During our recent three-weeks-plus visit to Sweden, my family and I enjoyed a six-day stay at a summer house by a gorgeous lake near Mellerud, in Dalsland. Peter Nordstrand came up to visit for an evening and in between kids-and-fun activities, we were able to take some time to mess about with With Great Power. As with my previous contact with the game, it made me extremely hungry for more.

In fact, I curse the universe, in the manner of Dr. Doom. This game is absolutely made for long-term play and I keep getting mere tastes! Reading it over with this in mind yielded significant realizations for me.

1. Color-first is key
Here's a quote from Michael S. Miller from our older thread based on playing WGP at GenCon a couple of years ago:

WGP characters are quick to make as long as everyone is on the same page. The first thing we did was discuss the type of comic we wanted to make. After some discussion of street level supers generally being loners, we settled on what Ron termed “Cosmic Zap” style comics. Y’know, the Silver Surfer, Captain Marvel, Kirby’s New Gods, Thanos, Darkseid, Galactus-kind-of-thing. Next up was the Stuggle. We decided on Community versus Glory.

6. Procedural questions

i) How does discarding work?

I guess what I need is a full, ground-up explanation. Let's say there are five people at the table and I am the GM, and it's relatively early in play so I have a primary deck and two auxiliary decks, and the four players have one deck each.

We run a Conflict scene and everyone participates. Where does each person discard? A single pile? One pile per player? One pile per deck? Do you sort the cards by deck for discard purposes?

I think I remember something about this from the con game ... when a deck runs out, you shuffle a discard pile and it becomes the deck, right? ... but where did that discard pile come from? How does that relate to the GM having multiple decks, or later, the players having multiple decks?

It may be that all of this is explained in the book, but I'm not finding where. Michael, if you're reading this, or anyone else with solid canonical experience with the game, please help me out. At the moment, this is my main stumbling block to play.

ii) Is my explanation in Assessing for new GM cards WGP correct?

iii) Struggle first: in long-term play, characters are to be taken through multiple Struggles, with Aspects chosen anew from their Scratch Pads. So if you go by the rules, you come up with a Struggle and make Scratch Pads for characters inspired by that, but in later episodes (and assuming you stay with these characters), you are working with existing Scratch Pads as you make up new Struggles. I guess this isn't a big deal because you can always jot down whatever you like on the Scratch Pad, and you can always start a new hero if you like when a new Struggle is decided. But I want to make sure I'm understanding correctly that if you stick with a given hero through several stories, then Struggle Creation and Scratch Pad reverse their order after the first time.

7. Follow-up
A day or so later, I found myself sketching down two more members for my Rogues Gallery:

i) Life Force - an artificially-energized dead guy who nevertheless can wield and channel shockingly powerful life-energies, both as physical feats and miraculous cures or explosive releases of energy. Scale: Personal.
Obsession: "I'm still alive, no matter what."
Asset/Power: The life force (Municipal)
Asset/Identity: Already dead (Personal)
Relationship/Family: Horrified but loyal son (Personal)

ii) the Numan Corp - oldie but a goodie, robotic replacement conspiracy, clunky industrial version, strong influence from 44. Scale: Municipal.
Obsession: "Humanity has failed; its heir's turn has come."
Asset/Power: Replacement of human targets (Municipal) (note: this looks like Minions but isn't)
Relationship/Lieutenant: Quisling politician (National)

It's been a long post, but it has merely scratched the surface. I have reams and reams of commentary, notes, musing, and questions about this game, with some stuff that I don't think has been well-acknowledged in discussions. I hope this post sparks a lot of interest. I think that along with Nine Worlds, With Great Power heads the list of outstanding games which were unfairly dropped from intensive play and discourse in 2005-2006.

Best, Ron

* By "Dirty Harry" stereotype, I am referring to the way the name is now used in casual conversations and references, definitely not the content of the original film.

Ron wrote: The game rules say "Struggle first." But here, we did a step before that, a crucial one, what Mike was calling "on the same page."....This is something I know a lot about. Back when I played the bejeezus out of Champions...I put a lot of effort into what might be called orientations prior to play. I stress that Champions of that time was a build-your-own, setting-less game, and it was notorious for game groups coming to grief because they couldn't get on the same page about what their comic-to-be was supposed to be like.

