Praetoria's morality...

True, to a point. It's a problem, but not an actual limitation as such. A few of Praetoria's Power arcs are written in such a way as to mimic player initiative, and done quite well. However, the only reason this was even considered was because the Power arc is assumed to be a megalomaniac out for himself. That's GOOD, but it's also not the only reason a person could be proactive for. A hero concerned with the citizens of Praetoria could be just as proactive, searching for people with information and following his own initiative. This is never pursued. In fact, the Warden path is almost exclusively reactionary - Calvin Scott sends you to specific people and they have problems they need your help with. Why can't you ever call Calvin and say "Dud, I have, like, the best idea ever! I heard Neuron is making these monsters and letting them loose in the sewers, see, and I need your guys to get me a few of them so my bud Aaron here can scan them. Can you do that while I go get his medicine?"

When first introducing himself, Crimson says something that I like: "You are not working for me. You are working with me. There's a difference." I'm paraphrasing off memory, of course, but that's the gist of it. And even though World Wide Red is still a case of "go there, do that," I never feel like I was initiated into an organisation and set to forward its objectives. I don't want the world to be ruled by Malta, Crimson doesn't want the world to be ruled by Malta, and we're just two dudes with a common goal and some sense of justice. This is missing from Praetoria. Even the Warden arc, which mostly consists of working with Resistance sympathisers rather than actual Resistance members, is still marred by "Resistance represent!"

Hell, I made my own Architect arc - The PDA that Knew - which is essentially proactive and essentially without a contact, and the developers have made a fair share of their own. It's not impossible, or indeed even all that hard for a decent writer. And I'm not saying the game's writers CAN'T mage such stories - they clearly can, as such stories exist, if rarely. I'm saying such stories don't seem to enter into the developer's official plans, which is a shame. Praetoria was the perfect environment in which to let players rebel against the system... And yet they can only ever do so by joining another system.

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 just want to point out that the game lore gives you the reason this isn't possible. Seers.

You're either a loyalist, and therefore free to act in Cole's interest, or you're a resistance member that's somehow protected from mind scans from the seers and various psychics (Sup, Tilman) in Cole's regime.

That said, most of my characters work on the pretense of keeping Praetoria out of anarchy. So I'm not just some lackey, I'm looking out for the good of the city.

But the Seers are no longer human beings once they're enslaved - leaving them as slaves is the same as taking the chance that more people might get killed by destroying the evil thought police.
Freedom always comes with dangers - but that'a acceptable, because freedom isn't something that people can live without - being free is default status for all human beings.
Tyrant and his stormtroopers are killing and harming more people than would ever be killed or harmed if the dictatorship was gone - that's the "joke" that happens with all dictatorships - the measures used to "protect" the people always cause far more suffering than if the people were free, because dictatorships vastly increase the amount of "crimes" that people can be "guilty" of, as they need to define opposition to the dictatorship as a crime in order to stay in power.
The list of potential crimes in Praetoria will be way longer than in a normal society, as there will be laws that define opposition to Tyrant and the dictatorship as cimres - which are also the priority "crimes" for the dictatorship, because stopping a "crime" against the dictatorship is more important for their goal of staying in power than stopping a crime that doesn't threaten them.

It's interesting that you would mention a relationship between Singapore and Praetoria. I've been to Singapore several times and if I were to say there was any place in real life that most reminded me of Praetoria it would be Singapore - minus the super powered people of course. The general collective organization and "vibe" I get from Praetoria's "well ordered Big Brother society" mirrors Singapore's quite well. I suppose the fact that Praetoria is mostly an island-based city state like Singapore is helps that impression as well. I wouldn't call Singapore a perfect model for say how most Americans might like to live, but I think their British-based "structured democracy" has many positive aspects that seem to be bringing peace and prosperity to that part of the world.

Enough of that tangent...

The main problem I see people talking about here is mostly a matter of choice - or more precisely the typically lack of choice most computer game players have so far suffered from. I think until games like this start allowing us total freedom to react to storylines any way we want (the Matrix, anyone?) we are always going to be confined to the few hardwired choices the Devs of the game program in. It really doesn't bother me if the choices in Praetoria are really more "political" and/or "moral" than I'd like because I already accept the idea that I really don't have complete freedom to do what I might like to do in this game anyway. It's not really a failing of CoH in particular - it's just that computer games in general aren't quite sophisticated enough to provide a truly realistic experience yet. *shrugs*

Aside from your own unwavering dogma, what makes you claim this?

