Sidekicks and teen teams

SYSTEM: ICONS

So I've been talking with Christopher Brady about sidekicks and teen heroes, and with his input and the Facebook group, I think I have something reasonably coherent to say. Bear in mind that I am not solely responsible for these thoughts: lots of people offered opinions. What I am solely responsible for is that, if you disagree with me, it's my responsibility that the words are here.

There are two ways to approach sidekicks in ICONS, and ICONS books actually tackle both of them. ICONS A to Z suggests that they be handled as Qualities (like pets). But ICONS Team-Up (which isn't canon anymore) suggests that there be a Quality and a character writeup, built on two-thirds the points of the main hero.

So there are two different situations where you might want a sidekick (mechanically, anyway):

• Working with the main hero (Batman and Robin)
• Working as part of a teen group (Robin and the Teen Titans or Robin and Young Justice)

If you just want a helper to the main hero, a simple Quality is probably the way to go: The hero stunts Fast Attack or Increased Effort or Extra: Burst or Pushes the power to reflect both of them hitting the bad guys or taking out the horde of minions. Even if the sidekick has vastly different powers, the sidekick Quality can be used to stunt any power that the sidekick has. (You might want to have a list of powers that the sidekick has or a description of the sidekick so you can figure out what stunts are appropriate.)

But if you're doing troupe play or if you're running a team of teenagers, then the sidekick is going to be a player character and you need an actual character write-up. So some thoughts.

A couple of caveats. I'm not talking about teen heroes in general; Spider-Man started as a teen hero, and some of these things don't apply (and nowadays, he's not a teen hero). I'm restricting the discussion to members of teen groups. There are teen heroes that don't fit this discussion (and there are probably members of teen groups who don't). I had Young Justice, Teen Titans, and Young Avengers in mind in thinking about this.

There are "pair" relationships that could be considered sidekicks (Johnny Thunder and the Thunderbolt, for instance, or even the wizard Shazam and the various members of the Marvel family), or Booster Gold and Skeets. They aren't what I think of when I think of sidekicks, really. Skeets is a fine example of a Quality given a body; I don't think of Shazam as a character, but I stopped reading Billy Batson stuff back in the 1980s, so maybe Shazam is a major character now; Thunderbolt isn't really a separate character from Johnny Thunder (though arguably Jonni Thunder).

And even though the Legion of Super-Heroes is about super-powered teens, I'm possibly cherry-picking a bit to claim it's not a teen team book. But I don't think it's about the same kind of things as most teen books; it does have some of the interpersonal stuff, but none of the mentor stuff.

Back to the thoughts. Teen heroes in a teen group tend to come in two different types:

• Sidekicks, whose main story is usually about growing up and choosing to be like or unlike their mentors
• Non-sidekicks, who might have a variety of stories but who usually use the group as a substitute family.

Sidekicks are usually a lower-powered version of the mentor. That doesn't have to be the case; a sidekick might be very different from the main hero. But usually the sidekick is a Captain America-Bucky thing, or Human Torch-Toro, or Batman-Robin, or Flash-Kid Flash, or Green Arrow-Speedy. (Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl are kind of a weird exception, but Dianna can beat Donna during the Wonder Girl time.)

Sidekicks should have a quality that reflects the sidekick status; call it Sidekick for how. It gets invoked as Trouble whenever the hero is fighting his or her mentor; it gets invoked as Connections because as a sidekick the character has met other movers and shakers in the universe, can talk to law enforcement agencies, knows things that aren't general knowledge. It might be a kind of Resources. But it's also not being taken seriously by the same law enforcement agencies. ("Yeah, kid, did Owlmaster put you up to this?") When the Quality is resolved or changed, then the sidekick doesn't get that Trouble applied when a fight with the mentor happens.

Non-sidekicks are usually disenfranchised in some way, and are looking for family: they're green, part-machine, or the offspring of a demon (Teen Titans); they are possessors of abilities that make them feared (every X-Men ever); they are gods de-aged, fated to become world conquerors, or secretly the heir to a warring galacting empire (Young Avengers or Teen Titans or Young Justice, which had a de-aged Lobo for a while). And often they are very powerful.

Both types of teen heroes end up sticking with the group because it becomes a kind of family, but I suspect that's more narrative: it was a convenient way to keep the players here.

So a non-sidekick probably has a Quality that includes that family connection: Needs a family, Looking for help against empire or so on.

