Notes on the Mass Effect universe 2.0/General Questions thread

We had a thread like this on the old forum. I think we need it on this forum too.

Mass Effect is a huge setting. It is full of codex entries, missable background dialog and a lot of fluff that is impossible for one person to fully memorize or know about that is very useful to know when RPing in the setting.

CDN canon is also huge and full of a lot of stuff people either aren't aware of (and so get frightened off when something from it is mentioned in an argument) or would be good for their writing to know ahead of time.

And the people that know these questions can either not be on IRC to answer these questions, or never come on it in the first place and since the VL is 'always there' (and needs to be used more often in general) I think it is a great idea to bring this thing back.

And that's what this thread will (hopefully) be for. Ask questions about Mass Effect canon, CDN canon, general questions about whatever profession your character is in (we have a lot of military peeps on here) or whatever else you think you may need to know when writing a character.

Here is the old thread on the original site for starters. It has a lot of good notes in it to start off with. Though I'm also not adverse old questions being asked here.

So ask away

note: I also have another request. There are a lot of old threads in the VL by Dippy, A|A, Spiz, etc. That had a lot of good info about what to avoid when writing your characters. If you can find them, and PM them to me (either on IRC via the nick Pariah or on Old CDN via Kari Zar the Exile) I will link them in the OP and be most grateful.

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Table of Links (READ THESE)

General RP/Writing advice
How to Make an Extranet Thread by AI Architect
Show Don't Tell by AI Architect
Dot dot dot (about low content posts) by Weishaupt/Harrad/Overlord
Let's Talk about Sex Threads (a rant) by Dippy
RP-ing advice? By Carthox. Read Harrad and Suri'Neyvi's posts especially
21st century by A|A. A very good thread
General Advice for CDN roleplayers by Taxes. Covers a lot of stuff in these links already. But it has a lot of other things that are a must read
Hey Kids! By Dippy. Or, why you should be wary about writing a child character on the forums proper

Notes on Mass Effect
Alcohol and Chirality by Human Quarian
THE KATAAAAANA by Espiza
Follow up on the Katana:Cybernetics by Gahars Patnus
Turian Hierarchy: A Sociological Analysis by Psycho Yoshi. Very long. But it has some things turian players may be interested in checking out
Notes on the Alliance by Nat


special thanks to Dekutulla for sending me these

I'm just going to doublepost here

If you think anything about the OP needs improvement, rewriting, flushed down a toilet. PM me. I plan on this being a constant thing to be added onto.

So I'm wondering what's the deal with kinetic shields. In Mass Effect 1 it was simple enough : a shield could only deflect high speed small projectiles, the rest was for your armor to handle. For instance shields were useless in melee or against rachni attacks.
Starting ME2 however things change. Shields now deflect everything, including biotics! Is it major gameplay and story segregation, did the technology evolve along with the thermo clips to recognize a wider range of harmful intents? Are there various grades of shields now?
This has pretty huge ramifications I think. Having personal shields able to deflect melee damages would have been a game changer during the reaper war. Right now i'm mostly wondering for my character Michelle, since she lives in a part of the Citadel where melee attacks are a very real threat, but where gunfire is not as common.

The way I see this issue, biotics being countered by kinetic shields has basis. Both of these are tied with element zero and the manipulation of space-time they do. Barriers manipulate space-time to deflect and stop incoming rounds (that move at percents of the speed of light to boot!), so sensors can very much pick incoming attacks. Biotics are also various forms of time-space manipulation which would be disrupted by more time-space manipulation like shielding and barriers.

However this relies on biotic attacks really being as slow as the games show them to be. If they're instant, then sensors would have problems to react in time to raise the shielding, unless incoming shift in gravity is easier to spot than an object flying in at 1% of c.

I have always assumed the "biotics not affecting kinetic barriers in ME2 and ME3" was a gameplay mechanic to keep biotics from breaking the game too much like they did in the original game. Especially since, to my own knowledge, nothing in the codex really mentions advances in kinetic barriers to prevent biotic attacks.

Ehhhhhhhh not really? I mean for some biotic attacks sure like warps which are basically personnel scale disruptor torpedoes which are explicitly designed to just straight up overwhelm shields. But other stuff which is basically "gravity now goes thataway" or "Yeah I'm kinda physically eroding your general person with my mind" is probably not even capable of being blocked by shields. I mean that's where armor's supposed to take up the slack really. Similar stuff for tech powers, which either are directed energy or too slow to trip barriers and used kinda like grenades.

Anyway point is whichever way you cut it melee's kinda a KB's weakpoint (though uh, protip: closing to melee with a dude with an automatic weapon, KB's, and bodyarmor is generally a bad idea except for certain people/tactics). Recalibrating it to a lower threshold is possible but that means that it's going to trigger if you, say, wipe out and eat pavement, blow away any chair you don't sit in really carefully and generally is going to eat through the power supply like a mofo because the range of stuff it has to react to is much broader.

Basically KB's are there to make sure you don't get turned into shredded meat by MA rounds. For everything else there's armor. But I mean, it's really not a big deal because a civilian on the Citadel probably isn't going to have either given that they are, by and large, military/paramilitary grade tech worn generally worn by augmented soldiers.

Well let's see it that way : Did kinetic shields protect soldiers from husks and brutes attack during the war or not?

What Sand said basically.

There is (I know, I know gameplay) basis for it in the actual games. The original game anyway since I got killed by husks with the super armor once :|. And, at least to me. It makes a little sense that slower-melee-based attacks would bypass the barrier compared to modern mass-accelerated guns. Hence armor.

For what it's worth, my understanding of it was always that slower attacks like melee just didn't trigger the shield. Same with the gravity abilities, like what Sandy was saying. If you're just changing gravity so that it's no longer there, or going up, or what have you, it's not going to trigger anything because there's nothing actually coming into contact with the shield. Gravity's just being a dick. KB's wouldn't trigger when you go from zero grav to normal grav on a ship, so the push/pull/lift abilities would be similar.

I'unno, why would they? It's not bullets or shrapnel or anything like that. Just super sharp knife claws/one fuckoff big crab claw thingy, neither of which are going bullet speeds exactly.

Yeah, agreeing with Sand here - KB's work just like the shields in Dune, basically, where they'll trigger vs anything moving at a high enough speed. I've mentioned my quarian tinkering with the settings on a number of occasions, and always included a mention that it's tricky because you don't want to break everything you touch etc etc.

So unless you're fighting a Mantis Shrimp or you've got them calibrated really low, probably not going to trigger in melee.