Roleplaying in the Wormverse (We can do better than this)

[Lago PARANOIA]

But surely there are ways in-universe to neutralize super criminality that isn't 'kill Atomo on the spot and incentivize criminals to fight society to the bitter end' and 'put him in jail and accept a nonzero chance of escape and reoffending'. You know: brainwashing, power nullifying, time displacement, cutting shady government deals, etc..

Then again, the reason why those methods backfire or are often not even on the table is that they're without exception suborned to the narrative purpose of 'have recurring villain'. So brainwashing always wears off, powers always return no matter how convoluted the stripping is, villains always renege on deals, etc. So who knows.

Maybe it's just a problem with stories that have a semi-permanent, sufficiently evil supervillain staff and don't have a definite end.

[OgreBattle]

Super powered villainy feels more like a military problem than a police problem, especially if they're global threats.

So I figure it'd be handled more like Bin Laden and Guantanamo Bay, where you either kill them on the spot or whisk them away to secret facilities.

[Mistborn]

But surely there are ways in-universe to neutralize super criminality that isn't 'kill Atomo on the spot and incentivize criminals to fight society to the bitter end' and 'put him in jail and accept a nonzero chance of escape and reoffending'. You know: brainwashing, power nullifying, time displacement, cutting shady government deals, etc..

Well Worm actually has you covered there, because the big superhuman jail is pretty inescapable.

Now a lot of people do get sent to flimsy prisons and then easily escape, but those are the people who rob banks and stuff. Because while they may be a nuisance to society they can be relied on to fight for the blue team when it comes time to unite against a common foe.

[Username17]

Super powered villainy feels more like a military problem than a police problem, especially if they're global threats.

So I figure it'd be handled more like Bin Laden and Guantanamo Bay, where you either kill them on the spot or whisk them away to secret facilities.

But of course, in the real world, Guantanamo Bay has been an unmitigated disaster, raising hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to support global terrorism and inspiring people to blow up civilians all over the world. It's not that no one would do that sort of thing, it's that it very demonstrably has not worked. Treating global terrorism like a police problem with court cases and jail sentences just works way better than kidnapping people and putting them in secret holding facilities in the murky nether realms between justice and war. Eric Robert Rudolph simply got arrested and went to jail, and he very conspicuously doesn't have an army of supporters threatening to take over a half dozen countries.

You would expect that roughly speaking every terrorist mutant you sent to a mysterious holding cell outside the reach of courts or human rights or dumped unceremoniously from a helicopter into the sea, that three more mutants would join the Brotherhood. Bush's war on terror and Pinochet's dirty war are certainly realistic in that they historically did actually happen - but they are nothing like optimal or well reasoned.

The comic book standard of revolving door penitentiaries is actually a more effective system of reducing harm to civilians than any iron fisted paramilitary shenanigans you care to imagine. Brevik is going to be released from prison in Norway in the foreseeable future, and that is because Norway very demonstrably has a more effective system of dealing with mass murder than does the United States. Not because the Norwegians are weak or stupid.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Well, what's the point in which a social problem escalates to the point of causing existential problems to the security of the state?

I know in long-running comic books it's a moot point, because killing Darkseid or Ras Al'Ghul foils exactly as many crimes as giving them a blowjob (because they get resurrected as cyborgs or demons or get a time clone shifted in or whatever) but for series which have a shorter timeframe and smaller set of meaningful crime events -- like most TTRPGs -- it seems like there should be a line in the sand. Brevik probably can't blow up Oslo with a nuclear bomb any more than some random future terrorist, but Magneto or even the Joker could.

[Mask_De_H]

Well that should come down to the players and the reasoning behind Joker Immunity. If Harley Quinn is going to nuke Gotham if her puddin gets hurt, then you better damn sure keep him safe unless and until you disable the bomb.

If killing a cape releases a Witch, then you don't kill the Joker because when you strike him down, he becomes more of a threat. You can then have situations where a desperate villain might commit suicide by cop or actively kill-switch themselves to create horrible monsters. On the flip, Joker doesn't kill Batman not out of misplacesd homoerotic tension, but because Man-Bat would tear him in half and shit out the digested Witch form.

