August Begins With a Campaign Flashback

Since we're loading up the moving van here at the Tower this week* I thought I would kick August off with something a little unusual. I recently ran across my old session summaries from my last D&D 3rd Edition campaign and after a few years they are kind of fun to read and recall. Plus there were some really good runs in there. I only have sessions 12-20 so I'm going to post those up one per day  along with some comments from the players (at the time) or from myself (now) to keep y'all entertained while I'm tied up. So if you can forgive me for a bit of timeshifting, it should make for an interesting campaign snippet at the least.

The premise for this campaign was we wanted a good long run (it was about 18 months), hopefully all the way to 20 (we didn't make it), and we wanted to travel around instead of being stuck in one location (as we had done in the previous campaign). I settled on a combination of the Savage Tide adventure path from Dungeon and the Freeport Trilogy. This would give us a lot of nautical adventure options from 1-10, let us wrap up one storyline (Freeport) fairly early in the campaign, then focus in on the epic threat of the savage tide for the higher levels. This is the one where I put together a special soundtrack to play during the sessions.  I still like it as the core of a wide-ranging campaign - maybe someday I will get to run it all the way through. In the meantime though I will share a chunk of the campaign that we did run - I hope you enjoy it.

* and since I'm going to be largely offline for at least a few days in there until the service gets hooked up at the new place - grumble grumble.

Planting the Seed - A DM's Tool

Barking Alien had a post last week that touched on something I have noticed all week. I'm going to take a slightly different tack on it. Let's call it the art of using someone's imagination against them.

"Ah! Theatricality!"

Well no, not exactly. BA noted that the kids he runs for tend to take things as they are while his older players tend to make all kinds of assumptions even when given very little real information. I have noticed the same thing - it's difficult to drop hints with the younger set because they don't have the experiences that drive the kinds of reactions you can get from adults.

Mainly they don't have the paranoia that can make planting a few seeds a lot of fun. You don't drop threats, you give them information - tantalizingly incomplete information that makes them want more - again,you are planting seeds that will be watered by the imagination of your players, for good or ill.

In the real world this is a skill often practiced when dealing with Ex-Wives - well, for some of us anyway.

In a gaming sense, it's the art of dropping just the right name, or artifact, or mysterious signal that sets off all kinds of alarm bells in the players heads or ignites their curiosity and as a result has an impact on character actions inside the game. Now you have to know your players to do this at a fine level with a subtle touch. In a lot of D&D games it's not something that is used a great deal. In games like Shadowrun though, it's a lot of fun. A mysterious katana that falls in their laps ... a strange program ... a shadowy opponent they just cannot catch - how does it all tie together? Does it tie together? Does it mean something?

Done right, it can drive your players crazy and have them thinking about the game in between sessions like you've never seen. It can lead to some really great things.

Done poorly and they will hole up in a safehouse for a year and refuse to come out. You won't win them all ...

It's often walking the fine line between curiosity, greed, and fear, tempting your players with just that extra bit of something that makes them want to extend their characters just that tiny bit more.

One of my best Shadowrun arcs involved a simple mission: drive a truck from point A to point B, wait 24 hours, then drive to point C and walk away, partial payment up front at the pickup site, the rest upon completion. It got more interesting from there:

• Starting point - the crew guarding the truck says "good luck - snort" as they walk away - immediate paranoia kicks in for some players. What do these guys know?
• The tuck is towing a flatbed trailer with something under a tarp. The patron's instructions were to not look under the tarp. This practically guarantees that someone is going to look under the tarp.
• A peek underneath reveals that it looks like some kind of missile ... with a glowing green substance dripping from a crack in the nose ...  which is radioactive ... tension escalates rather severely with each additional piece of information.
• The patron does not call with the new destination after the 24 hour wait - tension escalates some more. All kinds of scenarios are discussed.
• All along the way multiple groups have attempted to ambush the truck, helped to stop ambushes of the truck, and offered to purchase the truck and its cargo. The party is not talking to anyone at this point.

Eventually the tension gets to be too much and they end up driving the truck, cargo and all, off of a pier into Puget Sound and walking away from the whole thing. Note that I never confirmed it was a nuclear weapon on the truck - they got there very quickly and upped the tension of situation in a big way completely on their own. Of course, I never denied it either ...

