Things I Learned from Champions: A Consolidated Listing

I decided to consolidate all of the posts that I've done under the subtitle: Things I Learned from Champions:

• Preamble
• A Power Fantasy Has A Cost
• It's Okay to RetCon or Reboot or even Re-invent!
• Sometimes the JLA is Busy
• Exactly the Character You Want
• Sometimes You Just Want to Fight
• The Stories are Spectacular
• Being A Hero Isn't Easy
• A 500 pt. Character is different from a 250 pt. + 250 XP character
• The Multiverse Is My (Potential) Sandbox (part 01)
• There Are Always Possibilities
• Keep Some Surprises Under the Hood
• Maximum Movement Determines The Limits of Your Sandbox

I've been adding to the list, piecemeal, over the years, because I do love the system (and the games I've played in it), and am trying to put it into words -- to express why.

I will continue to post new articles -- especially now that I'm running games for my son -- as I want to see how I can help re-create that experience for him as we play.

At the same time, there's just something about the players of this game that, despite variances in preferences and play styles, seem to demonstrate that the style of play supported by this system is one that is enjoyed.

Jumpstart for Cyberpunk RED

Everything old is new again. The marketing machine for the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 video game is revving up, which is good news for us TTRPGers -- because it means a new Cyberpunk game from R. Talsorian.

I picked up the first Cyberpunk RPG when it first came up (this one was the boxed set with the 3 books, including Friday Night Firefight), and I continued collecting well into the Cyberpunk 2020 setting as well.

My preference was always for straight Cyberpunk with occasional forays into dark fantasy elements somehow interwoven into the techno-freakish future of Night City. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed playing Shadowrun a lot. However, the cyberpunk feel was always strongest for me in the world of Arasaka, Militech, and Trauma Team.

Also, I'm also tickled to see what's happened to some of the characters featured in the various iterations of the setting (Johnny Silverhand, Alt, Rache Bartmoss, etc.) as they've aged into this future.

Still reading through the Jumpstart Kit, but it's definitely bringing back that initial excitement of the first set of Cyberpunk.

UPDATE: Unboxing Video

Want to see what comes in the Jumpstart Kit? Check out the video below, from R. Talsorian:

Campaign Frame: Future Earth-641 (part 01)

My past posts regarding Earth-641 were various pieces of an aggregate world that tried to pull together two major comic book universes (DC & Marvel) along with bits of others into a single kitchen sink setting.

However, the recent news concerning the Legion of Super-Heroes and the future of DC Comics has begun my creative wheels spinning for the setting in a new direction.

Future Earth-641

Directly inspired by the reports and press releases regarding the (as of this post date) upcoming Legion of Super-Heroes: Millenium, I've turned my thoughts toward the idea of creating a similar future of Earth-641 for the kind of galaxy-spanning super-heroic adventure that I like.

 

At the center of the campaign would be an organization not unlike the LSH, or perhaps a future incarnation of the Justice League, that would grant opportunities for super-heroic gaming like:

• a high-tech home base
• interstellar legitimacy as a legal entity
• organization-wide gear and vehicles
• coordination with interstellar peacekeeping organizations
• reasons to have characters with a variety of powers and backgrounds
• reasons to break into teams and follow different plots and plot threads
• options to play multiple characters as those threads unfold
• lots of myriad corners of the galaxy to explore -- with different challenges and antagonists to encounter and overcome

Furthermore, the planned storyline seems to allow for the various futures of DC to be unified, meaning it could be mined to allow for the ff. to all exist in the same 'verse:

• OMAC
• Batman Beyond
• Kamandi
• Tommy Tomorrow

To which I would gleefully add in my version:

• Nexus
• Alien Legion
• Dreadstar
• Bits and pieces of the kitchen sink setting Lightspeed

So, those are the broad strokes. Let's see if I can figure out more ways into the setting and the overall campaign frame to flesh it out.

In Search Of... My Ideal Super-hero RPG (Part 01)

Despite my clear preference for various editions of Champions / Hero System for super-heroic gaming, I've never really stopped looking for several ideal systems. It's a big topic, and I've not mind-mapped this all out, so if this seems a bit scatterbrained, bear with me.

