The Well, Praetoria, and Incarnates; Problems with Writing?

The more I think about this thread, the more it occurs to me that objections to the Well's characterization/definition, and the storytelling surrounding it, come mostly from people trying to treat this game like a legitimate RPG. Except that it really isn't (no MMORPG is). It is, at best, a slightly interactive animated comic book, written by the devs who have left places for us to plug in our avatars and controls for us to choose attack animations and fx during appropriate moments. But make no mistake, our actions have no long-term peristent impact. We actually have no meaningful agency in the game world because there are no persistent effects that we can claim to be the cause of. If Nightstar and Siege are "permenantly" removed from the story, it isn't because we the players chose that outcome, it is because the devs made that the incontrovertible outcome of "succeeding" the BAF, and there are no other possible consequences or outcomes available as success vectors.

Consequently, I have come to realize that I will either like or dislike the storylines as fed to me by the devs, much like any comic book out there, and that I am ultimately a passive participant, relegated to the role of illustrator for a script written by others and for which I have no real input (proof of this is that every story arc plays out the same way no matter what AT or powerset I play and no matter what backstory I might imagine for my character). That's why the most satisfaction I get is from making a costume I really enjoy watching, with power effects/animations I enjoy watching, because my selections of those things (along with their color, to a limited degree) are the only things I have any substantial control over. None of us are really playing "characters" so much as we are driving game sprites, albeit somewhat sophisticated 3D sprites. Speaking in character with other players is about as far as the "roleplaying" can ever really get, but roleplaying and roleplay gaming are not the same thing (the former is but a single aspect of the latter).

Trying to invent a whole bunch of personal character lore that can fit within the CoX canon, and remain valid and uncontradicted by future changes, just seems like a huge waste of time to me. Particularly since not a single thing I might write into my character's backstory will have a single iota of impact on game outcomes.

But let me be clear about one thing: I do not need CoX to function as an RPG in order to enjoy it. If that weren't the case, I would have given up on it back in 2004 after the first 30 days of play. Its ability to deliver the passive, pseudo-interactive animated comic book experience has been enough to keep me addicted, on and off, for many years. I just don't fool myself into thinking I'm going to get an RPG experience from it, and consequently I don't have any unrealistic expectations about what the game can and will deliver. Everyone upset about the Well, the Incarnate storyline, or any storyline for that matter, and how it knocks over the apple cart of their characters' elaborately consctructed backstories (or in-game meta-narratives) are, to my mind, suffering from mismatched expectations.

TL;DR
Don't expect CoX to deliver a vehicle for roleplay gaming in which you have any genuine control over anything resembling "story", because the presence of "RPG" in the MMORPG label is as profoundly misleading as it is oversimplistic. You may be better off just treating it as a pseudo-interactive animated comic book, like I do, and leave any other more elaborate ambitions/expectations at the door.

The game delivered on those expectations for eight years before the Well came along. Just because you, personally, never had them doesn't mean they aren't valid and legitimate expectations to have. Some of us can, in fact, create characters under a certain amount of creative restriction and we can actually tell interesting stories with them even without direct control of the game world. Characters make a story, and if you can't tell two different stories wherein the exact same literal changes to the gameworld end up happening, then you're not very good at stories.

Also, this has been irritating me. Reductio ad Absurdum means proving an argument false by showing that it leads to an absurd conclusion. For example, if someone makes the argument "raising taxes always increases tax income and is therefore always in the government's best interests," you can reduce it to the absurd by pointing out that raising taxes to 100% would cause the entire economy to collapse because no one could actually get paid to do anything, therefore no one would work for money and there would be no income for the government to tax, therefore there must be some point at which raising taxes stops increasing total tax revenue.

On the other hand, if Alice says "raising taxes will help increase tax income in this specific situation" and Bob responds by saying "but that would mean raising taxes to 100% would be a good idea when it's not," that's a Strawman Argument. Alice never said that raising taxes would always be a good idea, just that it would be a good idea in the specific case being discussed.

