AndyC

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

New game!

Who would you guys fan cast as your characters.

(Preferably excluding actors who have actually portrayed the character)

I'll go first,

Liam Hemsworth

Luke Hemsworth

For real, would probably have to go with...

Alexander Sarsgaard

@Lord Wraith

I practically never think of live-action actors portraying my characters. Generally I look at a bunch of comic art and/or fan-art and try to match my writing to whatever aesthetic arises out of that.

So, not including obvious re-treads of DCAU/YJ/DCEU incarnations of characters, the strongest influences on how I envision my characters looking, acting, or speaking in this particular incarnation are:

Superman

Ippo from Hajime No Ippo

Lois Lane

Miss Pauling from Team Fortress 2

Jimmy Olsen

Lance from Voltron: Legendary Defender

Dr. John Henry Irons

Bernard from Westworld

Mxy

Bill Cipher from Gravity Falls

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

<Snipped quote by Byrd Man>

You know, I won't pretend to have invented the trope, but the earliest instance I can recall is me playing Detective John Grayson as a lead-in to a Robin run that never happened. Which was a big influence on my decision to take Selina that way when UDC rebooted.

@Eddie Brock

Was that the whole thing where Batman got blamed for John Grayson's murder? Because I ran with that for a while with Dick before getting wrapped up in Titans shenanigans.

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

<Snipped quote by Master Bruce>

It's true. One of my characters has canonically fucked one of Byrd's. Which means it's basically like me and Byrd have canonically fucked.

@Eddie Brock

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

<Snipped quote by Eddie Brock>

With as much reverence as I have for World Of Heroes, that second iteration of Ultimate DC was some of the best stuff I've ever produced to this day. And I wasn't alone. From Byrd's amazing Edward Nygma, who never became The Riddler but was an incredibly formidable opponent without the need for any of those trappings, to Andy's pretty awesome Robin and Raven ship, to Spike's Bane, to your Selina Kyle, who I still hold in such a high regard that I've never been able to feel quite right in writing Selina for myself. I still wish we had gotten to do half of the stuff we'd planned for Bruce and Selina as Batman and Catwoman, because we got to do alot of the build-up to it. There were alot of great players who visited UDC's Gotham... much to the chagrin of alot of players, who represented cities that weren't nearly as popular.

@Master Bruce

UDC 2.0 Grayson was probably my favorite character I've ever played. That or All-Star Marvel 1.0 Spidey. It's a pretty close toss-up between the two. Or a character named Seymour from an RP that none of y'all were involved in, but.....you guys don't need to know about him.

And as much as I loved giving people shit for turning every other character into a GCPD detective, it did provide some really great material when done well.

But you know what killed UDC 2.0? And World of Heroes? And All-Star Marvel? And every other game on the Hype? People not posting. So while we're all patting ourselves on the back for games we played a decade ago, let's not ignore that we've got a killer game going right now.

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

<Snipped quote by Master Bruce>
Kinda curious about these issues. World of Heroes is one of the games I never read the archives of.

@Inkarnate

I only jumped on to World of Heroes during its last two seasons or so, and I remember it being a real mixed bag. There was a big Legion-of-Doom-style arc which I remember nearly driving me to rage-quit-- there was a lot of really unsavory stuff in that arc like the Teen Titans getting captured and tortured (including Arrowette getting raped by Doctor Light while Deathstroke murdered Supergirl with a Kryptonite sword that he just...had, somehow), the Joker nuking Metropolis (without the player asking the Superman player [me] beforehand), and the heroes just kind of having to let them get away with it because we couldn't violate the no-kill rule, making the Justice League and everyone else look like a bunch of ineffectual losers.

I got so fed up with it that I eventually decided "to hell with it" and had Superman spend the entire next season in space, fight the ghost of General Zod in the Source Wall, and then spend the season after that bumping around outside the multiverse and fight Goku and stuff. That was sort of the start of me keeping my proverbial toys to myself.

