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

An unfocused rambling look at problem powers

SYSTEM: SUPERS! REd

There's a post on the Supers! board about problem powers, and since I can't get to the board from work, I thought I'd pontificate here.

My first thought, deliberately contrarian, is, "What problem powers?"

In one sense, the player chose it and you agreed to it, so there shouldn't be a problem. An attitude of letting everyone be excellent at something goes a long way toward this—everybody playing wants to be cool at some point, and they should. It's a superhero game, not a game of existential failure. So, yeah, in an ideal world, there would be no problem powers, and you see that in games where the powers are purely narrative.

At least, in some games all powers are equally the same amount of problem—the powers can be limited by the fictional reality more than the game mechanics (or the game mechanics refer to the fictional reality, I guess). Marvel Heroic Roleplaying approaches that kind of game, I think. So does Masks.

But it's not an ideal world. For Supers! and ICONS and Mutants & Masterminds and DC Heroes and so on, there can certainly be problem powers.

I think that problem powers are rare, but if you're in a problem situation, it won't seem that way. Problem powers are really a combination of things, because for some groups or some players, these problems aren't problems at all. It's an intersection of player, GM, character, and the way the power is written.

It seems to me, though, that the problems happen when this power wrecks the fun of players (including the GM). Some powers make things too easy in a way that the GM didn't anticipate; some powers destroy niche protection so that no other character is special; some powers have consequences that are just mind-blowing. This was suggested in the Supers! thread: what if a character with time travel wants to pop back in time to the beginning of the fight and change the conditions? I doubt you planned the fight with that in mind.

Off-hand, I can think of the following problem powers, in no particular order.

Time Control. Usually the base form (speed yourself up or slow others down) isn't too bad...it becomes a pain when you introduce time travel into the mix. What if someone wants to pop back two combat rounds and help himself? What a book-keeping pain.

Telepathy. It's really difficult to run any kind of mystery when the character can casually walk in and read minds. "Ah, Ozymandias killed the Comedian. Concentrate your search there."

Wizardry. How do you preserve any kind of niche protection when one character can do anything?

It's true too that some powers are fun-sucking when taken to the logical extreme. There's a lovely piece out there about how control of feces would be an incredible super power. Or the ability to speed up time on others is horrific if you limit it to chemical reactions, or grant them half the power of the Speed Force but not the "protects your body" part, so they rip themselves in two. Those would be problem powers.

The solutions or workarounds that I've heard of or used are:

• The power is off the table. This is the easiest for the GM to use. If the power+player combination is problematic, don't allow it. As Gerry Saracco said in the thread on the Supers! board, just because the power is in the book doesn't mean you have to allow it. This has the advantage that everyone sees it and everyone understands it. The disadvantages are that cool ideas from non-problem players can be dropped on the floor, or that you didn't know that the power was going to be a problem when you okayed the character.
• The power has limitations. This is the opposite tack and it can be applied retroactively. For some reason, the character can't do those game-breaking things. Steve Kenson has explicitly said this about Super-Speed in Mutants & Masterminds—the superfast character doesn't clean up the entire fight before anyone gets there because that's not the way things happen in the comics. It's a genre limitation.
• There are consequences to the action. Look, if the character casually scans minds, he or she is going to learn some unpleasant things about people, like what people really think of the PC or become the target of a shadowy conspiracy by learning something that was best kept hidden. The character is constantly blipping back in time to fix things? The timestream police come near and want to have a talk with the character...and they have specifically made themselves immune to his powers. (They've had eternity to research them.) Though I hate to use game mechanics for an in-game solution, you could take away a disadvantage (and its points) with the claim that it's entirely consistent with the character that he went back and fixed the problem in another timeline. (That last one seems kind of obnoxious to me, so I doubt I'd use it.)

It can be a very effective way to apply limitations by having the player create them. Say, "Using your timeshift power to travel back in time to the beginning of the fight is too tough for us to do. It's okay if you declare you're stunting duplication or something at the beginning of the fight, but suddenly saying, 'I go back and help myself' doesn't really work. What reason is consistent with what's already happened?"