Why I like Champions

1. I like granularity of the system.

While DC Heroes / MEGS is a fine system, especially with the logarithmic progression of the APs and the use of benchmarks to help streamline play, I always felt that it needed a smidge more granularity to address issues like Batman's strength on the lower end, and the huge ranges that begin appearing beyond the double-digit values.

I also enjoy having a wide variety of skills, especially Professional Skills and Knowledge Skills, that can cover very specific skill-sets. Penalty Skill Levels that allow you to ignore very specific (character history-based) penalties.

I also love being able to create one-shot powers (important to character concept) that may be extremely cheap, and almost never used -- but do add the overall concept just by their presence.

2. I like the flexibility of the system.

I've written about how you can build "exactly the character you want" in the past, and it's one of the things that are regularly commented on about the system.

In particular, the highlights include:

• being able to load up on a variety of Professional Skills and Knowledge Skill Levels (so you're familiar with theoretical and practical aspects of something you purport to be an expert on); 
• playing with special effects and power advantages like (variable special effect, variable limitation, and variable advantage) to milk the utility of a certain kind of defined power;
• covering science fiction, fantasy, and super-heroic tropes with a single, unified powers and skills system

3. I like the open-endedness of the system

While you can gauge power levels based on the active points, real points, and total points in powers, characteristics, and abilities, there's no real limit on them (except for arbitrary, and usually negotiable ones, based on the campaign).

I don't really like the idea of having a fixed range of power ranks (which is where clever systems like Mutants & Masterminds and even the classic TSR MSH RPG get docked some points in my mental tallies), and like being able to have someone (hero or villain) occasionally become more powerful/more skillful than the most powerful/skillful hero or villain in the course of the story.

4. I like having more than one way to achieve a specific end goal

More than a statement on how a given special effect can be build using the powers system in a variety of ways -- this refers to the various options for tactics, maneuvers, and teamwork can help a super-heroic group take down (or at the very least, thwart) a super-villain team. Power levels aren't the only thing to keep in mind when approaching challenges: creativity and working together cleverly can often defeat the most powerful villain, or stop their current plans for world domination / destruction.

The new breed of games

That being said, there are a variety of game systems out there that are certainly advancing the 'tech' of super-heroic RPGing, and it's time to take a look at them to see how they're addressing not just the simulation of the physics engine of the setting, but also the story-telling tropes that are prevalent in the genre.

That being said, I'll also look at ways to tweak these -- as was done in Fuzion, with dials and switches, to fine-tune the flavor of super-heroic genre being emulated.

Next: I'll start off with two of the games that I've been reading off-and-on over the past decade: Mutants & Masterminds, and Icons!

Brick & Mortar: Stratagemma (Florence, Italy)

Last month I had the pleasure of visiting Italy with my family and some friends. As is my habit, when visiting any new country, I try to find a local gaming store and check out the scene.

For Italy, it was Stratagemma (located in Florence, walking distance from the hotel we were staying at -- and very close to the Duomo, apparently). The visit really drove home several things to me:

1. the web and its tools make finding such places, and managing your expectations, so much easier than in the past. I was able to find the location via Google Search, got directions to it via Google Maps, and was even able to enjoy online virtual tours of the locale.
2. getting new blood into the hobby / hobbies is important for any store (and any hobby). They were having some kind of Pokemon card game introductory tournament when we dropped by, and boy was my son excited! He started chattering animatedly at the boys (roughly his age) who were playing. They politely listened, but perhaps understood as little about what he was saying as my son did about what they were saying. But the enthusiasm was reciprocated until I stepped in to let them continue with their tournament.
3. different locales have different preferences. I had no real understanding about what was popular in Italy, much less in this particular corner of it, but I was surprised by some things nevertheless: a Cyberpunk 2020 RPG (reprint) prominently displayed in the window, and apparently a call for players on the bulletin board; the absence of Pathfinder and the dominance of D&D 5th Edition; some local RPGs in Italian, but also some international RPGs in English on the shelves.

I would've loved to stay to discover more about the sub-culture, but museums, sights, and food were calling us to other parts of Italy.

RPGs: an aggregator of my fandom interests

At some point, gaming became a focal point of all my fandom. There were two main reasons for this:

1. my fellow gamers were part of that fandom -- we didn't share the same exact interests in Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, Crime, Horror, Humor, Comics, TV, Movies and the strange intersection that snags the interest of fandom, but the constant exposure helped broaden my own fandom beyond what I would have learned of on my own. And their enthusiasm was infectious.
2. games allowed me to express and reference my fandom -- character homages, plotline riffs, setting elements cobbled together from many sources, madcap canon theories discussed and dissected in the middle of games (and sometimes long after them) all helped to refine and catalyze my general fandom is a rich broth of imagination and experimentation.

