My love of remixes came up again today on twitter. Cam Banks, who’s leading the team over at Margaret Weis Productions on the next Marvel universe RPG, said something about a “doom pool” when alluding to mechanics getting playtested. Being a big fan of the Doom Patrol run that Grant Morrison did in days of old, I misread it as an implication of the Doom Patrol showing up in the Marvel universe and, well… I was off to the races:

In my amalgamverse the Doom Patrol has everything to do with Dr. Doom.  They’re like an International special forces Hulkbuster unit. One of them is a reprogrammed Doombot code-named Robotman.

I can leave it just there and feel the larger shape, iceberg-like, of the whole of that thing. Negative Man as a stealth operative flitting between bodies in the Latverian Underground. Elasti-Girl as a legacy-of-Reed-Richards type passionately committed to stopping Dr. Doom’s agenda on the global scale and less distracted by wild science. And so on.

Mash-ups are powerful juju. And they can get a little addictive once you get started.

So there’s your mission for this Wednesday. In the comments, mash up concepts from two comic book universes and show me the even more awesome amalgam that results! Bonus points for finding an “overt” connection that joins the two universes together (the way I used “Doom” from one to connect to the “Doom” of another).

World War G’s setup is basically like this: take World War II, but with its timeline utterly changed by the presence of one man. The Manhattan Project has brought together the best scientists of the era — Oppenheimer, Einstein, and Banner – working together on a secret weapon:

They have a working G-Bomb in less than a year. Two significant tests of the bomb produce significant side effects:

In the Pacific, on an uninhabited island, a G-Bomb is detonated. A lizard there gets irradiated with Gamma Radiation and grows huge and green and angry — undetected at first, until it begins its rampage. The Americans once they become aware of it refer to it as the gammasaur. Chinese observers call old legends of dragons to mind and refer to it as Fin Fang Foom. When it surfaces in the harbor waters of Japan, they name it Gojira. Other irradiated reptiles and critters emerge over time (Gamma-ra, an irradiated turtle, among others, makes an appearance). The ravaging of a radioactive, building-tall lizard gives Japan cause to attack America much more ahead of our history’s schedule. (I’m no great historian, so this also does the service in the game of allowing the events and battles of WW2 to head in utterly different directions.)

In the American southwest, a desert test goes several kinds of wrong. Dr. Banner fails to halt a test in time and gets irradiated. What happens to him afterwards gets deeply classified and studied for a time — an experimental super-soldier serum is derived from his new physiology and given to a few allied soldiers. Steve Rogers is the American, and shows promising early results, with incredible muscular development and no loss of intellect and control (unlike Banner, though he’s no dumb hulk either); the Russian Emil Blonsky, however, becomes an abomination, and creates enough collateral damage that the serum is lost. Meanwhile, a desert spider that survived on the edges of the blast bites one of the base guardsmen, a young soldier by the name of Parker, imbuing him with amazing powers. Eventually, the military puts Banner, Rogers, and Parker together in Special Team A — or, as they come to be known, The Avengers: Sergeant Hulk, Captain America, and Private Parker, the Amazing Spider.

(Naturally, the Axis manages to get hold of some intelligence about this and the effects of gamma radiation, but without Banner on the job, they have a hard time with their successes. A few subjects do emerge, of course — The Green Skull for the Germans; the Green Goblin for Italy; there are more.)

An unexpected dust storm sweeps through the testing grounds and travels further on, blowing Gamma-radioactive fallout on an internment camp housing Italian-American, German-American, and Japanese-American prisoners. The “G-Men” this creates break out — one Japanese-American couple features a man who can shoot green energy beams from his eyes, and a woman green-hued telekinesis and other powers of the mind; a German-American man named Kurt vanishes into the night leaving behind only a green puff of smoke; and there are others. Originally patriots, and no fan of the Axis, these G-Men aren’t sure what to make of their new powers or their role in the war, but they’re going to try to join the fight however they can. But can they be trusted as an unpredictable x-factor in a war that’s already gone strange?

The “rampaging kaiju” attacks on Japan spread around enough secondary gamma radiation that a few survivors emerge with strange powers they only partly control. They form a revenge squad, styled after the kamikaze pilots really, but they tend to survive the destruction they cause. They style themselves as Ascending Jade Strike Team, but American intelligence designates them G-Force.

