Superheroic rules dilemma, part 1

Okay, so I've got the start of a superheroic campaign using rules-light Fudge that starts this Sunday. Not only are my adventure notes rather sketchy, but I'm not even sure how I'm going to handle some important rules bits.

While I'm rules-light, I like to have a bare minimum of rules to support my style of play. I don't like to run entirely ruleless, because I'm bad at making arbitrary decisions. Even if I never compare a number on the character sheet to a roll of the dice, I like to have powers rated against each other so I can get a quick grasp on where the power fits into the grand scheme of things.

The big problem with Fudge here is that the preference is to use natural English adjectives to describe abilities… I'm a Superb swordsman with a Great sense of style, for instance. Those, under normal circumstances, rank +3 and +2 above 0 respectively. Zero is "Fair" and the center of the scale… the naming extends down to Terrible, which is -3 from Fair, and up to Legendary, which is +4 from Fair.

Now, if you consider Legendary to be the absolute maximum peak of human performance, and that's the last word used to describe abilities, it's obvious we have a problem when we start talking about a character that can life a hundred tons (or tonnes, take your pick). Fudge addresses issues similar to this with a set of rules called Scale, which are at the same time elegant and kludgey as all get-out.

Basically, Scale is just a giant number line with zero and Fair at the center. Except in some cases, you slide Fair around to a different value. Say, Ogres are just all around bigger and stronger than normal people… the Ogre "norm" might be +1. So instead of saying that Ogres start out at Good normally, you say they start at Fair, Ogre Scale. You slide Ogre Fair up to the +1 mark. Then when Joe Ogre and Joe Normal stand toe to toe, they both have a Fair strength… except Joe Ogre is Ogre scale, so his Fair is +1 instead of 0 like Joe Normal's.

It has its uses, but in general, it's a pain in the patooties. Because for Joe Normal and Joe Ogre to interact, I need to measure them on the same number line, and we've made the descriptive words unequal, so we basically just fall through to the raw numbers… Joe Normal has a 0 Strength and Joe Ogre has a +1 Strength. Blah. What's the point of using the neato natural-English words if the words fall down when it comes to actually using the rules?

Now, there's another aspect of Scale that works a little differently and is more useful, and that's scales that don't actually fit on the same number line. Something like, say, Stellar Class Starship Scale. You can be a Fair Stellar Class Starship, and Fair is equal to zero on the SCS Scale number line. And you don't know, or even care, where Joe Normal fits on that Scale, because Joe just can't compete… he loses every time, whether your comparing size, strength or firepower. So the two Scales have no meaningful overlap, so we can ignore the fact that, on some grand, massive scale, we could produce some directly comparable numbers, where Joe's Fair strength is 0, and the SCS Fair is around two-billion or so. With the spread of the dice being only -4 to +4, Joe would need a lot of positive modifiers to even get the SC Starship's attention.

Watch me smoothly transition into talking about superheroes…

Now, we know Joe Normal Scale doesn't meaningfully overlap with Stellar Class Starship Scale. But what about Planetary Class Starships? Or maybe Galaxy Class, System Class, and Dreadnought Class? Here, there is potential for overlap… some of these classes could meaningfully coexist on the same number line, meaning a Fair Planetary Class Starship might be able to compete with a Fair System Class Starship. This gets messy, just like Joe Normal and Joe Ogre… when you start comparing Scales on the same number line, that natural English just gets in the way, because what you really want to compare is the numbers. (Technically, even when you aren't using Scale, it's the numbers that Objective Fudge players are after anyway… but with the small number of adjectives, you can get to the point that you don't really think in terms of numbers consciously. Adding the extra layer of complexity that comes from Scale pulls you back into thinking about numbers.)

So what about this… Just declare, for ease-of-play and story purposes, that none of those Starship Class Scales overlap in any meaningful way. That means System Class Starships always beat Planetary Class starships. And, quite arbitrarily, there are no starships in between these two classes. There is a range of power within the class (Terrible..Legendary), but no range of power between the classes.) While that is technically silly when compared to real-life, it's a possible slight-of-hand that may not impact story at all. Think of it this way… you're flying a Firefly Planetary Class ship, and you're only worried about two things… do you have a chance against that Imperial Cruiser or not.