Hi Paul,

Considering that you opened your post to talk about pain, I'm guessing that the prospective GM was not especially happy that anyone but himself had brought creative meat to the table. But that's merely a guess.

I do think WGP is creatively and productively constrained in one fashion: the historical melodramatic content of Silver Age Superheroes. One problem with that is that those characters were massively commoditized over and over, whether 7-11 cups in the 1980s or zillion-dollar movies in the 2000s. Another problem with it is that later comics continued to transform the same characters well past the point of productive melodrama into ever-escalating layers of self-parody. The net effect of these trends has been to render even the phrase "Silver Age Spider-Man!" almost useless unless you're talking to people who coincidentally are cherry-picking exactly the same things from the nearly infinite heap of content and pseudo-content represented by it.

But getting past that problem is at least possible with some dialogue, and the game text does a really good job explaining its use of the term melodrama.

This leads to another point I've been musing about, implied by my mention of Codeflesh. There are many superhero comics which are definitely off-genre from what WGP does at first glance, but upon reflection, end up being very true to the same vision after all. If you go only by the specific history and conventions that the WGP text references, you might never think of using them as primary inspirations, but I think that they'd work well in terms of the melodrama itself and many of the same core issues.

My list includes: Codeflesh, Hero for Hire (specifically and only its first year, 1972-1973), Marshal Law (the first six-issue story only), Empowered, Suicide Squad (as written by Ostrander and Yale only), Nexus (1981-1985 or so), The Question (as re-interpreted by O'Neill in the late 1980s), The Liberty Project, Godland, and a few others. I don't want to spark a comics-centric debate, but I would not include The Watchman or Bratpack, nor the possibly more difficult to debate Hero Alliance or Invincible.

Best, Ron

Ron: Your character roster reminds me a lot about Doom Patrol! Starting with Negative's name (Negative Man was in the comic), the Devourer (surreal cosmic sorcery, pure Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, Brotherhood of Dada, etc), Life Force actually sounds a lot like how Negative Man was in the comic, etc. I wonder why I've never considered Doom Patrol and WGP together. Doom Patrol actually sounds like what would happen, if WGP was played on drugs.

I gotta test it. (Doom Patrol inspired WGP, that is.)

I can't remember having much trouble or questions with the mechanics, but I think it's been three years that I've played WGP, so can't really remember how we did all those bits. We might have just house-ruled the discard piles and not think about it that much.

Yeah, the game never happened. Prior to the current era of sfx-driven superhero films the GM's idea of superheroes was Saturday morning Spiderman and X-men cartoons. He didn't know what to do with our characters.

Anyway, onto the topic of your "color first" prescription. I actually think there are two ways to address the problem. One is "color first," as you suggest, to get everyone on the same page, and the other is the solution of wiping the slate clean of preconceived notions the way we did with <a href="http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=69.msg2725#msg2725">my device of a unique naming convention for the heroes and villains in our Theatrix game years ago.

Successfully wiping the slate clean has the effect of creating a conversation about genre via the chargen process. When I created a gadget-powered psychologist and PR agent to heroes in crisis, and Tracy created his troubled, sword-wielding knight, it forced Tom to make a superhero genre about those kinds of characters.

Do you think both work for With Great Power, or is there a reason to prefer "color first"?

Paul

Hi Paul,

I perceive your naming convention as itself a form of Color, so to me, it all looks like another way to do Color-first. Phrased in general terms, it could be added to my list of possible opening discussion topics:

- State an original, unconventional, and/or provocative detail of superhero-ing to use as a starting point, which may have the added benefit of canceling certain assumptions aside

Best, Ron

This game is absolutely made for long-term play and I keep getting mere tastes!

The fact is that "super-heroes" is a rotten starting term for such an orientation, because it appears to be a creatively-unifying concept but in practice is not, offering literally nothing solid for mutual understanding

I did a thought-experiment using Codeflesh as the model, which was very helpful in organizing my thoughts about it

Perhaps the deck mechanics will be less "bouncy" with just one person on each side.

