Scarlet Shocker

Originally Posted by Kheldarn

How about they give ALL of us a survey? That'd be swell.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

This is a problem, though. It may be a problem for just me and a few other people, but above all else in a story, I want closure. Not just an "end," but specifically closure. I want to know that the story's plot was worth retelling, I want to know that something was achieved, and I want to know that all the nasty stuff was worth it in the end. A good story does have pain and unpleasantness, I won't deny that, but it should balance those against sufficient closure to make it all worthwhile.

I don't really mind leaving open plot hooks in ongoing stories. Far from it. However, I do want the plot to end with a sense of closure before it's shelved. I don't want it to just sort of stop in the middle of a sentence when the writer leaves and the new writer doesn't feel like finishing the same story. In fact, this is something many amateur writers fall victim to as they start out - they begin many stories, excited about the possibilities, but realise how long it will take to finish them, get distracted by new inspiration, start working on new stories and the old one just stop. Sadly, half of a good story is no story at all, and that's a problem.



I don't really mean "weakened" in the literal sense, like how Hequat is weakened when we fight her, hence why we can take on a god. I mean more... Disrespected, so to speak. For instance, one of the big things many of us wanted to do way back in the Jack Emmert era was become at least about equal to the Statesman, way back when the only place he showed up in-game was in Tyrant's cave, where he spawned as a level 54 Archvillain. Yes, that's what he was classed as. Many of us asked to be as awesome as he was one day. Lo and behold, I19 rolls around and we are suddenly as awesome as the Statesman... Because he's revealed to be a sad, tragic hero wrought with weakness whose power is not his own and whose will is barely even there. The Statesman had to be brought to his knees as a way for us to measure up to him, and that doesn't make this feel more like an accomplishment as it makes it feel like the game just lowered the bar all of a sudden.

Remember how people asked for Circle of Thorns costumes, but in order to give them to us, the art team essentially changed their costumes to something completely different? That's sort of what I mean.

Speaking of matching up against respected characters, Time After Time does it so much better. Our villains travel to the future and take on Lord Recluse at the time of his ultimate triumph, at the peak of his powers and with legions of soldiers by his side. We defy the will of Arachnos, we break Recluse's scheme, we strike out on our own, and even Recluse himself eventually has to admit that we are not to be messed with. The trick is that the villain is put over very strong, we are just put over even stronger. That, to me, is respect. Even though he loses, even though he ends up failing completely, I can still respect Recluse for how close he got, and defeating a villain I can respect is just that much sweeter.

Originally Posted by Dz131

I respect Flambeaux

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

I like to see that as a good thing. We're always pushing the writers to try new and interesting things and up their game instead of relying on storytelling clichés. Sometimes it works (Praetorian Earth), sometimes it doesn't (First Ward), but it's still a benefit to the game. Unwittingly, Cryptic Studios created a game which put players in direct competition with the game's actual developers, and that's one reason we've pushed the team so hard.

While I think they've done well for the most part, I still want to criticise them for avoiding actually interesting stories and characters in favour of gimmicks and funky mission design. When I said they need to treat their good characters with more respect, I meant it. Recently, the game's storytelling has made it a point to take a dump on all established signature characters, I suppose in an attempt to make player characters feel more important (and then taken a dump on those, too) so that it's really turned into a world of losers and wimps. Everyone is tragic, everyone is in danger of dying, everyone is flawed, and there's just no respect left for the characters the story really SHOULD respect. When there are no respectable villains to compete with and no respectable heroes to measure against but the overpowered god mode sues which we can't really match anyway, it's that much harder to care.

And I WANT to care. I WANT to care about the storyline, I WANT to care about the characters... I want to care about this game's fictional world, but it seems like the writing stuff themselves don't care. "Old stuff is old," so previous writers' characters are killed off or ignored in favour of a Neuron style of development, always introducing new characters and plot points and then killing them or forgetting them just as quickly. I want to care, but I don't get the impression that the writers want me to care, or that they care about their own creations, at all. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but it's becoming pretty obvious they don't RESPECT their own creations.



Honestly, I never liked the Hollows or the story it told. Even back in I2 when everyone and their grandma was hailing it as the new standard of quality for how stories and missions should be made, I still saw it as garbage writing. It's not really a "story," just a collection of unconnected events punctuated by a milestone when contacts get bored of wasting my time. Flux, for instance, gives me a bunch of meaningless missions, then goes "Oh, by the way, I know where Frostfire is!" and at the time he brings it up... I don't know who Frostfire is to begin with. "Oh, he's the leader of the Outcasts!" He is? Then how come he's barely level 10, but when I take him down and move onto Steel Canyon, I see outcasts with powers greater than his extending all the way to level 20? Who's their current leader? How can I "bust" the outcasts in the level range before they originally even existed?