That also gets you an interesting fallen angel gimmick, where the Slaughterhouse Nine expy deliberately kills to cause kaiju madness and because Bonesaw is giving them all 1-ups.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The comic book standard of revolving door penitentiaries is actually a more effective system of reducing harm to civilians than any iron fisted paramilitary shenanigans you care to imagine.

Well that should come down to the players and the reasoning behind Joker Immunity. If Harley Quinn is going to nuke Gotham if her puddin gets hurt, then you better damn sure keep him safe unless and until you disable the bomb.

So, how long does it take before the populace flips out and goes all iron-fisted paramilitary shenanigans anyway? The United States flipped out over 9/11 hardcore despite liberals warning extensively what really needed to be done to actually reduce deaths and future attacks. I imagine that after a certain point, Magneto's threats to drop a meteor on a city for not releasing certain low-grade Brotherhood of Mutants members from prison wouldn't just be met with a shrug and factoring the dozens of extra deaths a year as a sunk cost; the actual response would be for the public to kick out the people who had voices of reasons and decide that having a city nuked for executing the Joker is a small price to pay for living with pride or honor or some stupid bullshit.

Hell, a particularly Obama bin Laden-ish villain like Red Skull or Scarecrow could specifically target states with more effective but 'softer' policies towards supervillain crime and use said policies as a justification for the series of attacks. While pretending that they're 'scared' of countries that take a hard line.

[Username17]

Technically, in a TTRPG, you are going to do a finite number of adventures. And in a superheroes TTRPG, each adventure is going to have the opposition tailored to your power level. So whether the Joker comes back or not, the opposition you face is the same. But if the Joker does come back, then you get free intel on the main villain that adventure, which is an advantage (however minor).

So it's always and in all ways to the player's advantage to not kill the Joker. The only question is convincing people who have never read a history of the fall of the first Chinese Empire that not killing the Joker is "realistically" a non-stupid thing to do.

-Username17

[name_here]

The most obvious method to counteract grim darkness from sending people to jail and having them escape later is for it to not happen very often. If most of the antagonists who go to jail don't recur, then it's an entirely valid and effective solution. I do not see it as any more grimdark than any other source of recurring villains. Now, if a guy is sufficently dangerous and hard to confine, eventually executing him might be justified, but if you want recurring villains you could just tone them down a bunch. Like, what they intend to do is in some way bad but they deliberately go out of their way to avoid civilian and law enforcement casualties and have a sympathetic motivation. If you don't want members of Team Evil to keep showing back up, make a setting where there is Team A and Team B.

I mean, Magical Girl Lyrical Nahona is pretty much as far as you can get from Grimdark while still having laser fights as a regular thing, the first captured villain wound up being given run of the ship until a trial where she got a blanket pardon, and by the end of the second season over half the main cast is ex-villains and most fights open with the main character asking her opponent to explain their motivation because she's sure there's some way to solve this without bloodshed. Admittedly, two villains were pretty much just assholes and got erased from reality, but one of them wasn't even sentient.

[TiaC]

Obama bin Laden-ish

Put a quarter in the jar.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I am so pitifully embarrassed.

[schpeelah]

I know in long-running comic books it's a moot point, because killing Darkseid or Ras Al'Ghul foils exactly as many crimes as giving them a blowjob (because they get resurrected as cyborgs or demons or get a time clone shifted in or whatever)

Isn't that the root of the Joker Problem though? I don't follow comics but to my knowledge, Joker doesn't have any particular in-world ability that allows him to repeatedly escape prisons - that would change the dilemma significantly. He repeatedly escapes by author fiat, because of the nature of comic book continuities. The people arguing that Batman should kill the Joker are asking the characters to respond "logically" to a pattern of repeated author fiat interventions. Yea, I can see the logic - and I can see the logic extend to the whole super villain/hero community descending into madness and bloodshed as the long-term unstoppability of its members makes itself apparent.



