Subplot Kudzu

A few of my players have expressed a like of Mutants and Masterminds, and one of them has loaned me his PDF CD so I could read the rules. To be honest, I'm not feeling the love, but I don't quite know why. At the core I think the default expectation of the rules (as with many rule sets) that the heroes are all equally powerful is too rigidly enforced. It's one thing in Champions where everyone has 350 points to buy powers and there are lots of various complex ways one character can be more powerful than another (from ideal point designs to clever synergies to the rules mis-pointing the utility of a particular power to one player not being good at builds). But this M&M is very clear in exactly what you need to do to keep your character evenly balanced, and it's pretty clear from the rules that deviation will hose you. 

I might be reading too much into this, and maybe it's not having a physical copy of the rulebook to flip through, but it's been hard for me to create our new V&V heroes in Mutants & Masterminds. Not in a "How do we model their powers" way, but a "Atlas' Growth lets him grow to 20', which is huge size, and would give him a 35 Str, right on line with a Powerhouse character. But when he grows he also gets a better chance to hit because of the deceptive nature of his gravity fueled growth, and not only does M&M growth force a reduced chance to hit due to d20 size modifiers, but his attack bonus has to drop below the because his +13 effect mod is out of line with a power level 10 hero. So I could raise the power level, no one else in the team can even come close to Atlas' damage potential when grown (Calypso maxes out at 2d8, Atlas maxes out at 4d10). Maybe Calypso and Titania, who both favor stunning and entangling attacks, have campaign levels in those attacks and Calypso has below campaign levels in her water control and super-strength. 

I just don't have enough feel of the system, but the idea of "everyone should start with the same scores in these key numbers and then apply +/- balancing to them, and we differentiate by how you justify those scores" just doesn't sit well with me. Can anyone who's played it offer another insight?

Long time, no post. Anyway, I'm starting to noodle around the edges of next year's prospectus, knowing that a lot of the voting will be eaten up by the Gaslamp Fantasy game (I'd call it a Girl Genius game, but one option is having it be set somewhere radically different - such as British Colonial India - or with a completely different history and supporting cast, so I have no guarantee that it'll actually be a GG game). I'd like to get back to running a supers game for a while, so I'm thinking of putting 3 supers options on the prospectus.

( Read more... )
I'm curious as to any opinions people my have. 

 Tomorrow, I post the write up to my recent ZoZ game. 

Bob Dushat just gave me his copy of Reality Storm, the official crossover module between Champions and Silver Age Sentinels, and it contained some supremely odd design decisions. The premise of the module is that the two big bad guys of the game system's default universes (Kruzritter and Dr. Destroyer) both find a way to reach the citadel in the time stream that is supposed to maintain the safety of the multiverse. Not trusting each other, they nonetheless decide to work together to use the citadel's power to conquer their respective universes. This is the framework for what is essentially a team up between the example hero teams of the two game systems.

All well and good - there have been enough of these sorts of things for a nice array of tropes to play with. Could be fun. However, the designers didn't set this up so that the players are playing either the Champions or the Guard (or both, or some selections from either team). I can understand this, I guess - people would rather play their own heroes over the ones in the rulebook. But they also don't have your hero team replace either the Champions or the Guard in the plotline. You would think this would be a no brainer: if you're running a Champions game then your heroes are the ones who team up with the Guard; if it's a SAS game they get to defend their reality alongside the Champions.

Nope. Instead both of the major super teams vanish and your heroes are suddely picking up the pieces, having to fight their universe's Big Bad plus the other universe's Big Bad in order to save both universes and rescue the captured heroes. I give them props for not having your job be rescuing the major NPC Heroes so they can save the day, but the module is still "The JLA and Justice Leage team up so that the Teen Titans can save them". Not exactly what one expects from this sort of crossover story. Your PCs aren't teaming up with _anyone_ from the parallel universe!

In another oddity, the plot has Kruzritter and Dr. Destroyer lay betrayal traps for each other primed for the exact same moment, so fi the PC just wait the villains will take each other out, leaving just their henchmen. While this does have an interesting 1970's Marvel Super Villain Team Up vibe to it, the whole thing is a little anticlimactic for a supers game.

I just don't understand what motivated these design decisions, when there was a pretty clear other way.

