At the end of the day, the "heroic" villains still have citizens running away from them in terror.
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Do they still run in the Rogue Isles? Because Mayhems are totally skippable. I thought most Isles citizens just kind of keep their head down and keep on walking.
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Originally Posted by Scythus
At the end of the day, the "heroic" villains still have citizens running away from them in terror.
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Which totally fits the oppressed population feel. They don't go out and thank the hero for saving them because it'll get them in trouble with some group that works against the hero.|
Originally Posted by ThePill
Do they still run in the Rogue Isles? Because Mayhems are totally skippable. I thought most Isles citizens just kind of keep their head down and keep on walking.
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Even in Mayhem Missions (which are -hard- to justify, though I've found a few ways) it's easy to explain the civvies running in terror! Do YOU want to stand there while two super-powered individual lob explosives at each other? Does it -really- make it any safer when one of the people throwing explosives is a Cop? Note you can sub in firing a gun, energy blasting, or grenades for "Lobbing Explosives" and it still works.
How do I justify Mayhems? I rewrite the mayhem as assaulting a mob-bank, basically. Recovering a few hundred thousands of dollars stolen from innocent civilians and then returning it to the oppressed businesses.
-Rachel-
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They run in the Midnighter Club and Cimerora.
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Originally Posted by ThePill
Do they still run in the Rogue Isles? Because Mayhems are totally skippable. I thought most Isles citizens just kind of keep their head down and keep on walking.
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Heros Villaisn it all realtive. whiole I have no Villian in Paragon [I do have some reformers. SS officer, Viking, etc.] I do have some heroes, or at least some very gray people. I spoken about Daimyo Shi and Shi no Oni but also have Marcus Calsis, a roman saved by Shi no Oni in and undocumented misadventure. He runs around doing Tasks for Shi No Oni, some are not very heroic and he doesn't like them but he owes his life to Shi no Oni.
Lady Bloodclaw is a pro-mutant activist she has links to Arachnos because of their "fairer" in her mind view of mutants. She much rather simply be a talker but well there a large amount of fear mongrling outside Paragon in regards to Mutants and in her native UK [where weapons are even less common].
Doom/Batman in 2012
The Resistance has boobs too, and better hair!
The Resistance has boobs too, and better hair!
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Why go against the grain? I think the problem we have in communicating here is that there are two fundamentally different paradigms for how to view a game like this. Camp A will feel that a game is a story being told by a third person storyteller, that everyone should play by the rules and go along with that.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I'm not trying to criticise other people's characters, even if I don't happen to agree with the general idea behind some. I'm just more curious why people consistently go against the grain of the game, as while there aren't any stated rules, the design behind the systems isn't hard to see. If you have your reasons, then that's just fine. I have no problem with that. I wouldn't quite run things the same as you do, but then I don't pay your subscription
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Camp B sees the game as a backdrop, ATs and powersets and such merely colors in their paintbox, and their fun is to make up their own story.
I know which camp I'm in personally. Without an actual live game master, you can't have anything even remotely approaching the interactivity of a true tabletop RPG session. As such, I feel we are each our own game master in our own solo campaigns. Other people obviously feel the devs are the game masters and we should follow their campaign. But honestly, I'd have put the game down years ago if that were all there were to do with it.
Interesting topic. I'm a roleplayer, and I play mostly redside because I find the ATs more interesting and fun, and I am generally more interested in playing the antagonist. I did try to run a redside hero once.
I had a redside hero of sorts around CoV's launch. She was an ex-Longbow agent, captured by Arachnos and used as a human test subject for experiments in cybernetics. She wasn't expected to survive, but survive she did, and after her escape, she decided to stay in the Isles and work with Longbow there. She saw it as the front lines of the little war between Longbow and Arachnos, and that's where she wanted to be. She got going with a small group of likeminded people, and for a while, we had a great time with the concept.
But it fell apart for a couple of reasons.
