Okay, a shorter draft of the Dark vs Spark adventure

SYSTEM: ICONS

To try and restrict myself this draft was done in Google Slides. There is nothing elegant about it, but I got to throw out many many words. It's down to 42 pages, but they are mostly 42 airy pages with 11 point body text.

With luck, most things are confined to a double-page spread: title usually on the left, picture on the right. Usually there isn't a picture. Character writeups got short shrift.

And I really hate the title. The longer I look at it, the less it has to do with anything but the end reveal.

You can look at it here. 

If I ever return to it, it will be to put artwork in and sweat through how you convert something like this to Scribus. 

I'd also reconsider how I did the character writeups: rather than making them the top or bottom half of the page with room for a portrait, I'd do them as one of two columns. Then a portrait (if any) could go on the right or, if you were cramming for space, you could have at least two a page. However, the current setup is fine. 

This Group Is A Team?

SYSTEM: ANY
Long preamble: For Christmas one year, we gave my son The New Teen Titans volume 1, and he left it in Ottawa. Eventually my brother-in-law returned it and my son wasn't around (I think he was at work). I decided to read it. At which point I discovered that there was introduction or foreword by Marv Wolfman. (I can't check any of this, for the book has disappeared back into the black hole that is my son's room.)

He mentioned something he had done when creating the new Teen Titans: He made sure that each triplet of the six main characters had something in common. Robin, Cyborg, and Changeling all had self-image problems in a way: one was concerned about being his own man, one concerned about being a man, and one concerned about being liked though he figured he was a Jonah. He goes through the items that the women had, but it extended on, too: Raven, Robin, and Cyborg probably had something. No matter how you sliced it, that three of them had something in common.
It was Wolfman's way of making sure that this was a group of people who would be friends and associates, rather than a junior Justice League.

Just recently, I ran down the list of players for this play-by-email game I'm doing. Right now, it's a shakedown phase and I'm doing solo adventures with each one, and each adventure has its own tone:

• The famous architect who has just discovered he is half-fey (sort of a changeling) and who controls shadows: his adventure has a sort of DC Sandman vibe
• The intrepid agent and vigilante who is skilled at espionage: he is slowly uncovering what will be a conspiracy to control something, probably the government
• The big lovable earth-controlling lug who adores sharks but is afraid of water: he is the new guy on the (NPC) team, so he is the fly in the ointment for a plot to gain revenge on the team
• The kids' science show host with transmutation powers who tries to make every moment a teachable moment: his is a very Silver Age story, with a villain who has Alteration Ray (growth) and whose eventual purpose is as yet unknown

Not exactly a set of cogs that mesh together to form a watch.

But what if I (or any GM) took a hint from Marv Wolfman and from Spirit of the Century? What if I asked each player to say what his character has in common with somebody else (or two somebody elses)?

We've done this informally in session 0 at the table, where people riff off each other ("Oh, so your earth police liaison can be my sister, so we run into each other that way"). But why not make it formal?

(It occurs to me that some of the background questions in Masks do this, but it's a lot more structured in Masks.)

Sometimes that reason is baked into the campaign:

• You're all students at the Cugat School for the Different
• You're all in the same squad in the military/spy service/police
• You're all family members
• You're all outcasts because of your powers
• You're all on the run from the Spinelli mob

Good players do this anyway: find a reason for the characters to be together. Yeah, eventually someone might leave because the pressures make it inevitable, but that's a player choice. You have to find a reason why your supposed loner character is hanging around with these guys in Spandex, right?

What I'm proposing is a little more Justice League, because the reason can be as small as "I know and respect person X".

Anyway, the point is to give the characters a reason to hang around together besides "We're the characters that the players came up with."

Open Source Adventures

SYSTEM: ANY Here’s an idea I had a while ago: open source adventures. Get a repo on GitHub and produce some adventures. Each adventure is in Markdown format (or tighter if necessary). The folder contains the text of the adventure and game stats for various games. We’d use some tool for creating the final HTML or PDF for the output. Eventually it would need a database to keep track of the adventures probably my keywords. You’d maybe want to have three levels of access: people who do system-specific conversions or provide keywords; people who write the adventures, and some kind of gatekeeper who makes sure that the new change doesn’ Contradict the other parts of an adventure. I think those sorts of changes would still be accepted but in a “retcon” folder: these changes alter the intent of the adventure.