The cover on the trade paperback collection shows Captain America, no shield but the uniform we know, arms akimbo, eyes glowing bright green, bulletproof. At his side, carrying what may as well be a hand-held automatic howitzer, is Sergeant Hulk. He’s wearing the Allied man’s uniform of the time, complete with the helmet — he doesn’t wear that because he needs it, he wears it to fit in. He is, of course, chomping on a cigar. They’re standing on top of a wrecked tank; the Amazing Spider, in his trademark green-and-black outfit, clings to the side of its armor.

Welcome to World War G.

That’s the pitch at least. Really, the idea is simple: take a Marvel character you want to play, drop him or her into the middle of an unfamiliar World War Two, and rework the origin story such that it arises from the side-effects of the emergence of a gamma radiation based arms race kicked off earlier in the war’s timeline than what got us the atom bomb in our native timeline.

So, who are your World War G characters? What World War G inflected villains do they face? Enlist now!

• My original Bandwidth post
• Daniel’s 5×5 thoughts

So, Daniel recently reposted his thoughts in response to my Bandwidth idea from December last year, and it’s gotten some interest stirred up on Twitter and his blog. Daniel’s 5×5 notion is solid, but it also cleaves close to the kind of design he prefers: interesting word-game mechanics which build towards the collaborative creation of a story. My angle is usually much more inhabit-a-character oriented and as such Dan’s designs — while good! — aren’t always in the pocket for me in terms of the designs I personally want to play. [1]

As a designer, I’m more interested in creating interesting dynamics of choice and tension through the numerical operation of the game mechanics, and THEN fitting theme and story to that. Bandwidth comes from the other direction, however, by saying “here’s some general themestuff and a setting concept” and then looking for system pieces that fit that. So as I back-of-the-brain tinker with this concept, I discard a lot of stuff that doesn’t fit the mechanical motifs that I find interesting. It’s a process of finding the Venn overlap between my system preferences and the setting conceit. At present, here’s what’s left after that vigorous flensing.

So here are words and phrases from the theme (radio broadcast superpowers) which I find interesting and which I think can be tied into system:

• 5×5 – Strength and Clarity
• Distortion
• Static/Interference

Here’s how I’d systemize these concepts for something interesting-to-me.

Tuners (or Receivers), the folks who gain powers by listening to the right signals, list the various signals they can pick up on their character sheets. They’ll rate these in terms of maximums — how much signal power they can handle (Strength) and how clear of a signal they can manage to achieve (Clarity) with their natural equipment. Strength will correspond to the magnitude of the effect the power can have, while clarity will correspond to how finely controlled that power can be utilized. Maybe the system will value clarity more than strength, if there’s a point-buy gig going on here, making it cost, say, 3 points per point of clarity but only 2 points per point of strength. [2]

Six sided dice, maybe as few as two (and definitely no fewer) get rolled when resolving an action. The goal is to get two numbers, each equal to or less than the strength & clarity numbers the character has for that signal, hopefully exactly equal so the character performs at peak ability. (Stay with me here.)

The player rolls the d6es and allocates two numbers from the results, one to strength, one to clarity. The more clarity (beneath or at your maximum), the more control you can exercise over the effect, the more delicate, the more complex. The more strength (beneath or at your maximum), the more power output you can achieve, covering a wider area, a more potent hit, etc.

If you can’t allocate a number that’s less than or equal to your target strength, that creates distortion, like what happens when you try to play something too loud through speakers that can’t handle it. In the game, distortion is a measure of unintended side-effects — extra bits of power that spew out the sides of your ability, increasing the level of (unintended/undesired) property damage and bystander casualty for example, or changing the nature of your power (it doesn’t sound the same!) in this instance.

If you can’t allocate a number that’s less than or equal your target clarity, that creates static; static builds up over time and (perhaps) reduces the number of dice you can subsequently roll, until you get a chance to squelch it. In play this may feel a bit like hit points: if you can’t roll at least 2 dice because of the static penalties you’ve accumulated, you aren’t receiving any signals. You’re jammed.

Even when generating static or distortion, generally your character successfully does something — assume that your power operates at its max level in something you can’t allocate, it just has some nasty side-effects, so long as you’re not allocating a 6. If you can only allocate a six to something, that should be a significant screw-up.

Let’s talk a few scenarios.

I’m playing a Human Torch type dude, someone who can dial in a lot of pyrokinetic power (Strength 4) and is at least middling good at mastering it (Clarity 3). Let’s say the default number of dice I might be rolling at the moment is 4 d6es (the number rolled needs to be examined but the idea isn’t far enough along yet to be sure of the ideal quantity).