It is with this in mind that I return to RPGs in the middle of this year, with some goals:

• to continue my son's RPG experiences either through our current Champions series (PowerPuff Girls: the Shadow of Krypton);
• to finish reading a number of RPG books that I've purchased and would definitely see regular play had I but the time and the game group;
• to understand the shape that this hobby (and -- dare I say it -- art form) has assumed in the modern era.

The last goal would seem to entail both a review of the current topics of discussion on blogs and RPG news sites across the field. The second goal would seem to involve a strict schedule of reading (and character building, my preferred way of learning both RPG systems and settings). The first goal would entail some more discussions with my son, now that we've had a number of sessions under our belt.

Gaming with the Kid: Fighting Crime Trying To Save The World (part 1)

I truly enjoy the SuperTeam Family blog.

The Powerpuff Girls, it turns out, aren't a pure rip-off of the Kryptonian power set. Each of the girls have their own unique powers -- and that's just from the original series. I won't go into the two other series that have aired since then.

In order to build the girls in the Hero System, I'd follow the following process:

1. create a base PPG template of powers
2. add in the individual powers and abilities of each girl
3. tweak the stats and complications for a completed character sheet.

1. the Base PPG template

Fortunately, www.writeups.org has DC Heroes character sheets for each of the girls:

• Blossom
• Bubbles
• Buttercup

These will not only help to build my base template, but will also help in the next step on how to add in the individual powers of each girl. However, not everything necessarily will be reflected in these stats, so I'd have to go to a Wikia page for an 'in fiction' explanation of those abilities.

2. Individual Powers and Abilities

It turns out that Bubbles has the ability to talk to animals, and that Buttercup is the fastest of the trio, and that Blossom has both fire breath and freeze breath. Thank goodness for fandom wikis which keep track of this sort of thing.

3. Finishing off the character sheet

I'll be honest in that I'll be trying to not only be faithful to the builds based on the two sets of source material above, but I'll also be balancing them against each other, point-wise. This is partially due to my longtime Hero System habits of wanting to know the point totals, but also to show my son how allocation of the same amount of resources can result in very different results... and different options for play.

Kult: New Apocalyptic Power?

When you read the copy of Kult, it's not unreasonable to jump to the conclusion that it somehow involves the Book of Revelation.

KULT: Divinity Lost is a reboot of the highly acclaimed and infamous contemporary horror role-playing game “Kult”, originally released in 1991. This, the 4th edition of Kult, features a completely new rule-set, and the setting is updated to present day. Escape your nightmares, strike bargains with demons, and try to stay alive in a world full of pain, torture, and death.

In KULT: Divinity Lost, the world around us is a lie. Mankind is trapped in an Illusion. We do not see the great citadels of Metropolis towering over our highest skyscrapers. We do not hear the screams from the forgotten cellar where hidden stairs take us to Inferno. We do not smell the blood and burnt flesh from those sacrificed to long forgotten Gods. But some of us see glimpses from beyond the veil. We have this strange feeling that something is not right—the ramblings of a madman in the subway seems to carry a hidden message, and, when thinking about it, our reclusive neighbor doesn’t appear to be completely human when we pass in the hallway. By slowly discovering the truth about our prison, our captors, and our hidden pasts, we can finally awaken from our induced sleep and take control of our destiny.

A real feel of the End Times, yes? And as a fan of the game from the first edition , I was more than a little bit surprised to see that it had hit the 4th edition with its latest release. Flipping through sections, pre-reading before a full read, I see something about gamemaster “moves”.

Now, moves are something associated with Powered By The Apocalypse games — and probably a system more approriate for the type of stories that seem to be suggested by the progressions and in-game fiction listed in the original copy that I owned. But my experience with PBTA is limited, so I am unsure how much of a fit this variant of the ruleset would be for gameplay.

But it does amuse me that the subject matter is aligned with the name of the system.

Gaming with the Kid

I wanted to get my kid into gaming. Not only is it one of my favorite forms of recreation -- I believe it taught me a great many things due to the nature of at-the-table game play, and all the reading and preparation between games.