Hope City NPC: Agent Anything

SYSTEM: ICONS

For the play-by-email campaign, here’s the government liaison for the “official” super-team (mostly NPCs and only just promoted to official status).

The team liaison: Agent Anything:

Perpetually three weeks from retirement, Agent Anything is the team’s Government Liaison. As a superpower, he can imitate and duplicate the function of any object between the size of a rotary desk phone and a tractor trailer. He was pulled from the field when he imitated a rotary phone but everyone in the embassy has gone to push-button phones that were too small. If startled he will often imitate something obsolete (he can do newer stuff, he just doesn’t think of it in an emergency).

Agent Anything (Ian Hampton)
PRW	Fair (4)	Specialties
CRD	Good (5)	Sleight of Hand (+1) Investigation (+1) Military (+1)
STR	Fair (4)
INT	Fair (4)
AWR	Good (5)
WIL	Fair (4)
STA	8
Det	3
Qualities
Government liaison Not like it used to be “I’m old, I’m not dead!”
Powers
He has Incredible (7) Transformation 7 into objects and a Magical ability to duplicate their function. It’s Instant but these days it’s also Tiring.

A fraction of an idea

SYSTEM: ANY

I started off by wanting to think of an adventure where the heroes had to be villains...not in the "We're killing everything in order to save it" way, but say as hired thugs to some bad guy.

Then I realized that I wanted to do it as troupe play, where everyone has two-and-a-half characters:

• Their hero, who is the primary character
• The bad guy based off the hero, who is the half character, and who the hero has to impersonate
• The other hero, assigned to bring in the bad guy because apparently the bad guy killed the main hero...

Would it work? I dunno. It's still a portion of an idea.

Solo superhero gaming

SYSTEM: NONE I throw these questions out to you:

• Favourite superhero rpg?
• Favourite for solo play?
• Favourite for online play?
• Different RPGs or the same ones? (Or do you house-rule for the situation?

I ask because I had a sudden fleeting urge to write a solo supers RPG, and I immediately got bogged in what I want from it

Time for/and Encounter Theory

SYSTEM: ANY

As I've probably said at boring length, I've been reading the draft of Ben Riggs' book on Encounter Theory. I'll recap the theory very quickly and then I'll talk about a thought I had today.

Skip this recap if you want

Encounter theory states that the important part of a roleplaying adventure is the encounter. That's where the character events actually happen. The players can do anything in the encounter. If it doesn't lead to interacting with an NPC (like a monster) or some facet of the setting, the GM can make it up.

And forget all that story stuff: RPG adventures are different and a lot of story stuff just doesn't apply, because the story doesn't exist until you add players.

Uh, Great Adventures?

Nominate one. I have never played any of the ones I hear about ("Ravenloft"; "Masks of Nyarlathotep"; maybe "Dracula Dossier") and my group was alway into brew-your-own-environment so I have no standards regarding published adventures.

Back to the point

So the idea is to present a reason to adventure, right at the beginning, some kind of modivation.

Then there are a series of encounters. Each encounter leads to one or more other encounters.

At the end, there's a climactic encounter that provides some sense of resolution.

There's a reason that it looks like a dungeon map: because it is. Sometimes the doors aren't literal, but that's what it is. (Somebody—Jonathan Tweet, maybe? John Tynes? Kenneth Hite?—pointed this out, possibly in D20 Call of Cthulhu.)

End of the Recap

Now, I'll buy that story, such as it is, is constructed after the fact in the minds of the participants. The arc of the antagonist is constructed by the GM as a result of player actions, but it can be heavily influenced by the adventure writer.

But Here's the Thing

One aspect of story is implicit in the design of Dungeons & Drangons: Change.

Change is important in most types of stories, even stories involving iconic characters who themselves don't seem to change. The world is tilted at a Dutch angle every time a client walks into 221B Baker Street, and it is Sherlock's mission to set the floor horizontal again.

