MA cliches: What to avoid in your new Arc.
By
Aces_High,
Posted on: 2009-04-22 06:15 in Mission Architect
it isn't just Mary Sue-ism when using your character
it is making in-jokes that no-one gets.
it is assuming we know or care about them because you do.
As noted above - every custom character is your character. But to the player it is just another character. It is when the author thinks that there character is important, special, or known that the problems start.
It's telling us they're important rather than making them important. It's telling us they're cool rather than making them cool. It's telling us to like them, rather than making them likable.
And many things besides.
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Um, yes it is. Just because someone else can do something does not mean you can.
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No, it's not an answer.
Why is this a bad plot: The 5th Column have gotten their hands on the DNA of several heroes and cloned them. The originals cant act because the 5th are watching them and will just scurry off into their bolt holes if they move against them. So they need you to do an end run around and shut down the project for them.
No, not an exceptionally deep or original plot, but why is it a *BAD* plot just because I've used Great Beyond as the person who needs help? Why does the act replacing GB with "Random Hero X" make it oh-so-much better?
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Um, yes it is. Just because someone else can do something does not mean you can.
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No, it's not an answer.
[/ QUOTE ]Yes, it is. It's not the answer you like, but it's the answer for the question you asked.
'The devs did it' does not make it good writing.
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Um, yes it is. Just because someone else can do something does not mean you can.
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No, it's not an answer.
[/ QUOTE ]Yes, it is. It's not the answer you like, but it's the answer for the question you asked.
'The devs did it' does not make it good writing.
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Since you seem incapable of reading or basic comprehension skills, I'll point out the second half of the question again:
Why is this a bad plot: The 5th Column have gotten their hands on the DNA of several heroes and cloned them. The originals cant act because the 5th are watching them and will just scurry off into their bolt holes if they move against them. So they need you to do an end run around and shut down the project for them.
No, not an exceptionally deep or original plot, but why is it a *BAD* plot just because I've used Great Beyond as the person who needs help? Why does the act replacing GB with "Random Hero X" make it oh-so-much better?
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Um, yes it is. Just because someone else can do something does not mean you can.
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No, it's not an answer.
[/ QUOTE ]Yes, it is. It's not the answer you like, but it's the answer for the question you asked.
'The devs did it' does not make it good writing.
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Since you seem incapable of reading or basic comprehension skills,
[/ QUOTE ]Now, now, you know that's not true.
I answered a simple question in isolation that I feel needs reiteration, and still do. Do not use the writing of the devs as justification for your own.
Uhm... may I interject, here? Talen and GB, you guys are furiously arguing two points that are only tangentially related to what the other person is actually saying.
Talen, GB is saying that he disagrees that self-insertions automatically make a bad arc; bad writing that includes self-insertions make a bad arc.
GB... uhm, never mind, Talen's point is pretty clear.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head." Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates
MA Arcs: #12285, "Small Fears", #106553, "Trollbane", #12669, "How to Survive a Robot Uprising"
Personaly I never understood why you would want to use your hero as a contact. I think of BT as a hero that can do any task. Why would she ever need to ask someone else to do something for her when she could do it herself. Making your hero a contact just makes them less heroic in my eyes.
Virtue
--Blazing Tiger-- 50 Invulrn/Fire Tank
<<Virtues Tankiest Kitty>>
Try my Arcs: #4892 and #112548
@Blazing Tiger and @Aqua Fox
Is it me or is there a TON of nit picking on this thread?
As authors of our own MA stories our responsibility lies solely with the vision of the story, not the critics, not some imaginary guidelines that people feel the need to apply.
Critique is a useful tool but it should not be the measure of your story and you should not limit your creativity based on it. Learn from it but do not restrict yourself just because person X hates Lord Recluse.
The process should be
Create
Refine
Publish
Learn
Repeat
You learn from the Critique to help your abilities grow.
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Personaly I never understood why you would want to use your hero as a contact. I think of BT as a hero that can do any task. Why would she ever need to ask someone else to do something for her when she could do it herself. Making your hero a contact just makes them less heroic in my eyes.
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Because they are watching you and that makes you shy to act!
