Venture

Responsibility Loyalists are the "banality of evil": people willing to look the other way and do the work required to keep a society running even under an oppressive regime just so long as they don't personally have to get their hands dirty. They may not deserve to be shoved up against a wall now that the revolution has arrived, but they ain't no kind of good guys.

That would be the Wardens. Of course, you could say much the same thing about them, as they were more than willing to benefit from the Crusaders' combat expertise and such, so long as they didn't have to blow up any civilians to benefit the cause.

So, we are getting Clown Summoning after all!?!

The real problem with "mutant-themed content" is the X-Men style "mutant stigma". It is very, very difficult to write mutant content without going near some kind of racial prejudice and/or eugenics issues, and Marvel in general and Claremont in particular have poisoned that well for the next ten generations.

Always.

Wrong. I have nothing against magic per se. I have many Magic origin characters in this game and in the Current Opposition. If I could afford a third MMO subscription right now I'd be playing That Other Game. The last two tabletop games I ran were both fantasy (one was a fusion of the Mage: the Ascension and GURPS: Technomancer backgrounds, the other a DB game called Everway).

My problem with the Well...one of them anyway, the Well lore is just horrible in pretty much every respect...is that they made something that behaves in every way as if it were magical in nature and then tried to slap a big NOT MAGIC label on it. It behaves like an insane god or demon, it offers a Faustian bargain, it lets you summon ghosts, it's associated with a Titan (magical being) and angels (yep)...uh, yeah, magic. Does it have to wear a robe and wizard hat too? I'd say that it's unimaginable that anyone would think otherwise, but, well, this is the Internet.

Yes, I read it too, and gluing feathers on a rat still doesn't make it a swan.

What you are describing is not "level progression equals story progression" at all.

Splitting hairs. America kind of got caught with its pants down in 1941 even after having fought a major world war just a few decades earlier....

I don't believe that was ever his plan (and it was a pretty stupid one in any case...right, Nemmy, go take on billions of minds with decades more practice at this than you. We'll wait.) The plan was to drive off the Rikti invasion and get hailed as a hero for saving the world, which would somehow cause people to forget about all the times he tried to conquer it...no, I don't think much of the Nemesis content.

I could never work in this field, because when someone threw out something like this at a pitch meeting I'd blurt out something like "THROW HIM IN THE IRON MAIDEN!" or "BRING ME THE BORE WORMS!"

"He" very clearly is magically based, except in the silly this-is-not-the-magic-you-are-looking-for sense the lore is trying to pull off. Really, for all intents and purposes, we're getting out Incarnate powers by making a deal with the devil...and we don't even get to read the contract.

No, it doesn't. When your characters meet your handwave vanishes in a puff of logic.

I keep bringing this up: Quine-Duhem Thesis. The tl;dr version is that if you try hard enough you can bamboozle yourself into believing anything. That doesn't mean you should. The amount of handwaving and looking the other way required to make "level-based story progression" work pole-vaults past the point of reason.

The Fauxdom Phalanx (sic) was able to smack around the Rikti because the Rikti had no meaningful military capability or supers of their own. (From a Primal Earthling's perspective every Rikti is "superhuman", of course, but the Rikti don't appear to have had the kind of "one man army" supers Primal was sick with, at least before the wars.) It was explained in the RWZ material that following the defeat of the Battalion the Lineage of War was returned to its diminished ceremonial role. I imagine world peace is easier to attain when you have a species-wide telepathic network.

It always seemed to me that if you connect the dots in the Rikti lore, the Lineage of War wasn't fooled for a second by the silly automatons and just took advantage of the situation to grab power. That would explain why their crazy goes to 11 when the truth comes out. But, like the mathematician whose proof results in a contradiction when taken one more step, the devs don't take that step.

No, it isn't. "Level-based story progression" was on life support to start with and got its final lethal injection with the destruction of Galaxy City, which happens at level 1. The devs keep trying to cling to this shibboleth but there are way too many inconsistencies. The one that gets trotted out most often is helping Angus McQueen stop a second Rikti invasion that's in full swing by the time you can run his arcs. They're trying to have it both ways and you just can't do that.

Because when the Battalion reference was dropped into the RWZ material, they (or it, as may be the case) were just a bunch of nasty aliens, not the soul-devouring Cosmic Horror they're now implied to be. Remember, the Rikti couldn't deal with Nemesis automaton versions of the Freedom Phalanx; they'd have been stomped flat by anything that's supposed to challenge our tricked-out Incarnates.

I.e., they've changed horses in mid-stream again.

But the players are "second string", and they always will be.

We weren't "in their shadows" until the writing put us there, which is a fairly recent development. (Though the trend started as early as i6.) It doesn't matter if there are characters more powerful than the player-characters; in fact there have to be. The world must be bigger than the players in anything but a single-player video game with no ongoing continuity. The DA material is doing a great job of illustrating what the tabletop branch of the hobby figured out in, oh, 1978 or so: great, now you're an Incarnate, just like Arachnos Redshirt #24 and Tsoo Gangster #87. Escalating power levels is a sucker's game, but that's a digression. The issue, again, is the character or characters' gravitas in the narrative.

No, the way to make the PCs shine is to make the story about them. Whether or not more powerful beings exist is irrelevant, so long as they are at best the Heroes of Another Story. If the GM/devs keep pushing other characters out in front of the PCs then you will have a problem whether or not those NPCs are physically more powerful than the PCs.

Anti-Sue. Suetiful All Along.

Making a character fail all the time does not in and of itself exonerate it of Sueness.

The only thing necessary for the players to be at the forefront is to put them there. The game's original model was "there are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them", and it worked. The ever-snowballing trend towards these grandiose plots is never going to produce the desired results.

Considering that the devs are embracing the worst parts of superhero comics, we could have had Uatu the Watcher, the Phantom Stranger, Q and the Archangel Michael on hand to certify that Sister Psyche was not merely dead but really and sincerely dead, and STILL have her show up alive in the next SSA.

I think the people who still haven't let go of GDR/ED have me beat there.

Many posters have held up numerous examples of well-written arcs, proof left as an exercise for the reader. We're not dealing with an Unpleasable Fanbase. Of course, those arcs are largely well in the game's past. Somewhere along the line the writing went in a new -- and wrong -- direction.

That probably would suck. Too many cooks.

The issue isn't whether or not you can plug the holes. You always can; welcome to the Quine-Duhem Thesis. The issue is whether or not you need to.

If you have things plotted out in advance but then insist on improvising in ways that introduce contradictions then ur doin it wrong.

No, they don't. They're making it up as they go along. It's obvious to anyone who's done it themselves.

So, business as usual then. The Well, as presented to us from the start, is nothing any sane, ethical person would have anything to do with. Now we're seeing Prometheus as being just as bad, which really was hinted at from the start. This is just more of the sadistic GMing we've had to deal with from the start, ranging from the initial endgame advancement option requiring your character to stick Devouring Earth substances in his body (what could possibly go wrong!) to the much-requested flashback system being tied to an obvious Nemesis plot to the UGC system being a product of known, obvious villains. Someone over there just fundamentally does not get it and doesn't want to.