Drunkard's walk Fan-Step: Rock

[azunth]

...as in, "and Roll".
So I've been interested in writing a crossover between Worm, the superhero Web serial, and Drunkards walk.  I've got a basic plot outline- Doug arrives in Brockton Bay and sets himself up as an independent superhero in between trying to find what song moves him to the next world.  It is then he meets Taylor Herbert, an insect controlling metahuman and would-be superhero.  Now, Taylor Herbert all but screams "troubled kid trying to escape her problems by superheroing", at least when she's not being terrifying, and she's got no interest in joining the local kid superhero team, which is also worrying.  So Doug decides to act as her mentor- at least for a while, and hopefully keep her from falling in with one of the gangs.

However, I'm still trying to wrap my head around Doug's character somewhat, so I was hoping I could ask you some questions, Bob.  
One, what is Doug's "Superhero Persona" like?  We see a little of it in DWII, but we haven't actually seen a whole lot of Doug as "Loony Toons"; mostly, he's just Doug.  Given I'm planning to have Doug actually do the superhero thing quite a bit, I'd like a few tips for writing him as "Loony Toons".
Two, any tips for writing Doug in general?  I'm re-reading some of your work, but I'd like a few characterization tips on your view of who he is, so I can keep him in character and build a good model of him in my head.
Three, can you give me a sketch of Emi's personality?  I'm leaning towards including her,  but there's  not quite enough about her written to get a good grasp on her personality and character.
Four, the plot summary I gave.  I think this is fairly in character for Doug to act as a mentor for an aspiring superhero, but I wanted to make sure with you first.

P.S: I noticed you tend to title the various steps in the vein of the crossed-into work, when a title convention exists.  So I'm playing off Worm's one-word titles with a musical reference with a double meaning.  Like it?

[Shepherd]

Do note that you misspelled Taylor's name twice. It is Hebert.
If you're planning on making a crossover which is faithful to the setting, I'll reiterate a post I recently made on the subject in another forum:

If anything, a lot of the fandom underestimates how much Shards can screw with their parahumans. If you look through the WoG thread, you'll find that:

• Many parahumans are specifically chosen to gain Shards because Scion's precognition suggests they'll be great vectors for conflict.
• People Trigger due to horrific traumas.
• Your Shard chooses your power, and often ensures it has unpleasant side effects.
• At the moment you Trigger, your Shard rewires parts of your brain. The younger you are, the more it can change.
• Shards can continue to alter your thinking as your brain develops (ie. until your mid-20's. Note: All the Undersiders still had developing brains.).
• As you engage in conflict, your Shard get more toeholds for continuing to rewrite your brain.
• If you fail to engage in enough conflict, your Shard may mess with your brain to goad you into more conflict.
• If you fail to engage in enough conflict, your Shard may mess with your powers ("Oops, I didn't mean to shoot little Timmy. My hand slipped.").

