Some artwork for a campaign I'm not running

I used to draw a lot more than I do now, and I thought I'd try to pick up a pencil and pen and try again.  Like Rob Liefield, I am having trouble with drawing feet.  Time to do some studying.

This guy is a villain I've thought about for a supers campaign.  Not that I'm running one right now, mind you.

Where things are in May

I realized, amidst my waxing on about non-existent fictional campaigns, that I hadn't been talking about how the game I'm actually in is going.

Right now I've taken over running the 4E game for my group, a solid group of six players (including my son).  I'm doing a sort of urban sandbox-style campaign where the PC's are presented with multiple options for minor or major quests and choose how they wish to approach them.  I also keep the encounters a little less structured--for some there is a sense of location, but others are more fluid.  For example in the last session the PC's were being tailed by a group that is intended to ambush them.  The PC's then find a place (using a Streetwise roll) to go where it will be difficult to be ambushed and make their stand, setting up a counter-ambush with their bow-themed ranger.

It's interesting to see how a city-based campaign plays, because I've never done one before for D&D.  For one thing, the sense of resource management is different.  One PC has begun using hirelings, which makes a lot of sense.  At this point the PC group has quite a stash of unspent gold, and given 4E's treasure inflation they now are quite wealthy in comparison to the average peasant.  Thus the PC's can throw a little coin around having people run errands, track down leads, even work as bodyguards.  Also the pacing is a little interesting; with no immediate issues, the PC's can just go home, get some rest, and recover their dailies in a way that a group that is deep into a dungeon can not.

Plot-wise, the PC's uncover a series of disappearances in town all linked to a certain area.  The PC's set up one of their own as "bait," and reel in quite a catch: a vampire!  The vampire is connected to a mysterious society called the Icicle Club, which the PC's investigate.  There they discover that not only is the club a nest of vampires but is being run by a baelnorn lich called "the Ice Lord."  In the last scene of the session the PC's are ambushed by one of the vampire lords whom they had met earlier, but it appears that he was operating without the lich's knowledge.  Now the PC's have to decide if they want to try to infiltrate the club again, or just launch an attack on the lich's nest.

How to build a supers campaign the easy way

I continue to contemplate the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game, and my biggest stumbling block has to do with whether or not, should I ever run it, to use Marvel Comics' own universe or a homegrown one.
Licensed universes, regardless of genre, have their pro's and con's.  The pro's are that you have a background familiar to at least some of your players and a load of pre-generated characters.  The con's are that the PC's are relegated to second-tier figures in comparison to the established protagonists, or at least start significantly less powerful than they are.  With MHR's very fuzzy ruleset the power discrepancy is less of an issue, but the otehr's remain.
Plus, there's the fact that really well-informed players have a tremendous knowledge of the universe far beyond what the PC's would, and you end up with some meta-gaming issues.
Homegrown universes have the plus of avoiding all the fore-knowledge issues of pre-generated ones, and you can tweak it to look just like you would want (no magic, aliens, or mutants, for example) but have one big downside: they are a lot of work.  Unless you have a supers universe where supers haven't existed before the campaign begins, the GM (or excuse me, "Watcher") has to at least come up with the concept, if not the stats, of dozens of other heroes, villains, agencies, etc.
So late last night I'm up because of work and so I'm wresting with the issue of how to do a homegrown supers universe without having to do so much front-end work.  And then it hits me: the Justice Society of America.
For those who don't know, the JSA was a superhero team that began in 1940 and featured lesser-known characters that didn't have their own book.  Eventually JSA was canceled and then revitalized as an extra-dimensional counterpart to the Justice League, and then finally merged together after the Crisis on Infinite Earths.
In 2006, after a very brief and controversially-aborted run in the early 90's, a new JSA was put together featuring a combination of Golden/Silver Age heroes and various proteges of earlier heroes.  These "second generation" heroes spanned former sidekicks, descendants, inheritors of power, etc.

