Would you in this case consider more or less equalizing the male and female roles here too, much like with the business entrepreneur and the street gang leader?
Of course the male mc could be more the stereotypical, self-employed private eye of Hollywood fame who is barely keeping his head above water, at the start at least.
While topless female prize-fighting is very much not my thing (give me nude male (oil) wrestling any day) having googled it I nonetheless believe that diving into the 1920’s urban America culture of female prize fighting is a unique opportunity as I didn’t even know it existed.
Hmmmm…while I’m on the subject would nude male wrestling be a good idea for an expansion of the Adelphi club activities once the gay or bi mc hopefully takes that over? It would certainly seem to fit the club’s theme of trying to harken back to a kitschy version of ancient Greece through the imaginary lens of 1920’s gay America.
I’m having a hard time imagining female enforcer every role sounds plausible except that one. Considering with the hyper masculinity that’s normally in organized.
It has sense only if there are women put there to find spies or sadly homosexuals. Later in 30s and 40s in government they use women or men disguised as secretaries to discover what the terrible mentality of the time considered degeneration. I saw that in several documentary films. It is nasty and i found it terrible but it happened. However i hardly doubt anyone would want play as one. Except you have being put in the place by blackmail or something similar.
I was vaguely leaning in this direction myself (considering the lower popularity of the male Ex-Cop) but having looked at things more closely, it would be too big a change at this (comparatively late) date – in terms of those “behind the scenes” bonuses I mentioned in my previous post. If we now essentially also made him Private Eye (but with an Ex-Cop backstory so we didn’t have to change too much in-game), he could not have the female Private Eye’s bonuses as well, otherwise the gender scales (if not also the overall ‘other advantages’ balance) would tip far too heavily in his favor.
He may just have to remain a pariah on the street at the start and suck it up / rise above it.
There is at least a prizefighting racket in the game (you can become a prizefight manager with a stable of your own, and possibly expand on this by such as taking bets and / or even fixing fights in your favor). If / when we lose the Prizefighter female MC role – The Enforcer idea, originally suggested in a PM by @Eiwynn, certainly seems to be gaining support – then I’ll make a point of including mention of the female prizefighters in that particular story line. While I agree with @poison_mara that the game should not be / is not intended to be a history lesson, I don’t think it hurts to be at least an eye-opener in certain ways.
Congratulations – you’ve just become the first to add a genuinely original ‘Income Boost’ New Business Opportunity idea to a specific business / racket. Naturally, it will be Adamo’s idea, not yours, but I’m sure you can live with that… Thank you - I love it, as it will now balance better with Gina’s speak and one or two other ‘social venue’ type rackets.
It’s probably as much to do with your own experiences (in real life) or influences (as in TV and movies). I don’t have a problem on either score – in real life I knew a girl who was probably physically tougher than most men I’ve ever known (and liked to prove it – thankfully she liked me!) and I’m considerably less influenced by “popular culture” / misconceptions, and more so by actual research. Strong women – both physically and mentally – have never been absent from history.
If it helps, just think of it as a “what if…” scenario.
I picked Enforcer because I didn’t really understand what Prizefighter was supposed to be, but the concept actually sounds a lot more interesting now having read @idonotlikeusernames post.
@Shoelip You can always change your poll votes as long as they remain open. It’s too bad the new public demo isn’t up yet, as apart from Vendetta himself we’re all going by old knowledge and/or in some cases, like mine, our very old beta notes.
This one is more female boxing centric, but it has an old illustration from a french magazine of the era (1927), showing the topless women fighting and very briefly mentions those early female prize fights. In general it doesn’t seem to be that easy to even find information on them online, so I really applaud @Vendetta’s research skills here.
Indeed, though it does seem plausible to me. I mean it is a road not taken in Vendetta but the female mc could also have easily been a veteran soldier as in almost every war to date, or at least up until the full incorporation of women and trans people into the armed forces there have throughout history always been those women who preferred to don the male uniform/knightly plate and impersonate a male soldier/officer. Seems to have actually been not all that uncommon in WW1, or at least better documented than in many other historical wars.
