Stamina and Pyramid Tests

SYSTEM: ICONS

In fact, I had forgotten that I touched on Pyramid Tests and Stamina in the original ICONS rules, after Team-Up came out. Here's what I said...

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One of the optional rules in ICONS Team-Up is that characters can use success pyramids instead of Stamina. That is, instead of saying that a given character has 15 Stamina, you say that he needs a Massive Success to knock out.

Quick recap of terms: A Massive Success means that you get 5 or more points of Effort (that is, your roll and numbers add up to 5 or more better than the target difficulty, whatever it is: a roll+Ability of -1+8=7 is a Massive Success if the difficulty is 2, but not if the difficulty is 10). The thing that makes this a pyramid is that the successes are cumulative: two moderate successes make a major success, and two major successes make a massive success (which means that four moderate successes total up to a massive success).

In some ways, this is the same as Stamina, except that you're not whittling down Stamina points, you're whittling down even more abstract Success Pyramid points or levels. But that very abstraction opens you up to some different possibilities.

Those successes can be in anything. Suppose your heroes are fighting the evil Regenatron ("The Von Neumann New Man"), with Regeneration 10 and Damage Resistance 8, but only Intellect 3.

Aaaaand the powerhouse character (Strength 10!) player didn't show up the last mnute. What you have instead are Looneytunes the shapeshifter and Bob Howard The Duck, the computer-using occultist who has been cursed into the form of an anthropomorphic metrosexual duck.

With a success pyramid, they could take on Regenatron.

Rather than punching (Looneytunes is Strength 3; Bob Howard The Duck, henceforth BHTD, is Strength 1 because, hey, he's a duck), they confuse him into giving up.

Looneytunes begins by working with BHTD to create a dinner date, and Looneytunes assumes the form of an attractive female rabbit. (Well, it works for Bugs Bunny.) Their first scam is to make it think that he's the odd one for not being an anthropomorphic animal....and they get a major success, because it's not bright. They tell it it's supposed to be a sloth. (The GM adds "Gullible" to his list of challenges for Regenatron, and makes a note that a firmware upgrade will remove that later.)

Then they fake it out by claiming it has to go to the office, which it does, trying very hard to stunt its regeneration into transformation, trying to look like a sloth, and it's moving slowly. It's taken in by the office (moderate success), which is why the explosive in the filing cabinet surprises it. (Looneytunes' cosmic power whipped it up.)

Then Looneytunes comes in as Regenatron's "boss" and begins berating it, but Regenatron figures out who he really is (the poor shapeshifter has a tell), and gets mad (the GM is using the rule where a failure wipes out an equivalent success). Regenatron is angry, so it doesn't see the portable hole that BHTD has conjured up and steps in....and the hole leads to the other hole in the ceiling, so poor Regenatron keeps falling faster and faster, while Looneytunes gives it anvils to hold and gets popcorn while eating, right up until BHTD takes the hole out of the floor...

And so on. It rather reminds me of the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game in that abstraction (though the idea predates that game).

If you were going to use success pyramids for stamina, I'd consider only using them for villains, or major villains.

Though...in a sense, the minion rule in ICONS is kind of a success anthill: minions are removed from the fight by a single success. You could grade opposition by success pyramids...

Opposition	To Defeat	Possible Difficulty
Minion	A single moderate success	To hit value
Henchman	Major success	To hit value
Villain	Massive success	5, but depends on hero tactics
Megavillain	Massive success	8, but depends on hero tactics
Cosmic crossover style villain	Massive success	10, but depends on hero tactics

What it takes away is any concrete idea of what the heck they're doing, and the level of the power matters less. You have to refigure Regeneration and Energy Drain and Affliction.

What it adds is that villains who would normally be invulnerable are now accessible by all sorts of means

Have a villain group

SYSTEM: ICONS

Another repost from the LiveJournal.
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For no particular reason, I was thinking that there aren't enough villain groups for ICONS. (Man, did I love the Champions Enemies books back in the day.) So, have a villain group in ICONS. Have them without stuff like, oh, explanations or tactics. This group, Fourscore, specializes in stealing things: information, diamonds, ATM refills, whatever.

I see them as losers, actually, taking jobs and always looking for the next big job. Kobold keeps having his heart broken and talking to Covalent about it, who thinks, "I'm right here!" and Whackjob is laughing at both of them. Lightfinger is this earnest crook type who is sure that the very next job will put them in the big time. Despite their powers, they can't quite put it all together.

As powers go, they're actually not bad, though they are hindered by the lack of anything in a technical sense. On a lot of jobs, Lightfinger just sends in Whackjob as the new filing cabinet. She gets the stuff (so long as it's material; she's no good with computers—reminds of her days in an office, before the accident) and they go. She walks out the next day, and off they go.

If the job calls for something more direct, then Whackjob waits to be auxiliary if it all goes south (which she often ensures). Covalent general takes the leadership role here, because he has experience with small squad tactics; he's largely hampered by the fact that he doesn't know nearly enough chemistry.

Fourscore

Lightfinger

Lightfinger	Prowess	Specialties
Gardner Finch	8	Leadership
Birthright	Coordination
Stamina	6	Powers
8	Strength	7	Resistance (magic)
Determination	2	5	Power Theft
*	Intellect	4	Resistance (damage)
Height	4	5	Teleportation
5'6"	Awareness	Qualities
Weight	5	Sensitive about height and being different Loyal to his gang "These powers gotta be worth something!"
112 lbs	Willpower
Point Value 53	6

Whackjob

Whackjob	Prowess	Specialties
Tina Wells	5	Performance (Acting), Stealth
Transformed	Coordination
Stamina	3	Powers
10	Strength	5	Fast Attack
Determination	4	7	Transformation Limit: Not physical properties Extra: Stretching
*	Intellect
Height	7	6	Aura (usually grows spines)
Varies; originally 4'11"	Awareness	Qualities
Weight	6	Loves to imitate office furniture...especially filing cabinets Looney-tunes practical joker
101 lbs	Willpower
Point Total 51	6

Kobold

Kobold	Prowess	Specialties
Larry Erdman	4	Science (Geology)
Unearthly	Coordination
Stamina	4	Powers
10	Strength	4	Elemental Control (Earth) [Blast]
Determination	5		Extra: Defensive
*	Intellect	4	Mind Shield
Height	5	Qualities
4'2"	Awareness	Unknown to him, a changeling Falls in love at the drop of a hat Loves to lecture
Weight	4
118 lb	Willpower
Point Total  40	5

Covalent

Covalent	Prowess	Specialties
David Petersen	5	Military
Transformed	Coordination	Powers
Stamina	4	5	Transmutation Extra: Defensive Extra: Effect, Telekinesis Limit: One element at a time, full panel to shift Extra: Effect, Energy Drain (as all the oxygen tries to leave you)
10	Strength
Determination	6
*	Intellect
Height	4	6	Stretching
6'0"	Awareness	Qualities
Weight	3	Nonhuman looks Wanted by the US Military Hopeless love for Kobold
180 lbs.	Willpower
Point Total 43	4

Likes Kobold romantically, but Kobold is straight, so that's not going to happen.

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In my brain, they have this whole backstory. They grew up in the same poor crime-ridden neighbourhood.  Pick a problem, somebody had it, including substance abuse, health problems, self-image, abusive boyfriends, self-loathing, and so on. They stuck together because nobody else would stick with them. When they found the device, they figured selling it would be their ticket out. They were all eighteen to twenty at the time. They were hiding it at Finch's place when it exploded and caught all of them. It triggered Finch's mutation. Erdman tried powers for the first time and it works, so he figures he was transformed. Petersen was on leave from the Army, but he never returned, being a kind of glowy guy now.

My first thoughts about adventure scope: A reprint

SYSTEM: ICONS

This was originally over on my LiveJournal, before I started this blog. But some of the roleplaying stuff should move here, I think, so I reproduce it to meet the twin needs of wanting content here and collecting all the superhero stuff on one blog. It was at http://doc-lemming.livejournal.com/265175.html#comments

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Originally, I was thinking about classifying various superhero adventures. I complained last year (or the year before) about how many of the published adventures were "road" adventures. (I complained because I wanted to see local adventures, but road adventures are not necessarily a bad thing. Most of D&D is built around road adventures.)

Anyway, the obvious range for superhero adventures may have a mix of magic and science, or be one or the other. We'll do a Kinsey scale thing and call it 1 to 6. At the extreme ends, you need to have someone skilled in manipulating that technology; in the middle it's just trope flavouring.

An ICONS adventure such as A Murder of Crowes is essentially all about magic, but you don't have to be magic (call it a 2), while something like The Skeletron Key is all about technology (call it a 5). Most adventures sit in the middle—Gangbusters! has high-tech weaponry, but that's just flavour. Most adventures explicitly show you one pole or the other, but don't rule out the opposite....The Skeletron Key might have all the shiny tropes of technology, but it doesn't rule out the presence of Magus Rune, Lord of the Inscriptive Arts.

The other scale is scope, with it extending from local to cosmic. Say the range is City - Nation - Continent - Globe - Solar System - Cosmic. (I'm not sure that Continent gets a lot of play in North America—only three big countries—but it could be very common in Europe.) (I tried placing Neighbourhood in there and claiming that anything off earth was Cosmic, but several adventures take place near-earth and I wouldn't call them cosmic.)

