What's in a Name?

So, yeah, last time I said that I was going to be posting about my super-hero project.  What I had forgotten was that almost all the design work for that was already done.  What I have to finish are writing out all the power descriptions and more detail on the setting of Industry City.  Not really stuff I need too much feedback on.

But I did think of something I definitely do need input on: a name.

When I started this project, I was calling it The Never-Ending Battle.  I thought that was a cute reference back to Truth & Justice since, as every comic-fan should know, Superman fights "a never-ending battle for truth and justice".  Clever, eh?  But, others have pointed out to me that the name is not only far from mellifluous, but also really doesn't explain what the game is about unless you already know what it is.

I then moved to the current working title, Heroes of Industry.  That was supposed to work on two levels: at it's simplest, it refers to the geographical setting of the book (Industry City), while, on another, evoking the Studs Terkel-vibe I'm shooting for with that setting.  I am, however, not at all convinced that it works on either of those levels.

I had a cheeky thought the other night around 2 am: Lies & Injustice. That's, again, a reference to T&J, but with the implication that something has gone horribly wrong.  That's a crucial part of the 1970's setting atmosphere I'm trying to convey: the President of the United States is a crook; the CIA is making money from the drug-trade; the streets are filled with cast-off veterans from a war no one wants to acknowledge; regular folks have to stand in line to get gas for their cars - what the hell happened to all that Silver Age, atomic optimism? 

I thought of Crime & Punishment, although there is a police procedural game of that title.

I also played with some classic "X&X" type names, such as Avengers & Archvillains, Crusaders & Criminals, and, my favourite for obscure reasons, Overmen & Outlaws.  I'd worry that a name such as this would inaccurately suggest that this is some kind of D20 game, with Mutants & Masterminds being the obvious example (yeah, you've got Villains & Vigilantes, but that's also a damn old-school game, even if it isn't technically D20).

But I'm not sold on any of these ideas yet.  So, I'm throwing it out to you, dear, hypothetical readers, to give me some feedback.  You've read some suggestions; what do you think?  Feel free to make up your own too, as long as you are cool with me actually using it (I'd give you a credit in the book as well as a stainless steel No-Prize). 

Let's Roll Up A Heroes Character!

I'm not even going to discuss how many times I've redone the Body Powers Table since I posted my corrected Take Three.  Lord.    I mean, improvement and all, but...lordy, lordy.  Anyway, I'm so sick of revising that damn Table that I've decided to just roll up some characters today using the the whole Random Roll method as it currently stands, which is "not at all finalized".  But who cares?

OK, here's the Table as it stands:

 

Just like the previous rounds, I've made 20 rolls of 2d6 at Invisible Castle.  I'll use the results in order, dropping the second die if I only need to roll 1.  So here we go.  

I get 6 ranks of Powers.  My first roll on Table 1 is 4:5, which gives me the Object Category.  An Object can duplicate any other Power, so I roll again on Table 1, re-rolling if I get Object again.  My re-roll is 6:2 which gives me the Sensory Category.  So I have some kind of sensing device.  Going to Table 7, I roll 1:2, giving me the Cosmic Awareness Power.  Well, now, that's not something you usually see as coming from a device.  Hmn, I'm thinking that this guy has some kind of amazing  computer-thing that pulls information from the Cosmic Record (whatever that might be).  Kind of a Kirby Mother Box.  I've been fond of the Cosmic Awareness power since I first played Villains & Vigilantes (even though I never, ever rolled it).  I give it Excellent +2.

My next roll is 6:5, putting me on the Intense Training Category.  This gives me the Intense Training power to convert some number of Ranks in Powers into double that many Quality Ranks as I see fit.  I'm going to give this Excellent +2, so that I get 4 Ranks in Qualities.  The Mother Box idea has me thinking this guy may be from the future or a highly advanced alternate-world.  I'll give him something like "Good +1 Cosmic Scientist" and "Remarkable +3 Hyper-Evolved Human".

I have 2 ranks left to go.  My roll is 1:3, which is the Energy Power Category.  A 2:6 gives me Exotic Energy.  Oh man, that's too right.  That Power requires me to roll on Table 9 to determine whether this is a focused Power (with 1 Effect) or a Meta-Power.  The roll of 1:4 added is 5, so I get the focused version which is Energy Blast.  Can you say "the Power Cosmic"?  I think I'll give this power the Object Limitation, since this guy doesn't feel like a super-powered being to me.  It could be some kind of blaster, but that doesn't feel suitably Kirbyesque.  Instead, I give him a mace-thingy, crackling with dots, and call it "The Ion Rod".  I only have 2 ranks left so it gets Excellent +2.

I could discard 1 Power and add those ranks to another Power, but I don't think I will.

I move on to Qualities, of which I get 10 Ranks.  My first roll is 6:4, which gets me a Vehicle.  I'm going to give him some kind of Air Chariot.  I think I'll plug quite a few ranks into that.  It can fly and maybe shoot out some kind of entangling thing.  Gee, maybe even teleport.  Anyway, I give it Incredible +4.

6 Ranks left.  I get 3:4, which is Iconic Description.  I love that one.  Whatever my hero is called, his sub-title (if you will) is "The Ultimate Man!" (exclamation point included).  I give this Remarkable +3.  There's all sorts of times I can see that Quality being pertinent.

3 ranks left.  I roll 1:2, a Motivation.  With the Iconic Description in mind, the idea immediately occurs to me that my hero comes from a future where a hyper-evolved humanity allows itself to be destroyed somehow.  Traveling to the past, my Motivation is "To Save Humanity From it's Own Worst Instincts".  I'm not a crime-fighter per se, but someone who feels the need to inspire people to be their better selves.  Let's give this one Good +1 Rank.

2 Ranks left and I get 1:5, which is Iconic Description.  I don't see him as having another Iconic Description, so I drop this one and give the 2 ranks to my vehicle, bringing it up to Monstrous +6.  This is one, sweet Air Chariot.

I get 1 Signature Stunt.  I'll have him able to use the power blast from the Ion Rod as a defense; otherwise, the Ultimate Man is going to get splatted rather quickly against any super-scale attacks.  It costs 1 Hero Point to do that.

I've pretty much already got my background already: last survivor from a doomed future, hurled back in time to prevent his own tragic reality from occurring.  I need a good name now.  Hmn.  Let's just go ahead and lay the Kirby cards on the table and call him "Apocalypse, the Ultimate Man!".  I even have the title of his debut story: "The Man Who Murdered Tomorrow!"

Name: Apocalypse

Other Names: The Ultimate Man!

Fight: 18

Qualities:

Hyper-Evolved Human (Remarkable)

Cosmic Scientist (Good)

"The Ultimate Man!" (Remarkable)

Motivation: To save Humanity from it's own, worst instincts

The Air Chariot (Monstrous Vehicle)

Powers:

Intense Training (Excellent)

The Cosmic Computer (Excellent Cosmic Awareness)

Ion Rod (Excellent Energy Blast)

- Ion Shield (Signature Stunt, Excellent Force Field, 1 HP)

Body Powers: Take Three

Yeah, yeah: I posted just yesterday.  And less than 20 minutes after saying I had a form I preferred, I found a bunch of problems.  So, what the hell, here we go again:

On third thought, I felt that Claws are much more common than Poison and Acid Bodies.  So I broke the first out as a separate power and combined the latter two.  That got rid of the Body Weapon Power and Sub-Table.  Fortunately, I also noticed that I had accidentally left in Size-Changing as a Power, even after I added Growth and Shrinking, so everything fits in the chart.

Body Powers: Take Two

I posted Table 2: Body Powers some while ago.  But I've never been satisfied with several aspects of that Table.  I don't know why the dam broke today, but for some reason I got it to a form I prefer.  The changes are actually pretty minor, but nothing is too minor for me to agonize over.

For those keeping score at home, what's changed?

1. I took out the Density Powers sub-table and broke out Density Increase and Intangibility into separate powers on the main Table.  I think these powers are common enough that they rate individual entries.
2. Ditto for Size-Changing Powers into Growth and Shrinking for the same reasons.
3. And the same again for the Transform Self sub-table into Shape-shifting and Metamorph.
4. In the same action, the power Alternate Form was eliminated.  It was so specific that I felt it didn't really deserve an entry.  It can be duplicated by taking a Limitation on either Shape-Shifting or Metamorph to restrict them to one form.

