This is not a guide to writing good mission arcs. I'm certainly not the final arbiter on what a good mission arc even is. Its more of a journal explaining how I wrote mine, and how I approached the process of writing and publishing my mission arcs. I'm not 100% certain what the best way to organize my thoughts are, so in the absence of a solid organizing principle I'm going to roughly follow the order I actually did things, except when I decide it will make more sense to deviate from that. In other words, I'm basically going to do whatever I feel like doing, and let the chips fall where they may.
So, I'm starting at the beginning. And the beginning for me was: what should I write about.
There are lots of different angles people have taken and are taking in picking a topic. One of them is to pick an established canon character and write a story about him or her. City of Heroes/City of Villains has a wide range of colorful characters suitable for writing stories about. Some are practically written for MA missions: Dr. Aeon for example is quirky, flamboyant, and egomaniacal. He's a very easy launchpad into practically any story you want to tell. One of the early missions I ran during closed beta was an early version of The Butterfly Effect which is now a dev choice arc. This arc used Aeon in more than one way to clever effect (in my opinion).
(Note: my general rule here is going to be that unless I get permission to do so, I'm not mentioning anyone's arcs except my own in these articles, except for Dev Choice arcs which I feel I can safely mention for both good and bad since they have essentially become dev-publicized anyway).
Conversely, some players take the opposite approach. They see a CoX character that is heavily underused in their opinion and decide to flesh that character out more. Both of these options have pros and cons associated with them. If you decide to pick out an especially noteworthy character like Aeon to write about, you stand a pretty good chance of being just one of many people all thinking the same thing. There are only so many Nemesis plots that can be interesting before you practically have to be Hemmingway to make one noteworthy. Conversely, if you pick a relatively underutilized character, you might have a different problem: with little material to go on, it can be difficult to write that character in a way that will match the impressions of the other players. Unless the character is literally a tabula rasa, everyone may have their own impressions of the character you might collide with in your own writing.
Most people I think decide to write based on something that they feel strongly about, or have thought about for a long time. And no subject is nearer and dearer to players hearts than their own characters. This is probably the easiest thing for players to write about, and simultaneously the hardest thing for players to write about well.
I think people should write about what they want to write about. However, if I were to make a recommendation in this area, I would suggest that unless you have a lot of experience in creative writing and have been seriously critiqued on it you should consider writing something else first and saving you characters for the second or third arc you write. The pitfalls here are legion:
<ul type="square">[*]You'll want to say more about your characters than the story requires, or desires. Soon you'll have tons of exposition explaining how Cosmic Defenderman was sent to Earth by the Elder God of Tapioca to rid the world of the Circle of Thorns, why the Tsoo hate him so, how he helped overthrow the 5th Column, the cat he saved from a tree last week, and what he last ate for lunch.
[*]You'll also have the opposite problem: you'll presume players either know or care about critical elements about your characters that aren't remotely clear in the story. They'll be trying to save Atlas Park from a Malta bombing, and out of nowhere they'll be rescuing Cosmic Defenderman, who everyone knows is the most powerful defender of Atlas Park and arch enemy of the Malta. How will we know this? Because the Malta guarding him will say "you won't stop us this time Cosmic Defenderman!" They may also be bowing to him when they do.
[*]Probably most importantly, you'll have to figure out a way for any of this to be remotely interesting to the actual players playing the mission. If you don't make it important, it will seem trivial. But if you force the issue too strongly, you'll end up in Mary Sue territory with everyone trying too hard to explain to you just how important Cosmic Defenderman is.[/list]The problem is you'll care too much and that will color your judgement.
And yet, that's basically the problem I set forth for myself. I have an origin story in my head for my first alt: Lady Arcana. The basic outline of that story is that she was an experiment conducted during the Rikti War by a Crey weapons research program. Basically, she's a product of illegal research during the war. But I needed a way to use that basic story in a way that wasn't too self-important, where the player would be the focus of the story and not my own character.
