Plots and Plans

Not to be confused with Pots and Pans.

Here's something interesting that has been bugging me for a while now - we all like to talk about how villains aren't villainous enough but, barring killing civilians, no-one can really agree as to what they should be able to do. Personally, I want to leave off the GTA nonsense and focus more on the plots villains weave, either for greatness or for destruction, and I'd like talk about what we could conceivably want to let them do so that they could feel more SUPERvillainous.

But that's only half of it. Here's something even more interesting - shouldn't we really give heroes something to do that would make them feel more like heroes and less like call girls? I mean, yeah, it's cool they always do the right thing and answer the call whenever it may arrive, but give 'em some credit! Some of these guys actually have functional brains with which to make decisions, maybe even take initiative. But since they can't act unless ASKED to act, they kind of don't get to do much on their own. So why can't we give them the ability to make plans of some sort, even if they're something as simple as plans how to be more heroic?

Enter plots and plans. This isn't a suggestion, since I don't actually have a good enough idea to suggest in enacting this addition, since "plots and plans" is about as generic and non-committal as it comes. Instead, this is more of a question for you, guys. If you wanted to make your heroes and villains more proactive, which path would you take? What would you add to the game to make it so?

Now, I'll go off precedent. There was a thread in suggestions recently that talked about villains wrestling control of, say, an island and building their own evil lair on it a few steps at a time as they went up through the levels. I can't find the thread right now, and I don't want to get into the specifics of in-game implementation, so let me just sign off on that and call it a good idea. It is.

But what else can we do? What about heroes? Can't they have something in that vein? While super heroes can and do have bases, they're usually legal, or at least aren't taken by force from someone else. I suppose we could have heroes acquire their own island base of operations by kicking some hapless villain out of his lair, but that's a bit... Iffy. Let's have them build something. But what? Maybe have an instanced neighbourhood that's overrun with crime that the hero can occasionally go into and help rid of street thugs, rid of corruption and help rebuild? Say, transforming something that's a cross between Boomtown and Kings Row into a little slice of Atlas Park with no crime and happy living? That'd certainly be satisfying, at the very least, and mark a sort of personal achievement that's difficult to attain in the game as it is. That way, each of us can be the proud and respected hero of our own small corner of the world.

Moving away from real estate, let's look at something I and others have mentioned a lot over the years - self-serving missions for villains. Now, one of the BIGGEST complaints I've seen levelled at CoV is against Arachnos and how the storyline writes us as their fanboys. Almost the whole time, all we do is get ordered to go do this and that, and with how the contacts system is set up, there really is no good way around it. Or is there? Read the briefings and note that most of the "railroading" comes not from the contacts system, but from the actual writing. All of the missions present us as yes-men for our contacts, and very few (like putting one over on Tavish Bell) play with it at all. Oh, sure, we have paper and mayhem missions, but those are really for the villain with very little perspective and imagination.

So why not have a series of HELPER contacts, or even a few contact-less arcs that are written as though they originate from your villain, himself? They could even come in a few basic patterns where you pick, say, the item you want to steal (the crystal ball, the blueprint of the space station, the Pink Panther diamond, etc.) and have an arc about preparing for that. Or why steal? Why not plan to, say, poison the water supply for all of Mercy Island. Not that anyone could tell, but it's still a noble effort. Just something where your contact doesn't say "Go do this and I'll pay you." but rather "Here, I have the information you're paying me to gather for you. Do with it what you like."

I sort of went that way with my villain arc in the Architec, where everything is based on what looks like it makes sense, things you might as well do and so on and so forth without a contact actually telling you to do anything. It's harder to write, certainly, but the opportunity is there if you look for it. I could talk more about that approach if anyone's interested.

Heroes ought to have something like that, themselves. Their scanner missions, though appropriate for the kind of missions one would get off a police radio, are REALLY reactive. "Oh, no! Something's happening! Really Cool Dude to the rescue!" Why do we always have wait for crime to happen before we stop it? Why can't I look around, realise there's nothing going on and, instead of sitting on my hands waiting for something to happen, decide "Hey, now's a good time to go follow up on that lead I had!"

There is a LOT of leeway to work without an ACTUAL contact if you think about it, and simple things like information kiosks, dead drop mailboxes or even cell phones can provide that give the impression that we're giving rise to events while still having a traditional contact stand-in giving us traditional missions. To go along with the example, you decide you want to follow up on a lead, so you head to a police computer and do so, getting information on it as a briefing, with your action and decision implied by your taking the mission. If the briefing says "Hey, it looks like this warehouse might be a front for the Family. It might be a good idea to check it out!" and you click "Check out warehouse." you have already implied that, yes, it every much IS a good idea to check it out. When you then find more clues from the guy in charge of the warehouse and come back to the police computer to verify, you realise you've stumbled onto something big and follow the bread crumbs from there.

