Superhero Games

Hey, I'm back and am slowly getting over my problem of bloggers block, hoping I can produce something new and interesting. One thing that I was thinking about recently was different kinds of games, IE the types of role playing games that exist and what the most and least common stuff is. One big thing is that fantasy is huge, and I can see a few reasons why. Obvious ones are that it's relatively easy to work from since almost anything can be used for it and you can modify various epics from different cultures to produce a fairly interesting story. Couple that with the fact that the first RPG (Chainmail, later D&D) was fantasy based and it's also what's had the most time to 'mature'. Also popular is the post apocalyptic game which again has some good source material and also has some fairly venerable roots. The horror game can be a bit hit or miss but has a nice pedigree, and to be blunt I almost classify Whitewolf as its own genre. One genre that's been kicking around in my head lately is the superhero RPG (and it might be because I started playing City of Heroes Freedom).

What intrigues me about this genre is that it doesn't really have an iconic game the way that fantasy does with D&D. It isn't for lack of trying either, Palldium has a couple superhero books, Mutants and Masterminds has gone through several editions, I am fairly certain that GURPS has something specifically for superheroes, and if not you could probably cobble something together fairly easily, whitewolf has Aberrant, as well as Scion if you consider that a part of the genre. There are a lot of interesting superhero type games, I've run a few games of Savage Worlds Necessary evil, I played in the tri-stat Authority game, I also played in a game using the rules from the recently released Mutants and Masterminds book that has a strong eye on DC. I've played in several superhero style games and run others and I've observed a few things that tend to happen or be problems of the system, and I'm unsure if it's a a problem of RPGS in general, a problem of the systems they attempt to use, or if it's native to the concept of a superhero RPG. There are a few problems that I've noticed cropping up in the superhero games that I've played, I also want to get into the concept of online superhero games like DC Universe or City of Heroes.

One problem I've observed has to do with game balance between players. Now some of you are going to say that balance is irrelevant in a game of player to player, but I have to disagree. I'll also clarify, balance shouldn't mean that every character is identical, but it should mean that one person shouldn't be able to do everything by themselves easily while the rest of the group just sits there. When I go to a game I am going to play, and if one person is able to not only outperform me but outperform everyone else at the table when given the same resources there is a problem somewhere. The problem can come out in a lot of different ways, but I guess one good comparison might be Superman and Green Arrow. Both are heroes, both have a good sized fanbase, the thing is that Superman can do everything that Green Arrow is capable of easily and more besides where it isn't so true the other way. This isn't about who can beat who up, this is simply that in an RPG environment unless the group is rushing off to deal with multiple threats individually one person shouldn't be able to neutralize a threat that would normally require the combine efforts of the rest of the group. In some superhero games this is more common than others, it can either be that a player found a loophole that allowed them to get nigh infinite power or are able to hit so hard/fast or have a power that can change things enough to where they are able to neutralize any and all enemies. When a player is able to make it so that they themselves cannot be threatened by anything and simultaneously can cause a lot of damage there is an issue, though the degree to which it is a problem could be debated. One example that I'll use is from the recent Mutants and Masterminds game. I won't go into all of it and some of the arguing that came in, but our gadgeteer was able, due to the nature of the system, turn a moon into gas, launch an ancient warship and an enemy base into the sun hopefully never to trouble us again. We needed to end the game and it worked, and the person playing the gadgeteer was very scrupulous about not overshadowing others, only going full tilt at the end. The problem was that his character was able to mimic every single power at a level that exceeded anyone else in the group. There were other issues too with certain powers but I'd probably need to be a bit more in depth with that game to give a full argument on it.