Now seriously, i have not tried the poster's act, I'd have to check it out first, but there is nothing inherently wrong with having your hero as the contact. Now, there IS something inherently lame with a hero contact handing you a task and doing nothing himself due to a lame excuse, may as well ask for help for you to go with him, not just hand you his laundry list.
That being told, I personally think you can achieve a Mary Sue in the contact itself. It does not have to go in and show how better than anyone she/he is in combat than you by making it an AV, a contact that takes the center spot and deducts the unimaginable or acts as if you were an idiot, making you feel as the only think you are contributing is muscle power, also can be considered a Mary Sue. And all Mary Sues are more offensive when they are a played character of the creator.
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Now, there IS something inherently lame with a hero contact handing you a task and doing nothing himself due to a lame excuse, may as well ask for help for you to go with him, not just hand you his laundry list.
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What if my hero is lazy. Maybe he's level 46 and he's used to sitting at the door while someone else does the hard work. 
More seriously, though, one of the things I might do if I were going to use my own hero as the contact is to have him be running missions parallel to your own, so that both of you are working towards the goal. Obviously, in such a setup, you can't have the contact hero be doing the glamor work while the player is doing the grunt work (unless, of course, that is the running joke of the arc, and the player knows it going in)
"While I go check the situation on the Mission Monitor Board, Super-Jim is going to go tag the Freakshow boss with this radio transmitter..."
Even the more serious scenario would not require the contact hero to be there in the final mission. In fact, in a lot of ways it's better if he isn't. The bad guy you've been after might be in one of two different places and he goes off and does mission B, while the player, who is supposed to be the protagonist of the story, ends up where the real mastermind of the plot is and takes care of him.
@Doctor Gemini
Arc #271637 - Welcome to M.A.G.I. - An alternative first story arc for magic origin heroes. At Hero Registration you heard the jokes about Azuria always losing things. When she loses the entire M.A.G.I. vault, you are chosen to find it.
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though, one of the things I might do if I were going to use my own hero as the contact is to have him be running missions parallel to your own
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The contact's inability to be in two places at once is a very good excuse, as long as you also explain why he cant just do one thing first and the other one later. Although not exactly original, it is nice to see objectives intercept at some point, so you can actually feel the other guy has been doing something.
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Even the more serious scenario would not require the contact hero to be there in the final mission. In fact, in a lot of ways it's better if he isn't.
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It would be actually nice to have him show up sometime in the arc, though, as a testament of he actually doing something.
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A cliche's very existence in a work would not be something to knock points down for, I think.
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Cliches are bad. Tropes are neutral. As cliches are basically badly-done tropes, this isn't particularly profound. Using tropes is perfectly fine (and, truth be told, expected).
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In the MA there's nothing inherently wrong with using one of your premade characters. Just ask yourself these questions:
1) Is my character there to color the story, or is he there to kick [censored], impress the player and generally make the player a passive participant?
2) Is the story about the player and how they saved the day, or is it just dragging the player on rails through a story about my character?
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Those are the important points, and apply even if the character you use isn't one on your login screen. Mary Sues don't necessarily have to be author self-insertions (although they usually are).
If there is one, and only one, question that needs to be asked, it's this: Who is the most important character in this arc? If the answer isn't "the player", you've got a Mary Sue problem.
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More seriously, though, one of the things I might do if I were going to use my own hero as the contact is to have him be running missions parallel to your own, so that both of you are working towards the goal. Obviously, in such a setup, you can't have the contact hero be doing the glamor work while the player is doing the grunt work (unless, of course, that is the running joke of the arc, and the player knows it going in)
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I love when people do this. It's a way to keep the contact involved in the story without making them the focus of the story. One of the most frustrating parts of running the Phalanx TFs is that the Phalanx never seem to be involved in any way. They aren't doing any work to help out, all they're doing is standing around picking their noses. The TFs could be given by any of the other contacts and it would not change the story significantly at all.
I'd rather see the contact doing behind the scenes work (talking with the victims, working with the police, hiring the transportation, etc) than have them appear in the missions. There can be good reason for it (using them as an ally to help against a difficult foe, if it works in the story), but it usually ends up feeling forced and annoying and takes away from my place in the spotlight.