Know the difference. It could save your life.

If you want to get into semantic details, prior to the Well players had total control over their own origin stories and power sources, prior to dialogue being worked into text boxes players had total control over their character's responses, and etc. The fact that the ability to change undetermined things never gave anyone the ability to change determined things has nothing to do with the fact that players had the freedom to determine it themselves. Now I know it's hard, Wing Leader, but try and respond with something other than a disingenuous rant about how creativity of any kind is just impossible if you aren't playing tabletop thinly disguised as a semantic argument.

To add to my post above, I believe that there are two aspects to consider when we bring up the Well of the Furies.

The Concept of the Well: The Well is the equivalent of "the Achievement Force" that is not unlike the Speed Force in DC continuity. Every species that reaches some type of breakout capacity develops one and each behaves like the Force of Gravity or Electromagnetism in the CoX universe. As such, it is "a power source" but not "the source of ALL power". By simply being Human, you are drawing power from it, which separates humanity from other animals, even if you are not drawing "Powers" from it. It seems that the Well, like the gods of the CoX universe, gains power through Human Perception but draws this power in respect of Humanity's ability to perceive and imagine in general rather than how the gods of the CoX universe gain power based on the number of followers and how far those followers believe a particular god's limits can reach.

The "Personality" of the Well: This is the personality of the Well itself and is distinct from the concept of the well as a Force in that it can choose direct "extra" power from the Force into those it chooses. Should they accept, it grants them the capability of defying the limits of the physical universe. This personality does not actually control the Potential of Humanity but rather behaves just like the Human Body in that it has voluntary control only over certain parts of itself. The Personality is also influenced by human thought, which changes over the course of generations and also goes into hibernation for centuries at a time for reasons unknown. In other words, the Personality is like our own consciousness - it is subject to restrictions and involuntary systems that maintain itself and the Force of Potential it is derived from.

So if you want to use this to your advantage to bypass the Well of the Furies in your character's list of powers, consider this:

The Flash - Draws power from the Speed Force.

Superman - Can fly almost as fast as the Flash can run, to the point where the difference in speed is insignificant. However, Superman draws power from the fact that his body is a solar radiation battery. He has never to my memory had any affiliation with the Speed Force as a power source, although like every being that has motion in the DC Universe he is connected to it in some way.

Oh, boy... Please understand that while I may use rude language below, I mean you no disrespect personally.

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Originally Posted by Wing_Leader Maybe it is all just semantics, but I'm not sure how anyone can have freedom without some measure of control.

Then you need to look harder. You seem to see freedom and control as two sides of the same equation, where both need to be balanced against each other. You can't have freedom without the control to forge the path for that freedom to take, as it were. That is simply not true.

Ruthless Samael actually put it the best, I think - our ability to redefine things that are defined for us has nothing at all to do with our ability to define for ourselves things that were never defined in the first place. As far as I'm concerned, making the game so very specific is what's robbing us of our freedom by making us have to have control, where this was never needed before.

I'll give you an example - if I want to claim that my character is a French secret operative working in Paragon City on joint assignment, I can. Why? Because there simply is nothing said in the game about France, so I'm free to assume that still exists. I don't need control over canon of any sort to do this. So I make this character, play her for six years and then it's revealed that France ceased to exist in 2002 when the Rikti bombed Europe into the stone age and then the place was rebuilt as a single, unified state. Oops! Well, NOW I need control over canon just to enjoy the freedom I used to before, and it's a freedom I used to enjoy without needing to control anything but my own actions to achieve.

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Originally Posted by Wing_Leader A common complaint I'm reading is that players playing redside never feel like villains because they don't have the freedom to act like villains, which to my eyes reads like they don't have enough control over what sorts of activities their characters engage in with regards to missions and the greater relationship they have with the game world as a whole (i.e., "We can either be lackies or anti-heroes who begrudgingly collaborate with heroes.").