JSA Vol. 3, #1 Variant cover

And that's the hook.  Have each PC be a second-generation hero of some kind: anything from a reincarnation of a WW2-era hero to someone who just was inspired by the earlier figure.  There's loads of possibilities, and that means you have not only a PC, but a pre-existing NPC that can be worked into a story.  I might even allow a person was has descended from a villain but has adopted the mantle of a hero.  Really creative players could even work an arch-rival of their "parent" hero into their backstory.
And it really works for players who struggle to come up with a "hook" for their characters but instead just slap together an impressive set of powers, and you have a reason for the team to be together.

I have to think on this, but I like it.  Comments welcome.

The Pathfinder Experiment, Part Two

We finished up our Pathfinder campaign last Friday.  It wasn't a long session for a couple of reasons but the biggest being that we still had a couple of players who could dish out 60+ points of damage in a single blow.
This actually illustrates for me my biggest gripe about the entire Pathfinder experience, namely that the effectiveness of PC's in combat is directly proportional to how well you understand the game, and it's a steep climb.  Many players just build fairly straightforward PC's without a lot of examination of the feats, etc. while others went online and spent quite some time figuring out the best combos.  The latter group ended up dominating combat over the others, almost to the point of being detrimental.  This was especially the case for younger players who really didn't understand the rules.
I don't blame the guys who spent time researching their characters--their PC's were by-the-book and totally street-legal.  It's just the gaps that existed between people who were taking out CR 6 opponents with one blow (at fifth level) and the ones that complained that they were "just shooting toothpicks" were really painfully obvious.
After it was done my son were upstairs and later came down and apologized for how badly he thought it had been.  He was one of the low-end PC's, a druid he built just to have an animal companion.  I told him people had fun and there were some good moments in the game, but I think that he won't be hassling me to play this again for while.

The Pathfinder Experiment, Part One

Okay, I'll give credit where it is due.  My son pressured me into running Pathfinder for him, and the rest of my gaming group went along.  As it turned out, we had a great time.

The story was really straightforward: the PC's are trapped within a large building when a huge earthquake strikes the city.  The thrown-together survivors of the quake agree to accompany a small NPC girl back to her father, a wealthy alchemist in the city by moving through the city's sewer system and avoiding the chaos above. Along the way they battle a few denizens of the sewers and meet a small and very smelly group of cultists.  The father points them towards the home of a powerful wizard who might be able to ascertain the source of the (unnatural) earthquakes, and the PC's rescue said wizard from a demon the earthquake accidentally unleashed in his tower.

A few thoughts about the game:

• I don't know if it was just changing the game system or what, but the group approached encounters very differently than we were in 4E.  Often the question was raised, "can we roleplay out of this one?"  And since the answer was yes a few times, they did.
• They also exercised more creativity.  For example rather than just seeing what daily/encounter/at-will could be used, players would often try to interact with their environment looking for advantages.
• With a witch, druid, and ranger on the team, all with animal companions, the group looked a little bit like an episode of Pokemon.
• Challenge ratings for encounters seem really inconsistent.  The group could plow through one CR5 encounter and then struggle terribly with another.
• Cavaliers seem really over-powered.  Charging from horseback, the PC cavalier could dole out 40 points of damage, which is pretty good for a guy who isn't a spell jockey.

We got a good way through the mini-adventure, and in fact we should easily finish the entire thing next time.

First Thoughts: Marvel Heroic Roleplaying

I picked this game up yesterday, having read a lot about it at various blogs that I follow.  I'll be putting up a decent review of it after I fully digest it, but in the meantime I thought I'd as you, gentle readers, a couple of questions.

First, how important is PC balance to you?  Some games have a pretty strong mechanic towards PC balance, usually enforced by a crunch-heavy system.  Others, like Rifts for example, have uber-powerful characters fighting side-by-side with guys who are barely more than everyday humans.  Marvel Heroic Roleplaying (which I'll call MHP for short) eschews PC balance to reflect the disparate power levels of its source material.  Hawkeye and Iron Man on the Avengers, or Colossus and Shadowcat on the X-Men.