I quickly decided that the one thing that *wouldn't* happen was a time travel mission to see my character's own origin. I'm not saying all such missions are bad: I'm saying I think its too difficult to make good enough. And time travel itself gets into very dangerous territory: it all happened before already: why tamper with it in the first place?
So I decided that rather than tell my character's origin directly, I would tell a story about someone trying to reproduce my character's origin in the present day. That way, no time travel, and better yet no problems with my character being too important to the story. The motivation I could give the players was stopping a crime from happening, rather than being focused on my character specifically.
In the end, I ended up with a story outline that used something near and dear to my heart - my main alt's origin story - and yet crafted a story that was not about her, but rather about a criminal conducting illegal research. I was able to connect that story to canon by connecting it to the Rikti War, but in a way that wasn't likely to collide with existing canon (who *knows* how many funky things happened during the Rikti War no one knows about yet). And I had a basic plot: a way to connect everything together so that the events were not disconnected. An investigation can lead to all sorts of places with a lot of latitude, so as long as the storyline was reasonably linear, it wouldn't be (as Venture puts it) "just a bunch of stuff that happens."
So, I had my story (this became the arc Secret Weapons). All I had to do now was craft it.
My next step was designing some of the custom critters I was going to use in this arc, so I'm going to discuss custom critters next. That topic might be long: I'm still not sure if that should be one article or two yet. I'm also not sure how often I'm going to write these, but I'm hoping as time permits I get at least one per week if not quicker. Also, this was just plot selection: I'm going to return to this topic again when I talk about scripting which is (to me) a totally different thing.
Did I get it right? Did I get it wrong? Play Arc 9172: Secret Weapons and let me know in-game or in this thread just exactly what's right and what's wrong with my plot. Be as harsh as you like: I can take it. This incredibly transparent arc advertisement is brought to you by the letters S and W, and the numbers 9, 1, 7, and 2.
Arcana Author Journal 01: Intro and Plot
This is not a guide to writing good mission arcs. I'm certainly not the final arbiter on what a good mission arc even is. Its more of a journal explaining how I wrote mine, and how I approached the process of writing and publishing my mission arcs. I'm not 100% certain what the best way to organize my thoughts are, so in the absence of a solid organizing principle I'm going to roughly follow the order I actually did things, except when I decide it will make more sense to deviate from that. In other words, I'm basically going to do whatever I feel like doing, and let the chips fall where they may.
So, I'm starting at the beginning. And the beginning for me was: what should I write about.
There are lots of different angles people have taken and are taking in picking a topic. One of them is to pick an established canon character and write a story about him or her. City of Heroes/City of Villains has a wide range of colorful characters suitable for writing stories about. Some are practically written for MA missions: Dr. Aeon for example is quirky, flamboyant, and egomaniacal. He's a very easy launchpad into practically any story you want to tell. One of the early missions I ran during closed beta was an early version of The Butterfly Effect which is now a dev choice arc. This arc used Aeon in more than one way to clever effect (in my opinion).
(Note: my general rule here is going to be that unless I get permission to do so, I'm not mentioning anyone's arcs except my own in these articles, except for Dev Choice arcs which I feel I can safely mention for both good and bad since they have essentially become dev-publicized anyway).
Conversely, some players take the opposite approach. They see a CoX character that is heavily underused in their opinion and decide to flesh that character out more. Both of these options have pros and cons associated with them. If you decide to pick out an especially noteworthy character like Aeon to write about, you stand a pretty good chance of being just one of many people all thinking the same thing. There are only so many Nemesis plots that can be interesting before you practically have to be Hemmingway to make one noteworthy. Conversely, if you pick a relatively underutilized character, you might have a different problem: with little material to go on, it can be difficult to write that character in a way that will match the impressions of the other players. Unless the character is literally a tabula rasa, everyone may have their own impressions of the character you might collide with in your own writing.
