Marvel Heroic RPG after-action report

I forgot, I never got to write up that after-action report for my Marvel Heroic RPG.

The characters were chosen some time earlier. Matt chose Cyclops, Chris chose Storm, and Alan chose Cannonball. So there we were, with Team "Team Leader."

To try out the system a little bit, we started with a Danger Room scenario: the team fighting ninja vampires on the rooftops of Neo-Tokyo. The players interacted in an interesting manner...seeing three team leaders interact was fun. XP were gained as a result of the small inter-party confrontations.

We started quickly picking up on how to manipulate the environment by dice rolls. I'd bought a big dry-erase board earlier that day, and jotted down valuable notes for everyone to see (what effects were in use, some stats for bad guys, that sort of thing). We found that keeping the board out there, and constantly writing out the effects we created for everyone to see helped.

We picked up with the mission: Cerebra picked up a new mutant coming into their powers somewhere in the midwest. The first part of the action started at a shopping mall, with a pit of darkforce growing in the floor. The group did a good job moving the civilians out of the area, disrupting the threat from the darkforce, and finding whomever was the cause. The run from the mall, with a young mutant in their arms, was troubles by a couple of black helicopters with anti-mutant folks at the guns. The choppers were defeated, and the new mutant was saved.

The players all picked up the narrative use of the dice quickly. There was only an occasional bit of prompting. If someone said they were attacking, I asked what effect they were looking for. This created a cool, action-filled set of scenes.

We had a transition scene, with the PC's meeting with the new mutant's parents. Storm went to give the "I understand you're going through a lot of changes," speech. Cannonball and Cyclops gave the, "We work at a really cool school...we even brought pamphlets," speech. It was a nice way to get the players to find their characters' voices.

No dice rolls in the transition scene. No one had taken any damage in the previous scene. It was cool, but in danger of going to far.

So, in come the Sentinels. And some Hellions. The fight was cool, with everyone pulling out the best opportunities to do cool stuff and create effects that stayed over the battlefield. Plot points were handed out, the Doom Pool was used to near exhaustion. Ultimately, the Sentinels were defeated, and the Hellions were sent running. The new young mutant agreed to go to Xavier's School, with the blessing from a very nervous, but appreciative, parents.

The dice rolling during combat was quick and loose. Thanks to Christine for having her laptop open, ready to confirm the rules we needed. The biggest wall we'd hit, I think, was how we were supposed to use our Plot Points, and how I was supposed to give them out.

Its art.

Another year of me missing Gencon. And every year, I say that I'll make it next year. Its tough for me at home this time of year, with most of my friends either at the Pennsic War or Gencon.

My Castles and Crusades game made up for it a bit yesterday. I don't know that I can say that the slightly rules-light system has contributed to more character and story development at the table. Not to say that slightly more complex rules or more book-keeping has kept character or story development down (my Star Wars Saga game was built on personal character development and having the players take a strong hand in dictating how the story would progress). I can say, though, that it feels easier for me to design adventures and encounters, and it feels like less of a chore to run.

Really, this is what Castles and Crusades feels like to me:



Its the dirty notebooks filled with hand-sketched maps and notes jotted down in the margins. It feels like beat-poetry.

Persona in the SCA: re-evaluating re-enactment

There's a romantic ideal that I look for, and its what I want to portray. In the same way the the idea of chivalry that we play with is more a construct of romantic-era literature, so is the notion of the Renaissance swordsman that I want to portray based on Cyrano deBergerac, The Three Musketeers, even as far as The Gray Mouser.

I want to portray someone who is in love with life because he knows how short it can be...someone who speaks too loudly, laughs too boisterously, and carries a mercenary attitude towards church, king and country. Someone who loves every gulp of wine and every bite of food because it could be his last. Someone quick to draw a sword in defense of his own honor, or the honor of a lady, or of whatever cause carries his attention that day.

Its an easy character to play when you consider that I can rush into a duel and leave with only minor injuries.

My life is comfortable. So is yours. What better way to step out of oneself than to be someone whose life is dependent on a twist of a knife or a draw of a sword.

That doesn't mean I wold want to abandon historical accuracy...I would like my kit to be a little more authentic for a Venetian stuck in London. I prefer to study historical swordsmanship (and teach it as well, when the opportunity is there). But that all helps take me away form the modern.

Vacation notes

I just got back from camping in the NJ Pine Barrens for the weekend. Great fun. There were lots of moments where I felt like I was watching other people enjoying their vacation while I could do little more than sit in a chair watching the river. But I fished, I spent lots of time reading and writing. It was a good weekend.

