Uniqueness

See if I can stay on topic.  The general concept is the extent that PCs should be unique or, more specifically, differ from each other.

Of my four current campaigns, one is highly dependent upon me to do things certainly to have any sort of player interaction, one has me do a lot of talking during play where one of the three players does much less, one has me do nothing on a consistent basis, one has had me do nothing recently.

Hmmm … sounds like griping about something besides special snowflaketitude.  While pointing out how little I have to do in the supers game, I got into how so much of our activity is what the character is bad at and why getting better at those activities doesn’t make any sense to me.

Much more with supers than anything else I can think of, PCs are supposed to be individuals.  That’s my view, anyway.  Maybe my expectations of telling comic book stories is off since games aren’t composed the way fiction is.

For example, I don’t have a problem with everyone in a party in most play – L5R, Vampire, etc. – rolling Perception/Investigation and just going with whoever rolled best or handling an ambush or whatever.  But, when you have Daredevil and The Thing in a party, one will know there’s an ambush coming and the other will just get sucker punched and not care because been punched by The Hulk before.

Most games have “like beings”.  Even to some extent crazy stuff like Mage.  Supers are very intentionally not like beings.  Sure, X-Men is very different from Avengers.  And, yes, characters still overlap in abilities.  Thor and Hercules in party at same time is a thing [sic].

However, the characters I have in mind when I think of supers play are extreme in their differences.  Where I’m getting tired of L5R 4e play because I feel too much character convergence, actively fighting character convergence is a thing I do with Denver CRUSH.

Which, in my mind, should inform play.  Yes, we could work together much better in a tactical sense, but we work together far too often.  There’s no reason for more than one PC to do research (arguably no reason any PC should do research except we are all geniuses due to how the system works).  There’s no reason half the party should sneak around strategically.  While stealthy dude does stealthy investigating and bee hive does bee spying, plant woman and I should be doing other things.  But, that necessitates that there be other things to do.

I’m a fan of splitting up parties and having them work in parallel until they converge for climaxes.  That’s effort, though.  So, I get why play sees the party stick together far more often than makes in world sense.  Then, you can see where doing one thing at a time makes sense.  So, then, it makes sense that not everyone is important for what’s happening at the moment.  This is completely different from dungeoncrawling outside of thief/rogue lonerising.  While the magic-users/wizards are studying something in a room, clerics are still there to heal them and fighters to tank for them.

Sure, lots of other genres are more in between.  Party of vampires is still likely to hang together while doing stuff unless there’s a particular reason to split them up.  The more the PC abilities diverge, though, the less it makes sense for them to be in the same place doing the same things.  Immortal: The Invisible War played very much like Highlander supers, where someone turning into vapor and going through a sewage system is right out of a supers playbook.

Arc Flash, my supers character, is already kind of thematically off in that he’s way more resilient than I had in mind, but the system forced that as the system sucks for supers play and killing characters is rather easy.  Why fight the system in other respects?  Because more than one thing can be true at the same time.  I can not want to accidentally die because some dude rolls well on an attack in a supers game (even if coming back from death is de rigeuer) while still wanting to preserve niche protection [please don’t mispronounce niche like so many people are wont to do these days].

Niche protection is just much more extreme.  Look, everyone should have not only a group story but a personal story with RPG play.  Usagi Kidai chased the Emperor’s daughter.  Miya Tatakisu heralded [The Lords of] Death.  But, both shot arrows, one far more often than the other.  Both rolled social rolls, one far more than the other.  Etc.

Ghost Wolf may be more socially adept in a mechanical sense than Arc Flash, but GW is the edgy outsider type where AF is the public symbol type (for this party with its two inhuman members, anyway).  At no point has there been any important public social challenge.  Bureaucracy may not be interesting, so being good at it may just be fluff, but there’s no “Arc Flash, how come Denver CRUSH killed my kitty?” or whatever.

