Geek_Boy

Yes, it does continue. You'll have "failure text" to fill out if your player fails it.

Try out "Blight" by @muu for a perfect example. The first mission is completely impossible and it uses the failure text to send you down an interesting path. I won't spoil it for you, though.

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I guess my point is..

Dr. Who <> Star Trek <> Quantum Leap <> CoX Time Travel. Do not judge one based on the laws of a different story or medium.

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This. This. A thousand times: This.

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The arbitrary rules invariably either get applied or not selectively as the story requires, or create contradictions, or require someone to catch the Idiot Ball (if not an outright Idiot Plot).

Not defining the rules within the story is itself bad writing.

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From the beginning I've agreed with that. The problem is that you've got some folks in here that have their own set of time travel "rules" that they carry from story they are reading/watching/playing to story they're reading/watching/playing/whatever.

Bad writing is bad writing. Every story needs to follow it's own set of internal rules. Whether it be a time travel story, post apocalypse (like The Road), hard or soft science fiction, or even a romantic comedy. Every story has internal rules created by either the situation, the characters' personalities, some mix of both, etc. Saying "writers who aren't internally consistent are bad writers" is a truism that has nothing to do with any specific genre.

Applying some of these rules to time travel that I've seen in this thread (and elsewhere) is like not enjoying a romantic comedy because one of the characters doesn't have a jerk of a spouse they have to drop in the final act. It's like not enjoying a comedy because nobody slips on a banana peel. It's like not enjoying an action movie because it doesn't have circa 1988 Sylvester Stallone in it. Not all tales within a given genre are the same story told in the same way and there's a lot of room for interpretation and extrapolation by the author.

Likewise, not every story is an 800 page Michael Crichton book where he spends half the text explaining why the hook of his story works. In general, the less information the better. In almost every case, you're best off explaining things in as few words as possible with as little detail as possible to allow the plot to move. If you're going for mood, that's one something else entirely.

This is why most science fiction (and genre work in general) is so bad. You have writers that have forgotten this and spend half their works using mastubatory text that does nothing but stroke their ego as they explain how clever they are. In most cases, the reader doesn't need to know the intricacies of how your warp coil works. All they need to know is "this engine makes us go real fast." Any additional information needs to drive the story along or help create the mood.

A lot of the best sci-fi I've read doesn't say one damn word about the how's and why's of a given situation. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is ficking chilling, but you never find out for sure what exact consistency of excrement hit what brand, size, and oscillating speed of fan. Why? Because it doesn't matter.

If an explanation slows down a story for even a second and it isn't the author's intent for pacing reasons, it should be cut.

Basically I'm saying I don't think I'd like the stories that "follow the rules" because the rules are dumb and have nothing to do with actual storytelling. I'd rather read a gripping tale with solid characters and good internal consistency than something that I need a degree to understand that is technically correct in every way.

And here's a hint: no science fiction is going to work out 100% correctly since it's science fiction. By it's very nature it is dealing with things that are not possible and rarely plausible.

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See where this is going?

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Not really, since you're playing both sides of the fence to support your rather flimsy stance. You're holding time travel stories to an arbitrary set of rules, then pointing out that when you hold it up to a set of rules that arent' defined within the story, said new rules are arbitrary.

Pretty much any story can be taken to an extreme where it eventually falls apart when you start saying things like, "Well, what if the entire globe spends the next three centuries trying to undo what just happened?" It's a ridiculous criticism to start with.

A valid "plot hole" would be if they hadn't gone back and stolen the book back in Back to the Future 2. It isn't a "plot hole" to say that what if Biff's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren take a future time machine and go back to give it back to their ancestor again?

To paraphrase: What if monkeys fly out of my butt?

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Like I said before: If you open up that "what if" box, you've got to pick a point where you close it. You're saying "They'll just keep coming" and I'm saying "from where?" If you can't accept a story for what it is because of what happens hundreds or thousands of years in the future, then you can't just stop at "They could send more." If you want to write the next few thousand years of a story's history, then you'd better really write them.

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Which is exactly our point. The box should be closed.

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Removal of an entire story device because a small group can't stop playing "what if" isn't a valid solution to the "problem."

I'm just pointing out that if you want to play "what if," then you have to pick an arbitrary point to stop at. For those of us that enjoy these stories, we're basically stopping where the author tells us to. For those that don't, I'm pointing out that maybe you aren't going far enough.