There's also a benefit to the DM in that sometimes your players will put together something more fantastic than you were planning yourself, and if it makes sense to them then you have a green flag to run with it all the way to the conclusion.

Now this almost always goes somewhere interesting with older players, but with kids I have found they just don't care. A simple mystery is fine but they don't care about deep, layered conspiracies or really even gray areas and betrayals - they want to play the Avengers, or the Autobots, or GI Joe, or Aragorn and Legolas - not the X-Files, or the newer Battlestar Galactica, or the Sopranos - save that for later. The tweens-to-teens group in my experience is looking for a pretty clear division of good and evil and a clear opponent to deal with. The closest you might get to the mysterious campaign is in exploring a new environment - wrecked space travellers or fantasy heroes or the like - OR - a Secret Invasion Lite type approach which they were at least exposed to while watching the Avengers cartoon. To me this isn't a problem to be solved - it's a preference to be enjoyed while it lasts!

The Goal

So anyway, there's my thoughts on this particular tool in the GM Toolkit. The different ages do have clearly different preferences in my experience but aside form this different groups have different preference mixes - and tolerance mixes. With my main group too much fuzziness just annoys them, and there is an implied promise that most of it will be revealed in the end to get them to go along with the secrets. It's good to know your group and how they will handle these kinds of shenanigans, but then again, the best way to discover that is start doing it and see where the game goes.

Motivational Monday

Tip of the Hat

Vehicles in ICONS - Part 2 - Justice Wheels

I downloaded the first "Justice Wheels" from Fainting Goat a while back but at the time it only had the vehicle and the character inside. Recently they updated their supplements to add a few pages covering the Vehicle power and a set of chase rules. Seeing this I downloaded the updated version and looked it over after digging through the Marvel rules. Some thoughts:

Vehicle Rules:

• I still don't like Prowess as an automatic part of every vehicle. Would a Corvette have a higher or lower prowess than a Smart Car? What about a cement truck? Then you get into aircraft and it gets even stranger. I just don't have a way to gauge a vehicle's natural hand-to-hand combat ability and I think it should just be rolled into a driving test when a driver wants to sideswipe or ram something.

• Speed, Strength and Stamina make sense for pretty much any vehicle - that's pretty much the same trio of abilities that we get in MSH, less Type and Protection. 

• Then we get Coordination as an innate ability, basically the handling ability of the vehicle. This makes some sense as Coordination is used as the relevant ability for things like driving and piloting tests, modified by any applicable specialties. With these rules, the vehicles Coordination is used instead of the character's, although it is still modified by applicable specialties. Then we are informed that this should also be used for attacking with any vehicle mounted weapons. Presumably the focus here is ranged weapons, and I can kind of see that, but it's a little messy. You would think that ramming something would be even more dependent on vehicle handling than firing a hood-mounted bazooka, but instead this is supposed to use a vehicle's Prowess - that's just messy to me. For myself, I'd drop Prowess and just give them all a Coordination stat and use that for all handling type tests and for any shooting that comes up and for any attempts to smack anything with the vehicle itself. I'd also add in the rule from Marvel that those kinds of tests would use the lower of either the driver's or the vehicle's Coordination.

• As a power I do like it. To encourage their use I think that vehicle rules in superhero games should give back more points than they cost, with the consideration that the vehicle is not always present and can be lost or destroyed. These rules do that, giving some baseline options just for taking the power and then also including some notes on adding powers to the vehicle.

Chase Rules:

• The simpler approach given is to use a Pyramid test with some of the optional rules added in. That works but it's not anything particularly innovative. My biggest beef is that it would be over in one or two rounds most likely and seems like a fairly mundane approach to what should be a memorable part of an adventure - a dramatic chase!

• The more complex approach uses a custom set of chase rules which remind me a bit of some of the Savage Worlds chase rules and also a set of custom chase rules I ran across for Star Wars Saga Edition. Now when I say "complex" please realize that this is one page of rules - one page! - and is likely to be much more satisfying in play than "roll 4 successes and win". Pyramids are fine for handling some situations but for a dramatic chase sequence these are much much better. I'll be trying them out in play soon to verify my opinion and I'll cover them in my notes. 