And I had a plan.

Pokemon Investigators in Spaaaaaaaaaaaace!

He had demonstrated an interest in Pokemon... well, okay. He's a recovering Pokemon fanatic with near-encyclopedic knowledge of Pokemon up until he stopped following them. And he's still thrilled when we play Pokemon Go on occasion.

Plus, he really likes the Space Mice series from the Geronimo Stilton mega-franchise of books. To keep things simple, I decided we should play...

Ashen Stars meets Mutant City Blues, except instead of superhuman police, we have Pokemon Trainers-turned-Investigators sent out on Lazer-like missions, with a twist towards the Bubblegumshoe creation of a Solar System "neighborhood"!

But then I realized the work involved, and came to my senses.

Then he started asking me about how the Cartoon Network heroes might be able to take down Superman or any of the other DC animated heroes and I began to look at Hero 6th Edition. And that's where I am now. Figuring out how the decoupled HERO System, which I've never played, might be the gateway for my son's gaming interests.

Hello, old friend.

On the Radar: SF RPGs (2 Science Fiction, 1 Speculative Fiction)

Here are a trio of RPGs that are currently of interest to me -- two of them are science fiction (one harder science than the other), and one falls into the broader genre of speculative fiction.

The Expanse RPG (Quickstart)

The full RPG for The Expanse isn't out yet, but you can avail of this quickstart to try out the AGE system as applied to this setting. For those who haven't really tried out any of the seasons of The Expanse, nor read the books that the TV show is based on, you may wish to hop online to get a briefing (but beware spoilers).

Here's the product blurb:

Don't Wait For A Countdown. Launch Right Into the Action.
We've got the crew assembled and ready. Strap into your ship and go full-burn toward adventure across the Solar System. The Expanse Roleplaying Game uses the AGE system to explore the science fiction universe created by James S. A. Corey. 

The Expanse RPG Quickstart includes everything you and your friends need to play your first game except some six-sided dice and pencils: condensed rules to help you learn how to play, six pre-generated characters ready for action, and Cupbearer—a complete adventure that sends the crew on a job aboard Ganymede Station.

I myself am curious about how they handle explaining to folks who may not be as versed in hard science fiction (or, indeed, real-world physics) how deadly adventuring in space really is. I'll be downloading this shortly.

Star Trek Adventures: Science Division Supplement

I've been waiting for this one to come out before I pick up all the division supplements and review them. And is that a Kzin on the cover? Hope so -- it would be interesting to see a crew with Klingons and Kzinti represented -- especially with a certain short story that was turned into a ST: TOS Animated Series episode involving them. They certainly weren't part of the Federation at the time...

Here's the product blurb:

The Sciences Division supplemental rulebook provides Gamemasters and Players with a wealth of new material for use in Star Trek Adventures for characters in the sciences division. The Sciences Division supplemental rulebook includes: This book requires the Star Trek Adventures core rulebook to use.

Detailed description of the sciences division, covering both the science and medical departments, Starfleet Exploratory Division, Starfleet Science, and Starfleet Medical.

• An expanded list of Talents and Focuses for science and medical characters, as well as new character creation choices for cybernetic and genetic enhancements.
• Guidance on creating truly strange and unique alien species, as well as advice on including spatial anomalies,parallel universes, the Q, and time travel in your adventures.
• A list of medical equipment and pharmaceuticals, and rules for their inclusion in Star Trek Adventures.
• Advice on creating plot components that focus on their scientific and medical Player Characters, as well as information on including counselors in a campaign.
• Rules for creating new, truly alien species, introducing hazardous and hostile environments into scenes, and new mechanics for suffering or curing diseases.
• Detailed descriptions and game statistics for a range of Science and Medicine focused NPCs and Supporting Characters, including Carol Marcus, Noonian Soong, and Zephram Cochrane.

The Star Trek Adventures supplementary rulebooks and sourcebooks require the Star Trek Adventures core rulebook in order to play.

TM & © 2019 CBS Studios Inc. © 2019 Paramount Pictures Corp. STAR TREK and related marks and logos are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Over the Edge (3rd Edition)

I never bought the 2nd edition -- all my print materials (which I've hung onto) are 1st edition, and it's thrilling to see how they might've updated the system and the setting for the modern era. A lot has changed -- greater geopolitical awareness, shifts in societal norms, and a greater preponderance of weird fiction in popular media. I'm getting ready to buy this while it's on sale...