Our spectrum of activity is far too narrow, at least in terms of what matters.  I don’t disagree with the GM that all of the components are there for comic book style play.  But, the focus is in a limited number of activities.

So, I’m mostly motivated to speak to supers play due to how it differs from other genres.  But, what about other genres?

One reason I avoid making combat-focused characters in RPG play is because everyone should be combatting.  What is my character doing when not fighting?

Interacting with other NPCs than the other PCs, for one thing.  If another player is particularly interested in a particular NPC, as rare as that is in my play, then I leave them alone as not everyone should be trying to do the same things.  To facilitate these varying interactions doesn’t require different mechanics – two 2nd level fighters with 15/12/14/9/11/10 attributes could care about vastly different things based on backgrounds, personalities, or affiliations.

Of course, I’m not terribly motivated to have PCs that are that similar mechanically.  I like systems with skills as I like having different skills than others.  For instance, there are two PCs in my PBP game (again, after someone dropped out).  I tend towards Animal Handling as a skill that players constantly forget about as a differentiator.  The other PC has it.  So, when the snow tiger eyes us warily while we climb through the mountains in the North of the Colonies, I don’t feel a need to get involved in their interaction.

One reason to play spellcasters … for me where I’m not into power … is to cast different spells.  When I was playing Chuda Kitayakei, even though Earth Affinity, we had a planned Earth Tensai, so I tried to focus on Water spells and get into Air spells.  Lots of characters in various systems can’t differentiate themselves that much.

Not RPG play, but True Dungeon has a bunch of classes that basically just attack.  Barbarian, Dwarf, Fighter, Ranger, Rogue all come across to me as just hit things for damage.  Now, Rogue has it’s puzzle box ability … which I don’t care about.  Why, then, do I find the fighters more appealing than the other three?  Because I’m attracted to weakness.  Sure, Double Strike isn’t useless, but it’s amusing to me to try to find ways to add value playing two of the most useless classes.  Why aren’t Monk and Paladin on this list as the other two classes that don’t have spell lists?  Paladin has Guard, heals some, and Sacrifice.  Monk has poison immunity, Improved Evasion, non-magical missile immunity – it has interesting abilities that sometimes matter.  Barbarian Damage Reduction is not terribly different from just having more HP.

Of course, how do I make my TD builds different from others?  By spending way too much money … oh … nature’s loser, again.  No, wait, plenty of other people spend way too much money on tokens.  By coming up with formats that other groups don’t play that leads to running suboptimal tokens due to either mechanical restriction or thematic flavor.

I’m very much of the view that every PC should be unique.  It doesn’t have to be mechanical, but it helps, and I heavily encourage it, including by having groups go outside the books to make up abilities that are unique to each character.  I hate characters being defined by their equipment, a very oD&D way to differentiate characters, because you could just hand the equipment to someone else and lose any sort of uniqueness.

At the same time, the more characters vary, the harder the GM’s job.  We have a PC with very low soak that can easily be killed, which makes coming up with antagonist stats much harder as either too dangerous or not dangerous enough as opposed to being in a narrow band of capability.  With most play, can solve this conundrum by focusing on thematic differences.

But, supers are different.  Supers are far more defined by their power sets than their personalities or whatever.  Even “powerless” Batman has a power set that includes a bunch of gadgets.  Firebabe and Icebro may end up with exactly the same numbers in Champions, but one has 2x STUN from fire and the other 2x STUN from cold, and that shouldn’t matter – it *must* matter.

There’s a reason so many RPG settings have clans, orders, tribes, or whatever as factions.  Even if you do the same things and (effectively) believe the same things, affiliations are a way to distinguish characters.  … Assuming the game ever actually makes these things matter.

I didn’t really get into much GM advice, even though I see a responsibility on the GM side to make these differences matter.  Hopefully, it’s obvious enough how a GM can say to themselves when thinking up sessions “What would MNO do that STU wouldn’t to give each of those PCs their own personal narratives?”