This is about where my imagination (or rather, where my preparation) ends. I can't really think of any other ways to make us feel more proactive at the moment, but I'm hardly the smartest guy around here, and I'm sure guys would have better ideas than mine. So what do you think? How can we go about doing that?

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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.

I've always wanted to be able to craft my own missions. No, not the MA. This would be more like getting a rumor in the form of a recipe and then I would have to find clues in the form of salvage. Once I've gathered all the clues I needed I would confirm the rumor in the supergroup computer, or at the library. Once confirmed I would now have a new mission and if I complete the mission I get a special reward which was mentioned in the recipe. A unique enhancement or a temporary power or a special inspiration or whatever. Something that would make the gathering of rumors and clues worthwhile, at least.

Example: You fight Hellions and hear a rumor about a ritual that is about to happen. The Hellions are going to sacrifice their girlfriends to an evil entity mentioned in an old tome they found. You gather clues by fighting more Hellions: one drops a Where, one drops a When and one drops a Why. You go back to base and feed the computer with your findings, and out comes a mission. You complete the mission and get a Tome inspiration which grants 1 hour of double xp earning.

Ideally the clues should affect the mission so that a Where clue should determine the map type, a When clue could cause the mission to be timed and a Why clue would determine whether it's a defeat-all, defeat the boss, click a glowie, escort a hostage or something else.

Some of the folks from the Markets portion of the forum are looking for more inf sinks. Crafting an arc or paying a contact to gather info for you are two good ways to get inf out of the game.

Also, I like both ideas a lot.

Could always set it up like a choose your own adventure novel... Contact A would give you a brief run down of what is going on and you would have two (or more) choices on what to do about it... You chose to do X and that eventually leads you to another spot where you have to make a choice, and so on and so on. Ideally there would be half a dozen (or more) possible endings to that particular story arc.

Actually, ideally, this would be implemented with GR and depending on what choices you took you could start going down a heroic or villianous route...

And, for all I know, this is a part of the GR plan... I have studiously been avoiding all I can about it - I like suprises and I'm new enough here that I still have plenty of current content to grab my attention.

Well, choose your own adventure style gameplay is fun, and it will most likely be in Going Rogue (it ought to), but I had something more proactive in mind. In choose your own adventure, you make your own choices, but you're still presented with an event to choose how to react to. I was sort of more looking at missions that don't come from somewhere else and are then handed to you, but rather missions you come up with to do on your own.

Finding a clue that leads to a bigger story is an acceptable "reaction" as far as I'm concerned, because you were still out there actively doing things when it landed. Having to visit a contact and ASK for an assignment, however, crosses over into reactionary territory, even if all the contact does is tell you what's happening. Ideally, I wish we could have some subsystem that made it at least SEEM like out characters are coming up with their own ideas, not just reacting to circumstances.

Again, paper and scanner missions are a step in the right direction, as they marginalise the contact giving them, but they're still reactionary. "Hey, this happened! You could go interfere with it if you want!" That's as opposed to "You know, today I want to build a death ray. Where are my blueprints? Igor! Get my spanner!"

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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.

These sound like great ideas. The having my own paradise haven/island of doom where people have to worship me, build statues in my honor and I can relax and think about future projects. Sounds like fun.

I also love the discover your own clue and build from the clues your own adventure idea. Problem is how do you avoid outgrowing them? For example if you beat up a hellion and he tells you what his boss is planning an dlater on you hear from a malta what for artifact they want to steal, then it doesn't make much sense that these two clues belong to each other. Only solution I see to that is talking to other heroes/villains and share the clues so you can complete your recipe, In other words, we need another wentworth blackmarket thing for that.

I think the idea of the lead/clues approach has real merit.

A lot of players may ignore them, but for those that like puzzles or have played the normal approach to death so far, this could be a neat carrot to get out there and beat the streets.

I agree the mission computer would be perfect for this, however, that leads to the possible opposition:

• What if my base doesn't have a mission computer? (off the cuff response - abandoned labs in the Isles could have one, or the university could have a dedicated station)
• If the initial lead drops randomly, then I'll miss an opportunity. (again off the cuff, but if any permanent reward was temporary or tradable you wouldn't be 'denied' anything. Plus if there were a couple of stories per villain group then the opportunities could devleop them throughout your career, and it sounds like a nice way to further promote altitis to find that content you 'missed'.)

