Today, in my head

Any

He was sitting in his wheelchair in the sun, looking out at the grounds. She walked up to him and put herself in his line of sight, showing off the scars on her face. “Remember me?” she asked.

He studied her for a long time, and then shrugged.

“Anja Bostovech. You kidnapped me once. Captain Wonder stopped you.”

The man shrugged and half-smiled. “He did that a lot.” He half-smiled and looked at her, waiting.

“You had a plan. You were going to download my consciousness into a robot body and take advantage of my fame.”

“You want to know why? To take over the world or something,” he said. “It seemed very clear then, but the new medication...“ He shrugged again.

She shook her head. “What I want to know—” She did a pirouette so he could see the scars and the useless hand she normally kept hidden. “What I want to know is, can you still do it?”

Musings as avoidance

SYSTEM: ICONS

Thoughts while I try to avoid thinking about the bad news that’s consuming me.

• I just realized that putting an Affliction as the secondary effect on an Energy Drain (Or any damaging attack, really) gives you lingering effects for the attack. Like, the blood thinner on the sword makes them keep bleeding, or the vertigo (stunning) that just won’t go away.

  Might be an interesting way to treat lingering effects for some genres. (Trouble or a new Quality might be better.)

• I just got BubbleGumshoe and I’m thinking about where and if you could blend it with ICONS, though maybe without a Quade diagram equivalent: silver age and before had a number of mystery books. Might be good for a Crisis-style arc or short-shot: they’re often structured around mysteries, like Heroes in Crisis or Identity Crisis.
• Could you do a fifteen-minute podcast that’s just fleshing out adventure ideas? Get two or three people to talk, each episode someone brings a premise and they riff on it for fifteen or twenty minutes? Would that even be interesting? (Okay, it would be to me, but I suspect there already is one like that; I just don’t know about it.)
• 
  I know there’s something about teen heroes that isn’t served by Masks, but I haven’t been able to put it into words. Thoughts?
  
• Why doesn’t Deadman find someone brain-dead and possess them permanently? (And then set about killing Rama Kushna, perhaps)



• Do self-aware tulpas found religions? Do they lock up True Believers so they have assured existence?

RPGs are better than comic books at...what?

There are a number of pieces that talk about what works in comics but not at the table. The first time I saw one was in Aaron Allston's Strike Force where he listed the things that didn't work at the table (implicitly for him):

• Separating heroes for long stretches
• Capturing heroes
• Skipping over long stretches of imprisonment
• Having NPCs rescue PCs

Essentially these are two different problems:

1. Leaving most players without something to do (you know, if Kid Cosmic isn't in the room with Imitation Gaymer and Fuzz Lightyear, how does he participate in the conversation? If all three are separated, each can only participate in one-third of the scenes.)
2. Removing player agency (You want to get from Monday to Thursday, but the players want to try something on each day)

There's a third problem which might be considered a subset of that second one: Writer convenience is not player convenience. Things can happen just because (or for good reasons that we don't get into) but might not work because player characters will poke and prod.

One thing that works in a story but not necessarily at the table (my bete noir), is complicated plotting. (You'll get to hear me be overcomplicated if we ever finish this actual play for BAMF.) It falls out from the fact that if the players don't see it, it didn't necessarily happen, and I generate an awful lot of "Well, A means B, and C will be upset, so C tries this and the players find out when D approaches them..." kind of storylines.

It might be that the problem there is that I don't have a fine enough hand at exposing villain motivation.

All of which is prelude, because what I really want to think about and ask is, "What works at the table that doesn't necessarily work in a comic?"

A couple of things come to mind.

• Because you never re-experience the game session (okay, not true if an actual play is recorded, but generally), you can be looser about tight story logic. You don't necessarily need A leads to B leads to C leads to D; if it plays out in the order ACBFD, where F is something you had to invent on the fly, hey, that's okay, if you all had fun.
• Roleplaying is much more improvisational, so you can go off in a totally different direction.
• Character empathy is a lot higher because the players are being the characters. This means that you can (on purpose) have the characters doing less admirable things without losing your audience of less-than-ten.
• You can use props. I don't do this, but you can: you can enrich the experience with all sorts of things that wouldn't be possible in a book. Call of Cthulhu is great at presenting handouts and props, but thinking of them is a skill that I don't have. Anybody who uses a handout or a newspaper that presents in-world material does this.

