If Only All Problems Were So Trivial

Four day weekend.  And, I have little idea of what my primary gaming thoughts are.

In the world of RPing, while I played Friday night for the first time in a while, my mind is much more in the realm of GMing.  In particular, I keep thinking of how to do a superhero campaign.

Problems with … supers

One can agonize as much as they want over what system to use for a supers game.  I’m sure I’d just stop and use Champions since I’m more familiar with it and it’s long history suggests that it actually works.  Though, I have thought about how I’m not really so familiar with any particular system to be entirely comfortable for a game with so much variety of abilities as a supers game.

No, my greatest concern is suspension of disbelief.  I just have such a hard time believing in the plausibility of a world with supers.  It’s not the “Why doesn’t a more powerful team deal with this problem?” sort of issues so much as it’s things like how ordinary people would react to supers.  For the most part, mundanes in comics act like having godlike beings around is no big deal.  Deciding just how the law views supers, by itself, is painful to think through.  The point of supers isn’t to be caught up in minutiae.  It’s to do cool stuff with obscene power as part of a soap opera.

So, while Merge World might have been my previous idea, my latest idea is actually reasonably clever.  I’m sure it’s been done before.  The idea is that supers don’t exist in the present, then time travel solves that problem.  Still going to gloss over the historical impact that supers should have.  Time travel and what ifs are such a pain because you have to put so much work into explaining what happens as a result of the change in history, even if the results look much like the present.  I just don’t have the will to build out elaborate histories.  It’s amazing those that do.

Problems with … role-playing

RPing is so often not what one would think it should be.  In that, a lot of the time, people just sit around while others are doing stuff.  One of the big advantages that combat focused games and the tactical wargame style of play that D&D is designed as is that the participation level is so much greater.  No waiting for one player to have a long conversation with a NPC.  Or, whatever.

I don’t believe everyone has to be involved all of the time.  I know I can enjoy the time that others spend doing things when it’s interesting what they are doing.  However, when it isn’t interesting or when there’s too much down time, I feel that there’s something wrong.  So, I’m of the mind to try to figure out ideas for how to increase engagement level.  At times, having someone play a NPC can work.  More combat can work, assuming the party hasn’t split up or simultaneous combats can be run.

I could go into other problems I find, but it ends up being more of the same sort of “Are people’s expectations the same?” issues, which I’m not in the mood to get into in detail.

Problems with … decks

Dominate is oppressive.

Gear switching – activated.

I said that the last time we played.  I had to clarify that I didn’t mean it was oppressive to play against, which is just an ordinary experience, but oppressive from a deckbuilding standpoint.  It’s just so much easier to put Dominate into a deck than do other things.  I often go out of my way to avoid it, such as with my con-dom decks that use a clan with Dominate as a clan discipline but play no cards requiring Dominate.  From a game management standpoint, this has been the greatest flaw in the game since, well, actually, to be fair, Sabbat.  Hardly fair to Dark Sovereigns and Ancient Hearts that they should fix the dominance of Dominate.  Sabbat actually tried.  In theory, if you only played Sabbat, you wouldn’t have to deal with Govern, Conditioning, or Deflection.  On the other hand, you wouldn’t have Telepathic Misdirection, either, nor did the game come up with a lot of “this is as good as Scouting Mission, Threats, and Redirection” stuff for other disciplines and strategies to use, so the game was still afflicted.

Anyway, the game is what it is.  There will always be stronger and weaker.  Animalism is also oppressive in the modern game.  There are even some similarities for why.  Deep Song has flexibility like Govern.  Efficient combat offense/defense for one compared to efficient bleed offense/defense for the other.

Putting aside that it’s too easy to fall into playing Dominate and frequently a pain in eschewing it, there are two other aspects of the game I’ve been finding difficulties with.

Blood denial has been a fourth strategy to bleed/vote/combat.  While I can think of good blood denial cards, well, at least one off the top of my head in Free States Rant, it’s the relative merits of blood denial vs. combat that has me questioning what sort of strategy I’d be sufficiently interested in.  It doesn’t help that I’m really tired of voting, as voting opens up a lot of possibilities, good or bad.

One deck I built recently uses Baleful Doll.  I’ve used it in the past and come to the conclusion that it’s as bad as it seems.  I wanted to give it another shot, more so as a distraction play than a serious attempt to gain an advantage from playing it.  So far, the deck has major problems actually doing anything, which it wouldn’t have if I replaced the Baleful Dolls with Governs.

