Posi Blogs about con to the ret

After exercising what little search fu I have, I did not find another mention of this blog post by Positron.

Interesting read.
Not sure if this is the best forum section for this, but there it is.

Awesome
Thanks for sharing
I'm glad to hear Posi believes in harnessing the creative talents of the people he has on hand and not being caught up in the past.

I've never been to that site at all. I'm going to have to read it from the beginning.

That. What she said. All of it.

I would also add that tampering with "behind the scenes" continuity, so to speak, is just asking for things like Dominatrix and Tyrant's little indiscretion to happen. You end up with a much more cohesive game world if you work within the continuity rather than getting "creative."

A good story can trump a retcon. What is the point of having a super cohesive story if it is mediocre at best? The problem nowadays with comics is that there are bad stories due to retcons.

The writers do a pretty good job of balancing creativity and continuity - like the new Atlas Park content.

Thanks for the soapbox warning, Arcanaville, but a reasoned and thought out argument is always welcome.

Frankly as a long-suffering comics reader I'd have to go with the simple "don't retcon if you can rewrite". Yet the most brilliant (IMHO) comics concept of parallel universes of "Earth-1" and "Earth-2" is, itself, basically a retcon!

At some level they're going to be unavoidable, but there's no excuse for lazy writing.

At least BAB didn't show up when the Freedom Phalanx did in Alastor's arc.

But... shouldn't he be there if he's one of the sigs that could die? He's on the poster. Rather than leaving BAB out, they should be calling it "The Surviving Eight," no?

For that matter, is Numina really on the Freedom Phalanx, or has she been presumed to be since she's also part of the Surviving Eight?



It's still a mess.

Is Dr. Brainstorm and his Resonance Manipulator still canon or did that go die in a fire like it should have?

I predict that clean and well written Arcanaville post will be hacked apart and quoted out of context to demonstrate support for abolishing the Cottage Rule in two days, tops.

I24 Proc Chance = (Enhanced Recharge + Activation Time) * (Current PPM * 1.25) / 60*(1 + .75*(.15*Radius - 0.011*Radius*(360-Arc)/30))
Single Target Radius = 0. AoE Non-Cone Arc = 360.

Chiming in here to agree with Arcanaville. The number of storylines that have been mangled or abandoned because the original writers moved on is a tragedy. And she makes a very valid point that allowing retconning in story while not allowing breaking the cottage rule is arbitrary, making no sense when analyzed from that perspective.

Great stories are always welcome. Great stories that don't change what we the players "know" (at least without some heart-searching) would be better X 1000.

Cottage rule has been broken.

My stalker had a power renamed and it effects totally and completely changed.

Don't they change powers quite a lot? Or stuff like Defiance for Blasters? I know they've changed MoG a bit, and they did something with Kheldians in I21 - and they've got something different planned for Dominators in an upcoming Issue. Plus, stuff like making the Fitness pool inherent and adding a new power to the travel pools and changing the level you can get them at seem to be quite big changes too.
And the way they give out free respecs quite frequently with power changes kinda implies that the changes are big enough to make some players consider changing their power choices and slotting.

I agree with Arcanaville here. 'Cool' does not equal 'continuity change', and nor should it. The very fact that DC Comics is making a move whereby they are changing their continuity wholesale and is being met with widespread resistance from the existing audience should tell any casual observer that.

I'd add to Arcanaville's point, however: continuity from a writing point of view serves two major purposes: the first is to allow a first-time reader to be introduced to a short form of said continuity for purposes of firstly understanding that there is a larger story going on, but secondly to facilitate an anchor point in the reader's experience; and the second is to provide any writer that would work in a shared universe a grounding in the material from which to work on.

Noone reading these forums would disagree that some of the most seminal works in superhero fiction have been or were direct influences from the very continuity on which they were based. Yes, they may have expanded upon them or even deconstructed them, but the point remains that without them these stories would have no point of inspiration or reference to draw upon.

In a game, where admittedly the format is by its very nature fluid and non-static, this must also apply. A player's core anchor in a game is an understanding (however deep or shallow they wish to participate in it) of the world and type of genre in which they exist. Therefore, it's a necessity to have characters around them that inform them of the story as it stands when they first encounter it. Any character after that point that they encounter will expand upon that knowledge or present them with a viewpoint that they may have already encountered. A very obvious example here is the heroic experience of Atlas Park and the stories that this experience takes into the world of Praetoria.

Any writer who therefore comes onto the story of Praetoria would a) look to the existing continuity that's been written and b) want to expand upon or detail the information or viewpoint that has been given already. Continuity is best seen as the mortar that holds the walls of a story together; when you stand back and look at the finished structure, you can see then the process in how it came about. The new story arcs of Atlas Park in the wake of the Galaxy City disaster bear this out; by the time a player comes to a point where they've fended off villains and learned the story of Matthew Hashaby, they can then look back and see how that story has come about to its climax. None of that can be casually discarded and changed for the sake of some new idea.

The only way a new idea or a new way of looking at a continuity is by looking at the continuity itself. Continuity is by definition continuous; you can see how and why one event has come out of another. Or how an expansion or redefinition of an event has come out of the unconsidered or in some cases unthought of aspects of the original. One of the seminal comics events (if I may be so indulged) of my youth was the invention of the Nightwing character of DC Comics. It was by necessity that Dick Grayson was put into a position whereby he would no longer be the Robin character, and the writers were put in a unique situation where they could redefine and expand the character. In doing this, they made an explicit point of delving into the character's own continuity and drawing a new identity (Nightwing) from the various influences it gave. When readers saw this, it was very well-recieved and thought of as an intelligent piece of writing that not only respected the character's present tense, but also the prior history and continuity of that character whilst preserving it.

This then must be the basis for any considered change to a story in an MMO. To make a change 'just because' will leave any player scratching their heads and wondering 'why is it so?' If you cannot answer the cardinal writers questions of Who, What, When, Why, Where, and How, then the readers will know.

Positron mentions the playground of the game. In fact, the playground is a sandbox, and the sandbox is only defined by your imagination. If we didn't have imaginations, there would be no spin-off Star Trek novels. There would be no Expanded Universe for Star Wars. There would be no Justice League cartoon. By all means, look at your characters, look at your stories and ask 'what more can they do? Is there more they can do? Can I bring them to an end?' But never, ever say 'this story deserves to go. That story doesn't mean anything. That story never will.' Because then you invalidate your mortar, and the structure falls apart. At that point, your sandbox has become a jigsaw puzzle where in order to form a picture, you're willing to throw away pieces.



S.