Godlike

[Dav]

Anybody;

I have been hearing much fanfare regarding this game (and not just in the Profiling thread).  I was wondering if anyone had played this game, and would take a moment or two to give me a brief rundown of the who-what-when-where-why-how for the game.

Also, more relevant to the Forge, is the game an indy game?  I honestly don't know much about it, other than it had some pretty nifty posters, and the title reminds me of myself.

Dav

[Matt Snyder]

Anybody;

I have been hearing much fanfare regarding this game (and not just in the Profiling thread).  I was wondering if anyone had played this game, and would take a moment or two to give me a brief rundown of the who-what-when-where-why-how for the game.

Also, more relevant to the Forge, is the game an indy game?  I honestly don't know much about it, other than it had some pretty nifty posters, and the title reminds me of myself.

Dav

I have played Godlike, Dav, and I'll try to give you a brief rundown of the game. I admit my bias right upfront -- I'm part of the Godlike crew, sorta. I just started doing graphic design and layout for their books. Godlike IS and indy game by definition, because the creators, Dennis Detwiler and Greg Stolze, own the game.

You've probably figured out that Godlike is WWII meets supers. In Godlike's case, the dials are set to gritty. Think Private Ryan meets the Defenders (older Marvel title set in WWII). Supers, called Talents in the game, are capable of extradinary things, but they're often as susceptible to bullets as the next G.I.

You may play most any group of soldiers, though the game's obviously set up for Talent Operations Groups of the US Army. The game highly discourages play as Nazis. One interesting setting element (from my perspective) are the Nephilim, which are the Jewish talents that appear to fight the Nazis as partisans and resistance fighters. Other groups are possible: British commados or French Resistance fighters, for example.

The system is very clever, allowing all kinds of resolution based on one roll of several 10-sided dice. The aim is to match numbers, rather than meet-or-beat targets. More matched numbers -- say three matched 7s -- is a good thing, obviously. The number on the dice determines hit location (which I think is a bit over doing it, but it works well enough for a gritty WWII game).

The game's real strength is it's rich setting and background. Game creator Dennis Detwiler has done his homework, and it shows. He's got pages and pages of how WWII is different with superheroes running around. The long-story-short of it is this: Talents are important, but they're not powerful enough to change the overall outcome of the war.

THe mechanic that keeps Talents in check is Will. All Talents have Will, and they can detect the use of superpowers by other talents. So, characters can spend Will to inhibit the powers of other Talents. What this means is that it's a pretty fair fight among Talents, but Talents typically mop up "normal" soldiers.

If Godlike's not to your liking, the Godlike crew will be releasing "Wild Talents" this summer. Wild Talents helps you build a superhero setting using the Godlike rules. This means you can do most any comic setting -- from Rome to Intergalactic War -- and have far more powerful characters than you might in Godlike. I'm really looking forward to this one.

Hope that helps.

Matt

[contracycle]

Any influence from the 2000AD comic substrip Zenith?  The "Yea though I walk through the valley of death" scene in Berlin always was a stonker, for my money.

[Blake Hutchins]

I've talked to Detwiler and looked at Godlike -- it's a nice job.  The system has some interesting tweaks, and they've done some very gritty writing for the setting.  I particularly like the Talent who can fly, but only so long as he continues to chant "Hail Marys" and self-denigrating prayers.

Best,

Blake

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

One thing I'm seeing very little of in this thread is Actual Play. Matt, as the one person who's done it, what's it like to play? I mean, in detail. What sort of a story was it? Who created the story? Was it metaplot-heavy? What sort of character interactions and people-interactions went on? Did you sit and wait for your turn or not, and why or why not?

Based on what I've seen and read so far, Godlike sounds very much like Wild Cards from the 80s book series. Am I totally wrong on that, or on the right track, or in between?

