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Should Villains Be More Powerful Than Heroes?


PamelaIsley

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As I create more 6E characters, I've been looking a lot more closely at villain stats in the 6E books, specifically the three volume set (Master Villlains, Teams, and Solo Villains).  I also have the 5E books, so the issue I'm going to discuss isn't just related to 6E.  When you look at the solo villain book, most villains in it are built to take on a team of superheroes.  Most of their writeups even talk about this fact.  There are a few that aren't built using 400 or more points, but those are really the exceptions. 

 

First off, from a gaming standpoint, I can understand why they are doing this.  Hero seems designed for a group to play and Champions deliberately makes superheroes so powerful that henchmen aren't a plausible threat (there is even an entire section on how to make sure agent fights go fast and aren't boring).  So that means the big bad guy for an adventure needs to take on multiple heroes at once.

 

But from a universe building standpoint, I'm not sure this makes much sense. 

 

Champions Universe says there are roughly three supervillains for every two superheroes.  So there are more villains in the world than heroes.  So we have a conceptual problem almost immediately.  If the villains are not only more numerous than the heroes, but also more powerful, then the world seems in trouble (you can always make the case that their divided, selfish nature keeps everyone safe -- evil eats evil and all that -- but that's a pretty unsatisfying answer).

 

Does the idea that individual villains are more powerful than individual heroes fit with other comic universes?  It certainly doesn't with the Batman and Superman settings.  With very few exceptions, Batman as an individual is significantly more capable than almost all of his Rogues Gallery, especially if you look at the era around TAS and the 1990s and 2000s (the time period I'm most familiar with).  Superman, of course, goes without saying.  The X-Men face a lot of villains that are threats to their entire team, but I'm not sure the average X-Men villain is more capable than the main team members.  Same goes for Spider-Man.  Is he weaker than each member of his Rogue's Gallery?  I will concede that I know very little about other Marvel rogues galleries.

 

I'm a lot more familiar with Batman and the JLA than with any other comic setting.  So a lot of my biases come from that universe.  It seems to me that the tenor of most adventures is that heroes have to figure out what the villain is doing, unwind the villain's plot, and then confront them.  Is the last part supposed to be the most challenging?  If a villain is more powerful than a hero or a team of heroes straight up, then I'm not really understanding why a lot of them go to such trouble to have elaborate plots. 

 

Anyway, my own thoughts are a little rambling.  I'm mostly interested in people's opinions.  Should the average supervillain be more powerful than the average superhero?  Is raw combat power the best way to balance a supervillain against a superteam?  Does the Champions Universe go a little too far in making so many 400+ point villains?

 

My own opinion is that villains should be roughly equal to heroes (if not a little weaker), that most adventures are more fun when they are more about the villain's plot than the villain's stats, and that henchmen / agents / normal people should be more lethal than presented in CU.

 

Thanks all!

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It depends on what you're trying to do, what the scenario is you're trying to run.

If you want an epic battle where the heroes have to struggle to triumph, then the villains should be MUCH more powerful than the heroes.  

If you want a tough fight where the villains seem roughly equal to the heroes, you need the villains to be slightly more powerful than the heroes.

If you want the heroes to feel powerful and look good to the world, the villians should be weaker than the heroes.

 

I don't like a "one size fits all" approach to every scenario.  Sometimes the heroes should just mop up on enemies.  Sometimes it should be a desperate battle to survive.

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51 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

I don't like a "one size fits all" approach to every scenario.  Sometimes the heroes should just mop up on enemies.  Sometimes it should be a desperate battle to survive.

This is very true.  And Master Villains and Villain Teams fit in well when you need more serious combat challenges.  (As an aside, when I look at many of the 5E/6E master villain writeups, I just laugh.  These people aren't supervillains.  They are gods.  It's just way out of whack with how I would build a world.)


But in terms of universe construction, if you tell players "the average hero and villain are about the same", and then they only fight 400+ point villains over and over because you're trying to make it a challenge for a team in terms of that final fight, then people might start to look askance at how you've created your setting.