The WoG thread source for most of this info:
Depends on the shard. Bonesaw elaborates on the idea by noting 'breadth and depth' in her interlude. If the shard gets you while you're young, it can shape your personality across the board, on a deeper level. The more conflict you're involved in, the more toeholds it gets to rewrite your consciousness and your subconscious. To alter your thinking, it needs to do it as a part of the trigger event, or as part of the brain's development.
In the extreme cases, the shard can leave you with an impulse (Must fight when a fight presents itself), help set up an obsession ("Wall myself in!"), steer a neurosis in one particular direction (specific hallucinations rather than random ones, of you hurting people, pushing someone down the stairs, etc), create a link between A and B (Being around fire makes subject lose empathy and inhibitions. With lower empathy and inhibitions, subject uses power to make more fire.), or steer a personality trait to an extreme (Must be on top, I answer to no one!), or they just overwrite stuff (Can't understand humans, only dogs).
In the lesser cases, it can be a nudge, hard to distinguish from one's own psychology. You might be on the fence about something, trying to make a call, and the passenger pushes you one way over the other, based on your own feelings of doubt or fear. It might tap into emotions, and dampen X emotion while promoting Y, just dampen them across the board, or take the joy out of day to day living while adding excitement to the cape life. A vague sort of depression that only goes away when one's out and fighting. Sometimes, as mentioned before, it's set up as a trap, a flood of emotion or a set of mental switches that get thrown when a prerequisite is met - such as a cape just steering clear of all confrontations, except the shard set it up so they can't, and they have a sort of limit break/command cutting in that mandates them to fight in one way or another. Or it plays off a limit or a berserk button that already exists - Damsel can't spend too long being anything less than top dog or she gets restless, and if she goes too long despite that, then she has to act, she's acting without thinking about it. This takes time and effort for the passenger, and a host that doesn't demand that time and effort (by circumstance or intent) is going to develop a better connection with the power. This in turn is a reward of sorts. If Damsel did kill the local capes and assume control over the area, fighting off all comers, she'd find her facility and control with her power just ramped up like crazy.
It varies from cape to cape and shard to shard, and it varies depending on the host, the host's background and the host's personality.
Beyond that, other influences include the passenger playing fast and loose with the power itself, as it controls the metadata, which may be more visible if the subject breaks from their norm in terms of consciousness (gets a concussion, tranquilized), working off base instincts and impulses like 'stay camouflaged' (be a little more creepy and unsettling), intimidate/dominate (passenger works behind the scenes to make you look a little more dangerous as you mutate/grow/surround yourself in the aura of your power), etc, etc. In more pronounced cases, the power is just plain controlled by the passenger, not the host, and the passenger makes the seemingly random or uncontrolled aspects generate more conflict... pushing a power to kill rather than leave someone alive, or a thinker power turns up a vision of something the subject didn't want to see.
On the macro level, too, don't discount the fact that some shards (particularly powerful ones that warranted attention) are just sent to specific people, with the idea that it's a combination that's going to promote more conflict just by the sheer dynamic of it (Powerful person with a destructive power, a desperate person with a power with negative implications).

The fundamental problem with Worm is that everyone with superpowers got them from genocidal alien horrors that are mashing their neurochemistry to promote maximum mayhem. Given the nature of Taylor's particular Shard, she has a very strong psychological bias towards perceiving success as everyone doing what she says and failure as people not doing what she says, regardless of actual outcomes. This tends to make her a nightmare to work with unless your actions happen to coincide with her goals. And Doug succeeding in changing her behavior would just create disharmony between Taylor and her Shard, leading her Shard to angrily mash harder on her brain chemistry.
----------------------------------------------------

"Anyone can be a winner if their definition of victory is flexible enough." - The DM of the Rings XXXV

[azunth]

Shepherd wrote:

---

Do note that you misspelled Taylor's name twice. It is Hebert.
If you're planning on making a crossover which is faithful to the setting, I'll reiterate a post I recently made on the subject in another forum:

If anything, a lot of the fandom underestimates how much Shards can screw with their parahumans. If you look through the WoG thread, you'll find that:

• Many parahumans are specifically chosen to gain Shards because Scion's precognition suggests they'll be great vectors for conflict.
• People Trigger due to horrific traumas.
• Your Shard chooses your power, and often ensures it has unpleasant side effects.
• At the moment you Trigger, your Shard rewires parts of your brain. The younger you are, the more it can change.
• Shards can continue to alter your thinking as your brain develops (ie. until your mid-20's. Note: All the Undersiders still had developing brains.).
• As you engage in conflict, your Shard get more toeholds for continuing to rewrite your brain.
• If you fail to engage in enough conflict, your Shard may mess with your brain to goad you into more conflict.
• If you fail to engage in enough conflict, your Shard may mess with your powers ("Oops, I didn't mean to shoot little Timmy. My hand slipped.").

