Praetoria is NOT "goatee" Paragon

No, it's a fair point. When I said "superhero comics", I was talking largely about the Big Two's comics of, oh say the late Silver Age, because that's what I think of when I think "superhero comics" - because that was when I was in what the marketing people would call the prime target demo.

That said, the City of Heroes universe has always been pretty apparently reflective of that same era. CoH's world design, its... its flavor owes a lot to the Mighty Marvel era and its pre-Crisis counterpart over at DC. (I suspect most, if not all, of the original designers were also of about that same age, comics-fan-wise.) So what you just said - "it wasn't there before, so it feels odd to have it now" - holds just as true for the CoH universe, albeit on a more compressed "Internet time" scale. It just feels wrong to start screwing around with Deep Musings on the Nature of Right and Wrong after five years of two-fisted, punch-the-Nazis-in-their-face Silver Age-style action.

Whoa, jeez, you can take your bowie knife out of my forehead now. I didn't think I had to preface every remark I made with a disclaimer that everything I'm saying is my opinion, not a proof of Fermat's last theorem.

While I agree that the superhero genre requires a bit of moral clarity, there were a lot of shades of grey even in the Silver Age.

Spider-Man is a Silver Age character, and one of the big attractions of the character was that he often felt inadequate and lonely, and he didn't always feel that he did the right thing or that doing the right thing was even in his nature. What makes the character heroic is his response to the screwed up shades-of-grey world he is written into -- he makes a conscious decision to act like the sort of person he wants to be despite his doubts.

The end result is that Spider-Man would *act* with moral clarity, but there were "bad guys" he couldn't touch, bad things happened to good people, good things happened to bad people, and much of the character's strength came as a response to doubt rather than as a result of an absence of doubt.

I guess what I'm saying is that there is room for a superhero's world to have a bit of moral ambiguity as long as the hero personally doesn't, and as long as the "writer" assumes that there actually is an attainable "good" for heros to aspire to despite the apparent uncertainty.

This post sums up everything that is, and always has been, wrong with moral choices in video games. Any time a video game gives you a choice between being good or being evil, it's actually a choice between being good and being a jerkass. The game assumes you're following the "good" storyline, so evil can't be anything more than just a momentary, meaningless deviation. I think Fallout 3 handles it the best. If you're a dick and you murder 3Dog, the game gives you a middle finger and tells you to essentially figure it out yourself, then. Not that that changes anything, since Rivet City is a frikkin' LANDMARK. I would have SO loved it if dear old dad was hole up in a cave somewhere you'd NEVER find unless someone told you, and that you'd be SOL if you kill the only person who could know, but that's just me.

This is the big problem with City of Villains, too. It follows a sort of Dungeon Keeper "You are evil. Go wild!" mentality that still presents being evil as being anything between a mercenary and a jerkass. Smart, creative, charismatic villainy doesn't exist. You're a murderer, a monster, an opportunist with no larger goal than to die another day and maybe some day serve Arachnos. That's about as uninspired as it gets. You can make a hero who just does the right thing all the time and have a convincing plot, but you CANNOT make a villain who does the wrong thing every time and end up with anything other than goody silliness.

In a lot of these games, evil isn't evil at all. It's the opposite of good exactly. Which is often very, very stupid.

Personally, I see Praetoria as the "right" kind of evil. Believable, possibly justifiable, subtle yet very real. It's not just a bunch of people Mu-ha-ha-ing about how evil they are, it's an almost real person really trying to make something decent out of his world. I want to see the Loyalists vs. Resistance confrontation reflect that (and off the forums, but that's besides the point). Both factions can be drawn as completely justifiable, with one trying to fight for freedom from oppression while the other trying to fight for the security, safety and comfort of life under Tyrant. And I hope good and evil is drawn as a little more self-driven and a little less "go there and do that."

