Bob’s Playtest Con

I have been looking into running a Supers related game…but not using Champions (which we used in the past). I created the same characters for each of 4 games Powergame, Paladin, SuperKind (my OtherKind variant), and the Pool..

I decided to go pretty 4-color with the tone… Bill played Captain Wonder “The Greatest thing since Sliced Bread”, and Chris picked Doughboy “The Boy Wonder”.


“Cold Hard Cash”
45 mins
SuperKind (an OtherKind variant)

Dinner went long so we played a short session of this one…
Same characters… at the Hockey Arena in civilian identities…

Robbery in progress…

Rolling went ok… narration of scenes went pretty well, but the game felt a bit stilted
There was some confusion about how much should each roll resolve… still the narrated actions were fun. They were using multiple color dice (wisecracking and martial arts) (flight and strength) with a few Heroism/ Radiance points spent to offset SlapShot, CrossCheck, Hack, and Slashe’s Villainy/ Iron score of 3. Players were rolling well so there wasn’t much question about where to put rolls, I got to narrate once or twice on a low die to narration… the Heros had no Black Marks/killing to the Good Name/Life.



It was ok, but didn’t really flow… everyone thought it might work better as an on-line game (the way we used it on Indie Netgaming)

Some of the stilted nature came from the general inexperience with narration-type games... although all three of us are often GM's so it wasn't to much of a stretch...

It was also the first game after dinner.

As suggested elsewhere, my altering of the basic genre concepts may have under cut the game too. It just may not suit (I thought it would)

For those interested my changes were

Rolling Categories
Narration, Goal (movement), Self (safety), Others (Life)
Traits
attack, relate, skill, special

Descriptors
Useful, Impressive, Powerful

Life = Good Name
Radiance = Heroism
Killing = Black Mark

Iron = Villainy / Criminal
Moonlight = Lawful

Numinous = Innocent

I decided to give out Heroism/Radiance points
for saving Innocents/Numinous (it didn't come up)
and for defeating Villainy/Iron (equal to the overall Villainy/Iron score)

I also suggested that they could use their Heroism points to raise any roll (simulating using greater superpower)... after the fact and after Villainy/Iron subtraction, they did use it to reduce the Villainy subtraction once each.

Bob McNamee

PS: This game did prime us for the TQB/pool game that followed. It gave them practice with the narrative mechanic that led to some of the cool descriptions later.