Then again, I've always found people more interesting than situations. I prefer something where I know the characters in and out over something that has some grand meta-plot with cardboard cutouts. So if an author hooks me with their characters, I'll forgive all sorts of other issues because I want to know what's going to happen to so and so.

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Oh, I see, your trying to Loop Resources.

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I think you're entirely missing the point, which is that whoever possesses time travel can throw an infinitely regenerable army at whatever critical event they choose. If the first 100 agents you sent couldn't get the job done, send another 1000. Or 10,000. Or 1,000,000. The fact that it takes a century to train and dispatch 1000 agents doesn't matter because they all end up at the same destination. If the event is important enough to the possessors of time travel, they will eventually pile enough of their side onto it to win.

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Show me a society that has carried a consistent set of goals for that kind of period of time. Especially one whose numbers are consistently winnowed due to this never-ending war you're creating.

Like I said before: If you open up that "what if" box, you've got to pick a point where you close it. You're saying "They'll just keep coming" and I'm saying "from where?" If you can't accept a story for what it is because of what happens hundreds or thousands of years in the future, then you can't just stop at "They could send more." If you want to write the next few thousand years of a story's history, then you'd better really write them.

What if their religion changes? What if there's a natural disaster that changes their paradigm? What if the charismatic leader who is sending all these troops back has a sudden massive coronary and his second in command is a terrible leader no one will follow? What if a meteor falls from the sky and takes out the facility they're time traveling from? What if one of their technicians is a boob and spills coffee on their time machine's control panel and sends a whole group of them to the wrong period of time? What if their educational system becomes increasingly weak because of their reliance on a single method of world domination and they essentially forget how their machines work, eventually becoming unable to repair or operate them? What if aliens show up? How about wizards?

Saying that time traveling civilizations have all the time in the world to do something ignores a lot of basic facts about human nature. There are a lot of technologies out there even today that whole parts of the world have no access to or grasp of. There are endless of examples of lost arts that we have forgotten how to do (my wife actually owns some jewelry that no person alive on the planet knows how to make). Languages flourish and die. Society is not constant.

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Just remember, people: Thinking about things you enjoy is a bad thing.

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Now you're just giving up.

So I don't know about all of you, but I've had several ideas for Mission Architect arcs that just won't work. They might have been fun, they might have been original, but they just aren't possible within the restrictions of the MA and probably never will be.

So now I'll share one of mine and you share some of yours. I've got a few more, but if I share all of mine all at once I won't have an excuse to bump the thread if it dies off now will I?

The folks I play with know I'm a huge music nerd, especially for my favorite band R.E.M. I have several characters who are either inspired by lines from songs or that are lookalikes with names just different enough from their real world counterparts as to be plausibly deniable. Mister Stipe is my main one, "inspired" by a certain bald man with a flair wearing blue eye makeup during live performances.

So when the MA was first announced and a few of us were throwing around ideas, my first thought was to take something from my love of R.E.M. and make it work as an arc. I proceeded to take a few days and during my off-time at work (there was a lot at that time) I came up with an arc that strung together the titles of all of R.E.M.'s album titles into a single, mostly cohesive story.

Of course, to keep things simple I stuck to studio albums.

All 14 of them.

That's right. Each album was a mission that created one over-arching plot involving a dimension of music-based beings, Nemesis, and (everyone's favorite) time travel.

I still have a rough draft and just have to say: This is exactly why we're only allowed 5 missions per arc and 3 arcs per account.

Assuming mine was clever (which it kinda was and kinda wasn't), it would still be an enormous chore to get through. Imagine some of the worst writers out there in the MA with that kind of power.

So what are some of your more out-there ideas that you just can't pull off?

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GlaziusF here helped me a lot with Speeding Through Time way back when, so I'm just saying this is a great thread by a cool guy.

I may have to try and wiggle my way into a review here. Pretty sure I've played all your arcs at some point, but that's just because I'm awesome and ahead of the curve.

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Uh, you don't need to play my stuff or anything. Just post your mission on www.cohmissionreview.com and say you want me, baby. I'm easy that way.

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I was just saying I'd already played them to point out how cool I am.

GlaziusF here helped me a lot with Speeding Through Time way back when, so I'm just saying this is a great thread by a cool guy.

I may have to try and wiggle my way into a review here. Pretty sure I've played all your arcs at some point, but that's just because I'm awesome and ahead of the curve.

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speaking as a technical writer

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Fiction is not technical writing and dialogue can break all kinds of rules. Like I said, it isn't a three page run on sentence. It's a conversation with a guy who is fairly impatient and in a hurry.