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Thinking more about this, it really depends on how a hero/villain encounter goes down. 

If they devolve into stand-up slugfests, then villains have to team up or power up to be interesting fights for a PC group. 

But if villains have objectives (I'm here to rob that bank) and will prioritize those over combat (Screw fighting these guys, I've got my sack-o-money) and disengage or take hostages or otherwise play dirty, a single villain who'd 50/50 a 1v1 with a PC can pose an interesting challenge to a PC group. 

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Part of the problem is that the majority of Champions games are not solo hero adventures, while the majority of comic books are.

 

The Joker is less powerful than Batman.  As long as the Joker sticks to his areas of strength, he can be a reasonable opponent for the Bat.  He avoids direct combat unless he has some kind of advantage to even the scales, so he'll always have a secret weapon, or a trap, or some hostages or something to distract Batman.  The conflict usually ends when Batman gets past all the obstacles and is able to confront Joker directly.  When it gets to "punching in the face" time, Batman wins.

 

However, Joker doesn't really scale well when you've got the other members of the Justice League there.  Or other heroes at all, really.  The more heroes involved, the higher the likelihood that somebody is going to engage him in combat before he's ready.  Or avoid his obstacles.  Imagine if Batman was teamed up with Nightcrawler of the X-Men.  Bamf!  Punch!  Fight over.

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I guess the balancing issue in Hero comes down to relative points. If I have a 400-point villain facing two 400-point heroes, then the villain should lose. If I make the villain 600-points, then they could probably take on two 400-point heroes, but a third would probably tip things too far against them. Three 400-point heroes versus a single 800-point villain, then things get dramatic.

 

Doctor Doom seems more powerful than any single member of the Fantastic Four, but he usually has to take on two or more of them at once and often all four.

 

If you want even fights, villain teams of equal points to the heroes becomes the thing or a single master villain built on more points.

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Over the last several years, I've built up a pretty sizable collection of Marvel and DC character writeups.  I've tried to scale most of them appropriately with each other, and I've read through an immense amount of primary source material.  Then I try to convert them into usable game stats.  I'm a bit of a completionist, so if Batman turns out to be 900 points, that's okay.

 

A lot of villains turn out to be way cheaper than the heroes, because they only challenge the hero on one level.  Killer Croc is physically very dangerous, as long as Batman doesn't have his utility belt handy.  But Croc's crimes are easy to solve, he doesn't challenge Bruce at all mentally.  Penguin is very intelligent, and he has a gadget pool of different umbrella weapons that allow him to be versatile.  He will also have minions and traps that he uses to wear down the Dark Knight.  But once Batman gets his hands on him, it's over.

 

Villains are often specialized -- a lot of them have one great move that makes them very effective against an unprepared hero.  I think I built Count Vertigo as having a 12D6 NND Area Effect Cone Flash attack versus all sense groups, and then a bunch of Lightning Reflexes.  The idea was that if he catches you with his effect, you're too disoriented to really take an action.  You don't know up from down and can't really take any actions.  This sort of power is way outside the lines of what a normal hero would use, it basically hoses anybody who is hit with it (potentially entire teams).  And Count Vertigo likes to attack from surprise.  But if that move fails for whatever reason, he doesn't have anything to fall back on.  He'll be stunned by an average attack, and it's not like he's an awesome hand to hand combatant.  Villains can be one trick ponies, heroes shouldn't be.

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4 minutes ago, massey said:

  Villains can be one trick ponies, heroes shouldn't be.

 

Very few Champions villains are built this way.  Most are built using more points than a standard hero and have a ton of different powers and skills.

 

I do think that focusing on points is sometimes misguided (it's why I like M&M's Power Level, which is a good short hand; Hero has nothing comparable, you have to look at a ton of different numbers).

 

But most CU villains in the 6E solo book are more powerful than a standard 400-point hero in every way (DCs, total point value, OCV/DCV).  It's that aspect that I think is off.  I don't think the average villain in a setting should be more powerful than the average hero (in fact, I like the opposite construction).  I don't like it in practice and I don't like it conceptually.  But that's just my opinion.