Because of them, I might argue against lowering power levels. For a sidekick, unless you're actually modelling particular characters, just assume that the mentor is better at whatever the player character.

Lowered power levels

One of the things I considered is an origin tables chart that only goes up to level 7, so that even with an origin that grants +2, you can't possibly get to 10: only 9. The numbers are fudged slightly so that you are more likely to get 3 to 5.

2d6 roll	Level
2	1
3	2
4	3
5-6	3
7-8	4
9-10	5
11	6
12	7

If you're doing point-buy, I'd consider using 40 points instead of 45, or 40 points but a player can plead the case for the extra 5 points, or the extra 5 points in return for one all-bad Quality.

Though in some cases (like sidekicks) power level is important, there are enough exceptions that I suspect that attitude adn play-style are more important in running a teen team game.

Digression: Street-level

You could also use this for a lower-powered street-level campaign, although in that case, I'd up the number of powers by 1, because while street-level vigilantes tend not to be as powerful, they do tend to have more tricks up their sleeves. I'd also use the alternate rule involving additional powers that Steve Kenson introduced in ICONS Origins. (You can buy additional powers in the same power category for 1 point, so long as they can't be used simultaneously.)

Street-level vigilantes are often held up as an example of lower powered characters. Generally true, but I can think of lots of exceptions...still, I haven't researched it thoroughly enough, and maybe the characters are more highly powered in non-street-level contexts. Spider-Man is often spoken of as a street level hero, but it is tough trying to get Spider-Man down to 45 points. I have some trouble claiming that 40 points is enough for a street-level campaign. Again, I think attitude is a big part of it.

>Other Mechanical Changes

I'm tempted to take a page from Masks and DC Heroes and introduce multiple damage tracks: Stamina and Acceptance. While Stamina is Willpower+Strength (toughness of spirit and toughness of body), Acceptance is (6-Intellect)+Willpower. That is, the smarter you are (up to 6), the more you know you're not like other people; being smarter than a 6 actually reduces your acceptance level. A Quality that's specifically about self-acceptance can add or subtract 2 to the level; GM's call on what actions affect your Acceptance level, but it's all about roleplaying the character..

I have no idea how that would work in practice, but it's an idea.

The Villain's Backstory

Finally got to listen to one of the villain episodes of the BAMF podcast, and this grows from that. (If you don't listen to the BAMF podcast and you're reading this without being a close friend of mine, well, why not? I think it would overlap nicely with your interests.)

One of the problems with superhero games is that you don't get the backstory of the villain, and so the player interactions with the villains tend to be, "We beat'em up," and then the result is either "We won!" and they rarely think of the villain again, or "We lost!" and the players hate the villain and want to destroy him or her or it or them.

In superhero comics, however, the villains frequently have backstory that makes them more interesting characters with more complex relationships with the characters.

How to introduce the former into your game so they can  have the latter?

Well, first of all, recognize that not all villains are memorable. Lord knows there are certainly more than enough disposable villains in comic books (I have heard rumours that Grant Morrison brought back the Eraser, and I am frankly startled, because a more stupid villain I cannot imagine). If most of your villains are forgettable, that's totally okay. We tend to remember that the Joker and Catwoman had early appearances in Batman comics, but for every pair like that, there are a dozen or two dozen villains who are forgotten. I love the Monk and Dala, who appeared in a very early Batman story, but they didn't reappear until the 1980s, about fifty years later. Hugo Strange was largely forgotten until the 1970s. So villains don't need a backstory unless they tweak the interest of your players. Heck, Magneto (as Dr. Tondro mentioned on the podcast) didn't even get a backstory until issue 150 of the X-Men.

One way to make a villain memorable and known is to give them an existence before villainy. We feel about Terra's betrayal because we spent issues and issues getting to know her before she turned on the players. I was thinking that, because so many villains are failed super-soldier experiments, you could do an adventure where the heroes are tasked with getting a set of characters to the government labs. The characters become NPCs to interact with. When they are finally given superpowers, one or two or six sessions later (it's long and involved because they have to avoid the bad guy hit squads) and some of them turn eeeevil, well, the heroes already have an investment.

Another way is to give them a flashback (as I was talking about the other day). It's probably easiest to have the villain as a pre-villainous NPC and the other characters are playing people trying to help but failing, but you can go whatever way you think your group will like.