I'm going to ignore the whole breaking-the-fourth-wall thing because I think the real point is less can you break the fourth wall (you can in both forms) and more doing it well.

Any other ideas for things that work easily in roleplaying but not so easily in comics?

Two odd things

SYSTEM: Any

Yes, I've been away. Sorry I didn't write. Commuting more makes my days vastly longer.

Anyway, three odd things (was two, now it's three) that might make the basis for an adventure for someone...

1. Apparently in Britain they have something called "eggers" who are people who collect bird's eggs. It's illegal to do this in Britain, because it disrupts the bird breeding cycle. The practitioners are all male, between 25-45, and it's rather an obsession with them. They die getting these eggs. One fellow had 3600 of them in his house. I think another fellow stole them from museums. Sounds like Egghead from the Batman show of the 1960s....
2. Apparently the threat of bee colony collapse is staved off for now, but there are companies who have trucks full of bees and who travel from place to place to pollinate a particular area, such as the almond farms. What if someone were to hijack one of these trucks? What if they held it for ransom? Also, being trapped in such a truck could well make for an origin for an insect superhero.
3. The recent death of the last male northern rhino got me to thinking about odd things, like, did they collect his semen before he died, and if you're the one who does it, do you talk about it at home? But also, could that kind of genetic material be held for ransom? Could it be put to bad ends? Could you make something out of the attempts to revive a species or subspecies?

(Also I have thought of rude things, but you don't care about that.)

Not Tinder, but...

Worldbuilding

(Originally posted on Facebook)

It suddenly occurred to me today that a supers smartphone app would solve so many problems in contacting other supers (this is distinct from "super Tinder" which I have also talked about).

Problem 1: What's it called?

The names I come up with seem very...quotidian. SuperTalk. ParaGraph or MetaGraph. The cutest so far is "App, App, and Away".

I'm thinking of an app that does the following (or says it does; whether it really does it is left as an exercise for the GM):

• anonymizes or never gets location info
• offers the choice of really deleting exchanges or, like SnapChat, deletes them after a certain period of time
• encrypts data that's transmitted or saved, so if someone makes a copy of your phone somehow, they don't have a way to read your info. (I leave actual details to someone with expertise, but I'm thinking of a key that's stored somewhere and everything is encrypted in a new way after each look, though the transmission of the key might be vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack
• does not translate but handles multiple language code sets
• provides a list of enrolled supers, so if you've never met Fantastica you can still send him/her/it a message.

Problem 2: How are people verified?

Given that the supers population is limited, this might actually be a use for blockchain algorithms. My tentative answer is that some other user verifies you. So you can *get* the app off iTunes or the Google store or whatever the equivalent is, but you can't *use* the app until you're verified.

There might be a second app for getting in touch with heroes, but I think it would be like looking at a celebrity's Instagram: every fifth entry is "I love you so much! Please answer this!"

Side note: Dark vs Sparks adventure(s)

SYSTEM: ICONS

As I’ve mentioned before, I want to run a one-shot in the world of James Alan Gardner’s All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault. Now, almost any generic superhero plot will work,, but I want to use the unique features of the setting. (Which might be a good rule of thumb for setting adventures in any specific universe.)

Let’s say we have a dynasty of Darklings. They might be up to almost anything—a Darkling dynasty is probably the same as a LexCorp or a Kingpin, with evil things that have plausible deniability and nothing that will hold up in court. The heroes can’t get at them directly, so the question is, how do the players hear of it?

No game starts until the players get involved, whether it’s the time-honoured technique of the bad guys trying to take them out pre-emptively, or a discovery of some clue, or a remit from a mysterious figure in an inn. So you might have a spiffy plot but if the players never find out about it (or they don’t find out about it until too later), then you don’t have an adventure.

Now, I have a gimmick in mind that uses features of the universe (which I haven’t discussed with Jim, so there might be hidden details in the universe that invalidates it). I speak no more of it.

Anyway, the gimmick will result in the murder of several Darklings, so I think that a new Darkling, embraces by the shadow as a response to the murders, will approach the heroes about this: the murders have confounded the police and the Darklings’ own Dark Guard. (The PCs are not demonstrably not involved.) The bad guy who’s killing is probably a Spark or a Darkling (though an unusual group of mortals can’t be ruled out).

In my brain, it’s a story like (but simpler than) The Big Sleep, with family and business problems. Now, the reason for these twists is only to provide motivation, not to create a logic puzzle. I plan for this adventure to be a superhero adventure, not a mystery.