Frankly, and I may be in the minority about this, but I think it matters a lot.  There's a scene in the inital run of Justice League Europe where Captain Atom flies up to this big evil cloud and just incinerates the entire thing.  As he returns to his group, Metamorpho says, "what are we, your cheerleading squad?"

I think that if you have a game where there are some PC's who are able to do much, much more than the others, than the ones who can't are going to eventually ditch their under-performing PC's for ones that aren't.  And in a no-point-build game like MHP, all you have to do to accomplish that is convince that your new PC Cosmic Lass is just as good a concept as your previous character, Bolo Lass.  And frankly I'm not sure the counter-argument that "mature" players are going to willingly play de-powered characters holds that much water in a game where you are smacking villains most of the time.

Which brings me to my next question?  How should good roleplaying get rewarded?  MHP incentives playing PC's "true to type" by giving them bonus dice when they do.  So if Spider-Man makes wise-cracks while battling a villain, he gets more dice to roll which means he does better.  This is a break from the old model, which tends to reward good roleplaying after the session as an XP bonus of some kind.  MHP still has those XP awards, but they tend to be plot- or task-motivated, e.g. you get a bonus if you quit a team, or help a teammate recover from being emotionally traumatized.  You're still true to type, mind you.

Finally, how important is it to you that you know what your supers PC can do, and how well s/he can do it? What do Spider-Man, Luke Cage, Ms. Marvel, and Sentry all have in common?  They all have the same stat: d10 Superhuman Strength.  For whatever it is worth, the Thing has it at d12.  Now I'm pretty sure that there is some disparity between the ability to lift heavy objects between those four individuals, but there's no game mechanic to suggest that.  Marvel's ersatz Superman is going to hit you as hard as radioactive spider guy.  I have this suspicion that in gameplay this may actually mean that my aforementioned concerns about balance are misplaced and that everyone is essentially the same level (a d8 or d10).  I've heard reviewers excuse this by saying, "well, how often are you going to have to raise the question of who would win in a arm wrestling match?"

Ahem

My own personal inclination is to think that there is something inherent to the genre that has players asking how strong, how fast, or how smart is my PC?

Or President Lincoln, for that matter

Okay, that's enough for now.  More ruminating on MHP later.

Why I'm about done with DC Comics

I finally got over to my local comic book shop to empty out my pull box.  I'm a sucker for team books, and right now have The Avengers, Justice League, Teen Titans, and Batman and Robin being held for me.  I had dropped Amazing Spider-Man after the whole "Spider Island" story.  DC has recently done the whole "relaunch the entire universe" thing (aka "the 52"), and I've been hoping that it would bring something interesting to the table.

Justice League #7

Nope.  I'm pretty much done with the Justice League, but my son is trying to get me to continue with Teen Titans.  After six issues to introduce all the characters, Justice League #7 has shifted into the post-modern crypto-fascist drek of the '90s.  The US Government is antsy about the League having a new satellite, people want the League to take over the government, and the members of the League continue to be snarky, unlikable characters with no chemistry.

Look, DC Comics.  The Justice League is not the Authority.  Even the Authority got pretty tired after a while because you end up alienating a young fan-base and a sentimental old fanbase with all this deconstruction garbage.

In addition the pacing seems really off, a problem that the Teen Titans seems to have as well.  Some of that is the simple issue of art: there's too few frames to tell a story, and there's such a weird sense of both trying to introduce new characters while at the same time referencing old ones that there's no time to set things up well.  The Teen Titans are really worse than JL, because they seem to be bringing in a new villain every month while at the same time trying to establish the group.

Marvel Comics seems to be willing to spend six months having Norman Osborn pick apart the Avengers, which means the pacing is a bit better, but they have the problem that they can't seem to tell a team story without having it go cosmic-level: the Avengers have, in the last few arcs, dealt with the Infinity Gems, an Odin-level villain, a Hydra-AIM-HAMMER coalition, and are now gearing up for the Phoenix once more.  It's a wonder that they even bother having Spider-Woman and Hawkeye on the team anymore.

So, I need a good team book with low- to mid-level heroes fighting villains with solid characterization.  I'm open to suggestions at this point.