Let the game begin...

Today we got our superhero campaign off the ground. Just barely, and we're still kind of wobbly, but at least it's moving.

None of the characters are quite complete on the character sheets (one of them still hasn't been translated from Champions stats), we're not even entirely sure how we're using the rules, and I had a half-baked idea for a starting adventure... but by gosh, we actually roleplayed. I've been away from it for too long... going on a year, I think. It's nice to be roleplaying again, even if our start is a bit shaky. And we didn't even get to have combat. (The actual roleplaying was a bit short because we were doing some character info tweaking, deciding just how everyone met, what kind of headquarters, if any, they might have, and where everyone lived. The latter is especially important to ask of a pack of five winged space-lizards who don't have a job.)

In my last post, I talked a lot about Fudge Scale issues, and while I still feel like the only way to use Scale usefully in a superhero game is to have arbitrary, non-overlapping Scales, I just decided to pretty much can the Scale thing altogether and just go with numbers. Everything else I tried felt too artificial (the non-overlapping Scales) and trying to compare Superb Heroic Strength to Good Super Armor just took too much mental work. So I'm just using numbers because they're the quickest. Nobody knows what Superb Heroic Strength really means until they look it up on the chart to see about how much you can lift with it or compare it to the defenses of inanimate objects. Without a real-world reference (how much can I lift, how fast can I fly, how think a wall can I blast through), the adjectives just aren't very descriptive because the scale is very open-ended. In fantasy, I can say that Legendary is the peak of human ability and we can all get an idea of what each level means in that context. But that doesn't work so well with fifteen or twenty levels in the "usable by PC's" range.

One of the things I'm finding hardest about trying to choose the rules to use in a "mostly freeform" format is that I tend to creep more and more into "concrete rules" instead of "freeform." I had started to throw out Relative Degree because it can act wonky at large scale differences (in my opinion, yours may vary), but then I started asking since when I paid close attention to relative degree anyway? I mean to use it only as a guideline... in fact, the die rolls themselves are only supposed to be a guideline. Yet I find myself again and again wanting to fall back on the "crutch" of having rules to back up my decisions, or make the decisions for me when I don't know what I want to do (or what I'm doing). On one hand, I need a frame of reference... I want a good, general idea of how the system is supposed to work before I start freeforming the results. I don't know why that is. Maybe it's because the superhero abilities are so broad and all over the map, and I don't have any clear reference into just how thick a wall the group brick can punch through without either describing the character's strength in painfully minute detail ("Now, say you're faced with a double-thickness cinder-block wall... how many times do you have to punch that in order to make a hole big enough to walk through. Now what if it was triple-thick?"), or making a set of general rules which I can apply and use until I get a more intuitive feel for the kind of results it develops.

That's kind of a weird approach... using rules to develop a baseline from which to base my freeform decisions. Heh. I don't really care if we roll dice, add up numbers and do some comparisons, so long as it's all fast and I can tweak it on the fly when I need to. I don't need every decision to be "ah, you rolled high, he rolled low, that will certainly hit, and you do... um... oooh, he looks pretty hurt by that one." The danger I run into is what I did in the last fantasy campaign... the heroes won far too often. I couldn't seem to bring myself to really hurt them, because that would have seemed like I was hurting them arbitrarily. So instead, I let them win arbitrarily. I was just at the point where I realized that I really needed to do something about that when I took a break from gaming to keep up with school.

Now, just to get the balance right in the superhero game from the beginning, without arbitrarily walking all over them in the first combat.