We'll always have Paragon.
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So..do we have a consolidated list yet? o.o If we do maybe they should post it in the help thread so people know what to use and not to use, I think that could save alot of trouble and anger from new ma arc makers...
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There should never be a consolidated list. Ever. No one should be telling people what they can or can't use in their arcs.
We can direct them away from cliches that will hinder their writing, but if they want to use them, more power to them. Maybe they'll pull it off and impress us all.
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Now, I originally thought that putting your own characters into a story was a decent idea until Venture came and told me otherwise.
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*twitch* *twitch twitch*
What's with the hero worship? Venture's got a decent grasp of proper writing structure, but he's nowhere near the leading authority. He's wrong about as often as he's right.
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It didn't matter how I used them, be it an origin story, a moment in the story where you bump into them and they help you, they are OOC put in as a helper against a tough enemy group or av, it's not appropriate.
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That is so untrue it's astounding. It passes the Incorrectness Event Horizon and warps its way back around to being right. And that crosses the line again back to being wrong.
It's only inappropriate if your characters are explicitly designed to be more important than the player character. If the player is tagging along for the ride while your character steals the spotlight, then, and only then, you're doing it wrong.
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It's called mary sue, and idiot ball, if I recall.
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*twitch*
Mary Sue
Throwing the Idiot Ball
They aren't directly related at all. The only way I can see them being correlated is if the writer creates a Mary Sue by throwing the player the Idiot Ball. That is, the writer shows that their character is awesome and smart by declaring the player to be an idiot.
Please. Please, please, please. Anyone who plans on writing a new arc. Read. Comprehend. If you've got questions, ask us ('us' being those of us on the forums who use these terms often). We want you to write a good arc. We're happy to help you in the pursuit of such.
And for the love of [insert deity here], stop worshiping Venture.
We'll always have Paragon.
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We can direct them away from cliches that will hinder their writing, but if they want to use them, more power to them. Maybe they'll pull it off and impress us all.
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Agreed. As long as we're bringing in TVTropes, two ways to use a cliche to great effect:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreSavvy
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...SubvertedTrope
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Talen, GB is saying that he disagrees that self-insertions automatically make a bad arc; bad writing that includes self-insertions make a bad arc.
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Exactly - bad writing is bad writing, and the method of delivery is only the window dressing. If you hit the randomize button on the character generator and find a name with the Superhero Name Generator, it doesn't inherently make a mission any better or worse than if I use a pre-established character if the rest of the mission is pure bollocks.
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Even the more serious scenario would not require the contact hero to be there in the final mission. In fact, in a lot of ways it's better if he isn't.
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It would be actually nice to have him show up sometime in the arc, though, as a testament of he actually doing something.
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I think my natural dislike for allies in MA makes me think it's better that he went off to the wrong mission, but that's just me.
@Doctor Gemini
Arc #271637 - Welcome to M.A.G.I. - An alternative first story arc for magic origin heroes. At Hero Registration you heard the jokes about Azuria always losing things. When she loses the entire M.A.G.I. vault, you are chosen to find it.
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though, one of the things I might do if I were going to use my own hero as the contact is to have him be running missions parallel to your own
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The contact's inability to be in two places at once is a very good excuse, as long as you also explain why he cant just do one thing first and the other one later. Although not exactly original, it is nice to see objectives intercept at some point, so you can actually feel the other guy has been doing something.
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That's what I did for the story in "The Portal Bandits". The first mission has the contact bringing you in to lead a strike team coming in from one side of the base while he comes from the other. You don't see him as he gets delayed and you finish the main task before he can get there.
Later on events are happening simultaneously so you are each doing different missions, and it's only in the final one that you meet up in the same place and the contact becomes an ally for the big showdown with the villains.
In fact it is implied during the arc that you're getting more of the action than him most of the time. At another point you go off to raid two safehouses at once so as to interrogate both villains. Guess who gets the empty safehouse and who ends up running into both villains at the same place?
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You know I kinda brought up that point in a thread I made, it seems that the only thing ok to make is a flippin radio mission! ><
-C.A.
