Venture

No, it hasn't, because those arcs still have you doing other peoples' jobs.

Because the heroes have been playing by the rules of a democratic society with all those silly things like "human rights". Tyrant, on the other hand, would probably nuke the Rogue Isles from orbit (it's the only way to be sure) and then send in the robots to clean up the dozen or so villains that survive.

Being a criminal is not so easy or glamorous in societies where Off With His Head applies, where an autocrat can hand a list of names to the head of his secret police with a slow nod and know those people will never be seen or heard from again in 24 hours. As it stand the villains of the Rogue Isles are lucky to have a patron like Recluse who is relatively disinterested in what they do because fostering a pirate's den suits his plans.

As for all of the usual complaints about villain content, there are people who simply need to stop playing villains. This is not a sandbox game, it's based around your character doing jobs for other people. This means you get to be Colonel Moran, not Professor Moriarity. The game can not and never will deliver what these people want.

The problem isn't that Schroedinger's Gun is a trope. As you say you can't write without using tropes The problem is that it's a bad trope. It's hack writing.

A one-paragraph obtuse blurb hidden in a part of the game 90% of its players have never seen does not even count as "foreshadowed", never mind the "very well" part.

I have to wonder what the people who think this was "well foreshadowed" thought of Darrin Wade suddenly whipping out a ritual that would kill Statesman, given that the difference between the two is one scant paragraph or so. I'll also add that the "incarnate powers are not magic" camp is looking even sillier now. What we've gotten here is no different from needing the Sword of Macguffin to kill the dragon in Generic Fantasy World #7897.

I would not have written this story on a bet, so the question is really moot. If I were somehow stuck with it, I would have, as referenced by another respondent, made sure that the Whatevers of Jocas had an adequate build up in the story I was actually telling and not just an off-hand blurb under a pile of dust in the corner.

I am familiar with the Midnight Club lore. I recognized the dagger immediately. I also recognize the moves I used 30 years ago. Don't Ballet Slipper a BattleShip artist. Something you learn to do early on in GMing is to throw around lots of stuff that you don't really have any plans for, or even really know anything about, so that you can pick up any old thing lying around later and say "oh yeah, this, this was it!"

Something not pulled out of someone's Back Orifice.

The point is that calling it "pre-existing lore" is being exceedingly generous; from any reasonable perspective it is something completely out of left field. The prior reference is far too scant to justify its new importance.

It's not "a new item" but it is something that was basically a throwaway reference in an obscure part of the game that's suddenly been thrust front and center as a Big Deal. This means it is either a) a very poorly foreshadowed plot development or, more likely, b) a thinly-disguised butt pull.

Or, maybe, one of the themes of the story is how people react to the unknown, especially when what they've encountered challenges all their assumptions.

I don't have time to deal with all the fail in this thread right now, so I'm just dealing with this: dude, you need to stop what you are doing and go read some history. You're just embarrassing yourself. Tyrant's regime is patterned almost exactly after any number of real-life totalitarian states. All of these clowns had some kind of senate or assembly or "advisory council" that supposedly had legislative power but in reality existed to do nothing but rubberstamp the autocrat's decrees. On rare occasions these strawmen would be used as a face-saving measure; if it became clear that (usually due to external forces) the autocrat's planned course of action was not feasible he'd have them "pass a resolution" against it. The Magisterium assembly only existed to provide the facade of legitimate government. The truth was that Tyrant answered to no one, and that's patently obvious to anyone who didn't sleep through high-school history.

Completely disagree. All the MMOs like City that are filled to the brim with soloable content are struggling, and the Industry Leader that puts out raid after raid has two orders of magnitude more subscribers.

He's too dangerous. Even if he's completely lost his powers -- which does not appear to be the case -- the first thing he'd do if he ever got free is try regain them or get new ones and start the whole thing over again. He'd be another Darrin Wade in the making.

I should think that would be a good thing.

Scirocco was a terrorist before he got his hands on Serafina's trove. Manticore used a lethal weapon against a known serial killer who arguably could not have been subdued or contained, and it didn't work anyway which just hammered home his point. Nor would I have given him a "free pass": if it had been my call I'd have him investigated by a grand jury and if indicted, tried.

First off, it's Heel Face Turns. Face Heel Turns happen all the time, sadly. Secondly, there are plenty of cases in which I'd accept that someone has learned his lesson and deserves a second chance. There are a lot of things a person can break, physically and conceptually, that can be replaced. Human lives aren't one of them, though, especially when taken deliberately and in cold blood and even moreso when done repeatedly.

In a discussion of totalitarian states and fascist leaders it would be more unusual if the Nazis and Hitler did not come up.

He thought he was. That's the point. All these guys think that. It's the central theme of fascism: all of the instruments of society are corrupt, the common citizen is at the mercy of criminals and subversives and the only way out is for the Strong Man to ignore the law and all reasonable principles of morality, take charge and use whatever means are necessary to restore order. The lead singer and musicians change but the song remains the same. Tyrant had the advantage of a physical boogeyman but it is not at all clear that Praetoria's only hope of survival was to hand him absolute power over the worlds' govenments and it is certainly not clear that any of Tyrant's policies following the "truce" were necessary or even effective.

