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.

To add to your animal mimicry/totem list

SYSTEM: Any

The biggest problem with playing (or writing) a character who has the powers of the animal kingdom! is that you have to know some of the cool animal powers out there. Yes, you can go the Vixen route, and grab the cheetah, the rhino, a vulture, a killdeer, and an elephant, and you have speed, strength, and flight, which is good. (Not knocking those powers or animals at all.)

But sometimes you want the weird factoids that you used to get from reading comics in the sixties. You know, "Dung beetles can pull 1000 times their own weight!" and other factoids that Gardner Fox used to throw into stories.

I need a place to put them when I run across them, and that place is here.

The noise of the pistol shrimp. Quoting Wikipedia: "The snapping shrimp [also called a "pistol shrimp"] competes with much larger animals such as the sperm whale and beluga whale for the title of loudest animal in the sea. The animal snaps a specialized claw shut to create a cavitation bubble that generates acoustic pressures of up to 80 kPa at a distance of 4 cm from the claw. As it extends out from the claw, the bubble reaches speeds of 60 miles per hour (97 km/h) and releases a sound reaching 218 decibels. The pressure is strong enough to kill small fish. It corresponds to a zero to peak pressure level of 218 decibels relative to one micropascal (dB re 1 μPa), equivalent to a zero to peak source level of 190 dB re 1 μPa at the standard reference distance of 1 m. Au and Banks measured peak to peak source levels between 185 and 190 dB re 1 μPa at 1 m, depending on the size of the claw. Similar values are reported by Ferguson and Cleary. The duration of the click is less than 1 millisecond."

Elephants communicate subsonically. So if you want characters to communicate and they don't have telepathy, and don't want to be heard by BatHearingGuy....

Love darts of the ninja slug. The ninja slug shoots darts into its potential mate. The calcium carbonate darts are tipped with hormones intended to get the target in the mood for love. If you replace the aphrodisiac hormones with other abilities, suddenly you've got a whole theme for a character.

Oppossums are immune to most venoms. Yeah, well, you figure this for an animal whose other defense is lying very, very still. But yes, oppossums have a protein called LTNF (Lethal Toxin-Neutralizing Factor) that grants them (and rats injected with LTNF) a very high resistance to the venoms of snakes, bees, and scorpions...even snakes that are not native to the same continent.

Exploding ants. A species of ant in Malaysia has members that can tighten particular glands all along its body, causing the secretions to, this is gross, explode out of the ant's head. I do not know if this kills the ant, but it probably does. What's even better (worse?) is that the explosive substance is sticky and binds together the limbs of the predator (up to a certain size, of course). The secretion has other unpleasant chemicals in it...expect a rash.

The jellyfish that's its own child...and possibly immortal. One particular jellyfish, Turritopsis nutricula, can revert to its polyp stage after reaching sexual maturity. And after that polyp gets old and becomes a jellyfish, it can do the trick again...and again...and again. Now, jellyfish polyps are immobile and tasty to many things, so it's really unlikely that there are any immortal T. nutricula, but there could be....and that kid over there might be a supervillain who's nine hundred years old and just occasionally imitates a T. nutricula. That's the scarlet jellyfish, I think (but am not sure).

Wolverine? No, hairy frog. The hairy frog can break its own bones and push them out through its skin to make claws.

What do you want from time travel?

SYSTEM: Any

Some thoughts that have nothing to do with actual time travel (whatever that is) and everything to do with what players actually want to see with time travel. We're emphasizing gaming here, not the actual consequences of the fact that fundamental equations don't have a time component.

In part, this is sparked by a Mutants & Masterminds session I ran where the players just expected to end up in the past. I wasn't actually planning a time travel session, but clearly that's what they expected from the setup. So we went through time, with me vamping and trying to make sure that they caused the things they suspected they would cause. (They helped, because they suspected they would cause it.)

One of the characters, immersed in the whole superhero-supervillain subculture since birth said, effectively, "You have to go back to WWII. It's on your superhero bucket list. You won't feel like you really made it until you do."

So when you're devising your time travel scenario:

• You can change the past. Maybe not a huge amount, but you can do it. 
• You can't change the big things. You still want a recognizable future to go back to.
• You want consequences. Maybe you can't kill Hitler or stop 9/11, but you can erase yourself or the person you love.
• You want to interact with yourself. If you were alive in the time period (because some characters are immortal or long-lived), you want to be there.
• You want to interact with the people you've heard about. Going into the past and being Joe Schmoe isn't nearly as interesting as discovering that you have to convince the first Golden Warrior to give up his Ring of Ares so that the third Golden Warrior can take it from a Soviet spy in 1956, and the person who's going to help you is your great grandmother, who thinks you're kind of hot.