Should you care about any of this?  Probably not.

Help Me With a Name (Again)

Last time I did this, you were all very helpful.  So let's try it again.

As discussed previously, two of the ways of looking at a Power are its Effect and its Category.  At least right now, there are seven Effects:

• Attack
• Alteration
• Control
• Defense
• Meta-Power
• Motion
• Quality

And there are nine Categories (which are mostly used for the Random Roll Tables):

• Body Powers
• Energy Powers
• Matter Powers
• Mental Powers
• Movement Powers
• Object Powers
• Sensory Powers
• Super-Qualities
• Training

Can you guess what my question is?

Yes, I have a Motion Effect and a Movement Category.  Isn't that confusing?  I think so.  So I turn again to my hypothetical readers for suggestions for changing one of them, hopefully to something that doesn't begin with an "M" (thus, "Motility" isn't that helpful).

Creating Powers in Heroes of Industry

If you can describe a Power and decide upon its Effect, you should be able to create just about any power you need in Heroes of Industry. One of the most important things to keep in mind is how often or how easily the Power can be used in unusual ways. A Power that generally functions in one way is best represented as a Power with a single Effect, which can be occasionally expanded through Stunts (this is called a “Focused Power” in the Powers List below). A Power that has no single, usual function is better represented as a Meta-Power with several Effects through its Sub-Powers.

Notice that the above does not say “if it is flexible”. All super-powers are flexible in the comics; ingenious uses of one‘s power is one of the backbone of the genre. Thus it makes more sense to presume that all Powers will be used in unusual or less obvious ways. This is perhaps a bit counter-intuitive: the game-determined uses of a Power are just the baseline from which the players are expected work.

Does that mean that a player is “bad” if he can’t come up with lots of great stunts for his Powers? No, it doesn’t. But it does mean that this player is going to be doing a lot of the same over and over (“I blast him!”, “I blast him!”, “I blast him!”). Still, he can always make it up with snappy patter.

Sometimes, a Power would seem to have maybe two Effects; not enough to justify a Meta-Power, but enough to feel constrained by a single Effect. For example, consider a Power that allows the hero to turn his body into pure light so that he can fly and is also intangible. This is two different Effects (Motion and Alter for those keeping score at home). This seems tricky, but isn’t really. There are two simple ways to represent this kind of Power.

The first is using Signature Stunts.  A Signature Stunt effectively adds an Effect to a Power at the cost of 1 Hero Point per use. Buy one of the Powers (Flight) and take a Signature Stunt to allow the other use (Intangibility). In this case, the player will have to decide if he has the ability to use the base Power without the other; if not, then he should take the Limitation “Cannot Use Without Activating Signature Stunt”. What does that accomplish? Well, it means that if the hero is out of Hero Points and therefore unable to use the Signature Stunt, he cannot use his Flight Power either. That sucks except that he will probably earn a Hero Point for having his Limitation come into effect.  Getting screwed in order to come back and kick evil's ass is how the genre works.

The second option is even simpler. List the Power on the character sheet as one Power (“Body of Light”), but list both Flight and Intangibility beneath it. Mechanically, you have two Powers (which can even have differing Ranks if you like), but the Description is the same for both of them; that is, they are understood as being part of the same Power in the game world.

How To Handle Cosmic-Scale Powers

One of the many elements of PDQ that I like is that I don't have to do much math.  Add up two d6 plus a modifier of no more than 6; that's pretty much it (if you use my rule for upshifts beyond +6).  The Ranks then cover a pretty wide range of whatever it is they are describing and that's generally a good thing for my kind of gaming.  But sometimes you find yourself needing to bring out the Ultra-Mega Big Guns - the Imperial Star Destroyers and Cosmic Space-Gods that blow up or eat whole planets for breakfast respectively.  Actually, you don't even need to go quite that far.  In Storn Cook's write-up of his very entertaining Grey Legion campaign, he notes that having competent characters face up against a Target Number that maxes out at 13 can be kind of anti-climactic.

The new iteration of PDQ, called PDQ#, acknowledges this by adding some higher Ranks (Impressive, Intimidating, Impossible, and Inconceivable).  What is interesting about these Ranks is that they have no Modifier associated with them; only Target Numbers.  This essentially means that these upper-tier Ranks are unavailable to characters and can only be used when setting what I call Challenges in Heroes of Industry.  In a game like Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies, for which the PDQ# system was created, that makes good sense.  

But in a super-hero game, that may not be true.  Maybe the really Big Guns ought to have a larger modifier, even if you restrict it to NPC's.  This is a bit of a fine line to me though, because once you go beyond a modifier of +6, the roll of the dice makes less and less of an impact.  As is my wont, I have more than one idea on how to handle this:

1. Unearthly Ranks - this is my name for those "off-the-scale" Ranks above +6.  I'm not going to use the same names as PDQ# because they don't fit the supers-genre (as much as I think "Inconceivable" is awesome for a swashbuckling game).  A major consideration in play is that my version of PDQ is normally hard-capped at a dice roll of 18 (boxcars + 6), unlike regular PDQ and PDQ#.  That means that a Rank with a Target Number of 18 is the extreme limit of mortal possibility; something with a Target Number of 19 is literally impossible for someone operating on the usual scale of Ranks.  A Rank with a Target Number of 18 would have a Modifier of +11, which would effectively set the upper limit of these Unearthly Ranks.

I think that judicious use of these Ranks could be pretty fun.  Fighting a being who brings +11 to the table means that the deck is heavily-stacked against the heroes, but they still have a slight chance.  That's important because, sometimes, the heroes aren't supposed to have any chance at all.    Trying to the punch out Eternity may simply be impossible and, in those cases, setting a number - no matter how high - is the wrong answer.  The right answer is Option No. 2:

2. Revoltin' Development - This is already a part of the rules, but I would have to emphasize how it is useful in these sorts of situations.  If the heroes are not supposes to have any chance, don't try and a make it practically impossible by setting a Target Number they can't beat; that is a form of illusionism and amazingly frustrating to players.  Instead, just hand out a Revoltin' Development give the players the Hero Point to make the thing palatable.  They can then use that Hero Point later to come up with some clever idea that doesn't involve punching the incarnation of all Time and Space.

I'm pretty comfortable with those two options.  But here's where I get less sure of myself.  Because I thought of a third alternative using the Scale mechanic: add a "Cosmic-scale" on top of the existing "Normal-" and "Super-scale".  It might work something like this:

Cosmic Scale in Conflict

Opponents who both operate on the Cosmic-scale interact in the usual manner: roll 2d6+Modifier and see who rolls higher.

Cosmic-scale versus Super-scale works just like Super-scale versus Normal-scale: the higher scale actor adds or absorbs TN extra Grief.

Cosmic-scale versus Normal-scale effectively turns the Normal-scale actor into a Goon: any success on the Cosmic-guys part zeroes-out the normal-guy, while the any success on the normal-guys part does 1 Grief only.  A Normal-scale actor is no more than an annoyance to a Cosmic-scale actor, but sometimes that can be quite an heroic thing to be.  For example, the normal-scale Dark Avenger might do his best against Galaxus, with the hope of just delaying the Muncher of Worlds until his Super-scale buddies show up.  He keeps hopping around doing little bits of Grief and trying his damnedest not to squashed like a bug.

I think Cosmic-scale is kind of neat and I like that it basically works using the rules already there.  But I'm not sure if it really adds anything.  Right now I plan on including it in a box as an option, but, as usual, I'd be eager to here anyone's thoughts on the matter.

Smack on the Head: Power Breadth is Pointless!

The drawback to being as anal as I am and re-reading and re-re-reading my stuff is that I keep finding things that I have written that are, to put it politely, stupid.  Case in point Power Breadth.