You could go binary with this thing, with the two values being road and local, but as an adventure classification, you probably want to know how far the PCs are going to go.

Dimension hopping is rather like scope. I was thinking about it, and rather than dimensions being woo, another axis, they're really a bit of flavour. Another dimension is another city or farther; same scale as scope. If your players go to Opposite World, where everything has managed to come out mostly the same despite everyone having the exact opposite moral compass, or Annelis, the world that exists on the surface of a fluke burrowing ever deeper into the body of the glutton god Azagulp, really the difference is how distinct they are, not how far they are. What you're measuring is how much the everyday behaviour of the heroes is appropriate to what they're doing. I just indicate dimension hopping with an asterisk...and let the scope indicate how different the rules are. Even though everyone on Sauroglobe is a reptile, the world acts like ours. Call it a different city (Nation). Opposite World is a global change: It's at least as different as someone from Poughkeepsie going to Mongolia. Annelis is probably cosmic.

A big part of changing scopes means, I think, losing allies and being unfamiliar with the local customs. So if you normally run Zebulon Odd and his adventures with the Omicron Gang, having him be trapped in one city forces him to deal with things he can normally ignore. In the same way, when Vine-Swinging Gupta has to travel around the world, he gets to deal with all of the culture shock details he normally doesn't.

Remember: we've already established that things like lethality or noir-ness are set by your campaign.

For the set of adventures I did (all the Ad Infinitum, Impossible Tales, and Stark City stuff), there were 33 adventures. Fourteen were restricted to a city, the rest were not.

There's certainly wiggle room: First, I don't have all of the adventures handy and had to go by memory. Second, there were other choices; for instance, I chose to say that the prison complex in "Jailbreak!" was far enough away that it counted as national, but there is a precedent in comics for putting dangerous prisons full of supervillains right in or by the city. Call it roughly half were in the city, and half were a road trip of some kind, either shrinking into a man's body, taking a trip to Alaska or New Zealand, or discovering extraterrestrial empires.

However, I chose the values so that they could be used for random creation (though I'm not sure you'd want to). The scope is a simple D6 roll (though if you want to weight it heavily, use 2D6:

2d6: Scope	Means...
2-7: City	Something happens in the city. Your city. Go beat them up.
8: Nation	Road trip! There's a problem that you'll have to travel to, but fortunately, there's transportation available.
9: Continent	Be careful...they do things a little differently where we're going.
10: Globe	We're going to be cut off from our regular allies, and at risk of sowing confusion and interruptions, but this is something only we can fix.
11: Solar System	There's some problem in a satellite, a space station, an experimental space craft, or the hidden world on the inside of the hollow earth.
12: Cosmic	"Help me, Obi-Wan <insert-name-here>. You're our only hope!"

Now, those descriptions (beside being firmly tongue-in-cheek) also assume that the city is your normal stomping ground. If you normally run a game of the Planetary Protectors, those aren't the conditions that apply: you probably have allies in Tokyo, Norway, and maybe even on St. Pierre.

For magic versus science, it might be:

Magic vs. Science D6	Means...
1: Magic galore	The main threat is a seriously magic one, and knowing some magic is essential.
2: Magic	Lots of magic, but science can certainly help here. You can make do with Grimoires For Dummies.
3: Magic flavoured	It's a bad thing with a magic label, but we can all thump it.
4: Science flavoured	It's a MacGuffin with a science label, but anyone can hit it.
5: Science	It would really help if we had someone scientific to help, the answers might be available on Wikipedia.
6: Superscience	I hope you have a tech whiz available, because just pulling out the plug is not going to work.

(I did a bubble plot in Excel — because I had to learn something in Excel, I figured I would do this as well — but haven't saved it as an image and put it up. Later.)

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harvey_rrit pointed out that some settings are rich in both science and magic, so maybe you need to roll twice.

Nowadays, I'd probably set the scale at neighborhood - city - nation - international - solar system - cosmic.  

But what's your core activity?

I was listening to the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast and they once again mentioned the idea that you ought to be able to name a core activity of your game. It doesn't mean that the activity is the only thing you'll be doing, but it's the main thing.

So my first attempt at defining the core activity for my favourite niche-of-a-niche activity (superhero RPGs) is "Defeat the bad guys and preserve order."

I was also listening to the Fat Man on Batman podcast, where Andrew Kreisberg mentioned that in the Flash TV show writers' room they have a sign that indicates the recipe for each show (Heart, Humor, Spectacle, in that order of importance). Kind of the same thing...it's their statement of core activities.

You notice that bad guys aren't mentioned? In fact, I'd say that the villains are often the weakest part of the Berlanti DCTV-verse. The season bad guys are generally good, but the individual episode bad guys can be quite weak. Supergirl in particular has this problem right now.

If you have players who are committed to the story and the relationships (the kind of players who would take on the game Masks, for instance), that might be totally okay. If your players came up through Champions, though, and they expect bad guys, that would be a problem. "We are good guys and we always win because the opposition is pretty wimpy."

The Base Raiders game makes this explicit....I just wish I liked the system more, because there are details that I like a great deal. In that game, the players defining goals means that they also define the core activity.

So here are some other statements of core activities for superhero games and how they might affect the campaign.

We salvage stuff either before others or in dangerous places. This is less combat and more situational puzzles, with the possibility of rivals and possibly some legal loopholes.

We rescue people, from natural and unnatural disasters. I was trying to think of something that was super and would use super abilities, and be heroes, but not have your traditional punchy-fighty structure. The characters are first responders, essentially, to great disasters.

We are the superhero support team, who make them look good, despite resistance from them and the other side I had thought of this one some time ago as a campaign that had every player representing both a member of the support team and the superhero. The two might be attached to each other or not. It was either going to be structured as a prep-fight thing, or as a series of flashbacks during the fight: every time a hero wanted to use a retcon or said that something was available, I was going to flashback to how it got there. (The latter might be interesting in a story, but I couldn't see a way to make it work as a roleplaying session.) I loved the "Our people meet their people to discuss where the fight will be" scene, though: "It turns out your original nominee is owned by a mob boss we're beholden to. That's off the table. We'd like this place, because it's due to be destroyed, and we'll split the demolition fee with you." This also implies a lot more social stuff and relationship stuff than the others.

X-Men...really?

I was listening to the Play On Target podcast, where Lowell Francis interviewed Eloy Lasanta, and Lasanta mentioned his love of the X-Men. I've heard of this love from others and I realized that the superhero RPGs I love (Supers! and ICONS) do a more four-colour setting by default.

I was never a big reader of the X-Men...the proliferation of X-titles in the 1990s was of the reasons I fled to DC (truthfully, I had been a DC child anyway) and then away from comics. But I recognize the basic characters and I see that the powers approach of my favourite games doesn't really reflect the X-Men as I understand them.

Caveats that I might be totally wrong in my understanding so that True Fans(TM) might object. However, this approach might be fruitful in figuring out how you do things to more accurately reflect the comics. It's mostly inspired by Marvel Heroic Roleplaying (it's not influenced by AMP except for what was in the podcast; I don't own AMP and haven't read it).

When I look at them, the characters in the core X-Men and the New Mutants (again, circa the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when I was occasionally looking at the books) are mostly human but with one or two powers that make them different. As humans, they're usually pretty good...Scott Summers is well-trained, Warren Worthington seems to be buff, Kitty Pryde manages well, and so on. (In story, the justification is the danger room and the training.) It's not until later (such as in Excalibur) that you see any disabled heroes. Anyway, the powers are applied differently: a character might freeze a lock or throw iceballs or make an ice wall, but it's one power. We'll call it a theme. This is like the power sets in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.  (I don't have a list of themes handy, but I might edit one in later.)

Both Supers! and ICONS have mechanisms to handle this stunting: Competency dice and determination points.

First, we roll to see how many themes you have. We're going to use 2d6 because we want the bell curve.

Roll	Number of themes
2-6	One power theme (Colossus has the Strength theme; Angel can fly; Cyclops blasts things with his eyebeams)
7-10	Two power themes (Kitty phases and is smart; Wolverine has the healing factor and an animal theme)
11-12	Three power themes (I can't think of examples at this second, but I'm sure they exist. Maybe Cable, who has cybernetics, and the telekinesis, and being from the future and having that kind of knowledge might qualify as a third--I don't know enough about the character to be sure.)

Then we're going to figure out the width of your biggest theme. This is the number of standard expressions of your power. Iceman lucks out because he has three main expressions: ice armor, movement, and the ability to create things out of ice. Colossus has two expressions: strength and durability. (You might be able to call that one in ICONS with Alternate Form.) Cyclops and Angel have a single expression: optic blasts and flight, respectively. (Actually, you could make an argument that Angel's second theme is wealth but I'm not sure I want to go there. Worth considering that wealth might be a power, like any ICONS ability over 6.)

Again, we roll 2d6 for the bell curve:

Roll	Width of theme
2-6	One main expression
7-10	Two main expressions
11-12	Three main expressions

If you have multiple themes, the additional ones only get one main expression. (That's okay: you can stunt on any of these themes.) You get to pick which one might have multiple expressions, if any. You can run all of those main expressions at once. So Iceman, who has three main expressions, can have the armour, the movement, and the attack.

You pick (or roll, on the nonexistent table) your themes. Once you have themes, you can pick or roll main expressions. Those are the powers you normally use, but you can stunt others.