So, is the search over? I think it might be! I'm willing to give up the separate Body/Protection ratings used in MSH to keep things a little simpler, and I'm going to drop Prowess too. I may keep Type though as it does help clarify things a bit when looking at some custom super-vehicle. Even with these changes I think the Marvel vehicle list will translate over just fine and that's where my personal campaign list will start. I think a front and back sheet with the chase rules on one side and a list of stock vehicles on the other is quite worthy as an addition to the campaign. 

Wednesday Funny

Pretty busy but Apprentice Red found this on Facebook and I deemed it worth sharing:

Vehicles in ICONS

This is one area where ICONS has not thrilled me. Being a bit of a gear head I like to have some kind of rules for vehicles, or at least a way to stat them up. This cropped up right at the beginning with the battlesuit in Skeletron Key and the lack of definition on it - is it a enhancement to the pilot's stats, or should it have its own statline like a giant robot? The adventure tried to have it both ways and I didn't like that answer. Since then I've seen one approach that just statted up vehicles the same as characters - that seems both counterintuitive in some ways and it feels like overkill. The first Justice Wheels gave a car Prowess, Coordination, Strength, and Stamina and that just doesn't click for me - Prowess? Is that tied to handling in some way? Is size a factor? So far none of these are doing it for me.

Then I realized that I needed to go to the source - quite a bit of ICONS comes from the Marvel Super Heroes RPG, so why not go back and look at how that game handled vehicles? Brilliant! Then I realized I packed that shelf up 3 days prior. Dern.

But wait! Packing up a completely different shelf I ran across my half-completed MSH binder - yeah, I had some plans for it - and look - inside it were the MSH Advanced Player's Book and the Advanced DM's Book! Excellent!

So anyway: MSH (Advanced Rules anyway) vehicles have 6 attributes:

• Type - Air, Road, Water, Off-Road, GEV, Rail, Space - just a broad categorization with some impact on how it interacts with the environment
• Cost - not terribly important in ICONS, this is the rank for a Resources roll in MSH to buy one
• Control - Now we're getting somewhere. When an operator tries to perform a maneuver they have to make a control roll using the vehicles Control or the character's Agility, whichever is less. There are many maneuver examples given, many affected by the Type of the vehicle and failure on one of these rolls means the vehicle enters a state known as "Out of Control".
• Speed - This is the maximum safe speed of the vehicle (in MSH ranks)
• Body - This is the toughness of the vehicle and is used to resist damage
• Protection - This is the level of protection given to passengers in or on the vehicle. On enclosed vehicles damage would have to exceed the Body of the vehicle to affect the passengers, who would then treat the protection rating as body armor against that damage. I don't want to get into rules too much in this post but there are a lot of degree of success measurements tied up in this as well.

I think that's a pretty solid set of stats for ICONS too:  

• Type is basically unchanged 
• Cost - we pretty much drop Cost
• Control stays as-is and is used when it's lower than the Coordination of the operator. 
• Speed would be rated in ICONS ranks which are pretty broad - Super Speed 7 is Mach 1
• Body would be probably best be equated to Strength but there may be enough exceptions to make that a bad idea. It's a start though. This would be used for resisting physical attacks 
• Protection would be treated as ranks of Invulnerability

Then of course we could add powers and such to a vehicle as well. They should probably cost less than powers on a character since the vehicle won't always be available but it might be easier to just let the player decide which of the powers they roll up are part of themselves and which ones are part of a vehicle and then make it a quality as this has upsides and downsides both. I could probably be talked into 5 or 10 points of powers for free if someone decides to take one. I'd do the same deal for a sidekick too, so why not a vehicle?