When I talked about "recipes as clues," I meant to use the already existing mechanic of finding a recipe and then looking for its salvage, only its salvage would drop from specific missions you go to to find clues, rather than off random drops. You get a recipe, and with it you get a few extra missions you can go to to look for clues to it. I didn't envisions needing to randomly run across clues for the lead, or to have to put them together yourself, as that's very much out of the scope of what the game seems to have (not that I'd be opposed to it) and instead imagined just having a recipe drop on you, and having three extra missions open up as soon as it happens. Each mission would give you a "salvage-clue" at the end that you can then use to put the "recipe-lead" together and get one more mission where you finish the thing.

As far as having proactive missions in the mission computer, I wouldn't be against that at all, as long as there's a terminal somewhere in the city that I can use to access them, too. Most of my characters are either without a SG or in SGs with cosmetics-only bases, so I don't actually have access to a mission computer. I'm not even sure what it looks like. But as long as there's a console in each PD, I don't see why not. This earns points for two reasons. For one, YOU have to go seek it out, it doesn't just drop on you, and for another, the mission computer would be just information, not ready-made tasks. You decide you want to do something, then go look up info on if over the PD's crimes database, and from there you formulate a plan.

At the end of the day, this is a question of presentation as much as it is of technology. We've already seen the possibility to run without a contact at all done very well in the Architect, and we've seen the possibility to go with a helper (e.i. someone who helps you, not someone you have to help) in place of a regular contact, and those work reasonably well. They're just ALL player-made.

Let me give you the one example I know of where developer-made content has this - Tavish Bell. During the course of one of his arcs, you begin to notice Crey is up to something. When he sends you on a boring time-waste of a mission, you lie that you're going to go, but instead break into the Crey facility you first went to rescue and make off with their secret project, only for Tavish to say he's sorry your mission was unsuccessful (you don't even go) and to say someone broke into their lab, but they couldn't call you to help save it. Oh, the irony...

But that mission has the right idea. You have a contact, he's trying to give you missions, but the ACTUAL mission is something completely different, written as your character deciding to do it on his own. Good idea, good writing, nicely played. Now we just need more missions like it

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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.

Yes yes yes plz!!!! This would be especially good if we could get the lead/clues at lower levels too (I'm incredibly bored with the low level content).

An interesting thought occurred to me as I was reading this thread: Could the missions be chained? For example, you get your lead and your clues, you get the I-put-it-together-so-I'll-do-this-to-finish-it mission, and the mission gives you another lead to continue the story (or to start another, related story).

To use an example already given, after you defeat the Skulls' leader and stop the ritual, you examine the book he was using and discover that it looks like a book of Circle of Thorns incantations, rather than ones the Skulls would use. You then have to find more clues about why the Skulls have this book in the first place, what the Circle of Thorns were planning to do once the death god was summoned, and the Circle's next move now that you've stopped the Skulls.

In this case, it turns out that the Circle realized that the incantations were dangerous, but they wanted the death god to be summoned so that they could control it. They realized that if they let the Skulls summon the death god with Circle incantations, it would be under Circle control rather than Skulls control, and they could use it to smite their enemies and gain immortality. Now that the Skulls have been stopped, the Circle has made a deal with another gang who will summon the death god using a copy of the incantation they gave the Skulls earlier in exchange for a large financial reward.

In order to make sure that everything works out, some of the Circle's mages will be present to oversee the ritual and guard against intrusion. Your task is to stop the ritual and defeat the Circle of Thorns mages who are present. Sounds like the last one, right? Well, this time one of the mages reveals that as long as the master copy of the incantation is intact, the Circle will keep trying to summon the death god. This would serve as another lead/clues set up, which would result in a mission where you go destroy the master copy.



All in all, I think that the idea of contact-less missions is one of the best that the player base has ever come up with, and it would definitely make this game more interesting, especially if it ended up being an alternate to other game content, they way MA was supposed to be, only this time you don't have to move into a certain building to do it. You could spend your time doing contact missions, or lead/clues missions, or some of both. Either way, I hope this is already in the works with Going Rogue, since it definitely should be. If not, I could see "Plots and Plans" being the title and content of a future Issue (hopefully the next one). This is just too good an idea to pass up.

Someone send this to a Dev right away!