Venture

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  1. Quote:
    Could you please stop calling it the 'Loyalist menace', seeing as in the case of Responsibility Loyalists
    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.

    Quote:
    they're working to keep the Praetorian populus safe from the excesses of both the Resistance terrorists (especailly the nutjob Crusaders) and the Powers Division/Cole Administration hardline.
    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.

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by William Shakespeare
    I did send to you
    For certain sums of gold, which you denied me:
    For I can raise no money by vile means:
    By heaven, I had rather coin my heart,
    And drop my blood for drachmas, than to wring
    From the hard hands of peasants their vile trash
    By any indirection: I did send
    To you for gold to pay my legions,
    Which you denied me: was that done like Cassius?
    Should I have answer'd Caius Cassius so?
    When Marcus Brutus grows so covetous,
    To lock such rascal counters from his friends,
    Be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts;
    Dash him to pieces!
  2. Venture

    Psychic Melee

    Quote:
    It certainly would be a shame not to put one of Positron's favorite concepts for a Powerset in game.
    So, we are getting Clown Summoning after all!?!
  3. Still way behind on this.

    Quote:
    Like I said before, I'm not sure what mutant-themed content would even look like, since we don't seem to have the mutant stigma here that Marvel has.
    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.
  4. Quote:
    Uh since when are Titans magical?
    Always.

    Quote:
    The fact that you consider everything supernatural to be necessarily magical seems to be a limitation of your own conception, Venture.
  5. Pressed for time so I'm just hitting this....

    Quote:
    These threads make a lot more sense if you replace "superheroes" with "the sort of writing I like" and "magic" with "the sort of writing I dislike".
    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.
  6. Quote:
    The Well is not magical according to any official lore. It has always existed, magic has not. It is specifically noted that "incarnate" is a different origin than magic in that one arc everyone loves so much.
    Yes, I read it too, and gluing feathers on a rat still doesn't make it a swan.
  7. Quote:
    The event happened concurrently for both of them, but one was level 50 and the other level 1. I see no handwaving in this instance.
    What you are describing is not "level progression equals story progression" at all.
  8. Quote:
    I guess I assume that some weaponry and a token standing army must exist even for a largely ceremonial fighting force.
    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....

    Quote:
    The stupid thing is that Nemesis ever attacked in the first place. He'd have had a much better chance of bringing his "upload my mind into the planetary mental network" plans to fruition if he'd just quietly gone about his business. If there was some good reason for him to start the war, I've never learned what it was.
    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.

    Quote:
    Meh. It's easy to be an armchair quarterback but really, I have to wonder who greenlights some of these ideas.
    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!"
  9. Quote:
    Again, he is very clearly not magical based on the most recent lore given to us about what he actually is.
    "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.
  10. Quote:
    Level-based Story Progression does work in-concert with Uniform Story Progression. Since you've brought up the Galaxy City tutorial, I'll use that as an example with two of my Scrappers, Daniel Eldridge and Chance.
    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.
  11. Quote:
    If his fake Phalanx automatons were strong enough to put the hurt on the Rikti then they were already strong enough to let him take over Primal Earth, especially if they were mass produced.
    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.

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Jack Handy
    I can imagine a world without war, a world without strife. And I can imagine us attacking that world because they'd never expect it.
    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.
  12. Quote:
    That is how the lore works, full stop.
    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.
  13. Quote:
    Originally Posted by G_Savior View Post
    I have not done any of the new DA content, but one thing I want to know from reading through this thread: Why can't we just get the Rikti to slap the battalions **** like they did in their own universe? Is there some sort of difference here?
    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.
  14. Quote:
    It removes that cap and says "Yes, YOU can be more powerful than the big names. You're not second string."
    But the players are "second string", and they always will be.
  15. Once upon a time in America, maybe 40-50 years or so ago, our political leaders were expected to avoid the appearance of impropriety. A credible accusation was enough to drive someone out of public life. Now, you can commit adultery in the White House, lie about it to Congress and not only not go to jail but still be president.

    Whether or not greasing Jack Emmert's characters was done out of spite isn't the point. The point is that it can be perceived as having been done out of spite (and various comments have fostered that perception, deserving or not). For that reason alone it shouldn't have been done. No one was putting a gun to anyone's head to force the use of these characters. They could have been quietly allowed to fade into the background if the company felt it needed to move past them. Killing those characters might not have been petty and vindictive, but it was certainly poor judgement.
  16. Quote:
    But how can we do that when we're in the shadows of near-immortals who are of a magnitude more powerful than our characters?
    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.

    Quote:
    The only way our character can shine story-wise when there is a more powerful generation that just won't die or age out... is to murder them.
    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.

    Quote:
    The content writers have already diminished the Freedom Phalanx in many ways by setting them up for failure. Positron is no new Mary Sue when villains steal the Fire of Prometheus from him; he was inconsequential in saving Psyche or Statesman; and he gets his entire team snared in Diabolique's trap, requiring us to save them all.
    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.
  17. Quote:
    He said on the latest UStream that "as far as I'm concerned" she's dead dead - although the producer and lead developer might have other ideas - plus, Verridian is writing the next SSA, not Dr. Aeon - and escape routes for her were totally left open by the way she died
    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.
  18. Quote:
    Actually, I was just making light of the irony of Venture saying we are not an unpleaseable playerbase when he's already a lock for the forum curmudgeon lifetime achievement award.
    I think the people who still haven't let go of GDR/ED have me beat there.
  19. Well before the time of most folks here, I suspect. Not mine, though.
  20. Quote:
    But the one thing that I can say with utter, absolute certainty about SSA2 is that at least 60% of the feedback will be complaints about how bad the writing is, mostly supported by quotations from tvtropes.com, interspersed with occasional complaints about how "player characters don't matter."
    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.

    Quote:
    (By the way, I'm convinced this would be true even if it were written by a coalition of geekdom darlings Neil Gaiman, Joss Whedon, and Terry Prachett's ghost, and was fully customizable by the player playing it.)
    That probably would suck. Too many cooks.
  21. Quote:
    That's when you play the "You don't have all the information!" card and quickly make up some explanation for the contradiction to present later on, with a smug grin, going "Of course I had planned it like this all along."
    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.
  22. Quote:
    Just because you have a plot planned out far ahead of time doesn't mean that you can't also make up things as you go along
    If you have things plotted out in advance but then insist on improvising in ways that introduce contradictions then ur doin it wrong.
  23. Quote:
    They do plan quite far ahead
    No, they don't. They're making it up as they go along. It's obvious to anyone who's done it themselves.
  24. Quote:
    To be honest, knowing what I now know about Prometheus, I would probably spend my time finding a less murderous way to transcend Wade's accomplishment and slap Prometheus silly.
    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.