It is same as people forget that women were gladiators too and even have same or similar popularity as males. Same people tend to forget that prostitution in Rome including male and women both in clients and workers. Same as women went to class gym and use bikinis. I choose the enforcer basically because It would be easy to understand to the casual player. We here are a minority of the people whom will read the story. I really think as testers we should focus on
What would make this story more interesting and attractive for the casual gamer/reader?
This is the beginning of game and key factor in a demo version to make people buy it . What terms will them understand easily? Because most of people will not looking for meaning it would say oh… That’s to difficult i will play candy crush instead.
It seems weird but i really read something like that in the android market. oneof most infamous was @JimD first game valoration on Spanish android. “one star I will give less if I can… this is not a game … THIS IS JUST A BUNCH OF LETTERS I don’t want to read.”
This is true, but all CoG and Hosted games also have public demo’s that will be viewed by much more casual players than the posts on this forum. In any case I didn’t mean anything as an attack on you or @Eiwynn and the enforcer is a perfectly valid female role, I just think the prize-fighter and the largely unknown history of (topless) female prize-fighting that comes attached with that is more interesting and something that more casual players could glean from the new public demo too.
Again the fact that without the new public demo to go by we’re operating half-blind at the moment makes some of these polls a bit premature, I think.
I mean, modern pop cultural depictions of gladiators are ridiculously inaccurate. They usually have them always fight to the death, and yeah, the Gladiatrix is pretty much relegated to the realm of fantasy. I would kinda love to have a slightly more realistic gladiator game, like maybe you could give it a sort of professional wrestling dynamic to keep it interesting for those with poor imaginations (by that I mean, they can’t imagine that their preconceptions about gladiators are wrong and therefore would find any realistic gladiator game unrealistic because it wasn’t violent enough).
The topless prize-fighting was controversial then and will be so, even today because of cultural war issues.
Even if you were to solely focus on female prize-fighting (originating in the US during the late 19th century) it was still a sport both at a professional and amateur level that was rarely acknowledged until 1970’s. In fact, the first “licenses” issued to women were in the 1970’s era of female boxing in the US.
No no no That’s one of crazy reactions Zombie exodus have in Spanish android. Many people was pissed with the only one being free. And others said blah, were are graphics… I gave years ago some examples to jim about how stupid can be casuals and how they could destroy the ratings.
For instance in @Havenstone game someone gave it a one star because it doesn’t have helicopters. LIERALLY.
@idonotlikeusernames I agree totally with you in everything basically. But the poll could be useful to @Vendetta focus or even just thinking about it on perspective. Also you are an ace if still keeping notes from beta testing five years ago… you are my idol, I am so messy that no way i keep something like that more rhan a month…
Awww…Though I should probably say my home is fairly cluttered with books and papers and everyone from my mom to some ex-boyfriends are surprised I can find almost anything in under 10 minutes. The same goes for files on my computer. I prefer to call it my application of chaos-theory or organized chaos.
Retention is also a professional necessity for me. You may or may not have heard it in the European news outlets but there are some major scandals at our national forensics laboratory at the moment and it would be a disservice to my clients and the firm if I relied solely on the government to safeguard files and evidence that may (or I admit in most cases may not) prove very useful at a later date.
Fortunately most of my file storage these days is virtual in my old(er) computers stuffed with hard-drives in the attic as I don’t trust the cloud all that much either.
@Vendetta does the Adelphi club currently already possess a legitimate business front? Asking cause I can’t find it in my old notes as the old beta seems to have ended just before we could really get involved with that particular racket. If not could we perhaps use a members-only gym as a front for it if we desire, it would fit with the Greek Gymnasium decor and gyms were seemingly more common in the 1920’s then any decade before the 1980’s. Their decline seems to have come with the depression and after ww2 where the surviving ones needed to turn to either boxing, body-building/weightlifting (and the already male-focused Adelphi could more easily be converted to that use when that time comes after the end of prohibition and WW2 then many of its competitors) or basketball exclusively in order to survive.