Meanwhile, combat isn’t really that hard.  I suppose that blood denial is more interesting against Animalism than combat since it’s not that easy to trump Animalism combat.  On the other hand, blood denial is pathetic against Imbued, something I do have to take into consideration.

Speaking of Imbued, my other difficulty of recentness is mixing Imbued with vampires.  While theoretically interesting to consider Imbued builds, in practice, I’d rather games be fun.  So, I’m much more inclined to look into how to meld Imbued with vampires to remove the ickiness of Imbued while still getting some use out of the cards.  I was inspired by the tournament winning deck that ran Maman as the only Imbued.  I could do something like that, but I’m more interested in trying to run a couple of Imbued to make their presence more consistent.  My recent attempt was awful.  I kind of figured that, especially when I changed the crypt to focus on only two vampires to go with the Imbued.  Goldfishing the deck only displayed that I had no real way to get the two vampires out.  Pool gain, pool gain, pool gain.  Have to come up with it.

Of course, with my disinterest in voting, the paths to pool gain are much more limited (outside of the good old Blood Doll/Villein/et al plays).  In general, when I go to build more decks, I keep feeling constrained by the need to do worthwhile things to compensate for the goofy things I want to do.

Which brings up a topic better left for another time.  Probably because limitations breed creativity, limited collections make deckbuilding more interesting.

Ultraworld

I continue to think about superhero role-playing.  Superworld, by the way, is an old RPG, which is why I avoided using it as the title of this post.  My current thought is, should a superhero campaign be created (which it won’t), to borrow extensively rather than reinvent the wheel.

In other words, my currently envisioned superhero campaign universe has DC and Marvel supers as NPCs.  See, I have a lot of Champions products and one of the things that comes through with Champions or with other non-licensed supers games is that they take the iconic concepts that DC and Marvel have done and create their own versions because they can’t just use the ones we know.  For instance, the “paragon super” is best exemplified with Superman.  In Marvel, the paragon is split up, with the personality and history (fighting Nazis) found in Captain America and the powers found in Thor (also Silver Surfer but Thor is more the man – interesting that both have silly ways of flying).

The knock-offs are only likely to remind everyone of the originals.  Now, these games can’t use the originals but GMs can.  Since I don’t want to play either the DC universe or the Marvel universe, by stealing characters from both, we don’t capture too much of the feel of either one.  This does create problems.  The various characters typically have highly developed backstories and may have abilities that make less sense outside of worlds built around them.  Again, using the obvious example, Superman’s ubiquitous weakness is Kryptonite, which means that the merge world has to have Kryptonite.

So, I started thinking of characters that I view as being iconic.  I’m not looking for the most popular characters or my favorite characters or whatever.  I’m looking for those who best represent concepts essential to the genre but also those that don’t necessarily make for good PCs, as the PCs can fill in essential roles rather than just being random supers.

Superman.  He’s a terrible PC – he can’t lose without creating a mess, he’s so absurdly powerful (especially the original) that challenges have to be ludicrous to be challenging.  There’s what?  A hundred types of Kryptonite?  Bad guys run around with Kryptonite hearts.  Etc.  It’s lame.  He does have other weaknesses, like his weakness to magic, but that’s not something you want as a challenge month after month, either.  He’s the best symbol of what it is to be a superhero, if not necessarily the most heroic hero (a moot argument).  He’s a problem because of his power level, but actually, I see the PCs not being cosmic level supers, which means NPCs will cover the cosmic level of super, which means … why not Superman?

Then, I ran into an issue right away which I’m going to talk a lot about below.  Before getting into that, Doctor Strange beats Doctor Fate for me as I’m much more familiar with the former.  No Batman as I’m a hater.  No Spiderman because Spiderman is the sort of character that a PC should be.  Spiderman has a wide range of activities, often fighting street thugs but also, infamously, beating Firelord (Herald of Galactus) in a one-on-one.  His Spidey Sense is a trump.

