A Conversation with Steven Schend about Super Hero Role Playing Games

 

A while back Geoff Engelstein wrote a 2-part series on his GameTek newsletter about game balance. The discussion primarily focused on different types of balance in table top board games, but it inspired me to think about the different types of balance in table top role playing games and how that focus has moved around over the years. I’m in the process of organizing my thoughts and doing a lot of background reading. This reading has ranged from Glen Blacow’s article in Different Worlds #10 and Robin Laws’ Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering and includes a lot of additional reading in rpg game design theory.

The tl;dr version of my thoughts is that table top role playing games have a number of types of game balance that ought to be considered when designing the game and that these kinds of balance tend to line up with different styles of play. The most obvious type of game balance is “combat balance” where the various kinds of characters are balanced mechanically with regards to their combat capabilities. You can see the evolution of the importance of this kind of balance in D&D from one edition to the next. Earlier editions had tremendous imbalance in this category, but more recent versions have much more “balanced” classes in combat. The first real step in this direction was when D&D 3rd edition gave Wizards proficiency with the light and heavy crossbow. This gave Wizards much more effectiveness in combat and much more to do in combat situations.

This was a break from D&D’s traditional balance focus. Prior to 3rd edition, the main thrust of balance between character classes had been an “activity” balance. John Eric Holmes, the author/editor of the first D&D Basic Set, discussed the vitality of this kind of balance in his book Fantasy Role Playing Games when he discussed how D&D’s game balance was expressly designed to promote moral behavior.

I’ll save further discussion of this topic for later, but I mention this because these thoughts were all in the background when I sat down with game designer Steven Schend to talk about super hero role playing games. I’ve got a deep love of super hero role playing games, and at one time could say I owned every game in publication, and Steven worked on the old Marvel FASERIP system. In this YouTube chat we talk about a lot of different elements of super hero rpgs, but one thing I mentioned a number of times was “role” balance. Super hero rpgs have a number of design decisions to make with regards to balance, and one is to abandon combat balance and focus on activity or role balance. One of the best, and Steven’s personal favorite (FASERIP), does exactly that.

Watch the video. Like and subscribe and feel free to comment on what we missed. We missed a lot, so I’ll be wanting to chat more about super hero rpgs in the future.

Learning to DM, Thoughts on Campaigns, House Rules, and Rules as Written. #RPGaDay Megapost 2, Days 13-16.

Overall, I've really been enjoying this year's #RPGaDay question line up and am trying to give each question more than a single sentence answer. I love the RPG hobby and questions like these are a time to share thoughts an memories as well as to answer questions.

That's another way of saying, "give me an inch to talk and I'll take 50 miles."

Day 13 - Describe a game experience that changed how you play.

I imagine that for a lot of gamers, this is the kind of question that evokes a tale of the "best gaming session ever." In such a tale, the author would wax poetic about how having a DM of Matt Mercer quality changed their life forever and made them a better gamer. That is not my tale. Mine is a tale of abject failure and learning from that failure.

I'm at a point in my life where I think I'm a pretty darn good DM. My gaming groups tell me they have a good time and there tends to be great energy at my tables and our stories often go off in wild directions. Heck, my groups have even developed their own sayings over the years. My favorite is the famous Drow saying, "It's as easy as shooting a dwarf in a well." I'm not saying I'm on the same level as a GM as Tom Lommel, Jordan Caves-Callarman, David Crennan (America's DM), or Satine Phoenix, but I am proud of the sessions I run. And the reason I am a good DM today, is that I was once a terrible one.

The interesting thing is that I didn't start terrible. I was inexperienced, sure, but the early games that my friend Sean McPhail and I put together had narrative qualities to them and our characters had personality. In my late Elementary school days, I was heading in the right direction. Then came my first experience being a DM for someone who'd never played. (Dun...dun...dun...)

A friend of mine in Middle School, not the one from the Sweet Pickles Bus Wars, saw me with some of my D&D books on campus and wanted to learn to play. We arranged a sleepover at his house with a couple of friends and we did our best all-nighter Stranger Things impersonation. Except it wasn't that cool at all. I had done ZERO preparation and didn't want to use one of the modules I was familiar with. I wanted to run my own adventure to teach these folks the game. So what was my adventure? I don't remember the particulars, and I'm pretty sure that I've suppressed them because it was so bad, but suffice it to say that it started in a tavern, had a fight with goblins, and ended with the PCs going down to Hell and killing Tiamat. They would have slaughtered all the levels of Hell if we hadn't gotten so tired.

That was all in ONE night. From 1st level to high enough to kill Tiamat. It was awful. I knew it was awful at the time. I was essentially opening to random pages in the Monster Manual and having them fight the monsters on the page.

As bad as it was, and as HORRIBLE as I was, it was still fun. It was at that point that I knew the game was better than I was as a DM and this was a good thing. I wanted to aspire to be a DM who improved the quality of the game instead of one who was "saved" by the quality of the game. That night changed my approach to the hobby and I'm grateful to the friends who endured the evening and were kind enough to wait years before mocking me for it.

Day 14 - Which RPG do you prefer for open ended-campaign play?

For me, the most important quality for open ended play is that the characters start out as great at what they do and stay that way. For a game to be truly open-ended, it cannot have class levels where characters start as inexperienced and work their way up to demi-god status. That makes for a great campaign, but not open-ended gaming that can be picked up at any time and place. In my mind, and this may be different for you, open-ended play is like a never ending soap opera. And I mean that as a complement. Good soap operas tell compelling stories for decades, but they don't tend to have people go from newb to l33t. If someone is l33t, they stay that way.

Games like D&D and with its levels, or Runequest with it's path to Rune Lord, don't fit that bill for me. They are fantastic games, but not open-ended in the way I'm interpreting this question. Surprisingly, Call of Cthulhu isn't either. I've heard too many stories of players with skill ratings in the implausible range, or even with enough power to fight the Elder Gods (can you imagine? That's like my D&D story above), to think that Call of Cthulhu fits the bill.