The first was the atmosphere. As has already been mentioned in this thread, the CoV game is written for a very different style of character - you are assumed to be a sort of thuggish mercenary with powers, not a hero. You have to handwave away a whole lot of the missions you're in, and pretend the NPCs are saying things that they're not actually saying. This happens blueside from time to time, too, but it's just way more frequent if you're trying to play a hero on villains' turf. Mentally find-and-replacing the word 'kidnap' with the word 'rescue' for like half the missions on that side of the game got pretty old after a while. Trying to come up with a reason why my Longbow agent kept getting jumped by other Longbow agents was similarly annoying.
The second was the other players. It was fine when I played with others in my group, because we were all playing the same player-altered version of the content. But I am a social player - I like to team with others - and if I wanted to play that character, I had to convince others to play my way or just play the 'official' version. Because the difference between the two versions of what we were doing was so extreme, those conflicted quite a bit.
The third was SG drama. The small group I was in broke down, and after I lost access to those other likeminded characters, my interest in that character faded pretty quickly.
So it didn't quite work for me. I enjoyed it a bit, but not enough to try it again. I broadly agree with the assertions that the redside content doesn't support that sort of character very well. Still, I wouldn't try to convince other players doing this that they're doin it rong, or try to explain to those players that they're not actually having fun. It can work, in my experience... as long as you're willing to discard a lot of the content in favor of your own explanations, and as long as you're willing to put up with the fact that most other players on that side of the game won't subscribe to your altered version of events - at least not right away.
The Ballad of Iron Percy
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Ugh... No, I'm not asking anyone to abandon anything. Why does this always devolve into these kinds of semi-personal attacks? I'm asking why one would want to play a game that's designed to support a certain subset of concepts and stick a different set. Would you try to play Blood as a pacifist? Would you try to play StarCraft as a caveman? Would you try to play Oni as a man?|
Originally Posted by M_I_Abrahms
Something about your stance really got under my skin, and it took me a while to figure out why. You're asking people who try to fly the Hero flag to do one of the most un-heroic things I can think of: Abandon people truly in need of help, just so the "Hero" themselves can be safe among allies.
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This isn't about asking heroes to move away from the Rogue Isles. Heroes are not designed to BE on the Rogue Isles. And even with Going Rogue, heroes WON'T BE on the Rogue Isles. At most, Vigilantes will. This is not about taking a hero of the Isles and making him abandon his religion. It's about the purely meta-game aspect of going against the grain and playing a hero in a game where virtually EVERYTHING is written with a villain in mind. Even the simplest of Paper missions try to paint characters as sociopathic jerks, and most contacts do a lot worse.
Even if you cherry-pick only the least evil of evil contacts, even if you stick to the least evil of evil paper missions, even if you somehow avoid fighting MASSES of longbow or robbing a bank in Paragon City every other day, even if you manage all of that, you're still doing enough hand-waving to unscrew your hand from your wrist. Yeah, I could play Aliens vs. Predator and try to explain away how the Predator is really a caring good guy who's actually trying to help the Humans in their fight against the Aliens, but after pulling a guy's spine and head out of his *** (I'm not joking here) for the umpteen bazillionth time, it's starting to feel a little hollow.
I'm not asking you to make moral choices. There are no moral choices to make in the meta-game, no more so than there is in picking an AT. A Blaster isn't inherently less evil than a Corruptor and a Brute is no more evil than a Scrapper. But that's because they're ability frameworks, NOT character concepts. City of Heroes and City of Villains are NOT just different, interchangeable locations. They are environments geared towards a specific subset of concepts. And while it's true that one can go against the grain, the question is "Why?" Why make a villain and claim he is a hero in a game designed to be played as a villain, when you can make a hero in a game that's already designed for heroes?
Certainly, the answers people have given me do make sense, but please don't try to claim my question is somehow morally bankrupt, when what I'm asking is purely pragmatic.
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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.
