Clobberin’ Time: Kapow! Playtest
Posted by Joshua on Nov 30, 2009
We had our first real (in the sense of using the rules and rolling dice) session playtesting my Kapow! Superhero RPG, and I’d say it went pretty well. We had one short combat, where the gang–who have decided to call themselves The Beacon City Brawlers–took out a dozen thugs armed with pistols and shotguns who were robbing a diamond exchange with startling ease. Startling to them, that is…one thing I was hoping to get out of the combat was to teach them how much more powerful they were than normals. We generally play in much, much lower power settings, so I think they found it gratifying when they realized that bullets really couldn’t hurt them.
The combat out of the way, we moved to the meat of the session, with them investigating a bank robbery by a group of masked, super-strong and fast women the press had dubbed “Barbie-zons”. The players got to invoke various of their shticks, with Jungle Gal scouting the bank with her heightened senses, The Wraith using his contacts to acquire the surveillance tapes, Redline using the Crime Lab in the base to analyze the tapes with facial analysis software, and even Namaste getting into using her knowledge of yoga and anatomy to analyze the way that they moved.
One thing that I realized in GMing is that even though I made up all the rules, and even wrote them down, I don’t have them all at the tip of my fingers, and the rules aren’t quite light enough for there to be only one thing to remember (e.g. roll vs. target). I’ll need to review them a bit before I run again. They did seem to work pretty much as I had hoped, to direct and resolve actions without getting in the way. There’s definitely a tendency for the players to ask for permission to try things that’s a legacy of other games we’ve played over the years, such as questions about whether they can move and attack, or does the move take their entire action, but I can definitely see them warming to the possibilities of simply being able to say “I phase through the top of the van that’s speeding away and into the seat next to the driver” without needing to make a skill check or negotiate it with the GM. Which reminds me, I did want to nail down the rule for over-awing somebody (along the lines of a Champions “Presence Attack”) before next session.
The session was it it was over before we knew it, and in fact we were fifteen minutes past our usual stopping time when somebody noticed and we had to wrap things up. People seemed pretty absorbed, and into their characters, and you can see the personalities starting to emerge. I’m really looking forward to the next session.
Kapow! Playtest Starting
Posted by Joshua on Sep 21, 2009
Last night we started hashing out the parameters for a supers campaign playtesting my new Kapow! Superhero RPG System. We didn’t actually generate characters because people wanted time to mull it over, but we discussed how it worked, and settled on some things about power level and tone. To summarize:
- Tone: serious, but not grim. Superheroes don’t kill, and supervillains mostly don’t either (because it’s not their MO or they’re stopped by the superheroes). No “Joker Syndrome”–if they catch a killer, the authorities can put him away for good. Realistic consequences of property damage such as throwing a car or getting smashed into a building aren’t generally considered, but violence isn’t sanitized to the point where fighter planes blowing up are followed by a cut-away to all the pilots floating down on their parachutes, Saturday-morning cartoon style.
- Scope: City-wide. The adventures will mostly take place in a single city, but range all over the city rather than be focused on a particular neighborhood. The PCs will be major players for their home city, but there are well-known groups and supers much more powerful than they.
- Prevalence of supers: Supers are common, and have been so for a long time. Every city probably has at least one hero, big cities will have a hero group, huge cities might have several. A super group can expect to fight a wide variety of villains, not the same ones over and over. There’s a wide spread of power-levels, and many who have powers have minor ones and don’t use them to fight or commit crime.
- Fictional Cities: the world will use fictional analogue of cities (a la the DC Universe) instead of real ones. The players agreed they would rather not get hung up on their knowledge (or lack) of actual geography, distances, and characteristics of neighborhoods. Play will take place in Beacon City, a fictional analogue of Boston.
- Not SF. The setting will be treated according to genre conventions rather than SF ones. We just won’t explore logical implications of certain kinds of technology or proof that magic works and literal gods walk the Earth. No explanation will be given or asked for as to why the world hasn’t changed in this or that way because of the existence of supernatural creatures, aliens from another world, artificial intelligences and so on.