Trumps.  I’m a big fan of trumps.  Maybe they don’t work as well in gaming as in fiction, but I think they can.  The idea of a trump is that, no matter what your power level is, your ability trumps everything else.  Who is the odd man out of:  Silver Surfer, Thor, Daredevil?  It’s not meant to be a trick question.  Daredevil can’t normally hang with the other two.  Yet, if you read the Fear-Eater stories in Marvel Comic Presents(?), you would know that a Fear-Eater can defeat Silver Surfer, can defeat Thor, but flat out dies to Daredevil.  Not fails.  Dies.  The Man Without Fear has a trump in that he’s immune to … wait for it … fear.  Danger sense is easily findable with others, especially cosmic beings like The Watcher, but Spiderman’s is typically a trump – he senses danger as well or better than any other entity in the universe (even if it doesn’t always work).

No street level supers, in general.  I’m not into street supers as my recent post mentioned.  They are also easily replaceable.  I’m looking for concepts.  Dr. Strange satisfies the “I’m the ultimate magic guy who defends the universe from other universes with magic entities”.  Iron Man takes the powerarmored super role.  Flash (Barry Allen or Jay Garrick, I’m sure) takes the speedster role.  I’m not sure I want a water super role as Aquaman gets a ridiculous amount of grief and I actually find Namor sillier.

I didn’t get much further than this.  One reason I didn’t get further is that I started thinking about Wonder Woman.  No female super is remotely as iconic as Wonder Woman.  But, what is she iconic for?  Sure, her powers are different from Superman’s and she has her own stories and backstory and whatnot, but I see her being defined primarily by the fact that she is THE super heroine.  I’ve been doing research to try to recall other female superheroes who have enough cache to be iconic.  It’s actually fairly amazing the lack.

From DC, besides Wonder Woman, the most commonly named super heroines from best of or popular of lists, rather than sexiest lists (though they make those, too), are Power Girl, Supergirl, Black Canary, Huntress, Raven, Starfire, Hawkgirl, Batgirl, Zatanna(!).  Here we see an obvious problem with being derivative of a male super.  Power Girl and Supergirl are both Superman knock-offs.  Hawkgirl is related to Hawkman.  Batgirl, Batman.  Not that this is unique to DC, but I’m looking for characters to fill roles, so why not just use the better known male super that these relate to?  Raven and Zatanna are mystical, which might be worth something, though there’s only so much mystic supers you want in a generic supers world.  Huntress has something of her own identity, but I think she’s street.  Black Canary might have her distinct identity, but she lacks resonance [ha!] and notoriety.  While a much more independent super, I always think of her in conjunction with Green Arrow.

From Marvel, we get Storm, Rogue, Jean Grey, Emma Frost, Shadowcat as mutants.  Which brings up something.  Female supers rarely have their own comic.  Even if they are notable within a team, even an insanely popular team like the X-Men, the iconicness of the characters ends up being limited because they don’t have a distinct identity from the team.  Black Widow, She-Hulk, Invisible Woman, Spiderwoman, Scarlet Witch (yes, she’s a mutant but she’s more of an Avenger), Elektra, Ms. Marvel generally show up on lists.  Interestingly, Wasp doesn’t show up on many lists.  It’s fairly interesting who the original Avengers were.  Not Captain America, except in reboots.  Thor, Iron Man, Hulk, Wasp, Ant-Man.  We get some of the same problems with characters being defined by their relationships to male characters.  She-Hulk is defined in contrast to the Hulk.  He’s a berserker.  She’s a lawyer.  And, they are related.  Storm and Elektra (even if she’s street) are the only two out of these that I can see being all that enthused by as icons.

It’s also interesting to think about how many supers could have been women or still could be.  While there are plenty of female Green Lanterns, why did it go Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, John Stewart, Kyle Rayner?  There’s nothing particularly male about a “willpower hero”.  On the other hand, I can see why there isn’t a (major?) female speedster taking the Flash name – superspeed is just not a power I associate with a female.  Captain America could be a woman.  Punisher.  Green Arrow.  Iron Man, not so much, not just because of his name, but also for an obvious element to females in superhero worlds.