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See, this I can roll with, but it still leaves me wondering about one particular detail. Yes, if you view the entire game as little more than a backdrop, then I can see putting heroes in the Isles as a possibility, but then wouldn't it make sense to pick the most appropriate backdrop? Yes, I realise some heroes need to exist among villainy and scum, but the backdrop in question is less "location" and more "intent." If the game actually accounted for people being heroes in the isles and had actual heroic, or even semi-heroic missions available there (Hardcase notwithstanding, one contact does not a game make), then I could easily see that. But it doesn't provide anything of the sort.|
Originally Posted by Paladin_Musashi
Why go against the grain? I think the problem we have in communicating here is that there are two fundamentally different paradigms for how to view a game like this. Camp A will feel that a game is a story being told by a third person storyteller, that everyone should play by the rules and go along with that.
Camp B sees the game as a backdrop, ATs and powersets and such merely colors in their paintbox, and their fun is to make up their own story. I know which camp I'm in personally. Without an actual live game master, you can't have anything even remotely approaching the interactivity of a true tabletop RPG session. As such, I feel we are each our own game master in our own solo campaigns. Other people obviously feel the devs are the game masters and we should follow their campaign. But honestly, I'd have put the game down years ago if that were all there were to do with it. |
City of Villains' entire narrative is geared towards villains. And it's not just the grandstanding storyline or the specific mission goals. All the little flavour text exudes this. Every little detail paints our characters as callous, sycophantic, violent slime whose only goal in life is to get "brownie points with the Spiders" as a common paper mission puts it. I can kind of see a villain who goes along with this but has an agenda. But once you start putting a hero through this, either you have to basically ignore the entire settings, which makes me ask why not just go hero-side in this case (Kings Row, Independence Port, Brickstown and others are as crime-ridden as the Isles), or you end up with something skirting the line in a BIG way.
I can see the appeal of being a hero in the Isles, believe me. I'm just not entirely sure I see the appeal of being a fake hero in a world designed for villains when you can be a real hero in a world designed for heroes and still have much of the same settings, minus Recluse.
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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.
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Sort of as a side note Sam. I am pretty sure you can go full Hero (from Villain) or full Villain (from Hero) in GR. You just have to jump through the hoops.
Types of Swords
My Portfolio
I think, Sam, the problem her is that you're more or less hardwired to use the setting fairly exclusively and you enjoy it.
I don't enjoy the storylines. Though I enjoy the zones, enemy groups, missions, style, and more magic-oriented feel of Villainside (I.E lots more missions against CoT, Corallax, and other mystical origin groups).
I own City of Villains. I know I also own City of heroes... but I don't -like- playing the villain. I Roleplay every character at pretty much all times. I do my best to get into their mindset while I play because City is, for me, escapism from reality to some degree or another. So roleplaying the Villain is no fun for me. It's easier, for me, to shoehorn heroism into the Evil McDarkitypants realm of CoV than to try to enjoy even a mercenary/murderer character.
There are some things I can't disassociate myself from based on a game's -setting-, even if I want to. If I'm playing in D&D, for example, I put myself into the shoes of a character of that world. Killing is all fine and dandy so long as the dead foe is a threat to myself and others and has shown intent to attack or hurt people. I can even fight against foes who aren't really -evil- but just go against my religion, if I play a zealot!
In a "Modern" setting, however, I feel more constrained by modern morality. Even as a "Villain" I wind up weighing every kill as another -murder-. And it makes me think of it in modern terms. Grieving families, court battles, orphaned children... Things of that nature. Heroside it's not a problem, as the Medcomm system affects NPC enemies, as well, whisking them away to the medical wing of a hospital if they're badly injured.
So, on villainside, all my characters wind up pulling their punches and aiming to hurt, rather than to kill. Just enough to put the target on his or her butt. Otherwise I can get fairly affected by the activity on screen and grow to hate a character for making me feel bad. So I stop playing that character and, eventually, delete it.
It's the method of my madness, I suppose.
Obviously, you don't have these issues and as a result can fully enjoy being a "Bad Guy". So it seems odd to you to do it any other way, i suppose.