"Great," you say. "But what is the point?"

The point is that it's free to swap expressions or powers within your main theme. (In systems with a finer grain, such as Mutants & Masterminds, you might say that swapping within your theme takes a bit of time, maybe your movement action, but doesn't cost hero points.) To keep extra expressions up simultaneously costs a competency die or a determination point. To stunt in some other theme costs a competency die or a determination point. It costs two dice or points to bring a power into your theme, and you have to have a justification.

By defining the themes, we get to ones where it's difficult to use a power (it's from a different theme according to the homebrew rules we've just put down).  In fact, you can have character generation being constructing your theme, or players can add to the theme with experience. (That's certainly the only way to add powers or expressions to a secondary theme.)

Themes would include a particular animal or being animalistic; darkness; force; light; air; earth; water; fire; plants; movement; telekinesis; mental; decay or corruption; magic; strength; time; body alteration; and so on. A theme has one or more obvious main powers and the set of things that often go with it. A theme has, oh, five to ten powers in it--we're looking for comic book cliches here. Some of them will be contradictory...just don't take them both.

For instance:

Theme	Expressions (powers)
Air	Flight or Gliding, control winds, shielding winds, alternate form (air), gentle fall, shielding
Animal theme	Depends on the animal...Power mimicry specific to animals, Flight, Swimming, Burrowing, Leaping, Claws/fangs, Strength/toughness, Growth/Shrinking, Super-senses (smell, taste, hearing, eagle eyesight, 360 degree vision, sonar, infrared vision, electroception)
Body alteration	Growing, Shrinking, Phasing or Intangibility, Air walking, Density Increase, Duplication, Regeneration, Enhanced Senses, Stretching or Malleability
Mental	Mind reading, Mental link, Mind control, Mental blast, Mind find, Possession, Telekinesis, Precognition
Phasing	Intangibility, Air walking, Enhanced senses, attack by phasing through things, disable electronics
Strength	Strength, Invulnerability, Leaping, Flight, Superbreath, Alternate form that gives strength, Density Increase, Immobility

A given power can show up in more than one theme. There are multiple ways of doing an energy blast: that was the whole point of going to effect-based powers. Here I'm trying to graft a cause back on to those.

Themes might possibly be the character types in the Mutants & Masterminds random character creation system. In Champions terms, everyone gets an elemental control and the ability to stunt within it for free.

This is totally untested, but I think it might work.

Pyramid Power!

SYSTEM: ICONS

I was thinking about pyramid tests in ICONS. I don't think they're a solution without a problem, but I think there isn't enough guidance about what they can be used for. Let me make my suggestions, and other things will naturally occur to you.

A pyramid test is a set of tests where you want to accumulate a massive success. Lesser successes add to larger successes. So you could roll once, or eight times barely successfully. That's the concept. How can you use it?

In combat, it could represent firing the photon torpedo down the narrow access shaft to destroy the Death Star, or managing to get sufficient damper rod material into the atomic monster's tiny mouth opening. (There might even be a way to replace actual combat with Stamina and such with pyramid tests, but I don't want to go there.) It's an interesting way to handle a crowd of minions or a swarm of bees: rather than treating the swarm as a single opponent, the PCs have to win a pyramid test where they can use any technique, from swatting with the wall of a shed to the quantities of honey they put out to attract the insects.

In tests, it's good for something that the skillmeister does while the combat bunnies fight. For instance, perhaps the combat bunnies keep the Killdroids busy while your tech-savvy character is defeating the firewall(s) around the computer that controls the Killdroids, or that supplies them power in a mad Nikola Tesla air-power scheme. The tech-savvy character may take three panels to break into the computer while the fighting goes on, but the combat bunnies would never be able to destroy the Killdroids unless TechGuy got through the firewall.

One place that I've had good luck is to use the pyramid test instead of detective work. In a scenario I had written, there was a certain amount of detective work, which was the jam for my first playtest group but tedious to the second. The first group just roleplayed it. (In game terms, I was mostly concerned with how fast they'd find the information, not that they'd find the information.) I replaced the roleplaying with a pyramid test, because the second group of players preferred--they were able to say, "Oh, I'll do this to test," roll to see if/how well they did it, and add that to the pyramid test. So long as players had reasonable ideas of how to approach the problem, I allowed it. The fact that you can spend an Advantage to get +2 to effort helped, too, because they were able to minimize the boring detective stuff and get on to what they wanted, which was to fight bad guys.

Your opponent can negate your character's successes, or you can run with a second pyramid test. They represent opposed and unopposed tasks: if what your opponent does subtracts from what you do, then you subtract their degree of success from the total you've achieved.

Uberfraulein (the cousin to Ubermensch) is having a tug of war with Wonderful Chick. Obviously they're working against each other. You have a single pyramid test.

Ubermensch and Flicker are running for charity. Unless they're actively working against each other, I'd run it as two separate pyramid tests, each rolling against the same target number. Ubermensch will probably lose to Flicker because he has flight 8 and Flicker has Superspeed 9, but maybe not. Maybe an earlier mistake by Flicker (that is, a bad roll) will allow Ubermensch to get to the finish line first. (You can even make it a sub-game by giving each player the choice of whether they want to make a roll to add to their own pyramid or subtract from the other's.)

You could certainly run a pyramid test when trying to convince someone that they are wrong about something--say, your character's secret identity. Your character needs to provide a certain number of points of proof, because the other person knows that shape changers exist, so just seeing the two of you in a room isn't going to convince them.

Basically, if one person has to succeed at a number of tasks in a row, a pyramid test might work.

One Tontine, No Waiting

Emily Dresner-Thornber reminded me of one of my favourite illegal financial mechanisms, the tontine.

In case you're not familiar with it, the tontine is a group ownership of some item. As each person dies, his or her shares pass to the other survivors. Whoever is left standing at the end, owns the whole thing. Very useful if you want an excuse for murders galore.

In a powered person context (because clearly this isn't going to be about superheroes, just supers), all powers derive from one power source. Originally, all of ten thousand people had powers. (In a supers game system with points, everyone had the same low number of points.) But if you kill someone, you get their points. When you have children (if you have children), they get your points. There's a trade-off: more kids means that someone is likely to survive, but they probably each get fewer points. And you're stuck with fewer points. Some powers, like immortality, let you avoid losing points under normal circumstances, but if you have kids, you're unlikely to be immortal....they've sucked up your points.

The contest to kill other super-powered people starts. I think it would start as overt, but as members got better, it would move to covert: some people would hide. Once individuals get past a certain point, they might be overt again. ("You killed that guy, and then your skin started glowing. Weird.")

There's an interesting situation where some very low-level supers had kids and essentially became invisible because everyone had so little power. And then the parents die, and the kids get stronger. So they get attacked. Maybe it's luck, maybe it's the fact that their parents took someone out with a rocket propelled grenade just before they died, but all of a sudden, the kids are in this decades or centuries-long game and they have to survive. And folks aren't going to leave them alone.

Re-using a Villain (or other character)

SYSTEM: ANY

Following up on my notion of "cusp" versus "rise" characters, character re-use is central. So now I'm thinking about re-using a character. Obviously, if the character was intended to be re-used, it's easy. Or if the character got away, all you need is a motivation, either a diamond as big as the Ritz, or revenge if the character was an onion-skin away from capture.

Maybe character write-ups should come with a "re-use" category, indicating the ease of incorporating the character into your campaign over a long term. Well, relatively few characters are sold with the idea that they can't be reused (though there are situations that call for it: Dr. Immoral Dilemma, for instance, also known as SAW).

But let's say you have a character who was a one-off but the players are still talking about him or her. How do you bring that villain back? 

And, in fact, I'm going to challenge my earlier idea and say that there are some characters who are refreshing to see again but they aren't tied to any long-term goal. They're just wacky or inventive or fun. The Foxbat character from Champions was like this.

Anyway, in one sense, it's a silly question. In my youth, when we wanted to bring a character back, we said, "He broke out of jail and now he wants revenge. And he's bringing friends." And it can be that simple. If that's what you want to do, go for it.

On the other hand, that was hit and miss. Sometimes it was worth doing and sometimes the character just showed up and it was another ho-hum session.

Nowadays, with more time between sessions, I'd ask myself some questions before bringing a character back.

Why was the character popular? Was it the connection with one of the PCs? Was it the cool power? Was it the plan? Was it the hostage situation? The costume? The seasonal connection? The fact that the villain always brings candy canes? You don't want to destroy what made the character a success in the first place.  Presumably you're bringing the character back because the players talk about him or her. What do they say?

You don't have to do the exact same thing, of course: sometimes it's fine to riff off the previous adventure, presenting the villain and heroes in the opposite light. Maybe the villain is trying to shake off the depression after having tasted godhood. Maybe the villain wants to be arrested because he's hooked on prison food (The Emerald Epicurean has been promoted at the Superguy prison, and his breakfast souffles are to die for.)

What do you need to change, if anything? When you resolved the last adventure, what had changed for the PCs or the villain? If the villain had a great plan revolving around the worship of Samhain and it's early Easter, do you have to take that into account? If the villain professed her undying attention for one of the heroes who has since gotten publicly married, does that change things? If the villain wanted to get hold of the eighth star of the Pleiades that fell to earth in the fourth century AD, and it got destroyed, what's the villain's plan now?

