Evil twins, of one kind

I've been thinking about evil twins recently.

There are a few different ways to parse "evil twins" so let's unpack it a bit.

I mean duplicates of the characters who differ in a significant moral or methodological way. Powers can differ slightly, but really the focus is on morals or technique. So the folks who are thematically related but have different powers or the actual siblings who happen to be bad or the arch-foe who stands for everything the PC doesn't, well, those are outside of the scope of what I'm thinking. Evil Kirk is just barely inside the scope.

The Justice Lords from the Justice League animated series are probably the best example of this line of thought. There are others, of course: Dark Beast, Dark anyone

Really, this is an example of "If this goes on..." — the character represents something taken to a logical extreme, and (we hope) forces the player to think about what the character's actual limits are. You might have a Wolverine-style character who meets Sabretooth: the power sets are nearly identical, so what makes the difference?

There are a number of ways to create evil twins. Super-science is always good: the copy can be an actual clone (Galatea from JLU) or a mysterious copy (Bizarro or the Sand Superman from the 1970s, for instance). Alternate timelines, mysterious future timelines to be avoided, those are good sources. Dark mystic mirrors will do. Transporter accidents. :( (Keeping the transporter is the precedent for keeping the holodeck.)

Defeating evil twins usually requires pointing out the flaw in their thinking, the One Thing that the evil twins lack that the heroes have. It might be external ("We have the Flash!") or it might be internal ("We still don't kill, and this gives us the edge when we release sixteen enemies to fight you instead").

A question -- "looky loo"

This is related to RPGs, and it might even be useful to you. The technique of doing something flashy over here to hide what you're doing over there. In his comics, Brian Michael Bendis continually calls it a "looky loo" but when I search the term (I use Duck Duck Goose, so I don't feel right about calling it googling) I find that a looky loo (or looky lou) is a rubbernecker, someone who slows down to look at an accident. Obviously, it's a kind of misdirection, but in magic, that bit of misdirection is to something harmless. (Which might be how criminals regard supervillains--oh, let's let the flashy looky loo try something that he thinks will be successful, while we commit the real crime.) But is there a term specifically for this kind of "stop crime A so I can commit crime B" that seems to be more accepted than "looky loo"?

Subplots

Okay, what was supposed to be a brief break for things like a 25th wedding anniversary went a little longer. Time to get back on the horse.

At one point, I was thinking of doing an ICONS campaign book, with a setting and a set of adventures that derived from a particular scenario, and one of the things I thought would be useful would be listing possible subplots for PCs. In this case, cliche is good: although we don't know exactly how things are going to turn out, we want to know the general shape of them.

I wrote up several of the possible subplots and illustrated them with characters from the setting. Quickly, so you understand what the heck it is I wrote....

The Premise

The players have been hired to be the "villains" on a reality show that creates (validates?) superheroes. The show actually has three sets of villains: the PCs, an evil organization (Society for Total Unilateral Terror, or STUnT (because it's made up of stuntmen...inside joke)), and a criminal mastermind. Except the conceit is that by episode five it becomes apparent that shows with the PCs are much more popular than shows without: the show is being rewritten as it goes in order to put more emphasis on the PCs. They find themselves teaming with the contestants against some other threat that has been cobbled together, or having the show's producers dictating that they do certain things because it would fit the narrative of the show.

The PCs were reformed supervillains, or heroes pretending to be supervillains to keep an eye on the supervillains the show was hiring, or supervillains pretending to be reformed in order to provide plausible deniability for their next crime spree.

That was all going to be played against the fact that some of the contestants and other heroes have secret identities, so even the people with public identities were two-faced: there was on-show and off-show, and the two could be different. You could also have temptation and redemption stories as the villains decide to commit crimes again or not.

Part of the problem is that I didn't have a good way to handle the on-camera stuff versus the off-camera stuff.

Anyway, it was going to be set in the small city of Dynamo, which had a decommissioned missile base and a couple of colleges and not much else: even the superheroes were from nearby cities.

