Praetorian storyline does not bother me.

Looking at the Blue King comics, I think it is safe to say that Rick Dakan had nothing to do with any positive aspects of early City.

Seeing as how, IIRC, he was the primary creator of the game's initial story bible, I'm going to respectfully disagree.

Of course, all this talk about lore and story telling just makes me miss Manticore. :/

Rick Dakan created City of Heroes. The story, the NPC backgrounds, almost everything story-wise.

Edit: Also, I'm going to disagree with you about that run of comics. The adventures of War Witch, Apex and Horus might not have shared the production value of the Freedom Phalanx comics, but those three characters were a heck of a lot more likeable than most of the Freedom Phalanx. War Witch and Horus's deaths were actually kind of a bummer to read.

Agreed, his lore thread was a huge bonus while it was being maintained.

Well I'm offended!

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 do miss Rick Dakan. I'm not sure why he got sacked (I hear he was a good writer but a terrible project lead), but I do still appreciate all of his original lore, which to this day remains some of the best in the game. Sure, the original City of Heroes missions and arcs weren't exactly marvels of writing, but the lore behind them was so solid it could carry even a terse story through to a good conclusion. After all, I spend most of my days with the History channel going in the background, so I know the value of history retold even if it's not necessarily retold within the confines of an action-packed thrill ride. Rick's old lore was and is so good that even badly-written stories about it are still interesting, because they keep me wanting to know more.

If I had to point to one major failure of writing in City of Heroes since Rick left and, yes, since Jack left, it's that the game no longer has any "lore." It has episodic storylines that start with a contact and end with a contact, but there's no sense that there exists an actual, living, breathing world behind them that these stories were spawned from and existed in the context of. It feels, instead, like someone took 12 different books and strung them up one after the other, rather than if someone wrote 12 stories over the same fictional universe.

And it's not "just comic book writing." As a matter of fact, I may have unduly criticised the writers of this game for not knowing their lore and backstory and not caring for it, when I should have made it a point to criticise the whole game story philosophy that we don't need lore and canon, and that everything can be weaved out of wholecloth as it became necessary. You CANNOT write for a world like this unless you're willing to do research and be careful, which our writers have clearly not been, pretty much from Reichsman on.

If you want to write for a persistent fictional world, you first need to establish this persistent fictional world, or at least have a basic idea of what it's going to be like. I don't know if there's anyone left at Paragon Studios that knows that any more, since Jack apparently took the story bible with him.

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, and how much of it actually made it into the game? The factions we originally heard about, for instance, are almost entirely unlike the ones we actually got.

That's damning with faint praise, as the Phalanx characters are near-universally reviled. More to the point, the stories were complete garbage.

I dunno, some total amateurs have done a pretty good job of creating stories that seamlessly fit into the larger game world without any sort of story bible to go on. A bunch of amateurs have also done a very good job of compiling the game's lore into a reference guide. There is no excuse for the professionals to try to pass off garbage like Akarist working with Reichsman and relying on the amateurs to point out that it's wrong.

Dakan continued to create a huge amount of content for quite a while as a contractor, and many of the game's existing factions were his creations too.

You mean the stories were complete garbage to you, in your opinion.

We may be treading dangerously close to a nerdy argument on the Internet, so yeah let's agree about something, I'm puzzled over the Freedom Phalanx's characterizations. I found most of them likable in their first comic story arc involving Prometheus. Likeable from my comfortable distance as a reader, anyway. Statesman hadn't revealed himself to be so self-absorbed yet, and Manticore only seemed a bit petty about his place in the world.

Then, in the following arc ("Smoke and Mirrors")--with the exceptions of Positron and Citadel--members quickly devolved into self-absorbed, immature, high-school egomaniacs who were so distracted by each others gripes about their poor attitudes, pages flew by where the story didn't progress at all. ("It's SO hard being Sister Psyche" ... "No, Sister Psyche, if you only knew how hard it is being STATESMAN.") Manticore goes from being a grim vigilante, being willing to throw his teammates under the bus for the greater good, to being Dr. Phil, nit-picking Statesman because he's not stopping to give every upstart hero a Captain-America-like pep-talk.

I mean, seriously. We already have the X-Men comics for that.

Edit: It actually occurs to me that the Freedom Phalanx members seem more bitter in that second arc than they did in the first, despite the fact that they had all their powers back and relative peace had been restored to the city (working medi-ports, etc). Compare all this to the team of War Witch, Apex and Horus. That team had a lot more drama to be freaking out about, but they were always good about giving each other a necessary kick in the pants to keep their focus on whatever the task-at-hand was. The story was always moving forward. They just seemed more heroic.