The best role playing games for open-ended action are super hero role playing games. The characters all start out highly capable, they are super heroes after all, and in most systems the character improvement curve is very shallow depending on how you run the game. In Champions, as Aaron Allston pointed out in Strike Force, characters tend to learn new things rather than get increasingly better at the things they do. This is especially true if you are enforcing campaign wide Damage Class restrictions. Mutants and Masterminds has a similar phenomenon. But the best two games for this kind of action are Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP) and DC Heroes (MEGS), and of these two I have a deep love of DC's system.

What both of these systems share is that they use experience as an expendable resource. In Marvel it's Karma and in DC it's Hero Points. In both cases, the points can be spent to have an effect on outcomes. Why is Spider-Man able to hang out with Thor in fights? Because he spends a lot of Karma in those battles. Why doesn't Thor get even more Godlike? Because increases at his capabilities are super expensive and it's easier to learn to do new tricks with your powers. Why is Batman able to hang with the Justice League, I mean seriously? Because he blows through Hero Points like nobody's business. He's constantly going for "Devastating Blows" and Pushing attacks all day. Sure, his devastating blows are in the form of "exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents" rather than haymakers, but that's the mechanic.

Batman and Spider-Man's player can play for years and only increase in power by an increment, or choose to get better at a lot of things. The stories though, never get stale. This is because the challenges are at a fixed level an stay there.

I imagine that D&D could work that way if you started at 5th level or so and just told stories at that challenge rating, but that fails to take advantage of the "I'm getting better calculus" that underlies the game. The calculus underlying Marvel and DC is "I just did something normally not possible at my power level" and that's why it feels satisfying for very long periods of time.

Your mileage may very, but that's the kind of gaming I like for open-ended campaigns.

Day 15 -- Which RPG do you enjoy adapting the most?

Image by Andrew Asplund

 

Given my love of the Savage Worlds gaming system, one might expect that I'd drop that one down right here. Nope. Not that I run it "as is," though I mostly do, but it's not the one I'm always wondering what I could do with it. Though to be honest, I have yet to see anything it can't do with a little tweaking. The game I enjoy adapting the most is 4th Edition D&D, in particular it's Gamma World variation.

Shocking! I know.

It's just that the game can do pretty much EVERYTHING. It makes the basis of a very good super hero game. It's easy as pie to make Rocket Raccoon using the rules. You can be the characters from freakin' Phoenix Wright!

For what it's worth, I find that the Gamma World iteration and Essentials are all you really need. Once you realize that the game is really an effects based game and that you can rename powers whatever you want, it opens up endless possibilities. Coming from a super hero background, as I do, reskinning powers has never been an issue for me and I think this game can do anything...at least in a one shot setting.

Day 16 - Which RPG do you enjoy using as is?

Truth be told, I play most games "as is." I don't have a lot of time to spend creating house rules for games I'm playing and changing them up. I'd rather write adventures than tweaks to a magic system. This isn't to say that I don't do any house ruling, but I do tend to try to give the designers respect when I sit down to play. For example, a lot of people feel uncomfortable with Savage Worlds' initiative system when they first read about it. "You mean it uses CARDS? And you reshuffle a lot?" But the fact is that it's a fast, furious, and fun way of handling initiative that has a lot more give and take that it might seem just reading the rules.

Clearly from my previous statement about reskinning 4e like crazy, 4e isn't the game I play "as is." No, that honor goes to Champions 4th Edition...still the best edition in my mind. The fact is that Champions is extremely well designed and well balanced and any tinkering I want to do is filled up with making characters and not house rules. The 4th edition of the game stretched the rules to as granular a level as I like to play. 5th edition got a little too "engineering" based for me and the players I gamed with started to fall too much into the "if it's not on your page and paid for, you can't do it" camp for my liking and that seemed to be a trend with 5th edition. The 4th edition started down that path, but was only beginning. Like GURPS and 3.x/Pathfinder, this is a rules set that tries to have a rule for everything to ensure that you have a fair and consistent answer for every question. The underlying math is sound in the game, though Wayne Shaw did make an argument for a change in the skill system on my Geekerati podcast that I agree with.

If only I had 4 weeks to teach people how to play and make characters before starting up a campaign. I really miss playing this game, but it's not one that's easy for players to pick up and play. There is an initial learning curve, particularly if you are making your own characters. But God is it a great game.

Hacking the Black Hack using Zak's FASERIP System the Cypher Way -- Some Initial Thoughts

Readers know that I have long been a fan of Superhero role playing games. There was a time when I could claim to "own every Superhero RPG in print," but those days have long past. I still own a very large selection of Superhero RPGs that ranges from Superhero 2044 to DC Heroes to The Super Hack, but there are so many Superhero games out there that it is hard to keep up. I've read all of the games I own and have played most of them, but there are a few that stand out as able to withstand the test of time. Among those games that I return to again and again is the Classic Marvel Superheroes Roleplaying Game which uses the FASERIP system. The system isn't perfect, but it is very flexible, has quite a few "genius moments," and is great for getting people gaming quickly. It's a system that I want to use, but I want to use in a modified form and I've recently come across three resources that have inspired me in what I think will be a fruitful direction.

The first of those resources was +Zak Sabbath 's Character Generation Guide for his "Everything is Terrible" FASERIP campaign. In that post, Zak proposes a d20 based mechanic intended to replace the Universal Table that so many of us have used but which fewer of us have memorized. The Universal Table tells players what they need to roll to get a basic success (green), a substantial success (yellow), and a critical success (red). The division of success into different categories is one of the "genius" moments of the game, but needing to look at the chart to see if you've hit the next color (for those who haven't memorized the chart) can distract from game play.