In fact, that can be a large part of the adventure: a plan that would have been fine before the heroes got responsibility fails because the heroes just have too much to do nowadays (no, I'm not projecting; why do you ask?) so the villain falls on increasingly desperate attempts to get their attentions.

A special case of change is if the villain died. Coming back from the dead is almost as old as comics, dating to when they wanted to bring back the Joker, so there's no shame is revealing that the villain survived the terrible fate that apparently befell them. (Bonus points if someone said, "No one could have survived that!" when he or she died.) Heck, you can even have the villain actually be an imposter trying to duplicate the original's MO, or have the villain simply shrug it off. 

"But...I sent you to the pits of Tartarus!"

"I got better."

Why is the villain back? Let's face it, any sensible mercenary villain would go, "Hey, they beat me. I'll go work in the Congo, where there's only war and strife to worry about." So why did the villain come back here, to the campaign location? There are a couple of possibilities. Revenge, of course. Maybe what they want is only available here (there's a reason that the museum of supervillain trophies is in the town with superheroes), or they need the eclipse that's going to be visible locally. Maybe they are just too attracted to the hero or NPC to stay away.

Sometimes it's fun to beat up the bad guy who keeps trying to win (though my players are more likely to find out his inner problem and set him up with a job); sometimes there's a complex scheme that evolves from the return of a bad guy.

Cusp versus Rise

SYSTEM: ANY

Because RPGs are hero-centric, I categorize the villains as cusp villains or rise villains in terms of how the heroes view them and how they interface with the heroes.

A cusp is a brief (usually one session) interaction. A villain group might plan its heist for weeks but if the heroes don't know about it until they enter the jewelry store, it's a cusp from the heroic viewpoint. This might be the villain-of-the-week, or the latest installment of being harried by some other villain.

A rise villain has lots of hero face time. This could be because it's a friend of the hero who has succumbed to a sudden-but-inevitable betrayal, or it's a returning villain, or a spider in the middle of a web who is pulling threads.

I thought of this while considering shows like Flash or Supergirl, where the villain of the week is usually forgettable, even if they are terribly powerful, like Weather Wizard on the Flash TV series or Jemm on Supergirl. (It might be just my viewing, but it seems to me that Alex was losing against Jemm despite all the badass weaponry until the intervention of J'onn J'onzz.)

The idea in a roleplaying sense--and I don't know if it's useful--is that villains your players respond to can become rise villains. Rise villains are usually more memorable, possibly just because they have more face time. They recur. Reverse Flash and Zoom and Astra are all rise villains because you have an ongoing sense of them, of dread and anticipation.

In general, we want our campaigns punctuated by rise villains because they're memorable. The next question is figuring out what makes them memorable.

Campaign Framework: Community Service

SYSTEM: ANY

Spinning off from some thoughts yesterday, a kind of sponsored hero team....

It started when organized crime in Orchard Valley brought in a supervillain. (Less hired, and more finally succumbed to the insistence of one of its higher-placed members, who said they should get with the times.) Their first action, a protection racket, worked quite well until it expanded to the small business neighborhood of Cherrystone, where the owner of the Bran New! bakery refused to pay them. (Cherrystone's motto is Cherrystone—It's not the pits!)

They came around that night to burn down the place and show everyone. They didn’t realize that the pastry chefs are often working late at night to make pastries for the next day. They also didn’t realize that the pastry chef—Gloria Desroches—was a pyrokinetic, so arson was just the wrong approach.

She stopped them. There was collateral damage, because she had never done this hero thing before (she uses her powers to brown crusts and sometimes to caramelize the top of a creme brulee).

They came back with a car to run in the side of the building, but she extinguished the explosions running the engine, and it sputtered to a stop twenty paces from the building. (They did throw rocks and manage to break the window.)

By then, the local chamber of commerce had come to Gloria and asked her to be on call for the neighborhood. She agreed.

The city already had a “superhero”—the city a suit of powered armor seized in a drug raid, and they had been using it sans weapons for community service. The city had a kill switch for it, so there was little risk of an offender going berserk. The powered armor was strong and bulletproof, so it was useful for disaster relief, search and rescue, getting cats out of trees, and so on. Orchard Valley added Cherrystone to its regular route.

The organized crime group added a second supervillain, and Gloria had to work with the suit of powered armor. It still wasn’t a full-time gig: she was a pastry chef and Andrew was a stockbroker working off his DUI. Then organized crime added two supervillains, and Andrew and Gloria were outclassed.

So the chamber of commerce temporarily hired two more heroes. These two were actual heroes: they had powers and chosen to put themselves in harm’s way. They actually made it a team: the Social Protection Agency, or SPA. They put into place protocols and schedules and training regimes.

The players are members of this team. Gloria has since retired (it was interfering with her cooking, and she wanted to set up her own shop), and Andrew’s sentence ended. The power armor suit sits unused, because the user has to fit it: it is a Procrustean deal for all that it can change size slightly.

The team is not a full-time job—there just isn’t enough crime in Cherrystone or even in all of Orchard Valley. But the work of the criminal organization means that there is some crime and the team is necessary.

Ongoing characters would include various business owners (Gloria Desroches might still be around), the organized crime group and their rivals, the team's manager, local civil rights groups and lawyers, and whatever dependents your PCs bring in. Golden Acres

The Corporate Superhero

I meant to post this yesterday, but didn't. C'est la vie. I want to point you to a resource that I've only just found: A list of superhero tropes and cliches. Yes, I will be referring to it occasionally.

Today I'm thinking about the trope of the corporate superhero: the hero who is paid by a corporation or organization to act as a superhero. This is closely related to the supervillain mercenary or employee, and a lot of the things here can be used there.

Let's consider the world-building. A corporation can sponsor or employ a superhero because it created the hero, so it can work in a world with very few heroes and villains. (That would actually work for a three-heroes-and-no-supervillains background, right up until the rise of, well, supervillains.) In that case, the superheroes are probably transformed humans, gadget-based humans, or artificial in some way, but aliens aren't impossible.

On the other hand, maybe there are so many superpowered people that the corporation sees an advantage in having one. Evil Faceless Corporation (henceforth EFC) looks much more caring if Captain Compassion is on the job. (They just have to keep him out of Houston, where they're doing something...and that's just a name I picked out of a hat, not a reference to any real world thing.)

If most of the superpowered people don't actually want to be heroes or villains  then the corporate sponsorship is opportunistic and possibly unhindered by a moral code.

So corporate sponsorship can work with almost any number of super-powered folks, but the fewer there are, the more you have to justify it.

There are a couple of variations on the corporate superhero:

1. The hero has no powers or abilities at all, even in costume, but any acts of "heroism" are carefully stage-managed to look like such. In this case, the company gets the good will engendered by a "hero." It's probably cheaper to create a faux hero this way, but not cheaper to maintain this facade. Useful primarily as part of some other scheme (though a "keeping up with the Joneses" competitive matching scheme might work: if every other corporation in your market segment has a superhero and you don't, it might be worth it).
2. The hero has abilities, but acts of heroism are stage-managed to get a better effect. I'm not sure where stage-management shades into support staff, and you might be able to play with that distinction, especially if your heroes have a support staff.
3. The hero is meant for something else (such as advertisement or promotion) and stumbles into the heroism thing, to the delight or chagrin of his or her handlers. "We were fine when you got the cat out of the tree, but a guy who flies and is not bullet-proof should not be stopping bank robberies, he should just be tailing the criminals." This is a broader definition of the Tony Stark cover story that Iron Man is the bodyguard. It includes bodyguards but also the guy who makes supermarket appearances, or who acts as a superfast courier.
4. The hero is actually a hero, paid for by the company. The hero gets to hero without money worries, while the company gets reflected glory and good will. Expect pushback if the hero investigates corruption in a corporation or conflicts with their market segment.
5. The hero is actually a hero and is accepting sponsorship, which might lead to a conflict of interest when they tell the hero to look in one direction while they do something else.
6. The hero is totally on board with this and is maximizing profit. In stories, this character and the character in the item before are probably bad, but it might be more interesting to have them simply choose to help in the areas that don't leave them open to a conflict of interest, and to emphasize the ways in which that makes them similar to the player characters.
7. The corporation makes the heroes and funds them, but really makes its money on marketing their images (which is, I think, part of the background of Seana McGuire's Velveteen stories). The heroism thing is a loss-leader: it's necessary to keep the marketing going (you have to have something to market) but they aren't going to pour an infinite amount of money into it, either. It's possible that the corporate heroes are opposed by villains who are also funded by the corporation, that the stories (like professional wrestling) are planned out in advance but loosely, allowing for change depending on what happens.

A team of corporate heroes could be interesting rivals or opponents for the heroes without actually being bad.

Crisis on Christmas, ICONS style

SYSTEM: ICONS

Steve Kenson's Crisis on Christmas is a fine adventure that should be a Rankin/Bass production. But John Holmes asks for an ICONS version. So here's one minute of thought and twenty-nine minutes of typing. I assume you're read the adventure: no context provided here.

Early on, they can encounter Desparia's weather control powers. To create the "Cloud of Despair" (Affliction versus Will, ranged, burst, level 7) and the "Snow Blind" powers (Dazzle, burst, level 5), either stunt them using the "Ice Witch" quality or make them GM fiat: she can do them, but they require additional effort on her part and they won't happen during a fight. (Possibly before.) If you stunt them, it puts more determination points in the pockets of the heroes.

