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.)