Reasons could be the idea that you can go back in the past, you just can't be seen and change remembered history (he can timeshift, but he has to be careful not to be seen by the characters, so he puts the item they need in the potted plant...it's effectively a retcon, but the story is that he used his time powers), or it's very difficult to go in the past where you are, or the magic doesn't work that way.

Maybe the power only affects a certain mass, or volume, or the effects last only a turn (every power has a wreck-other's-fun rating that determines how long it lasts?) or it has side-effects that only show up a week later. It might not affect blue things, or green, or work in any room but the one where you did it previously.

If the player determines the reason, they're more likely to be happy with it.

In the meta sense, most people will change if you say, "Dude, you're wrecking everybody else's fun. Find a reason why that won't work." In the X-Men comics, Logan complained and complained about being on a team...but he stayed there. There was always a reason.  (If the player is still looking for ways to make you personally miserable after inventing a limitation, well, why are you playing with this person?)

On the bright side for the player, limitations might give the character more spotlight time. This is the Kryptonite rule: Whatever the character's weakness, it starts to show up much more often in the campaign. If your N-ray vision can't penetrate iridium, there's a lot more iridium in the world. Giving the GM a limitation is an invitation to create situations to your character.

As a GM, you have to be wary of the Kryptonite rule. And that leads to the last "workaround." Sometimes, the PC can just do it, because that's not what this adventure is about.

That's one of the big ones: If the character can do something, letting the character do it is fine, because the adventure is frequently about something else. If the character is super-strong, you never complain, "He lifted that car I put there and de-railed the entire adventure!" You put the car there to give him a chance to show off. If you need him not to move the car or rip the vault door open, then the car is attached to a bomb that will kill all the normals in the area if moved, or the vault door is made of Questonite, or something else.

As a GM, you're already used to thinking about when a power is important. My sense of consistency is such that I don't want a power that waffles in its abilities so I try to enforce consistency, but sometimes we hand-wave in order to get to the real story. ("Yeah, you can find rope in this barren warehouse and tie them up. Now the sigils on the floor tell you....")[1]

EDIT: I've gone back to this several times to try and clean up various sentences. Nothing major, but I do struggle to make this clearer. Partly, of course, because it's a jumbled mess of thinking.

1. I think it's Robinson Crusoe where the hero swims naked out to the shipwreck and then stores useful items in his pockets for the swim back. Revision was less common in the eighteenth century.

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.

There's no I in Team

The first superhero game I played repeatedly was Champions. Champions, like D&D, encourages tactical play, so teams tend to have types: there's the lots-of-damage-melee guy, the damage-at-range guy, the hits-what's-hard-to-hit guy, and the oddball, who either does damage to folks the others can't touch, or has some sensory thing that the others can't duplicate, or works as a support person. Your fighter, your wizard, your rogue, and your cleric, in other words.

And in terms of gaming, that's certainly what I did for years and years and I don't even want to admit how old I am.

But that's not the way that teams work in the comics.

Teams, as I've said elsewhere, exist between one of two poles: the IP parking lot pole and the Peyton Place pole.  An IP parking lot is a place to put characters just to prove that the Intellectual Property is being used; and Peyton Place is a foment of internal passions and discord. In the first, the villain is essential; in the second, the villain is, well, secondary and exists primarily to point out character things. ("This is why our love can never work, Moonsilver: Because you were not horrified when Amy Geddon said she wanted to kill everyone and start over...")

These distinctions are hardly absolute: the deMatteis-Giffen era Justice League tweaked personalities so that the interaction of the characters was primary and the villains were secondary, but it would be hard to find a purer example of an IP parking lot than the Justice League. On the other hand, the freshly-Kickstarted Masks RPG has a set of personalities and powers are almost irrelevant: what's important to the story is how the characters are going to react.

