If you haven't looked at the new Skulls, please do.

... says the guy who looks like Criss Angel and Billy Joe Armstrong had a baby.

Another one also says "why you dress so crazy?" while wearing a human skull as a mask

I don't want to put the blame specifically on Matt, but I DO believe that the problem is that they don't have a Ree Soesbee on staff; a professional writer whose sole job is to curate the story and expand it (and in the case of Ree is someone with experience at producing episodic content). It seems like they have sort of a communal understanding of the lore, not unlike a sort of virtual Wikipedia, story bible notwithstanding. Nobody really appears to have the job of editing anyone's work.

It's a little worse than that.

Direct quote from Matt Miller's professional blog, entry dated September 19 of last year:

I spoke out against the practice at his blog, and I am still against it. Anyone who cannot write within an established lore that is as flexible as the CoH background story, expand on it, and enrich it is, quite frankly, a hack who needs more education and practice in writing before they attempt to do it on an amateur level, much less professionally.

But I might possibly have strict standards.

Fixed.

They should probably test for this in their HR-mandated proficiency exams instead of asking prospective employees if they can write in funny voices. ("Yes, yes ... of course. Can write like Yakov.")

Anyone who understands storytelling should automatically know their mission is to write stories that carefully interpret and build upon existing lore. Positron's allowance of freedom should be taken as him having confidence in them, and for them to know that while expanding upon established lore is the main desire, they are not limited to the scenarios previously sketched in canon.

I guess Positron figures he's unleashing maximum creativity, but instead what we get are short stories roughly sketched and then ditched. It's like a gardener who plants anything anywhere in the yard, when a person familiar with gardening knows that for a successful garden you have to place things carefully with respect to the desired design, the environment, and whatever has already been planted.

I don't think you do. The problem is that the writing team actually *narrowed* the backstory and boxed themselves in (although Sam can speak to that better than I can). The really huge mistake was baked-in early, though, by trying to explain game mechanic changes (intro of capes) via story. Since then this has just been compounded with things like the Origin Of Power Storyline (OOPS) which shuts down entire backstories and alternate avenues.

The bizarre shoe-horning of every NPC origin into the Well of Souls thing is awkward, because a lot of them just don't fit there. And the reality is there's no reason for that sort of clumsiness when a perfectly good backstory hinting at multiple sources of power was already in place.

Actually I'd say it's the inverse; edgy gangs that practice death magic are the most likely to attract the types of people that have silly club hair.

I kinda thought this was one of Dr. Aeon's jobs?

Aren't the Skulls the in-thing these days for young hip people to join?

At least until next week..

The trouble, as you point out, is that you don't WANT to give ultimate freedom to your writers unless you trust them implicitly to be both very skilled and very competent. And I mean no disrespect to our current writers, but they are neither. That's not to say they're bad writers, but it IS to say that they need direction, supervision and help. Imagine never having heard of MineCraft then being tossed into someone's over-built village and told to "Go ahead! Create! And don't worry about messing up my buildings." It doesn't work, because that's really not how creativity works.

Creativity is spawned from inspiration borne of a particular solid idea, and then tempered and fleshed out by restricting it with internal rules. Particularly experienced writers will be smart enough to plan the rules constraining their story and then proceed to tell it "how it wants to be told" based on its own internal consistency and its consistency with the pre-planned rules. This often means that certain story threads outright CANNOT be told, and no amount of juggling and explaining away will do it. Such a thread should simply never be started to begin with.

All I'm saying is that new writers need help and oversight until you're certain that they're experienced enough not just with writing in general, but your fictional universe's constraints in particular, to not get lost in the canon. Only once a writer has proven to be able to temper his own writing can you trust him enough to set him free. "Freedom" in writing is not benefit. It's a burden that's difficult to understand unless you've run afoul of it enough times to actually spot where things go wrong. The more constraint the environment is, the easier it actually is to write in it, just because much of the plot writes itself. The last thing you want a new and mostly inexperienced mission designer posing as a writer to do is have complete freedom, because it removes the training wheels which keep his writing going in a straight line, so to speak.

Jack Emmert, for all his other flaws, was a solid enough writer to make those stick. In general, there's no real problem with explaining meta-game concepts via in-game lore. Just look at hospital reclimators. The trick is that you can't just slap on a hand-wave which explains why the mechanic exists. You need an explanation that plans ahead and considers its own implications both on existing stories and characters and on the scope of characters that can be made in the future with this meta-game explanation as part of canon.