Meanwhile, the way to fix that in a non-comic book medium is to simply not have revolving door prisons be a thing in the story. The end. Because you'll never need to have 30 different adventures in the same continuity that start with the Joker escaping and end with him captured.

[ishy]

So what can super villains do after they have served their prison sentence to make a living (excluding being a super villain again)?

[Username17]

So what can super villains do after they have served their prison sentence to make a living (excluding being a super villain again)?

Well, many supervillains have powers that allow them to create tremendous amounts of energy or identify the locations of huge reserves of hydrocarbons or other mineral wealth and could trivially retire as billionaires with just a few years of selling their services.

Other supervillains are just big tough dudes and have no particular marketable skills.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

The most obvious method to counteract grim darkness from sending people to jail and having them escape later is for it to not happen very often. If most of the antagonists who go to jail don't recur, then it's an entirely valid and effective solution.

Which is as I've said what would actually happen in a Worm RPG, villains that get sent to the Birdcage do not escape.

[schpeelah]

So what can super villains do after they have served their prison sentence to make a living (excluding being a super villain again)?

That would depend on what their powers are and what made them villains in the first place. Rationally, superheros and supervillains should be a minority among the supers, the majority making huge amounts of money legitimately with their powers. Of course, having some compelling reason for 'criminal' and 'vigilante' being majority career choices would completely change the answer.

[K]

But surely there are ways in-universe to neutralize super criminality that isn't 'kill Atomo on the spot and incentivize criminals to fight society to the bitter end' and 'put him in jail and accept a nonzero chance of escape and reoffending'. You know: brainwashing, power nullifying, time displacement, cutting shady government deals, etc..

Well, The Authority is a super-hero comic where villains are simply killed with extreme prejudice. That being said, the main problem with that is that comic writers are actually not very creative and recurring villains is a lot easier than coming up with new villains from a story standpoint.

I mean, The Authority will literally go 5-6 years between printing new issues because coming up with ideas good enough to drive sales and bad enough that you don't want them in perma-rotation is even harder than just having good ideas.

Stuff like brainwashing or power nullifying is just death by a different mans, except you leave open the door for them to come back for revenge when they shake off the control or get powers back.

[K]

Isn't that the root of the Joker Problem though? I don't follow comics but to my knowledge, Joker doesn't have any particular in-world ability that allows him to repeatedly escape prisons - that would change the dilemma significantly.

The Joker lives in a libertarian utopia where the government is incompetent and only a rich man who follows no laws can protect the people.

He will continue to escape until Batman builds a for-profit private prison because only businessmen unfettered by government can do things correctly.

[hyzmarca]

But surely there are ways in-universe to neutralize super criminality that isn't 'kill Atomo on the spot and incentivize criminals to fight society to the bitter end' and 'put him in jail and accept a nonzero chance of escape and reoffending'. You know: brainwashing, power nullifying, time displacement, cutting shady government deals, etc..

Well Worm actually has you covered there, because the big superhuman jail is pretty inescapable.

Now a lot of people do get sent to flimsy prisons and then easily escape, but those are the people who rob banks and stuff. Because while they may be a nuisance to society they can be relied on to fight for the blue team when it comes time to unite against a common foe.

The Birdcage is really more of an oubliette than prison. People get dumped in and forgotten about. It's inescapable because there's literally no way out, not for the prisoners sent there and not for any children who would presumably be born there.

It's a really shitty set up that does encourage people to fight to the death and really only hurts the less dangerous supervillains.

I mean, the inmates range from someone who built a gun powerful enough to knock the moon out of orbit and blackmailed the world with the threat of doing so to a woman who told her asshole ex husband to go fuck himself and just happened to be unaware of the fact that she had mind control powers. Some of them are powerful enough that containing them conventionally is impossible. Most could easily be held in a normal prison. Few actually committed crimes deserving of such treatment.