Now, apply that to super powers. What if, for reasons of ease-of-play and story, we decided that super strength "clumped up" into clusters. If you charted all the super-strength characters in the universe, you'd find they fall very neatly into four or five non-overlapping groups. This may seem a bit strange, but I've seen some comic fans argue that this is how it effectively works in comics. (I don't agree, but that's not important.)

So let's say we have the following non-overlapping Scales:

• Normal
• Heroic
• Super
• Cosmic

Heroic always beats Normal, Super always beats Heroic, etc. Extenuating circumstances can change this… multiple Normals combining their efforts might be able to win over a Heroic character, etc. And, of course, this doesn't describe the whole character… just individual abilities. So you could have Great Super Strength, but only Normal Superb Armor, for instance.

The question is, what effect does this have on the story, game play, and character behavior? Let's recall that I'm rules-light… I don't really want numbers, I just want to have tags of some kind that let me compare abilities.

First, do the players notice this big gap in between levels? There can't ever be a Strength that fits neatly between Heroic and Super, able to compete against both. You're either one or the other. There's plenty of room inside the Scale to differentiate characters, but no way to effectively compete with the Scale above you under ordinary circumstances. The players know it's there, but does it really matter? Considering how many arbitrary things we accept in the name of ease-of-play (like hit-points or armor class), I don't think it should be a problem in the area of verisimilitude, that is, the appearance of truth or realism.

The story shouldn't be hurt. We just happen to be picking stories that never involve characters that would fall into the gaps of the non-overlapping Scales.

How does it affect freeform, rules-light gamemastering? I think it will help a lot… it neatly, by design, pigeon-holes characters' abilities into broad categories, and then I only have to deal with comparing closely-related powers on a finer scale. I think this would be even easier to deal with powers all rated on a flat number line, because I never have to deal with those instances in which the numbers are close and I have to make a judgment call on a very marginal comparison.

Now here's my biggest issue… how does a mix of Normal, Heroic, and Super scales in the PC group and their foes interact? If the Centurion has Normal Accuracy, a Heroic Powerblast and Super Armor, does this work when his foe is mis-matched, with Super Accuracy, Normal Armor and Heroic Attacks? His foe always hits, but can never penetrate Centurion's defenses. But Centurion can never hit his foe, either. You can build characters like this in popular superhero games like Champions, but you basically just don't. In my years of playing Champions, I learned the importance of designing a well-rounded character… you might trade a little defense for a little more offense, but never to the extreme I'm doing here.

The issue here is, I like "realistic" superheroes, which Champions had a problem with… because of the balance issues, superheroes and villains in Champions rarely had normal-level Dexterity, and thus a normal-level Combat Value. Even if the nature of their superpowers didn't in any way support being super-dextrous, we all just overlooked the issue and took super-level Dexterity and Speed (especially Speed) because it was just too inefficient not to… if you didn't move often enough and rarely hit when you did, it didn't matter how powerful your Fire Jet was.

But in the comics, Cyclops had only one mutant power… he could fire force-beams out of his eyes. He wasn't super fast, he couldn't bounce bullets (though his later costumes were mostly bullet-proof), he couldn't run very fast, but he was pretty accurate because hitting his target was about as easy as looking at them. But Cyclops survived… mostly because his writers wanted him to, and because the writers could do a lot of mis-direction and never put Cyke in a clearly dangerous situation in which nobody was available to help him. Colossus would stand in front of him to stop enemy fire, other team-mates would distract the heavy-hitters, shield him with TK, ice, or whatever. Obviously, play that is going to support a Cyclops-like character is going to have to be very loose with the rules. Cyclops would never survive in Champions… he's way too unbalanced. And really, Cyke wouldn't survive in the Marvel universe if he wasn't a cog in a larger, well-tuned and oiled fighting machine called the X-Men.

So is this setup going to steer players toward making "all Super" characters to avoid being out-classed in any category? Or can good roleplayers cope with this and, assuming carefully managed villains and combats, avoid power escalation to avoid mistakes taking too great a toll?

I think I'm just going to have to run with it and see what happens. I might have to tweak or even completely scrap the idea as play progresses, but I think we're down to field research to find out what really happens.

There… over 1700 words and that only deals with one issue I'm having with rules-light superheroes. I still have to deal with Knockout/Killing damage, how to wing it with knockback (that comicbook staple in which attacks send people flying across the room), and dealing with fatigue and power batteries. (And they aren't just passing oddities… one character is built around powers that run on electricity, and has a power that intentionally provides a lot of concussive force so it can knock things around.)