The WoG thread source for most of this info:
Depends on the shard. Bonesaw elaborates on the idea by noting 'breadth and depth' in her interlude. If the shard gets you while you're young, it can shape your personality across the board, on a deeper level. The more conflict you're involved in, the more toeholds it gets to rewrite your consciousness and your subconscious. To alter your thinking, it needs to do it as a part of the trigger event, or as part of the brain's development.
In the extreme cases, the shard can leave you with an impulse (Must fight when a fight presents itself), help set up an obsession ("Wall myself in!"), steer a neurosis in one particular direction (specific hallucinations rather than random ones, of you hurting people, pushing someone down the stairs, etc), create a link between A and B (Being around fire makes subject lose empathy and inhibitions. With lower empathy and inhibitions, subject uses power to make more fire.), or steer a personality trait to an extreme (Must be on top, I answer to no one!), or they just overwrite stuff (Can't understand humans, only dogs).
In the lesser cases, it can be a nudge, hard to distinguish from one's own psychology. You might be on the fence about something, trying to make a call, and the passenger pushes you one way over the other, based on your own feelings of doubt or fear. It might tap into emotions, and dampen X emotion while promoting Y, just dampen them across the board, or take the joy out of day to day living while adding excitement to the cape life. A vague sort of depression that only goes away when one's out and fighting. Sometimes, as mentioned before, it's set up as a trap, a flood of emotion or a set of mental switches that get thrown when a prerequisite is met - such as a cape just steering clear of all confrontations, except the shard set it up so they can't, and they have a sort of limit break/command cutting in that mandates them to fight in one way or another. Or it plays off a limit or a berserk button that already exists - Damsel can't spend too long being anything less than top dog or she gets restless, and if she goes too long despite that, then she has to act, she's acting without thinking about it. This takes time and effort for the passenger, and a host that doesn't demand that time and effort (by circumstance or intent) is going to develop a better connection with the power. This in turn is a reward of sorts. If Damsel did kill the local capes and assume control over the area, fighting off all comers, she'd find her facility and control with her power just ramped up like crazy.
It varies from cape to cape and shard to shard, and it varies depending on the host, the host's background and the host's personality.
Beyond that, other influences include the passenger playing fast and loose with the power itself, as it controls the metadata, which may be more visible if the subject breaks from their norm in terms of consciousness (gets a concussion, tranquilized), working off base instincts and impulses like 'stay camouflaged' (be a little more creepy and unsettling), intimidate/dominate (passenger works behind the scenes to make you look a little more dangerous as you mutate/grow/surround yourself in the aura of your power), etc, etc. In more pronounced cases, the power is just plain controlled by the passenger, not the host, and the passenger makes the seemingly random or uncontrolled aspects generate more conflict... pushing a power to kill rather than leave someone alive, or a thinker power turns up a vision of something the subject didn't want to see.
On the macro level, too, don't discount the fact that some shards (particularly powerful ones that warranted attention) are just sent to specific people, with the idea that it's a combination that's going to promote more conflict just by the sheer dynamic of it (Powerful person with a destructive power, a desperate person with a power with negative implications).

The fundamental problem with Worm is that everyone with superpowers got them from genocidal alien horrors that are mashing their neurochemistry to promote maximum mayhem. Given the nature of Taylor's particular Shard, she has a very strong psychological bias towards perceiving success as everyone doing what she says and failure as people not doing what she says, regardless of actual outcomes. This tends to make her a nightmare to work with unless your actions happen to coincide with her goals. And Doug succeeding in changing her behavior would just create disharmony between Taylor and her Shard, leading her Shard to angrily mash harder on her brain chemistry.

I am not being terribly faithful to the setting, actually- I'm preserving as much as I can, but I'm having the tone and cosmology of Drunkard's Walk predominate here, which at bare minimum means hacking the setting into something that's not cosmic horror.  As for shard influence, I was of under the impression that fairly regular risk taking and conflict would keep the shard "satisfied", and that a person can turn out OK with a bit of guidance, or if they do manage to truly escape the situation and mindset that dragged them into the problem in the first place (using Miss Militia and Assault as examples).  With "normal" shards not specifically sent to a person (like Taylor's), you have to be avoiding conflict pretty hard, for an extended period of time, before you see problems.  Leet's and shadow stalker are on the high side of the scale, but on the other side you have Canary.  Taylor is going to be getting into fights quite regularly, but at the same time Doug is present to steer her character development- and there's a lot of character development for her to go through.  In addition, I did not think that normal shards cared from where the conflict flowed, as long as their host was getting in fights enough.  Ultimately, I didn't think shard influence would be an insurmountable issue in Taylor's and Doug's development, at least behavior wise.  Taylor is going to be nerfed, however; her range is going to be on the low of what we've seen in the Worm, and she's never going to get the ability to see through her bugs senses.  
Plus, early Taylor's dominant character trait is that she's lonely and sick of being bullied.  She's desperate for companionship, and in lieu of tattletale or, I dunno, Rune offering her hand in friendship, Taylor will stick by those who treat her nicely, and probably emulate them.  In addition, Doug showing up throws a wrench in all precognition, so the precognitive elements that caused taylor to be chosen aren't valid anymore- she's not fallling in with a teenage villain her own age with a guilt complex driving her to be Taylor's BFF- she's falling in with a more experienced superhero to show her the ropes.  This will dramatically influence her character development.