Character concepts that people are leaning towards are:
- Doug: John McClane from Die Hard as a super; he gets hurt but just keeps on going, and going. Also has a prototype power-suppression device (used to restrain supervillains).
- Elyssa: Namaste, a yogini who has yoga abilities exaggerated to the point of super-powers (much as various kung fu and karate-based superheroes).
- Wendy: a Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, type complete with a big cat (lion or leopard) pet. Possibly an ordinary woman who can transform herself and her housecat via a magic amulet.
- Mike: a paraplegic with a transforming motorcycle/powered armor suit, or maybe a Sonic Blaster, he hasn’t decided yet.
- Dan: a superspeedster who “moves through time at twice or more the rate of anybody else”, so he need to eat, breath, sleep, etc twice as often as everybody else, but can actually phase through solid objects (by going through the space before the Earth’s motion actually moves the object there? I’m not sure I understood the comic-book physics of it.)
Adding Crunch to Super Simple Combat Maneuvers
Posted by Joshua on Aug 6, 2009
Based on some of the comments on my post on Super-Simple Combat Maneuvers, some people are looking for more crunch to the system, or at least a more reliable way of forcing the issue. Here are some possible added fillips, bearing in mind that to the extent that you make maneuvers a more attractive option than just doing damage you tilt the combat towards being resolved by the use of applicable maneuvers instead. The original rules were designed so that you probably couldn’t use them to win a combat you would otherwise lose, at least not without a big dollop of luck. The result, though, was that you probably wouldn’t bother to employ them unless circumstances gave you a specific reason to (we don’t need to defeat all these enemies if we can just get the MacGuffin to the Altar of Doom); it gave you a nice way of adjudicating attempts to do things outside the scope of the normal roll to hit/roll for damage/rinse and repeat cycle of combat, but it deliberately didn’t give you a lot of incentive to do so or choices to make in how to go about it.
If that’s not adequate, then here are some optional rules to try:
- Advanced Maneuvers: accepting some penalty in return for increasing the chance of a critical that forces the issue. E.g. for every -1 you take to your defense, or -1 to the damage done if they refuse the maneuver on a normal hit, you increase the critical range by 1.
- Special Training: in return for spending resources on special training in using maneuvers (e.g. Feats in D&D 3, or Edges in Savage Worlds) you get either an increase in the critical range, or an increase in the damage done if the defender refuses the maneuver.
- Upping the Stakes: for every -1 you take to your To Hit roll, you increase the damage done by 1 if they refuse the maneuver.
- Reducing the Cost: if you think that forgoing a critical is too high a price to pay, so nobody would try the option, you could make it do regular damage plus the maneuver on a critical, or you could defer the decision to apply the critical damage or the maneuver until after the damage is rolled.
The exact numbers would vary depending on the system being used (a +/-1 is a lot bigger deal in Savage Worlds than in a d20 system) and the feel you’re going for. You probably wouldn’t use all of these unless you wanted a very maneuver-centric game, and you should be prepared to tweak the exact numbers or even which ones you’re employing depending on how they work out in actual play.
Of these, I think I like Upping the Stakes the best. There’s something conceptually kind of nice about the idea that you can press for extra damage, but you have to leave a way for the defender to weasel out of it if they value their hide more than whatever the tactical disadvantage might be.
As far as my actual play goes, it’s too early to tell. Friday we only had one combat, and it was pretty much a straight-up hackfest, as the party fought off a group of Neanderthals. Nobody tried anything fancy except for one wimpy mage who tried playing dead. There was one PC death to a nasty crit, but nobody expected Expendable 1401 (yes, that was his name) to last more than a session or two in the first place.
