Our Continuing Quest…
So in our gaming group’s continuing quest (or perhaps it’s my quest, since I’ve been guest-GM for a couple months now) to explore new games, we sat down to play the Leverage RPG. I’d never seen the show, heard a liveplay, or played it myself, but I was fairly confident given my comfort level with Marvel Heroic RPG so, hey, why not?
Hey there, true believers! So my wife got me the Marvel Heroic RPG Civil War Premium Event Book for Christmas. My short adventure must have been a hit! So one of the things I went and did after thumbing through the book was try out the Random Datafile Generator that’s included in the book. (which is also free on the website)
So I introduced our Saturday play group to Marvel Heroic Roleplaying over the past couple weekends. It was awesome! Without any introduction, without any guidance, I just handed the players a stack of datafiles from the core book. I told them to pick out any character, preferably one they knew best or identified with the most.
Over the last three weeks, I’ve run my local gaming group through my second convention module. I say second, but I never actually got a chance to run the first.
The mod takes place fifty years after Avatar: The Last Airbender and twenty years before Legend of Korra. Two of the PCs and one prominent NPC are the children of the main characters in A:TLA, and several characters in the mod go on to be part of TLoK.
The scene cuts from Bay 4, wiping open from the center. We see a battered turbolift open up, following the wipe. Inside are a couple of unknown humans, a gungan missing an eyestalk, Hiden wearing his latest headwear, Erska futzing with a datapad, Shalo masking his emotions, and BB making quiet binary noises in the corner.
Ok. I know. Dave Chalker (@DaveTheGame) and Adam Minnie (@atminn) have already put their four cents into this discussion at Critical Hits and Exploring Infinity respectively. The basic concept is taking Margaret Weis Productions’ Marvel Heroic RPG and adapting it to fantasy roleplaying, in the same milieu as Dungeons & Dragons, or Sword & Sorcery. So, while I’m analyzing, I’ll also put together a character – Gallifrey, the gnome bard I play in a weekly D&D 3.5e game.
It seems to me the big difference between folks’ interpretations about how this should go is in the Affiliations dice. Let’s take a look at the various options between posts and comments:
So the other day, I commented against this post on d20 Radio’s forums. And then I realized I had a bit more to say about the subject, so here we are!
I think the d20 revolution is over. There’s this huge push, in practically every corner of the RPG industry, towards “story-focused” systems. Deadlands, Cortex+, Star Wars Edge of the Empire, FATE, Numenera, etc. Games where the burden of the story rests on both the GM’s and the players’ shoulders. The burden of the mechanics also ends up split, and the results are extremely open-ended.
There’s no music, no production still. This is one of those vague moments between wipes when the bookkeeping happens. So help me determine where the wipe opens up. Are BB and Hiden going to sit at the console for a few hours, repairing and slicing? Are the party members going to try to do something about the stench aboard the Sybil’s Silence? What is Erska going to do about Arri? And what about the security dude? Not to mention Quida! Find out next time, on “Star Wars – Abandon All Hope”
Had a very short Twitter conversation the other day. Inspired this post. The premise is that game designers have a difficult choice when building their systems – the amount of connection between fluff and crunch.
In the background, we see Hiden neatly parking the Centennial Sparrow in Slot 4. Shalo, Erska, and Siet have already mesh-taped Nolest’s mouth, flippers, and legs, and are rounding up the bodies of their fallen opponents. The three mon calimari are stacked on the cargo lift, either reverently or non-ceremoniously depending on who’s stacking. BB is notably absent from the scene outside the Sybil’s Silence, presumably inside slicing the ship’s computer.