As upholders of the law and the weak, the heroes have to find out who is killing Darklings.

It wouldn’t be proper if the Darkling dynasty weren’t up to no good, so the dynasty is planning on doing something that’s probably a little more exciting than rigging zoning by-laws (though that might be interesting—something that looks innocuous on the surface but as a side effect would make superhero bases illegal—but I digress. The question is, can I come up with a dynasty plot that triggers the killer to start, and somehow gives a personal connection to the PCs and give us two or three knock-down drag-out battles?

Obviously the petitioning newbie-Darkling (Dusker? Dusker who, if you like wordplay on obscure rock bands) has to approach the PCs at some event where the heroes are known to be, which means that there might also be other overt antagonists there. That would give us a chance to start in media res.

Think think think. 

Fortunately, the Darklings can be from anyplace; it’s the heroes who are constrained in space. Although Jim’s book covers Waterloo and a bit north, I could set my adventure in nearby Kitchener (because I was born here and currently live here), in nearby Cambridge—still part of the Region of Waterloo, which replaced Waterloo County—or I could go farther afield. I’ll probably stay in Canada; except for Kitchener, the cities I have lived in are claimed in the book. 

I could go for London, Ontario; for Calgary or Edmonton, in Alberta; or for either Victoria or Vancouver in BC. 

Or—oddball choice—Owen Sound, Ontario, in the Bruce Peninsula. That has a number of good qualities, actually: there are vacation homes near, though not as many as the Muskokas; there’s a chance for some angst if there’s a young hero(es) who want to move away but declaring yourself a protector locks you into the location (though I suspect not permanently). Muskoka would be a better choice demographically—more of a history of vacation homes for the wealthy—but I know (sections of) the Bruce Peninsula better. 

(Aren’t you glad that you now know some of the waffling that goes on in my mind?)

Why supers travel in groups

SYSTEM: Any

This was inspired by a comment in this week's Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff.

Suppose that superpowers are somehow psychic, and the higher the concentration of superpowered people, the more powerful they are. So the Hulk is strong when he's all alone in New Mexico, but he's really strong—maybe the strongest one there is!—when he's near three other supers. It doesn't matter if they're good guys or bad guys; Superman is strength 8 when he's fighting Lex Luthor, but he's strength 10 when he faces four Kryptonians. (They, on the other hand, are already at maximum strength when he shows up, so they don't get any stronger.)

So, you know, supers would travel in groups.

I'm not sure how you'd model that mechanically in ICONS or M&M But it'd be easy in MHR.

Presenting an evil organization

SYSTEM: ANY

So I was thinking of the organization I want to replace VIPER or any actual snake-themed organization in Strange City, and I want it to have the following:

• Identifiable costumes
• A focus on some aspect of comic-book-themed villainy
• A commander with a notable name

From an adventure point of view, I want a recurring group that does things and there's some in-world explanation why they keep doing it, because really, Cobra Commander should have hung up his snake tattoo long ago.

...and this came to me.


It's an organization. For now, we'll call it SKULL, but I don't know what that stands for, so it might change. The organization's founders have a clearly-defined market:

Wannabe supervillains.

Specifically, the kind who attempt to set up organizations to overthrow the world. You know, the kind that superheroes defeat on a regular basis, because their ideas are not top-notch. Maybe even half-baked.

They've set up a franchise operation, and they will help you create your evil organization. (There might even be a multi-level marketing aspect to it, where you get to sponsor a new evil organization.) They have many, many features that you can buy for your organization, and they get a cut of your income until you reach a certain threshold.

For buying in, they provide:

• Name recognition. Everybody knows and fears SKULL.
• Standard weapons and tactics.(Uniforms and weapons for twenty are included in the initial franchise fee, and you can always buy more from them.) Tactics are written in the Skin-Bound Book (their manual of policies and procedures), but you can buy training.
• Access to someone who will sell you a base.
• Computers, a link, and encryption.
• A cool name, like Commander Dread, Commander Plague, Commander Panic, Commander Destruction, chosen when your group is founded.
• Stationery and the facilities to break into local broadcasts and interwebs. (Check on YouTube: there are over twenty-five world domination threats stored there, from the last four years. There is a SKULL channel, and part of the Dark Web is devoted to it.)
• Two jobs by an established SKULL supervillain team.