We're still working outside the edges of my new supers game world, built in collaboration with the players. So far we have Doc Toltec (a Thesophical Atlantean turned Doc Savage style science hero operating out of Chicago's East Side Hospital), Aeaea (the latest in a line of San Francisco legacy wizard-heroes that streteched back to the 1850's), Phoenix (working class musician who survived an alien attempt to build a sundiver, she now has wings and the ability to channel heat and velocity from a distant star) and Ladegard is likely building the current ruler of Atlantis - the under the sea Atlantis rather than Doc Toltec's Atlantis.

I'm already intending
* A&E inspidred hero Captain Nostalgia, a hyper-policeman descendent of the Red Baron from a future where the Nazi's won the war who uses time travel equipment and a harnessed gravity devices to make sure his future never occurs. Since the 1930's he has been aided by the Ad Astrans, a secret society of science fiction fans and wireless radio buffs who act as his science & cultural advisiors and field agents (ala the Blue Blaze irregulars).

* a mass of giant monsters escaped from an alien circus tracked (or possibly controlled!) by an intrepid boy who has befriended one one of the monsters, a cross between Clifford and Big Red Dog and Devil Dinosaur (& Moon Boy!).

* a lost city in the Andes containing a hyper-tech Chinese Mandrinate.

* the mecha-mole driving hero Dave "Digger" Mac Fadyn teaming up with industrialist John Galt to make subterrainian maglev railroads across North America - juncture points of which will be used to explain the growth of any fictional cities the heroes might decide to have as a home base.

* Atomic-Age tech-wielding Gorillas running the Congo. Heart of Darkness is a very different novel in this world.

* Iceland being the center of operations of  Doctor Von Frost and his gelid super-science, with the highly educated and risk taking Icelanders as his loyal minions.

* The Dominican Republic being home to a criminal cartel run by the strangely ageless Porfoiro Rubirosa, who managed to avoid a pre-nup with Doris Duke and theirfore controls much of the North American power grid.

*Zombies. Gorillas. Zombie Gorillas.

no doubt there is more to come....

A common scene in the comics is showing fast characters "sprinting" (or pushing their flight/swimming speeds) to get outrace a sports car, missile, torpedo, what have you. Some supers systems have mechanics for this sort of "pushing" of speed, but I've never been satisfied with them because they always feel more simplistic than simulation - short doublings of speed, or increasing speed by 10 "points" worth of the movement power. While I'm all for simulation I kept wondering if there was a better way.

( Truly geeky super speed math behind cut )

 

 As I noodle around on my supers setting building construction kit I have a question for my hordes of fans [Listens, daffy duck-like, for crickets]. Is there any super-hero concept that you've always wanted to play but either have had the opportunity or haven't found a system that could handle it? 

In my case two spring to mind (there used to be more, but I did get to play my super smart guy and my super-strong cowboy ideas in now defunct PBEMs). 

The first is an Adam Strange style SF adventurer: a two fisted science hero with a jet-pack, ray guns and other gadgets who, while a member of the super team on contemporary earth, is actually the defender of a different planet, time or timeline. The system would have to be able to handle someone who was basically a skilled, smart normal person with flight, a good dodge and a modest energy blast - a little tricky in some systems but more a matter of lacking opportunity rather than systemic problems.

The second is someone who has a separate energy body, similar to Negative Man, Raven's Soul Self or, ideally, Antibody from the New Universe book DP7. This is much harder to work mechanically - Cambias once recommended doing it as an Ally, or perhaps it's duplication where one of the duplicates has all the powers, or something of the sort. It's a really neat idea, but finding a system that could handle it is the problem. 

This latter is one of the reasons why I'm building the supers setting construction kit: the hope of being able to simply define the characters potency, versatility, and scarcity and have it be in the world as its own distinct power - if the scarcity is high enough (or even if it's not with an oddball power like this one) my PC might be the only person with it, but it would be a quickly defined part of the world. 

Finally, as a villain I still love the idea of a mummy whose internal organs were eaten away by vermin that now occupy his body cavities. He would be able to have his eyes turn into snakes, vomit up spiders, breathe out termites and so on for a variety of nasty effects. Icky, yes, but it just sticks with me,  

This is likely the last example in the series of posts translating a single character into a variety of systems, though I expect to do at least one more discussing what I've learned. The character in question – Dr. Zachary Zevon, the Indestructible Man - started in Villains and Vigilantes, and now exists in Silver Age Sentinels, HERO, Marvel Super Heroes, DC Heroes, FUDGE and Truth & Justice. There was an aborted attempt in GURPS and finally, I’m trying to tackle This lat entry covers GODLIKE, Greg Stolze's and Dennis Detwiller's game of supers in WWII.