The second issue has to do with player to game and this has to do both with what mechanics can allow for and a side effect of players going in different ways than a comic character might. One example can be found in the old tri-stat game set in the comic continuity of the authority. The problem in this one is that certain powers in the tri stat system can allow for...shall we say interesting combinations. Some are fairly simple, a person who wants to have a really powerful energy blast buys up an attack power, kits it out with a few extra bells and whistles, then grabs the 'augmented attack' power and chains it to their attack power and cranks the damage up to 11. Other tricks are a bit more complicated, one of them is that you could give damaging powers a backblast effect where you would be injured by it, then take powers that when you are injured convert the damage into temporary health levels or even into extra points you could pour into existing powers to further augment them. You can probably guess where that would go in terms of problems. There were also issues with people putting container powers into container powers and the like. Now some of this was probably just an issue of the system, but there can be other problems too. A character that is hypothetically perfectly balanced in a system can also be difficult to challenge, and that's even assuming that you aren't using something like the Palladium or early Marvel Superhero games that involved random rolls for powers wherein a person could be anywhere on the chart from 'Dog man! With the incredible power to...smell things really well and speak with canines!" to "Titan, Demigod with the power to manipulate all forms of energy, fly, teleport, and is impervious to any and all forms of physical harm that don't include element X!" No game can properly account for both characters at the same starting point without either killing dog man messily or Titan stomping everything. To go back to the main issue of what a player might do with a powerset that a comic book character might not, I give you the standard codifier of a weak powerset, Aquaman. Aquaman is actually hypothetically the most powerful superhuman on earth. Go to the logical conclusions of being able to command 2/3 of the worlds biomass and can make them act without thought of self preservation, and this even ignores the fact that he has the kingdom of atlantis at his disposal. From a slightly different angle, I once had a character called the Wraith, his main powers were insubstantial form and superspeed, I believe he also had a special tracking power and an attack that was designed to weaken enemies. The person running it actually refused to allow that character in because with it I could track any criminal anywhere, evade almost any enemy, and in essence be nigh untouchable. The problem that the person running had with the game wasn't that I was devastatingly powerful, but that I would be difficult to plan for, no villain could escape and actually making me harmable required such a degree of preparation that it was impractical for him. There's another area where things can get a bit wonky too and it has to do with the both the genre and the general system. Superhero games are very difficult to build challenging villains for. In point buy games the challenge is making a villain that is a challenge for the group without being fatal, which can be tricky without any kind of challenge level system. There are some other issues too, a group of players can all have wildly different powersets that can either take out an enemy much faster than anticipated or could end up inadvertently neutering one or more players. In a comic book it's one thing to neutralize a few heroes because it either helps move the plot along or explains why some of the A list heroes don't just nuke the enemy or how they got around the various detection and scanning abilities of different heroes. But in a game, it kind of sucks to have to sit out for most of a session because the person running accidentally or on purpose made the enemy du jour immune to your capabilities.

There are other things too but I really need to finish and post this, not to mention that I'm sure at least some other people will offer ideas or comments.

Edition Changes and updates

Hello to anyone that reads my blog. I have had a bit of trouble coming up with ideas but recently I actually managed to come up with something that might be interesting, game edition shifts and updates. They always tend to cause frustration in people as well as hope, hope for improvements and streamlining. Hope that major issues in the current game will be fixed and that the new system will emerge stronger and better organized. In essence the players hope for a more evolved system, and just as often people fear the changes. They fear the system that they've grown comfortable with changing into something foreign. They fear a system that makes players too strong or weak, that radically changes how things were done. Every time that a game changes editions there is a barbeque of sacred cows.

Talk to anyone that has a favorite game or system, when D&D changed from 2nd to 3rd edition, and when 3.5 came out, and again when it became 4th edition there were complaints on each one, some loud, some quiet. Some reasoned, some simple rage, but the complaints filled blogs and forums. The same is true for the new world of darkness and the new versions of the settings that were brought forward, when Deadlands became Savage Worlds the same thing happened. It happens regardless, but the big question should really be what creates the hostility, and for that matter why do some people jump forward to the new system, only to leave it later?

I already mentioned some of what caused my group to jump to 4th edition when it came out. It created a system where all the classes were in fact playing the same game, gameplay was more streamlined, and overall the system was far more balanced. Now this opinion changed over time, as you can see by going through my archives. What I find interesting is that looking back at it 4th edition seemed to fall apart as fast as it produced new things to fix itself, but I digress. The stuff for Deadlands between the original formats and the Savage World settings are also worth studying. Armor and toughness are different so are the concepts of arcane backgrounds and power growth. While I can see some definite advantages in the new system I find myself preferring the old one.

Gamma world is another example, look at each edition, each one had a different attitude and style, some more serious than others. I will say I quite like the latest incarnation that uses the 4th edition model, and uses it much better than the 4th edition game IMO. What is it that brings us to keep an edition or leap to the new one, I have a few guesses.

1) Fear of change or desire for it can motivate the migration or staying with an edition. In some cases people are comfortable with an older system and are more willing to use a few houserules and argue that a new edition will either be unnecessary or will introduce new problems and headaches, aside from having to relearn the mechanics. Similarly, there are people who get frustrated with a system and having to alter it, remake it, and in some cases have entire books devoted to clarifying rules (The Rules Compendium of 3.5 was a great argument for 4th edition let me say). For world of darkness it could have been trying to juggle rules between different 'settings' like Werewolf, Vampire, Mage, etc. It also could have been the fact that their tabletop and larping systems reacted very differently and had a lot of balance complaints.

