Plot vs. Storytelling

I agree. I've done Posi 1 and 2 about 10 times and I still have no real idea what the story is. Why are the clockwork trying to blow up the dam? What are the CoT doing involved at all? What does Vahz's plan to make the world a better place have to do with the dam?

The arcs look cool and are fun, but there is no story that I get as a player in a team.

What more did we know of GW at that point than we did of Statesman?

Nothing more than she was a Ghost.

Let's not pretend there's been a whole lot of GW characterization out there.

We didn't. And Seer Marino's arc established her as an interesting character.

Now let's look at Praetor Duncan's arc. What did we know about her before that? She's Tyrant's granddaughter, she killed her mother, and she takes advantage of Anti-matter's obsession with her. Quite a bit more to build on than we had with GW, and yet her arc manages to make her into alternately a bratty airhead, and Generic Contact #34092.

So tell me, why should I care what happens to her?

Are we talking about her DA arc?

You seem to have misunderstood what I was going for. As I said in my original plot, you CAN have a story with too little plot in it, and something like the Hollows or Striga that just gives you random, unconnected events and pretends it's a story is a good example of this. A logical progression of events is still necessary.

However, what you describe as good I cannot agree with. Crafting scenes as the plot "demands" it is known as writing yourself into a corner, in the sense that you tie your own hands and are forced to invent events for the sole purpose of making your own plot make sense. This is almost universally bad for a story because it robs the writer of options and forces a plot development that's probably not going to be idea, all because that's the only thing that could happen with the given situation, logically speaking.

As far as I'm concerned, allowing fictional events to dictate your plot is a mistake. Certainly it should look to the audience like events mandate actions and actions produce further events, but the actual writer should not be bound to this. A good story is a subject of creativity and inventiveness, and the writer really needs to have the freedom to chart his own plot. I'm obviously not talking about creating stories that make no sense, but more so that plots should really not be written such that only a scant few possibilities are even logical at any one point.

Moreover, a story that's ostensibly "about" making sense of a sequence of events and keeping them straight doesn't really have much of anything to keep the audience invested. Even a plot-driven story like a murder mystery still needs hooks for the audience, things to get invested about and care for. Even something as largely un-theatric as a documentary walks that same line, where you can retell a real event in both a very boring and a very exciting way. Let's say you're watching a documentary about a major disaster. A bad one will simply list events as they happened in a neat timeline in a way that's almost apathetic of the tragedy that occurred. A good one will set a mood and exploit it by bringing in actual survivors of the event to tell their own stories. Survivors and eyewitnesses in documentaries are never really there to provide exposition - a narrator can usually do it better. What they're there for is to provide emotion and to give the audience someone to care about and root for as the story progresses.

You can have a good story that doesn't have that much plot and doesn't do that much with it. Look at the original Matrix movie. You'd think that's plot-heavy, but it really isn't. At almost no point does the need arise to get a specific character to a specific place so something can happen to that character. Moreover, much of the universe canon doesn't create plot points so much as it's used to present the setting and set the tone. Certainly, events follow a logical progression and character actions are based on what the plot provides, but the actual plot of the story that move has to offer is not that complex: Get Neo to the real world -> Get Neo to the Oracle -> Get Neo to Morpheus -> Get Neo to the final boss fight.

The plot to the Matrix is essentially a video game that revolves around dragging the protagonist through several set pieces. What has made the movie as popular as it is, though, is the way in which this story is told and the way in which the canon around it is used. Character development for both the good guys and the bad guys (there's a reason Agent Smith is so popular), establishing the theme of the world, even dealing with what until the sequels might have been a supernatural element. It's not about a labyrinthine complex impenetrable plot, it's about the way in which a rather very simplistic plot is told.

I don't consider involving a signature character to be a good thing or a bad thing. It's just a thing. A tool to use in the creation of a story. You can use it well, as Ghost Widow is in Pia's story. There, the signature character is one that's been built up as big and important, and as such brings an air of awe and trepidation to the story. You can, however, use signature characters terribly poorly, when you bring them into a story to use as incidental cannon fodder, serving as icons of what they represent, rather than as examples of the people they actually are.

What I'm saying is that using a signature character is a good thing when used as a character, but not so much when said character is used as a thing or a plot device. This is kind of why I dislike stories with "too much plot" - a lot of characters don't get the chance to act like actual people and have story arcs and such. They're needed for the plot, and as such become little more than plot devices - little more than objects. Few better examples of this exist than "that woman" in Men in Black 2. She's not a character, she has no character arc, she barely has a personality and she just exists to be a "thing" the plot revolves around and that other characters can have a response to.