Case 1: I roll 6, 5, 4, 2. I need to allocate that 2 to my Clarity, and that 4 to my Strength, to get close to ideal: I don’t have my ideal level of finesse with how I use the power this time around, but I am able to dish it out at my maximum power level (4). So maybe this is a quick-from-the-hip burst of flame tossed at my target: it burns what it should burn, but it’s not as selective or well-targeted as it could be [3]. Or maybe I could decide I’m willing to take a burst of static in order to get the higher clarity result, allocate the 4 to my Clarity (it’s over my 3, so I get a 3 clarity result) and the 2 to my Strength (I didn’t need that much power in order to pull off the effect I’m going for).

Case 2: I roll 6, 5, 5, 3. I go for 3 clarity, and 5 strength, over my 4, which gets me some distortion. Bam! I fry the target, but (distortion) I fry it a little too good and a fire begins to spread. Or maybe instead (distortion) I throw my flames at the target but it comes out as more light than heat — I overload its optic sensors, but I don’t do lasting structural damage.

Case 3: I roll 6, 5, 5, 4. I can’t allocate any proper number to my clarity, but the 4 hits the target for my strength, so I put that there (I don’t want any distortion). This does mean I end up with one or more points of static (do I have to allocate a 5, and subtract my 3 clarity rating, to take 2 static? or do I just call this a burst of static and make a single tick mark?), which will reduce my subsequent die pool. But I get a clarity 3 effect and maximum power, and grit my teeth through the painful static.

Case 4: After taking some static I end up rolling only 2 dice. I get a 6, 3, and now the pain really sets in. First off, I have to allocate a 6, and if it’s clarity then there’s a complete lack of control, a true miss; if it’s strength, then I simply have no juice, a straight up fizzle. Where I put the six matters more than color, though. If it’s strength, then I’m looking at distortion, pure distortion as my power runs away with itself and does something really unintended. If it’s clarity, then I take static again, which would take my die pool down to 1 die — removing me from the fight as I get jammed. It’s likely I’ll choose the distortion, but what if my Aunt Mae is in the crowd?

So that’s the rough draft start of the direction I’d take the idea into system. It likely has some deep flaws to it, but it’s a start, and the dice allocation and shrinking pool elements mean I get the effects I’m looking for in a design: tension as the pool shrinks due to static [4], and interesting choices as the player decides how to allocate his numbers.

—-

[1] Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s something interesting in the word-game ideas that Dan has, but I also find myself squinting a bit when a sentence like “I kill you” is easier to build than “I kill your dog”. Yes, I’m oversimplifying his ideas here, but hopefully you get my point. [back]

[2] So, the Hulk’s superstrength signal might be high strength, low clarity — not a lot of control but a hell of a lot of power. Dazzler’s lightshow ability might be low strength, high clarity — a lot of finesse in using the power, but not a ton of punch. Magneto would be a classic 5×5 guy, tons of power and a lot of deliberate versatility in its use. [back]

[3] I’m imagining the existence of tables for both Strength and Clarity that give examples of what a use at levels 1 through 5 of each might look like. Today, I’m handwaving it a bit. Bear with me. [back]

[4] “Interference” is probably a term I’d use to describe static that’s inflicted upon you by others. Maybe that points at a “contested roll” situation where the strengths and clarities generated are compared to one another as you try your Superstrength signal against my Forcefield one. Other axises may exist on the character sheet as well for each signal, such as a Bandwidth rating that suggests how broadly your power can be applied — Telekinesis being potentially much broader than Heat Vision, thus being a greater bandwidth power. That kind of thing. [back]

Invincible has me from the word go. I know a few folks I’ve recommended the series to found it to come off a little flat, though several others have seemed really jazzed by it. I flippantly described it on Twitter the other day as “what Smallville wanted to be before it succumbed to a fatal case of kryptonite poisoning”, though I suppose that does more to tarnish the appeal of Invincible than elucidate it. (Ah, Smallville, what an acid-trip of a show you were before I took my leave of you.)  At its core, Invincible is the story of an alt-Superman’s kid, run through a heavy Peter Parker’s Life Sucks filter.  And boy, does it make my I-want-to-play-in-some-supers-genre-games itch flare right the hell up.

