SSA #6 Story Discussion ** SPOILERS **

As you note below the medium limits certain styles of story telling. The players character is not "permanently" killed off because doing so eliminates your audience from viewing the rest of your work. If this is Wades only known failure in chapter 5 then I would say Venture in the spirit of this debate is correct. Wade according to the evidence in chapter 5 succeeds on all fronts that the chosen medium allows for.



This is spot on. It's not this story arc but EVERY story arc that I have seen in CoH that would have my table top players feeling railroaded. The RPG in MMORPG is comparable to Table Top RPGs in the same way that Artificially flavored Orange Power drinks are comparable to an Apple.

Unless this thread is about how all CoH stories railroad people then it is unfair to compare it to another medium. Compare it, as some have, to those CoH Story Arcs you feel are good. If you don't think there are any good CoH story arcs then that suggests your problem is with the medium, not the storytelling.

I really don't see how that's relevant when the mechanics were not used in the story. The only two possible endings to that chapter are A) The player quits or 2) Ruladek is defeated. Since A) is not really playing the chapter to its conclusion, the only possible conclusion is 2), which makes any arguments about failure to kill the PC as some kind of failure on Wade's part to be moot. He CAN'T kill the PC. We have script immunity.

I think the idea was that if you go far enough back toward to origins, that there is no distinguishable difference between science and magic.

How do you know that. There appears to be no way to prove that yet, given that Wade hasn't actually revealed his entire plan yet, and may never within canon reveal all of the contingencies his plan contained.

To even begin to make the claim, you would have to demonstrate that at no time during the story line to date did anything surprise Wade, and at no time did he plan multiple contingencies that ended up being unnecessary. I would like to see such an attempt.

Whether the Well looks like a metal box or a Ming vase is irrelevant: either it functions according to scientific principles or it does not. If it does, its either Science or Technology. If it does not, its Magic.

By definition, if you can't explain it with Science, its Magic. If you can't explain it with Magic, its Magic you haven't learned yet.

Imagine if this game allowed players to select if their character was human, or non-human. And then one day a writer said that there was a third type of character that was neither human nor non-human, but beyond both. That would be a fanciful notion that also unfortunately pointed to functional illiteracy.

Back when Babylon 5 was in its original run, its maker was on Usenet corresponding with the fans on a daily basis. Once, while discussing something that had gone wrong, he interrupted himself to say (paraphrasing from memory) "I'm telling you guys this stuff not to make excuses, just to educate you into how these shows are made. Something I learned back in my theater days is that the audience only sees the play that's in front of them. They don't know that you're hung over from the pre-opening night party, or that your costume is torn in back so you can't turn around, or that someone forgot to put out a prop so now your next line doesn't make any sense. They just see the play, and that's the way it should be."

I don't have to deal with unpublished background material, or anything that ended up on the cutting room floor, or any of these absurd after-the-fact rationalizations or apologetics. I only have to address the story as it was given to us. What we've been given is a god-moding Villain Sue on the one hand and a bunch of people with a massive case of Plot Induced Stupidity on the other. If you have to write a second story to explain the problems with the first one, the first one failed. Likewise if the story was not sufficiently entertaining to keep the audience from noticing the sketchy bits.

Oh, and just as an addendum, revealing that Wade had scores of contingency plans would only make it worse.

I like the theory there


But yeah, I think and agree that it has to be something like that....


Or maybe now that Sister Psy. is in Wade's mind; Manticore can get into Wade's mind because of the whole "love psychic connection" thing that lovers share (Cyclops & Jean Grey in the 90s X-Men cartoon, etc...).

So.....yeah...

You would be referring to something akin to Big Gold.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight!_Iczer_One

If so, then either everything is science or everything is magic. Either option is a fail if the setting was intended to include both.

Don't get me started on that one. My particular peeve with that arc is that it casually lumps in Natural with the other origins and effectively says: "Yeah, so you know how you thought you were a normal human that through hard work and determination did great deeds? Tuns out you're not, and you're getting some mystic power that makes you do that. Have a nice day!"

I guess that means Wade could turn the obelisk on a Natural character and steal their motivation to train for 8 hours a day.

So, stepping sideways a bit, is the Power Cosmic magic or science?

I don't think writers are limited to a false dichotomy of "either/or" here I also recall a discussion in which you argued that magic must be systematic in a manner similar to science - there was a bit of a quip about finding a stone with every possible spell engraved on it, ending with an apology.

Well, uh, my natural tanker can naturally coat her body in ice and naturally cover her fists in stone or conjure a stone hammer out of the air, so, hmm.

She can also naturally throw fireballs.

You... don't read a lot of comic books do you? Most "science" in comics (such as turning into giant green monsters after being bombarded by gamma rays or gaining superspeed after being bathed in chemicals hit by lightning) outright break the known laws of physics in the real world.

By your definition, everything in comic books is "magic" and I'm pretty sure folks like Reed Richards or Lex Luthor would disagree with you.

True, it's fantasy science but that doesn't make it magic, it just makes it Did Not Do the Research, Didn't Care, and Rule of Cool.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

I wasn't counting the stretches of "Natural" that some players use.

Or Natural to cover things like aliens from other planets who naturally have powers when exposed to our yellow sun...

I've even debated it myself for entities such as angelic beings or dragons. In some of those cases it's a toss up of Magic or Natural is more appropriate.

What I'm talking about is the large swath of Natural characters who really are nothing special. An Assault Rifle or Archery/Devices blaster for example, who is only slightly less squishy than a non-powered human. A case can probably be made for martial arts and street justice using characters, even if game mechanics make them a little unrealistic, they're supposed to be able to be played as normal people who are just in really good shape.

It's those who the Origin of Power arc fails hard for.

"Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced." - Gregory Benford

Said character isn't a stretch of the idea of comic book "natural." I actually have a good origin/explanation as to how it worked for her, and it was a deliberate attempt to stretch the definition. In this case, it was a riff on the kind of origin stories that super martial artists tend to have, although in her case she achieved through training and meditation the power to "emulate" a mountain.

Even those superheroes who don't have such stretched definitions tend to exceed normal human capabilities (Batman is an example here). In the past, in my own games (tabletop RPG) I tended to go with the idea that there was a level of human potential that basically existed so exceptional people could be more exceptional. It was just how people worked, or rather potentially worked. Someone like Batman would technically be superhuman, but isn't because the idea of "humanity" encompasses someone who pushes beyond normal human limits for the sake of an ideal, or a mission, or whatever.

In that regard, the Well makes sense to me as what it is intended to be, which is a level of potential that truly extraordinary people can access. Of course, the game didn't need to say explicitly that everyone who's a superhero or supervillain is already accessing the Well.

"Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." - Larry Niven

"Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those that don't understand it." - Florence Ambrose

http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff300/fv00255.htm

Now, as far as Magic vs Science goes, I would like to point out something mentioned in one of the Valdamar books. Magic follows laws. If it did not, then it would be impossible to cast spells and get the outcome you expect. It has rules, laws, and patterns, just like science. So, where do you really draw the line?

"Any technologically advanced primates are sufficiently distinguished through magic." - Guy Perfect

Along that line of thinking, I find that works of fiction where the laws of magic have been clearly defined by the author tend to be the best. Even if the reader never finds out exactly what they are, and regardless of what said rules may be, it's the consistent application of them by the author that makes the work believable.

I would have thought it was obvious that when talking about fictional worlds, I would be talking about the science within those worlds.


The Power Cosmic has been treated differently by different writers, but mostly its been treated as a force in the universe which obeys normal scientific laws, even if they are laws that are different in that universe than the real one. Doctor Doom (among others) has used purely scientific and technological processes to tap the power cosmic in the past, which means it obeys scientific and technological principles.

I don't recall the discussion you reference there, but in most of the mainstream comics magic obeys its own laws. It generally *has* laws but they in critical ways are completely incompatible with normal science. Or else they would actually *be* science.

The dichotomy isn't false if its embedded in the definitions. Magic is generally defined to be that which is permanently beyond the reach of scientific principles to be able to explain. For there to be two different things beyond Science, their definitions would have to allow that.

The problem here is that the origins themselves in the game are expansive, not restrictive. The devs have made no attempt to redefine magic as something specific and not all emcompassing beyond science and technology: in fact they specifically *repudiate* such attempts at restrictive definitions of origins. But you cannot have it both ways. The only way for there to be a rational heirarchy of magic is for that heirarchy to have some structure to hold it up. Amorphous magic and more-magic simply isn't coherent.

Or to put it more directly, so long as Origin is some trivial non-entity, the devs can handwave away the fact that the origins themselves are extremely poorly and expansively *and* intrusively (with each other) defined. Doesn't matter much. But you cannot handwave away the structure of origins and then base a story arc upon the structure you continue to handwave away. In other words, you cannot say "origins are a little funky and ill-defined, but that's ok because we want players to have many options for interpretation, oh, but by the way they have a structure in which they are interrelated in an important way that has a similarly ill-defined source which somehow creates those five things we haven't defined."

No, No, No. I mean its obvious its physically possible, because the writers did it. But not even giant foam #1 hands can generate that magnitude of hand wave.

The way I describe Origin of Power is: it makes just enough sense to be talked about, but not enough sense to be thought about.

I don't think they wanted you to think about it, I think they just wanted you to continue being free with whatever concept you had in mind.

I don't know that it fails *worse* for them. I believe the canonical implication is that while anyone can pick up a gun and try to fight crime, most of them get gunned down in the street. There is something *special* about the heroes who *apparently* use nothing but natural means to be superheroic: call it luck, call it Ferris Bueller Syndrome, call it The Jazz. Something makes those people "just work" and its something deep within the way the universe works that creates such people.

The character of John Constantine was said to possess, and claimed to be able to control, a quintessential aspect of the universe called "synchronicity" which allowed him to subconsciously know the right place to be and the right things to do to have a huge impact on the world. Nearly everything he did wasn't ascribable to magic as such: he didn't have magical powers (most of the time) and he rarely used magical forces directly.

In The Books of Magic he shows up to save Tim Hunter and Zatanna from a club full of magical beings that were going to capture or kill Hunter. He shows up and basically tells them he's going to take the two of them and leave, and dares any of them to stop him. Which they all decide not to. When they leave Zatanna tells John that he has no magical powers and any one of them could have killed him easily, and wonders how he did that. John simply says that *is* his power. He says "stop me if you can" and they all run away, because they were all thinking the same thing: if he has the balls to do that, he must be more dangerous than they think. Which is his power: he knew the right thing to say, and it works - for him. It wouldn't for anyone else.

You could argue that riding synchronicity is a natural ability: its definitely not science, mutation, or technology. Its either magical or natural, but here no magical process occurs. John's weapons are sarcasm, bravado, psychology, and a little knowledge about forces beyond his actual control, and with those very mundane weapons he's taken down some of the most powerful beings in his universe.

Somehow, an analogous thing happens in the City of Heroes universe. Some beings armed with a gun and a utility belt of devices take down Cthulu. John Constantine has done it with a knife, some candles, and his middle finder.

Origin of Power implies there's some "thing" that makes this possible, but doesn't elaborate on it. But to be honest, the same conclusion was reachable *before* Origin of Power, so I don't know what it adds either.

"Any sufficiently advanced aliens are indistinguishable from God." - Michael Shermer