Quote:Original post by yapposai I think the corruption works for a rookie but it's not good for a veteran. I'm thinking the cop is like Gordon from Batman, he knows the system is corrupt but still tries his best. To get someone like him to quit you really have to rattle him. Which brings us to the question what can really rattle a cop who probably seen a lot of bad things over his career?
To clarify, I meant a sudden reveal of corruption. Gordon is dealing with constant, low-level corruption, and thus has grown accustomed to it. I am thinking of a situation where the protagonist serves in a largely honest police force, and makes the sudden discovery that his hero/role-model has fallen to corruption, etc.
You can then set up the role-model as the final antagonist (i.e. facing down the father-figure as a finale).
The father-figure finale and the "antagonist who hates the police and the crime" are both good ideas.
The figure head becoming corrupted idea is a nice. It's cliche, but at the same time, not too cliche to not be boring.
And the antagonist going against everyone through cleverness intellect would lead to a mystery-like gameplay of trying to find out who is performing such bad deeds against the police department.
Hmm, this is a bit different idea track. You say your character is a "modern paladin" so I take that to mean that his main interest is to stop crime at any cost. And that internal flaw could contribute his problems, rather than strictly an outside force being the cause of his problems.
Say, in the past he was on the trail of some horrible individual criminal, say a serial killer, as they are difficult to track until a pattern in their killings emerge. So somehow the killer and the protagonist confront each other in private (no backup, no witnesses) but the killer has taken the protagonists wife hostage. The protagonist decides to shoot his own wife to (as he justifies it at the time) take away the criminals one bargaining chip and because this might be the one chance to get the criminal. The criminal takes off, and the protagonist decides to try and stop the criminal over his wife's well being, he doesn’t catch the criminal and when he goes back and calls for help, help arrives too late to save her.
Course, his bullet would be found to have shot her and this would probably ostracize him from the rest of the force, not to mention it would probably end up causing him a lot of personal guilt in retrospect. Plus it gives you an antagonist.
@ Degrader: I don't quite get it. If he's alone with the serial killer and his wife, and he has a gun... Why doesn't he shoot the killer isntead of his wife? Even if the killer is hiding or something, if he wants to catch the bad-guy, offering his wife, then why wouldn't he go strait for his target?
Eah, that’s more of a details issue that the OP (or whoever) would have to fill in. I was more going for an overall motivation presentation where the protagonist is forced out of his job partially due to his own faults rather than strictly outside forces (such as corrupt officials). He is relentless in his pursuit of justice which in turn could be a result of him having too much pride in himself or because he’s become caught up in a revenge fantasy (something in the past makes him hate criminals, you know, like Batman) or maybe he’s just become too attached to his job for his own good.
But if I had to give details, hmm, I suppose one reasoning could be that the killer is holding onto the wife and using her as a shield. Unfortunately the killer is similar in height as the wife so the protagonist only has three real options in shooting: 1. shoot at the guys head (but this is incredibly risky as its hard to hit people in the head IRL and it runs the risk of shooting his wife in the head if the killer or wife make any sudden moves) 2. shoot at the killers legs (also a hard shot as they are partially hidden, plus missing would mean the killer gets a chance to respond) 3. shoot his wife somewhere presumably non-vital and assume the killer would be so surprised that he would let go of her (as a detective shooting at his own wife is pretty unexpected, even a killer would probably be surprised).
Since he doesn’t really want to kill his wife (he’s only shooting at her because he thinks that he has no better option) he opts out of option 1, considers option 2 and goes for option 3. He shoots her in the leg thinking it won’t kill her, and the killer does let go (thinking the detective has lost it or maybe he wants to gloat or something), but unfortunately the protagonist hit an artery in the leg which causes her to bleed out before medics arrive, which can happen IRL.
I do like how you maki it the protagonists own fault. Making him too extream for the polise to want him. It's one of the few solutions that I don't think is to much of a clishé. I do however, have a problem seeing the sceen you put up. He shoot's his whife to catch the villan, but then he fails to catch the villan, even though it went acording to his plans. As you said, you could make it work, so I supose there's no reason to ask you for details.
I would however like to see how things turned out if he caught the villan. He got what he wanted, but the cost was higher than he expected. I was thinking about that for a while. What if the villan haden't done a crime worth the death penalty, or he might get away since he's got a good lawyer or bribed the joury. The protagonist killed his whife and lost his job, and even though he caught the villan, the villan got to keep his life. Maby he even went free. Alternatly, the villan breaks out of prison. That could lead to either the protagonist wanting revenge on the villan, or the villan wanthing reveng on the protagonist... Or both.
The lead character was formerly corrupt. He changed his ways and became a model officer, even overreacting because of his past. He transferred to a new department where he thought no one knew about his past. He gets into an argument with one of the people in his squad, possible a new memeber or an existing rival whose personality he clashes with. That charachter tells him that everyone knows about his past and he will never be accepted.
It would give you the option to explore several areas if you needed to, including the main character's activities whilst corrupt, the thing that made him change and his relationship with the other officers.
How about instead of the wife getting kidnapped by the antagonist, the wife falls in love with the antagonist. Now he can't kill the antagonist, because he still loves his wife.
What about one day he comes across a squad seemingly doing something routine. He gets closer and asks if he can lend a hand, and when he approaches close enough to see whats going on he seems the cops chucking bodies in a hole.
Secretly, the low crime rates in the city were from sweeps like this, people not given a chance to defend themselves were buried and covered up.
He flee's from the scene, knowing its a matter of time before he has to tell someone about this, but he can't just do that, he's just one man. So he decides its time to quit the force.
After a brief period of being confused about the life he lead and the choices he makes, he decides to expose the corruption and risk his life - to defend the people of the city as he did once as a cop, but instead as a vigilante one man against this corrupt town.
These are some very good ideas. The problem with the antagonist idea, however, is that one character already in the story has an antagonist in a similar situation to deal with. And since this is an rpg (I'm sorry for forgetting to mention this), the player is going to be dealing with multiple characters.
larvantholos's idea pretty much fits with what I felt would be a great way to alienate the officer and also returns to the having your beliefs betrayed: aka, corruption in your very own department. When the man leaves the force, he actually takes on the job of an independent weapon supplier and bounty hunter official, which another main character comes to for conversation and weapons. For the time being, he "wishes" to do something about the corruption, but he doesn't know what or how. That is where the main character comes in, who is also a former cop, though younger and moreso left the force due to his brother getting killed by his very own unit due to a misunderstanding at the city's laboratories where he worked. This is the guy who has the antagonist I mentioned: the antagonist is a man who holds a very strict moral code of "balancing good and evil." This same man goes on to become a much higher official, working alongside the service of the city's government's more private law unit. The player is going to run into him a lot throughout the game with the main character continuing getting into mental and sometimes physical conflicts.