He’s brilliant and cute and it gives an excellent reason to include the super-cute Adamo among the list of hardened criminals that form the mc’s “gang-members”.
I know I’m the odd one out here-- the last time I played the public demo, I played the ex-cop route, which I really enjoyed, so I am very much looking forward to the ex-Pinkerton character. But yeah, probably renaming it “private eye” would have more appeal. It’s the same thing anyway.
BTW, if anyone is interested, author Dashiell Hammett was an ex-Pinkerton, and he wrote his first detective novel, Red Harvest (also first in the Continental Op series) in 1929. It’s a great slice of life for the era, and it’s easily as brutal as Vendetta. (I thought of Vendetta more than once as I was reading it.)
As a side note, someone upthread mentioned that it might be cool if the female MC might have been romantically involved with Billy, and I think that’s a great idea. Do you think that’s an option that could be developed?
To some extent, perhaps, but really these polls have been all about “first impressions”, not anything based on a detailed analysis and / or weighing of pros and cons – and on that basis alone the two bringing up the rear are as clear as the two in front… If the proposed changes would nudge them up nearer the 15% mark on the main poll (which the two recent ad hoc polls suggest it might, should we ever run the main one again), then I’d consider it a worthwhile exercise.
It’s currently situated on the top floor of a disused garment factory, which Adamo wants to reopen to pursue his dream of designing men’s fashions. Unlike his grandfather, he’s far more interested in design than actual tailoring! At present you only have the option of supporting that and helping to fund it, or not… would it be better in this case to offer other options such as you suggest, bearing in mind he may take some convincing?.
I’ve never actually read it - thanks for the tip.
In many backstories there are… indications leaning in that direction, without setting it in concrete. It’s mostly left open to interpretation, and hopefully can be read either way – as either teenage sweethearts or just very, very good friends. The order of particular scenes has changed in the latest version though (with the dream-memory flashback now happening somewhat later in the first chapter) giving us a little more leeway to develop that side of things more according to feedback.
Awww…that idea is much better than mine and my mc could never go against the kid’s dreams like that, so forget I said anything, re-opening the garment factory with an attached design studio is a good enough legitimate business front. My only practical worry is that I, or rather my mc, would want a reason to install, for the time, state of the art changing rooms with showers, but since garment factories do work with chemicals and may require some workers to change we could bill them to the city planners and the IRS as chemical de-contamination showers or simply a non-monetary worker perk and the changing rooms for some of the workers (and club wrestlers) will be no problem at all.
I also imagine the Union Organizer, if or when upgraded to primary would have the advantage when dealing with the local union when re-opening that thing. But my college kid can probably sell the showers to the union(s) as well, all the better to make it look like their idea in the first place. I imagine the mc, due to not relying solely on the garment factory for income can afford to be (seen as) a slightly more benevolent boss then most.
I wonder if aside from his usual studies the college kid’s leadership may have been honed by him having been the “captain” of one of his university’s sports teams in spite of him being both an Italian-American and a scholarship student?
It would certainly seem to fit the club’s theme of trying to harken back to a kitschy version of ancient Greece through the imaginary lens of 1920’s gay America.
Congratulations – you’ve just become the first to add a genuinely original ‘Income Boost’ New Business Opportunity idea to a specific business / racket. Naturally, it will be Adamo’s idea, not yours, but I’m sure you can live with that… 
Thank you - I love it, as it will now balance better with Gina’s speak and one or two other ‘social venue’ type rackets.
That’s one of crazy reactions Zombie exodus have in Spanish android. Many people was pissed with the only one being free. And others said blah, were are graphics… I gave years ago some examples to jim about how stupid can be casuals and how they could destroy the ratings.