GenCon is over.

Well, another GenCon has ended. I didn't go, of course. Karen and I went once, during the second year of our marriage. That was over ten years ago, and every year we talk about going and nothing ever comes of it. I wanted to go during its last year in Milwaukee, just for "old time's sake"… I mean, even if I'd only been once before, Milwaukee was the home of GenCon back when I started playing D&D, and Milwaukee was some kind of dreamed-of mecca of gaming back when under-traveled me couldn't imagine how I'd ever get to go.

So I figure we'll let GenCon get good and settled into Indianapolis, and maybe we'll go next year. I'll be out of school and we might be able to look far enough ahead to make reservations. At least Indy seems better suited to hosting such a large convention than Milwaukee. I didn't want to go to GenCon again if I couldn't get a hotel within walking distance of the convention center, and there just weren't many of those, and they all filled up very quickly.

Superheroic Update

We had our initial, "let's talk about just what kind of supers campaign we're going to play," meeting on Sunday. It was nice to see Bill again… I haven't seen much of him in the last year or so. Nobody had a solid character idea, so we didn't get as deep into talking about characters as I'd have liked.

I've been waffling over digging out the old Champions stuff verses starting out with the new Freedom City stuff. Well, the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized that neither setting is especially distinctive… they're what I call "classic" superhero settings, emulating the worlds of Marvel and DC comics. There's really no difference in saying I'm using the Champions Universe and importing characters from Freedom City, or using Freedom City and importing characters from the Champions Universe. And I've got tons of Champs stuff in the basement. Not to mention how well I know much of the world.

In the end, it was nostalgia that tipped the scales. That and the fact that there just isn't much material out for Mutants & Masterminds, even though the system came out nearly two years ago. They just got around to publishing their first adventure.

Mostly what this means is that I'll go with the defaults of VIPER, UNTIL, and all the distinctive organizations of the Champions Universe. M&M just came out with their first adventure, while I can get entire books about VIPER and UNTIL (and have some of them… I think Hero Fifth has more new support material for it than M&M does. I think they may have put out more adventures than all the M&M sourcebooks combined.)

So I'll buy the M&M stuff to steal stuff from, but I think I'm going to be solidly in the Champions Universe camp. Time to go dig some books out of the basement.

Tried and true vs nifty and new

Having decided to run a superhero campaign, I've been debating whether I should shoot for a standard, old-school world where supers started appearing around WWII, or try something new and different, like making the PC's part of the first generation of supers and giving all superpowers a common origin. (Like Mutant X, for instance, but I've got a lot more ideas than that.)

I decided that since it's been so long since Karen and I have played supers, and the other two players in the group have never played supers, I'd just go with the standard. That way, I can draw on resources like Mutants & Mastermind's Freedom City.

I bought Freedom City a few months ago, because I'd heard good things about M&M and wanted to see their world. It's a great sourcebook for converting to Fudge because it contains almost no rules information… it's chock-full of setting goodness with little tiny d20 stat blocks. But I've heard enough good things about the game system itself, despite it being d20, that I broke down and ordered the main rule book just to see how they handle things, and to avoid the guess work in figuring out what some of the characters' powers are. (Got a good deal from an eBay store… came to 20% off the list price after shipping.)

I'm sitting here asking myself why, with all that Champions stuff in the basement, am I buying new superhero source material? I dunno. Maybe it's because I never saw the Champions universe as being very coherent. Maybe it's because Karen and I know a lot about it, and our two other players won't know all the background we do about VIPER, UNTIL, and so on. Maybe it's because the M&M products have lots of pretty pictures that Champions products don't.

I have to admit, although I'm not too picky about art in roleplaying games, comic books are a visual medium, and having well-done art in a superhero game is a must. Hero Games had its share of good artists, but those old books don't compete with the full-color art of M&M.

And then there's just the fact that I like to be in on what's new instead of "living in the past," so to speak. I know there's new Champions stuff out, but M&M looks like it's going to to well and we'll see a lot more products. I don't know about Champions… the fifth edition wasn't a revolutionary new thing, and I don't know where that product line is going to go.