Example: Explaining powerset proliferation by saying Dr. Brainstorm invented technomagic and now all of a sudden Brutes can use swords is a stupid idea. That just makes no sense. But it also doesn't mean that a better idea can't have been given to explain this. For instance, a combination of super hero registration and advanced villain monitoring efforts have revealed that there are far, FAR more heroes and villains in the world than we suspected. Brutes using maces, Scrappers using electricity and so forth always existed. We just didn't know about them because we never ran into them. But now we know that not only do they exist, but they're actually quite common.

Yes, it's still silly and it does kind of sidestep the actual meta-game system, but that's the trick to an explanation. Meta-game will almost always make no sense from a narrative standpoint because it doesn't conform to narrative standards. It exists to make a game playable. That's why you need to take some liberty to explain the effect of the meta-game without trying to explain the mechanics of the meta-game. In this case, we aren't explaining why players can now pick more powersets for their ATs, we're explaining why these characters exist in the world when they didn't seem to exist previously. Those are two different concepts to explain.

If I had my guess, I'd lay this mistake right at Matt Miller's feet, because as far as I can see, this is the result of him giving his writers too much freedom and not enough oversight. This, then, resulted in a plot thread which attempted to explain ALL powers through the same bottleneck source. If you had an editor pass a glance through that, I'm almost certain it would have been sent back for corrections because its impact on the game's canon is staggering, but almost all of it involves retroactive continuity. Trying to alter the fundamental building blocks of a large, persistent world is a situation I wouldn't wish on the best of writers, and it fell to the hands of people who I don't think were hired for their professional writing credentials. It's just an unfair situation to put them in, and someone should have caught it before it made it into the game.

Trouble is, NOW it's in the game and you can never take it back. NOW the writers' hands are tied and they need to go down this plot, because that's the plot they've written for themselves without, as it seems, much foresight into what this whole thing implies. Now they're backpedalling and rolling author's saving throw checks, and it... Kind of works. As I've mentioned before, the concept of "ascension" is the one escape clause left in this plot before it turns into a complete dead end, because it offers an alternative. Once you break the "one and only" status of the Well, you free up nearly all of your concepts as potentially drawing power from an alternate source.

You don't even have to explain it. When the Well of the Furies is the ONLY source of power, then it becomes the source of power for everyone and everything by implication. You don't have to say that Tielekku's power comes from the Well, because it's implied. Now that there are paths to power OTHER than the well, this implication doesn't exist. Now, not explaining it DOESN'T infer the Well automatically and now your saving throw has succeeded. Not only has it succeeded, but it has branched off into inspiration, because now we can explore other avenues of power, as well. We know the Well isn't the only source, but do we know if "ascension" is the only alternative? What if the Well is only one of a number of power-granting, formless celestial creatures? What if they don't like each other and want to play champion against champion?

This is what I mean about constraining writing from before. When you're faced with a dead end with almost all avenues closed up, the free path is easy to spot and expand upon, until it blossoms into another node of possibilities, to misquote Maros. When writing under restrictions, the restrictions themselves become inspiration as you come up with ideas which fit all criteria, is what I'm saying. That's why oversight and direction for the writers is more important than freedom.

No, you're thinking of killing every named character in the game aside from the player. The game doesn't have the technology to perma-kill the player in a poignant fashion yet.

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.

No, you're thinking of the Williamsburg Skulls, with their bowling shirts over faded faux retro black t-shirts with ironic death metal band logos. They were into eating souls and wearing human skulls before it went mainstream. Now they just collect antique x-rays and drink homemade vodka.

When it comes to storylines, retcons and "respecting canon", there really isn't.

LEGION OF VALOR - Be a part of the Legend!

LEGION OF VALOR - Be a part of the Legend!

The other thing that confused me was people saying the clothes looked "too clean" I'm pretty sure being able to afford nicer clothes(within the fashion constraints of your subculture) (and also food and whatnot) was the point of being in a gang. All the kids who(claimed they where) in gangs I knew had much more expensive clothes and things than I did growing up.

In my experience, gangs are often multi-racial but the minorities (minority in relation to the gang make-up) endeavor to blend in.

LEGION OF VALOR - Be a part of the Legend!

And another thing. Why aren't the Skulls breaking into song with a lesson to teach children?

I'm also pretty sure that they're making quite good money from pushing drugs - that's kinda the whole point why people push drugs in the first place

Only because the writers of this game choose to throw old lore out the window or just step all over it. They really don't have to. No one's forcing them to.

I don't think that you'll find too many people who think that Praetoria 1.0 was better than Praetoria 2.0