Most people I think decide to write based on something that they feel strongly about, or have thought about for a long time. And no subject is nearer and dearer to players hearts than their own characters. This is probably the easiest thing for players to write about, and simultaneously the hardest thing for players to write about well.
I think people should write about what they want to write about. However, if I were to make a recommendation in this area, I would suggest that unless you have a lot of experience in creative writing and have been seriously critiqued on it you should consider writing something else first and saving you characters for the second or third arc you write. The pitfalls here are legion:
<ul type="square">[*]You'll want to say more about your characters than the story requires, or desires. Soon you'll have tons of exposition explaining how Cosmic Defenderman was sent to Earth by the Elder God of Tapioca to rid the world of the Circle of Thorns, why the Tsoo hate him so, how he helped overthrow the 5th Column, the cat he saved from a tree last week, and what he last ate for lunch.
[*]You'll also have the opposite problem: you'll presume players either know or care about critical elements about your characters that aren't remotely clear in the story. They'll be trying to save Atlas Park from a Malta bombing, and out of nowhere they'll be rescuing Cosmic Defenderman, who everyone knows is the most powerful defender of Atlas Park and arch enemy of the Malta. How will we know this? Because the Malta guarding him will say "you won't stop us this time Cosmic Defenderman!" They may also be bowing to him when they do.
[*]Probably most importantly, you'll have to figure out a way for any of this to be remotely interesting to the actual players playing the mission. If you don't make it important, it will seem trivial. But if you force the issue too strongly, you'll end up in Mary Sue territory with everyone trying too hard to explain to you just how important Cosmic Defenderman is.[/list]The problem is you'll care too much and that will color your judgement.
And yet, that's basically the problem I set forth for myself. I have an origin story in my head for my first alt: Lady Arcana. The basic outline of that story is that she was an experiment conducted during the Rikti War by a Crey weapons research program. Basically, she's a product of illegal research during the war. But I needed a way to use that basic story in a way that wasn't too self-important, where the player would be the focus of the story and not my own character.
I quickly decided that the one thing that *wouldn't* happen was a time travel mission to see my character's own origin. I'm not saying all such missions are bad: I'm saying I think its too difficult to make good enough. And time travel itself gets into very dangerous territory: it all happened before already: why tamper with it in the first place?
So I decided that rather than tell my character's origin directly, I would tell a story about someone trying to reproduce my character's origin in the present day. That way, no time travel, and better yet no problems with my character being too important to the story. The motivation I could give the players was stopping a crime from happening, rather than being focused on my character specifically.
In the end, I ended up with a story outline that used something near and dear to my heart - my main alt's origin story - and yet crafted a story that was not about her, but rather about a criminal conducting illegal research. I was able to connect that story to canon by connecting it to the Rikti War, but in a way that wasn't likely to collide with existing canon (who *knows* how many funky things happened during the Rikti War no one knows about yet). And I had a basic plot: a way to connect everything together so that the events were not disconnected. An investigation can lead to all sorts of places with a lot of latitude, so as long as the storyline was reasonably linear, it wouldn't be (as Venture puts it) "just a bunch of stuff that happens."
So, I had my story (this became the arc Secret Weapons). All I had to do now was craft it.
My next step was designing some of the custom critters I was going to use in this arc, so I'm going to discuss custom critters next. That topic might be long: I'm still not sure if that should be one article or two yet. I'm also not sure how often I'm going to write these, but I'm hoping as time permits I get at least one per week if not quicker. Also, this was just plot selection: I'm going to return to this topic again when I talk about scripting which is (to me) a totally different thing.
Did I get it right? Did I get it wrong? Play Arc 9172: Secret Weapons and let me know in-game or in this thread just exactly what's right and what's wrong with my plot. Be as harsh as you like: I can take it. This incredibly transparent arc advertisement is brought to you by the letters S and W, and the numbers 9, 1, 7, and 2.
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