-Rachel-
*edit* Actually... Even heroside my characters tend to aim to injure rather than risk the Medcomm system malfunctioning. Why?
Heh.
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You can - Rogues and Vigilantes are the middle part of side switching.
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Originally Posted by Zyphoid
Sort of as a side note Sam. I am pretty sure you can go full Hero (from Villain) or full Villain (from Hero) in GR. You just have to jump through the hoops.
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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Well, if you go by the letter of the writing, you can only really play one kind of villain: a thug for hire who is only interested in carnage and money in that order. That's incredibly limiting, especially compared to how many different heroic concepts you can play blueside. |
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
It's about the purely meta-game aspect of going against the grain and playing a hero in a game where virtually EVERYTHING is written with a villain in mind. Even the simplest of Paper missions try to paint characters as sociopathic jerks, and most contacts do a lot worse.
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I really don't see how one can *not* disregard at least *some* of the writing redside. A common bit of flavour text is "You slick back your hair and crack your knuckles. Time to be the bad guy." Does this mean that playing any villain without hair is "going against the grain" and you would never imagine doing it?
Redside players are used to ignoring bits of text that don't apply to them all the time. Playing a heroic character is really just another aspect of it.
Character index
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This was one of the main things bothering me (as I somewhat agree with Samuel_Tow's dislike of hand-waving). Most of my heroes hate Longbow, though, so it's easy to explain as a ruse to draw Longbow out for a fight. (My villains are less bothered by them, incidentally.) The Kidnap side quest would be hard to justify... but wait! There's no reward for that one. Even my puppy-kickers skip it.|
Originally Posted by Steampunkette
Even in Mayhem Missions (which are -hard- to justify, though I've found a few ways)
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| Do YOU want to stand there while two super-powered individual lob explosives at each other? Does it -really- make it any safer when one of the people throwing explosives is a Cop? |
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Even the simplest of Paper missions try to paint characters as sociopathic jerks, and most contacts do a lot worse.
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Most arcs do not fit this mold. Paper missions virtually never do--they don't even try to tell you that you did something unpleasant to the innocent civilian you rescued from the Council or that you put the powerful artifact to evil uses after you stole it from the Circle. Also, you just saved someone's life or stopped the Circle from killing dozens, which is why people who love playing puppy-kickers aren't happy about the writing in CoV.
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| Even if you cherry-pick only the least evil of evil contacts, even if you stick to the least evil of evil paper missions, even if you somehow avoid fighting MASSES of longbow or robbing a bank in Paragon City every other day, even if you manage all of that, you're still doing enough hand-waving to unscrew your hand from your wrist. |
Honestly, I doubt that you have many (if any) specific examples in mind. You're making broad statements about content that doesn't exist.
I play CoV as if the Rogue Isles were Gotham City. Your heroes are vigilanties working outside the law.
You don't get that sort of gritty aesthetic appeal from paragon city.
For some reason this thread makes me feel particularly defensive.
"Why do you play heroic characters in CoV?"
"Because I prefer playing as the hero, but certain ATs are only redside."
"But GR allows you to side-switch."
"I know, but GR isn't out yet."
"With side-switching, the AT argument becomes invalid."
"Not right now, though. My heroic characters in CoV are still stuck in the Rogue Isles."
"GR allows side-switching!"
"I know, and I promise you that once it comes out I'll switch all my redside characters to blueside, okay?"
"Why do you play heroic characters in CoV?"
"I told you-"
"I wasn't talking to you."
"... may I please be excused from the rest of this discussion? Oops..."
Defensive, but embarrassed.