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Actually I thought the opposite, I was incredibly disappointed with now hacknied Fallouts approach is to Good and Evil. It's incredibly unrealistic. I mean look at the first big Good/Evil decision you make in Megaton. It's completely OTT and rather silly. The only saving grace for it was the consequences for making the "good" choice on others.

Mass Effect does it well, you're not real, baby-eating, evil as a renegade, you're more ruthless and willing to make sacrifices to achieve your goals.

Too many games companies are worried about 'Oh, we're going to get sued if we show evil as an option, let's make it really carp!'. At least thats how it comes across to me.

I'm trying to think of an example where it's been done well.
But an example of the sort of 'Grey Evil' if you will.

Ceasar is pretty much a smart Troll. He's big, he's built like a brick ****house and he's smart to boot. Now, he could just go 'Yeah, lets be evil'. But he's more of a business man. He grew up in Eastgate, skint broke. He wants to live out his days in comfort and somewhat decadant luxury. So he's going to make a profit.
He's good with people. The Customer deserves the best. He likes talking to people, learning things and having discussions, simply because he can. Yes, he occasionally has to order someone roughed up, and sometimes does it himself, again because he can.

Hardly 'Baby-eating' evil. Theres a lot of characters that aren't ebil-jeebil screaming bonkers Evil.
Dunno how it could be handled though. We've got some good writers at PS, so we just have to trust in them, really.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I just meant if you choose to kill 3Dog. If you want to be an *** and just kill a person for no reason, the game gives you a middle finger and tells you to go find your own clues if you're going to be like that. Which is actually good way of handling it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

See, that's what I'm talking about. You don't have to be a Saturday morning cartoon villain who wants to take over the world or a complete monster who wants to eat dead babies or something to be evil. To me, all of the above are evil, minus the class. My counterpoint to your businessman is my fairly simple "overlord" style villain.

Ezikiel is not malicious, he doesn't specifically go out of his way to hurt people for the evulz or anything like that. He has an very simple objective - take control of the world away from those who are weak and don't have enough imagination to make use of that control, and pull the reigns himself, creating a world based on order and discipline where nothing bad every happens to you as long as you toe the line. If I were generous with his character, I could even make him redeemable, and somewhat grey. I went completely the other way.

I made Ezikiel a complete villain not because he is malicious, but because he is completely and utterly ruthless. Murder, kidnapping, torture, blackmail, manipulation, even self destruction - nothing is below him. He is a man who crawled out of nothing, who suffered crushing indignity for years and years and who lost everything he worked for many times over. He is a man who would stop at nothing to achieve his goal, and so everything he touches, every life he affects, he leaves completely and entirely putrid. Think of a man who's only goal in life is to hollow others out and manipulate him to his ends with no remorse ever given.

Evil by choice is what I had in mind for him. Of course, style with him comes from exactly the same source, this unashamed audacity, but that's a long subject that's besides the point. The point, in this case, is that evil doesn't have to be OBVIOUS in order for it to be complete. If anything, the more obvious it is, the less interesting it becomes. Recluse's empire of evil is highly uninteresting because his whole nation is one giant dump and there's so much rampant evil that it's desensitising. You don't have to make evil a point in order for it to be very, very evil. In fact, the kind of sinister evil that works just below the surface is simultaneously a lot more scary and a lot more dangerous.

All that said, I still think we need more proactive content in Going Rogue. And by "proactive," I don't mean more newspaper missions. They're just as reactive as regular content. "Here's an opportunity, go take it." I mean content that causes us to manufacture our own opportunities, to go out and set the plot in motion, not just stumble into a plot that's already rolling.

I'm a rogue working for the Loyalists. Nothing is going on, so I'll see if I can't start up a new investigation into uncovering some Rebels. I'm a vigilante working with the Rebels. Nothing is going on, so I'll see if I can't find some dirty secret about Tyrant to maybe sway some Loyalists over. Have the storyline originate with me. It'd help some with heroics, and it'd help a LOT with villainy.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Word.

BTW, "Justice League: The Nail" and "Another Nail" are two of my favorite Elseworlds. Just excellent, excellent stories.