From your point of view, you want time travel to have limitations or your life will be awful:

• You can't blip fifteen seconds into the past to change the outcome of the fight you just had. 
• Time travel is not so easy that they can readjust their arrival time every time they fail. 
• They can't stay in the past (unless you want someone to replace his grandfather).

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....

A moment of reflection: DC Heroes

SYSTEM: DC Heroes

I just wanted to take a moment to think about that other influential system, DC Heroes. Yes, the TSR Marvel game turned out to be stunningly influential, but aspects of DC Heroes have also influenced the modern superhero game.

I haven't the brainpower to spare today to actually trace the effects it has had, or even talk about what a mess the whole Blood of Heroes thing became. I just want to talk about the system and me.

I bought it in first edition. It concentrated on the Teen Titans, who were hot at the time, and it had (for me) two really revolutionary things. First, the action-opposition-effect mechanic was, well, beautiful. I still keep trying to recreate it in other things, and fall back on its division of physical, mental, and spiritual effects. I mean, wow. Other games have collapsed mental and spiritual or even provided mechanisms where all three are the same thing (only separated by power modifiers) but to me, there's something elegant in the domains of the mind, the body, and the soul. (Mind, it got confusing early in play trying to keep straight whether soul was the aiming attribute or will was or maybe spirit...but the structure of the cards kept it straight.)

Second, everything was on the logarithmic scale. Now, that wasn't new to me: Champions was already using powers to calculate strength. But applying it to everything? Wow. Information, time, distance, strength...all of it. You can see that influence in later games by Steve Kenson: both M&M3E and ICONS Assembled feature benchmarks that have almost all the same features. Heck, M&M3E even features the funky equations for distance, time, and speed.

Except...no one would play with me in first edition. So I eventually got rid of it.

Then a friend, my system whore friend, convinced me to try it again. We would run two campaigns that intersected: they took place in the same town but he would run the superheroes and I would run the mages. So I got second edition. And a number of the supplements. (I still own Magic. I might own others, but I haven't checked.)

I thought the campaign was a blast, and I still remember some of the player characters: the voudoun professor and the psychic private eye, and the mercenary who had been trapped alive in Hell since the Hundred Years' War. (Sorry, Jim, I don't remember your character. I don't even remember who I played as a superhero, except he was probably influenced by Batman because all my characters were influenced by Batman.) We were still playing it when the third edition came out, and I bought that so I wouldn't have multiple books to carry around.

Now, for all that I loved the game, I thought there were a couple of issues.

• The power names were too specific, and it was often the case that you had the same power three times, once for spirit, once for physical attacks, and once for mental ones. The gadget rules in the first edition were clunky...well, the gadget rules were always clunky. And the numbers were huge...at the time, I had played Champions, where a character was between 200 and 400 points...the idea of playing 1400 point characters scared me. (It still does, a little. No, I've never played Rifts. Why?)
• Even though the exponential growth is a way to make Jimmy Olsen and Superman fit on the same chart, it does lead to characters being rather similar at the low end.
• And I really wanted a formula instead of the tables. Having to do table lookups was a bit of a nuisance to me....still is.

But the game...well. Great. I can see why writeups.org is still a going concern.

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.

Machines don't evolve?

Just reading an article on the bioethics of CRISPR, and they pointed out that nature--biology--is a vastly complicated mechanism with checks and balances that allow (in an undirected way) responses to many actions. 
A mechanical item, such as an old-fashioned watch or a nuclear power plant, has only a limited number of responses to meddling, most of them a little bad (the glass pops off, it runs fast, it runs slow, or it doesn't run) or a lot bad (the nuclear power plant melts down), but "bad" unifies them.
Nature has more responses, most of which we don't notice because the system is so complex. Some are even good (for local values of "good"): this would be evolution in action.
But my sudden thought is, and this thought can be applied to superheroes hence its inclusion on this blog, is that machines don't necessarily have the same mechanism.
Oh, sapience changes a lot of that if the machines can change themselves (a kind of Lamarckian inheritance, I guess: they make children with the traits that they have found useful), but before sapience, or in the early early stages of sapience, the system is tremendously limited.  
There might be an adventure or a story in being the sole intelligent machine and being afraid to mess with your own innards, for fear that you will stop.