Here's one I wrote up.

Subplots

A subplot gives the character a bit of spotlight time and a chance to shine. A subplot can reinforce a characterization or illuminate a little used bit of background or Qualities. It can even be a chance to indulge in some character bits that aren't to the taste of the other players. Does the character excel at research but research is rare in your combat-heavy game?
When you're running an adventure such as this, there are two kinds of subplots: subplots that are essential to the main story, and subplots that are optional but are available because of the story setting.
Obviously, an essential subplot is, well, essential. The other ones are optional… Use them if it enhances your fun.
To figure out if one of these optional subplots will work for your players, look at their Qualities. If a character has "Protects the innocent," then providing some innocents gives the character a chance to shine. Similarly, a character with a bad reputation should encounter some "normal" people and have a chance to win them over.
If none of a character's Qualities apply, the character can always be involved in a subplot anyway, so long as the player thinks it's interesting. A subplot can result in a temporary Quality for a character: a player can invoke the temporary quality "Dating barista" if it's the barista in trouble.
In many cases, the character we identify as having the subplot can be replaced by some other non-player character if the new character works for your players. The "Local Romance" subplot might not work with Helen Hope, but that woman you invent as a barista at the coffee shop is interesting to the gamer playing Maximantis. Why not transfer as much as possible to her?
A particular subplot doesn't have to extend for the entire length of the campaign: perhaps the "A Helping Hand" subplot only lasts for two sessions, but it leads into the "Local Romance" subplot for the same character, and that lasts for the rest of the campaign.
You can even have two characters with different versions of the same subplot: perhaps two characters find romance locally, with different results.
Another possibility is to use multiple subplots that all revolve around the same thing. Not everyone responds to an event in the same way; when the PCs move into Dynamo, some people will be suspicious, some will be hopeful, and some will find their lives changed by the player characters.

Subplot: A Helping Hand

Some NPC has a problem, and the PC chooses to help out. (This is separate from the situation where the PC is forced or blackmailed into helping.)
Generally, the Helping Hand subplot has the following parts:

• Learning the problem
• Investigation
• Complication
• Resolved

As an example, we'll use the Hope mother and son, who run the B&B where the PCs might be staying.

Learning the problem

The player character learns about the problem. This could be as direct as having someone say, "Leslie's being bullied at school," or seeing others bully Leslie. This phase ends when the character decides to help; that would be the point where they get the temporary Quality.

Example:

Leslie Hope is a lost kid: he doesn't understand why his parents divorced, he doesn't understand why his mother made him move from Shelbyville to Dynamo, and he doesn't have any friends in Dynamo. Assuming one or more characters is staying at the Hope's B&B, the PC overhears an inconclusive argument between Helen and Leslie.

Investigation

The character needs to figure out what the cause of the problem is.
The character then acts on it: teaches Timmy to fight, or to be cool, or whatever the character figures will address the problem.

Example: Should Leslie learn to fight? What about teaching Leslie to be cool? Or maybe the PC should just frighten the bullies…but what effect will that have on Leslie?

Complication

Whatever action the character took, it goes wrong.

Example:

 Maybe Leslie ends up in the ER, or uses his new kewl ninja fighting skills to become a worse bully than the other guys ever were. Or the PC gets arrested in the process of trying to scare the bullies. (That looks good in the news: "Local Supervillain Frightening Schoolchildren")

Resolution

The problem is solved (or not) but it ends up in the relationship between the NPC and the PC being changed.

Example: Leslie bests the local bully by using the other thing he learned from the PCs: persistence. He does beat someone up: Patsy Schmiel, who has said disparaging things about the PC. The two of them end up in detention together…and middle school romance blooms, which the PCs discover when Leslie comes to them for romantic advice.

Like, totally random thought

And the thought is...

"Mulan Bonney"

Like, there are plenty of fine Chinese pirates, some of whom were women who didn't need to hide their sex. So aside from the accidental fact of both of them (Mulan and Anne Bonney) being women who dressed as men, and that I pronounce the "an" part the same in both cases, there's no actual need to make a portmanteau name.

