I'm starting this Saturday morning; we'll see how long it takes to write.
Currently in Vancouver, Washington for yet another youth soccer tournament. The boy and I had things going on yesterday (including coaching middle school girls) so we hopped the Amtrak last night to meet the wife and daughter down here. It was a late night (though I do love a train ride); everyone but me is still sleeping. Both kids are "guest playing" this weekend.
With regard to the Heroes Unlimited game I was writing about previously, the madness has passed. Well, mostly. I am still doing world building: working out hero demographics, using HU rules to build/model classic (NPC) comic characters, researching storylines from the 70s and 80s (and...rarely...later) for ideas on how various concepts and plots can interact with each other. Yesterday was looking at the history of Alpha Flight (and Omega Flight and Gamma Flight and Weapon X) and its ties to Roxxon Oil and how that was linked to Iron Man, for example. But this is all fodder for the mind factory, grease for the gears. Inspiration, not canon, which is welcome for the "lonely fun" that is world building.
Sadly most of the storylines post-1992 or so are pretty much crap. I shake my head and realize I got out of the comic books at the right time.
Still (and as I already wrote), that all's been back-burnered for the nonce (oo...reminds me I had a dream last night where I was interviewing for a sales job and part of it hinged on my ability to cook; interesting!). Instead, I am buckling down on my Cauldron preparations, and that includes designing and running adventures.
Last weekend I was up on Orcas Island with friends, and I had the chance to play-test the tournament adventure that will be this year's Blackrazor Cup extravaganza. Players included three boys and two girls aged 15, 15, 12, 12, and 7. Yes. I ran AD&D for a seven year old last weekend. His first time. As one might expect, he had a great time and the next day wanted to know when I was going to run "Part 2" and could he play, too. I had to explain that there's no "part 2," just a string of neverending adventures and OF COURSE he can join us the next time we play, if he's available and it's okay with his parents.
AD&D, amIrite?
I'd love to give everyone a blow-by-blow, but I can't until after the con because [SPOILERS]. However, I will say the group found a way to shortcut a ton of the content and instead got to both the grand payout (difficult putting THAT cart in front of the horse) before reaching the ultimate objective, and fighting a total of only two battles. Which ended up being fine because...with only five of eight PCs...that first battle was a bit of a slog. Two-fifths of the party were slain in brutal fashion by the end, but they walked away with a big pile of treasure even so...I haven't had the chance to tally the take, but I will (the boys especially were interested in their tournament score...the girls less so as they'd been reduced to steaming remains), and the score will be posted alongside all the other people who participate...at Cauldron. Just so they can know how they did.
So, yeah. AD&D mode. School is starting up this week (Diego Monday; Sofia on Wednesday). Cross country and school soccer starting in earnest this week (I'm coaching again...and it's already off to a train wreck of a start *sigh*). And I've got about five weeks to get physically and mentally ready for Cauldron. Two more adventures to pen (Diego told me "you're cooked") but I think with the kids back in class I'll have some time. And I'm excited at the prospect.
I don't know what it is about the Dragonlance saga that keeps calling me...not the books, but the whole concept of the thing. I don't believe that I'm trying to "rehabilitate" it (certainly not consciously) but I keep dragging out these old modules and using them as jumping off points for working scenarios and situations into my home campaign (yes: more world building). It's just so damn easy...then again, maybe it's just that the fantasy wilderness of D&D worlds lends itself to the real world 'layout' of my Pac Northwest campaign. For sure, if I wanted to do 'the Forgotten Realms' (I don't), I could place "Neverwinter" in Vancouver, Washington (the very town I'm writing this) while having Mount St. Helen's stand-in for Mount Hotenow (Mount "Hot Now?"). Yeah the Pacific coastline is a little farther west than the Sword Coast, but you can always have some cataclysm or other slide the coastline underwater. Global warming, anyone?
I digress.