Most traditional games approach it from the tactical end. Each character has a role. In games such as Champions, the role is about what the character does. In games such as Masks, the role is about what the character is or how he/she/it reacts. A game with random character creation is more like an IP parking lot because you have no idea what's going to show up. It might be the burrowing guy with the magic staff, the interstellar cop with the light sabre, the speedster who has trouble hitting Mach 1, and the cosmically powered witch.

I assume that most players want something in the middle. They want something that isn't just tactical, but the idea that the villain is secondary isn't quite their cup of tea either. So how do you fit them together?

If you don't know what characters you're getting, maybe the answer is to take a page from FATE (and sort of Masks): Powers are irrelevant to working together. What they have are Aspects or disadvantages. The Aspects or disadvantages are crafted to make the team work together (or to create friction while making the team work together).

For instance, the X-Men all have the mutant disadvantage. It doesn't just mean that they show up on bioscanners that the bad guys have...it also means that the world hates and fears them, that there are strong social pressures to keep them with the group. Most of the X-Men are young, so they fit into the school setting. That's an example of social pressure holding them in place, and perhaps it could be gamed that way.

Did they ever do the road trip with X-23, Sabretooth, Logan, and his son Daken all trapped in the car for a long journey? Because that's pure comic book: that's four people with essentially the same powers but different ways of reacting.

Maybe you can use something like that instead of saying, "Hey, we need an energy blaster."

Or, like, you can re-roll your character until you get an energy blaster. Whatever works for you.

What's the alternative to effects-based?

Okay, a lot of supers games are effects-based: you buy the effect, and then define the cause. So a blast can be a fire blast, a mystic blast, an energy blast, whatever. Usually these are point-based: you have X points to spend.

(Originally, games were menu-style, where you picked powers off a menu. You got the vulnerabilities that came with it. You had no choice. In the third edition of DC Heroes you can see the transition starting to happen there: they say that the names are essentially suggestions.)

But there never seem to be enough points to buy everything you should have.

I very much like games like ICONS where you sketch out the basic powers and the stunt mechanic lets you have the other powers you ought to have. But I have to admit that sometimes I chafe under the problem of "Well, I have a swingline; why don't I just tie him up?"

In ICONS you'd just get rid of the swingline, taking the Trouble of "no swingline" in order to stunt Entangle at the same level. But why should you have to?  Why do you have to buy/choose Blast, Swinging, and Entangle to represent that grappling gun that can be shot at someone or used to tie them up?

Is there a rules-medium to rules-light supers game that is effectively cause based? It lets you specify a cause and then you have a suite of powers that you can choose from that go with the cause. I haven't read Mutant City Blues but it sounds somewhat like the table there (apologies for forgetting the name).

The constraint might not be points but rather the number of powers you can choose that are associated with a specific power: the more powerful, the fewer powers. Between that and something like a Determination point mechanic, you might not have to worry about player balance. If you had a list of causes, you could make this relatively easy for the player. This is close to what Supers! does with its offense/defense/other trinity for each power, but that still has the problem that you have to buy Entangle separately, and that specifically is one of the problems I'm trying to avoid.

I'm just tossing out ideas, but let's model this off ICONS because that's what I'm thinking about today.

Power Level	Number of Powers	"Cost"
1-2	10
3-4	5
5-6	4
7-8	3
9-10	2

You can have between one to four causes, depending on what the GM wants to run. Something like this gives your utility belt guys lots of little powers (you wouldn't specify them, you'd just mark them off on a sheet of paper and charge extra after you hit the limit) because they get a bunch of powers at level 2 or so. Your big guns get Strength&Invulnerability (they go together so often in the comics that I'd just count them as one power, unless you want the disadvantage) and, oh, flight.

Then you tie them together with your cause. Again, you can choose the effects.

Or does that just hide the not-enough-points problem under a layer of complexity?

PDF Only Supplements

I was thinking about what I'd like in a PDF-only supplement, the kind that's never intended to be sold as a printed book. How could you take advantage of the electronic and user-printable nature of PDF?

Let's leave off the bookmarks, because those should always be there. The only time they might not is when the content is less than four pages. We also assume that end users can print material from the PDF.