The wolves look something like this:

Name	Wolves
Prowess	4	Intellect	1	Specialties
Coordination	4	Awareness	4	None
Strength	3	Willpower	3	Powers
Determination	-	Stamina	6	1	Life Support (Cold)
Qualities				1	Damage Resistance (shaggy fur)
Unnatural				3	Magical claw and bite Extra: Ignores non-innate Resistance
Pack hunters

Desparia's hobgoblins look something like this:

Name	Hobgoblins
Prowess	5	Intellect	2	Specialties
Coordination	4	Awareness	4	None
Strength	4	Willpower	2	Powers
Determination	-	Stamina	7	1	Life Support (Cold)
Qualities				3	Strike (cudgel) or Blast (crossbow, sling, iceballs)
Unnatural				2	Damage Resistance (armor)
Willing to die for Desparia

The extras for the wolves and hobgoblins might make them tough against your heroes. Feel free to treat them as minions. Shift things around a bit to suit your heroes: maybe the Blast is a bit higher; maybe the Strike is not a damage 5 bashing attack (Strength+1) but a damage 4 Slashing ice sword. If the hobgoblins are not tough enough for your heroes, then add the Quality "Small" to them, and treat them as if they had enough Shrinking for a +1 to hit and evade. (Hobgoblins: The smaller they are, the tougher they are!)

Here's a version of Desparia:

Name	Desparia
Prowess	4	Intellect	4	Specialties
Coordination	3	Awareness	6	Elemental Control Mastery
Strength	3	Willpower	4	Powers
Determination	-	Stamina	7	8	Elemental Control (Cold weather) Damage Resistance
Qualities					Extra: Blast (wintry winds)
Ice Witch					Extra: ESP (ice scrying) Limit: Extra time to cast
Scared and Angry Little Girl					Extra: Binding
Gifted by Mr. Infamy				3	Flight
				1	Life Support (cold)

At the end, when they try to convince Desparia, do it as a balanced Pyramid test...with three failures, it "tips over" (Mr. Infamy has gained the upper hand) and they have to start again after changing something about the situation.

A look at Masks

Here's a brief look at Masks, a PbtA game which had a very successful Kickstarter, and which I expect will be published in 2016.

I've never played another Powered by the Apocalypse game, so I'm a virgin there. I've never even owned one before, so I have no idea how it goes.  But there's a call for playtests on Masks, so I had a look at the playtest materials.

Currently, there are three PDFs to the playtest materials: one of the ten basic playbooks, one of the basic moves, and one of GM moves. I and my gang have been playing RPGs since 1980, so there is clearly some unlearning that has to go on, and unfortunately the skeletal nature of the playtest material doesn't help. Fortunately, I can look at the DungeonWorld SRD for some of the connective tissue. Unfortunately, it's a bit different.

Part of it is the terminology (what is the difference between a soft move and a hard move?) and part of it is the formatting (the PDF they supply is clearly in format for booklets, but figuring out how to print it isn't in the remit, apparently). Still...

The playbook for a character is also the instructions for creating the character. It lists the various decisions you have to make and the moves that are unique to your character type.

Premise

The characters are teen superheroes in Halcyon City. They are a team: they all want to be superheroes and they all want to be together. Reasons might differ, of course.

Players define their characters' backstories and then the players together define how the team came together.

Mechanics

It turns out that saying "powered by the Apocalypse" goes a long way, but not far enough. It basically covers the resolution mechanic and the approach to storytelling. But there are a couple of other things that are involved.

Characters don't have hit points; they have emotional conditions. It might seem limiting to say that the character has only five hit points, but emotional conditions are more fluid than hit points typically are, and there are ways to relieve an emotional condition, either in the scene or for the next scene.

There's an influence mechanic that affects your rolls against a character, but you can trade your influence in for something more momentous.

There's a team mechanic that can provide benefits to the entire group or to an individual at the expense of the group.

The game works best with three or more players and a GM (whatever they call the GM in this system...referee?). You can make it work with two, but it stutters, and I can't imagine how it could be done with a single player without some heavy alteration of the rules.

Encouraging the Tropes

The game has a number of clever things that really encourage the tropes or cliches of teen team comics. (You'd probably have to make changes if you wanted to be the Teen Titans as written by Bob Haney, but frankly, I'm not sure that Bob Haney's mind could be contained in any game.) It would handle the Wolfman-Perez Titans brilliantly:

• Robin/Nightwing: Protege.
• Starfire: Outsider.
• Raven: Doomed.
• Cyborg: Transformed.
• Changeling: Okay, Changeling I have trouble slotting into a playbook. I feel certain that he'd fit, but I don't remember all ten of the character types right now. Emotionally, he feels most like the Beacon playbook to me, but his powers don't match the description they give at all.

The biggest problem (as shown above) to me is that the playbooks are essentially classes, and sometimes you end up choosing a class because there's a power you feel is neat. In the full game, I hope there's some discussion of fitting powers to the playbook. I don't have enough experience with PbtA games to know where I can hack, yet

A Random Supers! Character

SYSTEM: SUPERS! RED

I decided I'd try a session the Mythic way, with no idea where it was going. After listening to the latest BAMF! podcast, I decided to use Supers! even though my character will be nowhere near as cool as the Goblin Ghost.

I'll put up the character first and then at some future date I'll put up an adventure.

Random character:
Origin (2d6): 2,3: Special Training (-3D powers, +2D resistances, +1D Aptitudes)
Resistances (8d6): 1,2,2, 3, 4,4,4,6:  One to add for player's choice, one for competency.
Composure: 3D
Fortitude: 2D
Reaction: 4D
Will: 2D
He's good. And the origin means I get to add 2 more. Let's make him a bit more strong-willed (3D) and increase his Fortitude a lot:
Composure: 3D
Fortitude: 4D
Reaction: 4D
Will: 3D

Aptitudes (5d6): 2. 3, 3, 4, 5--so ranks are 2D, 3D, 2D, and 2D. What are they, exactly? We'll skip the nominal first aptitude.
2,2 Aircraft
2,1 Vehicles
6,6 Survival
3,3 Investigation

Well, clearly he was on an around-the-world tour when his plane crashed and he had to learn how to survive, which made him tough tough tough. Let's say he can fight, for that extra D6 from his origin. If he had streetwise, I'd make it guns, but he clearly wasn't a criminal.

Aircraft: 2D
Fighting: 2D
Investigation: 2D
Survival: 2D
Vehicles: 3D

Power ranks (7d6): 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5
Powers would be
1D 3,6 Telekinesis
1D 3,6 Telekinesis
1D 5,4 Plant Control or Weather Control
3D 5,3 Invulnerability or Life Support
1D 1,1 Absorption

Well, his origin means that I have to get rid of 3D, so I'm dumping the first 3 powers. He has devices that grant him Invulnerability and Absorption. Since they're both devices, I can up each by a die. I think I'll put the 4D of Invulnerability as Piercing, so it's useful against bullets. It's clearly some kind of body armor.

Boosts (2d6): 5,2 both Lingering Effects and Persistent Damage don't really fit. He doesn't have enough dice for me to scarf one up for a Bashing Invulnerability.
Complications (2d6): 3,1 Well, we have devices. And 3,1 is Burnout, which seems appropriate for the Absorption device. So his powers become:
4D: Invulnerability (Device) Piercing
3D: Absorption (Device) Some kind of energy. Haven't thought of what, yet.

Advantages (2d6): 4,1 Attractive or Celebrity; I'll pick Celebrity, because...
Disadvantages (2d6): 4,5 Public ID

So I figure this guy is doing things in public as part of a payback thing: it's his public service. He gets the suit, but he's followed by cameras (and probably wears a body camera to make sure he doesn't do things.) If it's payback, maybe the crime he committed is connected to the vehicles/airplanes aptitudes. Heck, the investigation is probably training he got in order that he doesn't destroy evidence at a crime scene.

Since his vehicles and aircraft aptitudes are high, he wasn't really a criminal criminal; it wasn't his life's work (or he'd have streetwise). No, something like a DUI and wanton property destruction. And the judge, who has a sense of humor, sentenced him to public works. As a superhero. So the armor is painted in the city colors and has probably been tagged by graffiti artists.

He needs a municipal kind of name, or a name from the graffiti tag on his chest. Maybe he's officially known as Community Repayment Individual Municipal (pronounced CRIM), but people have taken to calling him Bad Boy, because that's one of the graffitos. Yes, Bad Boy is a good guy.

Bad Boy ID: Karl Shiner
Resistances
Composure: 3D
Fortitude: 4D
Reaction: 4D
Will: 3D
Aptitudes
Aircraft: 2D
Fighting: 2D
Investigation: 2D
Survival: 2D
Vehicles: 3D

Powers

3D Invulnerability (Device) Piercing
3D: Absorption (Device) Some kind of energy. Haven't thought of what, yet.

Advantages

Celebrity

Disadvantages

Public ID

Sentinels of the Multiverse revisited: Aiding Others

SYSTEM: ICONS

FIgured out how to do Legacy's aiding power in ICONS. My first thought was rather complicated: Probability Control (good luck), Extra: Affects Others, Limit: Others Only, Extra: Duration of Level, Limit: Extra Effort Only.  In play, you'd also want some kind of recharge extra, and he has (say) 4 ranks so he grants it to each of his teammates. So each teammate gets extra effort on each roll for (rank) panels. 