Yet my mind keeps returning to that thought. 

So, since there's no need for it to be actual pirates, what if it's a code name? Some secret hacker who is leaking information to the PCs. And the name "Mulan Bonney" would be a pseudonym, so of course the person is saying that they're a different sex than the name, but are they hinting that they are transgender, or simply cloaked? Is the different sex only online or are they trying it for reals? Or perhaps the double is to throw people off track?

Or maybe it's a throwaway.

Though you might be able to do something interesting with a source who keeps providing information using pseudonyms that are cross-dressers from history. (And in a roleplaying game with full knowledge of the real world, one of them could be "Danny T. Street".)

The Ultimate Spider-Man!

SYSTEM: ICONS

I got the collection Spider-Men out of the library, and loved it. So I thought I'd take a whack at Miles Morales.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17l6ukKO4-tAfThCY-L-DNhSfX2i7XAuqPkHvIizjl4k/edit?usp=sharing

PDF Only Supplements

I was thinking about what I'd like in a PDF-only supplement, the kind that's never intended to be sold as a printed book. How could you take advantage of the electronic and user-printable nature of PDF?

Let's leave off the bookmarks, because those should always be there. The only time they might not is when the content is less than four pages. We also assume that end users can print material from the PDF.

First, every character write-up on a separate page so they can be printed and used directly, without having. That means that the design of the write-ups is useful at the table as well as pretty.

A reasonably-sized graphic of a character that doesn't give away the secret ID (if there is one), so you can show the players, "Hey, he looks like this."

In fact, if the same write up had space so that you could annotate it (and the PDF allowed it), that would be great.

Cross-links between write-ups and mentions of the character. If clicking on the character's name took you to the write-up, that would be nice.

Certainly there's JavaScript stuff you could add that would make it interesting...a die roller, for instance, if there are random selection charts, that highlights the rolled entry or shades (not obscures) the other entries if you want to use the PDF directly from your tablet. (Actually, if you still want to keep the page count down in case you might print it, you can add a Print button to each character write-up that prints only that writeup, so the user could choose to print only the top character or the bottom one.)

Maps on the page would be nice: a way to print maps automagically, or to print only certain layers of maps so that the GM could plunk down the map before destruction and later after destruction.

Other ideas?

Helping others

So I got the iPad version of Sentinels of the Multiverse and one of the things that struck me was that Legacy's powers are very much about helping others.

In Mutants & Masterminds, I'd do it by leaning heavily on the Usable by Others modifier, with the advantages Inspire (pretty much made for it) and I'd probably use Favored Environment (With Teammates), or, if the GM disallowed that, put together a lot of Favored Environments and Favored Foes as Enhanced Advantages, usable by others. Then you wouldn't have to worry about power level limitations. Add Regeneration Usable by Others, and then build a tough scrapper with what's left.

In ICONS, you don't have the power level limitation to worry about, but it is harder. One way to do it might be Ability Increase Extra: Affects Others. (If the GM objects, you could do it as Ability Boost, with the caveat that you suffer the ability loss because you've been "lending" your strength to others.) Again, some Healing or Regeneration Extra: Affects Others.

In Supers, you'd want Healing, of course, and I think the best choice would be Imbue with the boost for Multiple Targets.

Ideas?

Team Soap Opera

SYSTEM: ANY

Once again, I'm thinking about the soap opera aspect of comics and how to represent that at the game table. I have read, and believe, that one of the great things that the 1960s Marvel brought to the genre was the soap opera aspect. While I'm not so crazy about the continuing narratives that developed, I certainly love the soap opera part, and felt when Gwen Stacy died, or that Doc Ock was dating Aunt May, or that Bruce Wayne was bereft when Dick Grayson moved out of the manor. But that's something that's hard to get across in RPGs.