First, every character write-up on a separate page so they can be printed and used directly, without having. That means that the design of the write-ups is useful at the table as well as pretty.

A reasonably-sized graphic of a character that doesn't give away the secret ID (if there is one), so you can show the players, "Hey, he looks like this."

In fact, if the same write up had space so that you could annotate it (and the PDF allowed it), that would be great.

Cross-links between write-ups and mentions of the character. If clicking on the character's name took you to the write-up, that would be nice.

Certainly there's JavaScript stuff you could add that would make it interesting...a die roller, for instance, if there are random selection charts, that highlights the rolled entry or shades (not obscures) the other entries if you want to use the PDF directly from your tablet. (Actually, if you still want to keep the page count down in case you might print it, you can add a Print button to each character write-up that prints only that writeup, so the user could choose to print only the top character or the bottom one.)

Maps on the page would be nice: a way to print maps automagically, or to print only certain layers of maps so that the GM could plunk down the map before destruction and later after destruction.

Other ideas?

Helping others

So I got the iPad version of Sentinels of the Multiverse and one of the things that struck me was that Legacy's powers are very much about helping others.

In Mutants & Masterminds, I'd do it by leaning heavily on the Usable by Others modifier, with the advantages Inspire (pretty much made for it) and I'd probably use Favored Environment (With Teammates), or, if the GM disallowed that, put together a lot of Favored Environments and Favored Foes as Enhanced Advantages, usable by others. Then you wouldn't have to worry about power level limitations. Add Regeneration Usable by Others, and then build a tough scrapper with what's left.

In ICONS, you don't have the power level limitation to worry about, but it is harder. One way to do it might be Ability Increase Extra: Affects Others. (If the GM objects, you could do it as Ability Boost, with the caveat that you suffer the ability loss because you've been "lending" your strength to others.) Again, some Healing or Regeneration Extra: Affects Others.

In Supers, you'd want Healing, of course, and I think the best choice would be Imbue with the boost for Multiple Targets.

Ideas?

Random Encounters in Superhero RPGs

I don't know which of Arneson or Gygax was responsible for the random encounter, but to me it's both narrative and non-narrative. Narrative in the sense that it provides material that the players can select among in creating their own narrative (kind of Darwinian story-telling) and non-narrative in the sense that these encounters have nothing to do with the story/adventure. If the adventure or arc of the campaign is about looting, er, cleansing the tomb of the lich-king, the  meeting with the kobolds in the frontier town on the way there has nothing to do with the story. It provides color, yes; it probably provides the PCs with enough XP to be able to tackle the first challenge in the tomb of the lich-king. In the hands of the right DM/GM it might reinforce themes in the adventure or campaign, and from a story point of view, it says you're telling a longer story, because you have time to spend on these interludes. (Of course, there can be no story, just an evening of random combat encounters. But we're going to ignore that for the moment.)

Most of which doesn't apply to superhero games in general and ICONS in particular. Color is good, sure, but combat provides experience in only the loosest sense, and there aren't levels to be concerned about. You probably don't want the random encounter to be too hard, because you don't want it to steal focus from whatever you have planned for the evening.

The rolls for Champions disadvantages were a kind of random encounter that were personalized for the campaign: DNPCs, Hunteds, and Rivals were rare (8-), moderate (11-) or common (14-). If a particular disadvantage got rolled, it was probably going to show up somehow.

Bearing in mind these purposes (buffet assortment to see what the players want to follow up on; color; soap opera), here are some ideas for random encounters in a superhero game. I have included two combat situations, but only against minion-quality foes, so the PCs should make short work of them.

Even moreso than in other games, if a random encounter doesn't make sense in context of the game, don't use it.