Now, granted, I suspect the Hollows was intended to be something like a level 20-30 zone that got scaled down because of the "Kings Row bottleneck" as it was known as the time, so a lot of the critters were WAY too strong and a lot of stories feel like they should take place much later. Learning about Oranbega, busting the Outcasts and the Trolls and so forth. I get why things are as they are, but the zone has no real story or backstory to it. Characters are introduced only to disappear the next mission over, and the only consistent "storyline" is that of Sam Wincott through his diaries, which I can't even ******* see the ending of because I've never, ever, not once, not a single time run the Caverns of Transcendence.

I'd actually go as far as to ask where you're getting this much more interesting depiction of FrostFire from, because all I've ever been able to gather from the Hollows "storyline" has been "FrostFire is the leader of the Outcasts. Kill his ***!" Same with Atta, actually. Who is he? How did he become the Trolls' leader? Why is "Grendel's Gulch" relevant? What is his story? I didn't know the Trolls even HAD a leader until Talshak the Mystic told me he had divined where Atta was.

The Hollows, Striga and Croatoa are actually by FAR my least favourite zones for storyline content. Their "arcs" are disjointed, packed with filler and ultimately unfinished, because they all end on a TF, and of those the only one I've run is Ernesto Hess'. Characters exist in them, but the narrative fails to show them any respect or give them any characterisation. Even Hess himself I don't know much about. And who the devil is Maestro? All I know is I fought Emperor Ming the Merciless at the end of the Hess TF.

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I get that we as players enjoy a narrative which strokes our egos and paints us as better than our peers and stronger than our enemies. I get that. But we need good peers and strong enemies for this to matter. Moreover, it is us who should be made better and stronger, not our peers and enemies worse and weaker. If the game respects its own villains, then beating them is that much more satisfying.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I know this is a nightmare to write for, but I think City of Heroes' greatest curse is also its greatest blessing - it is a game which inspires us to create, rather than just use what we're given. It inspires us to make our own characters, imagine our own stories and, eventually, become much more attached to what we create than what the game's own writers have to offer. I know it's hard to write for this, but it's also a VERY strong hook once you've become attached.

That said, I do believe the signature characters and storylines can be good, and can present us with good, respectable villains. For instance, I am endlessly impressed with the Nemesis and how he's written. Sure, some people find him to be a Mary Sue, but to me, that's kind of why it works - he is the ONLY one that the story treats like this, and that's why the Nemesis is awesome. The game's narrative allows him to get away with nonsense that no-one else can get away with. He can have a Shadow Shard base, he can have psychic robots, he can have a mind control railroad, he can have a weather machine, he can have his hand in every storyline the game has to offer. For anyone else in the game, this would be a stretch and a failure. Not for Nemesis. For him, this works, because he's awesome

More broadly speaking, the game's own writing is a source of inspiration, if nothing else. It has good villains in it. Many good ones, in fact, though most of those hail back to the pre-I1 days when they were less hammy. Many of the original stories are written with great respect for their antagonists, and it shows. Sure, not everyone likes them, but they're there. At worst, they just provide a decent story. At best, they provide the inspiration to create villains of our own. Ghost Widow, for instance, has made me explore ideas of existence after death and write several villains to take advantage of the concept. What's more, her mix of loyalty, resentment and tragedy serve to give her enough depth to earn my respect just on that point alone.

The are good villains in the game. Whether we as players appreciate them or not, I wish the game's actual writers would show them a bit more appreciation.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

That's true, I agree, even if there are exceptions. What I'm more concerned is how these villains are treated by the narrative more than anything else. If it's MY narrative, in the sense that I wrote it, then I simply do what I can to rob villains of their excuses. That doesn't mean they can't make excuses, just that their excuses don't work as justifications.

To give you an example, someone who kills people at random because he turns into a werewolf and loses control of himself can be forgiven. Sure, it's not "OK," but this is a redeemable character. If he can be cured of his werewolfism, taught to control the urges or simply locked up during a full moon, he can become a hero easily.

To give you another example, someone who kills people because they get in his way of becoming rich, powerful and influential really can't be forgiven. Even if everyone in the world lost a brain lobe and just gave him all the money, power and influence he needed, he'd still be a callous ******* who wouldn't think twice about killing people who got in his way. In fact, giving him these things would make him MORE likely to kill, not less.

In terms of narrative, forgiveable villains are those who can be redeemed and become heroes by changing physical attributes about them while unforgivable villains are those for whom a personality rewrite or epiphany therapy is required to make them into heroes, at which point they essentially become entirely different characters.



I still feel it's more a matter of writing than it is of reading. I've experienced enough of other people's stories to be able to spot what an author is trying to say through context, and some authors treat their villains with more respect than others. If an author goes out of his way to present his villain as both reprehensible yet still respectable, that will carry through in the reading. Certainly, it won't carry through for everyone and it won't read the same for those it does, but by and large it still will.

