DitV Hack -- Capes in the Wasteland

[Turbo]

Ten years ago, the world--as we knew it--ended.  One of the masterminds finally managed to activate a doomsday device.  I don't know which one it was, but does it really matter?  They did something, but it didn't destroy everything...just everything we knew, everything we relied on.

Now small settlements have sprung up around the ruins of smaller cities and suburbs, those old movies made real when the capes finally failed.  To think of it, it's amazing that it didn't happen earlier.  We got lucky for a long time.

I hear that most of the eastern seaboard is gone, but I haven't been there since.  That's where most of us capes operated.  But there are still some of us left, and some new heroes have emerged to help us old fogies. 

Just because the world ended, certainly  doesn't mean people stopped having problems.  But just because we failed to save the world, doesn't mean we can't still save people, one or two or a dozen at a time.  These days, the smile of a little girl is worth more to me than a still-sealed can of food. 

I've still got my cape, too.  It's beaten and dusty, but out there in the wastes, it still means something to people.  We still fight the good fight, settle disputes, crack a few heads when need be, an echo of the glory days.  It's no Golden Age, but it is still an age of heroes.


Capes in the Wasteland – Post-Apocalyptic Superes derived from Dogs in the Vineyard

Characters have powers, represented as Traits "I shoot lasers from my eyes 2d8" and "I'm a terrible flier 1d4" and travel around in the recovering remains of a world where one of DC's supervillains finally succeeded in destroying the world.

Dog's Coat is replaced by Cape, Book of Life and those religious accoutrements are replaced by relics and remembrances of supers from before the End.  "I'm a Hero" is the default trait.  Or maybe, "I'm a Super"

The PCs should be children raised on super-tales with enough time passed to bring them towards adulthood ranging to retired/older broken heroes who have taken up their capes again after the world's breaking.

I'm still working out how different this will need to be from DitV as printed.  The heirarchy of sins needs to be re-examined and specified to the setting, and I'll need to do some thinking/talking about whether the system as is models the way that conflicts would look in a Fallout/Mad Max but with Supers kind of post-apocalyptic world.

Any ideas to throw on the flame?  This struck me when I read Capes and Dogs close together and then picked up my week's comics.

--Mike Underwood

[oliof]

Sounds fun. You should probably rebuild the idea of sin and call it 'dastardly villainy'. Reconsider the base philosophy of super hero comics, and off you go with a game that is possibly the complement for people who are not already in the target group for Dogs.

[TonyLB]

I ... I'm not sure that villainy is the problem in that world.

Or, rather, I can't imagine how superheroes fighting supervillains is going to be their important role.  Keeping hope alive?  Sure, I can see that.  But fighting supervillains bent on world conquest?  What world?  What conquest?

I'd really like to see an idea of a hierarchy of sin.  I think that's what's going to tell the story of what the game is about.

[Turbo]

A little voice in me wants to say that the heirarchy of sin should, if not be entirely comprised of, be strongly involved with the continuum of Hope to Despair.

Post-Apocalyptic settings, like zombie or other survival(-horror) narratives, really good at cutting away the comforts of life and making people show who they are underneath it all.

When your wife died in a flying battle between Monstrosity Master and Invictus, your little girl died from malnutrition, and your brother ran off with your son to another settlement, what can a superhero do for you?

That's the question I need to answer for myself before I can go any further with this game.  That and the question of 'what does the above guy do when his world is shattered like that?'

Is the heirarchy of sins the long spiral from sorrow to despair to self-defeat?  If so, how can I make that into a rubrick for classifying the conflicts of a post-apoc world, and how super-powered heroes representative of a lost age of innocence interact with that despair spiral?

I need to chew on this more.  More input will make the process a hellova lot easier.

[TonyLB]

Without hope you can't be disappointed.

In a world where tragedy lurks everywhere, and where mere survival is a miracle ... are we sure that we still believe in the folks in capes telling us that mere survival isn't enough and that the right choice is to hope ... and to open yourself up to get hurt again?

Do even the people in capes still believe that?

[Turbo]

Hmm.  You've got me rolling. 

I think the heirarchy in this world shouldn't be a spiral down towards murder and hate, but a ladder up towards hope and rebuilding, with capes pushing and pulling people up the ladder.

The 'starting point' isn't hopeful survivors, but despairing and suicidal bombed-out shells of humans who you lift up with heroics and convincing words, reunions with loved ones and building of society.

If I go with that model, does that mean that Capes coming into an all-but hopeless community are going up against the hardest challenge, mechanically (largest XdWhatever that the GM rolls)?  It would stand to reason that it's hard to get things rolling, but I'd also want a game where it was still very hard to bring people together in re-building society, even once they had food, shelter, and connections with other people.  Conflict should escalate, not diminish as you move forward in a story.

Perhaps abandoning the scaling of GM's resources in direct proportion to the town/settlement's overall level of hope would make things go easier.

[TonyLB]

A ladder of virtue?  That's ... that's so cool.

