Episode 211 of the Letters Page: Creative Process: Mechanics of Definitive Edition

Get ready for some rulings!

I offer “board gameist” for the designers! Distinct from “board gamer” for the players. Though “architect” really hits that sweet spot of being both art and engineering.

I wonder what this graphic design of Christopher’s they’re laughing about is.

Okay, this fanfare is rad. Where’d that come from? And redoing it because Christopher got the wrong box is comedy gold. XD

Adam thinks about cars, Christopher thinks about drugs, hmm, hmm, noted.

Wonderful birthday song.

“We could get really granular on this” And custom designers absolutely have, and it sucks! :’)

Ed Sheeran variant for Argent Adept when :V

Physically, there’s no difference between “upon” and “after”. You have to use the power first, then finish using it to ‘mark’ it ‘used’, and then put the card on top of your deck. <.< Feeling like this should work the way it does in EE.

I think it’s Swedish, which means the ‘sk’ is said more like an ‘sh’ and the ‘y’ is more like an ‘oo’.

Good to know they keep backup Christophers in case of letter-related accidents.

Love a good mechanics episode!

Is it just me, or did that Young Legacy “maybe” sound a lot like a “yes, probably”?

And it is kinda weird that Alacritous Subdominant seems to be the only card that has an effect similar to “When this card is destroyed” effects, but seems less broken that way.

And the confirmation of the “What is a Hero” question raises a few issues with cards, but I’m sure we’ll find an answer to them!

Oh, and you can pronounce my name however you want, just please don’t Google it.

Maybe. It sounded like either “we’re already testing this and can’t say” or “we’re trying to decide if it’s worth designing.” Christopher admitting that a lot of lore and therefore card (or at least deck) stuff was revised following the wall of post-its is still having downstream effects. Since so much stuff is happening so much earlier than they originally had in mind, stuff’s changed. Harpy is a good example.

I hope they do a deck for her, solo. I think that their skillsets and methods are different enough that she warrants something new.

That said… I wonder if there is some kind of halfway between a variant card and a new deck that can be used. Like… a set of 8-10 cards (at the most) that replace certain others. Like I could see YL taking out stuff like Inspired Presence and Heroic Interception (or their DE equivalents… don’t know the decks that well, yet) as they represent more experience and tactical know-how that she doesn’t yet have, and replacing them with single-target buffs (she seems more person-to-person than her dad’s group stuff, if that makes sense) and variations on using her atomic glare.

[quote=“TakeWalker, post:2, topic:29290”]
I wonder what this graphic design of Christopher’s they’re laughing about is. [/quote]

I think he did the original Sentinels of the Multiverse graphic design, even before Enhanced Edition, just to get the game out.

It sounded to me like some of the ambient menu / Freedom Plaza music from the Sentinels of Freedom video game. I like the idea that that is the music playing at GtG headquarters whenever someone is looking for something, hehe!

Yeah. It jumped out at me when they admitted that the original plan for the Void Guard was that they weren’t going to appear until the end of the Vertex timeline; this actually explains quite a bit about the weirdly compressed Southwest Sentinels timeline.

Listening more, I wish they had reworded each card according to the template of Spirit Island. That game has such clean and clear cards! Most especially, a line break between any items that are supposed to be unambiguously sequential. I’m not sure that would fully clarify Alacritous Subdominant, but I also would have done that card by fully resolving the first action I read (including any weird cascading effects), then fully resolving the second, etc.

But more importantly, hey, where are the art and story hints in EE about the Terrorform?

That’s what I thought at first too, but didn’t they say “core set”? I’m assuming it was a reference to Definitive Edition with art on Hasty Augmentation and the Akash’Mecha critical event.

Maybe I’m wrong and some sleuth has noticed something in EE, though.

I think they indirectly answered something I was thinking about recently: how do they handle Events/Critical Events the heroes canonically lose? Is it just treated like a normal game, or does the win condition require you to “follow the script” so to speak and lose in a specific manner? It sounds like the former; just like how you can change the heroes and the environment, you can beat the Event even if the canon heroes lost.

“Transmission of Honor” is probably Chairman’s normal event, and the heroes lose that since Mr. Fixer dies and the Organization and Pike continue to rule. I wonder if once we get Apostate, if his critical event will be “Fall of the Prime Wardens” and how you would turn the revelations and team conflict into gameplay.

Just finished listening and I don’t have a lot of thoughts but I still have thoughts:

That Sentinels theme remix that we hear snippets of at the beginning when Christopher tries to find a copy of DE sounds awesome.

Ed Sheeran is obviously our universe’s equivalent to the Virtuoso of the Void, the Ginger Guitarist (yes I know the alliteration doesn’ quite line up).

The more they talk about Ra the more I can hear my physics teacher rolling in her grave. And she’s not even dead.

Is Inductor a Guise Book character or are they in the Core Rulebook and I’m just forgetting? Or are they in one of the preview adventures from before the official release of the Core Rulebook?

Inductor is formerly known as Citizen Sweat. They were shown with the new name in the RPG Stolen Legacy One-Shot as part of the Vandals with Tear (Citizens Tears) and Stygian (Citizen Blood)

Oh right. Completely forgot about that.

I’m now fascinated by the idea of Hedgelord as a variant for the Akash’thriya deck. I could see him using his crazy EXTREME!! plant seeds to do a lot of the same things the primordial seeds do.