 

Zak's proposal takes the categories on the chart and assigns them a Target Number. Players roll 3 Twenty-Sided Die against that target number. If only one die is a success, it's a Green result, two successes means Yellow, and three means a Red result. I recommend that you look at Zak's post for a detailed breakdown of the Target Numbers and his thoughts on the topic. They are worth your time. 

I took some time to do a quick breakdown of the basic probabilities of Zak's system in order to compare them to traditional FASERIP probabilities.

Looking at the basic Universal Table, you can see that a person with a "Shift 0" ability in something still has a 35% chance of achieving a Green result. When it comes to lifting weights, this works very well when one includes the "Intensities" rules from Advanced and Revised Marvel. In a fight, this means that a person with Fighting of Shift 0 still has a 35% chance of hitting his/her opponent. This somewhat high level of success seems to match with the heroic nature of Supers gaming. The same person has only a 6% chance of some level of improved success.

Looking at a table showing the probabilities resulting from his 3d20 system, we see some interesting results. The first is that Shift 0 really sucks. The second is that at the higher end, the probability of getting a Red result are close to those of the traditional FASERIP system. There are some notable differences at the low and mid-ranges, particularly with regard to Green results. In traditional FASERIP, a character with a Remarkable Fighting score has a 30% chance of a Green result and has a 44.36% chance in Zak's system. Scores lower than Good characters are less frequently successful under Zak's system and above Good they have are more frequently successful. I'm fine with that. It makes the "Street Level" heroes more impressive than they are under the regular system (when facing thugs) and the distinction between tiers continues.

To see how nicely Zak's quick Hack simulates the old FASERIP system, while requiring significantly less memorization, I compared the White results from FASERIP with those of ZakHak.

As you can see, the first four Shifts have a lower probability of success under ZakHak, you have a slightly higher probability of success from Excellent to Shift X, and the final two columns are essentially the same [Note: the percentage above is the percentage of 'failure' so higher numerical values equate to lower levels of success.]

I think Zak's system is intuitive and works and I'm likely to use a modified of it as I move toward adapting The Black Hack to the Superhero genre. There are a couple of previous attempts at Black Hat Supers (The Super Hack and The Powers Hack), but neither of those rules sets are as complete as I would like for a rules set intended for campaign use. What I want to do is take a the "roll under" system from The Black Hack as the base (this is as easy as taking the complement of Zak's value in a base 20 system) in order to have higher stats mean better results and have stats and results be the same number. I'm also contemplating adding the "roll x or y and add an interesting effect" rule from the Cypher System to the superhero game. The x or y will be yellow or red FEATS and they will allow the automatic use of some reality bending Power Stunt. I might event do a straight up mix of Cypher's 1 - 10 difficulty range and "pool expenditure" system, since I think that would mix with FASERIP's Karma system nicely.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be flushing out a full system but I will be using ZakHak as the base of whatever system I end up with.

Savage Things (Part 3) -- A Super Heroic Second Take on Stranger Things' Eleven/Elle

Image Source -- Thorin Thompson

Introduction

Welcome to the third entry in a series of posts that translates the hit Netflix television Stranger Things into material useful for the Savage Worlds role playing game. Following the final entry in this series, there will be posts featuring statistics in Mentzer B/E Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy Flight Games' Grimm role playing game, Hero Kids, Shadow of the Demon Lord, and other games as I am inspired to create the statistics.

Posts in Savage Things Series:

Part 1 -- The Setting and the Kids
Part 2 -- The Heroic Teens

Eleven/Elle Revisited (A Superheroic Look)

In the first entry in the Savage Things series, I presented statistics for Eleven/Elle that relied solely on the Savage Worlds Core Rulebook. This version of the character fits with a Firestarter or Scanners inspired campaign, but it doesn't capture the character for campaigns that want to take advantage of a more X-Men style of play. One of Stranger Things many influences, and one stated outright in the show, is issue #134 of The Uncanny X-Men. That issue marked the first appearance of "Dark Phoenix" and hinted to viewers who were familiar with the comics that psychic powers might be coming into play. My own take on the character is that she is also inspired by Rachel Summers, first seen in The Uncanny X-Men issue #141. The shaved head and manipulation of the character by scientists fits more with Rachel Summers, than with Jean Grey. With these thoughts in mind, I present to you an updated version of Eleven/Elle that uses the Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion which provides a more powerful version of the character. In order to balance this character, two versions of the Demogorgon/Monster will also be presented in the adversaries post.

  Eleven/Elle (Millie Bobby Brown) was kidnapped by Dr. Martin Brenner when she was born. Eleven's mother was one of Dr. Brenner's subjects in his experiments at the University of Indiana. While the show hints that she is the 11th child/subject Dr. Brenner has worked with, no other subjects are shown in the series. When Eleven runs away, she befriends a local diner owner named Benny and eventually encounters Mike Wheeler. Even though Eleven is quiet and largely clueless to the mundane world around her, she and Mike become very close friends. Eleven has abilities beyond her "experience" level and is an extremely powerful young woman. She hopes to find a way to rescue Will Byers and free herself from the influence of Dr. Brenner.

Attributes: Agility d4, Smarts d6, Spirit d10, Strength d4, Vigor d6
Skills: Faith d4, Notice d6, Psionics d12, Shooting d4, Survival d6, Tracking d4
Charisma: 0; Pace: 6; Parry: 2; Toughness: 5
Hindrances: All Thumbs, Clueless, Loyal, Exhausting Powers -- Powers Cause 1 Level of Fatigue When Used Can Knockout, but not Kill, Eleven.
Edges: Arcane Background (Superpowers), Brave, Danger Sense
Powers: Attack Ranged (Heavy Weapon, 4d6) 7 Points, Broadcast (One Channel at a Time, Contingent) 1 Point, Mind Reading (Slow to Activate, Increased Range to 1 mile, Complete Concentration) 5 Points, Increased Range on Mind Reading to Anywhere on Earth (Device: Requires Sensory Deprivation Chamber and Complete Concentration) 5 Points, Ensnare 3 Points, Mind Control (Slow to Activate, Very Limited Actions) 3 Points, Telekinesis (d12+1) 6 Points.  Power Points: 30 (Street Fighters)
Quirk: Loves Eggo Waffles.