Here's the product blurb:

During your stay with us, please remember that Liberty is Job One, Disarmament Means Peace, It’s Polite to Speak English, and, of course, Paranormal Activity is perfectly legal.

Thank you for your consent.

The Edge is the weirdest city in the world. Get into trouble. Question your place in the crazed multiverse. Transcend mortal limits. Join a cult. Fight a baboon. Along the way, you might find out who really controls humanity. Unless, of course, you’ve been working for Them all along.

Over the Edge is the classic RPG of counter-culture conspiracy, weird science, and urban danger. For its third edition, the game comes roaring back in a completely reimagined relaunch by its original creator. Everything old gets a new take. Nothing is a retread. Every conspiracy, every neighborhood, every major gamemaster-character is portrayed with a new spin. It’s not “25 years later.” Everything on the Island is reborn to surprise new and existing players alike.

Pick it up if you're got an itch to see Al Amarja again for the first time.

Things I Learned From Champions: Maximum Movement Determines The Limits of Your Sandbox

In my early days of RPG play, the limits of where you could go were defined by the walls of the corridors and rooms of the dungeon map. You often had a handful of choices at most in any given room, when you wanted to decide where to go next.

Eventually, after leveling up in power and stature, the edges of the adventuring world were pushed back -- flight and dimension doors allowed you to break out of dungeon edges. Wilderness adventures allowed you to choose any direction in which to travel -- though you were limited by how far you could travel in a turn, or an hour, or a day. But eventually, with the right equipment, the right spells, the right artifacts, you could break through these limits too.

But in Champions, you can pour a lot of your points into movement as a beginning character and already push back the edges of the gaming sandbox to a degree that might stun some beginning GMs.

A Staggering Selection of Movement

Even if you forego pumping points into a single movement power, the type of movement power can already chip away at those sandbox borders:

• Jump can allow you to hurdle impassable crevasses or leap out of a deep gladiator arena (much to the surprise of whichever would-be emperor is maligning your heroes);
• Tunneling will allow you to make your own corridors (and even close them up after you, if you pay the points);
• Flight allows you to not only overcome nasty traps like pitfalls or slides, it also allows you overcome barriers like mountains and impassable rivers;
• Teleport obviously allows you to bypass innumerable types of barriers without traveling through the intervening space (which could be filled with gas, invisible traps, monsters, etc.)

In fact, if you think about iconic heroes, a great part of their character is associated with a given movement power: Superman has flight, the Flash has running, Aquaman has swimming, Spider-man has swinging from a web, and so on. This freedom of movement is one of the defining aspects of super-heroism.

Faster than a Speeding Bullet

But overloading points into a single movement power also grants freedom of movement. Putting enough points into running will allow you to go anywhere on the hexgrid map in a single phase. Adding MegaScale to your flight or your teleport will allow you to go anywhere in the world (at the cost of a little / a lot of accuracy.

In other words, enough points in the right movement power will shatter the walls of your sandbox:

• "The only other person who knows the secret is halfway around the world."
• "We'll never get this kidney to the East Coast on time -- we have to find another way!"
• "How will we check the entire northern border of the state for the lost child?"

Control for Control's Sake?

Of course, we're all familiar with the frustrations of a DM who didn't allow you to go beyond the edges of the sandbox because of a weak reason. We all know the human limits on all GMs that prevent them from creating an infinitely detailed, fractal world -- but we don't like it when the borders of reality are so obviously arbitrary. We want some kind of consistent level of verisimilitude before we'll agree to the edges of a super-hero sandbox.

So we learned to talk to our GMs about the types of games they wanted to us to be able to play. We'd accept in-game, temporary reasons to nerf our powers for a single session (happens in comics anyway). We'd not play certain characters for certain adventure types -- all for the fun of the game.

But we'd never permanently allow that movement power to be taken away, as it was central to the character's concept.

Campaign Frame: Metahuman Investigations

In trying to come up with a campaign frame that allows (a) players to rotate through different characters; (b) some players to appear occasionally; (c) a coherent story throughline, I looked to a series of books for inspiration:

Sugar & Spike: Metahuman Investigations collects the stories of Sugar and Spike (all grown up now), as they solve cases and problems for some of the biggest names in the DC Universe (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman). It's a mix of embracing stories from the Silver Age and carrying them forward into modern day -- and how to address any lingering consequences from things like old bat-costumes and an island in the shape of Superman!