On a larger scale, you're absolutely right; and I have half formed plot points of Doug realizing something is very off about the world he's in, and that he's made some assumptions that aren't quite kosher.    But if Shard-mind shenanigans were to ruin Doug's and Taylor's relationship, I don't have a plot, so I have to use some the wiggle room in Wilbow's word of God, and the reasons mentioned above, and say Taylor's shard isn't leaning on her to heavily, and spends most of the time satisfied.

[Dartz]

That does sound a lot more like Security! We don't want to go full Security!

You need to be careful not to completely upend the setting - the tone of Worm is what makes it Worm.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[robkelk]

...
Three, can you give me a sketch of Emi's personality?  I'm leaning towards including her,  but there's  not quite enough about her written to get a good grasp on her personality and character.
...

Eimi is a complicated girl.

Let's start with the snapshot that I wrote as of the start of her travels with Doug: http://www.fenspace.net/index.php5?title=Eimi Bob has expanded her personality somewhat since then, I've kibitzed on that, Bob has kibitzed on my kibitzing, and so on.

She's picked up a few of Doug's personality traits along the way (they're spending decades together and only months with any other person), including many aspects of his sense of humour. However, she did start as Noah Scott's research assistant and administrative assistant, so she tends to pay attention to detail.

Eimi plays tabletop roleplaying games. She likes playing In Nomine (usually an Elohite of Lightning), BESM (usually a Sailor Jupiter pastiche), and GURPS 4e (usually a technomage, if the setting allows it), but those aren't the only games she knows.

She wears glasses. Even if she doesn't need to. On her, they look good - that's why she wears them.

Eimi swears in Japanese.

She's good at multitasking. Her first Step after she joined Doug was a Shadowrun world (which we haven't fleshed out yet), where she picked up some code and toys from a rigger. (Why? She wanted to do some "reality checking" of the Shadowrun rulebooks she had on file, because of her attention to detail.) Word of Bob is that she never got rid of those toys...

Given her breadth and depth of knowledge of fiction, she recognizes worlds in the Walk slightly more often than Doug does - but she is not familiar with Worm.

If she needs a family name, she uses "Anderson". Fans of dubbed Sailor Moon occasionally ask whether "Amy Eimi Anderson" is a Sailor Mercury reference - sometimes she's annoyed, sometimes she's flattered.

Eimi usually plays by the rules. Usually. However, she plays to win.

Eimi cares deeply about Doug and his well-being, but she isn't romantically attracted to him.

And that's all I can recall this early in the morning...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Bob Schroeck]

Azunth, I'm flattered that you want to write a Stagger, as they ended up getting called around here. To answer your specific question about Doug's public persona, well, it depends on where in the Walk you set your story. What you see in DW2 is the "purest" form of his hero persona as it was usually expressed in Warriors' World -- fast-talking, machine-gun pop culture references and song quotes, trash-talking jerk-with-a-heart-of-gold comedian who really, really likes hitting things with lightning. Later in the Walk he gets a bit grumpier, a bit less willing to play with his opponents and more inclined to smack them down hard and make sure they don't get up -- especially if he's mentoring or protecting a youngster at the time. He's less inclined to make with the rapid-fire patter, but he doesn't give it up completely; and he certainly won't miss the opportunity to fling a zinger at or bounce a quote off an enemy if it presents itself. And he still really, really likes hitting things with lightning.

I'm about to start work, so I really can't put a lot more time into an answer for you right now, but I'll think about it through the day, and if I find I have anything to add, I'll do it tonight, okay?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[azunth]

Thanks for the help guys! And to calm Dartz's fears, I have no intention of going full Security. That's been done. What I want to do is write a more typical, realistic story of someone helping out a troubled teen in a bad place. Doug can't/won't really do anything about Taylor's troubled school life- Taylor compartmentalizes so much that she would never open up about it in the first place. That part of things won't get changed. What he can do is be there for her, and provide a place where she can get away from the hell that is her school when she needs it. And hopefully, guide her onto a better path.

However, because of the way the plot of the original Worm is set up (and for a few other reasons), I need to change a few things in the background so that derailing Taylor's life doesn't lead to the end of the world down the line.

[Dartz]

That wasn't really what

It's too easy to jump to Taylor's defense and do just another fixfic. It' not really an existing plotline that grabs your interest. X comes along from Y settings It's low hanging fruit that's been picked to death. Sure, do yous not think it'd be far more fun to have her and Doug fighting for a bit, before he finds out her background? It's part what made DWII so good - fighting the Knight Sabers over an ideological misunderstanding. He's in conflict with the main characters for a legitimate reason, and it's a fair enough fight.