Like, your history of the town is "Mary found a source of clean water ... and then, rather than hoard it, Boss Grimm agreed to distribute it to those who needed it first ... but then people failed to take the next step up the ladder toward building trust and a determination to act for the community"?

That makes the game no longer be about judgment, right?

[Turbo]

This would be a game not about judgement, but about inspiration.  I think.  Or, I hope.  Both, really.

[Turbo]

And further, while I've got the idea in my head, the Capes don't have the authority to make judgements on/for people and communities, since they don't have a divine/societal mandate.

What they do have is the determination to be the bright lights in the darkness, the ability to serve as symbols to people.  Very much in line with some of the stances (and then the complications with) Superman via the most recent film.

Jor-El "They can be a great people, Kal-El.  They wish to be.  They lack only the light to show them the way."

Hopefully, this arrangement allows for the inclusion of many of the best thematics of supers as far as interacting with the people and the world around them, including the troubling ones, like 'we don't need a hero to save us, we're saving ourselves' vs. the people who are afraid to lead themselves and clutch onto the first cape that comes along, setting that person up as their leader, all the while stagnating their own process of individuation and self-reliance.  And then that super makes the choice of whether they need to leave the community so the people can grow on their own, become the crutch that people lean on, or try to find a way to inspire people while remaining, the temptation of benevolent authoritarian rule fighting against the impulse to help people lift themselves up by their own bootstraps.

I'm wondering now if this is straying far enough from DitV to be its own game, or if it hasn't yet, if it will.  Looking at The Princes' Kingdom, there's certainly some kind of room in there.  And as is often said, dice mechanics are not the kinds of things that are copyrighted in RPGs.

[iconoplast]

I would set the hierarchy to 'what the townspeople have at stake.'



Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (conveniently) has five levels, from Physical Necessities to Actualization.  I'm not sure if it's really right for this, or if we should start with the 'easiest' towns being at 5 or at 1 (Which is easier: having more to lose, or less to lose?).

So, the heroes roam from town to town, defending against supervillans and against roving bands of mooks with bad haircuts, spikey wardrobes and motorcycles.  And, in each, the townsfolk react to the hope offered by the heroes in a manner determined by the amount of hope in their own lives.

[Turbo]

I was definately thinking of using the Mazlo Heirarchy, once I started thinking that it'd be a ladder up rather than a spiral down.

I'm really looking forward to adapting the framework of DitV to the supers paradigm (as of Post-Watchmen era supers, rather than Silver Age.  The Deconstruction is pretty much built in to this setting.

Another thing I need is to start visualizing this world, how it would look, feel.  Return to the well for sources like Mad Max, Fallout, Deadlands Hell on Earth, Six-String Samurai.  The genre combination, mashing together expectations and pressupositions of supers and of post-apoc will  be one of the most important parts in making this setup work. 

Four-color spandex doesn't make a lot of sense in a post-apoc world, but the supers should probably have costumes in addition to the capes themselves, so as to have visual coherance.  Time to call on some of my artist friends to see if I can

[iconoplast]

I was thinking about this again this morning.  (I really dig this idea)

I think the five levels of 'What the town has to lose' should be phrased negatively, to show what the PCs will encounter. 

The spiral should be up, from desperation to hope, and should demonstrate that the townsfolk have more and more at stake. 

I think fallout and stakes should reflect this, and that the townsfolk should have to put up the stakes on the PCs side of the conflict.  The more the townsfolk have, the more they can invest in the PCs and the more they (the townsfolk) can lose.

e.g. "If the PC wins, the PC kills the Villain.  If the Villain wins, the Villain kills the hostage."

So, the five stages (corresponding to Injustice, Demonic Attacks, Heresy, Sorcery, Hate & Murder) are:

1. Physiological Deprivation: Starvation, Dehydration, Disease, Slavery and (Possibly) Radioactive Contamination.
2. Deprivation of Safety: Violence, Unemployment, Tyranny, Families forced Apart
3. Deprivation of Love/Belonging: Family Bonds and Sexual Relations are threatened.  I could see this as a Handmaid's Tale-esque forced reproduction schemes, as persecution of Same-Sex Marriage, or as some Dogs-reminiscent Polygamous mess.

The last two I have more trouble grasping, and may need to be explicitly reworked in terms of hope/hopelessness:

4. Deprivation of Status (esteem) Imbalances at this level can result in low self-esteem, inferiority complexes, an inflated sense of self-importance or snobbishness. There are two levels to Esteem needs. The lower of the levels relates to elements like fame, respect, and glory.
5. Deprivation of Actualization
Maslow writes the following of self-actualizing people:

They embrace the facts and realities of the world (including themselves) rather than denying or avoiding them.
They are spontaneous in their ideas and actions.
They are creative.
They are interested in solving problems; this often includes the problems of others. Solving these problems is often a key focus in their lives.
They feel a closeness to other people, and generally appreciate life.
They have a system of morality that is fully internalized and independent of external authority.
They judge others without prejudice, in a way that can be termed objective.
In short, self-actualization is reaching your fullest potential.