But you can get almost the same effect with Probability Control (bad luck) applied to the villains and their minions. That one is Probability Control (bad luck), Extra: Duration of Level, Limit: never for actions against him alone.

Or you invent a new Aid or Improve Others power, based on some combination of this and Healing. 

(I know that Certain People always like new powers, so this is for them.)

Adventure Seeds on a Theme

I have no ideas today, so we're going to take something and I'll riff on it, and see if we can produce one or more adventure seeds that way. This might be a bountiful harvest of ideas or it might be awful; if I edit this, it will be for presentation or spelling, not for content.

American Thanksgiving is coming up, but my (Canadian) Thanksgiving was last month. So, being between Thanksgivings, I'll take that as my theme.

Thanksgiving is traditionally a time of family togetherness. What if some big bad villain escaped from detention but it's actually so that he or she can spend the holidays with the family? Maybe Dad is dying or something, and this might well be the last Thanksgiving they spend together. The villain can't get out without the help of some others, so there's a whole group there (some of whom don't care about the holiday, so they're happy to loot or whatever, and when caught, they point the finger at Villain's family house. It might look like this:

The PCs are looking forward to their own festivities when the Midnight Throne escapes from his maximum security prison, with the help of several supervillain associates (past villains from your campaign or perhaps Dark Silver, Chicle, Solar Flare, and Limpet, to invent some names). Limpet and Chicle are easy enough to catch because they're busy hijacking a teleporter to get out of the nation, and they eventually point to a quiet suburban home, where the Midnight Throne is having Thanksgiving dinner with his two associates and his family. The ensuing fight puts Throne's father in the hospital--will the PCs let Throne go there to say goodbye?

Mind, there might be some juice to be gotten from avoiding a family get-together as well.

Lots of the team is off enjoying Thanksgiving but several people have volunteered to be on watch duty. They don't actually want to go home. The problem is that even the crooks seem to have taken today off. The PCs respond to an environmental emergency, and that's good, but there's still nothing. Else. To do. They're about to break out the D&D books (and really, don't you want to roleplay your heroes roleplaying D&D?) when the alarms go off. Someone is inside the base!

Now, it could be a story where their companions have decided to bring them some turkey and pie, or even one where the villains bring the food, but in the tradition of Kitty Pryde's Christmas, I'd rather it were other-dimensional invaders. The bad news is, there are a lot of mooks. The good news is, the interdimensional gateway has opened in the hallway on the same for as the Disaster Dungeon, where the team does its training. If they can't beat the invading force directly, maybe the Disaster Dungeon can do it (once they disable the safeties).

And I'm out of lunchtime, so there you go.

Sex and the Single Superhero

SYSTEM: Any

This is my smut entry. I'll try to keep it fairly clean in terms of words but we'll be talking about some adult stuff, so if you want to skip this, now would be a good time.

Still here?

I was thinking about sex and superheroes this morning on the drive in. Most comics just ignore it and that's a perfectly fine genre convention to keep.

If you want to go all hardcore (so to speak), go off and read Larry Niven's famous essay, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex. (The Wikipedia article is here, and a probably illegal copy of the text is here. No guarantees that either link will be good even a second after I post this.) I'm proposing something a little gentler.

For starters, let's ignore all the trained and gimmick-laden humans. They have no physical problems. (Maybe mental ones, but that's outside my purview right now.) We can probably not worry about lots of mutants: if your mutation is that you have wings or horns but everything else is standard equipment, you don't have a problem except maybe socially.

That leaves us the folks with powers that make things difficult or who aren't actually human: your super-strong or invulnerable types, your rapid regenerators, your superfast speedsters, or your aliens. It's not clear if Metamorpho even has genitalia any more, though he can probably produce something suitable.

The super-strong or the invulnerable might be in danger of hurting their partners or of, er, not being accessible. If regenerators happen to be capable of regenerating and there's a noticeable hymen, that might be a problem. Speedsters probably have a problem syncing up with their partners.

The obvious solution, and one that might feed nicely into any campaign that features any kind of super/non-super stratification, is that supers of that sexually-isolating kind only date other supers.

There's something terribly lonely about the woman with the permanent force field who can only date the person who nullifies force fields, whether a hero or not. The Obelisk might pine for Nancy Normal, but can only be intimate with Suzy Strength.  The Zipper might remember her old boyfriend fondly but the foreplay takes so damned long  (hours by her standards, even though he's known as Quick-Draw locally). And Quirk the being from Planet Z doesn't even find humans attractive, but dolphins work.

There's a subclass of supers who can only have relations with other supers, because they're afraid of hurting a normal partner. (I suppose there's a subsubsubclass of those that doesn't care about hurting a normal partner, but I prefer not to think about that.) So what kind of things are you going to see developing because of that?

MetaDate is the online dating service for metahumans. The customers (with exceptions, obviously) have a higher tolerance for unusual appearances. Gender categories include male, female, trans, neuter, and fluid. The profile form includes relevant powers, but they never ask which side of the law you're on.

The Underground is a dating club for metahumans. It can be classified as either a place for a date or a pickup bar, depending on what section you're in. The Underground is, well, underground: under an embassy of a country without an extradition treaty. In fact, it has an agreement with the embassy: activities on its soil are not considered to be bound by the laws of the host country, and while they might be technically illegal in the embassy's country, there is no access between the Underground and the embassy. The embassy's staff practices "don't ask, don't tell." The Underground is not a place for actual assignations; the staff is quite strong and there are other staff members who handle some of the more outre abilities. (There is a member of staff normally immune to suggestion or mind control, for instance.)

Dimension X has nothing so abstruse legally...it's just a place for aliens. It started small, and is gradually growing to fill the warehouse block where it exists. There are a number of small rooms, each of which attempts to mimic "home" for some alien species. Most of the rooms can handle a number of environments, but the number isn't infinite, and there are some things it can't handle at all. They used to have a problem with theft (supervillains kept stealing their gravity repulsor technology or their red sun filters) but a few retired heroes work there now, and that has lowered the incidence considerably. It is expensive, though the local agency that deals with and controls aliens (the Bureau of Extra Foreign Affairs) supports it.

Uplifted animals have different problems...but that's for a different post.

The care and feeding of secret identities

Secret identities are not particularly in, right now. On shows like Flash and Supergirl they seem to reveal their secret identities at the drop of a hat (mask?). The biggest group, the X-Men, don't really have secret identities, though some of them wear masks in sort a half-witted attempt at hiding their identities. Though the original X-Men wore masks and still do, most of the New Mutants don't when I look at covers. (Really...they're hated and feared. You'd figure they'd wear more disguise, not less.) The lamented Fantastic Four just say who they are, and Tony Stark admits to gallivanting around in armor. Thor has no secret identity, and Hank Pym seems to use his name as often as any of the other identities he has.

And, really, secret identities have a bad rep. It feels in retrospect like there were a bazillion stories where Lois suspected Clark of being Superman, but was foiled because Clark dressed up a robot, or Batman, or pretended to be dead, or used super-ventriloquism (really? I mean, really?) to pretend he was in the next room from Superman.

Not to mention that in the context of most superhero RPGs, your secret identity as Pablo Pinkwater, crusading blogger, doesn't matter except as a way to feed you information or get you in and out of scrapes.

So what's a GM to do with secret identities?

Obviously, you don't need them. It's totally okay if a player is fine with playing Frank, whose public name is Ionic Column, or even just Frank. If that's the game you want to play, great.

But if a character has taken a secret identity--has made a point of saying it--then what do you do with it?

There are, to my mind, three reasons why a player might take a secret identity for his or her character:

1. It makes sense for the character (the sole trained normal in a group of demigods, for instance) but the player doesn't really want to play it. In that case, trying to bring in the character's secret identity is going to be frustrating for both of you: you'll get annoyed that you keep throwing out plot crumbs that get ignored, and the player will get annoyed that you're wasting all this time on unimportant things. A variant of this is the player who is actively trying to keep you from giving them stuff that will distract from what they consider the cool gaming part. You see this in players who are there for the puzzles and game rather than the story. (No knock on either.)
2. It makes sense for the character because they have something to hide from the other characters. I had this in a recent M&M3E game, where one character was the child of villains and was actually working on behalf of the supervillain community. This wasn't underhanded as a game thing: The other players knew the character was like this, but their characters didn't. So we did a fair but of almost-lost-identity stuff that revolved around that.
3. The player likes all the angst and the convoluted solutions to pretend to be other people.

In the first case, both of you should just agree that it's the case. "Do you care about this stuff? I notice you didn't take secret identity as a complication or quality." As a GM, you can avoid certain areas easily.

The second case is really the easiest. The important thing is discovery by the other characters, and if your players like your basic fewmet football, then the other players are going to seize on every opportunity that the character provides.

The third case is the one I'm going to talk about. These ideas can also be applied to the second case.

A secret identity is just a specific case of A Terrible Secret. What matters are the consequences of exposure. Once you have sufficiently high consequences, you can play around with the threat of exposure. If there are no consequences, who cares? Your PC can be Hugh out in the suburbs who gets in the car every day, drives to a secret location, and changes. The super team is no different than, say, your secret government organization as a job.