Then you've misread the complaint entirely. No-one's asking about "the freedom to act like a villain" because no-one can give a clear definition of what "a villain" constitutes. Since the day CoV went into Beta, I've been having the same argument with people who feel that being a villain means murdering civilians for sport. Villainy is too broad a concept to pigeon-hole into any one subsection and have it stick, so what people have been asking for is variety in the tasks given. Give us tasks where we work for ourselves, tasks where we're lackeys for others, tasks where we pursue insane global agendas, tasks where we're just out for money and tasks where we kick puppies for giggles. Give us a broad variety of tasks like this, then let people pick what they do. Or don't give us a wide variety and simply give us a collection of rather generic missions that we can re-interpret as we see fit.

Neither of these requires control over canon. So I can't kill Arbiter Daos when he asks me to betray Ghost Widow. Fair enough. Then give me a reason to betray her that's not "Because Daos said so." So I can't have my own evil empire. Fair enough. That doesn't mean you can't give me missions where I try to build one. Dean McArthur and Leonard have a great arc in this regard, and I wish to see more like it.

But that's not what we're getting recently. Instead, what we're getting is a very specific vision of what a villain would be, and it's not a villain I enjoy. It's the stupid, brutish thug just out for the money, but who will help out against a greater foe. Run the Dr. Graves arc some time and note the kind of words I'm forced to say, and the size of idiot I'm being forced to be. Why was this necessary? Why was it necessary to put words in my mouth when they KNOW these words won't fit all but a small subsection of villains? Why not go with something less-defined and more open to interpretation? Instead of "I have a mental time bomb!" why could my line of dialogue be "Tell the Dean what Dollface told you." Sure, it's still stupid, but I can at least sell the mind control without coming off like Blond and Blonder in the process.

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Originally Posted by Wing_Leader A hero can't decide to kill a villainous threat even if that suits "their story" better, and the fact that said villain appears later on in the story arc or in another mission chain makes the so-called freedom to solve matters in the character's own way a massive exercise in ignoring the content and "rewriting" it in one's own mind.

I have no idea what you're talking about. If my character were a vigilante who'd murder people instead of arresting them... There are plenty of Vigilante tip missions to do that have just that in them. Problem solved! Again, it's stupid to go into a specific piece of content that doesn't fit your character and complain it doesn't fit your character when you can simply not do it and choose one that fits, instead. The problem arises when that's not an option because the piece of content which doesn't fit is the bottleneck through which you HAVE to pass if you want to progress.

Let's go back to Stardiver. Stardiver cannot speak. At all. The only way she can communicate with people is through basic emoticons like O_o and ^_^ and Q_Q. So when I went to run Keith Nancy's arc just because I enjoy fighting my double and was presented with a dialogue tree, I closed the window and went to pick a different story arc to run, instead. I didn't have to rewrite anything in my head, I just picked another story which did not ask me to converse. I needed no control over canon to do this, just control over my own actions. And I didn't even need to rewrite anything in my head. I simply picked an arc where what's on the screen matches what's in my head. Again - problem solved.

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Originally Posted by Wing_Leader It seems to me that the only meaningful way to exercise the freedom necessary to make the game feel like I'm experiencing MY stories for MY characters is if I have enough control over the environment to make choices that potentially alter the game world in ways no fixed story line could ever hope to accommodate.

And you're simply wrong in that assertion. You don't need to control canon in order to have choice, unless you're unrelentingly stubborn. And speaking as an unrelentingly stubborn kind of person, I have to say you exaggerate. I played through Mass Effect, for instance, and was very clear that the whole story is scripted from beginning to end, where my actions only change specific cutscenes here and there. This becomes quite obvious when you realise your choice of response a lot of the time range from "No, but thank you for asking." to "No, not really." to "Not just no, but HELL NO! Eat **** and die!" It's all variations of refusing, so the plot is still written for you, but you can still define WHO your character is by choosing HOW you make that decision.