So using this model here are some conversions from MSH:

Sedan - Type: Road, Control 3, Speed 4, Body 4, Protection 2

Sports Car - Type Road, Control 5, Speed 6, Body 2, Protection 2

Tank - Type Off-Road, Control 5, Speed 3, Body 7, Protection 6 (includes tank cannon and an MG)

Blimp - Type Air, Control 1, Speed 2, Body 1, Protection 0

Motorboat - Type Water, Control 5, Speed 5, Body 3, Protection 2

Now I'm not sure we really need Protection as a separate stat but in MSH attackers have the option to attack either the vehicle or the passengers and that might be a good thing to keep, in which case Protection does make sense as a separate attribute. I'm going to take a little time to dig through the rules and see how well they translate over. In MSH vehicles take damage differently from characters - PC's have a hit point type mechanic while vehicles do not - they degrade due to damage losing speed ranks (for example) until they become immobile. I think it might be OK to port that over directly but I want to play with it first. Plus there needs to be a little mechanical complication to ensure the Average Man at Strength 3 can't punch the Body 2 Sports Car and wreck it when it's parked. I think the Material Strength table will help with that but I need to look into it too.

So there's a starter kit on how we stat up vehicles for the game. Next I plan to look into the Advanced MSH rules for maneuvers and combat and damage and see how they work. Hopefully I will get to that and post it up before Team-Up comes out and settles the question first.

Motivational Monday

One Year of ICONS - and some Rules Tweaks

We've been playing some ICONS here in addition to the Great Pathfinder Experiment and some M&M chargen. Modern, WW2, 3 or 4 different sets of characters - we've covered a lot of ground. After our first year of ICONS I'm considering the following three rules tweaks:

"Heroic Toughness" - All heroes start with Invulnerability 2. This is to give the guys who roll no defense a little more durability against mooks with guns. With most mook/agent types having a Strength of 3 or 4 and with pistols coming in at a 3 or 4 this makes a big difference to the hero but it means that the group of normals is still a measurable threat. For a Mighty game I might even push this to a 3 and make handguns and normal strength pretty much a non-threat to the heroes but I'm going to start with 2 and see how it goes. NOTE: This is not a "+2" it's a "2", as in if you roll Invulnerabilty 8 as a power then you have Invulnerability 8 - not 10.

"Heroic Determination" - More determination gives the players more options, but I'm seeing a lot of characters that start with 1 and only a few that start with 2. I want them to have enough powers and abilities to feel "super" and the lack theoretically gives them an incentive to play up Qualities and Challenges, but it also promotes a stinginess as "I only have 1". I think starting with more Determination will break this barrier and encourage the spending of it, and in turn make them more interested in "getting it back" through the means already in the game. So, the new experimental rule is that starting determination is 10 - # of powers. This should ensure everyone starts with at least 3-4 points ready to go before the reporter girlfriends and the enemies start showing up.

"Heroic Versatility" - This is specific to one use of Determination - the power stunt. In the rules a player must tag something, spend a point of determination to stunt, then they have to roll to see if they can pull it off, THEN they might have to roll again to use the new power if it's some kind of attack or other contested effect. I'm dropping the roll to pull it off - if you can  tag and have a point to spend (and can justify it) then you can stunt into another power and you only have to roll if there's opposition or some way to fail when you use the new power, like an attack. I'm doing this because anytime there's a die roll there's a chance of failure, and if the Apprentices think of something cool I don't want them to fail before they even get to try the cool thing - if they fail at the action that's one thing, but they at least had the chance to pull it off. Plus, there are ways to increase one's chances to succeed too, if it's important enough.

Now the toughness and versatility changes are not something I alone invented - they are tweaks that have been discussed in many quarters but I wanted to get in more playing time before implementing them.

I haven't seen as much discussion of a change to starting determination but I'm sure I'm not the first to try it. I'm not worried about it being overpowered - this is a superhero game after all - but I do want to see if my theory proves true. I am also going to start using physical tokens - in this case glass beads - to represent Determination. I think having only a single glass bead out on the table would just emphasize the "gotta hang onto it" mentality but that having 4 or 5 of them in a little pile will encourage the spending of them even more, Call it a multiplier effect. I think it will enhance the change.

The Apprentices don't return until Sunday but I think our first try-out of these rules will be that  night, probably with "Day of the Swarm" from Fainting Goat which looks like a lot of fun. "Outside Atomic City, danger stirs beneath the earth ..."

Closing out a Theme

Found on Facebook ...