Welcome to C3G! – Directory

[A3n]

From the NM24 thread, I thought for my full answer it would fit better here.

Originally Posted by ibechief

I'm still trying to find out the unique differences between NM24, C3G, and TNT. I'm sure there might even be more I'm missing. I think there is a Hl1 or something like that also. I'm thinking NM24 was a quick shotgun version of C3G. TNT was something similar but allowing more than one version of each card? I'm thinking I need someone to explain haha.

I wanted to spread the love and learn all I can about them but It seams some of the threads are not as active as in the past.

TNT (Tried aNd True) was the first. Now I am a bit sketchy on the exact details of this as I wasn't on the site when it was around -- I also think it began on the previous site (before Heroscapers.com). Anyway I believe it was a small group of people that picked a custom card that they thought was finished & would playtest it to ensure it was balanced. If it was & was also costed correctly then it would get the TNT stamp & be released in it's own TNT labelled thread.

NM24 (No More than 24 hours) was a process for vetting personal customs. Basically a card was nominated by the previous person to go through the process & then the community would offer suggestions on how to improve it either mechanically or grammatically and theoryscape the price. When the card has been updated enough to receive 3 thumbs up of approval from the community it was eligible to receive the NM24 logo.

C3G (Comics Customs Creators Guild) was the brainchild of IAmBatman, GreyOwl, Griffin, & MarkB. They were a big part of NM24 (& the Marvel community as a whole) & they saw that there were a lot of great customs being created individually but a lot of them didn't work well with other customs. So they decided to bring a core group of solid designers together & using elements from TNT, NM24 & a structure of their own & C3G was born. Balantai, Necroblade, Matt Helm, Gerada & Whitestuff rounded out the initial group with Hahma joining a little later, myself being recruited towards the end of the first release & Spidey'tilIdie being a fanboy offering theme tips all through & officially joining after the 2nd release.

C3G has evolved over time as it was initially done totally public & aimed at releasing full sets, so to speak, that included new optional rules, glyphs, maps & scenarios. Once the first set was released (DC MASTER SET: WORLD'S FINEST). After the first set was released C3G started to get a lot of attention & so were allowed to create a sub-section (C3G Project) within the Comic Hero Custom Creations section of the Marvel Legends Forum. In our sub-section we started working on the RISE OF THE MUTANTS master set however with noise of a lot of enthusiastic people now drowning the design process we started to do a lot of discussions by email, Google Wave, & skype trying to complete the master set. However we felt the pressure & wanted to get the units out to the eager fans as soon as we could so we decided to drop the Master Set concept & release RISE OF THE MUTANTS as a wave.

We felt a lot of pressure of the release & there was a lot of discussions around people not pulling their weight & creating more burden for others, so we knew we couldn't keep on the way we were. We were granted our own sanctum & Bats was made an Admin giving us control of our destiny again. We devised more equitable processes where we designed what we wanted to & we started releasing figures 1 at a time as they were finished.

Fans expressed that they prefered the wave releases so we started trying to group what we each had & release them together. We decided to work towards themed releases to make it more exciting & fans wanted something to tied them over between releases & thats how the SSEs were born (Super Secret Exclusives - although I believe we initially called them Special Secret Exclusives & somewhere the name was mixed up & Super stuck).

C3G has continued to grow & evolve over time to what it is today. We are about fun & don't take ourselves too seriously, poking fun at each other & sharing lots of laughs. Nowadays we put a bit of effort into maintaining that fun so that doing what we love doesn't become a chore & cause us stress (which has happened in the past).

We have released:

• 295 units,
• 15 Destructible objects,
• 34 Glyphs,
• 33 Maps,
• 13 Scenarios (10 make up 2 campaigns), &
• 9 Optional rule sets

& we currently have over 110 designs currently finished awaiting their allotted release time.

I am proud of our accomplishments.

[clembo2021]

Wow, I've been waiting for a post like that for a while A3n, good write up.

C3G is the best. I feel extremely lucky to have stumbled upon this part of the forum earlier this year. We really are kinda tucked away in our own corner of the Internet, but you're really doing some amazing things with the talent you've been able to assemble.

[Scapemage]

A nice explanation, and I learned a lot about TNT that I did not know.

[Gurei-Ornery]

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to A3n again.

Would someone give A3N some rep for the history lesson. Thanks for doing that, it sheds some light on the perseverance the core group has had to keep this alive.

[davidlhsl]

Originally Posted by Gurei-Ornery

Would someone give A3N some rep for the history lesson. Thanks for doing that, it sheds some light on the perseverance the core group has had to keep this alive.

I tried, but I had just repped him last night for another awesome thing he did.

[IAmBatman]

Since I was there for the start of TNT, I can verify some things and clear up some others.

Originally Posted by A3n

TNT (Tried aNd Tested) was the first. Now I am a bit sketchy on the exact details of this as I wasn't on the site when it was around -- I also think it began on the previous site (before Heroscapers.com). Anyway I believe it was a small group of people that picked a custom card that they thought was finished & would playtest it to ensure it was balanced. If it was & was also costed correctly then it would get the TNT stamp & be released in it's own TNT labelled thread.

TNT started here. Way back when I first got to this website, slightly before the Hasbro Marvel Master Set even came out, I saw this Marvel customs forum, with a few threads here and there by guys like Doc Savage, which were largely inactive.

Me being me, I started my own custom thread and started bumping it just about every day, even if I was just talking to myself, and threw up a few hundred designs. Pretty soon Truth asked me if I wanted to be the Moderator of this section, and I accepted.