It should be noted that this version of Eleven/Elle is significantly more powerful than the one from the first entry in the series, but that the character should still be used as a Player Character in order to not have the players feel railroaded by the Game Master.

Guardians of the Galaxy in D&D Gamma World: Rocket Raccoon

Like most geeks, I am extremely excited about Guardians of the Galaxy. The latest Marvel Studios film is a brave leap into the lesser known characters of the Marvel-verse. Until Dan Abnett, Keith Giffen, and Andy Lanning's run on Annihilation the Guardians -like Alpha Flight - had been an acquired taste of a small niche of comic book fans. Abnett and Lanning populated the new Guardians with a strange group of characters - otherwise comical characters - and put them in extreme circumstances. Following after Tolkien's model, the Guardians' narrative within Annihilation is that of the "common man." Sure Rocket and Groot are a competent pair, and Drax has been a Marvel heavy hitter in the past, but none of them match the cosmic might of Firelord, Silver Surfer, or Nova.

It made for compelling stuff and now that same band of misfits - and not those who bear the power cosmic - are going to be featured in the upcoming film.

I asked my friends in the Social Network-verse what game system they would use to run a Guardians of the Galaxy campaign and received some very good answers. Some would run it in Hero System, others in Savage Worlds, and still others in Bulldogs!. I am intimately familiar with two of those systems, and almost chose to create statistics in Savage Worlds, but in the end I chose Wizards of the Coasts' excellent D&D Gamma World as my game of choice. As I was thinking how to stat the characters in as simple a fashion as possible, the ideas just leaped out at me. Groot was a "Giant Plant" and that's all I needed to know to stat him. I'll likely attempt a Savage Worlds conversion in the future...and a Marvel Saga and Marvel Heroic as well as purchase a copy of Bulldogs!...but for now, I'm using D&D Gamma World. It should be noted that all characters will be 10th level as most Gamma Supers should be.

My first entry is none other than my twin daughters' - History and Mystery - favorite Guardian...

Rocket

Marvel Villains & Vigilantes [Civil War]: Ant-Man

While I am in the process of researching my article on the first edition of Villains & Vigilantes, I thought that I might try to emulate something that the early writers of Different Worlds Magazine did and adapt some Marvel characters to the system. While the article I am researching is the second in my series of reviews of the games in the history of superhero rpgs -- the first can be found here -- discusses the first edition of Villains & Vigilantes, all of the adaptations I make will be for the more commonly available 2nd edition of the game. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that the 2nd edition is more widely available on ebay, from FGU, or a "revised revised" edition from Jeff Dee and Jack Herman at Monkey House Games. The second is that the revised edition is an easier game to play than the first edition.

My hope/plan is to emulate the Friends and Foes from the excellent Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Civil War Sourcebook to see how well the V&V system represents the characters in that product. This being the first of the adaptations, I've already notice some major differences in how V&V works versus the mechanics of Marvel Heroic. In this case, the way that Growth works. The Size change power is one of the wonkier powers in V&V because of the way that weight affects hit points and carrying capacity. As adapted, Eric O'Grady would be a pretty effective Solo character against many of the characters published by FGU and Monkey House Games.  If you are wondering, here are the guidelines I used to adapt.

1) As much as possible translated powers on a 1 to 1 basis. If a hero has Energy Blast, then they will get V&V Power Blast. The only exception might be if they have Energy Blast at the d12 level, then I might increase the damage capacity from the base V&V power.

2) For "Enhanced" statistics of up to d8, I give the Heightened "x" power at the "A" level -- +2d10 -- as opposed to the B level which is +3d10. For characters that have d10, they get B, and for those of d12 they get both A and B.

3) Base statistics tend to be in the 10 to 16 range. For example, O'Grady is a covert expert etc. so he has a 16 Agility. Most of his other stats were 10 to 12 before the bonus from powers/training.

4) Specialties are treated as Heightened Expertise and give +4 to the area on attack rolls or "saves" that are related to the expertise. Ant-Man has "Vehicles" expert and so any rolls he makes to drive - Agility Saves most likely - will receive a +4 bonus to his Agility for those purposes.

5) All Heightened Statistics results will be rolled and not selected in order to emulate the way that V&V works.

Those guidelines will be used in all cases. I will minimize my own editorial decisions to add powers or increase them, because Cam and crew did such a good job adapting the characters for Marvel Heroic and I thought it might be nice to be able to play through the campaign they developed with V&V stats.

You can access a PDF of these stats here.

As you can see, O'Grady is kind of a power house. We'll see how he compares to Araña in a future post.

Make Mine Savage -- What Statistics Can Tell You About Baseline Super Strength and Converting the Hulk

Sorry that it has been so long since my last post -- pretty much exactly one month -- you can blame that on my busy work and school schedule. I'm a full time Ph.D. student in Political Science at UC Riverside and work full-time as well. Add to that the fact that I actually spend time with family and game twice a month, and it leaves little time for blogging.

I'm a huge fan of Savage Worlds and the more that I play it, the more I find that the system falls into the sweet spot of where I am in my gaming life right now. I need a game that is relatively intuitive, that is flexible, that has some good tactical rules, has some good "abstract" rules, and can be played in a hurry. Savage Worlds is one of those rules sets. Recently, my group has been playtesting FENG SHUI for Atlas Games and playing around with the Accursed setting for Savage Worlds. In the near future, I hope that my group will be interested in playing a Savage Worlds based supers game. Before I ask my players to make that leap, I do want them to be more comfortable with Savage Worlds as a system. Super hero campaigns push any rules set to the limit and demand a lot of players with regard to knowledge of the rules set, so I won't likely be asking the players until early next year.