You can also buy a base, and they will build one for you. The exact mechanism depends on your local geography, but they do have an automated borer robot that will dig out one of eighteen floorplans for you and put the exterior in place for an underground base. They actually have construction teams who will come in and do the interior for you, and it only costs a bit more. Plus, you don't have to kill them afterward; they're already bound by oath.

The Skybase is popular and based on reliable blimp technology, though more expensive than it used to be (because of the helium shortage). Only a few Islebases are available, but they're quite swanky.

Escape vehicles are essential, but do cost extra.

There is also an insurance company to insure your minions. Once you're caught, of course, coverage ceases.

Depending on your interests, you might want to buy laboratories to research That Which Man Was Not Meant To Know, or to research giving minions super-powers. (If you have enough money, you can buy a supervillain team for after those first two jobs.)

Basically, they can provide at a ridiculous markup anything you need, customized and with the SKULL logo.

The Concorde campaign

This is mostly a piece to record memories of a campaign. It will probably be boring to anyone but me, but I'll throw in some commentary about what I did wrong or right. (If you played with me, feel free to chime in and correct my memories because it has been a long time, and I might well have things wrong.)

So I had given up roleplaying pretty much, and one camping weekend in 1983 my friend Jim Gardner came with this game, which was Champions, first or second edition. We played, I enjoyed it. I think it contributed to the breakup of my relationship at the time (me being an asshat provided the lion's share of it, though). And Jim started running a campaign, set in Felicity, a thinly-disguised Waterloo which had been the setting for several radio shows and plays that Jim had worked on.

Eventually I wanted to run something, so I pestered and eventually Jim allowed as how he was doing other things so maybe running every other week wouldn't be awful, and wouldn't it be nice to get to play once in a while?

So I created an alternate alternate Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge, Concorde (not to be confused with the actual Concord, Ontario). It was a bit grittier than Felicity but not much; the grittiness mostly came from the fact that I grew up in Kitchener, a former manufacturing town, so early settings tended to be things like an abandoned cannery plant or a warehouse or an alley. Concorde used to have a supers population, but most of them had moved to Toronto after the main superhero, the Gray Wolf, disappeared. (In fact, it was a running gag that the two UNTIL agents in the city had picked Concorde because it meant they weren't likely to have to face supers. Agents Murcheson and Traynor were supposed to be a kind of alert system, and just call in competent people if there were a problem.) (Later campaigns were set in the future of the Concorde universe and featured James Nicoll's vampire PC Harker Westenra, and the Bureau of Extremely Foreign Affairs, and even later ones the Anderson Disk.)

We had pretty much the same characters through Concorde's run (though recently I updated it when we tried out Mutants & Masterminds 3rd edition). Player characters included:

• T'A Shrin, a humanoid fox from another world, equipped with flight harness, force field, and blaster. (Brian)
• The Lensman, a Lensman from the E. E. Smith novels pared down to the requisite number of points and plagued by spectacularly bad dice rolls. (JWB)
• Silver Mirror, an alien from Gallifrey in flying armor with silver quantum blasts. He had seen the truth once across a crowed street and let it go by (that is, he told whatever story was useful at the time). (Jim)

Honest, there were others and I'm not slighting any of you people, but at this second, I don't recall who your characters were. (Everyone seemed to pick aliens. I'm not sure why they were protecting Earth. I think we explained it at some point, but I don't recall it.)

So: I did a good thing getting rid of the heroes and letting the PCs be the star of the show. Of course, one of the early things I did wrong was send them somewhere else...I had in mind an alternate world shaped like a spool, which had three places: the disk on top, the disk on bottom, and the area where the thread would go. I forget how they tied in, but Gray Wolf had been exiled there, and the PCs rescued him. He promptly retired, giving his blessing to the PCs.

Memorable NPCs...

• Angel O'Shaughnessy was a one-armed private detective with minor psychic abilities. She had been a superhero vigilante, but retired and became a detective. She was the daughter of Sam Spade and Brigid O'Shaughnessy, which I don't think every came up.
• Murcheson and Traynor have been mentioned. (In the M&M campaign, one of them had been turned into a woman by a villain and she then married the other, and they had a child...featured in the Steel City campaign as Canadian Lass.)
• (Name Escapes Me...Gordie?) the Ghoul was a ghoul, from an early run-in with ghouls, who had been a fifties greaser and still dressed the part. Silver Mirror convinced the ghouls that they were the saviors foretold by prophecy, and they called on him whenever they had an inconvenient corpse to dispose of. His tag line was, "Are you guys saviors or what?"
• Professor Grainger was the mad scientist at one of the local universities. He would help the players and then casually mention that he'd been thinking of moving the Earth out to the orbit of Jupiter because the observation facilities there would be better, and have to be talked out of it. (Yes, I had just gotten a copy of The Blood and Dr. McQuark.)
• SAT, but I don't recall that I did a huge amount with them, because they were pretty plainly American, and my game was set in Canada.