Current main:
Schrodinger's Gun, Dual Pistols/Mental Blaster, Virtue
Avatar: Becky Miyamoto from Pani Poni Dash. Roulette roulette~
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This one has been flawed every time it was brought up. The hostage always says "Ok, can we work something out?" A question I get to answer. I just say "Sure, you are free to go."| This was one of the main things bothering me (as I somewhat agree with Samuel_Tow's dislike of hand-waving). Most of my heroes hate Longbow, though, so it's easy to explain as a ruse to draw Longbow out for a fight. (My villains are less bothered by them, incidentally.) The Kidnap side quest would be hard to justify... but wait! There's no reward for that one. Even my puppy-kickers skip it. |
Also, ALL of my characters tend to have a dislike of longbow. So that is not a problem for me.
Types of Swords
My Portfolio
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Play how you want. Screw what Samuel Tow and others think.
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Originally Posted by DKellis
For some reason this thread makes me feel particularly defensive.
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See this... This I can get behind. You own City of Heroes AND Villains, and it makes sense to try and make as much use out of what is ostencibly half of the entire game as you can. OK, I can roll with that. I'd actually not thought about it like that, and given that I've been making points to a similar effect recently, I really can't argue against this.|
Originally Posted by Steampunkette
I own City of Villains. I know I also own City of heroes... but I don't -like- playing the villain. I Roleplay every character at pretty much all times. I do my best to get into their mindset while I play because City is, for me, escapism from reality to some degree or another. So roleplaying the Villain is no fun for me. It's easier, for me, to shoehorn heroism into the Evil McDarkitypants realm of CoV than to try to enjoy even a mercenary/murderer character.
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Objection withdrawn, question answered. Thank you.
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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.
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Well... When paper missions tell you that the voices in your head order you to smash, when practically every missions is you selling yourself out for money that's only spoken of but never seen, and when half the time you buckle under pressure because someone threatened you... I'd say the game succeeds a lot more often than you give it credit for.|
Originally Posted by Teeth
Try. They try. The Devs intentionally avoid forcing (overarching) motivations on our characters, which helps play heroic redsiders; they tried to make us do villainous things, but they tended to fail. Kidnapping citizens for the Vahz was a well-written redside activity because it assumes nothing about your motivations and yet makes you a villain regardless (unless you're into hand-waving).
Most arcs do not fit this mold. Paper missions virtually never do--they don't even try to tell you that you did something unpleasant to the innocent civilian you rescued from the Council or that you put the powerful artifact to evil uses after you stole it from the Circle. Also, you just saved someone's life or stopped the Circle from killing dozens, which is why people who love playing puppy-kickers aren't happy about the writing in CoV. |
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My contention remains that you are dramatically overstating this. I even checked the arcs on ParagonWiki before posting this, to make sure I wasn't imagining things. I wasn't; nearly every arc at every level has you fighting Arachnos, Longbow, Circle, Luddites, Carnies, Goldbrickers, Family, Council, Rikti, or some sort of monster (Coralax, Arachnoid, etc.). The only people I'd feel bad about fighting would be Scrapyarders, Legacy Chain, PPD, and Wyvern, and the rare ones I can't skip usually require very little hand-waving (which is to say that they're not usually preventing some cataclysm or protecting innocent lives from me--they themselves are normally the only good guys in danger). In general, though, even the puppy-kickers spend their time fighting off Nazis, aliens, robots, undead, demons, gangs, and other classical acceptable hero targets Honestly, I doubt that you have many (if any) specific examples in mind. You're making broad statements about content that doesn't exist. |
There are a few, obviously. Petrovic has you save the Iron Widow and Hardcase has you save a bunch of people over and over, but by and large, the missions are not nice. Timmothy has you harass the Rikti and kill their offspring, Verandi has you basically make a mess out of St. Martial Island, Daos sends you to kill - not defeat, kill - his own son, Dobbs has you crush the Arachnoids' last hope for a cure, Darla Mavis has a sickeningly bitter story of revenge, Angelo Vendetti has an even more sickening one, and that's not even counting all the straight up "agent for the mob" or "agent for Arachnos" characters who basically hire you out to forward Arachnos' goal.
You can, theoretically, look past all that, but chances are you won't see the horizon. If you simply ignore what contacts say and just go by who you have to beat up, then sure, that could work. But at that point you really take nothing out of the actual game. It's the stories that make the game.