When I do run the campaign, I will likely be running a Marvel game or a Marvel/DC mashup game and so I'll be converting a number of characters as well as using some conversions I find online. As I've mentioned a couple of times in the Make Mine Savage series, one of the challenges in character conversion is avoiding "power exaggeration." This occurs when a player/GM substitutes their own power fantasy about a given character to set the assumed baseline instead of starting with the game's mechanical baseline and moving from there. The prime example of a power fantasy setting a baseline in relative power discussions often occurs when chatting about whether The Hulk or the Juggernaut is stronger. For gamers/comic fans of a certain age, one only has to wait until the second or third round of discussion before the scene from Secret Wars where The Hulk holds up a mountain range comes into play.

Let's just say that if you are setting your baseline for what The Hulk needs to be capable of at "Fifty Billion Tons" as a mechanical necessity, this is beyond even the Cosmic Level of Savage Worlds which would set d12+12 at 10,000 tons. Were I adjudicating the mountain scene above, I'd use the Dramatic Tasks rules and apply appropriate penalties with each failure on The Hulk's behalf equating to a level of fatigue.

So where would we set The Hulk within a Savage Worlds framework? What is the appropriate level for The Hulk? The old Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, as well as the old FASERIP system, place The Hulk at the 100 Tons range which is d12+9. This is useful as far as it goes, but doesn't really tell us a lot. This is especially true if the GM is using my alternate "dials" with regard to lifting or is using the following Edge:

Super-Brawny 
Requirements: Novice, Strength and Vigor d12+
     Your super-bruiser is significantly stronger than other characters in the setting. This is either because the character is large for his or her size category, or because she or he is very fit. The character is more resistant to damage than other characters (+2 to Toughness). Additionally, the character can lift or carry more that most characters with the same strength. This character can carry 10 times the amount listed on the Superhuman Strength chart. This edge may be taken multiple times where the multiplier stacks logarithmically (2xSuper-Brawny = x 1000 lift, but the character only receives the Toughness bonus once. If you wish, you can require the expenditure of a bennie and a STR roll at -6 to activate this ability. A failure on the roll equals 1 level of fatigue. Characters who become incapacitated from this fatigue must rest until they recover.

 I'm a fan of the above Edge because it allows for increased carry/lift capacity without altering the underlying damage mechanics of the game. One of the seeming truisms of comic books is that really strong characters, characters capable of lifting battleships, often punch street level heroes without turning them into paste. This emulates that aspect of the game.

A feat like the above, gives a tool that allows Savage Worlds to accommodate what The Hulk can lift, but it does little to tell us what The Hulk's combination of Strength and Damage should be. To establish this baseline, we need to ask how easy it is for the average "Brick" to destroy some very big and very impressive vehicle or piece of hardware. I think that the M1A1 Abrams serves this purpose nicely. The Abrams weighs approximately 68 tons and for all intents and purposes serves as a nice baseline for "Super Tank." According to the Savage Worlds Rulebook, the Abrams has a Toughness of 77/58/29 (60/41/12), or in "real" terms a toughness of 17. What I mean by "real" terms, is Toughness - Armor. This is because in the Savage Worlds baseline campaign it is possible for super heroes to add the "Focus" modifier to their "Attack, Melee" combat power. The Focus modifier allows attackers to ignore armor if they make a to hit roll at a penalty. One can imagine two kinds of Supers games. In the first, all "Bricks" worth their salt have the Focus modifier. In the second, none have the modifier. For the purposes of the statistical analysis here, I will assume that they do have the Focus Modifier.

This makes our question -- assuming that the "Mean" super hero can "destroy" an Abrams with one punch -- what is the right combination of Strength and Damage to achieve this task? Destroying a vehicle requires causing 4 wounds (+16 above the Toughness) and thus requires a roll of 33. We can set our bar lower to require only that the character be able to "Damage" an Abrams, but that is a setting dial. For our current dial, let's assume 33.

Using the calculator at Anydice - set to default settings -- this provides us with the following answer:

 

=31.81 σ = 7.99 min=13 max=116

If you prefer, you can make it d12+9 which makes x-bar 32.81 and increases the min and the max by 1 while having no effect on the standard deviation. In fact, at Attack, Melee 4d6 the amount of Strength above 12 provides a great dial for use with regard to punching holes in Abrams tanks and crippling them.  If you wanted to increase the spread of pluses, you could set the baseline as:

STR d12+5 with a 5d6 Attack, Melee Power with focus. 

=32.99 σ = 8.59 min=11 max=131

 Doing so would allow for some more control over where the supers fall in the distribution as influenced by the plus component rather than the d6 component. We can use the statistical information to decide where The Hulk falls within our super hero world.  First we have to decide in what percentile we want the Hulk to fall and then we can use a procedure called "Standardizing a Normal Distribution" to give us our number. We use the following formula in this case:

Z is a value that corresponds with a certain percentage of outcomes. For example, 90% of outcomes will be equal or less than z =1.645, 95% will be less than or equal to z =1.96, and 99% will be less than z =2.57. If The Hulk is stronger than 90% of really strong people in your game, you should set z to 1.645. If stronger than 95% of crazy strong people, at 1.96 etc. We would have an equation that looks something like:

1.96 = (x - 32.99)/8.59

Hmmm....the first thing that jumps out is that this tool isn't necessarily useful for our purposes. Another way to translate this is STR = d12 + z(Bonus - 5) + 4d6 attack.  What this means is that if we wanted The Hulk to be stronger than 95% of other Bricks we'd have to increase the "flat" number by 17.18 and that takes if off the chart. This tells me that the Abrams may not be the best baseline to use even if it's cool. This is largely due to the "swingy" nature of the open ended die rolls. Setting the baseline at such a high number means that we cannot use an actual distribution based on the likelihood of actual occurrence based on rolls and have it be very useful. In fact, even if we set the "average" Brick Strength at:

d12 + 2 with a 1d6 Attack, Melee

We get the following:

=13.27 σ = 5.83 min=4 max=56

Even at this level we see that The Hulk would have to be (1.96*5.83) points higher than average (11ish points) to be stronger than 95% of all other Bricks.