About two months ago, I posted on how I was going to describe Powers in Heroes of Industry using three "view-points": Breadth, Effect, and Category.  I have no idea why that seemed so clever.  Maybe it was at that stage of the writing process.  But today I had one of those "smack on the head" moments where I realized that Breadth is totally pointless.  Well, it is once I realized that Meta-Power can be used as an Effect.  That is, a Power's Effect is either set (Attack, Defense, Alter) or it is a Meta-Power, which let's you use the same Power for various Effects.

At the same time, I realized that I had left out something vitally important in a game like this: description.  In a game like this, the way in which a power is describe in words is really as important as how it is described in terms of mechanics.  It's one of the things that avoids the logical-insanity of purely effects-based games ("Can I use my Fire Blast to light up the room?"  "No, illumination is a Visual Illusion effect and you only have Energy Blast.").  So here's the new text:

Power Scope

Scope is the same for Powers as for any other Quality: it defines the Power, describing what it does and when it is applicable. Some powers have fairly simple Scopes: Fire Blast means you can shoot out a blast of fire. But other powers are more complex: what do Air Powers do really?

Now some of the answers can be discovered through play, when a player suggests that his power ought to let him do such-and-such. But it is useful to have some starting understanding of the power shared by the player and GM. This game uses three different “viewpoints” to discuss the Scope of Powers: Effect, Category, and Description. When you Describe an Effect within a certain Category, you have created a Power (congratulations). That’s the DIY motto of the game. There are a list of powers located in this section for your convenience, but you don’t actually need them unless you are using the Random Roll Method of character creation (in which case you definitely do need them).

Effect

Effects describe how Powers work in play. The various Effects appear in almost all of the Categories: there are energy attack powers, matter attack powers, and mental attack powers.

Some powers have a single Effect; others have a variety of Effects (a Meta-Power), and some come in both versions. In that last case, the player is free to choose the power’s Effect at creation if using the Modeling Method; if using the Random Rolling Method, the player must roll on Table 9: Power Effect to determine this.

The most common Effects are discussed below. Keep in mind that there are characters who appear in comics and in the heads of players with odd-ball powers that don’t comfortably fit into any of these Effects. It’s up to the GM to either disallow the power or come up with a way to make it work, using these effects as guidelines. When making up an effect, try to keep in mind MOD, TN, and Scope: most powers will involve the hero rolling the dice and adding the power’s MOD. His opponent will usually either make a defense roll of his own and either comparing the difference to determine Grief or to try and beat the hero’s TN.

Category

Categories are thematic: energy powers, matter powers, mental powers, super-devices, and so on. They have little mechanical impact on play, but they provide some of the colour of the power. They exist mostly as a way to organize the Random Roll Tables. However, see the discussion of Description below for more thoughts on this.

Description

A Power’s Description is how you would explain the power in words, without reference to mechanics. It is the way it would be described in comics: “the proportionate strength of a spider!”, “nigh-invulnerable skin!”, and “heat vision!”. Powers with exactly the same Effect and Category can still be distinguished by the Description.

It might seem as if Description is only useful for narrative purposes, but Description can have a real, mechanical impact. It helps the player and the GM determine what are and what aren’t reasonable uses, stunts, and limitations of the power. Fire Blast and Magnetic Bolt, for example, both have the Attack Effect and Energy Category, but only one of those Powers can reasonably be used to light something on fire. In a high-trust game such as this, a Power’s description can have a real effect.

Should Average-Rank Remain 0?

One of the first changes to I made to standard Truth & Justice (and PDQ as a whole) was to alter the point at which someone "zeroes-out" i.e. loses a conflict.  This change predates the idea of Heroes of Industry and was something I put into my T&J House Rules those many months ago when I thought that I was just doing a simple house-rule document.  Ha!

Anyway, I love the term "zero out" for taking an opponent out of fight.  But what always confused me both practically and philosophically is that actors actually aren't out when all their Qualities go to zero (which is Average Rank), but rather when they all go to -2 (Poor Rank) and then lose one more Rank.  I would screw that up in play over and over again.  Thus my simple little change.

But that simple change brought with it something more significant.  It meant that one couldn't just give every unexceptional person, place, or thing  the Quality "Average [Person, Place, or Thing]".  It meant that the Average Rank could only be an effective, rather than base Rank (which is to say, some Quality could be ranked Average only as a result of damage or downshifts).  You couldn't say, "Oh, he's just an Average Goon" or "I dunno - it's an Average car".  Any Quality that is worth representing will have a rank of at least Good +1.  Average-ranked Qualities represent all those infinite things that a character can do (Walk), think (Knows Addition), and be (Internet Surfer) that are utterly unimportant and, perhaps more meaningfully, cannot be used in a conflict.  To stat something up this way, you pick the one thing (or two or three  things) that make you unique and call that Good.  So, the cheap hoods are Good +1 Goons and the plain old car is a Good +1 Car with all other Qualities as invisible Average Rank.

But I'm wondering if that terminological shift is  more confusing than it is worth?  By comparison, FATE uses the term "Average" to describe the +1 rank and calls the zero rank "Mediocre".  In that system, you can describe someone as Average.  That is more intuitive in some ways.  The trade-off is that I, at least, tend to associate the modifier of zero with the descriptor "Average" and think any bonus (positive number) should have a positive-sounding name.  By the same token, in FATE you assume that everything is Mediocre +0 except for those few areas where you are Average +1.

So, I think that I have made the right choice in not using the FATE-model, but I'd be curious to hear anyone else's thoughts on the matter.

Jack Kirby is Awesome

[I justify this post as gaming related because it discusses an important under-pining of Heroes of Industry.]

Jack Kirby is awesome.  Yes, not exactly breaking news.  But we could paraphrase Chevy Chase's old joke and say that Jack Kirby is STILL awesome.  And I say "is" quite consciously.  Sure Jacob Kurtzberg the man is dead, but Jack Kirby the artist cannot be anything other than alive; gloriously, vibrantly alive.  If you don't think so, then you haven't read a Kirby-book in too long.

I've been wallowing in Kirby recently, having finally gotten a hold of the first volume of Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus.  I missed these comics the first time around due to the fact that I was just being born.  Later, I was a pretty staunch Marvel Comics fan and so managed to miss the occasional appearance by the characters. My first real exposure to the Fourth World Mythos (is that a term? if not, it should be) was that season of Super Friends with Darkseid as the recurring villain.  As bloodless a representation of the Mythos as that was (in all senses) there was something intriguing there.  

One of themes that Kirby so ably tapped into was what I call "Cosmic Mysticism"; the place where Science Fiction and Religion converge.  And the glimpses of Kirby's Astro-Theology (to coin a Kirbyesque term) hinted at something big going on with Darkseid and Apokalips.  Something infinitely more...well, just infinitely MORE than the standard super-villain or evil planet.

An example: Issue No. 2 of the Forever People gives us Glorious Godfrey and the Anti-Life Movement.  Glorious Godfrey is from Apokalips, but seems free of the weird appearances of most of the baddies we see from there.  He is a "Revelationist" and comes to earth to hold great revival-style meetings under a tent.  There he preaches the freedom of "Anti-Life".  When I first heard about the Anti-Life Equation years ago, I just assumed it was some some cosmic Macguffin that would kill everyone.  But in Kirby's theology, Life is literally equivalent to Free Will and thus the Anti-Life Equation is actually the ability to remove all free will from people everywhere.  Now, think for a second about the implications of all that.  

But no!  This is a Kirby comic and we don't have time to sit back and think because STUFF IS HAPPENING!  Glorious Godfrey tells people that life is full of trouble and anxiety and so true happiness can be found by grasping Anti-Life i.e. giving up all personal volition.  And once that is done, you can have perfect justification for doing absolutely anything.  To lack justification requires there to have been options and those without will have no options ergo they are always justified in what they do.

The Hitler analogies are pretty obvious (and Kirby doesn't try to hide them; among other things, he opens the issue with a quote from old Uncle Adolph), but Nazi-stories are a dime a dozen.  The thing is that the lure of Anti-Life is much bigger than Nazism or any of the other great tyrannical -isms.  This is about the way in which a culture can become suicidal in search of happiness and the value of pain.  And, at the same time, it's about some weird space-hippies with a computer that they love and a giant motorcycle that can travel at light-speed and the ability to switch atoms with someone called the Infinity Man who makes the sound TAARUN! when he appears and bends or breaks the normal laws of physics but can still get knocked out by a mere probe from the satan called Darkseid!

