Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

[zornwil]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

I'd like to add it on that may be just my play experience...

 

... but the "status quo" type of supers game. The one where the general game world is status quo... the villains attack, get beat... nothing changes... next week, rinse and repeat.

 

I've never gamed with a group that accepted the general inanity and pointlessness of most supers comic material... where there is never true success... the world is not changed for the better (or the worse) by their actions... that it is all sound and thunder, signifying nothing. My players have always wanted to see villains got to jail and stay there. To attempt and end world war and hunger with their powers, to change the course of society and shape history... to really have an impact with their play.

 

Could be that others enjoy the more whimsical sturm und drang of supers, but I've never seen this work in actual play. Basically, the players want their character actions to matter... which means change takes place... and the status quo is not.

I have found my players in general, both in the past and present, want to change the world or simialr big things, but they don't really sweat the run-of-the-mill villains who return. The really evil ones or the ones that have done personally bad things to them they won't tolerate a revolving door for.

 

Just on a tangent but re this thread, I have to admit I have been guilty of the "must get truth out of them" mentality as have some of my players on occassion - I think for everyone it depends a bit on their PC, but also still often some go overboard.

[zornwil]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

If I want a villain to break out of jail' date=' I generally design a specific scenario around it. That way it's not a case of arbitrarily yanking the PCs' victory out from under them, but rather the villain's revenge as part of a storyline.[/quote']

Yeah, usually there's some sort of specific incident, often woven into other storylines going on.

[SteveZilla]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

"And then we'll bzz-bzz-bzz"

This is the secret plan that you get to watch unfold as it happens, usually for maximum dramatic effect. No, if you're playing a game you (rightly) spend 2 hours arguing every contingency. Then it goes kablooey the moment you open the door and see the red dragon.

 

Sometimes also known as a "LLLLEEEERRRROOOOOYYYYY JEEEENNNNNKIIIINNNNSSS!!!!!!" moment?

[SteveZilla]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

World threatening story-lines [/b]are also tough. What happens if the players fail? Game over?

 

Been there, done that (as a player). Yep, game over, though it wasn't the whole world. Only a 20 mile radius sphere around The Fragile Object That Should Not Be Broken that was simply gone.

 

But much, much later, the GM resurrects the game in a time-honored comic book way. We weren't dead, just catapulted into a different dimension!

[Karmakaze]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

I do recall losing a Star Trek Paintball LARP to the Borg. We, er, lost the entire Alpha Quadrant. Oops. The next game needed a universe reboot.

[Hugh Neilson]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

I do recall losing a Star Trek Paintball LARP to the Borg. We' date=' er, lost the entire Alpha Quadrant. Oops. The next game needed a universe reboot.[/quote']

 

Well, the "Time Warp lets you keep reliving the events until you get it right" plot is fairly common in Star Trek (funny how they only screw up big time when there's an extremely rare and unlikely deus ex machina around to let them fix it...), so you should be OK on that one.

[shaunclinton]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

Time loops and time travel are two things that work well in the source material but usually go kablooey when PCs get involved.

 

The Time Loop is immensly boring if you have to go through it more than a couple of times generally. One way of getting it to work is to have the PCs come in at the start of the 'last loop' and then to discover that they have been trapped in the loop for x number of repititions. Of course, this only works with loops that you don't remember so it doesn't work for the Korvac/Captain America style time loops.

 

Time Travel works well when tightly controlled. But often in the source material the 'characters' choose ridiculous times to go back to when trying to fix a problem. Likely the PC won't make such interesting and dramatic mistakes and will just go to the most efficient possible point to fix everything.

[Psylint]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

Part two of this is' date=' if done on the board, or through Roleplay, how do you get the PCs unconcious. Either have to use some sort of plot device (which they won't like, or will like and want to grab on the way out so they can use it) or do so in a fight. This begs the question for the players are there certain fights we're supposed to win, and certain fights were supposed to lose. If that's the case then the players may 'give up' anytime a fight is too challenging figureing that the GM has some death trap he wants to put them in.[/quote']

 

Some alternatives:

1) Tried and true kidnap the DNPC, steal the focus, etc.