2) Sacred Cows, once again this is an area that causes people to want to change or want to keep. People will sometimes look at a game and say "This isn't X" people would say that 4th edition wasn't D&D, that the products for the New World Of Darkness weren't 'really' Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, etc. The usual reason for it was that the sacred cows had ben barbecued, vanican spellcasting was gone, class distinctions were annihilated or reshaped. Principles that had guided design for supernatural beings in the world of darkness were suddenly wildly different. Some people hated these things, I will say that Vancian Spellcasting is probably one of the biggest problems for game balance in 3.5 D&D and in the current Pathfinder. I will also say that getting rid of it as they did also probably helped create some of the problems that 4th edition faced. Some people are afraid of losing something that's been part of the system from the get-go, and others see those things as either anachronisms or bad design choices.

3) Cash, a simple one, and more towards keeping to an older edition. If you have a game that runs well the idea of forking over more money for new books that essentially invalidate your old ones can be infuriating. And it can also be annoying that things you would have been happy to pay money for (expansions on a few new power systems, books for greater customization levels, etc.) are no longer being made for your game of choice, at least in the incarnation you have most of the other stuff for.

4) Simplicity, another argument in either direction. A person familiar with an edition will usually know all the necessary rules or at least have houserules and rulings to deal with hiccups. That being said there can be huge rule cludges that are either avoided or rewritten, things that come up after multiple sourcebooks and errata colliding with one another as well as the ubiquitous problem of player inventiveness. New editions tend to be fairly simple to start off, rules are streamlined and USUALLY the books don't have too many glaring errors or problems, but you usually have to relearn the system and rules not to mention the problem of dealing with new errata and rulebooks adding new features and changing things.

Now playing groups and the like are part of it too but those are a bit more subjective and this is more based on personal desires one way or the other. Any other ideas, comments, etc. are welcome. I hope to hear from someone.

Does Balance Matter?

Some of you out there are probably familiar with the game Gamma World, for those of you that are younger or more familiar with the most recent release of it (quite fun btw) it is a very fun and very bizarre game. One thing that I find is that there are a lot of people who enjoy Gamma World in part because it is so crazy and to an extent because it is imbalanced. You can be a super mutant with radiation powers and have a suit of power armor alongside a crazy feral person with a sword, and oddly it doesn't matter too much. The game does somewhat assume frequent deaths, but really you can have people of wildly disparate power levels in the game and it will still be fairly fun.

Now some of it might be that Gamma World runs heavily off of the weird factor, IE a big part of the enjoyment is more the bizarre spectacle than say balanced gameplay. On a note with my own group, I have mentioned before that I'm a big fan of Deadlands, my group currently has a Deadlands game going. When I set up a Savage World jaunt for them briefly I got a few positive responses but a lot of negative ones. Now Savage Worlds is more balanced, and the response may have been more rooted in either a desire for familiarity or something similar but I found it interesting that by and large their reaction was relatively negative towards it. A few of them even commented that the relatively imbalanced nature of the game was part of the fun.

For the record my group does generally care about game balance and if someone has abilities that are dominating combats and the like we usually talk about either nerfing or altering how the abilities work. And I'm sure that's true in most games. Maybe the question should be if balance really matters but also what we mean by balance.

Character deaths

I got into a rather interesting discussion recently which helped me around some bloggers block. One of the things brought up was the idea of a game where it was hard for PCs to die, or as he put it 'Care Bearing'. I thought about it, now in my games character death can vary wildly depending on systems but I will admit that I tend to be a bit more merciful than some, maybe due to player complaints or because of how I feel about games. Some of it is that I have fairly clever players, and some of it is that I try to avoid doing games that are going to eat the players alive consistently. Another person that was somewhat intermittently involved mentioned that he enjoys the look on players faces when their characters die, usually the shock that it happened, and complained that modern games coddle players too much. The person I was talking more directly to also complained about ideas like game balance and the like.

I disagree on a few fronts, but some of it also has to do with how I view the games. For example, in most editions of gamma world I've played you can whip up a new character quite fast and frequent deaths are part and parcel of the experience. The same can be said for games like All Flesh Must be Eaten or even certain games using the Cthulhu mythos. Some old school fantasy games are similar, in these cases death might be annoying but the relative speed in which you can make a new character means that the death won't mean that either the player is sitting out for most of the night or that everyone else has to put things on hold while a new character is made. In such games character deaths aren't a big deal and can even be a source of amusement.