I had to share published villains with Jim. We'd go through new Enemies books and divvy them up, laying dibs on any we were particularly interested in. I think I got Deathstroke, but Jim had most of the villains from the main rulebook. Anyway, villains I can recall:

• Jack the Ripper homage in that cannery plant.
• The ghouls, already mentioned.
• Bad Day, a fast regenerating slasher. Bad Day's regenerating power was so great that he could grow back from a tiny fleck; the rest of him was destroyed and that fleck was kept in an evacuated bell jar, in case. This was the first time that I had handed disposable normals to the players to be near a character (and mostly killed, I think) during his origin. As a pre-transformed human, he kept saying, "I'm having a bad day," so that became his name. That was a useful idea, by the way. (I think Viktor's right; Bad Day was a Waterloo villain.)
• Kick-Axe was a (superpowered) wanna-be rock band who held the courthouse hostage on the day of their sentencing, but who could be distracted by free pizza. Because I loves me some stupid villains.
• Gratz, from The Circle and METE. He was so successful that when I tried to introduce Elisabeth Bathory later, they fried her just to prevent that sort of infiltration again. Never really got to use vampires again. Shame; Jim and I loved vampires.
• Dark Silver was an evil female Silver Mirror, but she was an escapee from a mental asylum. They did talk her down in a climax that I found affecting.
• Chicle was a stretcher-brick, as I recall. The follow-up M&M campaign revealed that he had married Dark Silver and they had a child, who was featured in that Steel City campaign.
• Rapture and the boys (uh, Obelisk, Micron, and... I no longer recall) were a mercenary team. She was a mentalist, and the smell of fresh-cut grass was a sign that she was tampering with your brain. She would snipe from hiding and the others would do the overt things. They were a problem for the team for a while.
• The Arthropoids. This was the villain threat that actually ended the campaign, because it took me years to figure out how the heck they were going to defeat them. They were alien slavers after T'A Shrin, and they were parasitic: they'd implant grubs in a human and it would eventually burst forth, killing the human. Eventually, while running a DC Heroes campaign in yet another alternate world (Wellington) I figured out how to defeat them, so the Wellington heroes travelled to the Concorde universe, I rewrote some of the characters as DC Heroes characters, and we finally dealt with them (the city was under an impenetrable "silken" dome by that time, and much horror could have been had).

Okay, in retrospect, there was a certain amount of killing, which might have contributed to the slightly grittier feel.

Another untried adventure!

System: ICONS

A while ago (two years? Three?) I had an idea, so I scribbled it down. It's kinda a Silver Age idea, with the heroes' souls transported into toys so they fight in a playroom... Ah, it kinda makes sense. It's never been played, it's never had its rough edges sanded down or its logical inconsistencies pointed out, and it's long. (You can actually find it in the Google+ ICONS group if you scroll backward far enough.

<sarcasm>So far, it sounds ideal.</sarcasm>

I found it again just recently, as I was spending money I don't have to make Word work (because it suddenly stopped. Gah.) I formatted it using a new tool, as an experiment, so it isn't even lovely.

So I threw the adventure on my Google drive as a PDF, and here it is: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0KkM_vAe2HXOFZJQl91MWQ0YVk

I think it's accessible to everybody. Let me know if it isn't.

Parts of it belong to Fainting Goat Games (and I thank them for giving me permission to include them), parts are (of course) ICONS. The parts that are mine are released under Creative Commons Attribution license.

If you look at it and have comments, I'm glad to hear them, but I'm actually not inclined to revisit the adventure. I might implement the changes I think I have merit, or I just leave the whole thing alone.

John

"Danger Rooms...Are Our Business"

Yeah, most danger rooms/doom rooms/wreck rooms/what-have-you are one-off creations, done by your insanely talented team members, but during the brief hiatus where that person is dead, who are you going to call when the training facility is down?

Yeah. You're going to call Wreckreation.

Not just because they're the only appropriate site with a web page and in the phone book (also approved by BBB), but because they're the only appropriate site.

