Venture

Only because behind Chuck Norris' beard there is no...eh, you've heard that one.

Fixed.

The problem is that it was shaped by the worst of the seven years of content that came before it. It's also practically a Random Events Plot with a godmoding Villain Sue. Statesman's death is supposed to be the big thing here despite the fact that he is not a character in the story; he only shows up to die.

The DA material is garbage, too. It's pretty much a blatant haircut of Blackest Night (which wasn't the most original thing in the world to begin with). It's got a gratuitous side trip to Not-So-Ancient Rome thrown in, because time travel is k3w1 or something. And not only does it fridge the Knives of Artemis, but does so by turning the faction into an expansion pack for a Praetorian faction of dubious merit. The "Knives of Vengeance" compound the sin by resembling nothing more than a novice MA architect's first attempt at custom mobs: their costumes are an explosion in a junk factory and their powers are a random collection of new shiny powersets.

People keep saying "we should have cut scenes in MA!" and I keep saying "no, we shouldn't" and they say "why not?!?!?" and I say "because you would use them".

You may as well draw that line around Ouroboros in its entirety, since it only exists to provide the "flashback" mechanic.

Has it? Your Contact bars won't have changed.

It is not, as you have already pointed out yourself.

Actually Twilight's Son tells you straight up in the Ouro tutorial that the Menders have never been successful with any of their attempts at temporal intervention.

That said, trying to make sense of time travel in this setting is pointless. It's used as a plot device with no thought given to its implications. Other eras are treated as Adventure Towns with a healthy dose of Timey Wimey Ball (and, of course, Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act). Yes, this is poor craftsmanship, standard rant, yadda yadda yadda.

FWIW, in my own campaigns, I decided there were two basic types of time travel. Some methods, including any I would ever give the players access to, worked within the space-time continuum and were thus limited by the Novokov self-consistency principle; in essence, it is impossible to change history using such methods. Other methods involved exiting the space-time continuum completely and re-entering at the desired time, which (for my purposes, anyway), breaks the traveler's chain of causality and would allow for (e.g.) Grandfather Paradoxes where you could kill the old duffer in his youth and come back to a world where you "don't exist". PCs never had reliable access to such methods; they were reserved for the bad guys.

Given the curse Scirocco is under, it's doubtful his plan would have worked. It's more likely to have gone horribly right.

If you've never seen a western, maybe. "Villain is the hero's father" is one of the oldest gags in the book. Even my sister, who is not a serious fan, figured it out after the first movie.

Fixed.

People pay money for Selena Gomez's "music", too.

There are any number of ways to do that; none of the good ones require adding time travel into an already convoluted and cliche-ridden plot.

Shooting from the hip, probably referring to Shaggy Dog Story or Shoot the Shaggy Dog.

It could also be argued that if you were not present things could be much better. If things were different they wouldn't be the same.</berra>

It is a philosophical position with connotations that can't be summed up in six words, your statement is a declaration, not an argument, and I had no idea who that was a picture of until I used Goggles and even now I have no idea what the reference is supposed to mean.

I don't know where you're getting this from. My position hasn't changed.

No, you're supposed to show why you think the trope is being misused. As almost everyone in the thread but you has pointed out, you can't because they're not.

No, not really.

In other words, it is ham-fisted exposition, i.e. bad writing. Did the Midnighters actually need to see the artifact stealing known Rularuu groupie to figure out he might have something to do with the Rularuu groupies stealing their artifacts? Does Costco offer bulk pricing on crates of Idiot Balls?

I don't believe WWD compares favorably to anyone's work. Ed Wood was inept enough to be funny, at least. "Blight" had better costumes.

I can think of a fair number of comic stories that were better than this. As for your examples, Batman defeating a weakened Superman is not something I would give a writer a hard time over, and Ozymandias' plan was if anything uncovered too easily (and didn't work in the end in any case).

Falsifiability is a principle from philosophy of science used to evaluate scientific hypotheses. It has no applicability to literary criticism. Arguing over whether (e.g.) the statement "in Shakespeare's Hamlet the titular character feigns madness to deceive his uncle" is falsifiable is gibberish. Arguing that statements must be falsifiable to have validity is the essence of logical positivism, a school of philosophy that is Deader Than Disco.

No, it just means the statement isn't a scientific one. The statement could be an axiom, or a tautology, or a theorem derived through valid rules of inference, etc. This isn't a discussion about science; falsifiability is not a useful metric.

Not in front of the children.

Well, that's because it's true, and therefore cannot be false. Certainly whoever wrote WWD could have included meaningful setbacks for Wade but as the vast majority of respondents have already observed, they didn't.

Again, as others have already demonstrated, Wade hasn't made any real mistakes. The fact that e.g. his summoned pet fails to kill the player is simply not to the point; it's not part of the actual plot and doesn't affect the story in any case. One of the litany of sins WWD commits, and again, numerous people have pointed this out to you, is that it really doesn't matter if the player-character is involved or not. Sometimes you can get away with that. I did in "Why We Fight" (#253990, don't bother, it's broken by the filter), but that is a very different sort of story. "Blowback" (#4643, still works AFAIK) is a better example; while it has had a few detractors over the years not one of them pointed out that the player doesn't really affect the outcome and most of the feedback on the arc has been very positive. WWD doesn't pull it off. Between the Villain Sue and Idiot Balls and the use of one of the most miserable factions in the game (Rularuu) it's more aggrivating than entertaining and ends up drawing the audience's attention towards its weaknesses instead of diverting it from them.

The only explanation that matters is that it is just bad writing. It's done so the writer can have Wade twirl his moustache and rub our noses in the fact that he's a god-moding Villain Sue and there's nothing we can do about it. His appearance serves no other purpose, either in-story or from a meta perspective. It's certainly not "a flaw in his plan" because his plan, both the immediate one in that chapter and the overall one, has gone off without a hitch.

"The Simple Art of Murder" is not about "writing mysteries", and when you understand why you will gain a slot in Enlightenment. As for its age and applicability, a dead white guy wrote stuff about writing over 2,000 years ago and it's still valid.

If so, then either everything is science or everything is magic. Either option is a fail if the setting was intended to include both.