2d6 Roll	Random Encounter
2	Unusual type of minions (such as zombies shuffling out of graveyard for normal heroes)
3	Informed that enemy has escaped custody/been freed
4	Loved one tries to get closer to hero
5	Fan tells hero of approval
6	Uncomplimentary article or comment from member of public
7	Loved one explains new interest that could be a source of trouble later
8	Date with romantic interest
9	Hero has chance to do good deed
10	Persistent NPC fakes being victim of crime to get interview
11	Enemy publicly claims to have reformed
12	Loved one wants to break it off

Obviously, there could be many more, but this is a random (ahem) sampling. You could subdivide it like this:

1d6	1d6	Random Encounter
1-2	1	Trouble at work
1-2	2	Good news at work
1-2	3	Extra obligations at work
1-2	4	One of the neighbours needs help
1-2	5	There's a superhero request and the person with PC is oblivious to hints about ending this conversation
1-2	6	A relative/old friend visits
3-4	1	Fan tells hero of approval
3-4	2	Someone fakes being victim of crime to get interview
3-4	3	Hero has chance to do good deed
3-4	4	Loved one has interest/new problem that could be a source of trouble later
3-4	5	Loved one arranges a date/party, possibly at a bad time
3-4	6	Loved one wants to break it off
5-6	1	Store robbery
5-6	2	Mugging
5-6	3	Informed that enemy has escaped custody/been freed
5-6	4	Enemy publicly claims to have reformed
5-6	5	Uncomplimentary article or comment from member of public
5-6	6	Unusual minion spotted in crime (e.g., zombies in a street-level crimefighter campaign; plant monsters; etc)

What's your game about?

SYSTEM: Any

So Howard Tayler was, as of GenCon, writing a roleplaying game set in the world of Schlock Mercenary (I think the Kickstarter is over, so if you didn't know about it, you have to wait until it's really available). The podcast Writing Excuses this week was about worldbuilding for RPGs, and the very first piece of advice from the guests was knowing the purpose of your game. Not the higher moral purpose, but rather, when someone is playing your game, what are they doing? What's the usual activity?

And for superhero games, part one of that answer is almost always going to be, "Beating up supervillains." Another part is going to be, "Encouraging fun at the table" (however you describe fun) which I prefer to "good roleplaying" because I have discovered that "good roleplaying" varies with the group and the player or GM. So can "encouraging fun" but you run into fewer conflicts about whether a particular action was angst or wangst.

But as it happens, I'm also drafting the part of one manuscript where I talk about potential rewards.

One of the things I happen to believe is that, when you get points for killing things, everything looks like it's got hit points. (I ran into the equivalent when running Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.) So what do I want to encourage in the context of the game? What's the point of this little adventure?

Back in the Herozoic era, when I began, there was a table for XP, and it had things like:

• Just being there (1)
• Long involved adventure (2)
• More than one session (+1)
• Outnumbered (+1)
• Clever, inventive, roleplayed well (+1)
• Characters totally failed at purpose of adventure (-1)

Now, that's not "Kill things and take their stuff" territory, but it is kind of vague, and you notice that only the lines "clever, inventive, roleplayed well" and "totally failed" have anything to do with what you as a player did after you got there. More than half was just showing up. Frankly, my first draft of experience looked pretty much like that. (I've been influenced, what can I say?)

Both Supers! and ICONS have abandoned that XP approach for an "achievements" approach. Minor achievements might be just showing up (and as I get older and life seems to get more complicated, I do appreciate it), but they can also be things like resolving the storyline. There's a little less of the "you showed up, you get a point" kind of thinking.

Still, they don't give you an actual guideline. In one way, that's awful, but in another way, that's great. You get to define what your game is about. You get to say what a minor achievement is, and what a major achievement is. In fact, Base Raiders formalizes this as goals for your character. (Some other time we'll talk about goals-you-can-achieve and goals-that-are-your-pole-star, and whether they're the same for everybody.)

Because you know that players are going to do whatever gets them character advancement. If it's "solve a mystery" then they're going to find a mystery and solve it. And, out of fairness, the GM better put the thing in there that gets them character advancement. It's not nice to say they advance by solving a mystery and then not providing one, or worse, by killing kobolds and then giving them a whole village of kobolds they have to save.