My wife and I spent more time than I expected talking about Pennsic. We're working more and more to make labor-intensive camping-style vacations like Pennsic more fun, less chore-like. We've decided that when we make it beack to Pennsic, we're taking it easy, buying food when we get out there, cooking little, and enjoying more things together.

Which was what our weekend trip was like. I'm still nursing a ruptured Achilles tendon, so there wasn't much for me to do. But we had fun together. Neither my wife nor my kid are terribly interested in SCA activities, and I'm much more interested in having fun as a family than I am in experiencing more SCA stuff...we'd likely enjoy a relatively short Pennsic vacation in the future...a short week, where I'd fight and fence a little, shop a bit, and experience so much more together.

We all went out last week to be part of a western martial-arts class. The boy was bored, my wife ended up doing a little nature walk while I talked to the instructor and witnessed the class. It interesting when there's not a whole-geek household (or a household where we don't geek out about the same things...my wife loves the natural world and local history, I'm a gamer and history / literature buff, my kid has developed a strong appreciation for video-games, far beyond my interest). But we've learned to accommodation each other. This may not sound remarkable, but I know too many families that can't seem to do this. I'm glad we can.

We took a day trip to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire last year, and we all had a great day. My plan is to have another weekend-vacation out there, where we could all have fun at faire, then spend the rest of the weekend chilling out in a hotel. With a pool.

Lord of the Rings gaming coming back

Have you seen pics from Cubicle 7 of the new Lord of the Rings role-playing game, The One Ring?

Well, take a look.

I'm a sucker for nice presentations, and the pics alone make me want to add this to the collection. The dice in the next-to-last picture are nice, though I think I would rather use Q Workshop "Elven" dice. The maps look nice, and I guess that's to be expected. You just can't have a Tolkien game and not have gorgeous cartography.

It reminds me of their Doctor Who - Adventures in Time and Space boxed set, which included some equipment cards, blue dice, and a sheet of "story points." I enjoy boxed sets with props and extra bits (anyone seen my small collection of 3rd edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay?). I can see myself getting The One Ring just for the cool bits.

Am I interested in playing in a Middle-Earth setting? The usual argument about playing in a setting like that is that all the cool stuff has already been done. I never quite got into LoTR gaming, but I blame the people who introduced me to LoTR gaming...rabid fanboys who forced their own love of the setting on the players, and punished any deviation from their image. I've had the same problem with Dragonlance, Star Wars, Serenity, Star Trek, Forgotten Realms, Call of Cthulhu...same as most gamers, I imagine.

If you love a piece of literature or fiction like that, enough to want to run a game in that setting, then you are going to want to spread that love to the rest of the layers. You want them to be as rabid about the things you love about the setting as you are. But then, you get folks who want to play quick-drawing space pirates in a Starfleet-based Star Trek game, or are playing Forgotten Realms just to kill Elminster*. Things just don't work, and you declare that they just don't get your artistic vision or some such thing.

I ran a Star Wars game for a few years. The players played it like they were CIA agents in the early 1980's. They spent a great deal of their time destabilizing planetary governments, making propaganda videos, assassinating heads of state, organizing military coups...nothing at all very Star Wars like. There were no heroic Jedi Knights fighting to restore the glory of the Old Republic. This was the kind of story we wanted to build together. And we spent a lot of time sitting, talking about what we all wanted to do with the story. And we built it all together. If I were more of a rabid Star Wars fanboy, I'd be upset. But they wanted to do what they wanted to do with the setting, and I had to be cool with that.**

So I hope that people have fun with The One Ring, and make their stories their own. Best way to make it succeed.

*And can you blame them?
** As said during one LARP: "The rest of us are playing Call of Cthulhu, and Tony's playing Kult."

News from DriveThruRPG.com

Do you get the DriveThruRPG.com weekly newsletter? If not, you're missing out on some good gaming news.

The thing that got me today was a write-up for John Wick's new game: Wicked Heroes: Children of the Mirror. Here's a setting where a sorcerous mirror is the origin of superpowered people. But Wick put his spin on them:

Each born with one Blessing, one Curse. But if one kills the other, he
steals her Blessing, adding it to his own, replacing his Curse with hers.

They are faster than us. They are stronger than us. They are better than us.

This is the kind of superhero setting I want to know more about. These are the kinds of heroes I want to get to know.

Short update about being hopeful

So, next month, I may know if I can fence again. I have some physical therapy ahead of me, I understand.

This is bugging me just a little, because I've been planning on buying a new sword and some new armor. I'll like to try out SCA cut-and-thrust fighting, and I've found another western martial arts group in the area.

So, for right now, I hope for the best.

Something else to look forward to: Castles and Crusades game this coming weekend.