Supernatural TSoY thoughts

[xjermx]

What if there were a Shadow of Yesterday game that took place in a somewhat altered version of our modern reality?

What if in that game, the PCs were normal people, capable of completely abnormal feats.

What if they could throw cars?

What if they could use the power of their mind to stop bullets?

What if they could move so fast that they eye couldn't even follow?

This is that game.


Proposed rules:
Modern TSOY. Normal.
Capable of feats that defy logic and physics.  Use the innate abilities, Endure, Resist, React, to perform incredible feats.  Use a scale of 1-5 penalty dice for increasingly impossible tasks.
1 penalty dice: weird task. Levitate or throw dice or cards with one's mind.
2 penalty dice: Lift the front end of a heavy truck.  Hurl books, plates, machettes, etc with your mind.
3 penalty dice: Shatter a reinforced concrete wall with your shoulder.  Throw a person across the room with your mind.  Land on your feet after leaping from a three story building.
4 penalty dice: Lift a bus, uproot a telephone pole and use it as a missile.
5 penalty dice: Throw a bus a hundred yards.  Juggle automobiles with one's mind.  Move with such speed that you can be in two places at once.  Land on your feet after leaping from a 30 story building.

Let players use gift dice and pool bonuses to give themselves bonus dice to these incredible tasks, to dimnish the penalties from the penalty dice.  These tasks arent supposed to be easy, especially the insanely difficult ones, they're just supposed to be possible.

A few suggested guidelines: 
No flying.  Or allow flying - superman style flying, at a penalty of 5.
No mind-control and illusions, no fireballs.  These are not D&D sorcerers, or even characters from white-wolf's Mage.  They're people who can twist reality right around them.
The PCs are not supposed to be Gods-Among-Men, to be worshiped and rule over mankind..  Have some kind of Occult mumbo jumbo group that plays good and/or evil, and keeps things seemingly normal, to normal folks.  Instant conflict.

Influences:  The Matrix, Night Watch, Constantine, Supernatural, Heroes, Unbreakable, maybe even Charmed

[this occurred to me earlier today, and rather than let it wander away into some dark corner of my mind, never to see light again, and since I do not have a group of players that I can try this on, right this second, I'm sharing it here with you guys.  Discuss amongst yourselves!]

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I feel like a heel saying this, but I'm not a fan of this idea. Certain RPGs are good at certain things, and not good at others, and narrativist RPGs have restrictions in spades because of their focus. For TSOY, it's simple: it's about humans. Specifically, it's about humans in a world where everyone has a fair shot, and no one can categorically defeat anyone else. While statistically unlikely, even the weakest TSOY character can beat the toughest, and that is by very intentional design.

Characters with superhuman powers break that pretty heavily. Mystical powers work in the game as long as their scale of action isn't higher than anyone else's.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Didn't we discuss TSoY superheroes a while back? I remember some thread where i wrote about this.

The interesting questions is, why make all supernaturalness an additional function of the passive Abilities, instead of taking it through the Secret system like you'd normally do for exceptional talents?

[oliof]

There was something here and over at story games about a supers game (set during US civil war times) using the TSoY engine. It seemed to me from the description that TSoY lends itself to a certain style of supers gaming.

Since one of the core story elements of the superhero genre is "Man against Himself", TSoY is probably a better fit than Clinton thinks.

[shadowcourt]

I'm with Eero on this one; I used the TSOY engine to run a modern-set urban fantasy game, and it went to great success. (Though, I think that one of the conceits of urban fantasy is classicly that even though you're sometimes dealing with gods, angels, demons, and other supernatural whatnot, those seemingly-powerful creatures are within the human scale to take on and defeat. Take Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" as an example, wherein various pantheons get bested by actions by essentially human characters. That said, back to the meat of this...)

Why not have any of the special powers be simply Secret-based? Piling on oodles and oodles of penalty dice seems like a bizarre way to coax pool expenditure out of people, so why not simply have it be that? Plenty of the Secrets already do things which are fairly incredible, even on Near-- elves return from death and walk through walls, Three Corner Magic can create and uncreate any number of things, and plenty of other Secrets from the Species and Culture lists do other amazing stuff.

I think the conceit that Clinton's pointing to is one that can be well-addressed in the right type of super hero game, provided the focus is kept poignant. There's nothing that keeps the modern Spiderman movies, for instance, from being done fairly well with TSOY's engine, because the focus stays fairly firmly on the emotional ties between characters. Sure, they can sometimes swing through the city on a web, or they have super-long robot arms, or fly on technological gliders and throw pumpkin bombs, but that's not out of bounds for TSOY-flavor in a game wherein those people are at the mercy of their all-too-human foibles (any more than those immortal wall-walking elves or anything else is).

