Valerian Scarlet: Is She a Villain or Not?

[Lord Liaden]

I must respectfully disagree. Several fundamental elements of the system were altered between 5E and 6E, and relatively minor tweaks abound. I'm still stumbling over details I never noticed because it didn't occur to me they might have changed.

[steriaca]

55 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

I must respectfully disagree. Several fundamental elements of the system were altered between 5E and 6E, and relatively minor tweaks abound. I'm still stumbling over details I never noticed because it didn't occur to me they might have changed.

Ok. It is not that perfect. But 30 STR in 5th edition is 30 STR in 6th edition.

[PamelaIsley]

The rules really don't matter to me.  I tried to get into Hero when 6th edition came and built some characters, but I don't particularly like it.  Insofar as I prefer anything anymore, I like M&M 2 a bit better (even if it fails miserably on some counts).

 

I wanted an updated bio to reflect some of the CO changes, which makes the character a little more interesting than she is in Vibora Bay.

[Christopher]

2 hours ago, PamelaIsley said:

The rules really don't matter to me.  I tried to get into Hero when 6th edition came and built some characters, but I don't particularly like it.  Insofar as I prefer anything anymore, I like M&M 2 a bit better (even if it fails miserably on some counts).

 

I wanted an updated bio to reflect some of the CO changes, which makes the character a little more interesting than she is in Vibora Bay.

I do not know how much back porting there will be.

I mean after the costume they gave Gravitar, we have no hopes they even try to stay with the source material.

[PamelaIsley]

16 hours ago, Christopher said:

I do not know how much back porting there will be.

I mean after the costume they gave Gravitar, we have no hopes they even try to stay with the source material.

 

Yeah, Gravitar looks awful in the game.  But her art has never been that all awe inspiring in Champions material either.  She looks very little like how she is described.  She's one of my favorite characters in the CU so I was buying every book that covered her at one point.

 

I will say that I really love the 6E Villains book 1 art with her writeup. It's stylized, but at least she could pass for being as attractive as her writeup says she is, and if you squint hard enough you can almost say the colors match the description. 

 

There was a ton of backporting of CO material in the first wave of 6E stuff.  Lots of events in the game are mentioned in the 6E Champions Universe book, the 6E villain books, and the Champions book.  A lot of it isn't for the best, but some of it cleans the setting up a little bit.  Valerian Scarlet's 5E background isn't quite as interesting as her CO role, so if they had included her in Book 3 (and I disagree with LL above about whether she should have been), I think it would have been an interesting read.

[Lord Liaden]

Hey, disagreement keeps life interesting.   I disagree with a number of choices in the official CU publications.

 

VS's role in CO Vibora Bay is motivated by the specific plot of the VB Apocalypse. In that it's consistent with her book portrayal as a scheming opportunist, who saw an opportunity and exploited it.

[PamelaIsley]

Well, the 5E Vibora Bay book says she isn't aware of her role in Therakiel's plan and underplays her compared to Caliburn.

 

In CO, she IS Therakiel's plan and Caliburn has no "choice" to make.  So Scarlet is a much bigger deal in CO than in 5E Vibora Bay.

 

She's also portrayed radically differently.  She starts CO pretending to be (and dressing like) a hero.  You run missions on her behalf in the Queen City and then more when she convinces Juryrig to help her.  That wouldn't happen in the 5E version of Scarlet. She's out and out a villain all the way through.  And no costume is mentioned at all (she has a great look as a villain in CO).  As a small aside, the CO writers did use elements of one of her plot seeds in the Vibora book.

 

As you mentioned earlier CO changed a lot of characters (sometimes for no reason at all -- speaking of Juryrig).  I would have liked to read a CU-ized version of the CO Scarlet.  I think they really improved her character.

[Lord Liaden]

IMHO the CO developers were more interested in telling the original stories they wanted to do, than in following precedents set up in the PnP books. So they changed characters and plots to suit their purposes. As you say, in the book VS is a fairly small fish, while Caliburn is crucial to Therakiel's plan. CO almost reversed that. Valerian may have become more interesting, but Caliburn became less so. Why? Because that's the story the devs preferred to tell. They wanted a different scenario for Luther Black's apotheosis scheme, so they upended everything carefully laid out in DEMON: Servants Of Darkness. They wanted a Lemurian civil war with a sympathetic side, so they added more nobility to the human-looking Lemurians, while making Arvad, who spent eons plumbing the depths of evil, develop a conscience.

 

All that said, the priorities of scenario presentation for PnP and MMO gaming are different. In the former case the onus is on providing elements that a Game Master can modify however they want for their own game group, so the writers try not to tie them too tightly to a particular plot. Champions Online had already done that modification, and presented the story they expect players to run through, leaving little room for plot improvisation.

[PamelaIsley]

That's a very fair point.  The MMO needs the villains to be a bigger part of any story because you end up basically doing nothing but fighting (there's no RP'ing of convincing Caliburn to do the right thing, for example).

 

It helped Valerian's character out a lot, and hurt Caliburn's (although I am impressed by how much of the archmage-to-be source material they ended up keeping).