He sees Warlord Taylor as the enemy, the big villain. She's very likely to distrust anyone with any semblance of authority unless they meet outside the cape scenario.

They're far more fun fighting each other. And it's far more likely.

The big reason Taylor's so popular and sympathetic is that we ride along with her for all her internal justifications and decisions and see her convincing herself every step of the way. She's the hero in her own story. You never really see her from an outsider's perspective.... not entirely anyway. We get Miss Militia making few points about her and her friends completely ignoring all the social mores of the cape world. And Doug is the perfect outsider to show the darker side of her, without her reasoning.

He drops in and has to learn about the world very quickly. Okay, PRT do the organised hero thing. Those are villains. Hey, it's not *that* different. Then, throw in the Endbringers and the switch between Holy Fuck what is That to, enh, it's only a 6-dimensional being meeting with Scion. What marks do Shards make on people in magesight? Stuff like that. Doug's freaking gonzo in settings, but in a lot of way's he's a victim of his own power as the others, just not as overtly. His real killer Power might be able to spot people with Powers in civil life - which pops him right up against the unwritten rules. Whether he's too pragmatic to follow them, or too pragmatic to ignore them depends.... he doesn't have family to protect, for a start.

The only reason people bey the Geneva Convention is because they have an interest in the enemy obeying the Geneva Convention.

There're so many more potential beans of entertaining conflict there that can captivate readers with possibility.

Doug + Taylor -v- the universe is..... well, it's stations of the fanfic canon that.

Anyway, a useful thread: http://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/t ... read.3783/

Edit: I don't want to seem neagtive - I didn't mean to be like that.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[azunth]

Dartz wrote:

---

That wasn't really what

It's too easy to jump to Taylor's defense and do just another fixfic. It' not really an existing plotline that grabs your interest. X comes along from Y settings It's low hanging fruit that's been picked to death. Sure, do yous not think it'd be far more fun to have her and Doug fighting for a bit, before he finds out her background? It's part what made DWII so good - fighting the Knight Sabers over an ideological misunderstanding. He's in conflict with the main characters for a legitimate reason, and it's a fair enough fight.

He sees Warlord Taylor as the enemy, the big villain. She's very likely to distrust anyone with any semblance of authority unless they meet outside the cape scenario.

They're far more fun fighting each other. And it's far more likely.

The big reason Taylor's so popular and sympathetic is that we ride along with her for all her internal justifications and decisions and see her convincing herself every step of the way. She's the hero in her own story. You never really see her from an outsider's perspective.... not entirely anyway. We get Miss Militia making few points about her and her friends completely ignoring all the social mores of the cape world. And Doug is the perfect outsider to show the darker side of her, without her reasoning.

He drops in and has to learn about the world very quickly. Okay, PRT do the organised hero thing. Those are villains. Hey, it's not *that* different. Then, throw in the Endbringers and the switch between Holy Fuck what is That to, enh, it's only a 6-dimensional being meeting with Scion. What marks do Shards make on people in magesight? Stuff like that. Doug's freaking gonzo in settings, but in a lot of way's he's a victim of his own power as the others, just not as overtly. His real killer Power might be able to spot people with Powers in civil life - which pops him right up against the unwritten rules. Whether he's too pragmatic to follow them, or too pragmatic to ignore them depends.... he doesn't have family to protect, for a start.

The only reason people bey the Geneva Convention is because they have an interest in the enemy obeying the Geneva Convention.

There're so many more potential beans of entertaining conflict there that can captivate readers with possibility.

Doug + Taylor -v- the universe is..... well, it's stations of the fanfic canon that.

Anyway, a useful thread: http://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/t ... read.3783/

Edit: I don't want to seem neagtive - I didn't mean to be like that.

