Super Heroes
I thought I'd get down some ideas about a supers game I'd like to run or play in, after seeing Iron Man this weekend.
Contents
Executive Summary
I'm proposing a super-hero genre game with the following key meta-mechanics:
- Episodic plot: The plot is about the heroes, and as such, chronicles their triumphs small and large, and their failures minor and catastrophic. The plot as such will be focused on such moments, and continuity will be a minor, at best, focus.
- Theme-driven: The best heroes are quasi-mythical, and are about something - they have themes. Heroes for this game will have primary
themes, the essential story of the character. The theme of the overall game is about "outsiderness" (since everyone will be neccessarily different), either fore- or backgrounded by the intersection of the themes of all the heroes. Which is to say, I'm sure the group's heroes will share some very interesting themes, and I'd rather have the game be about stuff the players have built into their characters than something I've arbitrarily decided.
- Contemporary, legible setting: The setting is May, 2008. There are at least 7 ( group + Nate ) superhuman people extant. The rest is essentially wide-open, though will be significantly defined once the heroes are. Also, my favorite old saws are factionalism, moral ambiguity, and collateral damage, so in absence of other mood-defining elements, expect those to play a role.
- Custom Antagonism: I'm going to be cooking up archnemises based on the characters, ideally with your input. These will provide the bulk of significant antagonism.
- About People: The best comic stories are about people, even stories about people who aren't people like Vision. I'm going to do what I can to make sure a decent amount of focus is on human relationships: friendship, rivalry, hatred, maybe even love.
- About Whooping Ass: Without the old can-a, we'd just be in a soap opera, people! While the best conflicts have a heightened sense of stakes and are integral to the human drama, sometimes an old-fashioned barnyard brawl is in order, and I'll be more than happy to oblige.
Heroes
Put links to your concept pages here. When dreaming up concepts, try to think of major themes your hero represents, and explicitly mention them. Secret themes aren't appropriate - other players need to know what sorts of thematic content is already out there, and be able to fit their concept into an unique niche.
--Gdaze-- Hey guys, think we could all put down our rolls here? Just wanna see what it looks like.
Elemental: Scrapper (Tanker?)
CatScan: Controller (mentalist)
Striker: Scrapper
Ouroboros : Sneaky Type / Multi-Function
BrimStone : Blaster
Teletraan-7 : Information / Support
Key Elements
A Blank Slate
The game world would basically be the world as it is today, with the heroes as the first beings of such stature. A key theme is that the focus is on the heroes, and their actions.
Importantly, the mechanics of the world are no secret. Society functions as it does today, and the actors in it respond in believable ways with plausible motivations. Specifically, this means that people follow common sense. If your hero turns into a fiery demon and tortures enemies with the screams of the damned, they'll freak out. Further, the world today builds up its heroes only to mine them for schadenfreude later, and as a time-honored comic book tradition, expect that sort of public opinion.
However, the main plot mechanics are the heroes, and to an extent the villains. The mechanics of the world will only matter in as much as they contribute to the heroes' story.
If you need an example from existing literature, think of the orderliness of any comic's world after a "reboot", or of most comic films: the focus is on the heroes specifically, not on a larger "universe" that's chock full of other distracting superhumans.
Setting
2008 New York. Seattle is a possibility, if players would prefer a more familiar setting.
Role of Super-Folk
Doing "good". I expect and hope that debates over the specific nature of that phrase will ensue, but when the cards are down, there's someone doing wrong and someone doing right and there's not always time to figure out where the best place to put down the cards is.
Since the players are some of the only superhumans, backgrounds should incorporate that exceptionalism.
Group Hook
Theme is Important
I want the heroes to have definable major themes, and at least one theme per hero that doesn't overlap with the rest of the group. Iron Man, for example, is about the future - about technology, about our fears of it and hopes for it. The Hulk is about the dark side of rage that hides in us all. The X-Men were about being different. It's reductive to paint the hero as entirely about such a theme, but the best stories are where the main character and the theme intersect.
The focus of the story would probably shift from hero to hero as the game went on, but I anticipate a lot of overlap in themes - a story arc involving an "anger" hero would ideally include the other heroes' difficulties with anger and its destructive potential.
The themes your character has will be the strongest points of conflict for him or her.
Character themes
Viho Themes:
- 1) Overcoming odds. Conquering physical, economic and social limitations by the use force of will and intellect to succeed in life.
- 2) Living with adversity. Despite having conquered the demons in his life and succeeded, he is nevertheless an outcast due to his extreme dwarfism.
- 3) American Dream. Having come from an native american reservation and with his physical disabilities he has risen to the top. This is the american dream, pulling one self up by the boot straps.
- 4) Pride. The correlate to the american dream. Anyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Threfore, anyone who has not done so has some fault in their motivation.
Brim themes
Elemental themes
Orobros themes
Ethical State
Viho: general do gooder
Brim:
Elemental:
Orobros:
Introducing the Villians
Each hero ultimately has a nemesis, and I want the players to be collaboratively involved in the creation of their enemies. I see most of the conflict in the stories taking place between the heroes and their enemies, and would ideally like for the villians to be interesting and compelling beyond a set of stats or a particular difficulty of fight.
Emir abu-Kaliq nemesis of Dr. Viho Ciquala
Contained Arcs
Whether it's this or another game, the next game I run will involve contained arcs. This group trends heavily toward continuity, and I'd like to try something different. My hope is that framing the game with theme as opposed to objective, continuity breaks will be easier to handle.