[and why not? it's now Sunday evening that I'm continuing this post]
I digress...there is a rich tapestry of ideas in the Dragonlance saga, desperately needing an editor who's also (sorry to say) something of a subject matter expert in advanced D&D theory-hammering. Which is just about the silliest thing to be a subject matter expert in...but we all have our foibles and weirdness. DL is DUMB, but it is totally USEFUL. I realize I am dripping with snobbish condescension when I make this analogy, but it's been a looooong last two days (a long last two months), and I'll make it anyway: reading Dragonlance modules (I have a few) is like listening to the wildest ideas of my younger, "more creative" child, and realizing I can add a dash of Old Man canny and repurpose it into something wondrous and (for the players) "magical." It has nothing to do with story of the thing; the Hickman's "story" is as tired and trope-y as any fantasy fiction. It has to do with the situations and scenarios and ideas being presented...stuff that can be used by a DM to give the PLAYERS an opportunity to tell their own story. Which is what D&D...real D&D (in my opinion) is all about.
Just like that seven year old regaling his parents with his adventures.
Not his character's adventures, mind you. HIS adventures. "I did this, Mom!" He survived. He triumphed. He struck the final death blow against the 'Big Bad.' It's no different from my own children's introduction to the game. Well, except he hasn't had a character die yet. Next session maybe.
; )
ANYway. I'm meandering. I'll leave it there for now, but...I'm back in the saddle.
Though I don't hate Palladium games, I still think that if you want D&D-with-superpowers, you're better off with Villains & Vigilantes, or else Guardians if you don't mind a post-OSR "what if we knew then" approach.
ReplyDeleteV&V has things to recommend it. I especially like the "power vs. power" combat matrix, and some of the interactions of primary and secondary mechanics. But there are others things I do NOT like about it, especially the amount of work lumped on GM's shoulders to ensure coherence.
DeleteGuardians is pretty good, too (the Night Owl version...Starchilde's Guardians RPG has great art but some trash design choices). But like other Night Owl products I find it 'not quite enough.' And the typos and such bug me. But it's good enough that I have little temptation to do a similar, lightweight, D&D-style project. Heroes Unlimited just gives you MORE...and as I said, my interest in running a supers game (these days) is just taking a solid game system and USING it, NOT writing/creating my own system. I don't want to "tinker" with Guardians; I don't want to add extra stuff to make it palatable. Using HU is more an exercise in EDITING (i.e. cutting stuff)...and that's a lot easier as a GM.
Yeah, fair criticisms, though I have more than a few to level at HU too (and yes, Night Owl - I don't know much about the Starchilde one and tend to forget it exists). I suppose if I were to run a superpower game these days, which is low likelihood actually, I might be tempted to use either something really obscure like Supergame, even with the necessity of having a calculator for the simplest things, just because there just aren't any players with system mastery to excessively abuse the rules but yet they're open-ended enough to do just about anything I want them to do, or else V&V despite any weaknesses, or possibly the TSR MSH - in both of those cases I'd drop rolling for powers and let players pick what they want within reason. Definitely not fiddly point-buy, Supergame excepted because it's not all that fiddly, which makes GURPS Supers, Champions, and Superworld non-starters for me at this point. But there is a reason we used to call HU "Heroes Limited" (to be fair, I'll point out that we never even looked at 2nd edition, but I seem to recall you were interested in 1st anyway). If you've worked out those issues for your games, good on ya', of course, but personally I think Palladium's system is really only good for a few things and most of them are Rifts.
DeleteI actually feel 2nd Edition Heroes Unlimited is too, too much. "Revised" (the edition between 1st and 2nd and the one most of us were playing in the late 80's and 90s) sits at a pretty good spot...unless you're looking to play something Silver Surfer or Justice League level. I think a lot of people who only know Tony Stark from the movies don't know how truly LIMITED the character was; the MCU has him as a conglomerate of Stark, Reed Richards, Hank Pym, and Forge.
DeleteWell, and if you want your characters to be able to lift 75 or 100 tons in a cartoony kind of way. There's always MSH for that.