So how's the fidelity here: Bad, as several key elements just run against the setting rules. This bugs me much less than the problems I have in GURPS or HERO, because GODLIKE is designed for a very specific environment: you're playing Supers in WWII, and not just any WWII, but this specific version with these specific power rules. It's not designed to be customizable to other settings, and I suspect that if you took it out of this one it would fail. Wild Talents, the generic version of this rules set, took years of playtesting (it just came out last year, when GODLIKE appeared in 2001). whswhs tried using these rules for his Ghazi game (the PCs were bearers of one of the 100 names of Allah, fighting off the Crusaders) and he had serious problems not just with the dice curve but with the lack of heavy firepower needed to counteract some of the abilities. The problem here is not that GODLIKE can't handle Dr. Z, but that Dr. Z has no place in GODLIKE. A can't be a standard bearer for systems designed for specific settings and then complain that the specific settings can't handle my ported in character: unlike the others, GODLIKE never claimed it could.

Expect a wrap up essay in the next day or so. I might still noodle around with getting GURPS to work, but that will be inside the GURPS post and not on the main page. So far it's been an interesting experiment. 

Last week I started a Thought Experiment in supers games, looking at what changes a character goes through when converted from one system to another. This is meant to test the validity of most supers games claims that you can use the system to build “any” character or run “any” kind of game. The character in question – Dr. Zachary Zevon, the Indestructible Man - started in Villains and Vigilantes, and now exists in Silver Age Sentinels, HERO, Marvel Super Heroes, DC Heroes, FUDGE, and, from the hands of the man with powers, Chad Underkoffler…
Not surprising, but this is a very clear map over into another highly narrative system. I’m getting the feeling that my largest problems with mapping things over come in games where the damage of firearms is most clearly nailed down against reality and the powers in play, hence the higher costs of being invulnerable. My next step is GURPS unless someone wants to save me. This will likely take a few days, so don’t be surprised by a delay.

On Tuesday I started a Thought Experiment in supers games, looking at what changes a character goes through when converted from one system to another. This is meant to test the validity of most supers games claims that you can use the system to build “any” character or run “any” kind of game. The character in question – Dr. Zachary Zevon, the Indestructible Man - started in Villains and Vigilantes, and now exists in Silver Age Sentinels, HERO and Marvel Super Heroes.
That done, how well would this work in play? This is really hard to say. I’ve owned the DC Heroes rules since they came out in the 80’s but have played it only a handful of times. I suspect the combination of powers would let me do a lot of the things I liked with the character, even if it would be a stretch on more than one occasion. He’s combat worthy enough, at least to my untrained eye, and I think I have a handle on the Gadgetry rules. If I’m wrong on that score I’ll know soon enough.

Zach ended up costing more in DC heroes than I thought he would, but that’s the cost of the Intelligence, Gadgetry and Science skills – not to mention having to sink points into 3 stats to capture his powerful mind and 3 more for his high charisma. Still, given the freaky point structure of the game his relative point cost to other characters is hard to measure, as 25% of his points are tied up in Advantages.

This experiment left me seeing that DC Heroes is a high versatile, powerful game that’s buried under some godawful power mechanics, and perhaps an overly fiddly dice engine. It is designed for a much higher power scale than the other games I’ve reviewed so far and looks like it does a good job of balancing out Batman with Superman in a mechanical and narrative sense. If I were to run something in it I’d use it as an excuse to chuck the entire power listing and start from scratch, adopting the ideas of Scarcity cost and Versatility that I’ve been discussing of late in Alarums & Excursions.
Scarcity would replace the base cost of the power or skill and would be determined by the player who first built someone with that ability, given them control of how often the power would appear in play. Give something a high scarcity cost and you’ve set a bar on entry for other characters; a low one means that you aren’t staking a claim on this niche (unless you set a low one and then buy 20 ranks of the power, daring people to try and catch you). An entirely new structure of Scarcity costs in the campaign would make the world look like a very different place than the standard comics universes.
Versatility would take the place of the Factor Cost, a 1-10 ranking by the GM and player about how flexible the power or skill is intended to be in play, setting the groundwork for the gentleman’s agreement that determines how much leeway the character is cut when he tries to use the ability in new ways in play.

I’m very interested to hear whswhs’s take on these thoughts, since he’s the only person I know who ran a long term DC Heroes game and can tell me how the dice mechanic worked out and whether my fears that profligate hero point spending would seriously skew play are true to life. Tomorrow we tackle the FUDGE write up that Mr. Stoddard wrote for me today, and then Mondat we get to chadu's Truth & Justice version.