QUOTE (Lynchmob @ Aug 21 2013, 06:17 AM)
I choose to believe you are being sincere in which case I say, Thank you I try so very hard.
I like the megacorps being evil not as James Bond movie villains bent on holding the world hostage but in more human ways. They are about amassing wealth and power at the expense of *almost* everyone and everything. You can turn them into silver age comic book villains and have a grand old Pink Mohawk time tearing them down but it requires suspension of disbelief beyond the amount required to play a game where you're a grizzly bear sized cyborg with horns getting into shoot outs with fireball throwing wizards. So yes on any given occasion one or more of them might be playing around with satanic black magic but to single out a handful of them as good and a handful as evil in the longterm ruins the fun. It shouldn't be that easy to figure out who the enemies are. So Aztechnology sliding down a few notches on Forbes Top 500 Evil Forces and Horizon / Ares taking major strides towards the top of the rankings makes the setting more interesting. Old school runners screaming and yelling about how Aztechnology and Renraku are the worst of the worst and the new generation shrugging it off as so-last-decade. Ares gets away with being considered one of the "good guys" but they make most of their money from guns. Without sparking a debate it's pretty easy to call that blood money. Horizon makes most of their money by manipulating the populace through media control. Aztechnology makes most of their money from food and consumer goods. Ares sat out a failed (... or successful) coup attempt while trying to sell themselves as All American, Aztechnology showed metahumanity that even Great Dragons bleed. The Azzies didn't do it to save the world, they did it to win a war they might have started and Ares didn't sit on their asses because they hate America they did it because they didn't want to lose out on military contracts with the victor.
Longwinded. I like the shades of grey. If all my players assume every run for EVO is to deliver candy to poor starving children and every run for the Azzies is to open a gate to hell it takes a lot of the dystopia out.
Very much sincere! I always love having new eyes on things, and this crosses over into my wheelhouse a bit. Dr. Doom is a great villain, for instance, but if you use him in the same way over and over, he gets stale. You have to give him occasional time off to recover. You have to give his other aspects, like his nobility, a chance to shine through to show he's not one dimensional. Sometimes he does magic suff just to mess with you. He's rich in all the right ways which turns him into a *great* bad guy.
It's easy to fall into a rut with the megas as well. If Aztechnology is always the big bag mojo boogeyman of uber-evil, then it gets all to easy to just drop them in when you need a magic badguy, so much so in fact that people will read ahead and go, "Oh, bad magic? Well, it's gonna be the Azzies." *flip pages* "Oh look! I was right. Surprise surprise."
So, yeah, you have to go with the classics because, well, they're classics, and you have to mix it up a bit as well. The Azzies beat Sirrurg the Destroyer. By themselves. They put him *down* and on Trideo so everybody saw it. They're being hailed by people all over the world for being butt-kicking do-gooders. Who saw *that* coming? I know I didn't. That's an *awesome* story and I can't wait to see where all it leads.