Does this mean that we cannot use a normal distribution to help us in our converting of characters? I don't think so. I do think it means that we cannot base our conversions on a distribution of damage, rather we have to create an arbitrary distribution and mean. Let's say we keep the mean around d12 + 6 (we can set the number of d6s of Attack based on how likely we want the character to be to damage, hurt, destroy an Abrams with each of those being an added die above 2d6). Given that a "normal" can have a strength of up to d12 without Edges (we can assume that the Edges allow for characters beyond human and in the low end of Brick like Captain America), this gives us a working range of +1 to +12. If we choose 2 (arbitrarily) as our standard deviation this gives us a distribution that looks like:

=6 σ = 2 min=1 max=12

If we use this in all of our calculations, we will get The Hulk as having a d12 + 6 + (1.96*2) Strength. In other words, a d12 + 10 Strength if we want him to have a Strength higher than 95% of other Supers. He'd have a d12 +9 at 90% and the percentage of people at d12 +8, +7, and +6 become larger until you hit 50% of your target population. Then the pattern repeats the other way with 95% of your Bricks having more than d12 +6 - (1.96*2) or d12 +2 Strength. That leaves only 5% of your Bricks with d12+2 or less. You can use this as a guideline to shape your campaign and should try to follow it as much as possible. This way if players as "How Strong is d12 +9?" You can answer that it is stronger than 90% of all other "Brick" caliber characters and be correct in saying so.

While some of this conversation may seem obscure, I think it is important to have some structured guidelines that help GMs and players when they are creating/simulating characters especially when it comes to abstract things like emulating the comics. The same player who might balk at The Hulk having "only" at d12 + 10 Strength when told it is 200 Tons might smile with joy when they find out that this is the level better than 95% of all super strong characters in the campaign universe...a campaign universe that includes Galactus and many others of the ultra-cosmic scale.

Additionally, we can see how Savage Worlds dice have a pretty big standard deviation due to the open ended nature of the rolling and the combination of several dice. The analysis was also useful for looking at what it really takes to create a character who can destroy an Abrams Tank in a single blow. It is easily possible through a number of combinations that are affordable at character creation.

For me, I wouldn't set that as the baseline for my "Bricks." I'd probably set it at around 21 which is the amount of damage it takes to do 1 wound to an Abrams, but YMMV.

Little Geek Girls: Don't Say Superheroes are "Just for Boys"

On Tuesday, Kirk Hamilton at Kotaku shared a music video by The Doubleclicks entitled "Nothing to Prove."  I'll be honest and say that the song itself doesn't do much for me and sounds a bit like a song that would be performed by Carrie Brownstein on an episode of Portlandia, though I guess comparing a song to a song by a member of Sleater-Kinney isn't exactly an excoriating review. The aesthetics of the song notwithstanding, it was the visual content of the music video that really resonated with me. In particular the woman holding the "Don't tell my daughters that Lego, Robots, and Superheroes are for boys."

That sentence struck me like lightning and with almost perfect timing. As regular readers of this blog know, I am the father of two young girls I call History and Mystery in my blog posts and who are the two "Twin Princess Superheroes" referred to in the right sidebar. To give you a picture, this is them on a "Fancy Day."

As you can see, they are wearing Fancy Nancy-esque clothing with sunglasses, domino masks, and History is holding forth a Captain America shield. This is them at their "Princess Superheroiest," well accepting when they where their Bell and Aurora dresses kitted with Merrida bow and arrow and Iron Man masks and "Boomers." All of which is to say that they have acquired many of their mom and dad's geek obsessions. I cannot express how much fun it is imagining playing D&D with the twins when they get older. I'm giddy right now thinking about it.

As you might guess, my daughters live a pretty happy life. They have parents who share their interests and who play are willing to play any game or support any interest. But that's not to say that these young innocents haven't already faced the dreaded "you aren't allowed to be interested in that" assertion by some of their peers. There was one student at their school - a student that History had a crush on no less - who saw that History and Mystery were wearing superhero tennis shoes (Cap and Iron Man) and who took it upon himself to point out to my daughters that "Superheroes" are for boys. What's more, the boy also pointed out the "Blue" is for boys too.

Blue.

BLUE!

Are you kidding me?! This kid tried to lay claim to a color? Ugh.

Back to the story. This young boy's attack upon their preferences was the first time that my daughters had been told that something was outside their purview. Sure, Jody and I have told the girls that we cannot afford certain things or that they have to wait until they are "bigger kids" to play Advanced Squad Leader with dad, but we've never told them that any given entertainment was reserved for a particular subset of society. Jody and I find that concept to be absurd on its face. No one is going to stop me from DVRing REAL HOUSEWIVES (OC and Jersey only), and certainly no one is going to tell Jody she cannot watch JUSTIFIED or THE AVENGERS because she's a woman.

So after this boy attacked my daughter's love for superheroes Mystery comes home weeping. She's upset that she's no longer allowed to like Captain America - who has fought off more Closet Monsters than I care to imagine - because he's for boys. Needless to say, it didn't take me long to inform my daughter that Captain America is for everyone and to give Mystery several real world examples of the women in my and Jody's life who are fans of "Steve." After which we watched a couple episodes of EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES and called it good. My daughters seemed satisfied. Heck, History started wearing blue (Mystery's favorite color) in solidarity with her sister.