I've done some of that, myself (but I have a policy against promoting my own Architect arcs), so I know it's doable just from what you pick up playing the game. Jack taking his story bible and running home was just a joke to illustrate how unconcerned current City of Heroes writers are with City of Heroes canon, and how often they write completely unrelated stories when a completely related alternative existed.

I'm not sure if it's because they didn't know any better (Reichsman, raise your hand) of if they just didn't care (Roy Cooling, step up to the podium, please), but what I see is an almost complete abandonment of established City of Heroes lore for some kind of "whatever you think of on the spot" approach to writing, which I HATE.

---

I've written a few longer stories, myself. I appreciate the need for a story bible, if for no reason other than so I don't forget what I called historic locations and characters. To write for a whole world without consulting one is outright irresponsible.

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.

Such as?

No. They were bad. Weak stories. Poor dialog. Wildly fluctuating power levels. Numerous plot elements that simply....



...did not make sense. War Witch torches a building through inept use of her powers, getting innocent people killed, and she gets off with "oh, my bad. Let's go punch someone." (Frostfire did the same thing except he only killed one person and they threw the book at him!) The whole "jury duty" storyline Fails Law School Forever. Kheldian lore was abused like a red-headed stepchild. That's just off the top of my head as I'm not motivated enough to subject myself to a re-reading just to complete the indictment.

Once upon a time I could tell you (I used to read the guy's blog). I know he's responsible for most, if not all, of the undead varieties you see in the game, such as the Vahzilok, Circle of Thorns and at least the minions of the Banished Pantheon. (I get the feeling you're expecting me to go research the Internet Archive and scroll through years of blog posts in order to argue my point in an Internet argument with a complete stranger.)

Well, you seem to feel very strongly about this! Good points all around, though keep in mind, comic books are full of instances like the one you describe involving War Witch. I can't tell you how many times I've seen Captain America step outside the boundaries of the law, but at the end of the day, he's still the hero. And that's fine. There's a certain level of suspension of disbelief you've got to bring to the table (if you want to remain sane) that differs from that which you'd use to scrutinize an episode of the Battlestar Galactica remake, or a hard science fiction novel by Verner Vinge or Cory Doctorow. I'm a huge hard science fiction nerd, but I put that aside when I read comic books, including those in the CoH universe, which do not stand up to much scrutiny--and weren't designed to!

Also, we're having two different arguments here. I'm nitpicking disagreeable characterizations, whereas your beef seems mostly to concern technical details, which I'm almost always willing to overlook in the comics (or in a game inspired by such). So I'm not going to say "you're wrong", it's just that I don't care if you're right.

(I think we've veered away from the Praetorian storyline, which is the topic of this thread. I'll let you get the last word in, but after that I'm done and we'll have to PM each other to go on.)

So he's responsible for three of the factions people go out of their way to avoid fighting in the low-level game?

Actually they are not. If a hero causes the death of innocents in a comic it is almost always a major plot point. This time it is handwaved away a few panels later.

The audience is required merely to suspend disbelief, not hang it by the neck until dead. N.b. that in the very next storyline, the aforementioned "jury duty" debacle, a hero is charged with murder on the grounds that a spell he cast to disrupt a cell phone inadvertently blocked another super's Medicom beacon. Murder, not manslaughter, despite the fact that there was clearly no intent, just one of the story's many mistakes. If the author is going to ask us to "suspend our disbelief" on "collateral damage" he could at least do so consistently.

If you are arguing that the Blue King characters are more likable than the Top Cow ones, I've already conceded that. My point is simply that this does not mean the Blue King ones are somehow well-done or exemplary in any way. They're just not despicable like the Top Cow series' portrayal of the Phalanx.

This. This is my problem with Praetoria as "The Current Storylline," and I could scarcely have said it better myself. It's not that Praetoria is - or at least, was - a bad setting, it's that what the game is continuing to do with it strips it of everything that made it unique and interesting.

You can't because Cap doesn't.

FIRST
Honestly, you could have picked almost any other Marvel (or DC) Hero and had a possible point, but Cap is really one of the last ones to 'step outside the law' in the manner which you are hinting at.

SECOND
Even conceding a point that a Hero (Cap or anyone) steps outside the law... and being costumed vigilantes they all skirt it anyways... So the premise is a hero bending the law in a few places in order to catch a menace to society which is too powerful for normal human law enforcement (and this is what most super hero comic book characters are doing).

That's our basic premise for your debate point. 'Stepping outside the boundaries of the law' in no way compares to involuntary manslaughter of over a dozen people.