From this, I'd take the premise of being hired by known movers and shakers from the meta-human realm and addressing smaller problems of theirs that may have grave consequences for normals caught in their particular kind of gravity. It's a variant on the old triskaidekaturion campaign frame that I wrote about before.

The benefits of this campaign are relatively low-powered starting characters, a way to drip feed aspects of your world's history through an active investigation, and some interesting enemies and allies that you meet along the way.

Chase was a comic book series starring an agent of the DEO (Department of Extranormal Operations).  The DEO was interesting, since its remit was to identify, monitor, and neutralize any metahuman threats to national security.

Different from the premise above, this assumes a government interest in keeping the world of normals safe from the metahuman realm. It also suggests an active role from government agencies seeking to gather information about all metahumans, and quite possibly strike teams and assassins tasked with taking out threats that super-heroes can't or won't address in a way that the government would prefer. With something like this, can't imagine that the Joker would stay alive for very long -- unless he somehow manages to fool them with misinformation or is a far greater threat than we understand.

Both of these deal with low-level (or lopsided) metahumans or talented normals attempting to keep the normal world safe in a world of metahumans. There's a rich tapestry of allies, neutrals, and enemies as individuals and organizations across a historical context that can make adventures less of a sequence of clashes, and more of an unfolding mystery that culminates in a climactic resolution.

Note to Self: The Armchair Gamer Blog Cycle (Q1 2019)

Trying to set up a regular set of containers for blogging, until I'm back in the habit again. My current areas of interest are:

• all the superheroic material on TV and the big screen
• comics (classic and new) and their multi-faceted canon
• return to Enigmundia (my alternate takes on the Mystara corner of the D&D multiverse)
• the Hero System
• all these FATE and PBTA game systems which run counter to my decades of more traditional gaming tastes
• cross-time / cross-dimensional RPG settings
• space opera / science fiction gaming

Seems like a lot, and am trying to get a good handle on each so I can set up a notes-and-outline incubator on my apps, so I can easily write from them.

Mining the Titans: S01E01 "Titans"

"Mining the Titans" is a series of blog posts about using elements of the TV show Titans for your superheroic RPG campaigns.

The TV show is definitely a grittier rebooted version of the comic book The New Teen Titans. There are elements familiar to fans of that original comic book: some of the original cast (Robin, Raven, Starfire, and Changeling), the Trigon / Raven conundrum as the primary reason for the team's formation, hints about an older team (Wonder Girl, Hawk & Dove), etc.

Introduction of Characters

It's interesting to see this as a super-heroic team forming with a variety of backgrounds:

• Dick Grayson (Robin) as the experienced PC, clearly with a long backstory that is referenced and drip-fed throughout the series along with Dick Grayson's subplot of trying to define his identity apart from Bruce Wayne / Batman.
• Rachel Roth (Raven) as a newly minted PC with a traumatic origin story that also serves as the catalyst for the team getting together.
• Kory Anders (Starfire) as another new PC, with the "amnesia that will slowly fade" schtick serving as the hook to allow the gradual reveal of her backstory, abilities, and skills slowly reveal themselves.
• Gar Logan (Beast Boy / Changeling) as, perhaps, an NPC hero turned PC for the purposes of this new campaign.

An interesting choice: giving almost everyone (Gar's character isn't given almost any screentime in this episode) a reason NOT to go to the authorities.

• Robin's secret ID and vigilante status are self-explanatory.
• Rachel seems to be the target of several people (one highly motivated 'killer for the greater good', and an apparently very large organization with members in soup kitchens and the police) who want to killer her, or use her for whatever nefarious purposes they may hide in their dark hearts.
• Kory is hunted by an apparent organized crime group that is also interested in Rachel.

These pressures will force them together as a team, even as their personality clashes and goals might force them apart. These forces would also allow the GM to define and reveal the hostile, neutral, and safe spaces of the world for the individual and the team in a very organic way. In classic reboot style, many references (meta-hints for the players, not the PCs) are generously spread throughout the unfolding of the storyline.

