I'm having a bit of a crisis now with the Big Friday Game. I had an adventure in mind which a) I love b ) feel is appropriately epic for a special get-together and c) has a lot of ties to the Freedom City setting. All set, right?
Well I was - then I started looking through my campaign binders. I have one for Freedom City (M&M 2E). I have one for Atomic City (M&M 3E), Then I have the Emerald City book (also 3E). I have a lot of good stuff sketched out. Almost all for 3E.
I want to run the big adventure, but it's written for 2E. I have a big bunch of stuff for 2E, much of it tied to Freedom City. I don't really want to convert it all. But I really like 3E. I don't want to move it to Emerald City either.
I also really like my home-grown setting. I could use it instead but I don't want to tie it to the Freedom-verse. I want it to be completely free. It will have a fair number of Champions nods, and maybe some M&M bits too, but I don't want it to be one more city in the Freedom City setting.
If I am looking at this as a kickoff for a new campaign, and I want that campaign to be in my own city, do I want to weigh it down with 2E? If I don't want it tied to Freedom City it's probably better to not even run this adventure and use one of my own ideas instead.
So yes I'm spinning through this little dilemma right now.
If I run this with FC now it's not really a "kickoff" and it doesn't really help me run AC later. If I run FC as the ongoing campaign, I'm limiting my chances of running AC in the near future. If I run it in 2E it's less work (no translation) and it's easier for new players coming over from Pathfinder to get. I just like 3E better for a lot of things.
Of course Freedom City 3rd Edition is in the works. I expect we will see it in the next few months but that doesn't help me run a week from now. If I'm going to run it in the future as a say once a month open-table type game then a well-known setting would make it easier for players to connect their characters to the setting. But a setting of my own design would be easier for me to run.
In a week I will have it figured out and ready to go. This is typical for me early-stage campaign overthinking while climbing up the "how do I want to do this" hill. Once I get over the top it will come together easily. I just have to get to that point.
Is it really that hard to convert things over to 3E?
ReplyDeleteI mean granted, I'm usually a little more loosey-goosey with rules specifics, but I can't image you couldn't run an entire session of a 3E game with the NPCs still written up in 2E stats. Conversion shouldn't be hard at all.
I say go with what you like best, even if those things are completely compatible yet. It might be a little extra work, but it's very likely to feel like a more worthwhile endeavor to port that stuff over.
I'm going ahead with 3E for the whole thing. I have time this week to do the conversions I need and despite some of the reasons I listed to like 2E I think 3E just has more upside at this point. I have HeroLab for both versions so it's not like converting is a huge manual chore anyway. It's probably time to let 2E retire to the bookshelf for good.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I am going full-on Freedom City for this one. It's a huge resource, why not? Freedom City is the "everything" setting, Emerald City is more like the Flash show - a city where one incident kicks off the new age of superheroes locally. I can still use it for a side campaign as needed. My own Atomic City will be a separate universe for the Apprentices and some friends when we're not doing the Freedom City stuff. It gives me an outlet that's completely my own and with supers it's not like there aren't crossovers between worlds and dimensions anyway. So yeah, it just took a few days to shake out in my head.
With that decided, I'm working on the details of the adventure and feeling pretty happy with the whole thing so far.
I'm waiting for 4e...just about the time I get a campaign ready to go, the edition changes. And after fours years of working on my campaign set in an amalgam DC-Marvel_FC-City of Heroes post-shutdown of the servers, I'm ready to go in 3e. So 4e is around the corner. :)
ReplyDeleteI get what you're saying - I went on a 2E buying spree in anticipation of a new campaign in late 2009/early 2010 and was then rewarded with the announcement of 3rd Edition. I've been bouncing back and forth ever since. Now that I'm finally getting something together I had the same thing on my mind : )
ReplyDeleteThis forum thread did put my mind at ease a bit:
http://roninarmy.com/threads/5642-Ronin-Round-Table-M-amp-M-Style