2) Have villans beat up a normal and have them tell the victim "and when uber-guy comes 'round, tell 'im I'm waiting for him."

3) Have a villan group coordinate simultaneous attacks in distant locales requiring the hero team to split up. [be real sneaky and have some be diversions, and concentrate power in one or two sub groups]

4) Gun emplacement: have antagonists develop a fortified position with the ability to harm at range (like a fortified artillery position).

5) Use tactics. One of my players has an Enrage, but being a terribly good fighter, it really wasn't hampering him much; so I got one of my fleetist antagonists to pop him in the nose (thereby enraging him) and then had him beat feet into an ambush.

6) Push them through their Secret ID. For example, Laura the co-worker is really getting to think that Bob the otherwise mild mannered office manager (aka Mr. Furious) is really a superhero. While slugging coffee at Starbucks on Gold Street, Thug the Abominable literally breaks into the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This catches the player between two compulsions the desire to remain secret and the need to beat up bad guys. Alternatively, the "non-death trappy" way out violates a psychological lim, like fear, or requires something anti-heroic like letting an innocent get hurt.

7) Impersonation. Have the antagonists impersonate the player through shapeshift, disguise, mental illusions, etc.

8) Duty calls. Have someone important request the player to undertake the suicide mission.

 

 

Cheers

[GamePhil]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

The One Trick Pony (OTP) -- these characters only have one major power, one thing they can do. Many of the X-family characters over the years have been OTPs. They have a big attack but no defense or movement powers. They have duplication, and that's it. Etc.

 

Well, really, the X-family are not supposed to be OTP's. Cyclops is supposed to be a superhero-class martial artist, who can hold his own with Wolverine (who can hold his own with Captain America) with only occasional use of the optic blasts. Angel is rich and handsome, useful in some areas that we never see because the focus is on the action, but the implication of his skill with flight leads easily to martial prowess, though we rarely see that, and now never will again because he's got big knives coming out of his back instead of wings. Ah, well. And so on. One-Power-Ponies can fit fine into a game, as long as that one power is not the sole definition of the character.

 

The Street Level Guy Who Runs with Epic Heroes -- classic example is Batman, who became The Batgod so he could hang with the Justice League, and yet still has trouble with the street-level foes of his classic rogues gallery. This in part leads us to...

 

Again, that's a flaw in writing. Batman has a lot to offer a group of much more powerful heroes, because he has that fabulous brain, because he is sneaky, and so on. This allows the team to work better with him than without him, but if both his personal and his team stories are well written, does not allow him to beat his own foes up on his own any more easily. Not that all of the stories are well written...

 

Power Levels of Convenience -- The same hero that threatens Cosmic Villain of the Year in issue #29 has trouble with a bunch of mooks in issue #37 later that year.

 

My favorite example is an issue of the Avengers where they are fighting Doctor Doom and he hands them their heads, including Iron Man and Wonder Man (though not Thor), but later on Iron Man confronts him in his own book and more than adequately holds his own. No argument here on how to fit the same concept into the game, simply because I don't like it in the original material, either (though if IM had gone in with some cool new device or something that explained it, that wouldn't bother me).

[sinanju]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

If the group has trust built up' date=' yes, it's fine in my opinion. Often, we have characters trapped after their player missed a session... Okay, I admit it, it's the one evil GM thing I do, otherwise I'm pretty clean. But seriously because we have trust it has worked fine.[/quote']

 

A (well, THE really) group I gamed with in college and for many years thereafter before moving to Oregon had a GM who loves the pulps. His game was (and still is) rife with pulp-style conventions. One of which is the PCs getting captured and then busting out of the bad guy's base, wreaking havoc on the way out (see any Modesty Blaise novel).