After he retired from superheroing--reflexes were going--Doc Coney (formerly the Red Wasp) wanted something to keep his mind active. He had enough money, but he didn't have something to keep his mind active. And he loves puzzles. Debugging a danger room is a joy and a thrill to him, especially if it might kill him. "I do some of my best thinking under threat of death," he says.

Even though Doc Coney is brilliant (not as bright as your campaign world's brightest, but good), he can't do it all himself. So he has friends in the superhero and superhero-adjacent community that he calls on as need. Several of them are really the core of Wreckreation, but it's still just a part-time thing for them. (There are perhaps two dozen danger rooms in the world at a level that needs Doc Coney, and maybe less. They don't all malfunction at once.[1])

His regular crew:

• BDO Initials pronounced as "Beedeeoh," for "big dumb object." BDO is strong, can grow a bit and get even stronger, and is as smart as your typical freshman college football player. (Your estimate of his intelligence varies with your school.) But he is generally easy-going, and he takes instructions very well. Sometimes a bit too literally...
• Nan O'Bot He grows, she shrinks. It seems like a useful pairing, though they bicker. She would like to be romantically involved with BDO (she's kind of shallow: he makes great arm-candy) but he is not that way inclined. She helps Doc Coney in part to keep up with electrical engineering; her "regular" job lets her get away to do superhero-ing but it's not really demanding professionally.
• Wisp He's a ghost. Really useful when you want to look into something, and frequently not harmed by the current danger room scenario, so he's useful as the emergency contact. He has a limited ability to affect the real world--a small amount of telekinesis, a little weather control--but he has some great stories about the old days. 

Other people can be called in as needed, such as if there's a specialty they need (extraterrestrial hard light technology, perhaps) or a bizarre power that needs to be tested.

Melting the bullets

System: ICONS

Because I have an odd brain, I started wondering how hot your flame aura has to be before it vaporizes the bullets shot at you.

Iron melts at about 1500 degrees Celsius, and that's higher than the melting point of steel or brass, so we're going to use that. The boiling point is about twice that. I looked up some bullet weights under the misguided notion that all I had to do was figure the energy that went into that mass...I digress. Most bullets (as opposed to cartridges) are under 100 grams. There are exceptions, but we're wingin' it, baby.

Now, having looked at the math, I now know why (a) my university physics courses didn't touch heat transfer and (b) I'm not going to calculate the heat transfer. Let's just say that any heat involved has to be intense.

There isn't anything in ICONS about blast furnaces or arc welders. (I know, I'm shocked too.)

But at the heart of it, claiming that the character's fire aura vaporizes the bullets is such a comic book thing to do, so I want to keep hacking at this for a moment.

We could stunt it, treating the flame aura as a force field and the special effect as vaporizing the bullets, but that really seems like a betrayal of the comic-book-ness of it.

Now, military-style heavy weapons are damage rank 7. Incendiary bombs start at damage rank 7, and bullets are deformed in hitting materials of hardness 6 or so. So let's say that fire rank 7 is enough to melt a bullet, which is less than 100 grams of lead, steel, or brass, over a panel or three. Fire rank 8 would vaporize the bullet, if the bullet were in it for a panel or two or three. (Fired bullets hurt the target before then, whether it's rank 7 or 8.)

But rank 9 is in linear terms much more than rank 8. So let's say that any character with a flame aura of 9 or 10 really does vaporize the bullets before they hit his or her skin. Oh, you can still hurt them by dropping a locomotive on them: that's a lot of metal to heat up. But you can treat them as having a force field for the purposes of small flammable projectiles. Concrete would probably hurt, but thrown bottles and cans wouldn't even be noticed.

Of course, I just realized that you could spray them with bullets for a long time and suffocate them by making them breathe in all that vapor they've created....

Romp adventures

I was thinking about adventures and the tendency for me is to find the nugget of decision that the characters have to make. Two choices, each of which has good points and bad points. The adventure becomes the story of the decision.

But. That isn't the only type of adventure, and it behooves me to remember that.

There's the milieu adventure, where the players take their characters to a new place, and sometimes mess up, because it's not like home. This fish-out-water story doesn't have to be another dimension or country. It could be going into board rooms instead of back alleys.

There's the adventure where they have to right a wrong. It might be as simple as stopping the ransom of all the fish in the sea, or getting the impenetrable dome off the White House. That's actually the most common superhero story.