You have a surprisingly narrow view of the term 'dictator', especially in the light of this game's Greco-Roman influences. Dictator was a standard governmental position in the Roman Empire, until Julius Cesar abused his power. Tyrant wasn't a pejorative until the Hellenistic period of Greece. Throughout history, there have been many tyrants/dictators/despots who were looked upon favorably by their people and the surrounding ruling states.

Even as late as 1860, Garibaldi was a benevolent dictator in Sicily. Add alternate histories in an alternate dimension, and judging Emperor Cole becomes so much more shortsighted.

You should avoid opening up ethical debates.

If I free the Seers, innocent civilians will die. If I don't free the Seers, they will die or, worse still, live a never-ending nightmare of psychological torture and torment. Are they not innocent, too? Because Seers didn't choose to be in the programme. They were taken, enslaved and essentially turned into nothing better than human batteries for a fortune-teller machine. The machine overmind from the Matrix would be proud.

To quote the Prince of Egypt: "No kingdom should be made on the backs of slaves." Any society which seeks to protect some by sacrificing others against their will is inherently hypocritical, because this infers people want to protect THEMSELVES, but have no qualms about condemning their neighbour to do so.

The story with the Seers is essentially a retread of Minority Report, and follows pretty much that movie's morality of good and evil. And I have no problem accepting that, as I agreed with that movie.

The final resistance choice is only extreme because I'm not given a choice. The Resistance have made their mind up, and the only way I can choose different is to join the Loyalists. This is not the right way to make the choice, because all it does is make me skip the final Morality mission and speak with Steven Sheridan directly. This WOULD be a good place to hold true to my own morality as separate from the Resistance, but the only morality separate from the Resistance is that of the Loyalists, and I don't share the Loyalists' morality, either.

Going Rogue promised a third option, a grey morality, a middle ground that is neither good nor evil. What it delivered was a binary choice over and over again.

I neglected to talk about them, but I have in the past. Those choices I LOVE, because they are choices which as me what I want to do, not what faction I want to belong to. As a Loyalist, I could choose to kill that suit and no-one will know, and no-one will care. But I will know and I will care, and so it is my choice to make, for my own reasons. I can choose to bring Vanessa DeVore into "Mother's" care, or I can choose to let her go, and in neither case do I actually face consequences or swap alignments. This is a choice I make based on my own morality and my own authority. THESE are the moral choices I want to make.

Ironically, what few moral choices City of Villains has are FAR superior to every Morality Mission Praetoria has to offer. Do you stop Amanda Vines from transmitting, or do you shut her down as Marshal Brass has ordered? It really doesn't matter. You get paid either way, you're not held accountable either way, the world keeps on turning either way. You don't join the Rogue Isles Citizens if you don't destroy the generators, and you don't join Arachnos if you do. This choice is not about pragmatism and choosing the "better" option. It's solely and entirely a choice of morality, and morality which asks YOU to give your OWN justification, rather than feeding you a ready-made one.

Or take Westin Phipps. The entirety of the Miss Francine moral choice is presented to you thusly: "Either capture Miss Francine and see her tortured and broken, or don't." Why? I don't know. The game doesn't know. Why did YOU choose to do what you did? Choices like these make me think. WHY did I do this and not the other thing? Praetoria's morality does not make me think. I want to play through the Resistance arc, so I'll pick the Resistance option. Why did I pick the Resistance option? Well, the pop-up window just told me why I did it. Feh!

Choices without faction swaps are choices where player opinion and RP matters. Faction swaps are just a game mechanic which often overrides narrative strength. Choices like saving your clone from the factory, or killing that Family goon instead of arresting him, or, hell, saving the Rogue PPD before the building burns down, THOSE choices I like, because they're choices for ME.

I don't think "lack of choice" here is the problem. We have choices. It's just that they're all effectively the same choice, and all of them driven by meta-game mechanics, instead of morality. It's not that I don't have choices, it's that I don't have the choices I WANT. And it's not for any practical game limitation that I lack those choices. The developers deliberately designed a binary world that disallows a third option, and they didn't have to.