Oh thanks to the OP of this thread. You can count me among those who had a more "Crime Syndicate" mindset for Pratoria to The Phalanx's "Justice League". It's nice to see it's more nuanced than that...

...but still evil. (dun-dun-DUN!)

Except, what is the definition of normal? People of different groups could have a very different idea of what is normal.

I think Torment has possible the best options in general. You can be psychotic (in fact, you were!) you can be incredibly, freakishly ruthless (one scene in particular still makes me break into tears when it comes up, there are *no* words for "longing") , or a paragon of virtue. or something in-between. (in fact, you were all of these things, at different points)

This reminds me of one of those Iraq war documentaries, where a bunch of American soldiers were retelling a particular firefight. One of them explained how they ducked into a building to take cover and walked into a family in the middle of a meal, which showed them just how much violence had become a part of people's lives. Here they are, a whole platoon of Americans having a huge firefight with insurgents, with rockets, grenades and masses of machinegun fire, and the common people are just staying inside and trying to have dinner. While the American soldier is trying to get the people to leave because it's not safe here, they're trying to offer them to sit down and have dinner with them.

So, yeah, "normal" is relative.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

You think Good and Evil are concrete, but that's not true. Good and Evil are relative to the society and environment of the individuals.
What it's evil in one society, it can be good in other one.

You've never encountered evil if you believe that.

Just because someone wants to kill you or hates your way of life, doesn't mean they are evil -- you can still reconcile that if you can avoid killing each other. But when you meet a guy who skins kids alive, or who ***** a guy through a colostomy scar and gave him herpes, there is no society where that behavior is okay.

In the western world we just don't get much face-time with real evil because those people are likely to be institutionalized pretty early on. When you go to parts of the world where someone can get away with skinning little kids or forcing their parents to eat them, the society there doesn't "approve" of that behavior in any way, it's just that no one is able to stop it.

I'm not so certain of a concrete "good", but I've met enough demons to believe in evil.

Of course not. They're Crey's.
(It didn't end well when that got out, either.)

Exactly. A famous philosopher (Kant? someone law professors like to talk about) posed the following scenario: A despot hands you a pistol and tells you to shoot the innocent political prisoner standing in front of you. If you don't do it, the despot will shoot you instead, then shoot the prisoner himself. The philosopher, whoever it was, asserted that the only moral option was to allow the despot to shoot you, since you'd be actively wronging the prisoner by shooting him. I've met any number of people in real life and many more in fiction who'd proudly tell the despot to kill them.

I believe those people are wrong. In this scenario, an activist becomes a martyr to self-determination and morality.

A hero shoots the despot instead.

I was going to say...that sounds like the logical thing to do. Even if his bodyguards shot you after that, theres a major flaw in giving you a weapon.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Good point about the genre, and something I hadn't really considered.

Again, speaking only for me, I think my problem is that I'm just not comfortable with settings where the premise is "fight the power, man!" These settings quickly turn into, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem," and I consider that a doctrine as draconian as anything invented by a fictional dictator. Some people, I would argue, are neither solution nor problem. For example, all the extras. I can't accept the notion that all the ordinary, non-super people of Praetorian earth are either stupid or bad just because they haven't risen up against Tyrant, and that's the slippery slope down which a bright Resistance-good/Loyalist-bad divide leads.

***

On a somewhat different matter, will the presence of a pseudo-good Statesman and his flunkies finally put to rest the continual claims of "Longbow is evil incarnate and [original] Statesman is a villain?" I mean, I don't particularly like the character, given that he's rarely been portrayed as having many likeable qualities, but he's not evil.

My theory is that he became a despot because he wasn't sufficiently knowledgeable to become a ditch digger.

<snerk>

Funny...but in the process you bent my head and it hurts. A pox on you.

Ow.

It should be noted that nothing in the example says the dictator has to be *there* when he hands you the weapon. He's not neccessarily that stupidl.