Reading these stories is almost literally that breath-taking.  You can actually see the fire of Kirby's imagination pouring out from his brain onto the page and from that page splashing into you.  This fire is too strong to be constrained by conventional narrative technique; the ideas come so fast and furious that he sometimes just skips over properly introducing them.  If you try and stop and say, "Wait, that wasn't where the previous issue ended", you will be run over by the Mac Truck of the imagination.  Kirby doesn't have time to set that scene up, because in the time it took him to draw the first panel, he already thought of nine other things that are even cooler and he only has 21 pages left in the book.

I've written before about kallos and how I hold to that in my writing.  I suspect that Jack Kirby would punch me in the nose if I tried to discuss kallos with him.  And that's fine (seriously, how cool would it be to to show your mangled schnoz  to your kids and say, "See that?  King Kirby gave me that broken nose.").  Maybe I appreciate Kirby in part because I know that I could never create the way that he creates.  As regular, hypothetical readers of the blog have figured out by now, I think things through.  A lot.  I put hours of thought into something before pen ever touches paper (not that I use a pen anymore).  I write a few sentences or put together a mechanic and then I stop, and look at it, and think about it some more.  And though I wish that I could write a little faster, all in all, my method works for me.

But Kirby is the anti-universe of that.  He's got stuff to put on paper and, if tomorrow it's clear that there was a better way of doing that, too damn bad, because yesterday is a million years ago in the Kirbyverse and he's already created and destroyed worlds by then.  That "just go with it, man" attitude must surely account for his attraction to the youth movement of the day and the often awkward writing of the imaginary hippy-slang dialog of the Forever People and the Outsiders  by a middle-aged man.  But even that is really okay, because no hippy was ever as far out as Kirby. 

Aaron Alston's THE BLOOD (1985)

I've discussed my troubled relationship with Champions before so no need to rehearse it.  Nonetheless, there were some fine products put out by Hero Games back in the day and those of Aaron Allston tend to hover at the top of my list.  I had a heck of a lotta fun with his Super-Agents book and his Lands of Mystery supplement may still be the best gaming treatment of the Lost World Romance (he also wrote a lot of good stuff for other companies as well).  But, far and away, my favourite Hero work of his was his half of Organization Book No. 2: The Blood and Dr. McQuark (although, Allston's portion is more like the first two-thirds in terms of page count).

The Blood are a group of super-powered, extraterrestrial mutants who are not nearly as goofy as that may sound.  Actually, the Blood are very much informed by things like Zelazny's royal family of Amber and Lee-Kirby's the Inhumans.  They are the descendants of a paleolithic hunter who was born with psychic powers, a mutant named Azor.  This old fellow used his powers to assume control of his tribe and then used his tribe to take over a neighboring tribe.  And so on and so on.  But, pretty soon, this neaderthalic Genghis Khan had reached the limits of Stone Age empire; without the agricultural revolution you just can't keep very many people in one place without starving. 

Azor's lust for power knew no bounds, though, and he soon made psychic contact with fearful, pre-human, chthonic entities who had been trapped for uncounted ages under the earth and in sunken cities and if you can't figure out who these folk may be then you fail at Weird Fiction 101. These foul beings granted Azor much increased power in exchange for a vow to find some way to release them from their eons-long bondage.  With his new powers, Azor then opened up a portal to a new world and took his tribe with him. 

There, they quickly spread out and advanced at a much faster rate of material culture development than their cousins back on Earth.  It turned out that Azor's powers tended to be carried to his off-spring, who gave them to their off-spring and so on.  These powers usually included teleportation, telepathy, "see through vision" (that name cracks me up, I must admit), greatly enhanced life-spans, and often bat-shit insanity (although you really gotta expect little drawbacks like that when accepting presents from the Great Old Ones).  Those with the power were "of the blood of Azor" and these blooded folk became the natural aristocracy.  Earth was forgotten during this period.

Flash forward some 20,000 years and a family of Bloods find their way to Earth in the 1920's.  They look upon this world as one giant play-ground for their own, idiosyncratic pleasures.  They split up and wander the world, learning what the want and generally taking what they want too.  Some of them eventually have children with earth humans and some of these carry the Blood.  So we end up with at least three generations of the family on earth somewhere at present (if the present is still 1985).

Now some of these folks are pretty decent types (albeit with a slight tendency toward insanity) and some are absolute monsters, but they are a family.  So when the psychopathic, megalomaniac Affrighter turns up to steal his siblings' babies (it's just kinda what he does), a brawl doesn't immediately break out.  He and his relative will probably exchange greetings, tell each other what they've been up to for the past few decades, maybe exchange some gossip about other members of the family, and then the brawl breaks out.

There is a lot more packed into those 18 pages - I didn't even get to the part about Bloodletter, who is a sort of creepy riff on Dr. Fate -  but I think that all the above gets the idea across.  I love the potential for stories that the Blood provide.  You can play with ancient mysteries, using Azor's origin as a jumping off place; Lovecraftian horror; political bickering; alternate dimension fantasies; family drama; and on and on.  I've wanted to run an all-Blood game for years, where the players are all third- (or maybe fourth-) generation Blood, born on earth and unaware of their heritage, who get pulled into family squabbling and danger and have to figure out what the hell is going on and how they can use their new powers to protect themselves. 

And yet...

And yet just look at those stat blocks (if you don't have the book, which is somewhat rare, imagine you can look at those stat blocks).  It's amazing to me that I can still make sense out of them after all these years but I guess Champions is indelibly imprinted upon my brain.  But what a mess!  In that previous post, I discussed how much I hated the "mini-game" of character creation in Champions, especially the game of picking out Disadvantages.  The sort of thing I was complaining about there is on full display here.  

Allston apparently liked Vulnerabilities more than my group because every singly character has at least one, but - and here's the point - for no discernible reason.  For example, Blade is one of the tougher and nicer members of the family with maybe more than a passing resemblance to Corwin of Amber (among other things, he has an amnesia story and a heroic son).  Blade is much stronger than anyone else in the family and is a demon with weapons.  And he takes 2x STUN from gas.  Yep: gas.  I can't even figure out what that Vulnerability is supposed to represent other than a way to get another 10 points of Disads.  There is certainly nothing in Blade's write-up to indicate that he has weak lungs or something; knock-out gas just works real good on him.

This same thing appears across all the other Bloods: Pathfinder takes 2X STUN from illusions,  Sabre takes 2x STUN from energy killing attacks, Sala takes 2x STUN from bullets (?!), Affrighter takes 2x STUN from magic; Bloodletter takes 2x STUN from flame, and Gran'pappy Azor takes 1.5x STUN from light-based attacks.  See the theme here? There is no frickin' theme except the game of "how can get some more points?"  Man, I just can't stand these kinds of game systems any more.

I have been thinking a lot about the Blood in the last 24 hours.  That's because I finally found a copy of the book and got to look at it last night for the first time in two decades.  I immediately began to think of things that I would change in the back-story.  Azor's deal with not-Cthlhulu doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense as written nor does the ban on travel to earth.  I'm also not crazy about the mixing of the mutant powers of the Blood with sorcery and would rather have them be part of the same thing.  That would involve re-writing Azor's background so that he only gets his powers once he conjures the evil beings.  And finally (well, not finally, but finally for this little list), I don't quite like the "typical" array of Blood powers; I'd rather redo those too.

None of that should suggest that The Blood isn't a good book.  It really, really is.  My addiction to re-writing things doesn't mean that the original is bad.  Even before I got this book again, I had put in Heroes of Industry a group of beings that fill a similar niche ("the Ultra"), although with more of Kirby's Eternals thrown into the mix as well.  It's interesting seeing how much I remembered of the Blood and how much somebody's game work could influence me thirty-five years later.  My hat is off to you, Mr. Allston.

Bonus Goody:

Here's my write-up for the Blood Meta-Power in HoI terms.  I would use this as representative of a "typical" Blood.  Important characters would probably have the Meta-Power at higher rank and get  some unique, "sport" power (Like Sala's power to create earthquakes or Affrighter's fear-power).