Best,
Ron

[Blake Hutchins]

In terms of the backstory, Ron, you're dead on.  In Godlike, the idea is that the Talents cancel each other out and are not individually so powerful that any one of them can affect the course of the war.  Consequently, WWII ends about the same way as in our timeline.  By the time of Wild Talents, though, Talents are FAR more powerful, such that the world is dramatically different.  Detwiler described it as like this (paraphrasing):  "Reed Richards types are selling immortality pills on the street, gangs have easy access to plasma guns, and a particularly powerful Talent has set himself up as the God-King of Chicago."  It's a world gone topsy-turvy.  My impression is that there will be an alternate history timeline, but that any metaplot is pretty low-key.  Detwiler told me he's more interested in exploring a premise with the game, though we didn't discuss that premise in detail.

Best,

Blake

[Mytholder]

Er...I was fairly sure that WILD TALENTS was basically a toolkit book, not a part of the GODLIKE setting. The future of GODLIKE is supposed to be GHOSTS and TEENAGERS+, right?

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Mytholder,

You are correct. Wild Talents is a generic superhero book concentrating on the creation of alternate history with superheroes - the rules are almost identical to Godlike, and the chapters on "how to create an alternate history" are written by Ken Hite, the grandpappy of alternate history.

That said - I agree with Ron. Let's see some actual play anecdotes.

[Matt Snyder]

Hey,

One thing I'm seeing very little of in this thread is Actual Play. Matt, as the one person who's done it, what's it like to play? I mean, in detail. What sort of a story was it? Who created the story? Was it metaplot-heavy? What sort of character interactions and people-interactions went on? Did you sit and wait for your turn or not, and why or why not?

Based on what I've seen and read so far, Godlike sounds very much like Wild Cards from the 80s book series. Am I totally wrong on that, or on the right track, or in between?

I'll base my experience from a playtest I took part in at GenCon, which was entertaining.

More specifically . . .  

We played pre-generated characters, which were members of a Russian Talent squad. I chose the ranking officer, who was a sort of Captain Soviet type -- no special powers, just an all around decent specimen with lots of Will.

My fellow party members included a guy who could literally kill with a stare, a soldier who could throw objects, like rocks, at obscenely fast speeds, a guy who could make perishable duplicates of himself, and a couple others. (FYI, this was an early version of "The Glazier," the Godlike playtest/sample scenario run by game co-creator Greg Stolze, who I THINK created the scenario.)

The object of the mission was to locate and capture/eliminate a mysterious Talent known as the Glazier. Apparently, this talent could turn things -- like tanks, radios, airplanes, guns etc. -- into glass, potentially rendering entire divisions helpless as their machines & equipment turned to easily shattered glass.

As leader of the group, I was eager to direct the other players according. For example, when we got pinned down by a german squad backed up eventuallly by a tank, I directed the brick-thrower to take out a machinegunner by hurling grenades at him at about 300 mph. heh.

I would have been more intereseted to explore the command structure of our group, but I think all of us were a bit preoccupied with 1) not knowing each other well enough to get bossy and 2) trying to stay "alive" in a quick paced, furious scenario. From my perspective, the game seemed to excel at the intensity of quick paced, deadly combat.
There really wasn't "waiting;" game play was sufficiently fast and furious enough that we felt affected by everything going on. Granted, this was due to frequent combat in the scenario, but I think folks will generally play the game like this. It is set in WWII after all! I never felt out of the scene or on the sidelines, especially trying (mostly feebly) to be commander of the troops.

The most intriguing aspect of the scenario was the surprising identity of the Glazier. We battled our way to a German bunker. Thanks to our forward thinking, we could radio in aerial support to bomb the bunker (Oops, I fogot to explain: Early in the scenario, the Russian camp was "affected" by the Glazier. As Talents, we could spend Will points to keep the Glazier from turning individual things into glass. So, we opted to save a Radio, an Airplane, and weapons and trucks for us.)