I asked that we stick to the minimum number, three

I tried to stay true to the text's advice that the Plan chooses the villain, not the other way around.

The card-draw concerned whether he forces her to tell or not, and he won.

I eventually realized that, for a given Page of Conflict, that the conflict will only include four specific combinations of the Style options.

I take the text's advice to really make Suffering matter very seriously.

Do you sort the cards by deck for discard purposes?

But I want to make sure I'm understanding correctly that if you stick with a given hero through several stories, then Struggle Creation and Scratch Pad reverse their order after the first time.

Thanks for the great write-up, Ron. Glad you enjoyed the game. Gonna touch on a few of your many topics raised, but I'll have more time later in the day.

Ron wrote:
1. Color-first is key

2. Scratch pad vs. character sheet

One on one is out of the text's recommended range of three to six players, but I think it offers some potential for powerful play.

Hi Michael!! I look forward to seeing your next post and developing the discussion.

I'd like to explain why I think the With Great Power rules, which allow for hosing your own character, do not violate my discussion of advocacy for one's own character in [PTA] Players wanting their PCs to fail?, for example. And the whole "Stakes" thing needs a good airing with this game, again, because I think the WGP rules function really well at the edge of certain risks. Annnnd, I have some very specific procedural questions for you about the Plan as an Aspect.

Also, so you know, I'm bringing my book and all the sheets to GenCon.

Hi James,

The trouble with a line-by-line response like yours is that it may generate even further line-by-line responses, resulting in an expanding spray of disconnected call-and-response, instead of a discussion. To counter that effect, I'm going to try to combine your points into paragraphs when possible, and set aside some of your points for later.

1. In our game, there was only one player-character and therefore only one Strife Aspect, so the Plan was pretty straightforward. Back in the Cosmic Zap game, which admittedly only went through a few Conflict scenes, I found that a Plan based on five Strife Aspects wasn't too hard.

In my musing about Plans, it seemed to me that, based on the rulebook's example, the whole thing in its entirety doesn't necessarily have be a plan in the villain's head, in part because it may involve more than one villain in complex cases. Mudslide's romantic ends toward Debris have literally nothing to do with Perjury's ends toward Pearl (Noir's Aspect) and the Stalwart; they're logistically linked only because Mudslide is working for Debris. Interestingly, that situational detail is not included in the book's presentation of forming the Plan, at least allowing the possibility that it's not required - which means a Plan as a whole may not be an in-game, in-fiction plan at all.

I'm curious to know about the fictional content of Plans, which is to say, yes, the GM will seek to Transform all the Strife Aspects, and yes, each one has fictional content in terms of a given villain's Obsession and the current Struggle ... but how often are the total/complete complex of sought Transformations someone's plan in the fictional sense, especially since clearly they do not have to be?

2. In my GM Enrichment scene, I didn't use the option of assigning the lieutenant's role to someone else (i.e., in this case, Peter). I think that might do better, in my mind, for later play, when the character's relationships and a certain amount of back-story content had been established. At this point, Peter was still finding his feet regarding his own character and the possible adversity he faced, so I didn't want to give him the job of inventing some of that adversity, at least not early on.

As with #1, this is mainly what I'd like to discuss, the legal diversity of applying the rules. I'm finding this game's rules to be quite open to the social and creative needs of moment, much more so that I'd thought upon my initial reading.
3. Really interesting things I'd like to understand better through examples of others' play.

i) I have no problem with conceiving of real Suffering at every step. Inflicting Suffering is my pride and joy when playing supervillains, and I never run out of ideas for it. My current thinking is to establish the nature of a given Aspect's Suffering early, and then concentrate on conceptually reducing its ability to recover as we go along, which after all is the actual threat being imposed by Devastation and then Transformation.