Frankly, I still think just showing up is worth a point, but why not give it out at the beginning of the session instead of the end? Every Supers! player gets a competency die, just because they're there. ICONS players get Determination points.

But beyond that... Depends on the type of campaign you're running.

You are the city's premier group.
Minor achievements:  Rebuild the section of town destroyed by natural disaster. Resolve the plot of the session. Protect your secret identity. Make it to your son's graduation. Have a date.
Major achievements: Rescue the mayor. Save the city from the doomsday device. Help the new team. Expose the imposters.

You are shadowy vigilantes.
Minor achievements:  Don't get caught. Take down bad guys without help.
Major achievements: Escape jail. Keep your secret identity.

You are students at a super school.
Minor achievements:  Get that cute MOTAS to notice you. Survive hazing. Reach out to the new kid. Survive the betrayal of the cute MOTAS. Fight off the bad guys from the rival school but be open to the good guys from the rival school.
Major achievements: Get picked for a super team. Pass the test. Discover and defeat the invading clones. Get the school to change its policies.

You are a supervillain's enforcement group.
Minor achievements: Succeed in the mission, which he will outline to you; keep your family in the dark; escape jail; don't lose any members in a fight with the heroes; avoid getting killed or fired by the boss.
Major achievements: Get a promotion; get your superior arrested or slaughtered; get your daughter into a good school; manage to hide your true identity all through Parent-Teacher Night even though rival villain or hero group shows up.

Digging a hole for myself...

SYSTEM: Any

There are a couple of superpowers that show in games where I look at them and go, "What?"

Now, these are perfectly cromulent superpowers. They have reasons to exist, and they fill those reasons very well. However, if you have a random character creation system, you look at the power and say, "Hey, maybe I can trade it for a Boost or an Extra."

For me, one such power is Burrowing.

I recognize the utility of it, sometimes. I think that the Troll, in ICONS, should be able to dig himself a hole where he can hide. I think that giant ants should have a way to make their giant anthills, and the machine from The Core should be buildable in your favorite game system.

But man... Burrowing.

Part of the reason is that it's slow. In some one-buttocked attempt at realism, many designers throttle back when it comes to burrowing, just like swimming. "Yes, you can burrow, but only at a speed that is one quarter of your overland movement speed." That's kind of like the M&M game where I suddenly realized that although the bad guy could fly, he could only fly at fifteen kilometers an hour. The heroes just paced him, occasionally whacking him like a beach ball.

We've got a game system where people fire blasts of concussive energy from their eyes, where people have mouths in their hands, where people make plants grow tremendously fast, and you're seriously concerned about how fast they can dig?

It should be a Bugs Bunny cartoon, where the tiny line of dirt is heading at the same speed as a running man. (And seeing the line of dirt is a complication or a limit.) It should be a total surprise when the building suddenly collapses because the hero has removed two meters of topsoil from under the foundation, or that the heroine uses her burrowing claws to trace a circle out on the floor, so they fall through, just like that woman in Underworld escaping.

Another part is that you start down the reasonableness path: well, if he can dig through gravel, maybe he can dig through that fencing that sticks down into the ground. Maybe he can dig through that concrete foundation. Maybe he can dig through that guy's chest...it's no harder than concrete. And the Champions players say, "Well, she can fly, so maybe she can go through water at the same speed. It's only a thousand times thicker." The characters just do it, and occasionally get a bonus when they launch themselves at the target like a cannonball. (This is one of the areas where the existence of bonuses and extras makes it seem like you ought to be able to or not to do something.)

Sometimes I wonder if there should just be a power called Movement, and the player gets to limit it by defining the medium...or doesn't. ("She can fly, and she's just punching her way through the rock.")

A special form of Burrowing might be an incredible knowledge of the sewer system—you know the paths like no one else does, so maybe you can get places no one else can. Your Burrowing level is actually your knowledge of the area. You fail the roll, there is no connection that you can get through. At low levels, that would work quite well, actually.