On the other hand, I've been told by everyone else that they had really great experiences playing WoH, and it's the one game a lot of the older Basement-dwellers wax nostalgic about. But yeah, I....don't.

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

Sure, I'll hide this, I guess.

Yay. I love when writers force into the narrative the whole "oh, that cool thing we only recently came up with? Yeah, these characters were doing that decades beforehand despite past stories contradicting this." Doesn't end up horribly done ever.

@Retired

Let's keep hiding it stuff, why not?

Yeah, I can't say I'm crazy about the villain being yet another existential threat from the dawn of time. Marvel does it a lot, but DC's been playing that hand wayyyy too much these days-- I mean, it worked when they introduced the Speed Force and the multicolored Lanterns, but for real, can't new stuff just be new?

That said, I kinda dig this angle and how it applies to Venom. For one, it gives them more to do than just "whoops, there's been some big misunderstanding and now we hate Spider-Man again." And two, it gives the series a touch of Lovecraft-style cosmic horror without just stealing the squid-monster motif. I don't really think Venom is protagonist material, but if they're gonna keep up with it, he does need his own niche in the Marvel universe so he doesn't continue to ride Spidey's coat-tails.

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

So, uh, while we're on the subject of origin stories and since we were talking about Venom a few pages back......

Spoilers for the current Venom comic

....the new origin for the symbiotes is pretty insane.

Apparently there's this primordial proto-god named Knurr who existed before the Big Bang and was basically the God of the Void. Then when the Big Bang happened and all the various cosmic beings in the Marvel universe came into existence and just had to start making shit ruining his perfectly good nothing, Knurr created the All-Black sword (the same sword that would be used by Gorr the God-Butcher in the Thor: God of Thunder series) to start killing gods. Somehow or other during one of his many deaths, he found out that he could use his gooey void stuff to bond living creatures to him, and so he decided that if he couldn't be the god of the void anymore, he'd just hijack everyone else's creations to make himself the center of all life in the universe.

Eventually he made his way to Earth, piloting essentially a giant symbiote-dragon, but he wound up on the wrong side of Thor and got his ass kicked. While he was out of commission, his creations started to get a mind of their own, imprinted on by their hosts, and imprisoned him. Klyntar, the symbiote "home world," isn't a planet at all, but just a giant mass of symbiotes trying to keep their god imprisoned. The word 'Klyntar' isn't the name of their planet or their species; it means "cage."

Meanwhile, that symbiote-dragon thing (which, incidentally, is the same dragon from the Beowulf myth apparently) is still on Earth, and SHIELD was using it for years to create symbiote soldiers long before Venom ever showed up.

So.....yeah. Wonder if any of that's gonna come up in the movie.

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

<Snipped quote by Nightrunner>

200 bitches.

@Sep

That's a lot of bitches.

<Snipped quote by Byrd Man>

So...

When did everyone start rping, where and who was your first character? Mine was on a browser game that also had forum rp going on. I was a Jaffa called Tul'ak I think his name was

@Sep

I think I've gone through this before, but I don't remember if it was in the thread or in a Discord chat.

I think it was around '98 or '99 or so. It was on a now-defunct message board called GameGossip, and while I was looking for info on the upcoming (and ultimately rather disappointing) Godzilla 2000, I stumbled across a Godzilla-themed RPG. I jumped in playing King Ghidorah, and spent about three years blatantly stealing from the old Marc Cerasini Godzilla novels.

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

<Snipped quote by Byrd Man>

In all seriousness, who is Brotha-Man?

@Sep

He was a very low-skilled writer who popped up very briefly on the Hype forums in '09 or so. His only real claim to fame was, like Byrd said, writing a post where his character was walking around Metropolis shopping for an apartment maybe three posts after the city had been nuked. He stopped posting almost immediately after that, and vanished into legend.

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

<Snipped quote by Retired>

Did I hang with you guys on the Old guild? :O

@Sep

We're retconning your origin story.