That's not character change, but it is change. (I don't think that character change is essential in all kinds of stories.) Character change is simulated in D&D by having the character go up in levels.

It can be further simulated by a recurrence of the villain: if the big bad guy wipes the floor with Our Heroes early or even midway through the adventure and then is defeated by them at the end, the players feel like they grew. If someone dies and has to be replaced during the adventure, the players feel like there has been change.

When the Antaeus Gang defeats Batman at the beginning of the story but loses at the end because he has discovered that all of their powers are negated if they are in the air, that's a kind of change.

And on my incomplete reading, Encounter Theory doesn't address this at all. (It may: incomplete reading, remember?)

How to Make Change

At this point, I'm just talking about creating the markers of change, so that players can impose their own meaning on it. Going up in levels doesn't mean that your character has suddenly Learned To Be A Better Elf, it means your character is better at hitting things or casting spells. But it's enough for players to hang change on.

In a game where there is character change (whether it's just leveling up or there's some kind of Aspect mechanism where the Aspects change over time), then the answer is to have the adventure take long enough for that quality of the characters to change...and have the new abilities important to the climax.

In a dungeon, there's usually some kind of change with levels: level 6 is tougher than level 1 was; level 15 has the Lich King. There's a kind of progression.

From a roleplaying point of view, I think it's important to tie these changes to the player actions. Yeah, it's great that the villain finds Jesus and decides to give up crime while the heroes are busy with that little problem in MegaDecaLopolis, but it just feels imposed from without. We're trying to create the illusion of change caused by or with the players.

One of the easiest ways to create change is to change the world. That is, the player characters don't have to change, but the world around them does. The PC actions cause the downfall of the kingdom.

You can change the way the PCs see the world. Batman isn't any different than he was at the beginning, but he can change the world by setting up some trap that separates the Anteus Gang from the ground.

In a similar way, you can change the people in the world. This normally happens organically as a result of the players doing things. The girl becomes an orphan, dresses as a man, and joins the army; the hard-headed reporter is inspired to don cape and cowl herself; the four-armed alien who fought the PCs at the beginning decides to dedicate its life to peace.

The last thing you can do is change the quality of the opposition. It could be as simple as the level of the opposition: you're going to go from your skeletons to your Greater Shadow to your Mummy Lord in terms of the quality of the opposition.

Sandbox games with timelines have external change of all of these. Act too soon, and you're not prepared; act too late, and they're over-prepared.

This part is still hazy for me, but it seems to me that a lot of a story or what feels like a story hinges on how the main character reacts to the opposition. Because we've posited that you can't dictate PC change, you have to change the opposition.

One of the ways is the level of opposition, as we mentioned. But another way might be to emulate the dynamic of a story by changing what the bad guys want as well as switching up the level.

This is time-based. It forces you to have a beginning, middle, and an end...it's strongly implied by your encounter structure that there are floors to this metaphorical dungeon. Sure, if they find the stairwell, they can descend very far, very fast but the outcome is likely to be disastrous.

Now To Do Exactly What You Should Not Do

...which is think about roleplaying adventures in terms of story structure.

I'm trying to limit myself. I'm trying to be restrictive. I'm trying to keep this with the floors-of-the-dungeon metaphor.

Well, okay, I'm not. I'm going to stick with Batman and the Antaeus Gang. But I am going to restrain myself from inventing something with all four elements as lieutenants and then Gaea as the big bad. No; we'll strive hard to stick with the Antaeus Gang and their minimal superpowers for now.

Let's divide the adventure into four parts, in homage to Larry Brooks and Steve Kenson both: either Set up/Response/Attack/Resolution or Threat/Investigation/Challenge/Comeback.