Blood Powers (Incredible +4 Meta-Power, Vulnerability to Magic, Limitation: Powers won't affect those protected against the Old Ones, Required Quality: Violent Temper)

- Super-Strength

- Super-Endurance

- Telepathy

- Teleportation

[all sub-powers at Good +1 Rank]

Help Me Name A Kind of Power

As promised, I haven't posted anything in a good while, not because I'm not doing anything, but because the work on Heroes of Industry is at a stage where I have nothing interesting to post.  And I never try to bore my imaginary readers.  But now I could use some help naming something.  

I've discussed in previous posts how I am organizing Powers in various ways: Category, Scope, and Effect.  The last includes such Effects as Attack, Defense, Movement, and Alteration (actually, I just did some stuff with Alteration that is kind of worth posting, but that's for another day).  There is another type of Effect for which I can't quite come up with a good name.  Right now I have been calling it "All-or-Nothing Attack".  It represents powers that entangle, blind, paralyze, and bind; that is, rather than go through a full conflict, you roll once and it either takes effect or not.  In the T&J book, we see an example when Snow Owl create ice manacles to shackle the bad guys.

"All or Nothing Attack" is an awfully unwieldy name.  Ideally, it wouldn't have the word "Attack" in it at all (since that is the name of another Effect) nor would be longer than a single word (since all the other Effects are single words).  I'm drawing an absolute blank and so I turn to my hypothetical readers.  What do I call this thing?

Balancing Between Exalted and Wushu

I mentioned in a comment the other day that I was now doing some drudge work in writing Heroes of Industry; namely, writing of the powers descriptions.  That reminded me of what a delicate balancing act I'm doing on this project.  Truth & Justice proudly describes itself as designed with a "Do It Yourself" aesthetic.  In opposition to the HERO and Mutants & Masterminds design of page after page of detailed power or effect descriptions, T&J gives some general advice on powers, a rather idiosyncratic list of  power only a few pages in length, and a brilliant little system for stunting.  Which is great.  Well, I think the powers list is a little too idiosyncratic - no telekinesis, but two different attack powers distinguished by "Beam of (Something)" and "Bolt of (Something)" - but, still, all in all great. 

I think about a game like Exalted whose central appeal is "being awesome".  But what is weird to me about Exalted is that the mechanics are mostly centered around telling the players how they may be cool i.e. Charms lists.  Exalted is designed around the assumption that a player wants someone else to tell them how to be awesome. 

Exalted: Here's a Charm that lets you flip over and catch arrows between your toes!

Player: Awesome!  Oh, hey, can my prehensile digits grab onto tree-branches, too? 

Exalted: Well, no, you don't have that Charm; I've told you how to be awesome, don't try thinking up new stuff.

Absolutely opposed to that is the brilliant little game Wushu, which is designed entirely around the requirement for the player to tell everyone else in what way he is awesome.  I was once involved in an interesting debate at rpg.net with an Exalted savant - a guy whose gaming reports and thoughts were indeed truly awesome; so much so that he almost made me want to play that game.  But what was fascinating was that he was stunned when I suggested that it would be much more fun to play a game in the Exalted setting using the rules of Wushu i.e. a game wherein the player would create all the awesome things that he could do.  He just didn't get that.

Now, I'm not going to pontificate and say that one style of play is inherently superior to the other.  On the other hand, it would be disingenuous to say that I don't believe that one style is superior; I just recognize that my bias isn't normative.  But what really interested me in that virtual-debate was that I could not simply dismiss the other fellow as not imaginative enough to play my kind of game.  Because he was and is a really imaginative guy who I suspect would be great fun to game with.

And that's where I get back to my game.  As much as I like the absolute freedom given by a game such as Wushu, I don't think that every game must go that far.  And, let's be fair, some days, you don't feel as imaginative as others.  So I set myself this design goal: to write a gaming book that makes T&J as available to Exalted players as to Wushu players.  And that, my hypothetical readers, is a bit tricky.  It means that I can't just say, "Like make up some powers, man, you know, like cool".  If nothing else, that doesn't work when you have a Random Powers method of creation.  But at the same time, I can't (and don't want to) spell out every little nuance of every single power.  I can't even pretend that I have thought of every single power.  That way leads to madness and a two-volume HERO System.

So how do I do this?  Well, that's the work I was speaking of at the beginning of this post.  I've adopted a multi-faceted approach by having several different ways to view Powers.  A game such as Villains & Vigilantes describes powers by their cause: Power Blast is an entirely different power than a blast of flame, which is a different power from a bolt of electricity and so on.  They roll different dice for damage, have different chances to hit, and different odds when used for  defense.   Conversely, Champions pioneered the now virtually ubiquitous effects-based description whereby all of those things are the same power - Energy Blast - simply distinguished by flavour text (and Limitations and Advantages, but let's not confuse the issue).  In HoI, I describe both a power's Category (cause) and its Effect (uh...effect). 

But more importantly, I have tried to describe each power in such a way as to explain it's basic use and suggest further applications (through suggested Stunts), without pretending to be comprehensive.  Each power is listed this way:

Name (Breadth, Category, Effect) – Description.

Sometimes (frequently) the Breadth is noted as “Focused/Meta” meaning that differing versions of this power are common and a specific one should be decided upon or rolled during character creation. In that case, the Effect is listed as “*” since it can vary.

Here's a pretty simple example:

Resistance  (Focused, Body Power, Defense) – The possessor is, in some fashion, highly resistant to injury. This might be supernaturally tough skin, a suit of armour, or a personal force field. Resistance adds it’s MOD to defense rolls against straight-forward physical attacks. It also absorbs TN ranks of Grief inflicted by normal-scale attacks.

And here's a much more involved example:

Air Powers (Focused/Meta, Energy Power, *) – The possessor can control the ambient air. This is usually understood to be the air around us on the earth’s surface (the troposphere), but the GM and player may want to consider whether or not this power affects other layers of the atmosphere (can it control the stratosphere?) and the atmosphere of other planets.

If using the Random Roll Method of character generation, the player must roll on Table 9, Power Breadth to determine whether the power is Focused or a Meta-Power. If using the Modeling Method, then the player is free to choose.

The Focused version of this power allows Air Push i.e. moving objects with gusts of wind as telekinesis. Common Spin-Off Stunts include:

• Air Blast – Generate a punishing blast of wind to attack.

• Air Shield – Create a bubble of energy that functions as a force field.

• Airy Flight – Whip up a vortex of air to allow for flight.

The Meta-Power version of this power would likely include the above as sub-powers. It might also include the ability to transform the hero’s body into a Gaseous Form.

Less common stunts or sub-powers that may or may not be appropriate to any particular game would involve doing something with the dissolved oxygen in water to allow humans to breathe comfortably, removing the air from someone’s lungs to knock them out, or even playing with the exact composition of the air so as to increase the amount of oxygen (an area with excess oxygen would be highly inflammable and also does funny things to people’s thinking).

A common Power Limitation would be that powers don’t function in a vacuum.  If the power is mystical in orientation, the possessor might have a Vulnerability to attacks from an opposing element (perhaps Earth) or a Limitation against affecting that element.

I hope this strategy is worthwhile.  Not least because of how much time it's taking.  In nay case, this is why posts of startlingly brilliant game design are likely to be in short supply for some while.  I've pretty much done all rules stuff, but the powers are going to take me a while.

Trouble and Problems

[This is an updated mechanic for Heroes of Industry.  The why's of this post are contained here.]

Troublesome Qualities

Sometimes, a Quality causes problems for character too. In fact, a good, flavourful Quality offers up as many potential troubling aspects as helpful ones.  This troubling can happen in any of three ways:

-Forcing an Action: If the GM thinks that a Quality would make the character take some course of action different from what the player has chosen, he may offer 1 Hero Point to convince you to change your behaviour. The player may decline if he wishes, but then player has to pay 1 HP to exercise control.

-Strength is Weakness: If the Quality could have an impact upon a character’s efficacy, the GM may offer Hero Points equal to the Quality’s MOD in exchange for which the Quality exerts a negative MOD equal to it’s usual positive MOD. So, a hero with “Excellent +2 Bad-Ass Dude” could be forced to take a -2 MOD when trying to calm down the leader of an alien armada about to destroy the earth.