[Turbo]

Following the setting construction methodology used in DitV, each town/settlement would have 'What does the town have to lose' as well as 'What is in crisis?' as in, what level on the Heirarchy of needs is being threatened by the conflict of the town/settlement? 

I really like the idea of working in the townspeople as helpers/assistants/comrades in conflicts.  The heroes inspire the townspeople, and the townspeople bear up the heroes.  'Farmer Manuel throws a mean right hook 2d8' and 'Widow Georges can calm anyone down 1d6' or even 'Tony the town rascal always has a plan 1d4.'  The heroes would have greater access to the townspeople as resources in a setting that has a greater degree of interconnection, a 'healthier' environment, but it also gets that much harder to advance people up another level, if we're following the pyramid paradigm of the Mazlo Heirarchy.

Finding a well or knuckle-sandwiching the local bandits into stopping raiding the people so much they starve is one thing, but getting two warring families to put aside their differences and work together to help a town rebuild is another thing.

The Hope of a re-built world is something that's not really even intelligible until a person/settlement has reached the top of the pyramid.  People will accept crappy crappy situations if they don't have the time or means to change their situation.  But if you remove the element of their opression, then they might be able to confront the fact that they were a painter back in the day, and that maybe they could paint some murals on the barn to brighten things up.

Of course, this is a tricky situation, given that as a grad student who has enough priviledge to spend hours thinking about this stuff, I'm fully cognizent of the following:

1) Mazlo's Heirarchy is just one person's idea, borne up by some other people.  It might be robust enough to inspire a framework, but that framework needs to do a good job of contextualizing the variance of desperation, crisis, and the human spirit in a hopefully-internally-consistent world that calls upon enough realism to be emotionally poignant in the way post-apoc narratives (IMHO) need to be. 
2) People find the time to be artful in their lives even in the most horrendous of circumstances.  They may not have the time to debate intricate points of art, but they will still be creative, they will carry on traditions that comfort them, which provide a context that helps make their life sensible.

A note:  Now I want to go back and read A Canticle For Liebowitz.

Something else that occurs to me is that one possible result of helping a settlement/town reach the Actualization stage is that you might get new PCs out of it.  People who have scaled up from rock bottom, seen the inspiration that supers can be, and decide to join them.  Being super isn't about having powers, it's about stepping out of the crowd and raising your voice for a better world, it's about standing up for hope and it's about going out into the wastes to try to make the world a better place for people.

The Four-Color world of supers is simultaneously far behind and intimately present in a setting like this.  The world looks very different, and the heroes are much more pro-active than in the 'react to supervillain' paradigm, but the ideas of power and responsibility, made family, justice vs. vengance, and being saved vs. saving yourself are all there, in spades, waiting for the players to pick them out of the rubble and hold them up to the light.

[themarchhare]

I have personally seen many variations on this particular theme in the past 25 years.  An old Polyhedron Magazine had an article about Gamma World Cryptic Alliances including the "Friends of Justice" that inspired a whole post-apocalyptic superhero campaign in Gamma World. I've played in games using TSR's old Marvel Super Heroes system that took place in  The Irradiated Territories  and more recently in a Champions game along these lines.  Were you approaching this as an idea independent of any system, the theme for each PC should be a "Virtue" or a "core set of Virtues" that they work toward.  They would also have an Inspiration or Instill metric that helps give hope to the masses.  These are far more important than powers that they wield in a given system because of sociological reactions to this sort of trauma. 

A portion of the people they will want to save will be resentful, perhaps transfering the tragedy to the very existence of powered beings.  Another portion will be subservient or perhaps worshipful of the powered beings.  The latter could tempt heroes into setting up their own petty dictatorships or taking advantage of the locals, they former could frustrate and anger them with the very people they wish to lift up.  PCs will have to remember who the real enemies are and be true to the ideals they represent: "The Virtue".

How do these heroes react to survivors conducting witch hunts for those born with a gift?  How do they react to being worshipped as gods?  These things will test them more than any combat against a super villain.  What if someone who had been the skilled equivalent of a superhero, a former ally, is now leading hunting parties of normals to topple both his old foes and his old friends?  A former villain trying to restore order to an area, is it just an attempt at dominating the people, or is it out of genuine concern?  What will the heroes assume?  As was indicated in another post when you take away the accepted socio-political systems in a tragic incident, you see what people truly are made of. 

So out of a system context:

Virtue:  The beliefs of the hero. The most important thing for the PC. 
Instill/Inspire:  A conduit to represent how much of an impact the heroes deeds have on other survivors.  A possible way for his/her "virtue" to be given to another, to overcome their fears, misconceptions, desperation, etc.  The villains would use Intill/Inspire to use fear to squash hope in the survivors.
Hope:  The ability to see the greatest good possible in potentially dire circumstances.
Desire: Something to be potentially exploited or twisted, a challenge for the hero.
Need:  Could gauge a minimum requirement for the hero, the villain, and the average survivor to keep them going physically, mentally, or both.

Just some thoughts.