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[WGP] Question about story style

Started by Wordmaker, April 15, 2009, 12:10:32 PM

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Wordmaker

I may be getting some friends together to try out With Great Power... soon. My idea is to run something in the veign of Watchmen and Kingdom Come, with both retired and rookie heroes choosing to work together to fix the problems that have arisen since all the old heroes were killed, forced into retirement, or chose to work for the government.

I have a couple of questions.

First, I'm a bit concerned with how well the system itself will manage to depict an origin story. In a setting like this, I think there's a lot of fun to be had playing out the events surrounding the new heroes finding their courage to take a stand, and the retired heroes realising that they have to put their masks on again, and seeing how that will play out and shape the setting and story for the future.

But a lot of WGP seems focused on existing heroes and villains clashing over established goals and issues. I'm wondering how well it would work if the heroes' Aspects were created with the intention that they would be pushed to Devestated and either Redeemed or Transformed into their new roles as active heroes, and if The Plan was set up so that the goal of it was to maintain the status quo of there being no heroes?

Also, the fine details of changing fighting styles aren't really a major issue for me, or my players. I don't think we'd all mind too much if there was no requirement to actively switch styles. Does anyone know if that would upset the card economy a lot? It would basically mean that the "Yes, and..." and "Yes, but..." responses would each require a higher card of any suit, rather than discarding any added cards.

chance.thirteen

I don't know a thing about WGP, but could you make trends in societal change act as villains to be confronted and altered at all?

Kingdom Come had one issue dealign with how without the moral compass of the older leaders, and the lack of opposition the new "heroes" became a danger to society. Watchmen has the super heroes thinking they would be facing robbers and megalomaniacs, and instead they were fighting urban decay, jingoism, and hopelessness and  excess in the face of nuclear war.

Wordmaker

That's true, but each also has a very definite main villain and a very definite Plan. In Watchmen, the Plan succeeds and the heroes' Aspects are Transformed by the villain. In Kingdom Come, the heroes' Aspects are definitely Devestated, but they win out and Redeem them in the end.

Perhaps if I use an establishing scene, just narration, which can spark off some major event which will lead to the heroes' return, and the Plan of the villain is to contain the after effects? For example, if we decide that, in the backstory, Superman was believed to have died saving Metropolis, but an establishing scene reveals evidence that he may have survived, and is still somewhere on Earth?

Wordmaker

Also, looking over things in the book again, I can see how changing how Switching Styles works would cause a lot of problems. All someone would need to do in order to force an opponent to yield would be to play their highest card, since there'd be no way out of that.