Combat and Use of Powers

The show is more violent than cartoons: Robin's combat scenes aren't about efficiently taking out criminals -- it shows this universe's view of the vigilante using the fear of violence against criminals (short of killing them, we assume). The manifestations of both Raven's and Starfire's powers are lethal to their targets -- again, almost as if Robin's player was an experienced gamer (a more extended combat scene), while the others are beginners (not quite combat, more of an introduction on how their powers can be used in combat).

This can be an approach GMs use as well -- giving all players a chance to strut their stuff, but with the experienced ones getting a bit more challenge in tactics.

System as Physics Engine, System as Narrative Engine

First off, let me apologize, as my terminology may be incorrect in modern gaming theory parlance; I'm not up to date on it. I'll try to define my terms as I go, and get this out of my head.

I've seen a lot of game systems in recent years (FATE, Powered by the Apocalypse) that have been called more 'narrative' in nature. On a linear continuum defined by two opposite poles, this would be one the poles. The opposite pole would be games that are more 'mechanistic' in nature.

Mechanistic game systems' primary priority is to emulate the 'physics engine' of a given world, including perhaps some unspoken rules of that world's genre. In the case of the Hero System, this allows to take damage and recover from it as people do in heroic fiction (books, comics, TV shows, movies), as opposed to how they do in real life. The game rules reinforce the consistency and therefore in-game plausibility of these things happening.

And plausibility -- strongly correlated to suspension of disbelief -- is one of the cornerstones of science fiction / fantasy stories.

Narrative game systems' primary priority appears to be (I've not played that many, and certainly not as long as I've been playing mechanistic game systems) to emulate the character archetypes and plot tropes of a given genre or sub-genre. The rules themselves enable and enforce the actions of characters and the unfolding of the story within certain parameters -- the good ones allowing for a multitude of stories without falling into the trap of the dreaded railroad.

The responsibility for plausibility here lies with the players and the GM rationalizing the unfolding of the story in a satisfying manner.

You'll note that I've steered away from calling either approach 'story-oriented'. To my mind, both are used to tell stories -- narrative ones seem to focus on the narrative flow of the game, while mechanistic ones tend to focus on the plausibility of the events that unfold in the game. Both seem to retain the agency of the players / player characters (for the most part).

With that in mind, some future posts I'll be writing will try to unpack what things I like about each type of system -- and which things I don't. My preference is clearly for mechanistic systems, as these are the ones that I'm most familiar with, and the type that I most strongly associate with RPG gameplay. But I've always been intrigued by different systems and settings in RPGs, so off I go...

Mining the DC TV Multiverse: Opening observations

When I was a young gamer, there was an extra delight in playing a supers game wherein there was a chance you might run into a villain or a hero from one of the established universes.

Certainly, if you were playing TSR's original Marvel Super-Heroes RPG, or the DC Heroes RPG, it was expected as the stats were already provided to you -- and it was expected that you were more or less in the same universe as the one in the comics. But if you were in one of the more generic superhero RPGs, then you expected that some liberties would be taken with the canon.

If it was a mixed universe -- with characters from both DC & Marvel (and perhaps other super-heroic universes), then you wondered how things were different.

For example: What was the REAL story behind supers in WWII (since the two big universes had different reasons why the metahuman population, along with the Olympic-level mystery men, could have ended the war a lot faster)? Did Superman first appear in 1938, and if so, does he look old now? Did Batman influence the appearance of the Moon Knight? Why didn't they find Captain America earlier with folks like the Spectre and Aquaman able to search for him?

And all of this is backstory, of course, not meant to detract from the stories and adventures of your own characters.

The current wave of DC multiverse TV shows (live action, not cartoon), shows that it's not afraid of shared multiverses (hello, Arrowverse) or segregated storylines (Titans, Gotham). Furthermore, they are comfortable  playing around with expectations derived from comic canon (Black Canary AND White Canary? Cisco Ramon?). Of course, the cartoon universe led the way with the classic Batman: The Animated Series -- and the movies have done their number of canon as well (Wonder Woman in WWI, older Batman, younger Superman, etc.).

It certainly has changed the expectations for variance from continuity -- now we're simultaneously looking at how the variances both stay true to the characters and their history, and how cleverly they change them to make them more interesting and engaging on their own, or within the context of the world they've been recreated in.

The bar has been raised (and lowered in some cases), and it's likely to be the same in your RPG's supers universe.