Take games that have more involved character generation however, say for example something from the folks at Palladium, and a character death could set you back hours in terms of time spent generating a new character. There is also the argument about how a character dies, is it different if they die from a single failed saving throw than if they died in a mass battle? If there are resurrection options in the game that might change things too, but how accessible do you make it for players? (IE at low levels do they have to suck it up and just wait until the cleric gets high enough to resurrect before they can die and keep their character?) Then again there is the question of if character deaths mean anything to the players or game itself. If you have a big story planned is it better to just keep the basic group alive so they don't have to keep reading the new guy or gal into the groups mission and enemy list or is it necessary to make sure that you prune their numbers so they don't get too sure of themselves?

Well, any readers out there are welcome to comment, hope to hear from you.

Magnificent Failures: Magic of Incarnum

One thing that I've been thinking on recently is on a lot of game supplements that were what I would call magnificent failures. These are games or supplements that while they never quite managed to catch or really get a big level of focus or were somehow flawed still had a really good concept, idea or system that was lurking under the problems. One of my favorite examples for this was a D&D game for 3rd edition called Magic of Incarnum, it was a supplement that offered a new kind of magic system to the game.

Thematically Incarnum was the calling and binding of souls, you called on the essence of all who lived and all yet to be born, you channeled this energy into objects that symbolized heroes, villains, warriors, thieves, etc. It was a very interesting system conceptually, you could mix and match powers and features to either gain new abilities or augment existing ones. There were also a few options for someone wanting to dabble in it a bit the real problem with the system however is that...well it was very poorly implemented.

Using the powers to their fullest extent meant giving up item slots, doable and there were options for sharing slots and the like but it was still kind of iffy. Also a lot of it involved juggling a second resource called 'essentia' that you got from being an incarnum using class or by taking incarnum feats that granted you essentia in 1 per feat. You had to track how much essentia you invested in the feats, the soulmelds, etc. and you couldn't change it during the day so you had to make sure you knew what you wanted to do and what was supposed to go where. It was clunky and it added a lot of extra book keeping.

The secondary issue was this, the classes themselves that were meant to be the central incarnum users were for lack of a better term questionably designed. The Totemist was probably the best designed of the three but the problem I have with it is that it depends heavily on the natural weapons that some of its soulmelds offer without bothering to explain how they interact and essentially 'locking' certain slots automatically during game progression, it's overall still pretty good but it was a pet peeve. The Soulborn was the second creation, this one was more a problem of there not really being enough of the actual class feature available. What I mean is this, the class itself didn't get much to actually use the soulmelds and abilities this was particularly bothersome because it made it feel like they, a class BUILT for using the new system, were little more than dabblers.

The third class needs a lot of explanation, the Incarnate was sort of the flagship for the Incarnum classes in my view. It had the most essentia, most access to soulmelds and gained them the fastest. It had full armor proficiency and full weapon proficiency, decent saves as well, in fact there was only one problem, it had the base attack bonus of a primary caster, IE the wizards. The first problem here is simply that looking at it was a little confusing, most of the stuff shown, and the description they gave said that this was a combatant that harnessed Incarnum to augment themselves and their allies, but the wizard BaB said that they were going to have trouble hitting and that their main focus would apparently be elsewhere.

I think that there were two reasons that this happened, and it probably also explains why the Soulborn actually got so few Incarnum soulmelds. The first is that because of how a lot of the soulmelds worked you could actually get a really good bonus to hit, probably edging out the fighter or at least getting close even on the poor base attack bonus. The second one is more that the soulmelds were really versatile, it wasn't just combat bonuses. They offered bonuses for just about every skill, if your group woke up locked in jail cells stripped of gear you could simply summon up the hands of the thief, the rogues vest and a few others and suddenly the jail cells might as well be made of paper.

I think the fear was that due to potential versatility they were afraid of the Incarnate becoming too powerful, the same with the Soulborn. This is one of the areas where the designers might have botched things a bit, it's kind of where theory and practice veer in different directions. The amount of versatility was hypothetically a major power for the Incarnate, but due to elements of design much of the vaunted versatility would sit unused. The reason was simply this, with everything but the base attack bonus proclaiming that it was meant to fight in melee or at least in ranged, most points and abilities were likely to veer in that direction, the other abilities were likely to sit unused unless say the person playing the rogue couldn't make it to that session or something similar.