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.

Before meeting Ghost Widow in person, we know:

How she died, in gruesome and unpleasant details via the surveillance tape, which gives us the pathos of the Wretch.

How she returned, what her relationship is with the Wretch and why she's in Reclue's inner circle.

What type of ghost she is, including what keeps her here and what her possible motivation and personality might be.

If you run the Veluta Lunata mission: That Ghost Widow has a controlling, sadistic streak.

If you listen to people's conversations: That's she's incredible dangerous and prone to causal violence against people who mock her.

We know she has her own tower separate from the rest of the island's Arachnos compound, with a single Drone guarding the door that's apparently NOT under Arbiter control.

Between that one story and the random trivia before it shows up, we know enough to give Ghost Widow a personality, and one that's not that common in the game. That's a LOT more than we know about most of the characters in, say, SSA1 before we meet them, or indeed by the end. The request about involving signature characters in storyline was made with the intention to give them more exposure and introduce them to people. Using them on first appearance as though we're well familiar with them is why I find the SSA1s don't really benefit from using signature characters.

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.

Perhaps not entirely related, but this made me think of an important story point regarding signature characters: If a signature character acts counter to their (described) personality every time you meet them (perhaps for very good story-related reasons), you're really just confusing people. A signature character should represent what the writer wants them to be most of the time, for any aberrant behaviour to have any significant impact.

This is also my main grief with the whole concept of co-op "villains saving the world again" thing. I don't mind the idea of it. It can make for a fine story twist. But if every story revolves around villains acting like heroes, the whole plot twist, that could have worked quite well, becomes entirely meaningless.

As it is, the overall story in CoH is rapidly moving towards the perfect co-op moment between heroes and villains: the Battalion. And we're already sick and tired of that particular story 'twist'. I think that's a darn shame.

In short: Characters (PCs and NPCs alike) should occasionally have the opportunity to go 'against their nature'. But that only makes sense if there's enough in-game story to establish that nature in the first place.

I guess we'll just have to disagree here, Sam. What we're looking at is someone telling the writer that "this, this and this needs to happen, this NPC needs to take part in it, this NPC needs to die halfway, this NPC needs to kill that NPC, this powerset needs to be introduced and these map textures need to be used - now come up with a plot to tie all that together." I seldom like how these kind of stories come out, because more often than not the plot (assuming I understood your definitions of story, plot and storytelling) ends up full of holes, forces characters (including PCs) to do atypical actions, and ultimately funnels the conclusion of a branched story into an undesireable outcome for at least one path (usually villains, who always end up roped into saving the world...). If the storytelling (again, assuming I understood your meaning) appeals to the player, you might enjoy it nonetheless, but once you sit back and think about all the plot-holes and out-of-character actions that took place, you'll either dismiss the story as goofy (killing all the emotional attachment it might have had when you first played it) or feel cheated and start disliking it altogether.

It's often said that writers lose control of their stories if they're not careful, but that only happens to good writers who respect the rules they themselves created - because they refuse to allow established characters to suddenly bend their personalities just to accomodate the direction you intend them to go. Good writers have enormous power to alter the direction of their stories, but to actually direct a story "carrot-on-a-stick" style they have to accurately predict every consequence of every plot they set into place - and certain plots are so inconspicuous that their effects are only felt much later in the story, meaning plot decisions can come back to haunt you when you least expect them. Bad writers just make free use of the idiot-ball and suspension of disbelif - whoops, let's all pretend that didn't happen, alright? Good writers either follow Walter of Chatton's anti-razor advice and keep adding variables until the story heads back into course - or they let the story evolve to its natural conclusion.

A perfect example of a terrible plot spoiling a story? Mass Effect 3. The writer was told in advance that 3 things needed to happen - Shepard needed to die (artistic integrity), the Normandy and its crew needed to survive (marketing demanded it so they could keep selling DLCs), and some big plot revelation needed to happen at the end (because the masses are suckers for plot-twists). Had the writer allowed her own integrity to supercede her bosses' demands, she'd have realized that Shepard would never bend over to the Reapers after that pathetic explanation, that the Normandy would have never turned tail and run away from the last battle, and that introducing the AI kid at the end without making it seem like he was pulled out of a hat would have required some sort of foreshadowing in the previous games. IMO, good storytelling, terrible plot, bad story.

P.S. Sam, I'm not saying you aren't right in demanding better storytelling - just saying it shouldn't be at the cost of a well-planned plot.