So if anyone can talk about how they narrated the steps of Suffering, especially all the way through Transformation for a Strife Aspect, that would be excellent.

ii) I think one of the most important elements of play is how the Struggle, the Obsession(s), and the Conviction(s) interact, especially when the latter are Strife Aspects. I was thinking about classic comics stories in which not all of these are hyper-stressful all at once in the instance of any single Story Arc, but sort of trade off in terms of which are the most fraught as Story Arcs rise and fall in succession. The main one which came to mind was the long and exceptionally story-stuffed Lee/Kirby run on The Fantastic Four. There are times in which the Obsession is much more thematically charged than any hero's Conviction, and other times when the reverse is true.

It seems likely to me that instead of working obsessively to make every single With Great Power Story Arc put every one of these elements up to 11, it'd be more functional to allow each combination of them, per Story Arc, to take on a unique identity regarding just where the thematic tension is coming from. That's one of the main things I was thinking about in terms of fruitful voids, too.

My tentative ideas about Codeflesh will have to wait for later (and hence is part of #4 below), but it's definitely a subtopic of this point. So I'd like to learn more about various combinations of these exact mechanics that others have used in play.

iii) That Scratch Pad again - here's my thought, for which I'd like experience-based feedback.

4. Ideas to discuss later - please don't follow up on these at this point.

i) Regarding the combinations of suits and various Styles, I may not understand the Page of Conflict as well as I thought; I'll hold off on further discussion until after I get to play through some serious ones.

ii) I'd like to talk more about GM power and the Plan vs. Heroes later. I'm a little surprised at your comment about being able to destroy them, but you have the experience with the game, and I don't yet.

Best, Ron

I'm assuming the Color-first has a particular meaning in context of With Great Power... (which I haven't read or played), but it immediately reminds me of a really fruitful technique I developed during my playtesting of Darkpages. After determining which Imprint (which covers tone and general style of the game-to-come), but before going through the whole character generation process, I would ask the players "Ok, so I pick up your characters comic off the shelf. What's the cover look like?"

I found that this was really effective at both getting the players thinking in terms of color and image (which is really important in Darkpages), and also at cluing me in to their comics background and preferences.

I can't comment on how [the evolving scratch pad] actually works in long-term play. I haven't been able to sustain long-term play for a variety of real-life reasons.

Hi James,

My understanding is a little different. It hinges on the difference between Devastation (which is the same as Capture) and Transformation. I'll phrase it like I see it.

A Devastated Aspect, and at any of the post-Devastation stages save for Transformation, can be regained by the player by winning a single conflict against the GM, which returns the Aspect all the way to Primed. This is called Redeeming an Aspect. However, it will be permanently changed by one or more of the various features listed in the text (Scale, et cetera), and if I remember right, the change is up to the player.

A Transformed Aspect is permanently changed by the GM in accord with the Plan.

Actually, these are the second and third forms of what can happen to an Aspect, so I'll list the least extreme for the full picture. As I implied above, an Aspect which Suffers but is not yet Devastated can change drastically in the fiction, but as long as it remains un-Devastated, later narrations to bring it back to the way it was, given reductions in Suffering, are permitted. Also, such an Aspect is not permanently changed even if its Suffering is still high at the end of an Arc; it just "bounces back" at that point.

I'm not sure whether (i) we understand the rules differently or (ii) we are saying the same things and running into a little terminological/phrasing confusion, so let me know.

----

I may still be a little bit confused about one thing: you refer to Aspects coming close to Transformation which are not Strife Aspects, and Strife Aspects are the only ones which may be Transformed, or so I thought. Michael, do I have that right? Can any ol' Aspect in play be taken through Capture and further stages up until Transformation? Maybe I was thinking too close to the Plan, which relies on the Transformation of Strife Aspects, and anticipating focusing on that end when I play in the future.

Best, Ron

Hi Ron,

As I implied above, an Aspect which Suffers but is not yet Devastated can change drastically in the fiction, but as long as it remains un-Devastated, later narrations to bring it back to the way it was, given reductions in Suffering, are permitted. Also, such an Aspect is not permanently changed even if its Suffering is still high at the end of an Arc; it just "bounces back" at that point.

Strife Aspects are the only ones which may be Transformed, or so I thought. Michael, do I have that right? Can any ol' Aspect in play be taken through Capture and further stages up until Transformation?

a Plan as a whole may not be an in-game, in-fiction plan at all.

