A general plotting rule

For all my superhero consumption:

If there's an easy way that normal people would handle a problem, consider that method for your super characters.

I know there are exceptions, such as when you want to show that someone is out of step with reality. Still, if it's something as easy as, "Phone work and claim the person is sick to buy time" rather than "Have the shape-shifting alien try to impersonate the person before the boss," well, I have to think, go the simple way. No, it's not as much fun as watching Melissa Benoist get to play a person pretending to be a person that she pretends to be, but it makes me throw up my hands less.

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.

 

A link

What a week--from funeral to sick-as-the-canid-of-your-choice. 

But because I was talking about parasites a while ago (and because I like parasites), here is a bit of news:

http://phys.org/news/2016-02-morbid-leopards-toxoplasmosis-parasitized-chimpanzees.html

Now, there's an idea--an intelligent parasite can only breed in organisms with a certain set of characteristics. Before its mind was subsumed the host left its planet to prevent infecting others. (He was a genius on his world, a twelfth-level intellect on a planet of fifth-level intellects.)

The parasite has caused superpowers because they're a side-effect in humans of the characteristics that the parasite needs. 

That might be an interesting end-game to a supers campaign. All sorts of organisms can be infected, but only in supers (or a certain type of super--one of the player characters, perhaps?) can it breed. The PCs have to stop the infection from reaching those individuals and wipe out the infection... Or failing that, wipe out the individual.

Who, I'm sure, is beloved by enough people that it's going to be a battle. 

Another family death

Sorry for being so quiet. It's a combination of work and another family death. 

I guess my family has just reached that age. 

(So long as we don't repeat that time 20 years ago when I did six funerals in six months.)

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. 

Fiction vs. Roleplaying

SYSTEM: Any

While I was driving in this morning, I suddenly thought of a bit for a fantasy short story. It would probably start something like:

I heard the noise of  someone entering and I wondered if this would be the person who finally managed to kill me.

The narrator is a guardian spirit who has been trapped guarding the tomb for a long time. Long enough to regain a sense of self, long enough to be totally bored (I mean, if you have a sense of self, there is nothing to do in a tomb), long enough to want to die, but unable because of the geas to just give up.

Now, that's kind of an interesting character to run across, but I'd develop these totally differently for roleplaying than for fiction, and I offer these ideas as a way to compare and contrast the two. While roleplaying can use a lot of the same tools as fiction, I think that anyone who is trying to tell you that they are pretty much the same is wrong.

(Oh, they're very similar in a lot of ways...but they're very different in others.)

There are lots of ways this could go (maybe it's set in historical times, because the guardian spirit is that old; dress it up the right way, and it could be nearly any setting, including superheroes) but for this discussion I'm going to assume plain-vanilla F20-style fantasy. It's a secondary world fantasy, a cod-medieval world with magic.

In fiction, it would be about the relationship between the guardian spirit and the invader. In that case, I might make the invader someone who is nominally harmless, maybe a young girl that the real thieves kidnapped and threw in here to deactivate the first trap, or a young boy (young to contrast immortal with youth) who is evading others and chanced into this tomb. (This would be a good way to bring it into the modern world, by the way.)

In fiction, the other person would also have an agenda. Maybe she wants to get revenge on her uncle who sold her into this slavery, maybe he wants his family back, maybe the invader wants to help the spirit or hurt the spirit, but both sides want something.

I'd tell the story from the guardian spirit's point of view, as above. Maybe there'd be a twist ending, maybe not; maybe I'd have a third group involved, maybe not.

And, in fact, maybe the guardian spirit shares his story...he was a temple thief himself, and got caught. He thinks; he might have made that up, after seeing so many tomb robbers. He can read and write, which makes him think that maybe he was a priest. Maybe a priest turned thief?

So he tells the invader, "I have to hurt you if you cross this boundary. I like you. Please don't do it. But if you do it, you have until I hit you three times to get to this rock on the tomb and destroy it. That's how you kill me."

And none of that mental exercise is suitable for a roleplaying game.

Maybe I could use some of it with pre-generated characters and a con session. Maybe.

As a GM, what I have is a guardian spirit who wants to die, because he or she or it is bored.

I have very little control over what the characters want. I can suggest things, I can put strong forces in place, but I can't make the characters want things. It's always a choice for somebody to decide that staying in town and huffing paint would be better. Well, we assume they want to adventure, because they're playing adventurers...but they don't have to interact with the guardian spirit beyond, "What level is he? Crap. Can we get out? Right, we were running away from the barbarian horde. Well, we camp outside its range but in hiding until the angry barbarian horde goes away."

In fiction, they have to engage because I want them to. In roleplaying, they engage because they choose to. I have made the other options so awful or this one so attractive that they choose to do it.

In both cases, the stated reason can be flimsy ("it's raining") but underlying it is choice.

Now, the spirit has an interesting (to me) backstory. How are the PCs going to hear about it? In fiction, I could just provide it as part of the narration, or I could guide the conversation, but I can't do that here. What can I do?