 

On a side note, I spent years converting DC characters into M&M 2E format to have a consistent universe.  I won't repeat that work for Hero, but it's a lot of fun.

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This topic highlights the differences between what makes a good superhero story and what makes a good superhero role-playing game.

 

Superhero stories usually delay the fight scene for as long as possible because once the fight is over, the story is over. The drama and interesting bits of a superhero story are the chase, discovering what's going on, and identifying who's responsible for it. In fact, there are superhero stories such as Batman where the super villain specifically does not target or want to directly fight their superhero nemesis. In the Dark Knight movies, the Joker doesn't attack Batman, he attacks normal people and institutions. The Joker creates situations where Batman must respond to his schemes rather than confront him. Losing a fight is usually part of the Joker's plan. "While you've been wasting your time fighting me, my minions have been busy strapping Harvey Dent and Rachel to explosives."

 

Superhero games tend to devote most of their rules to combat resolution and HERO System is no different. Players expect to use their powers to fight. I don't know what your games are like, but in the Champions games I've played most fights are completed in one turn or less. That's true even when a team of superheroes fights a more powerful opponent who also has minion support. Having weaker super villains might change that dynamic to fights lasting one to two phases, and there's nothing wrong with short fights as long as everyone enjoys it. Such games become less "Superhero fight club" and more like the source material where heroes spend their time and effort chasing and overcoming obstacles between them and their super villain targets.

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I've had a few fights last 2 or 3 turns, but have had just as many last less than half a turn.  I do think that it's good for a setting to have a handful of "mega heroes", who are usually busy handling their own business but provide at least a conceptual counterbalance to the proliferation of mega villains.  Someone's gotta be keeping the Dread Dark Destroyah in check when the PCs aren't around...

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In my mind the Skyrim Draugr Meme is in effect for Villains, when the hero is training team work, going to charity events, and living their life the villain is training.  This is sort of to show that most villains don't work well together so they will have more chances to improve, build better gear, or learn new spells.  That said in a realistic setting (not one where the villains at some point won, and heroes are just starting to stand up to them again) there should be a mix, some villains will be new and less powerful, some older and more powerful.

 

If the villain is going to solo a team them having damage reduction that kicks in after the damage gets past the armor (I forget the order of Damage reduction and Armor) might not be a bad idea that way they don't go down in a round or two but still can be otherwise as powerful as any one member of the hero team.  I also tend to look at effective power level rather than total power level as well, a villain that pays for 1,000 henchmen is going to be more expensive, though he isn't likely to use them all in a single fight.

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13 minutes ago, Durzan Malakim said:

This topic highlights the differences between what makes a good superhero story and what makes a good superhero role-playing game.

 

Superhero stories usually delay the fight scene for as long as possible because once the fight is over, the story is over. The drama and interesting bits of a superhero story are the chase, discovering what's going on, and identifying who's responsible for it. In fact, there are superhero stories such as Batman where the super villain specifically does not target or want to directly fight their superhero nemesis. In the Dark Knight movies, the Joker doesn't attack Batman, he attacks normal people and institutions. The Joker creates situations where Batman must respond to his schemes rather than confront him. Losing a fight is usually part of the Joker's plan. "While you've been wasting your time fighting me, my minions have been busy strapping Harvey Dent and Rachel to explosives."

 

When Dr. Bob Simpson was our GM in the late 90's, the flow of his games was a lot like this. there were three or four sessions of investigation, and det3ective work, with the occasional short fight, or Training day for the heroes, then all of that investigation and detective work would culminate in a fight, some s a long fight. He didn't use the single boss encounter very often, but it was ususally groups of villains, versus the heroes, so fights would last about 4-6 turns, and everyone was gasping for breath and using cover to recover. All in all he ran a very "rewarding game".