Yesterday did not go as I had hoped. But today's a new day.

Cardplay issues
In 1-on-1 play, I don't see any problem with the player offering up the card. The main reason for the "GM plays versus a random flip from the deck" rule is to avoid the situation where one player must weaken their hand to oppose the GM's Enrichment scene. It seemed like that would mechanically penalize one player for stepping up and being engaged.

Discards simply go into separate discard piles for each individual deck. That's why I recommend different card backs. We tried some other discard schemes, and they all proved to be wasted complexity. Even discarding one of the cards onto the Story Arc to advance it, and having it locked there for the rest of the issue, is a rule that brings more complexity than useful gameplay.

As for whether there should be only four styles of conflict in a particular scene, James has the right of it. As written, Spades can be "striking/punching/kicking" on Noir's sheet, and "persuasion/threatening/gloating" on Debris' sheet. And, if Debris changes style with Diamonds to "grappling/tacking", she can later change back with Spades to "using a power" or whatever. She doesn't need to go back to "persuasion/threatening/gloating." The suits never "lock" to a particular style. The only choice should be "keep the style the same" vs. "change to any different style."

I never considered locking them in to just four styles for a given conflict. Keeping track of which suits represent which styles is another element of complexity in a game already burdened with it. Perhaps it will be a fruitful constraint. I'll have to give it a test run for the revision.

Devastated Aspects
As written, the GM can attempt to Transform any Aspect that the player Devastates, not just the Strife Aspect. As James points out, it doesn't help The Plan, but sometimes you take what the players offer. This can occasionally produce play where what a player originally claimed was their Strife Aspect sees no suffering at all. Maybe the player is turtling, maybe the player thought they were going to have more fun with Aspect X, but in play they find that Aspect Y is more fun. My wife Kat actually runs a variant at conventions where she asks the player to change their Strife Aspect to the one they're obviously interested in, and adjusts her Plan to match.

Quick notes, I hope to come back to later in the day, but you never know:

The Plan is primarily an organizational tool for the GM, not for the fictional villain. If it can do both jobs as an in-fiction nefarious scheme, and as a metagame reminder of "this is the flavor of adversity to offer up", then great. But, particularly with larger, disparate groups, I need to use the Plan to keep my Stakes and my particular attacks consistently tuned to each player's needs.

I won't be at GenCon again this year. Hope you have a good time, Ron.

Hi everyone,

This is probably my last post to the thread before GenCon, but please, let's keep it going.

Jaakko, I'm familiar with the sources you mentioned but the similarities are superficial. Most importantly, our comic/game had none of the post-modern, self-referential features of Grant Morrison's writing. We preferred to dive into and adopt the genre conventions of retro-early-20th-century comics and animation, rather than step outward and "examine ourselves as a comic." The more I think about it, the more the original show Batman: The Animated Series informed my thinking.

Nathan, yes, that's exactly what I mean by Color-first. You're using one or two of the things on my list, and I suspect a whole lot of people do the same already for any number of games they play, especially fantasy adventure and comics. My thinking is that I'm not proposing a new or startling technique, but identifying one that's already in wide use, and quite likely absolutely crucial for successful play in many cases, but often not acknowledged. It'd certainly be crucial for playing Annalise, and if I remember correctly from my version of the rules, there's an explicit step for doing so.

James, I definitely want to get to the Codeflesh discussion later. Don't let me forget. Also, it's related to your current point, because among other things, I speculated that the Plan for a gritty, low-down setting like that may be best phrased in terms of no in-fiction planning by anyone, but more as a thematic principle along the lines of "This damned city" or something like that. However, in most cases, I agree with you that at least some (and possibly all) of the potential Strife Aspects in the Plan can be accounted for by one or more of the villains planning something. If nothing else, it's way fun to create and play.

Michael, here are some of the larger issues I'd like to explore with you regarding the game, and I hope they might be helpful in considering the potential revision.