Also pretty soon, Eclipse with his City of Heroes customs and a few others, and Allskulls with lots of superhero customs, started their own custom threads and we started paying a lot of attention to what each other were doing. We provided each other with detailed reviews in each others' threads for each custom we posted. We started breaking things down into categories, and then Allskulls brought in a cool visual scoring system (number of skulls to assert the quality of the design).

This collaboration, which was added to when guys like Whitestuff and GreyOwl got active in the forum, evolved into TNT. TNT (again, started here on this website), stood for "Tried 'N True" customs. Basically we looked at customs and put them on "trial." This involved assessing the design, the card, and there even started to be some consideration for testing the cards out on the map, but we just didn't really get going with that very consistently and the burden of playtesting responsibility started slowing down each of the trials and they all started dying out.

This led to us transitioning to NM24. The idea of NM24 is that we wouldn't spend more than a day evaluating each custom (no more than 24 hours) so that it stayed light and fun. People would nominate customs, we'd discuss them, and then once a card got three it was inducted into the NM24 vaults. Eventually discussions got more involved and quality standards increased and discussions started going on for more than 24 hours, but folks seemed OK with that.

I get sort of foggy here as I took about 6 months off from the site to finish my Master's Thesis for the University of Alabama. When I came back, and checked on NM24, it started getting more active than ever. GreyOwl was still there. Necroblade was pretty active (he'd joined TNT near the end, I believe), Whitestuff was still around, and new guys like Balantai, Griffin, Matt Helm, Garada, and Markb were getting pretty active (my old buddies Allskulls and Eclipse had by then moved on to other things - with Allskulls at least being lost in the initial transition to NM24).

Our discussions in NM24 became increasingly involved and there increasingly was a desire expressed by many of us to have a set of cards that were fully cohesive and consistent with each other. I think the example that brought it up was GreyOwl's Batman with a utility belt and some Kryptonite device on there that wasn't compatible with my Superman custom. Both were NM24, but they really didn't work well together, and that was just kind of disappointing.

I beat Griffin, Markb, and GreyOwl to the punch (I think all of them had similar ideas) and started the thread for the C3G project, and those guys, Whitestuff, Balantai, Garada, Necroblade, and Matt Helm all jumped on and history was made. (I think that's everyone who was here from the jump).

Obviously several other amazing people have come and gone since then and made this project and incredible success that has, IMO, more than dwarfed anything accomplished by TNT or NM24. We wouldn't be here today if it weren't for those past projects helping us evolve to this point, but I truly believe we've evolved to this point, and this is the height of accomplishment when it comes to Superhero Customs. I'm very proud and flattered to have been a part of it for so long now.

[ibechief]

And now everything is made clear! Very Cool.

[johnny139]

Ah, TNT. I was around for that one. Interesting seeing how closely that Batman lines up with the C3G Batman.

[Yodaking]

Originally Posted by IAmBatman

Our discussions in NM24 became increasingly involved and there increasingly was a desire expressed by many of us to have a set of cards that were fully cohesive and consistent with each other. I think the example that brought it up was GreyOwl's Batman with a utility belt and some Kryptonite device on there that wasn't compatible with my Superman custom. Both were NM24, but they really didn't work well together, and that was just kind of disappointing.

This is one of the primary reason I have embraced the C3G project. I have seen a lot of very good custom cards from different people on this site, but it just didn't seem as they all would be compatible with each other. When it comes to superheroes and supervillains, you want them to properly play together. The more generic scape units are not as dependent on that compatibility since they don't have the established characters and story lines.

[IAmBatman]

Originally Posted by johnny139

Ah, TNT. I was around for that one. Interesting seeing how closely that Batman lines up with the C3G Batman.

Well, the TNT Batman was my custom, so it shouldn't be that surprising. And, yeah, I remember you being around for that now! Good times.

I'm glad we got rid of that broken turn interruption element of my TNT Batman, though, and replaced it with the much more elegant auto wound on Evasive Strike.

Originally Posted by Yodaking

This is one of the primary reason I have embraced the C3G project. I have seen a lot of very good custom cards from different people on this site, but it just didn't seem as they all would be compatible with each other. When it comes to superheroes and supervillains, you want them to properly play together. The more generic scape units are not as dependent on that compatibility since they don't have the established characters and story lines.

Yeah, I know this group has done a heck of a lot more than I could have ever done as an individual custom maker, and to a much higher quality! A great thing about working at this intense of a level of collaboration is that it really encourages you to bring your A game, and prevents poorer designs from going through, since there are so many stop gaps. This isn't to say that C3G cards are perfect or that we never lay an egg, but I do really believe in what we produce and that we create an overall better group of cards than any individual customizer does or can (including myself, of course - though there are several individual custom makers I'd put far above me in terms of talent and production).

[davidlhsl]

I do enjoy hearing about the history of the group. I sometimes browse through the Thread That Started It All.

Centuries from now, Archaeologists will unearth the vast output of C3G and assert that we were, indeed, a great civilization. Then they will turn over a bottle of Burt's Beer, and they'll wonder where it all went wrong.

Edit: A3n and IAmBatman's posts linked in SP under the link to the TTSIA thread.

[Karat]

I remember NM24. It was a requirement back when I joined the group to have 5 smart customs and a custom passed through NM24 before we could design for C3G. This approach really helped me out as a designer, though I did have a lot of help from people like Griffin, Bats, Balantai, and tickle, but NM24 sparked my interest, and I became an active member of it until it died down. Which has all helped me to get to where I am today.