Years ago, I vouched for a "Nemesis Island" which would be a perfect utopia with a totalitarian regime, Big Brother policing and "thought police," I vouched for that with the idea that we would be the OUTSIDERS to that. During the Secret Wars, when Reed Richards walks into Dr. Doom's perfect utopia, he recognises it for the flawed utopia that it is, but he doesn't immediately join the already-formed resistance, at least he didn't in the 90s Fox Cartoons. That's what I mean.

We are given choices as to who to belong to, when the choice I want is to belong to nobody. City of Heroes does that already. The hero-side does not put you in anybody's thrall. Even the organisation you do join, such as Vanguard, the Midnight Club, Ouroboros and suchforth, really don't infringe on your personal identity. Outside of a few select instances, you don't act as a Mender, a Midnighter or a Vanguard agent. You don't represent those organisations. You freelance for them when you can, and they reward you for it, but they don't demand LOYALTY. As such, even though I don't like joining them, I don't really mind it, because I'm not indelibly associated with them. In fact, my association never really comes up.

For years and years now, the City of Heroes narrative has gotten more and more railroading as it progressed, and I don't like that very much. It used to be that I could make ANY character of ANY personality and that character would fit in the world, however loosely. These days... I just can't bring myself to make a Praetorian unless that Praetorian is politically-minded, because the game forces me to make political choices. A non-politically-minded character would probably insult both parties and look for another way, and the game really SHOULD offer us another way to go through Praetoria without being involved in its politics.

This, really, is the centrepiece problem with the whole world - it is politics-incarnate. If you avoid the politics, then Praetoria becomes pointless, because politics is all it has. And it shouldn't have been made into such a one-trick pony.

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 actually like White. At least he just is what he is, without any show or deception. Antimatter, though not as bad as some others, still only cares about himself.

There is the whole "built an army of War Walkers to invade Primal Earth" thing that counts against Anti-Matter, I would say. He's not the worst of the lot, no, but building an army of killer robots for invasion purposes does cause a bit of a blip on the Evil-o-meter.

I could see Marauder as being mostly okay, though. He's an angry man, and pretty dangerous if you get him mad, but he doesn't seem that evil. Not a saint, but not too bad either.

If I got to live in a world without danger and everything was taken care of, like Praetoria, I could live without my "freedom."

Technically I think that's under the orders of Cole, so that doesn't really count, though Anitmatter's own invasions into other dimensions does. I'm still unconvinced that it's completely his own decision though, he seems to be a perfectionist and wouldn't bother others without reason (well, save for Neuron, though I don't know where that bad blood started at), at least based on his arc.

So the "only obeying orders" defense is ok, is it?

You wouldn't be able to live like a human being then.

How much freedom do you really have? There are laws here. Things you cannot do. Are you not a human being?

Awareness is the decider. Any person who is conscious and aware enough knows, at the core of their being, what rights every living thing is entitled to. Because those rights are self-evident (sound familiar?) to those who are aware enough.

That's funny, because in almost every case where someone has attempted to codify natural rights, it's been different from the previous attempt. The closest thing to being universal is the right to "life", though that's often written as something closer to 'the right to attempt to keep your own *** alive'. Then, of course, various cultures have laws which relinquish your 'right to life', via a death sentence.

Hey, according to John Locke, the third natural right is property, not "pursuit of happiness". Thomas Paine claimed that everything is a natural right, and laws are meant to remove those rights; everything excluded from the law is kept as a right.

Definitions of inalienability aren't even necessarily consistent, especially with regard to the subjects of relinquishability, salability, and transferability. And some people don't even agree that there is such a thing as an inalienable right (see: Edmund Burke).

And if awareness is the decider, what about the people who say that non-human animals and plants have natural rights as well?

Which rights are self evident?

It's pretty self evident to me that if I'm stronger than you, I get your lunch money. Does that make is a universal truth?

That and the fact that (1) it is not proven that he knows what the warwalkers are for, (2) he may truely believe that Prime is sufficient danger to society, and (3) if it was solely built by him, he'd make sure that it'd be perfect: taking down only threats with minimal external casualties. Chances are he's only in charge of making sure the whole darned thing works, while Neuron deals with the mass production anyway.