So what are the consequences of exposure, and how do you make them obvious to the players? What are the consequences of exposure?

Generally, the negative consequences of exposure depend on a couple of things that might or might not be true for a given character;

• The hero isn't indestructible all the time. Similarly, trained guys need some kind of down time. If your hero is vulnerable if attacked in his sleep, suddenly there's a reason not to let people know where he lives.
• The hero's associated aren't indestructible. Your hero might be very tough, but the girlfriend/boss/employee/cousin/paperboy isn't. 
• The hero wants some privacy.
• The hero wants to stay in touch with regular people.

So you make them care about exposure by playing with the things that are true for that character and creating situations that might take them away.

People say one thing about the general case and act differently about the specific. So J. Jonah Jameson is against superheroes and these whackos, but it's different when it's his son who has become the Man-Wolf. Your character's dependents might mention how awful the hero identity is, and might even have a plausible reason for hating him or her, but it might not hold up when it's someone the dependent knows. For instance, Aunt May in the early days repeatedly said things about that awful Spider-Man, which made Peter afraid to let her know. During the period where she did know, it was obviously fine with her. (The Ultimates version of Aunt May knew, and was fine.)

If a PC has some romantic potential partner, having the partner say, "I would never date so-and-so" might well be a partial argument against a reveal.

The PCs can see the results of a public identity generally and vendettas carried out by villains against their friends who don't have secret identities: if papparazzi camp out on the doorstep of team-mate Avalanche, or if the Murky Molemaster attacks the family of Avalanche, well, the player has a reason to figure you'd do the same to his or her PC's relatives or loved ones. So feel free to attack them; it's especially effective against people you can't hurt directly. If no one on the team has a public or semipublic identity, feel free to introduce a hero who is being blackmailed in just that way: maybe Fisher Prince doesn't patrol the Swamp section of town whenever he gets a signal from the Bone Gang. There's a whole adventure there trying to resolve Fisher Prince's problem while showing the characters what might happen to them.

Gossip or hearsay can be a powerful tool. If Joe Random Stranger mutters bad things or even threats against the hero, is it so far-fetched as to think a villain might do bad things? "What's that guy, covering his face? What has he got to hide, huh? I bet he's a criminal. And the guy who does show his face, why, he's got these shifty eyes." Feel free to use any photos that fit, just like a "Separated at Birth" joke.

Secret identities seem to be mostly out of place in modern comics or modern supers RPGs. You can still wring interesting things out of them.

The Quality of your Origin

SYSTEM: ICONS

The ICONS system provides a suite of origin possibilities, each of which has a mechanical effect. You make different choices in the creation of your character and your character's backstory depending on whether the character is a birthright character, or artificial, or transformed, or trained, or a gimmick character, or unearthly.

Most characters aren't a pure strain of origin, anyway: very few trained characters have no gadgets; Superman could be considered unearthly or a birthright. In Marvel's current continuity, an Inhuman character is both transformed and has a birthright--only certain people are affected by the Terrigen chemicals. Usually the most important origin version is reflected in the character's qualities: "Feared as a mutant" or "Dedicated to being the peak of human ability" or "Curious outsider" or whatever you want.

Really, it's only important if you're translating a character from a different medium into ICONS (though really, you can just say, "Hey, she has seven specialties...deal with it") or if, like me, you have this compulsion to be "fair," by some definition of the word.

You could, for instance, say that every character gets a bonus on creation, and you don't care what kind--it's one of four extra specialties, or a +2 to a power or ability, or you can change one power without doing some kind of Extra dance.

And that would be fine.

But what if the origin were an extra quality that you could call on during play? Yes, you might still want to have "Exiled Lemurian Prince" as your quality, but you could always invoke your origin. I'm not thinking anything you can't already do with Advantages, but you can always tag your origin as a quality. My first thought is that it's just a freebie Aspect. But you could restrict it a bit more and use the Quality instead of the mechanical aspects that are currently part of the origin.

Trained: Pay an Advantage, get a +2 to your effort as if you had the appropriate Specialty. Because you do: you're Trained. You can invoke the Trained origin for that Advantage.

Transformed:  Pay an Advantage, get a +1 to any power's rank.

Birthright: Get a free recovery without spending an Advantage, but you have to take a turn..

Gimmick: Pay an Advantage and stunt any power because you just rewired the framistat.

Artificial: Pay an Advantage and treat your Life Support as rank 10 for the rest of the scene, or increase an ability by another 1 at the cost of some kind of Trouble that will later cause you to seek repair/refurbishment.

Unearthly: Stunt any power but as Trouble be vulnerable to something in the scene. (You suddenly have Martian Vision but you are vulnerable to fire.)

I have no idea if it would make play too wild; I just thought of it this morning.

Reflecting on Mirrors

Let's take the idea of a mirror that allows what it sees to come to life--the reflection steps out of the mirror and does battle. You can tell them apart because the evil duplicate is reversed left-to-right (well, technically, mirrors reverse front-to-back, but it looks like left-to-right). (I suppose if you draw a beard on the mirror, the evil duplicates have beards, but....nah, too difficult to manage.)

But what about funhouse mirrors? Could you bend and twist the mirror to make some kind of funhouse copy? Perhaps the mirror creates strong or heavy versions of people, imbuing them with strength or great girth, and creating different kinds of foes. This might be an encounter by itself: the hero is attacked by these funhouse copies, even though the original has no idea of it. It just gets worse when the hero has to go through the funhouse, and copies of himself or herself are created.

What if the mirror cracks? What happens then? A mirror that's a portal becomes two smaller portals, but one that creates copies might create smaller twins or not create twins, or create terribly flawed twins (the bizarro copy?).

From a mechanical standpoint, I find the biggest problem with evil mirrors is that they create too many copies. If you don't have a mechanism in place to limit the number of copies, you can have to deal with one or two dozen villains. (This is one problem with the house of mirrors concept.[1]) But if you have something in place...the mirror has to be hit by lightning or a magic phrase...then it's a fun idea.

Or if there's some kind of time delay. Perhaps the mirror replicates the last person who is entirely reflected in it, but the mirror has to go in the dark for some time afterward to prevent "seeing" something else. Suddenly it sounds like a kind of seance or medium scam: "Gaze into the mirror of Erised and see... Oh, sorry, got to cover it up again."

What about other mirrors around? Dressing mirrors, mirrors in clothes shops, hand mirrors, mirrors in beauty salons, hair salons, barber shops, dentist or doctor office, surgical theatres, little round mirrors used in stores to catch shoplifters, vehicle mirrors (including bus mirrors). What could you do with "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear"? Are the copies smaller? Are they superfast? Do they have growth of some kind so they can suddenly be much closer?

Presumably they've done all of this stuff with Mirror Master, but I haven't seen any Mirror Master stories (though I did see the Flash and Substance episode of JLU).

1. Possibly fruitful typo: "Hearse of Mirrors" My first thought is, evil copies of dead people. They entice living relatives into...something. Signing things away is the boring possibility.

Parts of the city... (Locations part II)

I'm sure this has been done elsewhere...perhaps in a fine supers RPG product...but I haven't found something similar for years (not that I've been looking).

Most hints on RPG adventure plotting tell you to come up with an idea or a timeline for the villains first, which is great. Even the two superhero adventure random generators that I've seen are really about coming up with a plan for the heroes to disrupt.

But the place often gets ignored. It might be because the place falls out of the combination of plot and your campaign, or it might be because place is too random. Maybe it's better suited to a random encounter generator of some kind. So here is a random list of areas and some typical settings within them for stories. I did a location list before--many of those were specific. This is more where those locations might be put. These areas might flavour those areas: a mall in the middle of a depressed slum might have a very different tone than a mall in the middle of a ritzy enclave.

1. Business district: corporate headquarters, travel agencies, office buildings with a variety of companies, mail order firms, restaurants.
2. Civic area: city hall, municipal offices, arena, park, skate park, pool, main library, community centre, adult recreation building, jail, police or fire station.
3. Disaster site: restricted access, fenced in, former supervillain fight or lair, smoking ruins, leftover cleanup equipment.
4. Educational or military: area including a college or university or a military base, so there are cheap places to eat, the actual schools or base, low-rent housing for students or military families, stores for booze and groceries.
5. Ethnic concentration: A specialized form of town, with a higher concentration of commercial establishments that deal with items unique to that ethnicity. We're talking Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Italy, Little Moscow, Little Portugal, Tokyo Lite, and so on. In some campaigns, that will extend to aliens of a particular stripe or all aliens.
6. Financial district: banks, stock trading houses, investment corporations, insurance companies, very high end stores, restaurants.
7. Industrial district: factories, warehouses, illegal or low-rent housing, breakfast places.
8. Hidden city: the disenfranchised, the homeless, a place to hide, large quantities of the underworld or criminal element.
9. Residential: light industry, illegal industry (such as grow-ops), middle-class houses, lower-class houses, gated communities, golf course, coffee shop, beauty salons, suburb.
10. Rural: Farming, test fields for agricultural work, clusters of houses that can't be called towns, service station-restaurants, various equipment stores, prisons, sewage or water treatment plant, power plant.
11. Slum: houses, tenements, abandoned institutions, shining lab built as an inspiration, low-tech factories, bodegas, fast food places.
12. The Strip: Some kind of entertainment area: theatres, restaurants, dance clubs, strip clubs, porn shops, head shops, cinemas.