A third way is to have a character or loved one of the players find the information out, talking to eyewitnesses. "Oh, yeah, Harlene Quinnzel, we knew she was abused but there was never any proof. We couldn't do anything about it. So sad that she died working at Arkham."

But again, you don't have to do any of this unless your players have already evinced some interest in the character.

Beating the second act blahs

SYSTEM: ANY

When he was editor for the Superman books, Mike Carlin used to say that comic books were all second act.

Brief summary here:  in Aristotle's Poetics, Aristotle says that a story should have a beginning (act I), a middle (act II), and an end (act III). He lays out some ground rules for what should constitute each kind of act. Act II mostly gets ignored as "not the beginning and not the end". There are also rules that are specific to the poetic performance medium he was familiar with. All kinds of rules have developed since then, like the one that says that Act II should be as long as Act I and Act III combined, but basically? Act II is the middle.



And if you think about it, that's more or less true: Many (although not all) heroes have an origin, a first act of some kind, and very few heroes have an ending, a third act. That was one of the things that was amazing about The Dark Knight Returns, that it gave us an ending to our hero. I recently saw Superman Returns referred to as the Robin and Marian of superhero movies, and that is in some ways appropriate. The bulk of their adventures is the middle.

But I've also heard that the second act is the hardest for many writers to write in books, and we're voluntarily signing up for them?

You bet.

Part of it is that there's some confusion about what the story is. Most of the fiction or screen-writing advice that I've seen treats stories as explorations of character through action: The characters learns or doesn't learn something and that knowledge or refusal to bend changes their world. Love stories are about giving something up so that you can take on something else--they're monkey-trap puzzles where the monkey realizes he has to let go of whatever's in the jar.[1]

Since those days of the 1980s, we have seen a number of third acts, of ends to the superhero story. So let's riff off some of those to figure out how we can deal with the second act blahs.

Your campaign could have a story with all 3 acts. The story could be the whole campaign, or it might be just part of a campaign. It doesn't have to be the traditional origin-middle-ending so beloved of movies; it could be like a season of a TV series, where there's an overarching villain that brings out something specific in the heroes. The villain is a personification of a problem or a set of problems, and when the villains are defeated, the problems are defeated (for these characters).

Your campaign could have a change in personnel. One character leaves because his or her story is done; another character comes in. When a player feels his or her character is done, well, the character can retire or leave or be promoted.

You don't need to change. Look, not everyone wants to tell a story of that kind. It's not necessarily about how the character changes or makes a decision. What some people want is the very clever way to solve the puzzle that the bad guy represents. That's many stories right there. Another is the ability to impose order: something has gone wrong, and the character has to fix it. Orson Scott Card has these as the I and the E in his MICE quotient. Robin Laws suggests that this kind of hero is about acting in accordance with his fundamental principles. In that case, you can see where the character has compromised in some way, whether that was growth or a mistake, and push right there. Come up with a villain and an adventure that presses right on that decision: that it was wrong, or that the hero needs to do that more often in some areas that are clearly wrong by the hero's earlier choice. Then the heroes either change (one type of story) or return to their principles (another type).


1. You bury a jar and place a piece of bait in it. The trick is that the monkey can't pull out his hand while he's holding the bait. Unwilling to let go of the bait, the monkey just stands there, entranced by what he has instead of what he could have. In the beginning, the romance character has their current life, and is metaphorically holding on to the bait. One of the primary romance stories is about changing their minds.

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.

The villain who makes a point about the character

SYSTEM: Any

On Supergirl on Monday, they had the episode with Toyman, which was a lovely episode from an emotional point of view and a bad episode from a superheroes-have-powers,-you-know point of view. (Really...some of the fixes that both Supergirl and the Martian Manhunter got into should not have been problems.) Both might be suffering from limitations that have not yet been explained to the viewer.[1] Henry Czerny does interesting things with his characters, regardless of the writing.

Part of the emotional thrust of the episode is the parallels drawn between Winn and his father, the Toyman, and the existence of those parallels as a driver to move Winn's story forward. That interested me. It's connected to the whole evil twin thing I've been thinking about.

But as a gamer, it isn't necessarily enough to set up a parallel. I mean, it would be great if the players immediately cottoned on to the idea, but it might be that the parallel is only obvious in your mind, or that you haven't presented it well enough. And, of course, even if they see it, the parallel is not necessarily going to drive them to change their behavior, even for one session.