There's the one where a character has to return to their core values. The character has to recognize there's a problem, usually by having some opponent or ally actually embody what they used to embody, and then there's opposition where the character can do either what he or she would have done before or continue the current behavior. Either way, the character loses something and gains something.

Closely related is the tough choice story, where both decisions are reasonable and rational, but one fits the morals of half the group, and the other fits the morals of the remainder. Decisions and consequences follow.

But the one I don't see mentioned often is the romp.

Generally, a romp is outrageous. It pushes things in a different direction...having Batman chase a pig and then ending with him singing is a kind of a romp. Stories with the Impossible Man tend to be romps, though you could make them dark and pregnant with meaning. Stories with Ambush Bug pretty much had to be romps.

And there's a place for the romp. It's an afternoon at the circus, eating cotton candy. It's a palate cleanser after dealing with the intergalactic overlord. It's an entire adventure with the heroes as hostages in their secret IDs and contriving to "accidentally" have the bank robbers and kidnappers keep falling unconscious. (There would be something to "The Ransom of Red Chief" with the superheroes being the kidnapped ones...they keep leaving and coming back, and the kidnappers wonder why there's no response to the ransom...)

Let's have a few more romps.

Sidekicks

One of the things that's part of superhero lore that doesn't show up a lot in RPGs is the sidekick. (By sidekick I also include pets and familiars, so Zabu, the sabre tooth tiger with Ka-Zar, counts as much as Robin or Stripesy.) I'm really talking about sidekicks as sidekicks, not a Teen Titans model where they fend for themselves.

A superhero sidekick is tough to play. When I think about it, I've only had sidekicks show up three times in decades of superhero RPGs: Once, the sidekick was actually an ex-sidekick; another time, the sidekick was simply another player character hero, and there's an agreement between players that character B is the sidekick of character A; in DC Heroes, where there was a specific in-game mechanic for handling sidekicks (that also existed in Golden Age of Champions, but I never used it). I've used sidekicks as a GM to comic effect (such as with Gecko and Lizardboy, where Lizardboy was actually the crazed millionaire's middle-aged butler), but for players, not so much.

Who Plays the Sidekick?

There seem to me to be four options:

1. The GM plays the sidekick.
2. The player plays the sidekick.
3. Another player plays the sidekick.
4. Rotating people play the sidekick.

Which is best depends on the situation and your players.

If the GM plays the sidekick, you have the advantage that the sidekick can do things that the player doesn't expect. There's also likely to be more emphasis on the disadvantages of a sidekick.

If the player adds the sidekick on to his or her usual load, you have the advantage that the regular PC and the sidekick really do function as one person. The player gets twice as many opportunities to act, which can be a disadvantage (though the player probably paid for this advantage, with an actual cost or a quality). It's rather like Duplicating powers that way.

If another player plays the sidekick, you have the same advantage as if the GM plays, but the amount of trouble generated depends on the players' relationships. I would assume things are easier for the character, but that won't always be true.

If you play the sidekicks in troupe style, then you can take advantage of all of these. 

I think it might be interesting in a low-membership group to have each player take a sidekick of one of the other players. That is, Player A plays Character A and Sidekick B, Player B plays Character B and Sidekick C, and Player C plays Character C and Sidekick A. You get six characters and because the sidekicks are usually lower-powered, they don't stress the players out as much.

Odd Sidekicks

Everyone thinks of Robin, the boy hostage, but really there are a variety of sidekicks and one of them might be right for your character, at least for a while.

• The sidekick is the one with the power, rather like Johnny Thunder and the Thunderbolt.
• The sidekick is unwanted, rather like Frogboy or some other minor character who tries to emulate the PC.
The sidekick is actually disposable: the hero is running a Be A Sidekick For A Week contest on his website (or such a contest was run without his or her knowledge), and the winner of the contest is an elderly man who has always wanted to be a superhero. ("Look, Brassman, you said that in the armor, anyone could be a superhero. So I built a contest based on that. You signed off...it was in that stack of forms.")
The sidekick draws fire, either because he or she is immortal or very tough in some way.

In terms of powers, sidekicks are usually copies, having powers or origins essentially like the PC (Robin, Kid Flash), so the operative phrase becomes "Like the hero but..." However, some sidekicks are spackle or complements, filling in some of the gaps that the hero has. In both an RPG and a book, this often occurs because the GM has determined that they need some power in order to get the plot coupons they need to advance. And some sidekicks are wildcards, some kind of random assortment of powers, joined to the PC through some social or psychological mechanism. 