See, most of that stuff happens in the solo books for a hero, and superhero RPGs rarely play that way. They emulate team books...which is totally understandable, because there are multiple players at the table, each with his or her own hero character. But team books don't have the same sort of personal dynamic.

It seems to me that team  comics come in two flavours: the anthology of characters (the Avengers or the Justice League), where popular characters from elsewhere are brought together, along with some characters who are seen only in the team book; and the collection of characters (the Fantastic Four or the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans), where the characters may have come from elsewhere but they pretty much live in that book. (I've stolen the terminology from short story books.) The lines between them aren't clear-cut; sometimes team books are places where comics companies park intellectual properties so as not to lose them ("We're using Generic Name Guy! You can't use him!") or during the period where their own titles are under revamp, so these categorizations are poles, not boxes.

An anthology book assumes that most of the characters will have their interpersonal stuff somewhere else. We don't need to talk about Bruce Wayne's relationship woes, we can just present Bat-God as someone. The stories tend to be puzzle stories, or they have personal effects only on the book-specific characters. (There are exceptions, which are usually the result of editors and writers collaborating across titles, or where the same writer does several solo books as well as the team book.) So the New Avengers during Bendis' run dealt with Victoria Hand and with the Hood and the effect of the Skrulls on Spider-Woman, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones, none of whom had their own series at the time. Other characters moved in and out and made quips or actions that cemented their (external) characterization. Heck, they even lampshaded it with Wolverine.

A collection book generates a lot of its soap opera from interpersonal conflict between team members. The teams tend to be smaller (though they aren't always: the total collection of X-Men would sink an aircraft carrier, but they usually focus on four to eight) and there are NPCs who deal with the whole team (your Jarvises or Victoria Hands) and NPCs who are specific to individual characters. The more interteam stuff there is, the less you need NPCs outside the team.

And none of that shows up in comic book RPGs. Oh, it can: Worlds In Peril has the Bonds mechanic, which I quite like, and lots of games have the idea of qualities or complications or disadvantages that deal with specific NPCs. The latter don't require NPCs and soap opera, however. (That's good if your players don't want to get into that stuff. I'm not writing about players like that, though.)

How do you encourage soap opera? I have no sure way. However, here are some ideas:

• Don't travel. Yes, you just had a great idea that involves everyone being on an interdimensional road trip. Have you established what they have to lose, back in the home dimension? Will they care if they ever come back? Yeah, you can travel once you've established your turf, or let the NPCs travel with the heroes, or give them other-dimensional analogues of the NPCs with whom they can say the awful things, or who will act in exactly the ways that the heroes hope or fear the NPCs will.
• Throw lots of NPCs at them. Some of them will stick, even if they haven't created characters with particular DNPCs. If the PCs seem interested in the NPC, bring him or her back.
•  Encourage qualities/complications/disadvantages that use NPCs. Try to make the NPCs interesting. It's a nice idea to make the same NPC the dependent NPC of several characters, if you can. If Clara Sparrow is the wheelchair-bound sister of one hero and the boss of another hero and is dating a third hero, well, you've got three reasons to bring her in, and some opportunity for interteam conflict.

I'm happy to hear other suggestions.

Villains: Making It Personal

When you play a superhero game, there are the villains who are puzzles and villains who are personal. (Okay, there are a couple of other kinds, but they don't start with 'p'.)

Puzzle villains are the ones you have to figure out--once you know that they're secretly plants that are vulnerable to Round-Up, it's session over. They can't come back unless they have new powers because otherwise someone will just go to the hardware or garden store.

Personal villains have a stake in what they are doing. They have an emotional need to do it. Victor Fries wants his frozen wife back. Norman Osborne, at least early on, was as much about his feelings for Peter Parker as his lust for power. 

This is something that Batman: The Animated Series was brilliant at, by the way: most of their adversaries had the kind of emotional hooks you could use multiple times. Other animated series have used it since then. You can certainly have mercenary villains who will split as soon as the projected profit drops--they're a nice palate cleanser, if you will—but it's good if the villains care.