It's not that the versatility idea was bad, just that given the nature of the class that had it it was unlikely to really be very often used. I view it in ways similar to high level wizard or sorcerer spells that were designed to turn them into melee powerhouses. While the spells themselves may have been impressive they weren't really all that likely to be used, or if they were something had likely gone wrong somewhere or things had changed rather radically.

What made Incarnum such a magnificent failure in my view is that while there were a lot of things that went wrong with Incarnum there was actually a lot of really great stuff here. The concept of essentially harnessing the raw spiritual energy of all the universes souls, shaped my archetypes of heroism or villainy, is a pretty neat idea. The sheer number of options that you could mix and match from was pretty cool too. The other thing is simply that the idea was unique, it was very different and very dynamic, I applaud innovation in game design and while this experiment might have been problematic it was still quite an interesting one.

The Right Way to play pt. 3

In my last few posts I've tried to talk about the concept of a right way to play games and this last post is somewhat of a tricky one, in part because I want to finish it here and this question is the root of a lot of bigger arguments in gaming. The biggest issue with the idea of a right way to play, at least in my mind, is that it's sort of a mask for either a bigger question or idea that the person is trying to state.

It can be about gamestyle preferences, it can be a question of what a person brings to a game, really there are a lot of ways to look at it. One way is simply a matter of style and preference, the people talking about roleplay or optimization as if they were mutually exclusive for example. Another is a bit trickier and it's somewhat more prevalent in online gaming than it would be in tabletops.

In online games there can be said to be a more objective right and wrong way to play, part of why I say this is that those games are generally of a less 'sandbox' method in that classes or skillsets are designed for certain things and the game can't really alter itself based on learning curves on a case by case basis (barring server wide patches and the like). The games are also much more based around cooperation in that if a person doesn't build the warrior to tank as well as they can or the healer is built incorrectly...well that ends up making things hard for others and creating frustration for all those involved. Part of what makes a game work, and what makes a way to play 'right' or 'wrong' has to do with what makes all the people involved happy and lets them have fun.

Ignoring the systems, the arguments, etc. we all game to have fun, to relieve stress and do something interesting with out friends. Now the biggest thing in all of it is that you and those around you are having fun. Someone is playing the wrong way when they and those around them aren't having fun, sometimes it means that the person should redo their character, sometimes it means that the group needs to change in terms of some people leaving or something similar.

The right way to play pt. 2 (sorry this took so long)

Sorry to any readers out there, real life got in the way of things for a while, I guess I'm back and will hopefully be able to put out more posts and make something enjoyable.

When last I left my second issue in the idea of playing right or wrong had to do with the concept of a player focusing more on the mechanical aspect of the game, and when the others in the group complained he argued that he got into the game to fight monsters, slay dragons, and find treasure not sit in town conversing in 'thees and thous' with local yokels. For those who are familiar with such arguments part of this is from the whole 'roleplay vs rollplay' or 'optimization versus RP' and other things that crop up.

In some cases it's a false dichotomy started by people more enamored with RP than mechanics arguing that a person who has any interest in mechanics is clearly only interested in that and they don't know how to properly roleplay. While there can be cases where people obsess over raw numbers to the exclusion of any RP elements I think this is the exception rather than the rule. I also would argue that to an extent optimization IS roleplaying but that might be a discussion for another day. Now, some people might argue that the mechanically focused player in the example is playing wrong, or at least isn't playing the game to its full potential. Conversely people might also feel some sympathy for him, if he's in a game like Dungeons and Dragons, Hackmaster, or any other game that sells itself as a game full of action and exploration then it does seem a bit like the player in question might feel like they were the victim of a bait and switch. Depending on the game some might even argue that the roleplay centric players might be 'doing it wrong' if the game they're using is a much more heavily action oriented one.

This isn't to denigrate roleplayers either, roleplay can help bring a game more to life. It can help flesh out characters and work out backgrounds for them as well as make players feel like they're a part of the world and really care about the story and feel excited about that happens around them. Some games do a better job of stimulating roleplay than others and I won't say much more on that subject.

The real crux of the issue in this one is more a matter of player expectations and group style. I have had players who have told me of my own games that they are alternately too roleplay light or heavy, that we need more or less action, etc. Now a lot of it boils down to personal preference of the players and what the person running is comfortable with. This might be a case where the group would either need to seek a compromise, maybe doing more action sequences if reasonable along with trying to get the recalcitrant player to interact more with the story. It might also just be that the player is a bad fit for the group, he or she would be happier with a group that did more action, adventure and exploring in their games rather than emphasizing social interaction.

At least this is my view, if anyone has any comments, feel free to offer them in the comments section.