Of course, just because I'm using Freedom City doesn't mean I can't mine my Champions material, old and new, for material to incorporate.

So, we're getting together tomorrow (Sunday) to discuss preliminaries about the game and look at some character concepts. The ball is rolling, and I'm excited to finally be so close to roleplaying again.

The sleeper awakes

I haven't posted here for awhile because I've been distracted from most things gaming in the last couple months. I'm really wanting to run something soon… and it looks like I will, finally.

I've started watching Mutant-X on DVD, which, despite it's mediocre start (I've only seen the first four episodes) has me interested in running superheroes again. It's an interest that's always been hanging there in the background for years. Champions was the game that converted me from D&D to build-your-own point systems, from "start weak with rapid growth" to "start powerful with slow growth." My style has grown away from Champions… it's too big, bulky and full of flaws to my eyes now. I play a far more free-form style now, and rules like Champions just get in the way.

Oddly, I've never quite had the chance, and never quite had the guts, to try to run an all-out superhero campaign using Fudge. I tried to free-form and diceless with Theatrix for a one-shot, and that had mixed results. And somehow I've been intimidated by trying to free-form something as complex as superpowers. Between that and just not having time to game everything I want, I haven't run or played superheroes in over nine years. That's a long time, considering that I played almost nothing but superheroes for the seven years before.

Mutant-X is both encouraging and discouraging at the same time. The heroes' powers are fairly simple and limited… feral cat girl, empath girl, density control guy, and electric guy. Simple and limited seems like it'd be a good place to start with learning to handle superpowers in a free-form system. But electric guy shows how differences in assumption can make free-form superheroics difficult.

Electric guy can throw electricity around… that's his power, he generates an electric charge and throws it at things. When he hits people, they're thrown off their feet, but they're just knocked out. Okay, that's comic book cinematics, and I can buy that assumption. But he can also use his powers to disarm and re-arm car alarms, start a car without the key just by zapping the ignition switch, provide power to a computer system when the power grid fades… but at the same time, he can blow out the locks in a safe deposit box and scramble a computer system with the same application of his power. I think that's where the assumptions get fuzzy, because I scoff at the television when his electrical bolts have some specific effect on an electronic system which would be very unlikely. Drop bolts of lightning into a car alarm system and you're going to just fry the thing, not disarm it and get it to unlock the car for you. At least that's my opinion, but if the player's opinion differs… with free-form, there aren't any rules to fall back on, and I'm afraid it degenerates into the GM and player negotiating details about the power in the middle of an action scene. If the GM lets it slide this one time to keep things flowing, he may have trouble denying the power stunt later in the game… "But it worked on the boss's car, why doesn't it work now?"

The rules of Champions, in all their infinite detail, clear up a lot of these assumption clashes pretty early on. In part, by washing out all the little special effects because people get focused on the game mechanics (10d6 Energy Blast) instead of the actual power (throws Lightning Bolts), so trying to finesse a car alarm doesn't even enter the picture because it isn't obviously a part of "10d6 Energy Blast." That's part of the reason I quit playing games like Champions… I don't want the game system to channel the assumptions about the game world or style of play in the wrong direction. So Champions didn't solve the problem, it just swept it under the rug and hid it, using a bit of unintentional misdirection.

I was thinking about running something a lot like Mutant-X, with fairly minor power characters. Some of them might have a fair amount of raw power, but they'd often be one-trick-wonders and have poor control over their abilities. Yet I'm afraid that might not be very satisfactory if the players want to play something more. It's one thing to see empath girl get told "the time for your telempathic powers has passed, this time we need the big guns" on television. It's quite another thing for your own character to hear that. I'm not sure I want to juggle free-form superpowers and a campaign setup that requires delicate handling to make sure the characters all get enough screen time. Superhero games involve a lot of combat… that's the point to a lot of it, and the easiest way to deal with the combat spotlight is to make characters flexible enough to give them something to do in most situations.

The more I think about it, the more I think I'm going to run a traditional four-color supers world and just deal with the free-form issue as it comes up.

Right now, what I probably need to be dealing with is how I'm going to handle the effects of combat… fatigue, knock-out vs lethal damage, knockback and so on. How much do I want to quantify these things and how much do I want to leave them free-form? (I'm not a totally ruleless gamemaster, I just want the smallest number of rules to support the look and feel I want out of my game.)