VTD 11B

Three runs of 11B.

With the reordering of the B side of 2022 VTD, this moves from last part of five part story to penultimate.  I don’t think that did it any favors.

Friday 5:48PM

This was our usual group run, Epic, no special rules.  Since we had eight players, I played pathetic paladin.

The first room looked the same as 11A, but the puzzle had a different solution.  The group got it quick, though never articulated the solution clearly.

Room two was same setting, different monster.  We took it out in three rounds, dealing a bit more than 1000hp of damage.

Room three was same as 11A.  We took four rounds to get through both guards as barbarian did not steal the alarm.  We dealt 1500+ damage.

Room four looked the same as 11A, but the puzzle had a different solution.  The group did a good job figuring it out.

Room five was completely new.  Some comedy.  The gimmick of how to approach it was also amusing.  I think my main problem with it after the first time was that it was just lots of dice rolling that didn’t mean anything.  I kept asking if there was any way to actually fail the room.

Room six was just same as 11A with an extra time-wasting step of having the NPC we are trying to save who apparently became our friend from interacting in one room show up to remind us that our goal is to rescue her.  There’s a much easier way to solve this that I only remembered after this run.  I did most of the work as only I actually remember details from previous game sessions.  In fact, I think I know all of the rooms of the dungeon clips, but nobody cares.  Nobody cares.

Room seven was very similar to 11A and we had similar result as to when we first played 11A – we lost.  We ran out of time, but much of the party was about to die.  This room is just overstuffed, though they did lesson some of the mechanics later in the weekend.  It’s also a room you want to meta for, where the group was not well prepared for its mechanics.  We lost tons of actions, where the time taken to explain lost actions exacerbated the problem of reducing our damage output.  It looks like we only did four rounds of combat.  I estimate we were about 55% of the way to winning and 90% of the way to dying.

It was okay.  I didn’t like 11A that much, though I didn’t like most of the A side that much.  Where other B sides felt different, this didn’t.  It felt like doing all of the same things with the names on the jerseys changed, so it was kind of boring.  The brawl room was … novel, but I’m not a slapstick fan, so it didn’t matter as much to me.  The puzzles felt like doing puzzles we had done before, where one was exactly and the other two were basically the same exercises just with different outputs.

Saturday 12:24PM

Interest in B side is much lower this year.  A lot of it has to do with how expensive tickets are for basically doing the same things.  Certainly VTD2, VTD3, and VTD5 were vastly better for having more variance, Easter Eggs, and, for me and apparently only for me, not having the awful dice roller that reduces my fun generally and makes me not want to play a wizard at all.  So, we didn’t have core player.

We still had seven players.  Our theme run was a new format – Subprime.  Your build (outside of TEs) had to cost less than the price of a ticket.

Real build diversity happened.  I ran some uncommons just because they were cheaper than similar rares.  With dungeon knowledge, the bard ran an instrument I have never seen used because of a combination of its effect and cost.

I find trying to figure out cost rather more work than I want to do, but it was interesting to find out what ludicrous prices people are trying to sell junk for.  And, it was interesting how easy it was to get to $67 without running much in the way of good tokens.

We didn’t do much coordination of how to own the dungeon, so we only did Hardcore.

The one person who didn’t know the puzzles guessed room one entirely correctly.  With extra time because there was a bubble behind us, we got room four.  Room six was completed.

We defeated room two in two rounds.  Room three in three rounds.  Room seven in four rounds.

Now, my view is that Hardcore should be what it says it’s supposed to be – for veteran players with a few starter packs.  So, $68 builds with full dungeon knowledge should have been relatively easy.  I did end room seven with 1hp.  But, cleric could have healed me if I cared about living.

It was successful not just as a run but as an experience.  Well, sort of.  Some folks were very frustrated with the Zoom call quality, where I’m used to minor problems with VTD so didn’t think much of it.  It was the first time I ever ran Medallion of Magick.  If I were doing Bloodyish Nightmare, I wouldn’t likely run it as there’s an arguably more powerful rare in neck, but this was a cheap option.

