'em were even villains dying to heroes who got sick of them escaping jail one too many times. There were rules, but they were only followed because they made the whole thing easier. It wasn't this make-believe namby-pamby FCLORP fantasy that you seem so hellbent on bringing back, even though it never actually happened!"
Is this a reference to Red Death? I feel like it is.

 
Seriously, we *tried* advancing on Hegos performance (maybe not as dilligently as we could/should have), but most times the dice *fucked us over hugely*

We try having him indirectly partake in a fight between Norm and the Inquinator, where his prowess and heoism would have actually been worth a lot? He more-or-less *critfails* and sleeps in so long that he only arrive after both other combatants KOed each other.

We take him to the Wasteland to apprehend a drug ring? The Wasteland turns out to be far more deadly than thought and Hego gets pummeled into the ground by both the druglord and a bunch of ecoterrorists.

We have him gotten locked into a Heroics option that´s actually slanted *in his favor*? HE STILL BRICKS IT.

Yes, we sorta coddled him too much thanks to misreading what Shego wants from us, but even when we actively tried remedied it, the dice just won´t let us...so he ending on a low note here is not really our fault and the mere possibility of the QMs insinuating that it was riles me up quite a bit.

I really want him to pull through - if for no other reason than to have a good Martial HUs that´s neither Norm nor Genghis MFing Khan -, but for that to happen the dice need to stop being little shit about him for one or two turns.
 
Last edited:
Yes, we sorta coddled him too much thanks to misreading what Shego wants from us, but even when we actively tried remedied it, the dice just won´t let us...so he ending on a low note here is not really our fault and the mere possibility of the QMs insinuating that it was riles me up quite a bit.
Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case:
To add on Arathnorn's point: There's a couple of different ways you could have approached "developing" Hego, but if he rolled bad then he rolled bad. Like if he trained under Khan and rolled poorly, or got involved in more riskier actions and rolled poorly. Those could move things along faster than the generic "Do Good Deeds" action, though if the dice don't feel like giving you something, then they won't. I know C-Moon doesn't fudge results. Kataclysm occurred because of the unlikely event that your efforts to root out Kat before he was ready to set off his master plan kept failing. We figured we'd do something big to take advantage of the way the results were going.

In conclusion, please don't take Roddy's verbal dissection of Hego as an indictment of you all as players. We enjoyed writing it because we happened to have a moustache-twirling Roddy and a delusional Hego who needed a dose of reality at our disposal. If we had a serious issue with your choices, we'd make an aside post to discuss it.
 
Back
Top