Also speaking of human rights, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_r...ional_security

And in effect, if considering Praetorian Cole's definition of a nation, he is absolutely justified in his actions. It's just that many of us disagrees with his definition of what constitutes a nation.

False. The Romans had not had a dictator in over a century until Sulla took the position by force, about forty years prior to Caesar. Sulla thought he was demonstrating to the people of Rome why autocracy was bad; instead, because he got away with it (he retired and died in bed) he inspired Caesar.

Moreover, the Roman position of dictator was more complicated than the modern connotations of the word, originally came with a limited term of office (six months) and ultimately proved to be unstable and destroyed the republic.

I.e., it was a bad idea.

I'm not going around the mulberry bush again on the rest; tired of trying to debate with people who got their education in moral philosophy from Wikipedia.

The notion that any self-aware entity will be aware of certain self-evident, inalienable rights that every other living being has is, and has always been, a fallacy. We as humans enjoy making rules of morality and ethics in the way we treat others because, instinctively, we know that "it could be us." You don't bash your neighbour over the head and take his stuff, because you don't want your neighbour to bash you over the head and take your stuff. You don't kill because you don't want to be kill. We like to think that if we don't do bad things, we step into an unspoken agreement with other people to not do bad stuff, either. Human society has built its entire mentality on that simple belief, to the point where we actually experience happiness and joy from holding to it.

And while that would be an idea society, nature is subject to no such laws, rules and regulations, nor are indeed other people. We can choose to ostracise them, incarcerate them or outright kill them for disregarding those rules, but we do so because they are a threat to us. We do so because they do "the unthinkable," and it's unthinkable because it's so horrible and unpleasant we don't want to think about it, not because it's impossible. In fact, horror movies, "shocumentaries" and even a lot of dramas rely on the unthinkable to shift us from our comfort zone where can pretend the world is fair and just.

One is only "aware" when one realises these are not rules of unquestionable righteousness and holiness, but are instead rules of survival and cofort, and that we apply those rules mostly to ourselves. Americans like to beat their chest and talk about "freedom" with the same connotation as food, water and shelter, and it always makes me laugh, because "freedom" as it is mostly used is nothing more than a pretty slogan. If I had to choose, I would personally pick the safety to not be killed if I happen to go out after dark, not running the risk of starving or losing my home if I happen to get fired and not worrying about dying from the common cold over "freedom."

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All of that said, I don't actually dislike how Praetoria is built, in terms of the concept of the world. Emperor Cole does indeed seem to be the only one who genuinely cares about doing the right thing, even if his view of what the right thing is may be quite skewed. In everything he does, you can tell he's trying to be the good guy, but has generally lost all faith in the actual people, and as such treats them like cattle, not like people. Most of his staff, on the other hand... Ugh! When they're not psychotic or completely ruthless, they're burdened by so much baggage. White may be an OK guy normally, but he has so much baggage about proving himself and being the big guy and all that stuff in his past... When you get down to it, the guy's probably as messed-up as Tillman. And, of course, Marchand is "the only sane man" in the whole operation, which brings another level of complexity.

The resistance, on the other hand, seems to be a two-faced entity. On the one hand, you have the ideology of freedom, where one can think, say and express what he wants without fear of reprisals, and where people are not herded like cattle. On the other hand, you have the reality of the fight, and many of the people who fight it, which is anarchy, murder, destruction, disruption and otherwise the horrors of war, to the point where one has to ask if it's worth it to destroy society for the slim hope of rebuilding it from scratch into something better. After all, that's what Cole did once, and this is what it turned out as. And where Marchand is the good guy among the slime for the Loyalists, for the Resistance Scott is the worst of the worst, quite likely more of a problem than a help.

Both factions in Praetoria are drawn with both good and bad qualities, and enough internal contradictions, disagreements and factions so as to be able to make a case both for and against both factions. That's GOOD, but if I just so happen to make a case AGAINST both factions, then what?

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.

Then you go solo Hamidon. Or get Cole and Scott in the same room and kill them both.

The basic principle here is that there is a war going on and there's two sides. In the world that's been created, you will get caught up in this war and your actions will help one side or the other. If you don't want to be on one of the sides, don't log in.