1. Phrasing for the Struggle is a fascinating consideration. Only one particular construction seems dysfunctional to me, and there's only one example of it in the book: "Tolerance vs. Prejudice," i.e., something pretty good vs. something pretty bad. That doesn't seem like much of a Struggle.  But in the functional range as I see it, I like the idea of posing two things which are both pretty good in their ways, and I like the idea of occasionally pushing the phrasing of a Struggle into more oblique forms (Love vs. Justice), in order to find out how far such an approach can go. I'm currently thinking that every Struggle actually has at least one more unstated "corner" to it which we discover through play.

That phrasing is actually only one part of my larger interest in the dance of Struggles, Convictions, and Obsessions both within a given Story Arc and from Arc to Arc, as I described in my earlier post.

2. I'm not entirely certain about the Plan-as-Aspect rules. Do I understand correctly that a villain's Plan is its own, entirely independent Aspect in addition to (a) the Aspects the villain has much like any other character and (b) whatever Aspects he or she Captures late in play? If so, I find myself a little boggled between considering the Suffering of such a Plan Aspect along with the Suffering of each of the Strife Aspects, because conceptually the former's fictional content is actually composed of the latter.

Also, if so, then I wonder why the players don't simply target that Plan Aspect via picking fights and reduce it to ashes in four conflicts, bam-bam-bam, especially after they gain numerical superiority later in the Story Arc.

3. The second paragraph in #2 is best considered as part of my larger concern, which is, admittedly based on not enough real play, I cannot see how any villain's Plan has a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding. Yielding Conflicts early in play is no big deal for players, and they can rack the Story Arc along fast, stealing the GM's decks and ruining his or her wild cards. If the players get one or two Aspects Devastated this way, all to the better - they get yet more wild cards (when the GM has less) and stomp the GM. And again, all they have to do is Devastate the Plan Aspect - three or four players against the GM, with six or seven decks among them against one, and only four conflicts to win among them, seems easy as pie.

Especially since the Strife Aspects need to go through four more victories each by the GM after Devastation/Capture. Under the reduced mechanical circumstances of the GM by that point in play, I can't see it - again, based at this point on minimal contact with the system.

4. The above point might be best understood given my current thinking about the Scratch Pad, which I'll try to explain. As I see it, a Scratch Pad has a lot of stuff on it, as many as 12 to 15 items, some of it better fleshed out (e.g. Scale) than others. I pick three to six per Story Arc ... and let's thinking carefully about those things which are not chosen.

i) For example, in most Batman stories, his savagely-effective and competent fighting ability would simply not be on the Hero Sheet, but would remain on the Scratch Pad, there to be included through auxiliary and Color narration, not at risk in any way. Or to take it to the rulebook, I'd expect to see such an item on Noir's Scratch Pad, reflected in Nick's constant narrations of kicking people in the head, and again, not in danger of risk. So these are things which are very important for a given character, and in some cases, perhaps central. I wouldn't want to play without them. (And yes, in the fullnes of time, maybe I would eventually choose to place one of them as an active Aspect, or even a Strife Aspect, but my point is that at the outset and through most substantive development of the character through play, they wouldn't be.)

ii) One might also think in terms of Scratch Pad items which are there for later consideration or inclusion, but aren't Aspects for the current Story Arc and don't enter into narration at all during play. These are more like an idea-bank, not "part" of the character yet or perhaps never to become so.

One might even think of these and other Scratch Pad considerations as a core, ongoing saga phenomenon. If you listed the whole Scratch Pad (keeping in mind it too an be dynamic, so listed through time) in parallel with the chronological account of which items were used as Aspects through several Story Arcs, and which of those Aspects underwent Devastation and maybe Transformation), then to me, we're finally seeing part of the larger Reward Cycle of play.

As I explained it to someone recently, any hard-core, long-term Marvel reader knows that Hawkeye was a fabulously successful character as a cast of the Avengers, and even today I'm happy to see what some writer or artist decides to do with him. But Henry Pym was not. No matter what any writer or artist tried, or no matter how much sturm und drang got caked onto him, he was boring and annoying. The distinction between these two characters, especially since in some ways they are equivalent ("beta-powered Avengers member"), is something any such reader grasps instantly. I see With Great Power as the single game which can really dig into how and why that distinction exists, in creative terms.