A villain is rarely describe in exposition outside of character biographies and shoddy stories. A villain is much more commonly described by example, through showing the evil deeds that they do. If the narrative makes it a point to describe the horror and terror this villain causes while downplaying his villainous virtues, then this narrative does not treat the villain with respect. On the contrary, the narrative wants you to disrespect the villain, such that when you finally come face to face with him, you'll want to insult him to his face per chance you can't punch him outright.

If, by contrast, a narrative respects a villain, it will give you more of a balance between the reprehensible things he does and the cooler things that make him awesome. Sometimes, respectful narrative will even downplay the villain's horror, having it happen off-screen, emphasising instead his positive attributes. If done poorly, this can undermine the villain's evil and his threat, but if done properly, this creates a villain we want to kill, but whom we can still admire.

Dr. Doom is always a good example. Specific writers aside, he's pretty much always an unambiguous bad guy. He kills people, threatens cities, bargains with homicidal aliens and more, so we know this is not a very good person. But at the same time, we can still admire his genius, we can still admire his achievements and we can still admire his tenacity. This is a villain that the narrative respects, and because the narrative respects him, we as the audience are in turn compelled to respect him, as well. This doesn't always work, obviously, but it still works more often than not.

Ultimately, everything comes down to how each individual reader parses a story's writing, that much I can't deny. But how the story is written can have a major influence on how it's read by most people, at least.

Originally Posted by Redlynne

As intended.


You have to have a grand total of ZERO Crab Powers on ANY of your (alternate) builds on your character so as to avoid wearing the backpack on ALL of your costumes.

Originally Posted by James_Donner

I understand the time difference but that isn't the info I was asking for.

I was asking what time do you want to run them.

Originally Posted by Cherry Cupcakes

Dang it, now I got this stuck in my head

Y'all can thank me later.

Originally Posted by Necrotech_Master

i would be interested but i only play on the victory server

but if you have anything on that server i would be happy to run duo/trio sf/tfs

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

An amoral villain is just a villain with a different type of motivation. Since amoral villains are rarely justifiable outside of amoral reasoning (he kills people because he doesn't care about them, but I didn't care about them either, so it's OK), I don't have a problem with it. In fact, it's a pretty good angle, if handled with care.

My drive was more to separate a villain's motivation from the qualities that serve to make that villain respectable, in a sense I sought to balance the villain's vices against his "villainous virtues." A villain that I literally CANNOT hate, therefore, is a bad villain in a storytelling sense, but then so is a villain I can't respect. A villain needs to be bad either through amorality, extremism or assoleism, but that needs to be balanced against reasons to respect this villain through genius, tenacity or audacity.

In essence, I want a villain I can respect first and know he's evil second, as opposed to a villain who's evil first and hateful second.

Now, as for whether an amoral character always has to be a villain, that's a subject of debate and a matter of presentation. That's really not the point here, however. I've accepted that villains need to be bad people lest I just make them on hero-side. It's a question of how to handle the unpleasant sides of this badness, and the answer seems to be two-pronged:

1. For incidental characters, make them hateful, then kill them off.
2. For persistent characters, make them respectable so people don't change the channel every time they show up.

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Something of a tangent, something occurred to me today: I spoke about how it's easy, as a player or a viewer, to see the game, the movie, the story as the obstacle and its creators as the enemy, therefore making it easy to hate repugnant villains. I also spoke about how difficult this is when you're the creator and the story is your own.

This isn't necessarily the case, as multiple people have helped me realise. This, really, is only true for important, persistent characters that we have to live with. Incidental, fleeting character very much CAN be treated as the enemy. I have, in fact, done this in my own stories. When I've needed accidental villains only important as plot devices, I've made them very, very bad. And then I've killed them in very, very gruesome ways. A the writer of the story, I hated these people, and as the writer of the story, I conspired to kill them, and no-one ever missed them. Because they were bad people.

That's why the abovementioned two-pronged solution works. If a villain will be prominent and recurring, he needs to be respectable. If he's going to be incidental... Meh, who cares?

Originally Posted by Mr_Grey

Well, that strikes me as a "Your mileage may vary..." moment.

To me, I get the stuffed shirt part, but his "emotionless" personality seems to be more restraint on his part. He's lived a long time, has protected people from increasingly bizarre situations and is all too aware of the struggle he has to contend with, possibly for the rest of his life.

Not to mention the fact that his wife's death was a painful reminder of the fact, barring some convoluted murder, he will outlive his entire family.

Stoicism is usually the mortal's response to the realization of immortality.

For his coming across as a twit, once again, I'm reminded of a teenager's response to when their father goes "What's wrong?" and while there's a million and one things running through the teen's head, the only response is a glumly mumbled "Nuthin'" before the youngster trots off to his friends to go "Man! My dad is such a twit!"

Originally Posted by Mr_Grey

I know. As I stated before, players seem to refuse to differentiate between the character and its creator.

Something about that seems insultingly childish on our part.