 

13 minutes ago, Durzan Malakim said:

 

Superhero games tend to devote most of their rules to combat resolution and HERO System is no different. Players expect to use their powers to fight. I don't know what your games are like, but in the Champions games I've played most fights are completed in one turn or less. That's true even when a team of superheroes fights a more powerful opponent who also has minion support. Having weaker super villains might change that dynamic to fights lasting one to two phases, and there's nothing wrong with short fights as long as everyone enjoys it. Such games become less "Superhero fight club" and more like the source material where heroes spend their time and effort chasing and overcoming obstacles between them and their super villain targets.

 

The situation we had as players, was that the villains might be as interested as you were in them,  especially after their schemes were thwarted, and they only barely escaped. Hell, the Heroes had a set of protocols of escaping when a fight went against them badly,  we had team tactics down to a science, and we did not suffer the fate of Dr. Bob's earlier player group, that lost a member to a mind control/transform, making the PC, into an NPC Villain, because he got captured by the Big Magical bad of his campaign. To keep the tactics interesting, bot sides had numbers and abilities to keep the combats dynamic, and i learned a lot from him. it made "Boss Fights" look and feel like cactus covered punching bags.

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The timing of this topic is interesting because this weekend I got to experience what groups of "weaker" enemies could do a "stronger" character. A group of 200-point minions completely pwned my 300-point hero.  Granted, this was a case where the GM had three really good dice rolls targeted directly at a hole in my defenses, but from a pure point-total versus point-total perspective it should not have been as one-sided as it was.

 

Point comparisons are only as good as the assumption behind them. Are the limitations on villain powers really limiting if the GM never plays the villains when their powers would be limited? If villains can ignore campaign limits, does it matter how many points they're built on? Is a lower-point villain who is spectacular at one thing really weaker than a higher-point hero who's just good or moderate at multiple things?

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18 minutes ago, Durzan Malakim said:

This topic highlights the differences between what makes a good superhero story and what makes a good superhero role-playing game.

 

Superhero stories usually delay the fight scene for as long as possible because once the fight is over, the story is over. The drama and interesting bits of a superhero story are the chase, discovering what's going on, and identifying who's responsible for it. In fact, there are superhero stories such as Batman where the super villain specifically does not target or want to directly fight their superhero nemesis. In the Dark Knight movies, the Joker doesn't attack Batman, he attacks normal people and institutions. The Joker creates situations where Batman must respond to his schemes rather than confront him. Losing a fight is usually part of the Joker's plan. "While you've been wasting your time fighting me, my minions have been busy strapping Harvey Dent and Rachel to explosives."

 

Superhero games tend to devote most of their rules to combat resolution and HERO System is no different. Players expect to use their powers to fight. I don't know what your games are like, but in the Champions games I've played most fights are completed in one turn or less. That's true even when a team of superheroes fights a more powerful opponent who also has minion support. Having weaker super villains might change that dynamic to fights lasting one to two phases, and there's nothing wrong with short fights as long as everyone enjoys it. Such games become less "Superhero fight club" and more like the source material where heroes spend their time and effort chasing and overcoming obstacles between them and their super villain targets.

 

Strongly agree with all of this.

 

Unfortunately, many players don't have the patience or the cognitive framework to pursue investigation, unravel plots, figure out what's really going on, etc. This is true in most genres, but seems to be particularly true in superheroes, where they want to get to the big fight throwing coffee cans of damage and knocking back bad guys for crazy distance, and so forth.

 

With supers, I try to remember to not fight human nature and reverse the scenes and story beats, placing conflict where normally there would be build up / plot development, and plot development where normally there would be conflict. 

 

One of the main issues with developing a story in any rpg is that what drives the characters forward is their individual agendas / motivations. But a lot of superhero character motivations are simply "...they fight crime!" or "...oppose supervillainy!", etc. Put a face for them to punch in front of them, and their purpose is clear. Put a situation for them to figure out in front of them, which is basically a maze with one or more supervillains hiding in it metaphorically speaking, and most players with their paper thin character motivations become inert with no clear drive forward.

 

Some players of course want to play "mystery men" detective types, and want to engage with a plot that requires / allows them to explore investigation and mystery. But if you've got one of those and three other more four color players at the table, its the classic problem of balancing the boredom factor for the uninterested players while you and the the plot engaged player scratch your story development itches.