But I’m also not sure that I would want to play a straight up “adaptation” of Invincible at my gaming table.  So I need to deconstruct this thing, figure out what its basic working parts are, and which of those parts speak to me as a gamer. If only so my friends can get a little closer to running the game I want to play in! (That said, the analysis will not go that deep in the interests of keeping things spoiler-free.)

The Art, Part 1: Dark things might happen, but it’s all brightly colored (I think the colorist has said that folks have called his colors “fruity” before). In a way the colors reflect the exuberance of the supers genre. It’s all a brightly-colored mess sometimes, a rainbow chaos. To read Invincible is to fill up your eyes with the truth of this. It’s a reality like our own, but poppy and bright and a little bit nuts.

The Art, Part 2: Those rubber faces! I’m not talking about some sort of super-deformed cartoony thing; I’m talking about how faces look in Invincible when they take a punch from someone who can bench a couple hundred tons. We are squishy beings, and the art shows that. It gives the bodies a sense of floppy, squishy volume that really serves the presentation of violence in the comic — which can get pretty bloody at times.

The Fights: Like I said, they can be bloody. But they can also be wacky (bad guy has device strapped to chest containing super-strong alien pet that looks like a knot of semi-sentient rubber bands), comical (squid-headed extradimensional freak has speech impediment during villainous rant), dreadful (our hero gets turned into meat paste), and poignant (family issues playing out on the battlefield). Best of all they’re pretty unpredictable. People are fragile, and this is a world where hypersonic fists and explosive power get flung around. Injuries result. Characters you’re sure will be around for a while longer turn up with a sudden case of being dead.

The Relationships: The relationships in Invincible get probably a good 75% of the screen time. You can get multiple pages of a conversation between the hero and his mom. Or his girlfriend. Or that girl who’s had a secret crush on him for years. Or his college dorm-room buddy best friend. Or the government agent guy with a mysterious facial scar. Or his tailor. You get the idea. It’s a story about growing up while shouldering the burden of massive, save-the-world responsibilities, and it never turns away from the chance to dig deep on how it’s affecting his “normal guy” life.  It regards all of this as such a priority to the story, in fact, that folks looking more for the pow-bang-zoom part may find the title disappointing. But if you buy in, as I do, it’s eat-this-up-with-a-spoon time. (And this is where the Smallville touchpoint came in for me: that show is also a place where the relationships are meant to shine, but good god the writing of those relationships is just dreadful. Invincible by contrast gets the relationships just right.)

The World, Part 1: The world is new, but recognizable. Looked at from the corner of my eye, Invincible is a DC Universe parody (among other things). The hero’s from-another-planet father is Omni-Man. There’s a big group of superheroes called The Guardians Of The Globe. Etc. But like I said, the world is still new. When they show up, they’re not standard takes on the tropes of other comics — something is askew and bent about it. At the end of the day I dig reinvention. When it’s done right it’s just magnificent — like a great, reinterpretive cover of an original song. That’s what Invincible is pulling off for me with its reinventions and homages.  It’s easy to dismiss the comic as “just another Superboy story” — which is both correct and completely off the point.

The World, Part 2: The implicit world of the comic is so much larger than the part that intersects with the hero’s story. This is a big one for me, because in a superhero story the universe itself is one of the stars.  Invincible really shines at implying a huge amount of story and setting in a small number of pages. Check out the one-page revelation (I think it was one page) of  The Immortal’s back-story as one example.  Or the just-around-the-edges bits of alien cultures. Characters that show up seem to be coming out of the middle of something else — and that makes the world feel weightier, bigger, realer.

There’s more I could get into, and specifics I could cite, but the avoidance of spoilers is important to me here.

For gaming application, my takeaways, none of which are particularly revelatory I’m afraid:

I like pain and consequence, whether it’s in relationships or in physical injury. That just about sums up the first four parts from the above list. Being a hero requires that a price has to be paid. You can either pay it deliberately or let the law of unintended consequences play out. Either way, it’s gonna hurt.

Reinterpretation/reinvention is fun and does a nice job of excusing liberal borrowing from other sources. By enabling that kind of borrowing, you bring along a lot of ideas that exist in the original source, ideas which can be understood quickly by the others at the table without having to front-load a lot of original setting knowledge. That’s a powerful shorthand (and tangentially, a big part of why I think Amber works so well for gaming).