It’s definitely not the Sentinels of Freedom “Plaza” music… I don’t know what it was. Very curious to find out, because I would have said I know all the Sentinels music that’s been put out thus far, and I didn’t recognize this piece.

I know we’re probably not getting a full Biomancer deck, but I would hope that if we get some kind of event around him, it’s the rescue of Tempest.

Maybe one of the missions in Megalopolis? Been a little bit since I played…

on the subject of what heroes were in what event-
I remember them saying once that Setback had not debuted at the time of “Cosmic Omnitron” but that later flashbacks and retcons did show him as part of that event.
standard “sliding time scale” stuff because obviously Cosmic Omnitron could not have been 30 years ago

When was Setback’s first appearance then? It’s gotta be close to this.

Anyone have a date for Mystery Comics Vol. 2, #212?

Cosmic Omnitron was April 1984, from the Critical Event card. Closer to 40 years ago!

From the WT notes on the Multiverse recap (episode 81) assuming it’s still correct:

• April ’91: MC vol. 2 #212, Setback! Science and Progress one-shot, Krystal Lee (later to become Friction - she does steal the gear at the end, also were Dark Visionary kills a bunch of scientists as told in episode 31). MOM #42, Dark Vis completely takes over (up to here she could be the good Vis with some dark tendencies as she fought her other self, but here’s where the bad one is fully in control).

'84 to '91, huh? Ah, what’s 7 years among friends anyway? I guess Omni II was just a one-off, correct? Maybe there won’t be art of Setback on the Cosmitron hull in Definitive Edition now that the Post-it Wall Project has organized things better.

It’s a one-off, but like The Matriarch, there was a “modern” retelling. In Cosmitron’s case that was in early Cosmic Concurrence in like 2008 or so. That’s where we’re told that the element of there being an intentionality behind the cosmic power-up rather than it just being this weird thing that happened. Of course, a DE-era retcon to how that all went down is also possible.

I can’t get over Setback’s hair on this card. Like, Setback always has crazy hair but for some reason I find this particular hairstyle hilarious.

I’m personally kinda disappointed that it appears he no longer lost his hair in the experiments. I liked that representation: It was simple and accurate. No idea why it was retconned, though. Might have to write in a question on that…

I know it was asked at one point. He did lose his hair but it came back quickly. The hair loss just isn’t depicted anymore. Granted I’m with you and wish that was still in the art

As sad as it is not to have a hairless Setback (that we know), that’s definitely not the biggest change I see with the Silver Lining card… I wonder if he’ll have another way of mitigating a big hit, and if Looking Up will make an appearance at all.

Could it be that the art is when he first discovered he had powers, and the hair loss (and eventual regrowth) occurred after that?

I thought they just shaved his head when they put him in the tube for testing.

Unless they’ve changed the story he lost his hair during testing.

They finally read another of my letters, as I am the mind behind the mask of L. M. Mentalist. The grab-bag of characters I named at the end of my letter was hastily and poorly chosen; Skateblade should actually have been Pool Shark, as that’s who I was thinking about. Karnal is indeed one of the Spite clones, as Vertex is one of the axes I’m still grinding a bit; I want those characters to come back into canon somehow. And I count Inductor as a new character because she didn’t just change name, but also gained new powers.

PS, they missed or opted to drop one line from my letter, right after I asked about lingering mystery people from EE: “(No doubt if that last answer is yes, the fan demand to include these ultra-successful ninjas in one of DE’s later expansions will begin posthaste.)”. Whether such persons exist remains uncertain; I can’t think of one, but I also don’t know any Terrorform hints in EE, so clearly I don’t quite know everything. (But that will change once I gain the power to conspire with Wager Master and combine my universe with the Sentinel Comics multiverse, allowing the premier super team of my world to fight the Freedom Five and Unity over possession of twelve cosmically powerful artifacts before me and WM can get ahold of them for our reality-warping schemes.)

Craftmason would be a good word for people who make creative things, including games as well as puzzles and certain complex types of toys, all collectively known as “crafts”.

I expected not to care about this episode, having never touched a Definitive Edition card, but the new music adds so much to the early part of the episode. I’m definitely enjoying it more than I should.

Oh hey, a fourth letter of mine. L.M. Mentalist is probably my best work, other maybe than America’s Crappiest Legacy, and he’s both harder to justify using and a lot less fun. Ted Doggett was my vanilla letter writer, with no gimmick.

To clarify LMM’s question, I’m interested in knowing which early design concepts they’ve steered away from, from the original IHOP meeting to Sentinel Tactics to OblivAeon to The RPG to Definitive Edition. I doubt that the original Infernal Relics design meeting had a ghost of a notion of Akash’Mecha in it, but we can be pretty sure that an early design had a character that was basically “Ra but sonic”, who became the Shrieker, who then became Glamor. We definitely know the original Absolute Zero had mechanical design aspects that didn’t survive to Ryan Frost, and I wish they’d been fully spelled out. I also wonder how far they got in starting to design Orthrus, and how much of that work eventually showed up for Plague Rat or Apex or Bugbear. And when did they decide on teams? Were they originally planning the Prime Wardens to include Ra and Visionary? How about the original plan to have all five hero decks from the Vengeance box, including the Sentinels when they existed in the 90s, be the ones who canonically thwarted the Vengeance Five’s carefully calculated plan to kill the FV? I really want to be able to fully document these alternate histories and make them all work, instead of only the version they currently accept as truth.

Oh, so Shoewhale then. That actually makes even less sense!