-This Only Happens to Me: If the Quality could result in other people doing bad things to your character, the GM may pay out 3 HP to have that happen. This is essentially a Revoltin’ Development specifically tailored to a character’s Quality, which results in the player earning an extra HP.

Troublesome Qualities are an important source of Hero Points in play, which is why a player may wish to have Qualities that are so broadly defined that it comes up with great frequency. Qualities with negative sides are also an excellent source of drama for those so inclined.

Indeed a player may wish to take a Quality that seems nothing but troublesome. For instance, Spider-man generally seems to have the Quality “Perceived by the public as a menace”. That really only works in a bad way. If a player takes such a Quality he is effectively asking the GM to give him trouble of this sort and lots of it. And players may wish to consider this: the GM can give you a Revoltin’ Development anytime he likes, so why not be the one to choose what kinds of bad things happen by selecting a potentially troublesome Quality and earn the extra Hero Point when it bites you in the ass?

On the other hand, some players don’t care for heroes with problems. In that case, they may define their Qualities so narrowly that it is difficult for them to cause trouble (and so seldomly supplies any Hero Points). That’s cool too.

Finally, note that players are free to suggest times when their Qualities trouble them. That’s a good thing: listen to them and screw them over upon request.

Problems

There is a notable exception to the general abstractness of combat in HoI. Whatever Quality takes the first downshift in a conflict generates a Problem. A Problem is a temporary Quality that is always and only troubling. Unlike the usual troublesome Quality, though, players do not get Hero Points for their pains. A Problem can never be used to help the character (i.e. add it’s Rank to die rolls) and cannot take Grief.

The exact nature of the Problem is determined by the Quality that took the first hit. If The Presence takes the first downshift in a conflict to his “Inhuman Aura” Quality, then the Problem has to be concerned with that. The player is allowed to specify the Problem, subject to GM approval. In this case, the player of Presence decides that his character is feeling depressed at his inhuman state, which reduces his effectiveness in conflict. He gives himself the Problem “Depressed at Inhuman State”.

Like any other Quality, Problem has a rank. When first generated, a Problem is Good +1 rank. If the same Quality takes the first hit in a subsequent conflict, then instead of generating a new Problem, the existing Problem goes up one rank. So, in a later battle, the Presence loses a roll and elects to take the first hit to “Inhuman Aura” again. Now his Good +1 Problem “Depressed at Inhuman State” becomes “Excellent +2 Depressed at Inhuman State”.

Which is a bummer, so most heroes will be anxious to rid themselves of Problems. They can do so by playing out a reasonable way of assuaging the situation and paying out Hero Points equal to the Problem’s rank. This can only be done in a later adventure than the one in which the Problem was generated or increased. Doing this gets rid of the Problem, but it also means that hero is down that number of Hero Points when he has his next conflict. There is a trade-off, which is why some players might elect to let Problems rise for awhile.

Example: The player of the Presence doesn’t want to let his Problem get worse than Excellent +2, so he decides to deal with it at the next opportunity. At the beginning of the next adventure, he decides that the Presence disappears from a meeting with his super-pals and reappears atop a mountain in the Himalayas. There he sits, oblivious to the howling winds and ponders the meaning of “humanity”. The GM likes this and continues it, having a mysterious monk appear and lead the hero to a hidden monastery. Seeing the existence of men in such circumstances and feeling their goodwill, the Presence feels restored. He pays out 2 Hero Points, removes the Problem, and waves goodbye to his new friends as he returns to the city. The game has now had a nice little soap-opera moment plus a mysterious new element has been added to the game. Just who are these hidden monks? Any GM worth his salt will have them show up again, in perhaps a surprising manner. Also, of course, the Presence returns to his duties to find himself in confrontation with the Raptor and lacking two vital Hero Points. He’s really going to need those to defeat his foe.

On Kallos in Game Design

The Classical Greeks ascribed to a notion of a beautiful symmetry.  Their word for it was kallos.  Greek sculpture is probably the paradigmatic example of this, although mathematical equations, rations, and the like (such as the Golden Mean) may be even better at exemplifying the concept.  In the realm of game design, I am a Classical Greek through and through.

I recognize that this is not at all an "old-school" characteristic, with it's "make it up as I need it" and "whatever works" ethos that gives you, among other things, the glorious mess that is nowhere better displayed than Gygax's 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.  Obviously (I hope), I'm not hostile to the Old-School philosophy.  But I can't design that way.  And as much fun as I have had even with AD&D, I can't admire the design strategies behind it.

This striving towards beautiful symmetry may have been apparent in my work on Under the Dying Sun.  Just look at the agon over coming up with a Weapon vs. Armour Class table that was "right" i.e. kallos.  If it wasn't apparent, look at the entries for Axe and Sword, from which everything else depended.

All of that is by way of an explanation for revisiting the damage concept from Heroes of Industry.  As I had originally written in Grief and Trouble, whatever Quality takes the first hit in a fight generates Trouble.  The idea is okay, but it's been gnawing at me for awhile because it was just too ad hoc, to asymmetrical if you will.  I'm thinking particularly of this: "Trouble is a special kind of attribute that partakes of both a Quality and Grief."  That might well play just fine, but it has no beautiful symmetry.

So, I've renamed and rewritten it and, in so doing, not only improved that, but was then prompted to improve upon another mechanic.  Let me be clear: this is not from my burning passion to design the greatest game ever.  I have no such illusions.  Nor is it because I just can't let go.  The truth of the matter is that I derive pleasure from finding kallos in game design.  The design is a means to an ends (playing a good game), but it is also an end unto itself  for me.

I'm reminded of a comment I received a while ago to the effect: "Stop trying to get the best mechanic and just play the game."  To me, that's the a defensible Old-School approach: the rules work well enough and you can always change them in play if you need to.  But that's not the point for me in designing a game.  "Well enough" has no beauty.

Does this mean that I am substantially less productive than other folks?  Yes; substantially.  But that's okay.  Beauty is eternal.

My Long and Sordid Relationship with the HERO System

I do not believe that I have mentioned my history with the game Champions.  Despite finding Villains & Vigilantes terribly interesting, V&V was not the supers-game my group played the most.  My friend John bought the 2nd edition of Champions (the boxed set expansion of the original hand-produced game) in 1983 (or maybe 1984) when we were in Middle School.  I recall thinking how much uglier it was than V&V which had Jeff Dee's infectiously enthusiastic art.  

However, once I started reading the rules, I was blown away.  Seriously.  I now find the basic design of Champions (and pretty much all point-buy systems that feature extra points for disadvantages) deeply-flawed, but I wouldn't pretend for a moment that I wasn't amazed at the time.  And it really was revolutionary.  Younger readers may not grasp it, but the idea that you could build anything -- any power, any skill, any device, any-fricking-thing -- with those basic rules was just mind-blowing.  Like 2001: A Space Odyssey mind-blowing.  

And let's recall that this book was all of 80 pages long.  The current edition of the HERO System is so bloated that it is published in two bloody volumes like a god-damn encyclopedia, but the original game, however much it isn't old-school in most ways, hewed much more closely to the classic design-length of the Basic /Expert Dungeons & Dragons Books (which only came out the year before the 1st edition of Champs and clocked in at 64 pages).  Those 80 pages -- well, it really was revelatory at the time.  You mean that I can buy Energy Blast and call it a Lightning Bolt or Power Blast or freakin' rocks falling from the sky?  Awesome.

Less immediately apparent, but potentially more meaningful were Disadvantages.  Now, recall that in a game like D&D, you would never want to have something about your character suck (unless you were one of those damn role-players who thought it was great fun to act out your PC's faults and make everyone else sit and listen to you whinge like a second-rate Elric or a third-rate Hamlet and screw over the party because "it's what my guy would do!"  And yes, that was me at the time so I have no reservations in making fun).  V&V made you take a weakness, but you had the option of ditching it if you didn't like it and losing one of your powers, so the idea that "sucking was to be avoided" was maintained.  But in Champions, you wanted to suck.  Sucking at something meant you got more points to buy your Lightning Bolt / Power Blast / Freakin' Rocks.