The problem with a setup like that is pretty much the same as Gitmo. You start out using it only for the worst cases, but without very strong rules in place the systems is going to start slipping and sending people there on suspicion and supposition rather than necessity. And the fact that it is on the table in many circumstances will encourage criminals to fight back that much harder.

[Sashi]

Isn't that the root of the Joker Problem though? I don't follow comics but to my knowledge, Joker doesn't have any particular in-world ability that allows him to repeatedly escape prisons - that would change the dilemma significantly.
...
Meanwhile, the way to fix that in a non-comic book medium is to simply not have revolving door prisons be a thing in the story. The end. Because you'll never need to have 30 different adventures in the same continuity that start with the Joker escaping and end with him captured.

The Joker has a kind of infectious insanity that really does result in his goons busting him out of prison because they're afraid he'll kill them otherwise. Now that Harley Quinn is around (who's actually significantly more intelligent and competent than him) any writer can get him out of Arkham and into the thick of it with about two "Harley does something amazing" pages.

Even then, The Joker doesn't actually escape from Arkham all that often. He's foiled but escapes far more often than he's incarcerated, and Comics have have a tenuous-enough relationship with continuity that writers aren't obligated to explain or even acknowledge that he got out of Arkham. And every Reboot resets the count.

I'd say The Joker has only escaped a max of 3 times in the canon of events that get conserved across writers, retcons, and reboots (kind of like how The Killing Joke will now always be his origin story). Once on his own, once in Harley Quinn's origin story, and once when Bane let out all the inmates. The Arkham Asylum games are popular and good enough that that story might enter the conserved canon as well.

[erik]

So what can super villains do after they have served their prison sentence to make a living (excluding being a super villain again)?

Other supervillains are just big tough dudes and have no particular marketable skills.

Sounds like there needs to be a supers sports league. Keep fuckers out of trouble by entertaining the masses!

[Vebyast]

So what can super villains do after they have served their prison sentence to make a living (excluding being a super villain again)?

Get creative.

The thing that I like about Worm is that, instead of focusing all the attention on the people with cool flashy powers, the author gives the place of honor to the people that are smart about using powers: all of the really memorable moments are people being creative. Skitter against Echidna, Imp and the Heartbroken threatening petty tyrants, Golem's costume, the Doormaker and the Clairvoyant working together, Khepri's entire strategy, and so on. People are actually intelligent with their superpowers, and it's incredibly refreshing.

The same creativity principle applies to rehabilitating supervillains. Regeneration lets you clean up hazmat spills and work in high-radiation environments, super speed helps with search and rescue and emergency medical care, super strength is useful for disaster relief (digging through rubble), super durability probably lets you do deep-sea work without worrying about pressure or decompression sickness, and so on. They might not be single-handedly supporting billion-dollar corporations, but if you can replace a deep-sea ROV or a coast guard patrol boat, you could easily command a seven-figure salary.

As for the original discussion, I think that capturing the "feel" of the Wormverse in a tabletop game would probably have to be very tea-party-ish. A large portion of a character's power comes from twisting powers around to do crazy crap they were never intended to do, and those kinds of shenanigans are almost directly opposed to rules.

[Longes]

So what can super villains do after they have served their prison sentence to make a living (excluding being a super villain again)?

[icyshadowlord]

Make themselves useful, it seems...

[hyzmarca]

Unbeatable "just as keikaku" kaiju is like the douchiest method I've ever heard of or contemplated.

-Username17

Well, they're not really trying to test anyone so much as they're trying to make one suicidally depressed douchebag feel better about himself and they really don't care who gets killed so long as he gets time in the limelight.

Which is in some ways worse, I suppose.

As plot devices they're more roving natural disasters that you can punch in the face. Which aren't a bad idea.

The thing that's really oppressive the roleplay is the precog abilities. Precog abilities pretty much assume that you can predict what the PCs are going to do. And that requires either railroading or asspulling. Often both.

But precog abilities are rare enough in setting that they're not going to come up often and they're not infallible. Even Contessa's power, which literally tells her everything she needs to do to win, has hard counters that she can't beat.