Or another special form might be a limited form of animal control: you can manage to control the ants and moles and what-have-you that they will make the space for you as you go.

Well, maybe Burrowing isn't so lame. But Dream Control....there's a power that's tough to play in a game....

Playing with a Supers! layout for here

SYSTEM: Supers!

I like the layout of characters that gets used in a lot of the Supers! stuff, but the list is, well, really list-y, and the graphically interesting stuff is beyond my capability on a blog. But one of the character sheets is mostly in my reach...

Dice	Resistances	Cost
2D	Composure	1
3D	Fortitude	2
3D	Reaction	2
2D	Will	1
Dice	Aptitudes	Cost
3D	Mechanics	2
Dice	Powers	Cost
6D	Elemental Control (fire)	6
1D	Elemental Form (fire)	1
4D	Flight	4
Dice	Advantages	Cost
1D	Charismatic	1
1D	Leadership	1
Dice	Disadvantages	Cost
1D	Mental Hindrance: Hothead	-1
1D	Public ID	-1
Total (20D character)		19

I mean, it still looks very list-y, but it's easier to do the math.

Fiddling with it:

Pyroguy (Tommy Drizzle)
Dice	Resistances	Cost	Aptitudes		Cost
2D	Composure	1	3D Mechanics		2
3D	Fortitude	2
3D	Reaction	2
2D	Will	1
Dice	Powers	Cost	Dice	Advantages	Cost
6D	Elemental Control (fire)	6	1D	Charismatic	1
1D	Elemental Form (fire)	1	1D	Leadership	1
4D	Flight	4	Dice	Disadvantages	Cost
			1D	Mental Hindrance: Hothead	-1
			1D	Public ID	-1

Second one is a little less elongated, which I like, but might have problems on mobile devices and is not as easy to do the math for.

In a layout program, I'd consider doing a list-like thing, then a second column that's mostly picture space and disadvantages at the bottom:

Dice	Resistances	Cost
2D	Composure	1
3D	Fortitude	2
3D	Reaction	2
2D	Will	1
Dice	Aptitudes	Cost
3D	Mechanics	2
Dice	Powers	Cost
6D	Elemental Control (fire)	6
1D	Elemental Form (fire)	1
4D	Flight	4
Dice	Advantages	Cost				Dice	Disadvantages	Cost
1D	Charismatic	1				1D	Mental Hindrance: Hothead	-1
1D	Leadership	1				1D	Public ID	-1

You'd put your standard stuff or your changing stuff either beneath or to the side.

Of course, the numbers are small enough (1-8, really) that you could do it more graphically:

Composure	Fortitude	Reaction	Will
0 0	0 0 0	0 0 0	0 0
Aptitudes			Cost
Mechanics (0 0 0), Leadership (0 0)			3
Dice	Powers		Cost
0 0 0 0 0 0	Elemental Control (fire)		6
0	Elemental Form (fire)		1
0 0 0 0	Flight Complication: Only in fire form		3
Advantages			Cost
Charismatic (0), Leadership (0)			2
Disadvantages			Cost
Mental Hindrance: Hothead (0), Public ID (0)			-2

That might just be a paper-only or layout-only idea. I've used zeroes here, but you'd use bullets instead.

We could combine the list and the table, but you'd probably lose in terms of calculation:

Name: Secret ID		Composure x Fortitude x Reaction x Will x		Cost
				6
Aptitudes	Cost	Powers	Cost
Academics 3D Mechanics 2D	3	Elemental control 6D (fire) Elemental Form 1D Flight 3D Complication Only in fire form	9
Advantages		Disadvantages	Cost

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.

Earth's Mightiest Heroes Villains: The Executioner

SYSTEM: ICONS

Here's a stab at the Executioner (ahem). He's interesting in that, although he's clearly a Strong Fighting Guy, half the stuff he does with the axe is never seen again. So I declared them stunts.

Clearly he's a foe who exists to (a) give the heroes a hard time and (b) generate Determination Points for them.