Well, the spirit's first speech could indicate that he's been there a long, long time. I could do that with elevated speech or with something painfully direct. That is, the guardian spirit could say:

Long have I waited here for someone puissant enough to challenge me. I can never know the release of the afterlife which I have given to so many. 

Or the spirit could approach them this way:

You're using pick-axes of dwarven manufacture and your clothes are strange. Foreigners who do not know of the dangers I present? Or has so long passed that I have been forgotten?

Or:

Any special last requests? Because no one else has been a challenge. 

Or maybe the spirit kept a diary in some way. A truly suicidal spirit might do that, leaving what hints he can in the journal and throwing it beyond his own boundary so that invaders might see it. (This suggests a scene where the actual bad guys get it, and the heroes have to save the spirit in order to get rid of the bad guys, and then get rid of the spirit.) Or worse, he's done it by erosion: there is a stream that passes through the tomb, and he has used his minor telekinetic powers to guide the water over the rock, wearing it down until it says what he needs it to say. (Hope someone in the party can read it.)

It would be nice to have the backstory contain the clue to defeating him, but then the players have to know the backstory. Maybe it's a legend told among priests, or sages, or thieves, that to create this particular kind of guardian, you need a specific kind of person, and you need to chain them to the sepulchre with chains interlaced with moly whose stems are tied in a particular way, and each guardian type leads to a different type of defeat. Then the party knows they have to talk to the guardian.

At some point, I would have to decide what the powers of the guardian are. These would be tied to the actual group. Perhaps it's a minor telekinesis tied with the ability to make paired portals. He makes a hole under the thief or thieves, and they start falling from one opening into the other. When they've reached terminal velocity, he makes the portals go away and they slam into the ground. If someone in the party has wings, he holds them together with his telekinesis, so they can't fly...and they eventually slam into the ground.

Yeah, that wouldn't kill a high-level party, but he could stop your blood flow with that portal thing (the portals are from the exit of your heart straight to the entrance, and the rest of your blood just...sits...so you pass out from lack of oxygen eventually). Certain spells would stop it, sure, but that's always true.

For my gang, figuring out the powers would be important, because that would be part of the key to defeating him, or re-directing him to the barbarian horde.

Same idea, difference focus.

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).

And now, a word in favour of the generic...

If you've read this blog for any length of time, I don't think it's a secret that at one point I wanted to be a writer of fiction. (Technically, I suppose I am still a writer of fiction, but I'm on a looooong vacation. My skills are getting rusty.)

But one of the things I love writing is the mash-up. You have a genre from column A and a genre from column B and you mix them. In a loose (okay, very loose) sense, it's how Shakespeare created Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet. The former is clearly modeled on the revenge morality plays of the time while the latter is a mix of comedy and tragedy, though it ultimately settles on tragedy.

Currently the vogue is for RPG systems that model the genre accurately, and to a certain extent I agree with that. If a particular element or aspect give you the frisson of excitement, you want to provide exactly that element in your gaming. Makes sense to me.

Except...

What if what thrills you is, oh, adding guns to your bronze-age fantasy? D&D resisted adding guns for the longest time, and even now it doesn't handle firearms particularly well (though with D20 Modern they did take a kick at that particular can). Or having mystery elements in your superhero game? Or doing a story about changes in personality set during a zombie apocalypse?

Sure, you can do them, but the system doesn't particularly model them well.

Granted, a generic RPG, like the Hero System or GURPS, might not do it well either, but it's guaranteed to do it consistently.

It's a balancing act. If you're introducing just one thing the current system doesn't do particularly well, then you might as well house-rule it. ("Uh....when your superhero sees Lovecraftian monsters, he has to roll against Will.") But if you're bringing in a bunch of things, or if you see the possibility of bringing in a lot of things, then a generic system might be what you want.

(And by "generic system" I'm even including something like GUMSHOE, which is a generic basis for systems. You can easily incorporate the NBA chase rules into your Trail of Cthulhu game, for instance.)

I know over on the Writing Excuses podcast they're busy talking about combining what they call elemental genres. This is something similar: when you know what kind of response you want from the players, what kind of flavour you're going for, then you know whether you have a particular genre but heavily modified, or if you have a new thing, in which case you might as well go for a generic system because you don't know what kind of response you're looking for.

Wait, that sounds kind of uncertain.

Except that sometimes roleplaying is kind of uncertain. The GM brings something to the players, and the combination of players and GM makes something new. Neither side has control over the result; either side can choose to scuttle it. It's something you do together. You might have a great history for your world, but if the characters never see it, it lays there. An NPC might have a tremendous fear of wights, but if no wights show up, big deal.

So a generic system is really useful if you're not quite certain what you're building together. Maybe after you've been at it for a while, you'll find some other system that makes it work better, that emphasizes the parts you really like. And that's okay: it's okay to switch game mechanics halfway through. (I used to joke about it, when we were switching from a game system where the attack had to be the last action in your turn to one where the order didn't matter: "He hits and runs away, because we've changed game systems.")

So there is a place for the generic system, even if you're heavily into specialized systems. They're the block of marble you start with, carving away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.

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....