5. So to combine points #3-4, what I'm saying is that if I see some or even all of my current Aspects Devastated, and even if I see the Strife Aspect Transformed, this is no disaster for me as a player. I have the Scratch Pad. Only one of its features can be altered by someone besides myself through play, per Story Arc, and I get to pick which one that is each time anyway. My current thinking is that there's no reason why game-play should not include a strong fighting chance for the GM to succeed in the Plan, and every reason for such a chance to be there. If I'm right about that, then I'd recommend removing the steps of post-Capture Suffering, and putting Transformation one short step from Capture - one more victory after that, and wham, it's Transformed. (Proviso: I plan to play by the current rules in some depth before I stand by that recommendation. It is currently speculation only.)

As you can see, I am not particularly invested in altering the details of resolution within either Conflicts or Enrichments; I think those work really well and that more attention should be paid toward longer-term, larger-scale aspects of the mechanics.

Best, Ron

Too much to address all right now, but two central elements regarding #2 (The Plan and the Transformation of Devastated aspects).

A) You're absolutely right that The-Plan-As-Aspect absolutely does not work. It was added to the text at a late stage, seemed promising in light playtesting. Failed miserably in heavier, post-publication playtesting, and Kat and I haven't been using it since. We're using the much more simple guideline of "If a villain Transforms the hero aspects necessary for his/her Plan, then they've succeeded!" It has the same effect with less complexity. If the heroes Redeem their Aspects before they're Transformed, they foil the villain's Plans and "save the day."

B) Once the GM has a Devastated/Captured aspect, she doesn't need to win entire conflicts in order to make it Suffer. It now belongs to her, and she can make it Suffer whenever she could normally make an aspect Suffer (i.e., during Enrichment scenes, or Assessing during conflict scenes).

I found using "only suffer by winning fights" moves too slow to be a threat. Unfortunately, the above tends to move too fast, and it's almost too easy to Transform an aspect once a player gives it to you. Fixing that pacing issue while simplifying the game are high on my lists of priorities for the revision.

Also, your thoughts on the Scratch Pad are lighting little sparks of possiblity in my head! I look forward to getting back to this after GenCon.

The Swedish name would be Anette. :-)

Cheers,

There are several things I'd like to say in this thread, but I'll try to stay focused on the original topic.

A year ago I ran a terrifically successful With Great Power... game, in large part because everyone at the table was completely and totally dedicated to the Color of the game.  ("So, it's like, Strange Tales circa 1966, except starring Spider-Man and the Thing!")  The players were great, but we were pretty much just coasting off the enthusiasm we all had for that particular source material.  Someone would mention the original design of the Beetle and we'd stop for like five minutes to discuss how great it was.

This past month I've been running a Marvel Super Heroes RPG game where we're simply not on the same page, because I completely failed in my duties to present Color first.  Although about half the players weren't comics-crazed like me, I figured, "Hell, I'm not trying to get much better than 90% consensus here.  The Marvel Super Heroes RPG provides a decent amount of color, and the comics are largely homogeneous from 1961-1986.  We'll probably be okay so long as the group doesn't drift toward the Marvel Monsters type stuff from the early 1970's."

And, obviously - they drifted toward the Marvel Monsters stuff.

I'm not enthused at all about this particular sub-gene, but I have nobody but myself to blame for not explicitly setting expectations.  We brought in a new player two weeks ago, and he wasn't quite sure what to make of the material--whether we're doing a horror series, a screwball comedy, or what.  Also, the rules don't support that sub-genre especially well (you're rewarded for behaving like a conventional super hero, are severely penalized for killing, and modestly penalized for scaring/intimidating people). 

All of this because I was simply too lazy to present a focused vision.  I knew better but didn't follow through.  I'm trying to make up for it, but by this point it feels like I'm swimming upstream.