You ask for control that's not necessary for freedom to discount freedom as impossible because it's impossible to have the kind of control that's not necessary to have. That's almost a textbook definition of a straw man. And again - I'm not saying you're malicious about it, but intentionally or unwittingly, you ARE creating a straw man.

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Originally Posted by Wing_Leader Armed with that sort of control (freedom?) the game would actually function as an RPG for me, not just a combat simulator with attached story rails that we ride along to give us a vaguely relevant explanation for the next fight sequence.

Freedom and control are not the same thing. I don't know if you're American or not, but if you are, I dare say your constitution and your declaration of independence might have something to say about trying to tie the two together. As a point of fact, trying to use the two words interchangeably is starting to become irritating, bordering on offensive. Please, never do that again.

Moreover, this what at you're doing here is an even more massive straw man. You paint City of Heroes in the same light as something like Virtua Cop, and you couldn't be farther away from the truth. Neither City of Heroes nor City of Villains nor indeed Praetoria are exactly "on rails." None of these sides of the game have a storyLINE, they have a storyplane. What this game's story constitutes is a lattice of different storylines going in different directions, crossing over under and around each other, converging and diverging and presenting what is, for all intents and purposes, a large persistent world that has no one set, mandatory line of progression.

As a point of fact, what you criticise the game for - being on rails - is precisely what I criticise the newer storywriting approach for, because it wasn't always like this, and it never needed to be like this. Pick any of the legacy Launch contacts and try to tell me which storyline they're part of. Unless you cheat on your notes, you won't find an answer to this question, because there IS no answer to this question. Things are happening in places all over the city, and by picking specific story arcs, you get a specific view of specific events, but there is no one overarching storyline. You can build a bigger picture of the fictional world, but this is an entity with depth and breadth, not a mere linear story.

I could, for instance, level up to 50 and never know who the Sky Raiders are, just because the path I took through the story lattice didn't take me across the specific storylines that they're involved with. Or I could level up to 50 and deal with the Sky Raiders nearly all the damn time, even when I'm far out of their level range, but completely miss anything to do with the Rikti, to the point where the Rikti war may as well have been ancient history. And the best thing is... I can pick my own path, and chart it such that I avoid all the things I hate and hit most of the things that make sense for the character. AND not repeat too much, to boot.

That's not a rail shooter, not even close. I'm not sure if you're insisting it is out of spite or if you're genuinely incapable of seeing it as anything more, but it's not a rail shooter. Maybe that's how you see it, and that's fine, but I take slight when you tell me I shouldn't be able to see it as anything more, and if I do, I'm somehow wrong, which is what I get out of your continued insistence on presenting freedom and control as being the same thing.

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Originally Posted by Wing_Leader Some new MMOs are offering a taste of this sort of freedom (control?), and they may very well feel more like an RPG than anything that has come before as a result. The sense that your character's story really is your character's story, and not just someone else's story with your avatar Mad Libbed into the blank spots, would be genuine and not so contrived.

They don't. I've played through story-driven MMOs and story-driven RPGs, and the fact of the matter is they offer significantly LESS freedom than City of Heroes does on a bad day. Much as I may like Mass Effect, I can only ever play one version of Shepard, because I can only ever play through one set linear story, and the Shepard I invented is the only one that I would like to see run through that story. City of Heroes doesn't have one set story, so I can make a nearly limitless number of characters, because I can fit that characters' experiences to the concept I had in mind, instead of trying to fit the concept to the set experience. It's the same reason that, much as I love Saints Row: The Third, I'm only ever going to have one character in it, because that's my interpretation of what character makes sense to do and say the things the game has me do and say.

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Originally Posted by Wing_Leader Maybe this is where the line divides between being "the star" and being "a guest star", as you've put it. I've never played an RPG in order to be a glorified NPC in someone else's story. That sort of game where it feels like no matter what your character would actually do (or tries to do), the outcome always seem to be whatever the GM had in mind all along, is no RPG at all.