Super
Most importantly, the game has to be fun. Comics as a medium aim to entertain, and do so, in the best examples, by mixing mythic actions with humanistic heroes. While a bunch of the key points I'm describing are trying to nail down how to keep one foot tied to an involving story, the other foot needs to wreak glorious, demolitionary havoc for the game to work.
System
I know I villify it, but I think the Hero system is the best choice. A big part of a supers game is hero construction, and while I've cooked up a DitV hack for supers, I think it's too reductive. The system for this game needs to have reliable benchmarks in terms of ability, so the heroes can exceed those benchmarks in satisfying ways. Also, consistent with the idea of thematically focused heroes, the heroes' ability to affect the world needs to have domains, so that "hit people guy" and "armor suit guy" can each have a niche.
I'll have to check out Abberant, but the Hero system is something everyone is familiar with, and I'm comfortable with it as well.
Tone
Modern. Think valiant, later wildstorm, recent Marvel, etc. I'm also a big fan of deconstructed books like Marvels or Watchmen or Alan Moore's Supreme run. Take that for what you will.
Let Me Have It
I know I've rambled, so mark down my score in the Talk page!
Issues
Here's where the precaps and recaps are listed. I'm trying something new here, and if it doesn't work we'll ditch it. I'm posting a skeletal outline of each adventure before we play it, but just the outline. If there's stuff you'd like to see, let me know by email or put it in the discussion tab, and I'll try to incorporate it.
After the session is finished, we'll fill out the outline with the recap. We can do it comic-script style if we've got the time, where EMPHASIS is CAPITALIZED.
And y'all better come up with a name for the group and hence the comic!
The Guardians - Issue 2: The Argus Directive Part 2
The Guardians - Issue 3: The Argus Directive Epilog
The Guardians - Issue 4: Who Needs a Hero Part 1
The Guardians - Issue 5: Who Needs a Hero Part 2
Post-Mortem
I'll clear out the talk page for discussion of what people liked and didn't like in the game. From my perspective:
things that worked:
- The feel was just right. I really enjoyed the mix of campy banter and pulp grandiosity, and the theme of what power does to a person and what responsibilities are entailed came through just enough.
- The villains turned out great. Each one had a distinctive feel, and you guys as players managed to build meaningful relationships with them.
- The fights went well when I put a lot of time into thinking about how the mechanics of the battle would work; basically, concocting a scene where an outnumbered villain would use the situation to his advantage. The stock market fight with Emir was probably the best example of this, where the presence of bystanders created interesting tactical considerations. Conversely, they didn't go so well when that kind of thought wasn't present.
- Viho's evolution into the team leader. I felt like everyone was on the same page with the team dynamic, and that since Viho was the only character with any real material stuff, an attack on him was an attack on the group. It helped focus the story, and without Viho as a character the team hook would have been really difficult.
things that didn't work
- I didn't quite get the hang of the episodic feel I was shooting for. There was too much continuity between sessions, mainly because players, I think, like continuity. For a truly episodic game, I'd say "this story arc runs for three sessions or until you figure it out" and leave it at that, so that the players know when I'm going to put the kibosh on machinations.
- Similar to the above: an episodic game is a lot of work. There's no established continuity to fall back on, so the scenario needs to be pretty explicitly designed, but not scripted, since the players often take unexpected routes. The times that I did that design work, the sessions turned out pretty well, I thought. The times I didn't and tried to skate, things generally went poorly.
-The system wasn't ideal. Hero is great for designing powers, but not so great for using those powers in interesting or creative ways, which is what I feel supers is all about. The jury's out on what would work better. Maybe something like the old Marvel Superheroes system.
-dieter. In the sense that I don't think I did enough to include Dieter into the game, and that's kind of a shame. Admittedly, supers wasn't his choice of genre, and admittedly, everyone was super-hyped on supers when we kicked this shit off, but still. I could have sold him a bit better on the concept, or we could have gone with a different game.
overall:
I really enjoyed the game. I feel like it ran its course, and I learned a bunch about how to do this kind of thing better in the future. I particularly enjoyed the way Viho evolved into the central character without it dominating or excluding the other players.
I do think I bit off more than I could chew; I got really busy over the course of the game, and pretty much all of my ideas were dependent on investing time in preparation to make something really cool.
The Future
So, I've been thinking more and more about the supers game recently, and I've got some ideas for one-shots to try and address what I thought were the principal weaknesses of the game.
System Shots
I'd like to run some one-shots in alternate systems. We'll take the existing heroes and their histories, and translate them as best we can into some other systems that seem like they might clear up some of the the issues we had with the hero system.
Savage Worlds: I've got a homebrew Savage Worlds mod that I'd like to give a shot to. Savage Worlds (supposedly) works a lot better with big combats than Hero does, and, as a bonus, uses dice of all sizes!
Mutants and Masterminds: cruising the forums for M&M makes me think that it could be an exercise in exchanging complexity for complexity, but my first look at the system was promising.
With Great Power... I just picked up the PDF of this. It looks like a decent stab at constructing a game explicitly around the superhero narrative structure, and it might be a great thing, or it might be something everyone hates. We'll have to see.
So, my plan is to run one shots either in sessions when we can another game for whatever reason, or at other times, as my schedule permits. If everyone from the original game is there for the one-shot, we'll just put it down as another issue of The Guardians of New York. If it's on a saturday afternoon, and the only people I can recruit are bums, then I'll set it as a side-story with appearances from the fantastic rogues' gallery we cooked up in the campaign.
Sound off in the talk section if you like/dislike the idea, such as it is!