Animal companions tend to be complements, granting the hero some extra powers in battle or reconnaisance.

What Stories Do You Tell?

If having a sidekick is going to be a special event, then you have to know what you plan on doing with the sidekick. Usually sidekicks are all about Learning Responsibility and About Power. (We don't need sidekicks as audience stand-ins because the players have regular characters for that.) 

You could also use sidekicks as a way to talk about the grit and stick-to-it-iveness that one needs to be a hero. There's also betrayal and infiltration stories, where the sidekick turns out not to be so nice.

What Do You Do Mechanically?

In Supers!, a sidekick would be an Advantage, with the number of dice indicating how powerful the sidekick is. Unless there's special approval from the GM, I'd insist that sidekicks are less powerful than the PC; it's probably a 2D or 3D advantage.

In ICONS, you dedicate a quality to your sidekick. Unless you've arranged otherwise, sidekick powers top out at 7, with origins adding to the powers...until they get to 7. (This gives them roughly the two-thirds suggested in some game supplement. Wasn't it ICONS Team-Up?

The TL;DR version is that I suspect it's rare to have the sidekick as a regular thing...perhaps a bit more common with familiars-as-sidekicks. But there's no reason why you can't introduce a sidekick as a running plot for a while.

A supers setting of no import

Because I'm bored, here's rough notes for a setting start.

All kinds of heroes (mutants, transformed, robots, magic, aliens, etc.). If you can justify it, it can exist. Heroes have been public for a generation, starting with Galaxy in 1979. (Yes, that means that there were decades of superhero comics to draw from.) Some think that the pre-existing comics shaped what came.

North American superheroes appeared after the meltdown at Three Mile Island. Surely it wasn't the radiation; dirtier bombs had been exploded in earlier years. But if metahumans have long been with us, the incident at Three Mile Island spurred them to be public. Galaxy had just come into her powers, so she is no proof either way.

In the recent past, there has been a battle between good and bad on an unprecedented scale, though the numbers of metahumans were never so high that everyone was affected. At the end of it, the various groups were shattered. Oh, there might be a member or two left of some (even most) of them, but the : mighty battle between good and bad, has destroyed both and left power vacuums. (If we ever want to bring them back, they aren't dead, they're in the massive crossover event Clandestine Infinities.)

The person on the street in North America would recognize as good-guy teams the Liberty Union, the Justice Vanguard, the Appeal, the Shadow Cabinet, and the Golden Balance, and hero names like Exalted, Galaxy, Nimble, Spicer, Suitable, Maximan, and the Sky Clan. The same person would know about Doctor Apocalypse, about Count Infinity, and about the Darwin Association, who have all very publicly tried to destroy the world.

They are less likely to know about the other criminal organizations, such as the Benevolent Organization, the Parliament of Hunters, the Federated Autarky, and the Underworld Syndicate. Those organizations are in disarray, though they're likely to be re-built in some form or another. 

The Atlanteans have only just come out in the last fifteen years (since the disasters off the coast of Africa), though they claim to be older. There seem to be at least three types of Atlanteans, ranging from the human-looking sub-mariners through the merpeople to the Deep Ones. They are beginning to be a threat to shipping, though nominally some counrties have treaties with them. (Adventure idea: protecting a watery caravan.)

Fight club exists, and it's for supers. Imported from Thailand, the underground combat rings for metas are a place where heroes and villains have both trained.

This is a time when super villains start to appear, eager to make names for themselves and consolidate control. At the same time, non-super organized crime--the mundanes--are trying to re-grasp what has slipped from their fists.

There is no obvious government organization dedicated to metas--that function has been distributed among all the different alphabet-soup groups. There is fierce rivalry between the groups. 

But you don't start with any of this--you start with something small. A group of female villains who have all adopted code names that start with B (who call themselves the "B Hive") have decided on something flashy as their coming out crime. They expect police involvement and maybe a superhero or two, but the point is to demonstrate that they are tough and can't be stopped. 

This first crime is a pretty standard bank robbery, except that they have their escape already planned--they expect that the psionic powers of one of their team will let them leave whenever they want. 

There are more members than the ones on the job, but this caper is Brawn, Blister, Blackbird, and Bungee, with Brainz held in nearby reserve.

 

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.

Sticky stuff The stickiest salamander is the northern slimy salamander, which produces a mucous so sticky that attacking predator gets its mouth glued shut. 

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.