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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.
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Not trying to take this to a personal level, I'm talking purely about the character. Yes, I'll admit you can't be a Superman type of character, but it's not that much of a stretch to be a Punisher, Venom, or just a semi-decent person. That kind of character has seen the redeemable cowered masses being ground away under Arachnos and Operation: Destiny.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Ugh... No, I'm not asking anyone to abandon anything. Why does this always devolve into these kinds of semi-personal attacks?
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Let's say I was reading a comic book. The main character is a brutal murderer who has no problems with taking things that aren't his. The thing is, there's a group of people he's keeping safe and maybe even hidden from the rest of the city, and the people he's killing and stealing from would gladly do the same to the people the lead is protecting. People who, for whatever reason, can't defend themselves like the lead character can.
Now plot happens, and along the way, the lead character has a crisis of conscience about his methods. He adopts a less lethal method of crime fighting, and a greater respect for the law. And in doing so, he moves to a new city, with new friends and challenges. Now remember, the people he just left couldn't survive without his protection, either directly, or indirectly. If I were reading this book, such a character would actually be more heroic to me BEFORE the change, no matter how much like Superman they try to paint the after version.
Actually, it makes more sense for me for a True Villain to make the full transition to Hero over the "Redside Hero". The True Villain never actually saw the people of the Rogue Isles, even as he slaughtered them.
And as far as the hand waving goes, I already hand wave 80% of the game away because it's things that only work because this IS a game, so what's another 5% to ignore the text that God Modes your character.
The Abrams is one of the most effective war machines on the planet. - R. Lee Ermy.
Q: How do you wreck an Abrams?
A: You crash into another one.
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As already pointed out, most character-specific examples of that text need to be ignored anyway (unless you really do only ever play characters who have psychotic voices whispering orders in their heads and who can't ever cover up or lack hair because it's mentioned a couple times). The "selling yourself out for money" bit is a particularly weak part of the alleged villainy we engage in, since a very large fraction of the game's story is written on the premise "you just saved the hostage/country/world from some sort of pointless spite-driven annihilation, but money changed hands at some point, so you're basically Hitler."|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Well... When paper missions tell you that the voices in your head order you to smash, when practically every missions is you selling yourself out for money that's only spoken of but never seen, and when half the time you buckle under pressure because someone threatened you... I'd say the game succeeds a lot more often than you give it credit for.
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Because even a mission that has you fight Arachnos can still paint you as the jerkiest of jerks, and evil, to boot. ...fighting the Council to collect gambling money for a casino run by the mob... ...collecting cybernetic body parts by ripping them out of people's body... ...Timmothy has you harass the Rikti and kill their offspring... ...Daos sends you to kill - not defeat, kill - his own son ...Dobbs has you crush the Arachnoids' last hope for a cure... ...Darla Mavis has a sickeningly bitter story of revenge... ...Angelo Vendetti has an even more sickening one ...that's not even counting all the straight up "agent for the mob" or "agent for Arachnos" characters who basically hire you out to forward Arachnos' goal. |
Most CoV content follows one of three patterns:
- Outright save someone or cripple an evil plot, but get paid for it. Contact explicitly reminds you how evil this makes you.
- Outright save someone or cripple an evil plot, but do this at the request of a card-carrying villain. Contact explicitly reminds you how evil this makes you.
- Enact elaborate plan to embarrass a big-name hero to no practical end and without doing anything resembling lasting damage. (Darla Mavis' arc and the Recluse Strike Force are good examples of this.) Contact gloats at great length as though they've actually accomplished something.
The first two rely on the notion "acts of good are inherently evil if even one bad person is involved, even if it doesn't do him any good." The third is a pointless display of immaturity by your contact and little or no effect on anyone else.