1. For the first part of the adventure, maybe only the first fight, the Antaeus Gang wants the money at the bank or the item at the museum.
2. For the second part of the adventure, the Antaeus gang is responding to Batman, maybe thinking they can get rid of him and the rest of the Bat-family will soon fall! In this stage, they specifically target Batman and Robin.
3. The challenge phase is where the PCs attack but the odds are probably still overwhelming. During this stage, the heroes learn the new way to look at the world, or the secret that will make hash of the bad guys.
4. Now, against the toughest odds (the entire gang! While Batman and Robin, drawn by Dick Sprang, are held in go-go birdcages in a vast warehouse, the gang tries to, I dunno, summon Gaea but Batman and Robin get free and fight them, winning this time because they have done something clever.

Harder to implement? You bet. But if you, say, have a list of these four different approaches and keep them in mind, things can still happen in any order...you just have to be ready to improvise NPC actions and motivations that are appropriate to what has gone before.

But weren't you anyways?

Here, have some free-writing to ignore

SYSTEM: ICONS

I know that fiction is the least popular thing here, but have some text that fell off my hands today. It has been a long weekend of dealing with estate and executor business, and I have no brain for anything else.

If I figure out what this story is actually about, this is probably the start of a Mynah story.

* * *

I am liberating some diamonds from their current imprisonment in a Kraft paper envelope in the second drawer of a locked safe when this translucent glowing head thrusts through the drawer and begs me.

“Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope.”

The words were different but the intent was the same.

Unfortunately, the room with the safe is miked for sound and while I can negate sounds like footsteps or careful drilling to open the safe, I can do it only if I expect them. This request is not one I expect and the alarms start going off.

I have no time right now. Police response time is between one and seven minutes, depending on where the patrol car is. There is only time to sweep some envelopes into my disposable-if-necessary bag and run like hell, tripping every sensor I avoided on my way in.

Plan A was stealing the gems. Plan B was escaping. It turns out that the translucent head hurts like hell when you put your hand through it to get the envelope, so Plan C is getting arrested.

Oh, I try hard: I lose about six seconds to pain management, and twelve to getting out of the room. I briefly consider diving out through the window at the end of the corridor until I remember that it’s barred. Instead of down, I head up six flights in the stairwell (another twenty seconds), and get the roof exit open (thirty very long seconds). There are three buildings I can jump to, so I pick the one with multiple exits, and run like a gazelle to get across.

All while this translucent blue figure is floating beside me and repeating the “Help me, Obi-Wan,” message.

The damaged hand costs me my jump because I try to use it to catch the edge of the next building and then scream in pain. I switch hands which means dropping the purse and the gems, which at least means that when the police pull me up I am not carrying contraband.

However, I’m of interest in at least two other larcenies. So they cuff me and hustle me into the squad car.

At least when the squad car starts, it leaves the blue translucent guy behind.

* * *

Today's power-gamey idea

SYSTEM: ICONS

Well, last week, really.

Take a character with Duplication 8. Add some low level of Mind Control...maybe Mind Control 4.

The working together rules say that the group working together can add the levels to either of the levels: hitting or the level of effect. So assuming all 8 duplicates help successfully, the original suddenly has Mind Control 8...which is much better.

Heck, you can add Burst to that and affect lots of people in the crowd.

Now, I am thinking of this for a villain, so I don't need to totally adhere to the rules, but I do anyway. (If I make exceptions, it starts to become a habit, so I'm really careful about making exceptions...because I know myself.)

Steve Kenson suggested the name Crowd Control but as a villain, I'm inclined to name him Cult, and one of the PBEM threads is perfect for him.

ICONS: The PBEM

SYSTEM: ICONS

So I'm trying ICONS as a PBEM. I would rather some other mechanism: I wish I could be around for a face-to-face group; I wish I could reliable schedule a Roll20 group; I wish that a play-by-post forum group didn't eat more resources than squirting email. But because the time I have is during my commute and the train doesn't have Internet access so I have to rely on my data usage for my phone, the choice is between email and nothing.

The big stuff with email in the past for me has been response time, so right now it's three players, three individual stories, though I do intend for them to cross over. To make life easier, I do all the dice rolling. I'm as fair as a martphone app allows., and at regular intervals I intend to post summaries of the game so far to a Facebook game I've set up for the purpose.

If people are amenable, those summaries might also show up here, but I haven't asked yet.