The problem lies in the fact that "I'm so strong I can shift the earth" roleplaying frequently comes at the expense of good dramatic tension-- we become more interested in how many pounds characters can press, and throwing cars at each other, and less about who these characters really are and what they care about. If you're willing to say that despite someone's Super-Duper-Mega-Strength a well-reasoned argument might bring them to their knees, you're probably doing just fine at using the TSOY engine. At the point where it's got to be only punched into the over-muscled hero character or nothing else works, well, you're probably fine in just about any old game engine, but you're probably missing a lot of said engine's charm. Any time you're going to always decide a conflict in favor of one character because they've got the Secret of Something Awesome, you've lost out on a real opportunity to have interesting conflict where the stakes get negotiated and the dice start rolling, and someone you weren't expecting gets narrative control and does something cool with it.

Could you do a Batman story via TSOY? Sure, as easily as you could do a story about an Ammenite vigilantee trying to liberate the Zaru and fight the decadent overlords of his nation, and donning a mask to do so under cover of darkness. Could you do a Superman story via TSOY? Quite possibly, if you're willing to say that the fundamental aspects of Superman's vulnerabilities are a little more than just kryptonite and magic and whatever weird flavor-of-the-week thing he's vulnerable to now. If he's as vulnerable to loss, to suffering, to someone giving him an ultimatum that he can't fight his way out of, then you're hardly out of the bounds of what works best in TSOY. Just make sure that Superman's Bash and Hold Ability isn't a higher rating, or any more or less functional, than, say, Lex Luthor's Orate or Intimiate ability. If Superman has some Secret of Mega-Strength which means that when he gets successes, the effects are more explosive, that's fine. But if both of them have Ability ratings of Adept (or 3, or whatever if you're using the old version of the rules), then you're still on great grounds to have one of them try and muscle through the problem while the other logics it out.

Of course, that's just my take on things. Your mileage may vary.

-shadowcourt (aka josh)

[Anders]

Of course, that's just my take on things. Your mileage may vary.

It's my take as well. I was thinking of writing more or less the exact answer, using similar examples and all, so thanks for saving me the need to type it up.

And I agree that handing out Penalty Dice for something that seems to me to be the point with this hack is a little backwards.

I believe that the previous thread that Eero was thinking about is this one.

[xjermx]

Any time you're going to always decide a conflict in favor of one character because they've got the Secret of Something Awesome, you've lost out on a real opportunity to have interesting conflict where the stakes get negotiated and the dice start rolling, and someone you weren't expecting gets narrative control and does something cool with it.

Thanks for mentioning that, Josh.  That's a great observation, one that I'll keep in mind.

I hear you, Clinton.  And echoed in other posts, I'm still talking about a humanity centric game.  My thought was not a traditional "supers" game, and I think that's what I was going for with the penalty dice - in that these superhuman feats are not just some neat trick that they can do any ole time that they want.  Rather, its something that they do not necessarily have complete control over.  So it could not necessarily be relied on to overcome all adversity.  Put more accurately, I intended it to be part of the trimmings, and not the focus of the game.

I'm also down with the handing out of penalty dice being the wrong way to handle it, though I'm not sure if there's a more right way.   

I appreciate the feedback!

[shadowcourt]

xjermx,

Of the inspirations you mentioned, I think the television series "Heroes" is probably the particularly good example. I hate to even mention pop culture TV stuff, as I know it puts some people off their lunch, but I think its the sort of human-scale story that would be ideal to tell with TSOY. All of those characters operate at the fundamentally human level, and most of the "powers" aren't anything that would unbalance a game. Those characters frequently run up against enemies, or find allies or other foils, who are entirely human and critically important to the development of the story and the characters themselves. The crises they find themselves in, despite the over-arching plot about "saving the world" and whatnot, are often about personal growth, protecting one's family, falling in or out of love, and the like. All of which is the very bread-and-butter of TSOY, in all of my experiences with it.

Despite your interest in doing this with penalty dice, however, xjermx, I can't recommend strongly enough the suggestion to make this Secret- and Pool-expenditure-based. If you want to, include abilities, as well. But I refer you to Eero's awesome post about Secrets and Abilities in this thread:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=23198.0

which had some brilliant ideas different ways to shape supernatural and related effects in TSOY. I just think you're going to have situations sometimes where a Storyguide characters shoots at someone with his Firearms ability and one of your players resists with his Timeshifting ability, and you don't want the deck to always be stacked in favor of the guy with the gun. Or, then again, maybe you do-- its your game, but the consistent application of penalty dice will communicate a clear message to players, sooner or later, and I doubt it'll be "With great power comes great responsibility." It's more likely to be "it's easier to accomplish things using mundane methods than our cool superhuman abilities," which again, is maybe the vibe you want, but caveat emptor.

Regards,

-shadowcourt (aka josh)