Comic books are obvious geared toward male-centric wish fulfillment.  All of the women should be sexy from this point of view.  I personally don’t have a problem with this point of view, of course.  But, it limits character types.  Monstrous heroes, like The Hulk, The Thing, and many others are rarely going to be female (how popular was the female Thing?).  She-Hulk, for instance, is tall and green.  She’s often drawn absurdly hot, as long as tall and green and muscular aren’t major turn-offs.  She can’t keep a secret identity, but she’s not monstrous.  Similarly, energy beings, supers with no physical body, etc. (e.g. Wildfire) are rarely going to be female because lack of body is less sexy than having a (comic book) body.  Supers known for gritty violence are less likely to be female – Wolverine and Punisher could have been female characters, though Huntress is fairly violent as I understand things.  That’s kind of threatening.  Powerarmored supers could be women, but powerarmoredness doesn’t lend itself as well to women because female shaped armor can look silly, armor that disguises a great body is not sexy, and there’s an additional barrier to the female super’s flesh (note how many skin happy costumes female supers wear for how important flesh is).

I was amazed how few indie female supers showed up on people’s lists.  Witchblade was huge for a while.  I looked into Dark Horse, Image, out of business publishers to try to find notable female supers, but there’s actually not much that I have any recognition of.  One would think that this would be a niche that would work for the indie publishers.

Obviously, many iconic supers have been around for ages, from times when views on gender roles were different.  And, there are more and more female supers and some of them aren’t strippers, some occasionally even don’t dress like strippers.  Team compositions are increasingly better balanced.  More established teams often seem like 25% or less female in their more common configurations, while younger teams and teams that have less iconic characters seem more likely to be close to 50%.  Still, that there seem to be so few stories of a single, female super that is not related to a much better known male super is surprising.  Of course, I’m not up to date on the comic book industry by any stretch of the imagination, so there might be greater change than I’m aware of.

Anyway, this gender gap for a world I will likely never bother developing has been the subject of a number of discussions (now that I think about it, all with women) I’ve had recently.

Supermotivated

I’ve been thinking about superhero role-playing recently.  It could be due to a reaction to the usual style of play of my Friday night campaigns or it could just be because I haven’t thought about it much in quite a while.

I don’t expect to play such until February or so, and I don’t have any interest in taking on more GMing duties, so the logistics of play, such as game system, are not that great a concern to me.  Though, I do have trouble thinking of what game system I’d even want for a superhero game.  Champions is probably okay, though the reason I think of it all of the time is due to character creation.  Silver Age Sentinels might be worth taking another look at.  If it mattered …

I got to thinking last night about motivation, especially supervillain.  Sure, it’s easy enough to find a list of motivations.  Many of the crazy motivations are fine – with great power comes great madness makes perfect sense.  I’m more interested in believable, relatable motivations.

It’s also easy to find a list of human needs, but the most basic are food, shelter, and security, with the latter two being something that can be considered together or separately – doesn’t really matter to me.  Taking a normal person and giving them superpowers, none of these are much of a concern.  Sure, there are parts of the world and parts of affluent countries where it would be more so, but I’m just thinking of some random middle class suburbanite, such as myself.

So, if not those as motivations, then what?  Well, um, there’s an obvious motivation, but I’ll ignore it.

I’ve gotten ahead of my self.  I can’t think of any good supervillains in the Marvel Universe off the top of my head.  Sure, I could probably be easily reminded of good ones.  And, there are ones that interest me.  But, if I were to port over the character type to a personal RPG campaign, I don’t know that I’d be happy.  Doctor Doom?  Silly.  Sabertooth?  Personal enemy.  Magneto?  Magneto actually would be good, but this makes sense after reading below.  Kingpin?  Too street.  Dracula?  Too supernatural.  Loki?  Too supernatural and too otherworldly.  And, so on.  You get supervillains that are too oriented to a particular hero, which doesn’t work with a large enough RPG group, supervillains that are silly (even for powerful groups like The Fantastic Four or The Avengers), ones that are too narrow (e.g. Mr. Sinister), etc.  On the DC side, I’m less familiar and the supervillains, like the superheroes, tend to be absurdly powerful.

From a villain side, if you had superstrength, the ability to fly, were invulnerable to bullets, and/or could blast people with some sort of energy attack (in other words, were a brick or energy projector), what would you be doing as a villain if you weren’t just insane? 

Mercenary is easy.  I can totally see ruthless mercenaries of the likes of Bloodscream and Roughhouse, which is perhaps part of the reason why I thought they made decent members of Wolverine’s rogue’s gallery.  Speaking of mercenary, I can see it on the superhero side as well.  The supervillain merc sets up someone as a warlord, probably in Africa or some made up nation.  The “superhero” merc acts as a bodyguard for traveling dignitaries.