But the story doesn't end with having a supportive mom and dad who have supportive friends. Sadly, this little punk has already sown the seed of a mental weed that must be constantly pursued and extracted as quickly as possible. I've already had History ask me if there REALLY are any female race car drivers and heaven knows what the next moment will be. One thing I do know, I'll have to be vigilant. It's no longer enough to just share the things I'm passionate about with my daughters. I now have to be prepared to help my daughters defend their enjoyment.

I'm happy to do it, but it's something that shouldn't have to be done. Stop attacking "Fake Geek Girls." Some of the kindest, warmest, and giving people I know are Geek Girls (yes I'm talking about you Jody, Susan, Shawna, and America...and many others). There is nothing fake about them.

And for those of you who spend the time "vetting" to see if a "Fake Geek Girl" is actually a real geek. You know that vetting time would be far more enjoyable if it was just a normal conversation where you both geek out right? Sure, you might end up fighting about whether Alan Scott or Hal Jordan are the better GL or how big a jerk Dan Didio is, but I guarantee that you will be more likely to leave that conversation with a friend than you will if you begin your "conversation" with an oral exam in which you scrutinize even the slightest error.

Disney + Marvel + Lucasfilm = ???

Yesterday it was announced that Disney would be buying Lucasfilm and that they would begin production on Episode 7 of the STAR WARS franchise.  The interwebonetosphere was abuzz with Gen-Xers in awe of how quickly Disney, under Bob Iger has moved to collect a good percentage of their childhood loves under one corporate banner.  Disney now owns the Marvel catalog of Super Heroes, the Star Wars Franchise, Indiana Jones, in addition to their own creations.  It's quite an array of IP.

My Geekerati co-host Shawna Benson mentioned how anyone who has been to Disneyland and walked through the Star Tours store could plainly see this was a natural move for Disney corporation.  Think of how many toy aisles will be filled with Disney owned action figures... Star Wars, Marvel, Princesses, Princes, Beauties, Beasts, Jake, Tinkerbell.  Good grief!

All of this analysis misses one key point, the real reason that Disney purchased Lucasfilm.  Lost in the annals of film, there is a highly underrated cinematic masterpiece that was produced by Lucasfilm in the 80s.  It has largely been forgotten.  Lucas himself attempted to Jedi mindtrick the entire human race to forget of its existence. 

No, I'm not talking about the STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL.  I'm referring to a Marvel property.

With the acquisition of both Marvel and Lucasfilms, Bob Iger has enabled Disney to overcome the legal morass preventing an updating of the greatest film of all time...

HOWARD THE DUCK!

I can see it now.  Howard the Duck taking over Toon Town.  A Howard the Duck inserted into the Indiana Jones ride.  A Howard the Duck journey on Star Tours.  A retheming of Splash Mountain to Duck Mountain.  Howard the Duck being made a canonical member of the Duck Tales verse.

You heard it here first.

[The above is not serious, it is a joke.  No one believes that HtD was a good movie.]

The Party is the Thing-D&D Heroic Roleplaying using Marvel

This post is about a rules hack for Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game from Margaret Weis Productions. It's specific to the 4E dnd Hack by Dave Chalker from Critical Hits. I originally started writing it as a comment on Rob Donoghue's Some Space to Think Blog but it kept growing until it felt like a full blog post. If that interests you read on.

Rob has been talking about MHRPG on his blog for a few months now. Ever since he mentioned Affiliation dice and the DnD hack for MHRPG I've been thinking about how to hack the Affiliation dice in regard to the 4e DnD hack. Dave left them in but it feels like he never figured out how to implement it properly with 'splitting the party' GM tactics. My thought is to emphasize the fact that the PCs are a party and that they don't split up. So instead you can emphasize their strengths and weakness within the group.

A good replacement bucket for Affiliation might be 'Party Role', in the form of Leader, Striker, Controller, Defender. They are an important identifier for D&D PCs that fall outside of the other distinguishing features of your charater. So the party roles can be separated out from powers, classes and race. Leaders who are fighters, clerics who are striker/defenders, and controller rogues all have a place in my ideal DnD. This hack formalizes your strengths and weakness for filling these traditional party roles with a die to build your dice pool around. I haven't tried this out yet but here is an example of what I'm thinking.

You could be a tactically minded Wizard with the following Roles:

Leader d10
Controller d8
Striker d6
Defender d6 (or d4 depending on whether you want to add a weakness).

So when ever you take action to control the battlefield or target lots of enemies with your spells you would roll your Controller d8. When you take action to encourage, heal or put allies into positions to excel you roll Leader d10. If you take your turn to make yourself a target of the enemies to save your allies roll Defender d4. Looking to deal a lot of damage to the 'Big Bad Evil Guy' with your nova power, Striker d6.

Try it out; let me know what you think.

IT'S MARVEL!!! --- Margaret Weis Productions Announces New RPG License

For the past few weeks, Margaret Weis Productions has been hinting that they were making a HUGE announcement regarding a new RPG license they had acquired and how excited they were about producing this particular product.  Questions were being asked..."Is it Glee?"  "Is it CSI?" "Is it Star Trek?" "Is it GoBots?"

Most of the questions focused on games that players assumed would fit within the Cortex+ mechanic, with the understanding that Cortex+ focuses on relationships and not "crunchy combat."

Today, Margaret Weis Productions made the announcement at 1pm Eastern.  Their new license is...

HULK SMASH!!!

While many gamers might believe that the "relationship driven" mechanics of Cortex+ might seem an odd fit for a Superhero rpg, this is a true match made in heaven.  The grand innovation that Marvel Comics added to the comic  book superhero genre was the blending of heartbreak dating comics with superhero action.  Think about Spider-Man during the Ditko/Lee era.  How many superheroes were worried about getting a date before this book came out?  How about the Fantastic Four and their family dynamics?