 

Including some lesser moments of combat like breadcrumbs through the maze to a big bad on the other hand allows the interstitial bits of the story to be doled out but keeps the players who showed up for fights periodically reengaged, and also allows the players to feel that their characters are powerful. Finding the balance between interesting and boring is the trick of course...too much and taking out the trash becomes a slog, too few and there wasn't much point to having them at all. 

 

I sometimes think the most important skill a GM can have is the ability to find "goldilocks zones"...not too much or too little of every thing that goes into a gaming session. In retrospect most errors I make as a GM can be reduced to "...overdid it a bit on that one..." or "...shoulda had more of that other thing...". 

 

Accordingly, I try to keep the threat levels of my bad guys and other obstacles distributed along a curve. A mix of stronger and weaker, solo and team, vectors of attack, motivations, etc. Variety. Seems to work, usually. 

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12 minutes ago, Killer Shrike said:

 

Strongly agree with all of this.

 

Unfortunately, many players don't have the patience or the cognitive framework to pursue investigation, unravel plots, figure out what's really going on, etc. This is true in most genres, but seems to be particularly true in superheroes, where they want to get to the big fight throwing coffee cans of damage and knocking back bad guys for crazy distance, and so forth.

 

With supers, I try to remember to not fight human nature and reverse the scenes and story beats, placing conflict where normally there would be build up / plot development, and plot development where normally there would be conflict. 

 

One of the main issues with developing a story in any rpg is that what drives the characters forward is their individual agendas / motivations. But a lot of superhero character motivations are simply "...they fight crime!" or "...oppose supervillainy!", etc. Put a face for them to punch in front of them, and their purpose is clear. Put a situation for them to figure out in front of them, which is basically a maze with one or more supervillains hiding in it metaphorically speaking, and most players with their paper thin character motivations become inert with no clear drive forward.

 

Some players of course want to play "mystery men" detective types, and want to engage with a plot that requires / allows them to explore investigation and mystery. But if you've got one of those and three other more four color players at the table, its the classic problem of balancing the boredom factor for the uninterested players while you and the the plot engaged player scratch your story development itches.

 

Including some lesser moments of combat like breadcrumbs through the maze to a big bad on the other hand allows the interstitial bits of the story to be doled out but keeps the players who showed up for fights periodically reengaged, and also allows the players to feel that their characters are powerful. Finding the balance between interesting and boring is the trick of course...too much and taking out the trash becomes a slog, too few and there wasn't much point to having them at all. 

 

I sometimes think the most important skill a GM can have is the ability to find "goldilocks zones"...not too much or too little of every thing that goes into a gaming session. In retrospect most errors I make as a GM can be reduced to "...overdid it a bit on that one..." or "...shoulda had more of that other thing...". 

 

Accordingly, I try to keep the threat levels of my bad guys and other obstacles distributed along a curve. A mix of stronger and weaker, solo and team, vectors of attack, motivations, etc. Variety. Seems to work, usually. 

 

And then there's the problem that some GMs think that they're award winning mystery writers, and they aren't.  I don't have that problem with my current group, but I can't tell you how many GMs I've played with who either completely leave out important clues, or include so much information that whatever is important gets drowned out, or make mistakes about basic background facts and so lead the players to draw the wrong conclusions.

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Just as a side-note, I'll point out that the current official Champions Universe isn't devoid of heroes in the upper echelons of super-power. Several of these have been described or game-statted, such as Albion, Celestar, the Drifter, Hyperion, Rashindar, the Star*Guard, Tetsuronin, Ushas. The late Vanguard was explicitly the setting's Superman analogue.

 

There are certainly more villains in that weight-class than heroes, but that's true in comics too; although the reasons why are different in each case. As noted, RPG heroes usually travel in packs, so solo villains need the power to balance against them. In comics the hero is typically the star of an ongoing series, and needs a steady varied supply of foes.