And speaking of MSH: yeah, I've never considered just dropping the random power roll and allowing folks to pick; that's kind of a brilliant idea. Of course, that doesn't get around the random generated Ranks that might give a player Feeble body armor and Amazing hyper-smell (which would make for a cool character concept, actually, but is not conducive to the "super battle simulator" that is MSH). There was also a Dragon article that introduced non-powered hero types to the MSH game (for the Batman, Black Widow, Shang Chi type characters) which was most welcome and necessary for the game.
But point buy systems? Hard pass.
I suppose it would be worthwhile to say why I wouldn't run a supers game, in part because there is a sort I might run. The problem, from a gaming perspective, with the genre as a whole is that the "good guy" archetype is almost entirely reactive. That is, it's the "bad guys" who have real agency, the "good guys" just react to whatever the "bad guys" do. There is no positive action the "good guy" supers can take, they can only interfere with "bad guy" actions. As a result, every scenario can only be a railroad. It's possible to create more open-ended ones, but the players never have agency to actually make things better, and if they did it would quickly become apparent that "beat up the bad guys" would never be a way to do that.
DeleteI have tried a couple of times to run games where the players have agency to use their powers for more than reactionary violence, but I have yet to have a group of players who were interested in - or less charitably, capable of - exploring that.
There was a board game superpower game where the players were all villains, able to make and pursue plans actively, and that's another direction I've considered, but I don't see much interest when I bring it up. With recently renewed interest in Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn, maybe I might find some, but frankly I'm just more interested in an AD&D or Traveller (or something similar, like Worlds Without Number) sandbox/Braunstein these days.
Using super-powers to rob banks and armored cars doesn't make much sense in a world where corporations would gladly sponsor a powered person in exchange for commercial endorsements, merchandising rights, etc. White Wolf's Aberrant RPG explored that idea, as has some films/shows. But the main appeal of any adventure RPG (and I'd categorize the "supers" genre as "adventure") is the ability to experience the exhilaration and adrenaline of ACTION, often in the form of combat...including the super-powered slugfests of comic books. Without "bad guys" to fight, the supers game feels very flat and masturbatory...certainly that was the case (for me) with Aberrant.
DeleteBoard games, on the other hand (or those miniatures/battle games, or those deck-building combat games) leave OUT the human drama that provided (in the comics anyway) a nice balance to the spectacle of super-fights and, as a result, are no better...and feel far more limited (and lame) than wargames, or even CCGs like MtG.
But I hear you with regard to other genres having more (and more lasting) appeal.
Hi JB,
ReplyDeleteThis is the second post of yours that I've come across in my blogroll. The great thing about blogs, compared to modern social media posts, is that the content still carries a personal touch. Daily life mixes with the core passion of the blog, giving it a sense of authenticity. These aren't posts written specifically to feed an audience; instead, the humanity of the person behind the keyboard truly shines through.
I'm thrilled to learn that you're from Seattle—it's one of the places that had the biggest impact on my teenage years, thanks to the grunge scene.
P.S.
I saw that you wrote an article on "Beyond the Supernatural." I'll definitely check it out. It's one of those games I always saw on the shelves and must have flipped through at least a dozen times, but never actually bought. Money was tight, my English wasn't great, and every two weeks a new TSR supplement was coming out. Back then, I had to save up my school snack money just to buy stuff, haha.
Have a great day.
Haha! Yeah...July through September are usually my "slow" months for blogging. Once the US school year is up and humming along, I'm generally able to find more time for posts. Expect more in October-November.
DeleteMy blog isn't monetized at all (other than it advertises the handful of game books I've published), so you'll find a lot of my content is "personal"...to the point of wandering off topic into obscure randomness and/or naval gazing. Eh. I try to be as authentic as I can be and I'm not forcing anyone to read. Hopefully my readers find it helpful/entertaining.
RE: Seattle
Born and raised and I remember the '90s and grunge very well (my college years were '91-'95 and I was in the thick of it back then). The city has a lot to recommend it...I've travelled fairly extensively, and I've yet to find a place I'd rather live. Lots of great towns and countries out there but, for me, Sea-town's just about perfect. I feel blessed.
Go Hawks!
ReplyDelete