Lord, the seductiveness of that idea.  And the unforeseen consequences.  Because, it quickly became apparent that there was a game in picking out Disads; one that could definitely be won or lost.  The game was to pick Disads that didn't actually -- you know, disadvantage -- your character (note: we did not ever play the game like John Wick.  Would never have occurred to me).  I don't think that i ever saw a guy with Vulnerability, for example; it was hard to game that one since it outright hurt you.  But Hunted by...?  Oh yeah, that's the one.  After all, is the GM really going to spoil his adventure by having one of your stupid Hunteds showing up out the blue?  And if he does...what, you just get extra screen-time as your arch-foes show up and let you beat them up.  Even better were Psychological Limitations.  Ah, the beauty of the Psych Lim in the dawning days of the Iron Age.  "Likes to Kill"?  That's a  disadvantage how exactly when that's what you plan on doing anyway?  Damn, I recall making a Rorschach-knockoff called "the Harbinger" who actually maintained a blacklist of people who needed killing.  Top of the list? Madonna.  And yeah, I killed her.  Geez, that's embarrassing...er, I mean, "Grim n' Gritty".

The central problem to all of this is that taking a Disad makes your hero objectively more competent than one without whether the Disad ever actually means anything or not.  And so character creation became this whole separate game in which you tried to come up with Disads (and Limitations) that made economic sense: that is, you got the most benefit for the least cost.  Now, I've mellowed a lot on the subject of economics over the years, but not in terms of character creation, or, as it became known, "efficient character builds".  

Goodness how I grew to hate playing Champions.  I found myself just recycling the same characters over and over again, rather than face the task of efficiently building something new.  I had friends who loved that game.  Some call character creation in such a system a "mini-game", but I don'.  It took me more time than actual play.  To me, it was an entire separate game that I had to play before I could play the real game.

I know that I have written about how Truth & Justice opened up indie-game design ideas to me and showed me how old-school isn't that far removed from indie.    I still recall confronting T&J and trying to absorb that idea that Disads don't make you more powerful, but give you meta-game power when and only when they actually cause some kind of inconvenience.  I don't think I can actually express how revelatory that was.  It was on the same level as my initial exposure to Champions but utterly refuting that first apocalypse.  As the years go on, it just seems more and more...well, I hesitate to use the word "correct", but it sure as hell feels that way to me.

And yet...

And yet, the pull of Champions is strong.  And I keep finding it creeping up on me while working on Heroes of Industry.  For example, I have been grappling with powers that seem objectively less good than others and how to handle that.  It's come up a lot while working on Body Powers such as Growth, Shrinking, and Density Increase.  I even went so far as to type up a whole new mechanic where you could substantially limit a power and get an extra rank for it.  Thank god that Tim Kirk of Silver Lion Games, a guru on super-hero gaming, talked me out of that.  

I find it kind of fascinating how these things work.

Matter Powers

I continue to plug away here. back to fiddling with the Random Powers Tables which are maybe 80% done now. At least until I change my mind again. Anyway, I'm going to be taking most of next week off to play with the kids, but I thought I might just post the tables for another category today to give more of the sense of where things are headed.

Table 4 is Matter Powers.

(Yes, I just noticed that I have Table 4.1 mislabelled as 2.1. Oh well).

I'm still not sure about Exotic Matter.  That seemed neat when I wrote it, but looking at it now, I think I would be stumped as a player if I rolled it.  And that's counter to the purpose of the tables which is to spur the thought process.  Otherwise, I think that I've hit about what needs to be hit here.  

Love to hear what anybody thinks.

Back to the Bronze Age - Part One

One thing that seriously only dawned on me recently is that I can reasonably expect some readers to not only be unfamiliar with the Bronze Age of comics, but to have not even been alive then.   Man.  So I've spent the last week working on the section on what makes a Bronze Age comic story.

This is a fun, but consuming section.  I keep wanting to write more than I probably should, specifically in coming up with connections:  connections between themes in the comics (how the social issues ties into all those wacky cults); connections between movements in the real world for those who didn't live through them (such as the cult scares of the 70's, which grew out of the spiritual searching of the 60's; and , of course, connections between the real world and the comic world (such as how wide-spread concerns about groups such as the Unification Church aka "the Moonies" translates into things like Brother Power and Sister Sun, who appeared in Spectacular Spider-man No. 12 (1977)).  I blame this on my former life as professional historian.

So I'm enjoying this even as I am wearing myself out.  I'll have to take a break on this soon and probably go back to the working on the Power Tables to avoid turning my game into an essay.  But I thought that I might post some of the work here and see if it makes sense to folks and seems helpful.  There is more to the section than this, but it's not presentable yet.

Back to the Bronze Age

Comic book historians describe the period of time covered in this game as the Bronze Age.  Unlike some of the periods in comics, there is no very clear line between the preceding Silver Age and the Bronze Age (although that doesn’t hinder virulent arguments about when the Bronze Age “really” started).  Rather, it was an evolution in which certain themes and ideas came to the fore while others receded.   It was both continuity and change.

But if you want a simple summation of the what the super-heroes of the 70’s faced, you could do worse than this: social injustice, student protests, Satanism, the Energy Crisis, Women's Lib, lonely Space-Messiahs spouting poetry in psychedelic space-scapes, classic monsters, disillusionment with the Government, Golden Age legacies, barbarians, Vietnam fallout, wacky cults, drug problems, Alien Astronauts, and the power of Kung-Fu.

Simple, no?

Well, maybe we could flesh that out a little.

We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us

Silver Age comics were very focused on defending the status quo.  The government is good, the police are good, American society is good.  Communists are bad, Bad Guys are bad, and violence beyond the cartoon level is bad.  This was in part a legacy from the comics reaching their height during World War II and in part a requirement of the Comics Code.  The point is that super-heroes in the Silver Age fought attempts to change things.

In the Bronze Age, heroes began to discover that some things might need changing.  Those student radicals taking over a campus might have a valid point to make.  Heck, rioting convicts had a point about inhumane treatment in the American penal system; Spider-man found out and went live on the Johnny Carson show to tell the whole country.  The super-heroes of the time confronted issues of social justice, economic justice, and the gender divide.  Sure, a lot of those folks were villains, but not all, and even the ones who were crooks seemed to have some justification for what they were doing.  As the Green Lantern learned to his dismay when he tried to protect a sleazy slum-lord from his aggrieved tenants, he had been so concerned with helping out the purple skins and the green skins that he had forgotten the needs of the brown skins.

But more than that, heroes began to find that bad guys did not always wear distinctive clothing and might well hide behind the façade of the corporation or the government.   The mood of the times was very much against “the Man” and He turned out to have His fingers in all sorts of pies. Particularly the kind of shady operations that had proliferated in the Viet Nam vortex.  The Rand Corporation, a think tank spun off from the military years earlier and still tied to them, was a good target for nefarious machinations within the halls of power.

The point is that the Bronze Age heroes stopped being automatically reactive defenders of the status quo, bringing them back full circle to the very beginning of the genre, when Superman was an agitator out to clean up corruption.

It wasn’t just society that turned out to be flawed; the heroes and their pals found themselves prey to inner demons that would never have shown up in earlier eras.  Marvel Comics laid the groundwork in the 1960’s with it’s less than perfect characters, but this only took full flower in the Bronze Age when the Comics Code was flouted to feature a storyline in which Peter Parker’s friend Harry Osbourne suffers from drug addiction. The competition went one better when the Green Arrow walked in on his sidekick Speedy preparing to shoot up.

Now, not every single hero turned out to be an alcoholic (just Iron Man, I think), but the idea was established that flawed hero meant more than just arguing with your partners.  Guilt and sin were prominent themes, whether portrayed realistically (Spider-man’s guilt at Gwen Stacy’s death) or metaphorically (The Ghost Rider is pretty easy to read as a religious parable).

Space Odyssey; or see Kirby, Jack

Outer Space had not been ignored during the Silver Age; indeed, that was a very science-fiction oriented period when previously mystical characters such as the Green Lantern were retooled into sci-fi characters.  Aliens of every conceivable shape, size, and four-color tone proliferated during the period.  This was a generally pulpy, Buck Rogers kind of science fiction.