P.S.  In regards to this...

any hard-core, long-term Marvel reader knows that Hawkeye was a fabulously successful character as a cast of the Avengers, and even today I'm happy to see what some writer or artist decides to do with him. But Henry Pym was not. No matter what any writer or artist tried, or no matter how much sturm und drang got caked onto him, he was boring and annoying. The distinction between these two characters, especially since in some ways they are equivalent ("beta-powered Avengers member"), is something any such reader grasps instantly

To chime in about something that was brought up earlier, I'm currently playing a one-on-one game of With Great Power. While it seems to be mostly well-suited to it, I think having fewer players to get into conflicts with leaves the results of conflicts almost entirely to where we are in the Story Arc since I (the GM) have to make fewer decisions about when and where to spend my good cards. I can pretty much throw down the meanest thing at any point early on and not have to put a lot of thoguht into it.

It does set up a situation, though, where once the tables start turning the player is chomping at the bit to beat the crap out of me.

Another consideration is strategy during the big conflict scenes.

When I GM'd, I understood that the rules would let me win very easily.  Early in a conflict, I would play low-value cards in order to lull the players into a bidding war.  After they exhausted 80% - 90% of their hand (and likely wrecking several of their aspects along the way), I would crush them with wild cards and aces.  (Tactic: player lays down an ace with a satisfied smirk: "Ha ha, super villain, I win!"  Respond by playing a wild card set to the same suit to cancel their ace.  Next round, play an ace of your own.) 

The fact that I burnt through a lot of my own cards to do this didn't matter, because every time a conflict started I got a massive infusion of new cards because the players had stressed their aspects so much.  I did this over and over again. 

I suspect the optimal strategy, from a player's perspective, is to realize they cannot win most conflicts early in the game, and therefore forfeit the battle.  This lets them husband their good cards for mid-game, where the GM has fewer wild cards.  If you only devastate one or two aspects along the way and leave the others untouched, you should be pretty competitive.

If the players aren't comfortable forfeiting, they should just play the best card they have for each suit and yield if all suits have been filled.  There's a chance with this strategy that you might beat the GM, especially if his attention has been split with a simultaneous conflict, but you'll only lose approximately 4 cards.

Hi guys,

In agreement with both of you, I'm thinking that battling to keep one's Aspects pristine is probably not in line with good strategy, satisfying story creation, or the spirit of the game. With the rules as currently written, it seems to me as if getting one's Aspects savaged is part of the point, and that much of the climax is about (i) what happens to which one and (iii) redeeming something before it gets Transformed.

I wonder whether, at some point in the design process, "the worst thing" that the hero players are trying to prevent shifted from Devastation to Transformation. I'm basing this on the pre-publication version, in wihch there was no Plan and no Transformation if I remember correctly, and as far as I could tell, in which Devastation was more like a final fate. Whereas, as I've tried to articulate here, in the full game, basically, Devastation is the real start of the game in action.

I think the current rules are much better in terms of genre and many other things, but they display a little ambiguity between these two frameworks. In the illustrated example, Steven gives up because he doesn't want to Imperil the Armor of Truth himself, which would open it up for one step worse if he loses the next round. He loses it anyway, for a final result of Imperiled, and my impression from that example is that this is a very big story moment. Here and in the majority of relevant examples, the player fights like a dog to protect the relevant Aspect from increasing in Suffering via conflicts, and again, the implication is that although you might want the cards, it's really quite significant to overplay your risk and end up with more Suffering than you planned.

Which is again kind of weird, because given the Story Arc and the fact that Transformation looks quite difficult to me given the heinous advantage of the players (even without the Plan to target directly as an Aspect) ... well, hell man, in strategy terms, in story/thematic terms, and in line with the excellent text in the game about how important it is to get your ass stomped first (with which I agree as a comics nut), I'd be racing the GM to get my Aspects devastated.

The fun seems to come from (a]i) those times in which the fictional content of the conflict is something I find too awful to submit to (Mike referred to how I unexpectedly "gotcha'd" him this way in our game); (ii) those times when I have two or more Aspects in the mechanics fire simultaneously, as the color depicts; and (iii) a combination of the first two. Or rather, here I'm talking about the strategic + fiction fun, becauae larger-scale emergent content of play is also all kinds of excellent, as I discussed about villains in the older thread and those things I'm interested in further discovering as I wrote in this one.

Best, Ron