Again, these are ideas only, not a strait-jacket. You might find one element inside another, or oddball things certainly happen. Maybe this city has a farm in the middle, because the Bauer family refuses to sell, and they own enough that  they can enforce the fact that this university campus includes an alfalfa field. Or any section might have a police station or a fire station, a water tower, construction or destruction of some kind, a power transfer station, or a public transit hub.

And I formatted this nicely as a one-pager and it's on the web: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-Qcn9P_vww4lJFofIYZ_WtP7p-WGfzcB9HBOIl9giFA/edit?usp=sharing

The abstract dungeon...er, city

Just ran across this (though it's years old). I wonder if this could be profitably applied to random encounters in a city?

Abstract Dungeoneering (by the Angry GM)

The care and feeding of the cliffhanger

Watching both Supergirl and The Flash this week, I got to thinking about the difference between feeding information on an ongoing plot (Supergirl) and the cliffhanger (The Flash). There will be spoilers ahead, so get out now if you care about that.

(Actually, it's interesting to see where the shows are similar and they differ, because both deal with similar themes and have an overlapping executive. Barry is pretty consistently dealing with father issues, while Kara is dealing with her mother and her aunt. Both of them have collected this surrogate and not so surrogate family. End digression.)

My first thought was to say that one resolves the main plot and one doesn't, and that's certainly a big part of it:  Supergirl beat Reactron, but the Flash didn't beat Zoom.  We could have easily made the Flash episode into not-a-cliffhanger: Barry beats Zoom but pays the price of his powers: we've resolved the main conflict but made the main character pay a price.

Now, not resolving the main story isn't the only way to go. You can resolve the story but the new information about any plot kicks it into high gear. The audience wants to know what happens next.  A twist where they suddenly see things in a different way but where there's nowhere to go is a twist ending. The revelation at the end of The Sixth Sense closes things off, rather than opens them up.

So it's a cliffhanger if they want to know what happens next. When you dole out information about, say, a conspiracy that the Girl Scouts are involved in (thank you, JLU), it remains abstract. [1] But when it's information about a person that the players know, it is much more likely to become a cliffhanger.

Or have the information be a context shift for the character. Barry's words at the close of The Flash are a fine cliffhanger, but the same sentence spoken by, oh, Joe West wouldn't have the same impact.

1. Memo: Find out whose job it is to add fluoride to the water in areas with fluoridated water. That's the guy your supervillain wants to coerce or blackmail in order to poison the city's water supply. Even if the water flows over a bar of stannous fluoride, someone has to put that bar there.

Your superhero puzzle adventure

As I was driving in today, I realized that I don't do a lot with the traditional superhero puzzle game, where you have the nigh-unbeatable villain until you learn his secret (He's vulnerable to cheese!...yes, the lactose-intolerant villain).

In a sense, this is a puzzle adventure: you need to tease out the weakness and then use it. In a non-superhero puzzle adventure, you have other issues, but finding the right kind of stake for the vampire or figuring out the identity of the actual bad guy is the same sort of problem...yet I don't seem to have the same issue when dealing with non-superhero things.

There are a couple or three reasons for this. Most of them are just me avoiding things I'm bad at.

• Superheroes punch.
• Character reuse
• Making it discoverable
• Making the final battle satisfying

Superheroes punch.

Part of it is that in this genre, combat is most of it. Not research, not character interaction, but punching. The superhero solution to a lot of problems is to punch it until it falls down. ("World hunger? What do I punch?") As GMs, there's a tendency to personify problems as particular villains. (This can be kind of tricky; I tend to avoid it.)

So there's a tendency for the adventure to be all about combat. That's certainly where an improvised adventure will go for me.  It doesn't have to be that way, but that's certainly where I'll go. I have to think about the adventure first in order to avoid it.

Character reuse.

Once you have had your players discover the weakness, it's still there. The character is a one-shot, which offends me. Historically there's a precedent for one-shot characters--I do not think that there's really enough attention paid to the fact that comics were (and are) a business. Certainly, the DC model was kids where the audience turned over every four or five years. You tore through a tremendous number of villains, and some of them were pretty awful, just because you had dozens of comics coming out a month, each with two or three stories. They couldn't all be gems. (In fact, I suspect that pressure was part of the reason that Gardner Fox came up with the multiverse idea: he'd written Flash comics in the 1940s, he had a tremendous backlog of characters, so putting Barry in that world might have been easy for him.) This view is also informed by something Alfred Bester once wrote about his time in comics. But for every multiverse, there's The Eraser, who even as a child I thought had a ridiculous getup.

There are ways to bring back a gimmick character.

• The character has fixed whatever weakness the PCs discovered. Usually the fix introduces a new problem, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it heralds a new tougher version of the villain. A lot of supervillain reiventions are like this--the secret of the Moon Mirror is retrieved by some other person, who says, "Hey, his mistake was so-and-so, and I'm not going to make that mistake."
• The character has a new gimmick based on the same theme. I always feel obliged to figure out why the character doesn't just go public with the invention and make money off it, at least until they've made the transition to obsessed-enemy status.
• Sometimes you bring back the character as part of the supporting cast, no longer a villain but a resource. He or she becomes a court-ordered ward of the hero, a stoolie, an inventing assistant, whatever.

Making the weakness discoverable.

This is a mechanical storytelling thing.

It is a genre thing that the obvious weakness isn't appropriate or isn't exploited. The Flash never takes Captain Cold's gun away. (Well, almost never. Side note: I was never a big Flash reader, simply because during the heyday of my comics renaissance, the 1980s, every Flash issue seemed to have something to do with the death of Iris Allen: either his new girlfriend looked just like her or he was off the rails because of her death, or she was in the future. It was like there was no fun in it at that period. I know a lot of people treasure their memories of that run, but to me it just seemed depressing and confusing, and hard to get into. End digression.)  And, when you think about it, there's a difference between a guy with a gun and a villain. The first is a threat until you take away the gun. The second is a threat even if you take away the gun. Maybe that's a touchstone you can use: a guy with a gun is an environmental thing: you don't choose to have a make-out session in Crime Alley because there are bad guys there; however, a villain finds you wherever you're having your makeout session.

Anyway, making the weakness something that players can discover and use is a big thing. I have invented aspects on the fly that can be used, but that always seems like cheating to me. Having laid clues before-hand seems fairer...but I know they can miss it. I know as a player, I totally missed something that I should have caught. I'm thinking of a couple of particular instances, because Jim Gardner is very good at making sure the clues are out there. (The reveal of Hexshark, one of his villains, had clues that were obvious in retrospect, but it was a total surprise to me.)

So when you're thinking about weaknesses, you have to think about how the players will discover them. And when they miss that clue, how will you show it to them?

On an episode of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff they used an example of monsters who were powerless against silver, and they had all sorts of examples about showing that the monster couldn't affect silver, and I recommend it to you (they were talking about varying monster powers), but the mechanical part of inserting the clues still seems problematic to me. Obviously, the villain picks a crime site without that weakness.

Still, if you're doing a puzzle adventure like this, you kinda have to structure things to lay the clues down. So the structure seems to be something like...

1. Original meeting: villain gets away with everything because the weakness isn't present at the crime scene.
2. Next meeting: the PCs bring their A game and because of that, the fight goes on longer than expected and hints at the weakness.
3. Some kind of research (actual books, talking to informants or scientists) indicates what the weakness might be.
4. PCs bring the weakness, but it doesn't work. Turns out the villain has prepared for it, knowing that's the weakness.
5. PCs undo the protection for the weakness, and use it successfully.

And that is a big hint for dealing with my last problem...

Making the final battle satisfying.

The players still have to have the final battle, and in a storytelling sense it has to feel like it's actually worthwhile. If the PCs show up with insecticide and the villain Katydidn't falls down immediately, that sure sounds like someone made their "Defeat bad guy" roll instead of figuring out what to do.

Sometimes that's appropriate: sometimes the apparent bad guy is just a step on the way to the real bad guy. ("Who turned her into a giant insect?") But if you don't have that in mind, my temptation is to pull powers out of my ass.  I am ashamed to admit that this is the area where I have fudged the most in my GMing career. And that's something I want to fix.

So assuming you want the final battle to be satisfying, I can think of the following approaches.

• The PCs are subtly wrong. They still have all the ingredients, but they try the method they've worked out and it doesn't work...but the battle reveals how it should be done, and they do it.
• Using the weakness is tough. It takes effort and skill to exploit, but it shouldn't be something that can't be done multiple times (or it doesn't require a roll). A spell that can only be cast at midnight and the villain has to be present. Maybe the villain has to hear it, and part of the battle is keeping the villain from covering his/her/its ears, or just leaving. You can't knock him unconscious because he has to be able to process it.
• The villain has taken precautions against this weakness: the battle is really about undoing those precautions so you can use the weakness. I've often wondered why various Kryptonians don't fly around in an articulated lead suit. They're strong enough that it doesn't hinder them, and with all the metric tons of Kryptonite that fell to earth in the Silver Age, you'd think it would be practical. This is really a variation of the last one.
• The weakness is hard to get to. Kryptonite and magic are rare now, and the PCs don't get to them without the bad guy appearing.
• The villain has assistants; he or she is just the final capstone. 

These aren't the only ways of dealing with this, just the ones I thought of in a moment..