I had a RPG session to switch to.  I spent a long time “playing” and talking to people in that game.  Got to bed late after a tiring day.

Sunday 8:00AM

Anti-Cabal run, as usual.  One different player as regular monk player is boycotting B side.

Only Nightmare as people don’t want to miss a bunch.  For this dungeon, that’s also likely the better difficulty if want to win.

I took 5 damage prior to room seven.  I didn’t even bother adjusting my HP in room seven for the continuous damage as it was impossible for it to deal enough to kill me in time, and I never got hit by the monsters that did damaging attacks.

Room seven took us five rounds to win, which was a bit easy, but that’s pretty typical for this run historically.

I ate two too large burritos as I suck at making burritos.  The ground pork with cumin, epazote, Mexican Oregano, salt, and some chili powder was fairly tasteless.  Tomato chunks were uneven.  Too little cheese in first one.  Too much sour cream, not enough guacamole as I used up too much of the guac in the two burritos I had Saturday morning when I cooked the meat.  Hot sauce helped, but I didn’t use enough.  I constantly put too much filling so that I can’t actually close my burritos, which means they end up being really, really big soft tacos.

Every time I think I can get burritos right, I don’t.  Well, in two days, I used up my eight tortillas, so I don’t need to worry about making any more.  Not sure the plan for using up sour cream.  I suppose I could bake something.  The pork was supposed to be done like my taco meat – browned, then simmered in salsa, but I forgot I didn’t have another jar of salsa.  I didn’t want to just unload a bunch of herbs and spices, even though I could have done that.  Still could with the leftover pork, but I might dump it in soup where I can just season the soup to taste.

And, I’m still bloated from those two burritos seven hours later.

Had CRUSH session at 11AM.  My character got on a plane.  My character got off a plane.  So, pretty much same session as the one before it.

Of my four RPG campaigns, my characters only do things of consequence in one of them.  It’s not fun.  This time, it was much more noticeable by everyone else, probably because it was two sessions in a row that my character did nothing.  Just nothing.  Use any of a multitude of super powers?  Nope.  Roll meaningful skill roll?  Nope.  Roll dice for something meaningless?  Nope.  Make any decisions for the party?  Nope.  Speak local language as a Linguistic Genius in either of two foreign countries where not everyone in the party speaks local language, including one language that nobody else speaks?  Nope.  In both sessions, my character boarded a plane, then got off a plane.

Not that this is a new problem.  In both campaigns, there are massive problems with players playing.  In the Saturday one, often nobody does anything that matters as bog down in minutia with rolls not corresponding to advancing any plot or subplot.  In Sunday one, two players play regularly, the rest of us sometimes have something to do.

Now, I could change characters to play someone who is into sneaking and investigating.  But, there’s a reason my character is terrible at the latter and isn’t terribly interested in the former – I’ve already played those campaigns.  I’ve never played a supers campaign before and want to lean into superhero tropes and embrace the genre, but it’s like we’re playing a World of Darkness game …  Well, Aberrant is a White Wolf game, so …??

It’s weird to me that most of the group is into the genre, yet we aren’t playing the genre, at least not the primary subgenre.

But, getting back to VTD 11B.  There were things I was interested in trying in additional runs even though the dungeon doesn’t interest me that much.  My runs were decent.  So, I’m not miserable and my thoughts are divided between productive activity and unproductive activity.

As 9A was my favorite VTD of this year, I’m hoping that the B reorganization of the narrative doesn’t make it worse.  I do want the rare completion token for 9B and may want to do four runs instead of three, where I’m only in two at the moment.  But, anyway, that’s a review for a month from now.

I had an idea for another blog post – whether it’s feasible to have truly episodic home play or not.  Maybe I’ll spew about that.