Ravenswing

I honestly don't know what to say. Really. Um... Yeah.

That's always been my 'issue.' The map of Paragon doesn't really fit Rhode Island anywhere.

I seem to recall the inclusion of Salamanca made it even worse.

True evil does not require huge scale. I'm not saying it can't, we can look at real life for 'fine' examples. 9/11, several of the bombings in Northern Ireland and in England as a result of the Troubles. Terrorists use this kind of thing to great effect, though not always the effect they wished.

The Warrington bomb is a good example of this kind of event which could be used effectively in a shared universe RP setting without causing too much 'trouble.' A bomb was placed in a rubbish bin in Warrington town centre and set off during a busy shopping period. Two children were killed. It was a national tragedy and one of the events which really pushed public opinion toward a resolution to the Troubles. Big, nasty, one could say evil, but the scale is such that direct action by every hero in the country would not only be a little OTT, but also probably counter-productive.

Personally, I prefer my evil on a much smaller scale. Or, if it's on a larger scale (I ran a demonic incursion plot recently which had city-wide scale and would have resulted in the deaths of possibly the entire population if the demon hadn't been obviously intended to fail) I don't like having villains so powerful that they don't have to be careful what they're doing. Enormous death tolls should be a feature of the end-game, and so preventable.

My current villain, Rei, is really not a very nice person, but she demonstrates her evil in the way she handles individuals. She's more the serial killer type (well, actually, she's a serial killer, basically). Given time, she could easily be responsible for way more than 2000 deaths. She just does them a few at a time (and the rate things are going, she isn't going to have the time to put that many notches on her surgical kit).

Quite, but the purpose of the NPC villains is to fail. If an NPC villain were to attack a school with a giant robot, that would be a mission, probably a TF, and the object of the exercise would be to demolish said robot before it killed so much as a hamster in the school science labs. When Lord Recluse launches a giant, psychic spider robot at the city, heroes are dispatched to stop it before it gets there, and they do.

It's great to say that this is a comic book world and should have comic-scale villainy, but that also means it should have comic-scale results. As soon as that robot appeared, the freedom Phalanx would have mobilised and Stateman would have had the thing in orbit before the first foot stomp.

Beyond it being impolite to stage an event which forces involvement, there are some particular practical aspects which come into play. One of them which is particularly apparent here is communication. I'll use a different, far older, and not villainous plot as an example.

Years ago, someone had a bright idea to celebrate the heroics of the non-heroes of the city (White Vampyr, I think, may be wrong). It was a nice idea and one I would happily get behind normally, but there were a couple of issues.

IC, the first many of us knew about it was a sort of press release sent to a lot of local businesses and such. It just so happened that my main at the time was running a courier business and so I could happily justify him receiving a copy. He was not happy. It was the way it was written, really. The idea was that it was drumming up money to build a park and monument to the policemen, firemen, hospital workers etc of the city, but it didn't just say they were heroes and should be celebrated, it seemed to belittle the efforts of Heroes.

The plot's owner explained that wasn't the idea, but they did that out of character, in the forum, and those of us (not just me) who had IC taken exception to the release explained that that was nice, but what had been written said that Heroes were basically worthless glory-seekers.

(First point about communication, and not really related to this discussion, you can't make people think something says something, just because that was your intention. It says what it says, filtered through their perceptions, not yours.)

Anyway, then the OOC arguments started. The plot owner was determined to have the city government bulldoze a section of the city (in King's Row, IIRC, the irony of which later) and replace it with a park and statue. Many of us said 'no' because it wouldn't really be there. Others said this wasn't a problem because we would agree to know it was there. We said we'd go with it if you could get the game designers to change the game map.

The problem is that we get new players, and we get people coming back after breaks, and we have people who roleplay, but don't read the forums. They aren't going to know that that block of houses doesn't exist in 'our world.' It would need to be very carefully handled within the Unionverse to be sure everyone was on-page, and that's without a constant need to reinforce it. (The irony is that, maybe a year later, the statue of Breakneck appeared outside King's Row station. Not exactly a commemoration of firemen, but certainly a memorial to the unsung heroes of the city.)

This plot has a smilar problem. Such an event would resound world wide. No one in the civilised world would not have heard about it, but we're going to have a constant situation where it would come up in conversation and people wouldn't have a clue what was being talked about. (Right or wrong, GG is one of the major public faces of RP on the EU servers, and we do attract new roleplayers all the time.)

Evil upcoming one week today.

Huge amounts of ROFL!

Rhode Island's summer holiday runs from June 25th to September 6th this year. (Source: http://www.bank-holidays.com/holidays_2010_378.htm)

Staff might possibly be in, I doubt even Summer School kids would be still in school. Let's face it, broken plot.

Ultimately, yes, the result of this would very likely be that a war between the US and the Isles took off. A massive number of heroes attack the Court. arachnos sees it as an attack on the Isles. Huge numbers of people die. There's some significant possibility that nuclear weapons are used.

We coud be talking about a war which would weaken both sides sufficiently that the Rikti or Praetorians could step in and take over.

It won't happen simply because it can't happen.

Hence plots on this scale are not viable for players to run.

Ah, but that's the thing. Is there any evidence that the place is overrun with Hamidon creatures, or are you just chompin' down on the TPN news feeds?

There is at least one dialogue example of someone saying "By Cole..." So at least some of the population sees him as a godlike figure, which is fair, since he is.

I suspect that Praetoria has a considerable illusion of freedom. So, for example, the Internet appears to be quite open, but is actually massively monitored. Consider it as a form of honey trap; give people the illusion of freedom and then lynch them when they overstep the mark.