Saying, "Too many commas," without some indication of where said extraneous commas dwell is completely useless.

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Just a curiousity did it ever occur to you that things like this thread, might just be why people don't like to give detailed comments.

Edit: I know after reading this I am certainly less likely to leave feedback.

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Oh, good grief.

One guy leaving crazy, funny comments is not the same as someone leaving constructive criticism. I've gotten tons of feedback that wasn't just "HAY THIS iS AWESOME" and I've taken it all to heart. I've had discussions with people about things to change and have heavily altered the arc in question since it was first published based on said feedback and discussions.

This guy was loony, though (as were his comments).

You're a troll anyway, though. I've rarely seen you post in a thread where you weren't trying to rile people up, so I'm done with you here.

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speaking as a technical writer

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Fiction is not technical writing and dialogue can break all kinds of rules. Like I said, it isn't a three page run on sentence. It's a conversation with a guy who is fairly impatient and in a hurry.

Saying, "Too many commas," without some indication of where said extraneous commas dwell is completely useless.

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Exactly. Constructive criticism is awesome. "Too many commas" is for lols.


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No, it's not. That's an editorial comment regarding grammar and voice. I would have no problem downgrading someone who consistenly wrote run-on sentences, strung clauses together haphazardly, and in general made their dialog a chore to read.

The chief test of whether or not something 'works' in fiction is if it assists the reader in becoming immersed in the narrative. Inconsistent grammar and syntax is something that has been shown to break that immersion. So while the individual in question may not have had the skill to articulate what it is precicely they felt was wrong, "too many commas" is one of the things that can do that.

EDIT - and, speaking as a technical writer: short sentences work better to communicate content. So they may have simply had trouble following your writing style, which is ALSO a valid comment that someone may have not had the ability to articulate clearly.

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No, it really is useless without specific examples or at least some clue as to where that problem lies. He didn't have trouble following anything, he was weird and nitpicky. I'm a bit of a grammar nazi most of the time, so it's hardly rife with errors. If there's a sentence or two where the comma is questionable, it's exactly that. It isn't a three page sentence held together by commas.

As with most everyone else in this thread who has tried it, I think if you try out the arc in question and then read his "review" you'll come away with a little different view of things.

Or, maybe, you, won't, I, dunno.,,,,,,,

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Allow me to rephrase. Let's say it takes five years' worth of gathering resources to send an agent into the past. So what? We've got hundreds of years. Lots of time to send agent after agent after agent to now.


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So what, indeed? How many groups keep the same interest over 100 years? 200 years? If it takes 5 years to put together a single time traveling trip, then by the time you can send your second guy, there could be a new President in office. What if the economy sinks in those 5 years and it becomes too cost-prohibitive to do it again? What if a religious movement rewrites the moral code of your society over a 25 year period?

If you want to open that box, it never closes. Accept the story for what it explains within it and stop nitpicking needlessly (still assuming the story is a decent one, of course).

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Remind me again, what would happen if either car was to hit a pedestrian?

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The pedestrian would learn a valuable lesson about not crossing at the light?

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#2. The engine that powers your car is much more efficient and much better than the engines that were being created in the 1900s. The pen you use is better designed than the pen your grandfather used. The toilet paper you use is better than the toilet paper that was used. The firearms being used today in common purchase are better than the best the military had to offer two hundred years ago.


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Yes, but cars have actually gotten less affordable and we were supposed to have flying ones by now. Most of those engines work on the same principle, but while they're more efficient, are less reliable than a lot of the older models out there. Saying that new cars are "better" than a lot of older cars is putting you on pretty shakey ground.

The pen isn't actually any better. It's made of cheaper materials and it comes in larger quantities, but it does not do it's job better than a pen from the 1950's. Is it better than a quill? Possibly.

What kind of pen are you talking about, even? The ones I use for pen and ink artwork are basically unchanged over the last few hundred years. The major innovation would be using plastic instead of wood holders.

The toilet paper is still paper. It is not remarkably smaller with more uses. One could argue that it is still less efficient than leaves or a hand and soap, but I'm not gonna go there because that's icky.

Firearms follow the same principles they have since their infancy. What has improved are rate of fire, ease of ammunition changes, things like that. A cannon still has to be x big to fire y size munitions.

The other guy was right that the rules that govern computers don't apply to everything. Things using processors and such will shrink over time, but some things will always have to be at least a certain size to work. Some things go up in price over time or stay static with inflation.