There are a couple of things you can help in the presentation.

First, echo things between the two. If someone describes one situation the way (perhaps in your GM text), use the same words to describe the situation that the character faces. This is especially obvious if you use a particular phrase.

Second, if you can, establish that other things are similar. One character's father hung out with the evil twin's father, or they worked at the same industry or place. The evil twin was a mentor before he turned bad.

Third, give them essentially the same situation so that the difference or similarity of the responses can point up the similarities and differences. In fact, you can provide the same situation several times. Let's say you're doing essentially the Bizarro adventure, where a copy of the hero (meant for good!) starts to deteriorate. You can start by introducing the copy while rescuing the dependent. Both are racing for the endangered reporter, and it doesn't matter who gets there first (the rerporter is going to be saved)...but it might burn a bit if the copy gets there first. Then they both show up somewhere else. One of the PCs predicts dark things ahead (either because he's genre-savvy or because he always predicts dark things). Then the copy starts to deteriorate. The PCs have to fix some of the problems that the copy makes. And finally, the copy decides that to protect the intrepid reporter, the reporter should be put somewhere safe. Like the arctic. Or the moon. Then you have a bit of repetition that calls back to the earlier rescue.

Fourth, if necessary, have an NPC comment on the fact that this is the same situation. Even if the NPC is shot down ("I'm nothing like him!") the idea has been planted.

But the other thing I thought of is that this parallelism might limit the villain if it's all you do with him. The various Berlanti superhero shows are rife with this: an interesting villain shows up for a single episode to act as an Aesop and provide a moral that the character should change his ways.

In a gaming context, that doesn't necessarily work. In a screenplay or a novel or a comic book, you can make the character change his ways. In a game, it's not your character. And if that's the only reason that the villain exists, well, the villain is kind of a flop if the PC doesn't change...

So in a gaming context, you can provide the opportunity to change. You can use the evil twin to comment on the path a character has taken...but you can't make the character change. Which means that your villains have to have something else about them to make them interesting and possibly re-usable.

The Endnote

1. I'm going to recap here because I need to vent.

• At one point, Supergirl is caught in quicksand. In a vat of quicksand. The woman can fly and lift a helicopter, but quicksand holds her. What? 
• The Martian Manhunter has a whole slew of issues on his mission, one of which does reveal a power limitation for this version of J'onn, but really, little of it should have happend. The dude can phase through walls. He can be invisible. Why not go through the building as, say, a security guard, from the outside, straight through to room 52? When questioned about the password, why not read his mind, eliminating the need to perform the awful mind wipe? 
• How did Max get the camera on Alex's purse? Why was Alex using her own purse, for starters? She's been undercover before. Since she suspects Max of doing evil things, why not make sure all the clothes are from the DEO costume department, which she has raided before? They might have cut some cat-and-mouse stuff for time, but at least allude to it. Or run the story past a gamer.

I enjoy the show, and as a roleplayer, I'm sure that I'm more tactically-minded than some of the writers, but hey... Maybe I can explain Supergirl's problem as hero-in-training, but the other characters are supposed to know. Vent over.

Death.

We had a death in the family and I'm going to the funeral tomorrow. (The weather does not incline me to head there today...if I read the forecasts correctly, it will be worse today for the visitation that tomorrow for the funeral. We'll see. I've been snowed in on the Bruce peninsula more than once. I digress.)

Anyway, death is on my mind, so let's turn it to the topic of this blog...superhero roleplaying.

It seems to me that there are a couple of ways or reasons for death to happen:

