Shadowe

Thanks for the post Pious.

It certainly clarifies your position on the matter, and I definitely appreciate that.

A few thoughts from me, though (not specifically directed at you):

CB has not said that he is intending to (again) reduce the numbers involved. That is the root cause of this entire tranche of this discussion - he was asked, in a PM, if he really thought that the original number was suitable (oh, and for anyone who thinks a school of 2000 is OMGHUGE, my wife went to a school with over 2,500 pupils, and I taught in one, too), and he did reduce the numbers. Fair play to him for having the gumption to retcon his own plotline by a 50% reduction in reported casualty figures.

But even so, a news network reporting the deaths of a thousand children, even at their most sensationalist, when the rescue crews wouldn't have given them the numbers, is a little off. In fact, the US government could make a case pretty strong case for Incitement to Riot against the reporter who broadcast such an unsubstantiated "fact".

However, ignoring that, CB has consistently defended his position in this thread, and unless I've missed something (which I will happily concede is quite possible) has not told the wider community anything along the lines of "It's not actually as bad as it was first reported, just hold on a bit, it'll all become clear".

For myself, if a "later news report" happened to come up saying "early reports of the death toll were unfortunately exaggerated, and emergency crews have now confirmed XX deaths. While still a grave tragedy, we are all grateful that it was not as bad as originally feared", then I'd do what I said earlier - have my characters acknowledge it IC, and move on.

I've so far avoided bringing my personal bugbear into the discussion, but it's been brought up a few times: That little thing I like to call "god-modding the game world". I will say, right now, that I do not think that CB is doing so, if the situation is toned down from "outright attrocity" to "terrible tragedy". Now, that's purely subjective, of course, since nobody gets to define where tragedy ends and attrocity begins, but a great deal of the discussion in this thread has given peoples' opinion on the matter: A thousand children is too many. A couple of dozen probably wouldn't be.

Of course, not everyone will agree with that, and it could well be that even a couple of dozen deaths in this circumstance would spur someone's character into taking some form of precipitous action, but I believe that the drop in orders of magnitude would mean that it would ultimately fall to player choice, rather than something that screams of a character demand.

Now, having said all that, I can appreciate CB wanting his plotline to have "impact" (defined in this case as "an event that makes people take notice"). In fact (if people will forgive me for putting my own perceptions on it), the entire purpose of this plotline is wasted if it doesn't have impact.

It's the degree of impact that people are disputing. I'm certainly not trying to tell CB "don't even think about murdering children in an RP plotline", or even "don't use emotive issues in RP". I suppose the point I'm trying to get across, and I'm doing this publicly rather than in PM's because I believe it's good advice for Plot-Masters, is that the degree of impact has to be carefully tailored to allow the full flexibility of responses.

Remember: Plot-Mastering is an artform, not a science. There are NO numbers or formulae that will tell someone how to do this.

If I were triggering an event like this, I would look at it as follows: I want something that will allow the players I want to be impacted to react, but not so broad that the players who aren't involved won't feel obliged to react. To do this, I settle on the idea of an attack on a school, in the middle of the day, involving a giant stompy robot - assuming that school is in session, this affords me a huge number of potential victims. I decide to make it a pretty big school because (and this is key) the scale of the tragedy could be huge. But it doesn't have to be. Children will escape. Children will hide. Children will do anything and everything they can to get away, and unless giant stompy robot literally flattens the entire school in one go, the death toll will be significantly smaller than the size of the school offers potential for. The key impact to go for here is "Wow, it could have been so much worse". So... Catholic School, during morning classes. I don't want to go for optimum destruction, because I have to remember the key impact I want. So I set things up so that giant stompy robot trashes a classroom or two, the kids flee in terror, and then giant stompy robot gets stopped. Total death toll: 1 teacher, eighteen children. Injuries: 4 teachers, thirty-seven children (of which six are in critical condition).

That's a noteworthy attack, but not a massacre that would trigger a military and general superhero response.

I had more to write, but I'm heading home from work, now, so I'll just leave it there. (Oh, and I started writing this at 3.00 UK time and am just dumping it onto the thread for people to consider, so I will have missed other posts in the intervening period).

And now we hit the real issue, and this is important.

We have here a Wide-effect plotline. The vast majority of people who have posted have not said that they wish to ignore the overall plot. The vast majority of people would actually like to incorporate the plot into the ongoing Unionverse lore and history.

The problem has struck because an element of the plot has moved from "stuff happening somewhere else that we can ignore" to "stuff that we know everyone is going to talk about", because it DWARFS the Dunblane massacre, for example.

The characters in a superhero story - and that's what CoH is - have the power to react to atrocities. And they would do so. To remain in-character, those reactions would likely be very extreme. The outright destruction of the Court by the combined might of the heroes of Paragon would simply be step one.

I have no desire to take part in any RP where an entire SG is effectively ostracised and unable to take part in the wider RP occurring within the game.

But many of the heroes from Paragon would consider such action to be completely reasonable. And it actually would be.

Yes, the problem we have here is one of scale - this is too big to be ignored. Where do we set the bar? I have no idea. But a good judgement call would be that if you think you could watch it on a news report without wanting to punish the perpetrators yourself, then it's probably okay.

Sorry, doesn't wash.

It's your plotline. You should provide the out for the people not wanting to get involved. None of the rest of us knew this was coming, so we couldn't arrange to be out of town, in another reality or whatever. So tell us, without god-modding it, how you have arranged things so that our characters won't react unless we want them to.

I ask that, because as has quite rightly been said before, people will react to something this horrific. I watched the news here in the UK on 9/11, and I will tell you, I was in shock. The whole world was in shock. And it sparked a war.

That's sort of my point: unless the character has been told where the other character in question is from, IC, they have no realistic way of knowing another toon's affiliation and AT.

Also, the registration document isn't a badge that characters wear, so IC information held on it shouldn't be used unless you go to City Hall and RP reading up on it.

So... less "nope" and more "yep, 100% correct", then?

I think that would fall under "unable to attack their enemy effectively".

Thanks, Castle. Most interesting, and very useful.

Intellectual curiosity striking me, now: One thing that I find mildly immersion-breaking is that a runner doesn't create aggro in other spawns it passes. Now, I'm sure there are reasons that I've not thought of for this, not least something along the lines of "We don't want the players getting swamped by unbeatable odds when a runner aggros the whole map", but is it theoretically or technically feasible for the following scenario to be built into the game:

Spawn 1 - players attack, one or more mobs in spawn have Grief flag set to on, Griefed mobs run.

Spawn X - Griefed mob enters perception range of Spawn. Spawn goes to combat stance and receives a small, short duration perception buff. If no players detected, spawn drops back to passive, otherwise spawn aggros.

And, general question to the people out there who think about these things: What are the implications of this idea for gameplay?

Off the top of my head, I've obviously already thought of the team getting swamped by this sort of "called in help", and I can foresee interesting possibilities regarding "trains" of spawns, but there's bound to be things I've not considered.

Daft question time, then: EU or US account?

This, this, this, a thousand times this!

I've lost track of the number of people I've had to tell "you need to click the contact again after their intro text to start their missions". This had better not be WAI, because it's counterintuitive, especially since we don't have those "exclamation mark I wanna talk to you" flags for contacts in this game, so there's no indication that they are willing to talk to you again.