Since we haven't yet worked out how to create the wormholes necessary for time travel, we can't say for certain that the device that creates them will be all circuits and processors that will shrink and become cheaper over time.

Cool that it won't purge and I'm actually kind of glad I'll be able to get a round two on posting my arc thread(s).

I did some more artwork for it that I want to clean up to do a new M-M-MEGAPOST about Speeding Through Time. Whenever I get around to it, anyway.

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4) Everything that can be done can be done again, later, cheaper. This is a general rule for development. Compare the computer you're using to read this message to the first computers being developed.

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For me, a story has a beginning, middle, and end. If by the end we haven't dealt with what someone might do 200 years in the future, then it usually wasn't necessary.

Assuming, as always, that we're not talking about something that's just crap to begin with.

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If you don't consider that version of time travel believable, I've got nothing for you and suggest you let people who are less exacting enjoy it for what it is.

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Since I still giggle at Bill and Ted without getting all bent out of shape, I'm sure I'd enjoy them. Always love a good book recommendation.

Your thread confuses me every time I see it (see title of arc in sig - and obviously the name of a thread I started about said arc).

Tangle in Time really is a great arc, though.

Oh God, I shouldn't have used Timecop as an example. It was mostly used for a laugh (since I haven't watched it since it came out and it was not exactly a good movie to begin with).

The Time Machine is consistent enough, isn't it? Of course, it's about a machine that is only used by one man and never reappears. How about Ludo's Broken Bride album? Of course, we're again dealing with a machine that is destroyed at the end.

Was Quantum Leap a bad TV series because it dealt with time travel? Was my youthful idolization of Michael J. Fox all for nothing because even though I enjoyed the hell out of the Back to the Future movies, they weren't actually good?

Is Star Trek 4 . . . wait, bad example.

No story is bad because it is set in a particular genre or uses a particular story device. A skilled writer could turn a stack of cliches into something awesome (just like a hack can turn something that should be fresh and original into boring crap). I refuse to discount something because it uses a single element.

Unless it's furries, of course.

If you can't enjoy an episode of 1980's Dr. Who because it doesn't address that the 2000's Dr. Who could show up and just save him or tell him what to do, that says more about you as a viewer than the writing of the TV show in question.

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You NEED other people's feedback in order to make your arc better for others. I've never understood why some people can't take criticism.

BUT on the flip side those that choose to give feedback need to be give it as maturely and responsibly as possible.



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Exactly. Constructive criticism is awesome. "Too many commas" is for lols.

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People incapable of sitting back and enjoying Nemesis for what it is or that judge a time travel story not by the story itself or the consistency of the rules it creates for itself are kind of sad to me.

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Look, in essence, if a 'story itself' leans on something that's stupid or doesn't make sense, or requires people to act like idiots to build tension or an emotional connection, then my not liking it is judging the 'story itself.' If all the guns in your world fire bananas and are nonlethal but you never tell the audience, any attempt to build tension by having people wave guns around is badly attempting to manipulate said audience and it's bad writing unless you're playing for comedy*.

* To paint with broad strokes here.

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Well, sure if the story is bad then the story is bad. What's being painted here (to borrow your broad strokes) is a picture of time travel as something that is never handled well because of an arbitrary set of rules that may or may not exist within the story itself.

If you say "I don't like Timecop because it doesn't follow this rule clearly established in Back to the Future," then you're a sad, sad individual (though if you say you don't like it because it's a Jean Claude Van Damme movie, we have something to discuss).

People incapable of sitting back and enjoying Nemesis for what it is or that judge a time travel story not by the story itself or the consistency of the rules it creates for itself are kind of sad to me.

Someone not being able to enjoy, say Quantum Leap, because they have a narrow view of time travel is no fault of the creators of the show or other people who might use time travel as a plot device.

Nemesis makes no sense, but neither do quantum physics to me. I always thought it was pretty obvious that not everything was steam powered anyway.

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IMO (and no offense intended, as I still appreciate the effort involved), some of the Dev Choice arcs aren't half as good as some of the ones that are just in the Hall of Fame.

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To my knowledge, we've only had one Hall of Fame arc thus far and it can't keep it for more than an hour or so whenever it regains the status.

I'll agree the Footsteps Initiative was more fun than any Dev's Choice I've done, though.

Thanks, MrCaptainMan! You completely got what I was going for with that arc.

Too many commas.