Randomized Initiative
Posted by Joshua on Jul 1, 2009
Randomized initiative is a hold-over from wargaming that I’ve never particularly cottoned to. Originally D&D didn’t even have it. Turn order wasn’t even specified, leaving it up to the referee to figure out. I’m sure Chainmail had rules, but the d20 vs. AC “alternate” system that was in the books which everybody actually used made no mention of it. Basic D&D officially had turn order alternating between the two sides, players and NPCs. In that context it made perfect sense to roll at the beginning of combat to see who went first. For some reason, though (at least by the time of the Mentzer Basic D&D) the rules called for rolling each round, which had the bizarre property that a side might go twice in a row. Unfortunately, strict alternation by sides is a) very “gamey” feeling, b) can convey a huge advantage to the side that goes first, or the side that goes twice in a row, leading to a lot of combats where one side or the other doesn’t even get a chance to react before being defeated, and c) doesn’t leave much room for having one character being noticeably faster than another (though Zombies did always lose initiative, no roll needed). Individual initiative feels more natural, and gives a much more fluid feel to combat resolution, allowing characters to react to changing battlefield conditions–perhaps unrealistically so, but a much better fit for adventure fiction. Oddly, to my mind, many systems with individual initiative rules nevertheless include a large, even overwhelming, random component. That puzzles me because it still feels very much like a game, and it inevitably leads to layers of extra complication to try to shoehorn character ability back in…plus slowing play down with extra die rolls and modifiers to arrive at a result that is arguably much less true to either reality or genre fiction. I grudgingly use Savage Worlds’ random initiative system when I run that, in part because the Edges that represent one character being quicker are fairly substantial, but in all my own games turn order goes strictly by the character’s speed. Usually that’s Dex or the equivalent. I’ve toyed with using Int (to represent “quick thinking”) and even incorporated it into a game once…but nobody who’s spent much time around my friend Russell–who is quite literally one of the smartest people on the planet–can take the notion of a strong correlation between brains and fast reaction time seriously. It’s probably better to represent quick thinking as taking some specific advantage (along the lines of and Edge or Feat) regardless of attributes.
Karma Points, or Payback is a Botch
Posted by Joshua on Jun 18, 2009
There’s a discussion over at Robertson Games about using Luck points or the like to reduce the impact of a series of bad rolls resulting in character death. I’m not a big fan of them, preferring explicit script immunity if the game isn’t going to just let the dice fall where they may. I totally get why not every game needs to challenge the players and have character death or significant defeat be a live option, or at least give the players veto power to avoid stupid or anticlimactic deaths, but I think that Luck Points in the sense of a small finite resource than can be spent to reroll or force a roll to a certain outcome aren’t an adequate response. On the one hand, they’re too little: they don’t actually guarantee that unacceptable outcomes never occur. Eventually the party runs out of do-overs, and then they’re stuck even if another unacceptable outcome occurs. On the other hand, they do too much, since the players will almost certainly come to consider their presence (or absence if they’re running low) when evaluating their options. If you don’t want a TPK when the party foolishly attacks a sleeping dragon they happen across while on some unrelated quest, giving them Luck Points may actually encourage them to attack it; in effect Luck Points subsidize them making game-mechanically foolish choices.
Generally I prefer that the GM and players either agree in advance that they have script immunity, or they take up situations where a run of bad luck has derailed the game or killed a character on a case-by-case basis, deciding whether to live with the outcome or retcon it as an extraordinary measure. I’ve long felt it to be a mistake to roll for something if you’re not willing to abide by the roll; if I really don’t want characters to die as a result of bad rolls in combat, I take the option off the table, for instance by making less than 0 HP mean incapacitated, fate to be determined. It occurs to me, though, that it might be possible to craft a mechanic that answers my objections.
Suppose instead of a pre-figured supply of Luck Points which could be used to overrule or reroll a bad situation, you had an unlimited supply…but each time you invoked the rule you gained one Karma Point. The GM could then spend one Karma Point to overrule or force a reroll some time down the line, negating some good result you had rolled. That clearly solves the problem of a finite supply just kicking the can of reckoning down the road, giving the players a form of script immunity when it was just notably bad luck that screwed them over. It might also address the problem of the players counting on their immunity to let them try dumb things, since they would know it would cause them potentially serious trouble down the line. Yes, they could know in advance that whatever happens they can survive the dragon’s first breath attack…but at the risk of turning an otherwise easy situation later on into a fiasco. It wouldn’t anwer for players who really need script immunity so their fun isn’t all bashed out of shape by random die rolls, but it might do for players who were generally interested/willing to subject their character’s fate to the dice but wanted some measure of veto power over extremely inopportune rolls.