 

Mostly the players went along with this. But...occasionally we got tired of it. One game session (that I missed, alas) a couple of PCs saw the handwriting on the wall and they decided NOT THIS TIME. What followed was an epic battle in which a couple of usually easy-going PCs started channeling the Samurai ethos of "Death before Dishonor" and made their stand.

 

They slaughtered huge numbers of bad guys before finally making their escape.

[sinanju]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

I have found my players in general, both in the past and present, want to change the world or simialr big things, but they don't really sweat the run-of-the-mill villains who return. The really evil ones or the ones that have done personally bad things to them they won't tolerate a revolving door for.

 

Just on a tangent but re this thread, I have to admit I have been guilty of the "must get truth out of them" mentality as have some of my players on occassion - I think for everyone it depends a bit on their PC, but also still often some go overboard.

 

Heh. In the aforementioned pulp-style game I played in for so long, MY personal bugaboo was the inevitable escape of the master villain. I had to stop playing one PC with some of the players' characters because of it. We were dealing with Morgan Le Faye (again) and had captured her. I wanted her dead. The rest of the PC group was negotiating with her; in return for her help in rescuing another PC, they would allow her to go free. That wasn't acceptable to me, which is why my PC didn't know about the negotiations until I stumbled across them. I tried my damnedest to kill her, and nearly killed another PC in the process (it was an accident, but...). Didn't quite become a player vendetta, but it was close.

 

ANother time, a fellow player and I were driving over to the GMs house for a game. The previous session had seen the defeat of Nightbeard--but he'd escaped, sailing away on his warship. On the drive over, the other player and I discussed it and we agreed that THAT WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH. We arrived at the game and announced to the GM that whatever adventure he had planed would have to wait; our characters were sailing in pursuit of Nightbeard.

 

And so we did. And we did eventually catch up to and kill Nightbeard in another epic battle (I think my previous misadventure may have convinced the GM that occasionally the PCs needed to achieve some more permanent solutions.)

[zornwil]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

A (well, THE really) group I gamed with in college and for many years thereafter before moving to Oregon had a GM who loves the pulps. His game was (and still is) rife with pulp-style conventions. One of which is the PCs getting captured and then busting out of the bad guy's base, wreaking havoc on the way out (see any Modesty Blaise novel).

 

Mostly the players went along with this. But...occasionally we got tired of it. One game session (that I missed, alas) a couple of PCs saw the handwriting on the wall and they decided NOT THIS TIME. What followed was an epic battle in which a couple of usually easy-going PCs started channeling the Samurai ethos of "Death before Dishonor" and made their stand.

 

They slaughtered huge numbers of bad guys before finally making their escape.

Of course, that's fair, too. I try not to overdo it, but when people miss games it's a good opportunity sometimes.

[David Johnston]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

That's always been the trouble with Super Tech.

 

Take, for example, Captain Cold. He invented a gun that shoots cold. Does he patent it and make tons of money? No. He robs banks.

 

So many villains expend all of their resources to rob banks, when the gadgets they make could net them millions in the free market.

 

If they could be massmarketed. That isn't necessarily the case. I had an NPC who had an intriguing super-power. He could change the conductivity of metals producing room temperature superconductors. There was no technological way to duplicate this power, yet. And he could only produce so much of the stuff per day. As a result gizmo jockeys were pulling off robberies just to get enough money to buy a tiny amount of unobtanium. (He couldn't sell it legitimately. He was Hunted by too many people who wanted control of him.)

[Manic Typist]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

Mostly the players went along with this. But...occasionally we got tired of it. One game session (that I missed, alas) a couple of PCs saw the handwriting on the wall and they decided NOT THIS TIME. What followed was an epic battle in which a couple of usually easy-going PCs started channeling the Samurai ethos of "Death before Dishonor" and made their stand.

 

They slaughtered huge numbers of bad guys before finally making their escape.

 

Rep if you give details!

 

I love a good war story.

[sinanju]

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

 

Rep if you give details!

 

I love a good war story.

 

I'd love to, but as I said I wasn't there and only heard about it after the fact.