A villain can care for lots of reasons. (Movies provide a good sampler.)

• He or she is getting back at all the people who laughed at him.
• He needs the parts or money to get that operation for the sick loved one (Dog Day Afternoon with superheroes?)
• She's on a vendetta against anyone who went to her high school
• He wants to get even with the other crooks who stole his share of the money (Payback).
• She needs to be proven right about some scientific theory that they all laughed at (but where fixing the immediate danger puts the world at risk if there isn't a danger).

It's even better if the emotional hook is tied to the heroes, in hero or civilian ID:

• The villain is jealous of the hero.
• The villain is getting back at the hero because the hero refused his offer of friendship or mentorship (Spider-Man).
• The villain and the hero know each other's secret identities, and one can't reveal the other without being revealed...but their drives or Qualities keep putting them in conflict.
• The villain wanted someone the hero is dating or married...and having discovered the secret identity, is going to humiliate the hero identity.

You know your heroes. Make it personal to them.

Whoops. We caught the bad guy...and there's still three hours to go.

SYSTEM: ICONS

Of course, that's the point, but usually you catch the bad guy at the end of the session. Sometimes you haven't taken everything into account (usually synergies of powers, but it could be that the players just out-think you, or--as happens to me--you just overlook something obvious like a little-used power and they don't, or something else) and the planned villain for the piece could go to jail in the first fifteen minutes, leaving you with a very early finish to the night.

As pointed out to me by Fred Hicks, if at all possible, you want to give them their victory: you want to say "yes" to this turn of events. The alternative, which I have used, is to hand each player a determination point or whatever your game uses as metagame currency, and go on as you originally planned. There are a couple of problems with that. First, it's not fair to the players. Second, it really encourages the "You lose until I say you win" kind of thinking that rules-light or narrative games can fall prey to (at least in my experience).

So the big bad guy is going to jail. First, let them savour their victory. Roleplay the news interviews while you figure out what you're going to do next.

There are a couple of possibilities at this point.

• The villain planned for getting caught, and he's on the street again in hours. This isn't bad, but you don't want to encourage the idea the players can't win in any way. The end result is that one or more of them decides that killing the bad guys is more permanent, and suddenly the light Bronze Age game you were playing is plunged deep into the Iron Age. And it depends on the villains, too: if the villain is a "leap before you look" kind, no one believes it. (However, if lawyers out of their snack bracket get them out of jail, the PCs know there's something up, and that can be the indication that you need that Someone Else is behind things.)
• The villain you just put away wasn't the real villain. This is a little more satisfying, if done right. How do you make it satisfying? Have an effect on the rest of the session. That effect can vary. Sometimes the effect is just that the PCs had a chance to be awesome. Maybe the rest of the story is soap opera dealing the consequences of that awesomeness: fame, fortune, whatever, for some team members, and dissatisfaction for others.
• The real villain learned more about the PCs so that he or she could execute the dastardly plan. If the PCs had to use a little-used power, that's a win. Specifically guard against it, and there you are. The real villain then launches the real plan.
• The plan called for the villain-in-jail to be in jail, either because the big villain has some kind of plan that they will enact in the jail, or because it gives them plausible deniability for the bigger crimes that are about to take place (until the PCs prove that the jail has a revolving door, or there's a link between the villain-in-jail and the villain-at-large).

In a campaign, you can also spend time on the various subplots you have going. You laugh and say, "Well, you put him/her/it/them away quickly, so now, Nuclear Lass, you can spend time with that loved one." That doesn't work as well if it's a one-shot.

Another thing you can do is turn the evening into a bunch of small encounters that build up the PCs' reputations. Then you can do something with that large reputation: either have them invited up to the next level ("The Avenging League is on the phone") or have them asked to help with a mission that looks like it's out of their range. (That would be the cliff-hanger where you say, "See you next week!")

And none of it involves saying, "You don't knock him out. Here's a Determination Point."