That does sound really interesting actually.  I might do that...I dunno.  I was going to have the intial meeting with the undersiders never happen, Lung never gets captured, and so the city stays stable while Doug and Taylor go after Coil (under Doug's mistaken assumption that the guy seems "relatively safe" for him to go after with a newbie cape in tow), and let things develop from there.
I wanted to do the fix-fic thing with Doug lets me do something- or rather, a combination of somethings- that I can't do with the current roster of capes, and is difficult to do plausibly in Worm alone.  
One- Have Taylor be an independent hero, giver her a mentor who can guide her through this mess, but keep it so that Taylor remains isolated from friends her own age.  I want to maintain her loneliness and pain for a bit (probably the duration of the story), while still giving her someone she can talk to.  That core character interaction was the heart of my idea.  Here, Taylor deciding to talk to her Dad- and request to join the wards- was to come after a long stretch of character development; only for things to blow up somewhat when Sophia comes to light.  However, capes being what they are in Worm, having an independent hero in Brockton Bay that's also stable and experienced enough to be a good mentor raises both eyebrows.  Thus, Doug.  He's a natural fit for the role.

At the same rate, I also want to focus on the helplessness of the situation- the crime situation in Brockton bay is a hell made from criminal balance of power, where any major attempt to clean things up will certainly make things worse in the short run, and may not accomplish anything in the long run.  (Another part of the rationale for going after Coil in the beginning- he's possible to properly get rid of).  

However, I do like your idea as well.  So...hmm...Ok.  I'll re-adapt my "independent Taylor with adult Mentor but still isolated" concept using Touhou project instead of Drunkard's walk.  I wanted to do a Touhou project crossover, but it had been looking like a fairly generic fix-fic, and I couldn't get it to go anywhere.  Re-adapt the concept using Reisen or Yuyuko, maybe Kiene.  I have to muck with Yuyuko's character less, but Reisen lets me draw parallels with Tattletale a bit and I don't have to think up of a solution why Youmu and Taylor don't become friends.

Meanwhile, I'll go with your idea for the Drunkard's walk crossover- though I do have to think through plot and characters a bit.  It is more interesting plotwise, but I'd have to reread that part of worm.

[ECSNorway]

Every time I think of Touhou and Worm, I keep thinking of Reimu visiting the Pawprint Shrine, and I get the giggles. So...
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Acyl]

I've always gotten the impression Bob was going for a kind of Spider-Man thing with Doug. He's actually a very intelligent, cerebral, tactically-minded guy. He's a highly-trained and deeply experienced senior officer in a military organisation. It's just that his persona in the field is this wacky unpredictable wise-cracking devil-may-care comic relief thing.

It isn't an act, precisely. But there are multiple levels to it. It's different from writing...Deadpool or something, where randomness is truly random.

There probably is a genuine reckless streak to Doug, since he admits in his narration that when he was younger, he REALLY behaved like he appears to. He also ends up stubbornly butting heads with people in many of the DW stories to date... well, I guess maybe Peter Parker isn't the only comparison you could make. Maybe Tony Stark is a better comparison.
But anyway...the older Doug, the guy in Drunkard's Walk, is pulling his comic routine, his Looney Toons battle shtick, while also being fully Colonel Douglas Sangnoir. Which probably means a lot of what he says and does, crazy as it may seem, is calculated. That's how it comes across in the battle scenes Bob's written in the DW stories.

Separately, in a Worm context...I'm interested in how you see Doug reacting to the whole Protectorate/PRT part of the setting. I mean, on the one hand, he's a law enforcement, peacekeeper, military type himself. He's not just a superhero, he's spent years as part of a team with a United Nations mandate. He commands non-powered troops - his rank isn't just for show. That could either make him sympathetic to the local team in setting, or he could also be incredibly critical about how the Protectorate/PRT handles things. Because it offends his sense of professionalism.

It's probably also worth noting that the way Bob's written the Warriors in Drunkard's Walk, and drawing from his IST GURPS sourcebook which is a variation of the setting... the Warriors are technically a mercenary organisation that's under contract with the UN, not a governmental organisation. It might mean Doug isn't inclined to think favourably about national government superteams to begin with - with all their bureaucracy, PR, politics, and so on. I don't know if Bob's ever been clear on what Doug feels about that sort of thing.
-- Acyl

[Dartz]

Oh, you can still do the mentoring thing. Maybe not to Taylor, but to the wards. It kinda takes the basic elements of DWS and DW6, and turns them on their head quite a bit.

He doesn't know of Taylor's meeting with Armsmaster, he just knows Chris got bugged, bad......

He doesn't know the dark and awful details behind the Protectorate. He might understand in an adult way that, the way the Protectorate might work to help Parahumans as a whole to avoid an X-Men situation. And then, holy fuck, there're Endbringers and now Bug-Girl is a friendly.....
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?