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9 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

There are certainly more villains in that weight-class than heroes, but that's true in comics too; although the reasons why are different in each case. As noted, RPG heroes usually travel in packs, so solo villains need the power to balance against them. In comics the hero is typically the star of an ongoing series, and needs a steady varied supply of foes.

 

I don't know that I agree the ratios are the same in comics (at least most DC settings that I know) and the CU.  The CU has a LOT of 400+ point villains.  There are very few villains suitable for one on one use.

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1 hour ago, massey said:

And then there's the problem that some GMs think that they're award winning mystery writers, and they aren't. 


While there may be GM's who falsely believe themselves to be exemplars of authorial acumen worthy of award and accolade, I would hazard that the far more common case would be GM's attempting to emulate genre-appropriate plot and story as found in books and on screen. Some may be less skilled at it than others, but at least they are trying to do something other than show up and roll dice.

 

But yes, sometimes a GM's reach exceeds their grasp when they lay out a plot for their players to experience and it doesn't work. There's also the problem that some GM's don't even attempt to tell a story and just run players through one pointless encounter after another.

 

Somewhere in the middle is where the majority lay.

 

Quote

I don't have that problem with my current group, but I can't tell you how many GMs I've played with who either completely leave out important clues, or include so much information that whatever is important gets drowned out, or make mistakes about basic background facts and so lead the players to draw the wrong conclusions.

 

Yeah. This happens. I've played in games where the GM has made one or more mistakes. I've been a GM that's made one or more mistakes. Mistakes happen. Feedback and adjustment, and remembering that presumably everyone who showed up to play did so to have fun are a way to move forward. 

 

A good example that comes to mind, I was playing in a superhero arc @WilyQuixote was running...this was a Champions 5e game coincidentally...and it had been going great. A series of really fun sessions leading up to a final encounter at a charity ball. The heroes had been following clues and knew a big sacrificial ritual was going to go down at the ball, so we all showed up on the doorstep of the mansion it was being hosted at a little bit before the start time.

 

After some blah blah blah, we the PC's came into the presence of the rich owner of the mansion and host of the event and his son and his son's fiance, a couple of body guards, etc. As the conversation developed, I intuited that the son was in on the evil plot and that his fiance was to be the sacrificial victim of the dark magic ritual. I was 100% certain of it. How? Contextual clues, the law of character conservation, a subtle mistake the GM made that only someone who knew him well would notice, and also I'm just one of those people who's good at guessing who did it in the opening scenes / pages. My character had enough information so that it was not unreasonable for him to have deduced this, though it was thin, so I felt justified in acting on my player intuition. In character, I shifted the focus onto the son and accused him of being in on it.

 

The other players thought I was crazy and their PC's turned against mine, and the NPC's turned as well. Suddenly my PC was the bad guy. The scene got ugly. The GM was pissed off at me. I got pissed off. My PC left and I sat the session out.

 

In the end, it turned out I was right; the son was in on it and the fiance was the sacrificial victim.

 

But that wasn't the point. 

 

The GM was trying to tell a story, and was doing a decent job of it, but made a few mistakes...in the set up by not including more than one character who could be the victim (per genre tropes) and more than one character who might be the heel (again per genre tropes), another in making the motivation of the son to betray his father too obvious, and an execution error during actual play (a tell) that gave it away to someone alert to it. 

 

I as the player should have been more alert to the needs of the session (this all happened within the first 30 minutes of the session), and the arc (this was to be the big culmination of the arc), and the players (we were due a big satisfying confrontation with the big bad, who'd been off screen the entire arc), and the PC's (this event would be a big defining milestone for the superhero group's exploits), and instead chosen to roll with it and collaborated to help the GM bring the session and the story arc to a more satisfying conclusion despite them having made mistakes in their attempt to tell the story. My error as the player in trying to force the denouement was far greater than the GM's technical errors in pursuit of telling a good interactive story for group participation and enjoyment.

 

Is WilyQ an award winning author of any genre? Nope. Was he able to still tell an interesting story, warts and all? Yep.

Edited by Killer Shrike
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