Anyway, once we mopped up the shell-shocked remnants of the German defenders, my character and another entered the bunker to find a small girl. I can't remember her nationality -- perhaps Polish. We quickly deduced that she was, in fact, the "terrible" Glazier and had evidently been coerced, perhaps even physically, into affecting her power on the Germans' enemies.

The real issue of the scenario was to decide what to do with the girl. Would we kill her? Let her go? Arrest her, no doubt to be tested, perhaps killed, by Soviet scientists? As ranking officer in the Soviet army ... I naturally turned her over to the KGB (or whatever it was -- intelligence, etc.). I did so because I reasoned my "hero" was likely anything but -- his description (pregenerated characters, you'll recall) defined him as an ambitious rising star in the Party. My rather tasteless decision earned me a much deserved promotion  . . . and some really awful vodka sodden nights, no doubt.

All in all, I had fun on this scenario. Like I said, I would have liked to explore the Talents relations to one another, especially in light of the command structure, but it was a relatively brief, furious session. I really liked that the crux of the scenario was a difficult ethical question, rather than kick-Nazi-ass. I answered in a kind of callous, casual way, but that was, as I saw it, the most intriguing and entertaining (in that sick sorta way) solution for the one-shot scenario.

Lastly, I'm not sure how similar Wild Cards and Godlike are, Ron. I've only read the introduction to the first Wild Cards companion, and I'm only vaguely aware of various elements, characters, themes, etc.

Oh, one other point. I'm not sure how heavy-handed the meta-plot is in Godlike. The game's presented almost as a historical document, complete w/ timeline. I don't see the "plot" progressing or changing over time. They've presented the entire war, and supplements (next being Will to Power, the Nazi sourcebook) don't change things, but rather expand on more details of the war from '36-'46. From there, it's the players' responsibility to shape things in terms of how Talents affect the greatest event in history!

[Dav]

Matt;

From your description, Godlike sounds a rather intense-action game.  Admittedly, your experience was a one-shot con-game, and thus, usually more combative than most games.

One thing begs some discussion (in my opinion):  are we (as characters) wildly bizarre Talents using our powers to survive through the hell of war, or is there a deeper context?  For instance, one of the obvious extensions of the game could be the fact that while the characters are lauded and respected in the service during wartime, adjusting back to "normal" life could be very difficult.  In effect, the Talent aspect could easily act as a leveraging aspect to shell-shock experiences.  

My main question is whether or not there is a subtext (supported or unsupported through game mechanics) of weaving the "otherness" of being a Talent within the given setting (WWII)?  Are Talents hated or feared by both sides?  Is there some doomsday device irradiating poor bastards to accelerate Talent growth?  

The game sounds like a fun romp, as it stands, but I get the notion that the game could go further with some focus upon character.  While we may get a detailed run-down of the Pacific Theatre, do we get a sense of how we fit into that Theatre?  In the end, the war backdrop seems a smoke&mirrors aspect to the overall point.  We are Talents (or superheros, or whatever) and we are in a war.  What is the connective tissue between these two facts?

Granted I should get the game and read it myself before flying off-radar with a slew of questions.

Dav

[hyphz]

Matt;
My main question is whether or not there is a subtext (supported or unsupported through game mechanics) of weaving the "otherness" of being a Talent within the given setting (WWII)?  Are Talents hated or feared by both sides?  Is there some doomsday device irradiating poor bastards to accelerate Talent growth?  

Talents are feared by both sides and sometimes even by their own side.  However, Talents THEMSELVES fear what may be expected of them.  Most Talents, even the super-strong ones, aren't supernaturally tough.  By and large a bullet in the head drops them as fast as anyone else.  They know this.  They also know that they're exponentially more likely than Bob Soldier to wind up in a situation where that bullet gets there.

Also, Talents aren't created by radiation.  Talents are entirely powered by the person's own massive force of will.  (The first talent was a staunch Nazi supporter who became that way because he really, truly believed in a master race of supermen.)