Hey...happy holidays

I hope this is a good time of year for you. If it is, enjoy it.

I know that this is an intensely lonely or painful time of the year for many people. If that's you, I hope better for you. I have no idea what brought you to this point, what terrible thing happened to make this a time of pain or sorrow, and I don't want to belittle that.

But I want to say this: It gets better. Sometimes not by much at any time, and sometimes &ldquot;better&rdquot; looks worse, but it does indeed get better. You can find someone to help you. Maybe not an official cousellor; maybe it's just someone to listen.

If you're choosing to be cranky and angry, I suggest you not. This is the time of year when a lot of people at least pay lip-service to peace on earth and good-will to all. Take comfort in that.

Whether it's Christmas, Hannukah, Festivus, the Solstice or whatever, I wish you health and wealth and happiness and safety.

On The Heist

Icons

Been away for a while. Did two solo plays, but one will probably not get posted because it’s over 50,000 words. But the other one, well, that’s today.

I converted the Twin Flames Publishing adventure The Heist for Icons, and I did a solo play of it, and I found it...underwhelming. And I want to talk about that, because I figured The Heist was a great introductory adventure.

It is a good introductory adventure, and Ivd still recommend it again as an introductory adventure. But I’m not an introductory player, and you do have to be aware of what I thought was the problem.

The structure of the adventure is pretty simple:

1. Deal with a supposed hostage situation: This would be a great opportunity to bring in minion rules, to try combat, and to maybe invent some Qualities and work for them.
2. Deal with supervillains who are getting the McGuffin. Now, in my solo playtest, the heroes were totally winning, but then there were a couple of bad rolls and suddenly all the villains were escaping.
3. Fight the big bad villain who has orchestrated all of this. The adventure is set up so that the supervillains you have already fought don't fight in this. (In my solo, I let them fight. The heroes did win because the heroes didn't have bad rolls, and frankly the villains aren't that tough.)

Notice this: conceptually the adventures are all linked, but there isn’t really a connection between them, and I think that’s the issue.

• The guys in the bank hostage situation never mention the big bad.
• The supervillains in the middle section don't mention the big bad. They can, of course, but there's no direction for them to do so.
• The big bad comes out of nowhere in the third act.

There are a couple of tricks we learned in improve that provide a sense of finality or ending to a story, and maybe they could be useful in running an adventure like this:

• Make it circular: present some aspect of the beginning in the ending.
• Present an obvious change.
• Ending the journey.
• If a question is presented (who killed Joe Blow, for instance), at the beginning of the story, then the answer creates the end of the story.
• A change in status or character belief, usually done by presenting some similar situation to the beginning and having the characters respond differently, or representing the status of the character: Just joined the superhero team ancontrasted with being the leader, for instance.
• The event that caused the story is resolved. This is in many ways the natural for a superhero story, but you have to make it obvious that it’s the same event. For instance, what I could have done in The Heist was have the big bad rant about his brilliance in setting up the dominoes that fell into place. In my solo play, they dogpiled the big bad and while that accomplishes the end — they won — it doesn’t result in a satisfactory ending.

What can you do? Well, you don’t want to predetermine the ending; the often call that railroading, and it interferes with the players having fun. If you’re constantly putting restrictions in place, they eventually have no choice but to do whatever you want or quit, and many people will choose to quit.

The only solution that I’ve come up with is that you have a set of things in the opening scene that could apply to multiple endings up there. Maybe not ending the journey — that one is kind of specific — but for instance, you can present something that might be called back; you can ask a question so that it can be answered at the very end; you can make the disrupting thing or event something that’s obvious, that you can see when it stops, when things are put back.

So I’m still in favour of the adventure, but I think you have to make some changes, and maybe those changes are second nature to you, but I have to think about it.

1. The guys in the bank know the name of the big bad (which is “The Frightener” by the way), and they say it. Then beating the Frightener has some heft to it.
2. The supervillains say that they’re working for “The Fightener.” Heck, they might be skeptical of him, too, and state that they're really in it for the cash or for the exposure.