1. One is that it's actually the beginning. If you're planning on doing a supernatural kind of campaign, it could well be the event that starts everything: each character dies, and then returns as the Spectre, the Wraith, the Revenant, the Ghost, and so on. In that case, you're really talking about death as part of the characters' origin stories. (The actual mechanism of death isn't actually important; there's no chart of "Death Origins" with "2-4 Shot by criminals/5-6 Hit by radioactive meteorite/7-9 Infected by other supernatural creature" or even "1-2 Vengeance 3-4 Justice 5-6 Redemption.") Since death-as-ending is on my mind today, I'll leave that one there for another day and just note that it exists.
2. Crappy dice rolls. It happens sometimes that the bad guy rolls really well and the good guy rolls really badly, and it's out in the open. Good guy loses, and we can't think of any other consequence than death. If everybody likes the character, this is a fine reason to have a during death and revivication scenario and adventure where he or she comes back.
3. Another is the fitting end, usually for a single character. The character does something so awesome, so perfectly in-character, that you respect it even though the logical consequence is death. If you feel this way, let the character stay dead. 
4. There is the forced end, which is a kind of fridging where the player is leaving, usually for good reasons, and the character's death motivates the other characters to do something, even if it's only investigate the death or extract vengeance. This is actually the one that feels most like comics as currently written, because the character could come back, when Tina the player visits again from the far-off land.
5. There is the disposal. The player is tired of his character and doesn't want to play any more, either the character or the campaign. Usually the GM engineers a good death, but perhaps the player is easily bored, and this is the twenty-third time this has happened. The GM is tired of carefully crafting a meaningful death, and suddenly a bus jumps the sidewalk and kills the character. Sometimes the GM can find some reason to make the death motivate the other players, but then it would be more of a forced end.
6. The last I can think of is to clear the decks. In this case, the GM is bored or frustrated, all die, o the embarrassment.

Of those six, less than half call for the character to come back to life: to deal with crappy dice rolls, because the player returns, or sometimes because someone has changed minds about a particular death. (This might happen years after a disposal or a clear-the-decks moment.)

It's totally in keeping with the genre to have someone apparently die (in our group, we often say, "No one could have survived that!" ironically, because we know full well that the GM can haul them out two sessions down the road). That tradition goes back as far as the second appearance of the Joker, back in the first year of Batman.

And, in fact, that's the way I'd play with crappy dice rolls. Ideally, the fact that the character rolled badly doesn't mean that he or she dies; the character might be kidnapped by the bad guys, or teleported away at the last moment (introducing the character with an unhealthy fixation on our hero), or the villain had the device's dial on "mind swap" instead of "disintegrate" (homebrew devices often have this disadvantage).

But if the death is to motivate or to complicate an investigation, it can certainly help...though it's sad for the characters involved. And unlike real life, you can certainly spin out a tale where the character comes back.

Somehow.

One Tontine, No Waiting

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

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

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

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

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

The Corporate Superhero

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are a couple of variations on the corporate superhero:

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

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

The Transplant that Ate Schenectady

SYSTEM: ANY

A confluence of things bring me to the idea that shows up in a number of comics. One of them is the podcast Geeks with Beer, specifically the episode where one of them (Frank?) describes the plot of Arkham Knight. Another is an adventure I ran in ICONS involving a certain villain ripping his heart out for his beloved. (He'd done it before. He got better. She was tired of the gesture.)

The idea is that regenerating tissue eventually takes over the body that it's put into. And that might even be true but mostly it's an old horror story trope (see Hands of Orlac or Mad Love--the 1936 movie--or even Eyes of Laura Mars or listen to the episode of Lights Out entitled "The Chicken Heart That Ate the World"--I think; it might have only eaten New York).

All of them hold the idea that the badness is inherent in the tissue itself, not in the recipient. In comics, the organ literally takes over the person, whether it's the Joker's tainted blood or some piece of Bruce Banner that's continually growing inside you (which makes the whole She-Hulk thing particularly nasty to think about: perhaps Jennifer Walters has very little in the way of powers; it's just Hulkness growing in her. Eventually she won't be some zaftig or Junoesque superheroine...she'll just look like Hulk, because he will have taken over).

Really, a lot of stuff in comics works through some kind of sympathetic magic or contagious magic, even though it often has a pseudo-scientific explanation. Superman is perhaps the most constantly scientific of the early heroes and his powers lapse into obsolete theories once in a while (the whole heat vision and X-ray thing seems based on the obsolete theory of sight that we emitted something that we then detected).

Much of the time there's a kind of morality play: when someone gets the heart of a killer in order to tame the urge and put the killer to good use, it's rare that the person succeeds: instead, it's a message that there are Things We Are Not Meant to Know. Heroes are rare and people with powers generally succumb to their darker urges (possibly because you only need one hero, but you need twelve months of villains to fight).