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Also overused: Those gosh darn flippin' radio missions! :P
(I too, use a whiteboard for a contact to represent $name planning a bank robbery instead of the Cannon solution of "Your contact gives you permission to rob a bank and give them all the money." One would have to be on some bad Arachnos drugs to think this means the board is talking to you, thoughÂ…)
It's a pity we can't say excellently written stories are overused yet.. 
Still hate the visit Winscott mission- make it dropable, have it give actual exp or remove it altogether. PS- Down knows who you are.
J/ Wilde/ / AIL - Celebrating five years!
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I think my natural dislike for allies in MA makes me think it's better that he went off to the wrong mission, but that's just me
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I'm starting to feel this way about allies. When I started writing my arc I thought they were the bomb, but they are hard to drag around long missions, especially if there are multiple.
Although my arc uses an ally, it's an optional side spawn, mainly to help soloers deal with the end boss that can mez. As such I wrote that part as a tangent, minimal and self contained, but related to the story at large. I set them to Boss level so they can help you fight but can't tank the whole mission for you or anything like that. Sometimes it's hard to get a teammate for an arc run, although the demise of AE farming should improve that situation, an in-mission ally is a neat way to ensure there's one "auto-teammate" ready to help someone who just can't seem to solo the boss.
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We can direct them away from cliches that will hinder their writing, but if they want to use them, more power to them. Maybe they'll pull it off and impress us all.
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Agreed. As long as we're bringing in TVTropes, two ways to use a cliche to great effect:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreSavvy
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...SubvertedTrope
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Oh please, please stop linking to this TV Tropes website. I'd never heard of it.
How in the heck will I ever finish a publishable arc if I'm spending all my time reading that awesome site! I'm already booked here to Thursday following the Nerf Wars Winery and Cheese Festival highlights. Let alone when am I going to actually play???
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We can direct them away from cliches that will hinder their writing, but if they want to use them, more power to them. Maybe they'll pull it off and impress us all.
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Agreed. As long as we're bringing in TVTropes, two ways to use a cliche to great effect:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreSavvy
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...SubvertedTrope
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Oh please, please stop linking to this TV Tropes website. I'd never heard of it.
How in the heck will I ever finish a publishable arc if I'm spending all my time reading that awesome site! I'm already booked here to Thursday following the Nerf Wars Winery and Cheese Festival highlights. Let alone when am I going to actually play???
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Well, you know, there's a TV Tropes article about that...
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So..do we have a consolidated list yet? o.o If we do maybe they should post it in the help thread so people know what to use and not to use, I think that could save alot of trouble and anger from new ma arc makers...
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There should never be a consolidated list. Ever. No one should be telling people what they can or can't use in their arcs.
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There's a great quote in How Not To Write A Novel: "We do not propose any rules; we offer observations. 'No right on red' is a rule. 'Driving at high speed toward a brick wall usually ends badly' is an observation."
Character index
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Personaly I never understood why you would want to use your hero as a contact. I think of BT as a hero that can do any task. Why would she ever need to ask someone else to do something for her when she could do it herself. Making your hero a contact just makes them less heroic in my eyes.
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One of my characters, Miss Megajoule (see avatar) has spent the last few years helping the Resistance against Nemesis Rex in an alternate timeline. Note that I say "helping", not "leading." She's a very visible and inspirational symbol, but there's only so much that one super-powered being can do against the Emperor of the Americas and his entire army. That's why she's been trying to get whatever additional help from this, her home dimension, that she can - and in my arc "Blood, Sweat, Toil and Tears", that includes your character.
(And even then, while two - or up to eight - heroes can strike a powerful blow for freedom, it's still a struggle that must be mostly fought and eventually won by the ordinary, extraordinary people of that Earth.)
My characters at Virtueverse
Faces of the City
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He's not affiliated with me. That's a real karmic exchange, considering my avatar....
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*wipes diet coke off the keyboard*
Test drove the arc again, no Mary Sues. Just Biz's bitty bot guy.
I hope there isn't a cliche about using a known contact as a hostage...
*quietly shoves Tina Macintyre behind her*