World changer.  Magneto falls into this when it’s more about mutant respect and safety and less about how humans should worship the almighty mutant.  Terrorism is a touchy topic, but it’s prevalent and reasonable in comics as a supervillain activity; one could even say that the default supervillain activity is terrorism.  Besides, comics try to use real world issues.  Magneto has often been a terrorist.  Extreme environmentalism drives various supervillains.  Superheroes get in the act by eventually deciding to take over government.  Often, the supervillain has noble intent but an extreme view that overlooks practical considerations.  While this can be to the point of insanity, there’s enough sane part of the spectrum where this still works as a good motivation/activity.

Wealth accumulation.  Seems a reasonable motivation.  We all like having more dollar dollar bills (or Euros or Baht or whatever).  But, when you can fire lightning bolts, rip tanks open with your bare hands, etc., why in the world would you ever be so stupid as to rob banks or do all of the typical things that get superheroes to show up and beat you down?  I was thinking about the most useful superpowers to commit crimes in a realistic world and it was all invisibility, teleportation, and mental powers.  Actually, just the mental powers would do it.  Cracked.com had an article not long ago about major crimes committed just with a phone, including stealing $30,000,000 (over a bunch of years).  It can just take saying the right thing to deprive people of money. 

Anyway, back to superpowers.  The ability of a single person to fly at will at high speeds is an amazingly useful ability.  Military would love it, though I already mentioned being a merc.  Superstrength, especially at higher levels, has numerous applications that can be turned into money without resorting to robbery.  Sure, sportfighting, which any doofus super could get into, is not heroic in any way, so even though it would be an easy way to make money, it’s lame.  There are occasionally jokes about supers using their powers for mundane activities – Storm making wedding weather perfect or whatever.  But, look around at what people get paid for.  If not a purely mundane job, with virtually any superpower, there’s some sort of specialized job that no one else can accomplish.

Stealing makes a bit more sense in cases where the villain needs something to live.  Here, though, we aren’t usually talking about stealing money, unless it’s money to pay for rare drugs or as a barter with someone who can provide some rare resource.  Vampires stealing life through blood drain, irradiated supers (or robots) stealing radioactive materials to live, aliens stealing resources from Earth – all makes sense.  But, as a motivation, it gets tiresome.  You feel bad for some of these villains.  Maybe not vampires.  But, Radioactive Dude needing plutonium to live is sympathetic.  Sympathetic is okay sometimes, like when being sympathetic to world changers with noble intent, but you really want to beat the tar out of supercriminals most of the time.

Revenge and/or hatred of something makes some sense.  A lot of supervillains are disfigured in accidents and hate normal looking people.  A lot are striking back at somebody who has wronged them.  Street gang gets shot by cops, weird doctor takes one of them and does experiments, new supervillain takes revenge on cops – okay, reasonable.

Part of the concern is looking at it from the superhero or superneither perspectives.  If I were to acquire superpowers in a world where it wouldn’t be awful (government test subject not being the logical life path), what would I do with them?  Would I just try to use them for my personal benefit?  What is a world like with superheroes and no supervillains?  Does such a world make any sense at all, ignoring that it would be boring as a RPG?  If it’s not clear what the superhero or superneither is going to do with superpowers, why would it be clear what a supervillain would do?

Comic book worlds rely on the superhero vs. supervillain dynamic.  Of course, because a primary reason to read comic books is for epic fights.  But, what is the logic behind the fights?  Fighting for the sake of fighting is ultimately hollow.  Superheroes can’t just exist to counter supervillains.  Supervillains can’t just arise to give superheroes something to do.  There’s only so many alien invasions that give a simple enemy to deal with.  I think my basic problem is that so much of the crime that supervillains engage in is insipid while the dealing with that crime often ends up being just as bad in terms of things like collateral damage.

Revenge, needing to steal to survive, trying to change the world, dirty missions outside of the eye of those who can do anything about it, insanity, aliens – that’s probably enough sources of supervillainy.  It’s the mundane stuff of blatant robbery of highly visible targets like banks or train shipments or whatever that I don’t buy, even street criminals with no superpowers blatantly robbing stuff in a world with superheroes stretches credulity.  Keep in mind that the Mona Lisa was stolen just because some guy stuffed it in his clothes and walked out.  The amazingly lack of subtlety in comic book worlds is, uh, amazing.  Mental powers, for instance, should pretty much get you anything you want, which is, actually, really scary when you think about it.