(Which is okay; there ought to be someone like that.)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11ygg8ud1jrr96eq3RzmqWNRPqGJK0bNcCEeFrkrphwM/edit?usp=sharing

The Sidekicks Origin Generator!

Special ICONS Origin Generator for Sidekicks

Instructions: Roll a d6 once for each parent on the appropriate table for the character. (Roll for the correct number of donating entities if the character's origin is Unearthly.) Mentor refers to the primary hero; roll once on the Mentor table to determine identity.

Mentor:

Roll	Mentor is...
1	The real or adopted parent
2	Actually younger than the sidekick
3	Actually a group of heroes, such as a team
4	A close personal friend
5	The biological or adopted parent
6	Entirely ignorant of the sidekick right until they show up at the same place and time

Birthright:

Roll	Original Parent is...
1	Captured by evil people
2	Absent, back home
3	Willingly gave up child to die
4	Has somehow misplaced the kid
5	Objects to this crimefighting lifestyle
6	Is the character's main foe

Gimmick:

Roll	Biological Parent is...
1	Conveniently absent or comatose
2	Wishing he or she could operate the device but these brittle bones...
3	Is actually an agent charged with finding the sidekick and mentor
4	Inconveniently absent and the sidekick is covering up
5	Dead
6	Is the character's main foe

Transformed:

Roll	Biological Parent is...
1	Worries so about this dangerous lifestyle
2	Gave his or her life so that child would have a motivation to fight crime
3	Has no idea that this kid does that stuff
4	Conveniently absent (out of the country, etc)
5	Coma
6	Dead

Artificial:

Roll	Creator is...
1	Mentor
2	Friend of Mentor
3	Missing
4	Dead
5	Dead
6	Dead

Unearthly:

Roll	Parent Is...
1	In another dimension
2	On another world
3	On another continent
4	Forbidden to be involved
5	Approves of this
6	Character's archfoe

Trained:

Roll	Original Parent is...
1	Comatose
2	Dead by fire or explosion
3	Dead by flood
4	Dead by disease
5	Dead by criminal action
6	Dead of causes to be specified later

Special ICONS Origin Generator for Sidekicks

Instructions: Roll a d6 once for each parent on the appropriate table for the character. (Roll for the correct number of donating entities if the character's origin is Unearthly.) Mentor refers to the primary hero; roll once on the Mentor table to determine identity.

Mentor:

Roll	Mentor is...
1	The real or adopted parent
2	Actually younger than the sidekick
3	Actually a group of heroes, such as a team
4	A close personal friend
5	The biological or adopted parent
6	Entirely ignorant of the sidekick right until they show up at the same place and time

Birthright:

Roll	Original Parent is...
1	Captured by evil people
2	Absent, back home
3	Willingly gave up child to die
4	Has somehow misplaced the kid
5	Objects to this crimefighting lifestyle
6	Is the character's main foe

Gimmick:

Roll	Biological Parent is...
1	Conveniently absent or comatose
2	Wishing he or she could operate the device but these brittle bones...
3	Is actually an agent charged with finding the sidekick and mentor
4	Inconveniently absent and the sidekick is covering up
5	Dead
6	Is the character's main foe

Transformed:

Roll	Biological Parent is...
1	Worries so about this dangerous lifestyle
2	Gave his or her life so that child would have a motivation to fight crime
3	Has no idea that this kid does that stuff
4	Conveniently absent (out of the country, etc)
5	Coma
6	Dead

Artificial:

Roll	Creator is...
1	Mentor
2	Friend of Mentor
3	Missing
4	Dead
5	Dead
6	Dead

Unearthly:

Roll	Parent Is...
1	In another dimension
2	On another world
3	On another continent
4	Forbidden to be involved
5	Approves of this
6	Character's archfoe

Trained:

Roll	Original Parent is...
1	Comatose
2	Dead by fire or explosion
3	Dead by flood
4	Dead by disease
5	Dead by criminal action
6	Dead of causes to be specified later

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 bemagic (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 Keymight 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 worldacts 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. 

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