MWPs Smallville game was a sea change in game design mentality, and one that will have significant affect on the industry.  Instead of having a character's success in an action being determined by how "uber" he or she is, that character's success is determined by how the character's relationships with others are affected by the action.  Instead of a Paladin's skill fighting devils being represented by a high combat score, it can be represented by a high dedication to protecting innocents and his or her relationship to individuals or communities.  The mechanic ensures that players interactions with nemesis characters matter, and the mechanics aid players and GMs in the creation of exciting and engaging narratives.

A Marvel game based in interactions and relationships harkens to what is great in comic book storytelling -- remember the Claremont/Byrne era of the X-men?  It has some epic battles, but it also has engaging tales of relationships.  When Sabretooth attacked the mansion trying to kill Psylocke (in a beautifully illustrated issue) it was Wolverine's concern for her safety -- and hatred of Sabretooth -- that fueled the issue.  A similar discussion could be had of the Juggernaut vs. Colossus fight issue.  The relationships are what make it work.

MWP plans to release 16 products within 15 months for the game structuring the expansions around major comic events.  The first product will be a Basic game, which has everything you need to play, and the first event will be Marvel's "Civil War" -- a perfect playground for relationships.  Each "event" line will have two editions an essential edition which merely has the campaign advice and an edition that includes a copy of the basic rules.  The events will be supported by three support products, and then it's on to the next event.  All of the products will be designed to be shelved with the trade paperbacks covering the same event.

This is big people!

Captain America: First Avenger...In Context

There are going to be those in the interwebs who watch the preview below with something less than excitement. They will bemoan how cheezy the special effects and the lighting look, or complain that Chris Evans isn't right for the part. They are wrong on all counts, and they likely need to be reminded of the history of the Captain America franchise when it comes to visual entertainment.

Take a few seconds to watch the most recent preview.



Now...compare this to moments from the 1990 Columbia Tri-Star production.



And...the 1979 television movie.


Captain America (1979) - Opening by Internapse

Given the history of the franchise, the new version looks like it was crafted by the hand of God. My inner child, my nostalgic gen-Xer subconscious, and my hyper critical comic geek super-ego are all in agreement. We will love the new movie, because it will be the best Captain America film produced to date.

Sporadic Geek Update (9/3/09)

Once in a while I like to imitate the excellent Morning Medieval Miscellany done by Professor Scott Nokes at Unlocked Wordhoard. Doing a daily update of all things pop culture related would be an absurd task for an amateur blogger. I much prefer doing individual posts highlighting things that interest me, at least as my "regular" post technique. But there are times when it's nice to kick out a Sporadic Geek Update featuring things that might otherwise be overlooked.

Following the merger between Marvel and Disney, Sony has backed off on the Spectacular Spider-Man Cartoon. Does this mean that Spidey is headed over to Toon Disney? What about the new Avengers and Iron Man cartoons?

SF Signal has a good discussion about what San Diego Comic Con can learn from Worldcon and vice-versa. With the exception of the highly predictable "pretentiously disdainful view from the old guard" by Lev Grossman, the comments are excellent. Notice the difference between his snarky anti-"common fan" rant and the insightful comments by Jeremy Lassen of Night Shade Books. Lassen presents the difference between the SF "tourist" and the SF "devotee" as a good thing and looks at each con in its proper light. Grossman, a critic for Time Magazine and best selling SF/Fantasy, slanders the unwanted popular rabble in a fashion typical for one who favors "literary" works.

Lassen's Night Shade Books is a publisher of books important to the SF/F historiography. Night Shade keeps alive brilliant writers like Manly Wade Wellman and Clark Ashton Smith by releasing beautiful editions of their works. They also promote exciting, and often overlooked, new talents like Liz Williams and her Detective Inspector Chen series.

Lassen's trying to bring in new fans and introduce them to classics. Grossman is content to denigrate those who are introduced to SF/F via Hollywood. This is ironic, because Grossman's blog at Time isn't usually so filled with venom, and his writing is engaging. One expects a little, "I wish the casual fan understood how rich the SF genre is," but one would rather not read "the rapid expansion and mainstreaming of -- for want of a better term -- nerd culture is a dangerous thing." This isn't to say there isn't room for criticism of SDCC, and how commercial it has become, just that I would have rather read it without the snark. Snark is so 90s.

Matt Tarbit has done a wonderful job in creating a visual representation, with links, to all the games featured in Green Ronin's wonderful Hobby Games: The 100 Best. If you are looking for the perfect resource as an introduction to "Hobby Gaming," you cannot do any better than this book and Tarbit's webpage gives you the pictures the book lacks.

Wolfgang Baur, and his exciting Open Design Project, have announced three new projects that are awaiting patron support. I am particularly excited about Red Eye of Azathoth, though I wish they were offering it in Gumshoe format in addition to Pathfinder and Basic Roleplaying.

Kobold Quarterly has an excellent interview with Joseph Goodman regarding the state of the role playing game industry.

Catalyst Labs, the Battletech people, have a good blog post about role playing gaming and "those kids today."

Topless Robot -- Village Voice Media -- provides us with a trailer for the next installment in the Star Blazers saga. Like the writer on that site, Star Blazers was my first anime. I eagerly awaited each new episode as a kid. I have embedded the preview below, but head on over to the website and give them some traffic.

Progressive Boink has a demonstration of the typical immature fanboy hatred of Rob Liefeld. Liefeld is certainly not among the best artists in the field, but in a field filled with talented artists who are constantly behind deadline Liefeld is a worker. I remember reading in the introduction to a Hawk and Dove trade paperback that Liefeld was one of the most tenacious "submitters" in DC Comics history. He was constantly submitting work and had a huge productivity level. He is also one of those who expanded artist's rights within the industry, took on powerhouse Marvel, and was one of the founders of Image Comics. Image is to this day one of the shining lights of the industry and promotes a number of excellent titles -- books like Invincible, or a number of other titles. Sometimes an artist's legacy isn't in the work itself, but in what that artist has done for the field as a whole. He still cannot draw feet, but he certainly didn't deserve the treatment he received from "Yellow Hat Guy."