So? I didn't come here to look for a GM-driven RPG. I came here for a loosely-defined setting that lets me create a wide variety of characters, a "sand box," if you will, to which I can bring my own toys and play with them for a while. City of Heroes is not D&D, and I don't want it to be. To me, City of Heroes represents freedom. The freedom to create, the freedom to imagine... The freedom of inspiration. I don't need other people or the game to acknowledge my inspiration. I just want them to keep out of my way.

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Originally Posted by Wing_Leader And no, I've never engaged in fan fiction. The likelihood of conflicting with canon, both past (unintentionally) and future (out of one's control) are too great to make it worth while to me. The common solution of reducing the scope of one's stories so that they never come into potentially conflicting contact with the main storylines (and characters), is unappealing to me.

While I can respect that attitude, you seem to be foisting it on everyone else here in this thread. I HAVE written fanfiction, myself, and it's a past time I enjoy greatly. To me, it's an expression of my love for the source material, which I know in depth and which I would like to expand on. To me, that's simply a fun aside.

What would happen if I brought Samuel Tow over to the Chunin Exam and had him fight Orochimaru? Hmm... Well, first of all, how would that transfer happen? Well, I brought Sam to City of Heroes, which has dimensional travel, so let's just say that that takes place in another dimension. OK, that'll work. What about power levels? Well... That's not nearly as easy to explain, and it depends on what kind of story I'm looking to tell, doesn't it? What about continuity? Meh, I can fit that in somewhere where it doesn't interfere. Why bother? Why the hell not?

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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.

Wow. I sort of feel like DareDevil watching the Hulk and the Thing as they level a number of city blocks... I dunno if I should poke my face in this.

One thing that stands out about CoH is that the Devs take notice more than those in any other comparable venue, and they really try to do the right thing whenever they can. There are many wonderful things now in the game because of this, and a few things that got 86'd upon request as well. I am a piker as a Beta Tester or an RPer or an altoholic, so I am not up-to-the-second on lore or what is around the corner. I have watched with interest the reports Sylph has brought out from apparent developments in the lore that are now on the Beta server.

It appears that the Well may be taking a step back and becoming "A" source of power as opposed to "THE", and that it will be much like an automotive battery that absorbs power and supplies power at the same time to and from all the denizens of Earth, of whatever sort they are, native or alien, flesh or machine, etc. The Well may also be taking a step back from being fully sentient into being an intricately programmed sort of computer intelligence, as it were, that appears from its actions to have sentience because it responds to events as complexly as it does. It also appears that they are tossing Mender Ramiel under the proverbial bus and also making the Well "A" source of being "Incarnate" as opposed to "THE." Should that be the case, the Devs are doing a great thing, and sorry about that Mender Ramiel.

All of that is what I am deciphering from Sylph's reports, the remarks of others and the tremendous epic dialogue in progress with Samuel Tow. I could be mistaken. And what appears on the Live servers may not be the same when it gets there. But if true, this is Very Good News.

If this is all correct, I will spot the Devs a good measure of leeway to bring these changes about. A tremendous sticking point has been the Well's seizing of Statesman and making him talk like a sock puppet, combined with the Well's sentience and apparent insanity. While this is not quite "You said Darth Vader betrayed and murdered my father" territory, let's face it, Lucy, someone's got some 'splainin' to do. I am prepared to do a TREMENDOUS amount of winking if the Devs are fixing this and the crippling implications that have flowed from it. If I may indulge in an anaology in this regard: If the placque under the statue of Atlas needs to change how it reads yet again, I will happily be a good Orwellian and say that we have ALWAYS been at war with Oceania and the placque has always read as it now does.

And to come back full circle, if the Devs make the changes it seems they are, the Hulk and the Thing will realize they are now on the same side and will go off happily together to beat up the Kingpin and the Rhino.