Venture

A smart guy once said it's our choices that determine who we are.

I'd recommend the guy in your example get professional help, but whatever his internal monologue, he resisted temptation and walked away. I don't damn people for things they didn't do.

Easy, narrate that the bombs killed a lot of people but didn't do much structural damage. Clockwork will have it cleaned up in no time.

Players already did that, it's called the Mission Architect.

Of course, the players promptly showed the devs what they really want: farms. This may even be why current storytelling is so weak.

You can repeat it again if you like. He didn't do it, that's all that matters. Scott and Tyrant were both given the same choice; Scott went one way and Tyrant went the other.

False. Tyrant was prepared to allow Arachnos to destroy one of Antimatter's reactors because it suited his agenda. Scott was not willing to allow renegade Crusaders to destroy a hospital even though it would have furthered his agenda.

That does not make Calvin Scott the good guy, of course. My whole position from the beginning has been "Praetoria is a corrupt society and anyone capable of exercising power in it is corrupt". You just can't even begin to argue that he's worse than Tyrant. Tyrant's regime is sacrificing innocent lives every day, and there is no reason to believe the whole "protecting the remnants of humanity from Hamidon" thing is anything but a convenient scapegoat at best.

I reviewed over 150 arcs. Police Woman and Glazius have reviewed lots, there have been any number of less prolific contributors. PW went to the trouble of creating an "alternate Contact tree" for people looking to level through MA. Players have run their own contests involving MA.

Net effect: zip.

The community has held up its end here, gone the extra mile. Barring an extraordinary effort by the devs -- which may still have no effect -- this is it.

I said "air strike" not "nuke 'em". Neither the BAF or Lambda would require a nuclear strike, based on what we've been told.

Of course, that's assuming we're sticking with Mr. No WMD's arbitrary pronouncements.

We have conventional weapons capable of dealing with hardened underground targets in the real world; I'm sure the Omnidisciplanary Scientists of the City universe can do just as well or better.

"It's not enough to survive. One must be worthy of survival." -- W. Adama

So say we all.

Not gonna happen. This is Patron Powers 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Support the underground railroad and get as many people as possible out of Praetoria. Hook up with resistance movements in other parts of the world doing the same. Try to build a power base outside of Tyrant's sphere of control. Attempt to derail State atrocities whenever possible. Following the discovery of interdimensional travel attempt to win support from legitimate offworld agents (i.e. not Arachnos, Malta, etc.)

That's what I would do as a Praetorian, mind you. As I said way back in GR's beta, my recommendation to the government as a Primal super who's seen Praetoria would be to either block access to the dimension or, failing that, open portals and throw nukes through them until the planet is uninhabitable or we run out. (One of the reasons why I can't get interested in the new trials is that they don't present any tactical problems that are actually better solved with small groups of superheroes instead of an air strike.)

No, not catagorically. Anyone who thinks that has never been asked the following question:


(I'm aware that Kant doesn't agree. It's important to remember that a) even Solomon can be wrong and b) Kant died a virgin.)

Ethics are situational but not subjective. To argue the contrary is to embrace ethical nihilism, which is self-refuting.

As it happens, this is exactly the rationale behind Tyrant's regime.

There is such a thing as just war theory, and the Crusaders utterly fail to meet its criteria. And the Wardens, however well-intentioned they may be, are joined to them at the hip.


Countess Crey is irredemable, having jumped over the Moral Event Horizon with the creation of Project Revenant. Of course, Frostfire is also irredemable but that didn't stop anyone over at PS.

So maybe there's going to be a Tyrant trial. We get to arrest Recluse, too, which accomplishes exactly what?

Why not? It can do anything the devs want it to do; it's just a plot device. The fact that it's spewing contradictions and Unfortunate Implications all over the place is just a demonstration of why your phlebotinum shouldn't have a speaking part.

And how many storylines in this game are actually "over"?

No. He doesn't. This is the point. He is an evil twin, he will always be an evil twin, he will never be anything but an evil twin. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Yeah, as it turns out, stories that are centered around one of the most trite, cliched, overdone hackneyed plot devices in history actually aren't all that interesting in the long term. Go figure.

That's the sad part.

If your game has no story, it's not an MMO, it's Tetris.

I can't think of a single frequent commentator who did either of these things.

Who, as it happens, already has a weapon designed to disrupt powers taken from the Well. I'm guessing we'll never have a chance to fire an Orestes Rifle at Tyrant or his crew, though.

Lady Grey is just another chick with superpowers who won't come clean about her background.

The competition has already told that story. It didn't end well for the protagonist, or about, oh, half the population of the planet he was standing on at the time.

For that matter, if there was ever any shred of decency in Tyrant (which I doubt), your position was also his.

If it can talk, then it is intelligent, and as a very smart person once said, never trust anything that can think for itself unless you can see where it keeps its brain.

How do you know that, or more importantly how do our characters know that? The claim that "a little won't hurt" is, as it happens, the standard method for inducing corruption. No sane, ethical person would have anything to do with the Well as described.

Easy: don't make it a moral agent.

What makes sense about the Hollows arcs? They're just a bunch of stuff that happened, bordering on Random Events Plots. The same goes for Striga. Croatoa is marginally better.

Xiang Yu. Incomparable warrior, brilliant military leader and strategist...and completely inept at politics or any kind of normal personal interactions. If he'd delegated some authority or at least listened to his advisers he might have ruled China. Instead he torqued off people and nations, turned potential friends into enemies and, depending on which version of the story you like, ended up either cutting off his own head so an old friend could claim the new emperor's reward (which is impossible, but if anyone could do it, it would have been him), or getting hacked to bits by a mob (so badly that the emperor had to split the reward five ways).

"Sometimes smart goes all the way around and becomes stupid again." -- Rita Rudner