(Side note: I wonder if you could do a small adventure or campaign involving the characters who have decided to actually change the world, and who are inevitably thought of as villains because of that. So the opponents are either lawyers and bureaucrats of the campaign city, or all the heroes who are trying to maintain the status quo. Heck, you could have more than one adventure where the PCs get away because the "heroes" end up fighting each other for the chance to beat them up. I have often been uncomfortable with the knowledge that Batman, one of my favourite heroes, is essentially part of the 1%, and whose work is representative of nobility and monarchy....Superman, though a godlike alien, is closer to a democratic character.)

But let's look at the concept of the transformative transplant. Does someone with regeneration get used as a source of transplants? I remember reading something where the regenerator is essentially going to put himself or herself in the hospital forever so they can take lungs and spleens and whatever. But if you have regeneration, what kind of immune system do you have? Do the transplant recipients need huge quantities of immunosuppressants because the organ will just take over? Does the regenerating organ "know" when to stop? It's being nourished, so does it grow new other things, until the person pops open like rotten fruit and a clone of the donor steps out. (Which is pretty gross.)

Which might be your hook: someone wants that to happen, so they've intercepted the drug manufacturing for the immunosuppressants. Or replaced immunosuppressant B, which normally augments A, with something that suppresses A. And the clones start growing.

We can even throw in another SF trope which is that the clones, like identical twins, have some kind of psychic connection. The donor can control them or even flip between bodies. You do this once so there are thirty or a hundred of the regenerating villain around, and the donor can move between them or summon them, so the character never officially dies.

The care and feeding of secret identities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your superhero puzzle adventure

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

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

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

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

Superheroes punch.

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

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

Character reuse.

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

There are ways to bring back a gimmick character.

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

Making the weakness discoverable.

This is a mechanical storytelling thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making the final battle satisfying.

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

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

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

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

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

The Unsecret Identity

I just watched the new Supergirl trailer, and I quite liked it. It looks like it's mostly stuff from the pilot (or they've edited several episodes together to look like it tells a complete story). I think that's Dean Cain behind Helen Slater as her Kryptonian parents (whose names I have totally forgotten, so sue me.) Anyway, I was never hugely attracted to the character though I did like the Earth-2 version, where I feel like they had more chance to be free with her characterization...though that fell apart after Crisis on Infinite Earths. Yes, I am old.

Anyway, one of the things I noticed is that at least four people know who she is (five if you count the unmentioned Superman): her sister, James Olsen (and I like the changes I see in this trailer), her friend whose name I didn't catch, and the DEO operative. Now, since this is by the same producing team that gave us Arrow and Flash (where it seemed like Iris West was the only person in Central City who didn't know who the Flash was), perhaps that's not surprising, but it got me to thinking about secret identities.

In games, it's been very difficult for us to generate secret identity concerns. Oh, we do it...I recall the Wendigo-possessed Blizzard having problems, and Batman ripoff Shade was forever trying to hide it, but no one knew or cared who Silver Mirror was, and Ta'Shrin was a fox-like alien so she couldn't hide anything if she wanted. Firewall was a paroled criminal so you could find him if you wanted. (Only one of those characters was mine.)

Part of that is the nature of the beast: Superhero RPGs are largely modeled after superhero team books, where the concern is the team, not the individuals. Historically, in the comics, secret ID problems were mostly the concern of individual comics. In a team comic, you don't have time to worry about whether someone has figured out that Wayne Brewster is Wombatman; you've got a world to save!

On a TV show, you want interaction between different people, and while it's useful to keep some people in the dark, the more people who know, the more different kinds of interactions you can have. And, frankly, we've had 75 years of the kind of story where "she loves the hero but thinks his regular joe persona is a nebbish." Yeah, you can wring some interesting changes out of that, but it has been done before.

In Champions, they separated it into three categories: Secret Identities, which you worked very hard to preserve; Public Identities, where everybody could find you (worth some points), and no points for the disadvantage at all, where you could be living next door to a superhero and maybe you knew and maybe you didn't, in the same way you could be next to Chris de Burgh's drummer and not know until he said, "Yeah, I'm going to be in France next month on a tour...you want me to get that item for you?"

That latter is still my default, but I admit that I often have a Sam-and-Ralph view of it (after the sheepdog and the coyote in the old Warner Brothers cartoons).

Plus, I have to think that it's really hard to keep your identity secret these days. Between cell phones with tracking devices, computers that keep cookies, and the various ultratech that really exists, the best defense is often making sure that you are not a person of interest. 

EDIT: Helen Slater and Dean Cain show up as her adopted parents. And fixed a typo.