Why not both?

Completely, utterly false. Hamidon didn't dictate terms. It just gave Tyrant a second chance to show humanity wasn't worth destroying. Instead he showed that it was. Hamidon wasn't standing behind Tyrant saying "all right, now you're going to build a literal thought police...that guy's teaching real history, kill his family, that should shut him up...now, here's the formula for the mind control drugs to put in the water...." All of the totalitarianism, all the war crimes, that was all Tyrant's doing. He chose not to tell the truth about his "victory". He chose to build a society based on lies. He chose to exercise absolute power instead of democracy. He did all of these things because, again, he was a coward who was afraid of the human race.

He was responsible for having that gun pointed at his head. He deliberately allowed the Devouring Earth to destroy much of society so he could control what was left. The prior society shares the blame too, of course. They panicked and handed power over to a madman long before exhausting their options. (That's assuming the whole "Tyrant was given power" story has any truth in it. It looks confabulated to me. It strongly resembles the bit where Marc Antony offered Julius Caesar a crown just so he could refuse it, only with the ending flipped.)

Name them. Cite sources.

It was nothing like what happened in Praetoria. Yes, I watched it. Baltar wasn't charged with maintaining order in post-Cylon New Caprica. He had no power at all. He was a figurehead. Tyrant was not Hamidon's figurehead; he was in charge. He had all the power. Baltar was not acquitted at his trial because the court agreed he "had no choice"; he was acquitted because Apollo successfully pointed out that he was being made a scapegoat.

Yeah, actually, no, there weren't. One of the most mishandled Tweeests ever.

No, it's more like I do believe in the Moral Event Horizon. You can't backtrack after you've walked off a cliff.

Edit: oh, and I agree with Brad. Less war, more crimefighting. With meaningful consequences plz k thx bai.

They do have a connection to each other; their stories are much the same.

You can say the same about pretty much every dictator (etc.) in human history.

We don't need his help. Even if we do. The price is too high, the risk too great. He's too powerful to be trusted and a greater war criminal by far than anyone executed by the Nuremberg trials. Better that the human race should die to the last person than to make a deal with the devil to try and save it.

Of course he is. He's even more of a madman now. Like all of these guys, when they get cornered in that last bunker (etc.) they finish losing whatever tenuous grasp they had on sanity. Hitler gave the order to destroy Germany when it was clear his number was up; his men just didn't carry it out. Tyrant didn't have to give an order. He did it himself.

I don't think we need much debate to establish that (e.g.) Manticore's use of excessive force against Protean does not even remotely compare to Tyrant's crimes against humanity.

No, he hasn't. He just likes to think he has. He's a terrorist and nothing will ever change that.

There is nothing a war criminal on this scale could do that would possibly redeem him and if he was ever going to realise what he did was wrong it would have happened long, long ago.

They're never going to stop believing he was right. You can't reason people out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

It prevents him from repeating his crimes.

Hardly. I'm indifferent to most of them.

I actually like some, like Crimson, but then he's clearly being played by Samuel M**********ing Jackson. I used to like Penelope Yin, until she was made the new Wesley.

No, he didn't. He said he had good intentions. He may even have believed he had good intentions. But as a dead fictional white guy said, it's the choices you make that determine who you are. Tyrant's choices show who he really is: a bully and a coward (but then I repeat myself), afraid of the rest of the human race.

All of the true monsters in human history, from Chin Shih Huang-Ti through Hitler to Osama bin Laden and whoever else is coming down the pike, committed their atrocities because they thought they were doing good. They were saving their people from evil and corruption, according to them at least. What is so frustrating about this Argument That Will Not Die is that practically everything Tyrant and his regime said and did is cut and pasted from real human history. If you're prepared to argue that Tyrant was really a good guy then you might as well argue that Hitler was just misunderstood.

As for the comparisons made to Paragon City, I wonder exactly how we know what the murder rate is in Skyway City and where this information is available, either on the company website or in game. The truth is that Paragon City is in growth mode. They're rebuilding destroyed areas of the city, building new housing, and that wouldn't be done unless people were moving into the city. The game's artificially-inflated portrayal of criminal activity notwithstanding, people want to live there. Whereas even with everyone drinking the mandatory government-supplied Kool-Aid people were literally dying to get out of Praetoria.

Quite the reverse: as a Usenet commentator whose name I long ago forgot observed in the dawn of MMOs, "the downside of 'everyone can solo' is everyone will solo".

I would put a bullet in Tyrant's brain even if the supernatural entity of your choice said it was a certain fact that he was the only thing standing between earth and the Battalion.

The real world has had plenty of examples of what life is like in a totalitarian state that doesn't have telepaths or super-technology to spy on its citizens. If you'd rather live in such a state...you deserve to.

So can everyone else.

Yeah, well, Foucault was just torqued off that he couldn't wear his bondage gear in public without getting stares.

It wasn't a civilization. It was a prison.

Right, kind of like how the executions ordered by the Nuremberg trials made the Allies just as bad as the Nazis.

Oh, wait.