In the Bronze Age, space turned out to be pretty trippy man.  Just as the film 2001: A Space Odyssey had brought the unfathomable, mind-altering qualities of space to the fore, the comics were doing the same thing.  This was a sort of “cosmic mysticism”, full of existential and religious themes.  And it had it’s Space-Messiahs, like the Silver Surfer and Warlock, who wandered the stars seeking enlightenment and an end to violence while still finding time to kick some bad guy ass.  But even there, the bad guys might turn out to be a vaguely-scientific looking reinterpretation of Satan (like Darkseid).

Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods was published in 1968 and proved to be a popular theme in comics.  This is the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis that extraterrestrial life-forms had visited the earth in the ancient past and influenced the development of human beings in some fashion or another.

These space odysseys could turn up in the most unlikely of places: Thanos the death-loving Eternal premiered in the pages of Iron Man of all places.  And poor Rick Jones, who had begun life as the Hulk’s sidekick ended up sharing bodies with Captain Marvel through the power of the Nega-Bands.  The most notable expressions of all of this were Jack Kirby’s Fourth World books for DC and the very same Jack Kirby’s Eternals stories for Marvel. Considering that he had pioneered this stuff in the Silver Age with Galactus and the Watcher, that should come as no surprise.

Everybody was Kung-Fu Fighting

Kung-Fu was big in Bronze Age comics.   In earlier periods, heroes were better fighters because they had a mean right hook.  Neither Captain American nor Batman fought in a style that, in any way, was not good old Yankee fisticuffs.  If you read the comics from Cap’s revival in the 1960’s, you see that he is constantly called “an acrobat” and Batman is referring to his style of combat as “street-fighting” as late as 1970.

But the Bronze Age brought in the Fu.  Five years after that street-fighting reference, Batman is suddenly referred to as a master of judo, kung-fu, and aikido (in addition to plain old fisticuffs). Martial Arts heroes sprouted everywhere, even the 30th century (the Karate Kid in the Legion of Super-heroes). Despite that last example, though, the Martial Arts heroes of the Bronze Age did tend to inhabit their own “street-level” sub-culture. They did not usually fight aliens or gods or powerful master-villains (well, except for Fu Manchu); instead, they fought street gangs, corrupt businessmen, and Martial Arts villains.

Kung-fu wasn’t just about fighting, though. There was a great deal of interest in “alternative spiritual traditions” (i.e. not the Western monotheisms) and this played an important role in Kung-Fu stories. Again, you can find the roots of this in the 60’s, particularly in the faux-Eastern mysticism from Doctor Strange.  The Kung-Fu characters from the Bronze Age often brought with them images of Chinese temples, meditation, and a quest for peace--although, being the comics, this quest for peace could only be preceded by extreme ass-kicking.

It’s worth noting that this was all pretty Sino-specific; the omnipresent ninja of later years didn’t really pop up until the early 80’s and “batarangs” were still actually boomerangs in the 70’s, rather than the shuriken they would eventually become.

All You Need is Love…and Satan

More than just the philosophy of Kung-Fu, the Bronze Age stories paid a lot of attention to variant religions, which had been pretty much absent during earlier periods (perhaps because the comics were created by a lot of Jewish fellas writing for predominantly Protestant audiences?). The favourite depiction was the cult and the cult was usually one ostensibly proclaiming universal love or brotherhood or spiritual enlightenment or one of those hippie-things and then turning out to be a front for neo-Nazis or master villains or alien squid-men (yes, alien squid-men.   See Nebulon’s Celestial Mind Control movement, which also involved it’s participants wearing Bozo the Clown masks.  See, this is what I’m talking about: the Bronze Age was awesome).

A special kind of cultist is the Satanist and these fellas were also coming out of the woodwork in the 1970’s, spurred on in part by the popularity of movies such as Rosemary’s Baby and the Exorcist.  There were lots of evil Satanists as antagonists, whether or not the object of their affection was “Satan” strictly speaking or not.   For instance, there was "Satannish, which would sound like the adjectival form of Satan, but was his own…er, demon.  His cult, called “the Sons of Satannish”, involved wearing funny masks and adopting scary names.   It was sort of a diabolic LARP.  He also made Faustian bargains with individual diabolists.  Other maybe-Satans included Mephisto, who bedeviled Thor and was constantly tempting the Silver Surfer, and Trigon, who played the Rosemary’s Baby gambit to produce the new Teen Titan Raven.

That last example points to one of the stranger phenomena of the Brozne Age: super-heroes with diabolical origins. If DC had the demonic Raven, Marvel went one better in having a hero actually called “the Son of Satan”, who was just as advertised on the box (he also had a sister called “Satana” not to be confused with the musician).  More famous today is the Ghost Rider, a human who made a deal with someone (let’s call him Satan for the hell of it) and had a demon bonded to his soul as a result.  This guy could never have been a hero in the Silver Age.

Body Powers

I did a little preview of how powers will be formatted the other day and then discussed one of the ways that the Scope of powers is defined (Breadth).  Today I want to focus on another way to define powers: Category.  

A power's Category is a sort of genus for powers.  Categories are thematic and there are seven Categories: Body Powers, Energy Powers, Matter Powers, Mental Powers, Movement Powers, Sensory Powers, and Super-Qualities.  Categories have little direct mechanical impact on play, but they provide a great deal of the flavour of the power.  And that can have mechanical impacts when deciding what does and doesn't fall under the scope of a power.  

For example, Air Blast and Power Blast are both...well, blasty.  The principle mechanical use is to damage something at range (this is the Effect; I haven't discussed that yet, but the idea should be familiar from Champions and all the effects-based games depending therefrom).  However, Power Blast is from the Energy Powers category and Air Blast is from the Matter Powers Category.  In a game, there may be something that functions as an Energy Deflection Shield.  That would probably be effective against Power Blast, but not Air Blast.

Categories are also the foundation of the Random Roll Method for powers (the last version is here, although I have made changes in the interim).  Let's look at the Body Powers Table:

You'll notice that several of the powers require you to make a further roll on a sub-table.  Sub-tables!  How often do we see those anymore in these anti-wargame days?  Well, take that you haters of sub-tables.  I got sub-tables out the wazoo here.  OK: I have four for Body Powers which may not be out the wazoo, but it's some way along the wazoo.  Here's the sub-tables:

The dice mechanic here goes from a variety of simplified D66 to a straight 2d6.  Why?  It's all about the numbers, baby.  The main Tables have a lot of entries so that 2d6 just doesn't work, not without making really odd probabilities such that every other hero would have Invisibility.  I wanted the odds on this table to be pretty equal with the notable exception of Resistance (which is what I'm calling the generic Armour/Damage Resistance/Invulnerability power) since pretty much every other hero does have some form of super-protection. 

But the sub-tables have too few entries to make D66 practicable.  Plus, I wanted to have less balanced probabilities on the sub-tables.  Alert, imaginary readers will note that I have put rough odds out to the right on the sub-tables.

Some of these powers may be Focused or Meta-Powers.  Sub-tables 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4 make that determination, as does Table 9 which is the generic Power Breadth table discussed last time).  One Power (Inhuman) is automatically a Meta-Power.  The player who rolls this is free to choose the exact nature of his inhumanity (Alien, Robot, God, Hard-Light Hologram, Golem,  Living Planet, whatever) and he and the GM then work out appropriate sub-powers.  Consider it my homage to Villains & Vigilantes' Body Power (speaking of which, that venerable game has finally passed back into the control of creators Jeff Dee and Jack Herman, who have released a cleaned-up version as edition 2.1).

Some of these powers, such as Animal Powers and New/Extra Body Parts are similarly open to interpretation, while others, such as Size-Change and Stretching are fairly straight-forward.  This is something I agonized about a great deal: how specific should the powers be?  Make them too general and you lose the point of even having a random roll method; make them too specific and you end up with characters who look more like Gamma World mutants than super-heroes.  I again took a leaf from V&V and mixed it up a bit, producing what I think is a nice balance.