This was actually my problem with some of the story arcs a la "The Origins of Power" that were added to CoH. There were quite a few of the stories in game that weren't very well written and didn't tell a compelling story, but seeing game design abstractions and game mechanics codified as official in-game lore that way made me cringe internally regardless of writing quality. That and the whole thing with Dr. Aeon's jiggery-pokery causing heroes and villains to suddenly get access to each others' powersets, but at least that wasn't called out in game, just in news announcements on the official site.
I think there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it, but I think actual in-game fiction doesn't suffer the same fatal flaw that VV mentions, because you're actually there. The game has to hand-wave its own mechanics all the time, so you're not introducing something players aren't being confronted with all the time. The question is execution.
There were many story arcs that were not well written objectively, and Origins of Power was one of them. But the thing that really burned my noodle about Origins of Power was one of the few areas I think I disagreed with Paragon Studios as a whole irreconcilably. Knowing the time constraints of MMO development, and knowing the limitations of collaborative efforts, and knowing everything I know about how this works, and factoring in all of that, I am *still* not even *remotely* convinced that its a good idea to treat your canon as extremely flexible, and the rules of your universe as mere excuses to have things happen. Origins of Power, and the entire rest of the Incarnate story line, treats how things work as a fuzzy unimportant thing that you can simply string words together that sound cool and no one should care if they make sense. And I can suspend the part of my brain that rails against that and just play the game, but its always there, having a tantrum and tossing neurons around my skull.
It doesn't really take any more work to make a coherent backstory and set of world rules than it does to make crazy patchwork ones. It just takes more thought. And the excuse that its just comic book logic so anything goes is particularly offensive to me. All fiction, including comic books, rely on rules for the reader to have any sense of drama or consequence. If literally anything can happen, if literally nothing has to make sense, its impossible to know what the ramifications of anything are. Is this good or bad? Who knows. What will the characters do next? Who cares. Its impossible to care, because
anything can happen. So why bother trying to understand anything.
This really has its roots in origin of origin, where someone in the dev team said we need a way to designate how the player got his or her powers, and they decided Science, Technology, Natural, Mutation, and Magic were reasonable necessary and sufficient descriptors. Except Science, Technology, and Mutation
are all the same damn thing. Sure, you can ask stupid irrelevant questions like isn't being hit by lightning totally different from making a suit of armor? Yeah, in the same way getting hit by lightning is different from being doused in chemicals. The problem is all technology works on scientific principles, so the overlap between those two was going to be hefty. And Mutation? Is there a non-scientific kind of mutation?
There are really only three origins. Science/Tech, Magic, and Natural. If your powers come from a scientific discovery or technology, then it operates based on presumably similar principles to what we know as science. All of those are understandable as extrapolations of real world science and technology. If your powers come from magical sources, then it operates completely differently than how real world science works. Instead, it works based on a set of fictional internal rules that contradict how the real world works, but are at least internally consistent and have a flavor we'd recognize as magical.
If you're Natural, your powers are in fact normal for the world of City of Heroes. Just like Arnold Schwarzenegger can get blown up by a grenade in Commando, James Bond can get shot and go back to chasing villains in a week, and Ethan Hunt can get thrown onto a train by an explosion and survive, but all those people are not superhuman in their movie worlds, we're just supposed to assume that in their world, that's possible, in the world of City of Heroes, "natural" isn't the same as it is here. Its the world of Kung Fu movies where if you just practice enough you can split a rock with your little finger.
And that's it. Either you obey the rules as we basically understand them, you're proof the rules are radically different here, or you defy the rules. No other options exist. Neat and simple. And because those origins aren't just pulled out of thin air but are actually
justified, you can actually use them narratively. The devs actually originally had plans to use origin beyond a blank on your character sheet and an unnecessary blizzard of enhancement types. But when they created their names randomly, and added the additional "players have the freedom to make up their own reasons for choosing them" they killed that narrative opportunity in the crib, and they know it.
Knowing exactly how and why the Well of Furies did what it did isn't just a nit pickers exercise. It lays the groundwork for the narrative rules that guide its storyline. But the "official" story about Origin of Power is honestly Dan Brown levels of bad. And not even "well researched then spat on" Da Vinci Code bad. I'm taking Deception Point bad. Even Digital Fortress bad.
You don't make stories consistent and well-thought out for the nit-pickers. You do it for yourself, so that you don't paint yourself into narrative corners. So you can build on foundations that won't collapse. So you do not have to keep telling your readers "check brain at door, illegal to operate on the premises." So you don't have to paint a line this high on your story and say "must be at least this stupid to ride."
Did I mention I'm not a fan of Origin of Power? Yeah, not a fan.