Don’t bring anything into the story without knowing what its story is — even if it’s just to give 15 seconds of added detail. This is really a broad story-telling lesson, when it comes down to it, but is super effective for GMing. (I know that Jim Butcher has plenty of backstory in mind for the supporting cast of the Dresden Files, for example, that will rarely make it into a story, but it’s there to be tapped for his stories when he needs to motivate a character or provide foundation for a quick few paragraphs of dialogue.)  Knowing that there’s a story there, even one broadly sketched in two or three sentences on an index card, gives your world volume, weight, and life.  While the game’s story might be all about the player characters, the world isn’t all about them, and many players will respond well when it’s clear the world is not a paper-thin mirage existing only to serve them.  And by keeping these hidden little stories implicit, you’re free to change the unspoken details if you need to later. The only thing that’s locked down about that particular iceberg is the tip that’s showing above the waterline.

Pacing is a matter of paying attention to player priorities. That’s a fancy way of saying that if your players are showing up with a lot of investment in how their characters’ love lives are falling apart, don’t respond to that by giving them a session-spanning fight scene. Sometimes the fight is just a quick-cut breather between the heavier relationship stuff. Then again, sometimes it’s time to fly off to Mars with a team of heroes to see what you can do about that nasty mind-controlling squid-thing problem. Look where the camera of the players’ attention is pointed, and make things happen there. That’s a choice they’re making, and you should make sure there’s something for those cameras to film there. Combined with the implicit story strategy from my earlier point, this is a pretty easy one to follow. If everything has a little bit of story already going on with it implicitly, then wherever the cameras get pointed there’s going to be something to see.

I think there’s more here, but I’m running out of steam. Share and enjoy.

So I’m looking to head in another direction, one based on something that I think Rob Donoghue cooked up for a supers game once (though it might have been Matt Gandy).  I don’t remember much about it, other than the idea that the folks with superpowers were regulated by (and in several cases, employed by) the Food & Drug Administration.  Now that’s something that has legs, because the FDA is a weird choice, and it forces you to sit and think about what that choice means for the nature and origin of superpowers in your setting as well as the politics of regulation and oversight that got things stashed there in the first place.

So let’s go back to my original question, and turn it on its ear: starting with a particular government agency as the body of regulation, what’s the reason superpowers exist in the world, and what form do they take?

To quickly illustrate where I’m going with this, I’m gonna pick the Federal Communications Commission, the body that controls the airwaves here in the USA, and that makes me jump right away to a setting idea I’m calling Bandwidth.  From the FCC’s website:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent United States government agency. The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC’s jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions.

So, if the FCC is the starting seed, then it could be that superpowers give off all kinds of radio-and-other-things interference.  That’s not bad, but I like my stuff a little trippier.  How about instead that superpowers are transmitted to the people who get them on some kind of “power frequency” — making them Receivers?

This, I like.  I can see the FCC stepping in once the power frequency band gets identified, and I can see all sorts of radio tropes getting into the mix. “Pirate station” superhumans, powers getting jammed or having fitful bursts of static (and what would that look like?), and the idea of bandwidth itself.

Some Receivers might be able to tune into multiple frequencies at once, while others have their dial stuck in one place, and a few out there only have one or two powers but can tune in which ones those are as they see fit.  Particularly common powers might have the fattest band, making them easy for a Receiver to tune: lots of folks out there have flight, and plenty dance to the beat of pyrokinetic pop.  Other, rarer powers have a weak or just plain hard-to-tune signal, so it’s an unusual Receiver who’ll pick it up. I also wonder if there’s only so much energy to go around on any given power-broadcast, making that particular power weaker the more who tune in, but as I chew on that I don’t find that I like it — doesn’t feel right, even if it’s “bandwidth”-y.  I’d rather just have the breadth of a given power’s broadcast determine how many people can tune in, period.

Big setting secrets could revolve around questions like “what’s the source of the broadcast?” (I’m thinking the planet itself, vibing on some sort of Gaia-planetary-lifeforce thing, but it could just as easily be from outer space, or the result of an actual terrestrial technology) and “what else is riding on this same signal?”  Developments could include the discovery that every receiver tends to “echo” a much lower power transmission of their own, making them traceable (or at least some of their powers identifiable) with the right equipment, but also causing resonance with similar receivers nearby: show off your telekinesis, and a latent TK receiver nearby may suddenly activate.  Or maybe your sidekick gets that much more awesome when he’s teamed up with you.  Nemeses with similar power frequencies too.

What’s your superpowered world spawned from a government agency look like?