My hero isn't so sanctimonious that she'll refuse to hurt the Mafia because the Evil Empire is involved, nor do I have trouble justifying a task done for the Evil Empire if the target is the Mafia. Your own characters' motivations aren't forced to be anything specific by the story, most of your actions aren't inherently evil, and most of the things that have bothered Samuel_Tow have been petty chatter by the contacts that doesn't even try to relate itself to player character motivations.
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"Selling yourself out for money" is only bad because you end up doing whatever they with the money ask, not out of some sense of loyalty or ethics. Yes, you can pick and choose what to do, but again, you can't always choose something good, you ALWAYS have to do Mayhem missions, and you still end up skipping half the game.|
Originally Posted by Teeth
As already pointed out, most character-specific examples of that text need to be ignored anyway (unless you really do only ever play characters who have psychotic voices whispering orders in their heads and who can't ever cover up or lack hair because it's mentioned a couple times). The "selling yourself out for money" bit is a particularly weak part of the alleged villainy we engage in, since a very large fraction of the game's story is written on the premise "you just saved the hostage/country/world from some sort of pointless spite-driven annihilation, but money changed hands at some point, so you're basically Hitler."
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| My hero isn't so sanctimonious that she'll refuse to hurt the Mafia because the Evil Empire is involved, nor do I have trouble justifying a task done for the Evil Empire if the target is the Mafia. Your own characters' motivations aren't forced to be anything specific by the story, most of your actions aren't inherently evil, and most of the things that have bothered Samuel_Tow have been petty chatter by the contacts that doesn't even try to relate itself to player character motivations. |
There's just not paying too much attention to briefings and messages that assume too much, and then there's simply ignoring the settings of the game and rewriting them with your own ideas. Obviously, it's your game so it's your call, but there comes the question - but couldn't this much hand-waving just ret-con hero-side into this kind of setting? Because it ought to.
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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.
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Let me just find my Caps Lock key... There we go. WHAT CHANGE?!? I never mentioned starting in the Isles AND THEN moving to Paragon City. I never mentioned abandoning anyone anywhere for any reason. I didn't see anyone so much as imply this, either. The question was why make heroes in the Rogue Isles in the first place, which assumed the opposite of why not make heroes in Paragon City TO BEGIN WITH? Where did you even get this idea that you'll take an established CoV character and cross it over into CoH? I didn't talk about it, that's for sure.|
Originally Posted by M_I_Abrahms
Let's say I was reading a comic book. The main character is a brutal murderer who has no problems with taking things that aren't his. The thing is, there's a group of people he's keeping safe and maybe even hidden from the rest of the city, and the people he's killing and stealing from would gladly do the same to the people the lead is protecting. People who, for whatever reason, can't defend themselves like the lead character can.
Now plot happens, and along the way, the lead character has a crisis of conscience about his methods. He adopts a less lethal method of crime fighting, and a greater respect for the law. And in doing so, he moves to a new city, with new friends and challenges. Now remember, the people he just left couldn't survive without his protection, either directly, or indirectly. If I were reading this book, such a character would actually be more heroic to me BEFORE the change, no matter how much like Superman they try to paint the after version. |
Did my bringing up Going Rogue somehow allude to this? Because Going Rogue will open up all ATs to both sides WITHOUT having to start in the Rogue Isles. At the very worst, you'll have to start in Praetoria, and from how things look, you'll be able to start acting heroic as soon as you pop up. Moral choice system and all that.
Really, I understand your position. I understand your example. But please understand that it is IRRELEVANT, because what you're accusing me of suggesting is not something I suggested, or even implied. Yes, obviously you can cross established villains over to the hero side, but if you made them into established villains, you'd need A REASON to cross them over. That's precisely why I didn't talk about this. I specifically pointed out that Going Rogue will open all ATs to both sides, even if it doesn't necessarily open up all characters.
And, really, this story you told about could just as easily have been told about City of Heroes. There's nothing inherent in the Rogue Isles that this story relies on that can't be relocated in one of Paragon City's ghettos with just as much effect. Well, other than Arachnos.
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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.
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Little or no "dubbing in" is necessary to make most redside arcs heroic.