[With Great Power ...] Brief but strong play in Sweden
Ron Edwards:
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:
Quote
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.
All right, this is a big deal, because the game text is wonderfully explicit about exactly what to do and how to play ... but I think something is missing. 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." What is that, substantively? This is something I know a lot about. Back when I played the bejeezus out of Champions with several different groups, often simultaneously, 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. 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.
This is one of the things that my incomplete Color-first threads in the Endeavor forum were intended to dissect. Although the rules of With Great Power are absolutely explicit that the group arrives at the Struggle first, clearly there is something else which we need to do before that. Something that terms like "Superheroes!" or "Four-color superheroes!" won't do. Something that what you see in a lot of game texts (although not WGP to its credit), vague abjurations to arrive at a "character concept," won't do it either. This missing thing must be concrete, inspiring, and communicated clearly, among everyone involved.
A couple of months ago, I did a thought-experiment using Codeflesh as the model, which was very helpful in organizing my thoughts about it. I'll go into that in detail later in the thread if anyone is interested, but for now, here are my thoughts on what to discuss prior to talking about the Struggle. To be clear: this is not a required, one-by-one checklist, but a list of possible starting points for a brief discussion to get on the same page. I doubt that more than one or two would be necessary, and it'd be up to you to decide which one or two were most important for you as game organizer.
- look of the clothes and superheroic imagery
- the economics and subcultural identity of the book-as-item
- look and content of action
- the edgy content (which may be found across many possible topics, and I like to distinguish between fake-edgy and genuinely edgy as well)
- specific artists, specific titles, specific characters, specific time-periods of a given title
2. Scratch pad vs. character sheet
I only recently figured out that the primary character sheet for WGP isn't the carefully organized and formatted document that would ordinarily be called the character sheet. It's the Scratch Pad, which does have an official Incarnadine version, but might as well be exactly what it sounds like, a piece of paper with scribbles on it. That's what persists as a character is played through Story Arc after Story Arc, with some items never being used as formal Aspects and game mechanics, and some items being used and "returning" to the Scratch Pad unchanged, and some items being either altered significantly via Devastation/Redemption or Transformed through villainous Plans.
Since every Story Arc has its own Struggle, that means that such a character would develop, over time, an emergent larger issue or theme that cannot be anticipated. I find this very, very attractive, and it's clear that my thinking about the game to date has been hampered by focusing on a single Story Arc - exactly the conceptual block that I often discover in others when discussing Systems and Creative Agenda relative to a given game title. My comments about the fruitful void in the Cosmic Zap thread are still valid, as I see it, but they are I really did not grasp WGP's real reward cycle until now. I have a lot more to say about its nuances but will save that for when I have more direct experience with it.
3. Our game: Color-first worked its magic
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. I don't have enough of a feel for the math/mechanics of the game, through one Story Arc or multiple Story Arcs, to say whether such play is limited in those terms. Perhaps the deck mechanics will be less "bouncy" with just one person on each side.
Peter stressed that he didn't have an encyclopedic knowledge of comics, so from the Color questions, I asked him to consider the look of the clothes, providing a contrast between tight form-fitting costumes vs. baggy-ish clothes as a seeding point. If he'd been a comics-nutjob like me, I might have focused instead on titles or artists. He thought a bit, and came up with very baggy or swirling clothes, including cloaks, zoot suit pants, and hats. Lots of hats. We talked a little bit more, resulting in a kind of retro 40s or even 1920s look and feel. A key part of that discussion was the idea of technology that at that time was still exotic, and I posed an "electrogun" as an example power. That led to Peter being excited about a character based on a battery of some kind, and he started talking about the guy's big hat. I thought I might be feeling this. Does he have goggles? I asked, and Peter instantly knew that his guy had to have goggles. So we were on the same page now.
For myself, encyclopedic comics nut-job that I am, the mental imagery was inspired mainly by the 1970s superhero and Dracula art by Gene Colan, Bruce Timm's art directing for the early 1990s Batman: The Animated Series (skim the PDF for the cityscapes on pp. 33-43), and Mike Mignola's Hellboy. (The final link is probably superfluous, but I want to single out this work as opposed to other Hellboy illustrators and the movie.)
Then I asked him further about imagery, specifically actions and situations. I phrased it carefully - One kind of superhero illustration which has always bugged me a little is what comics artists call "the floating hero," which is to say, in the absence of any background or anything else. And related to that, what I call the "fight with nobody," in which the heroes are facing the reader and all yelling and blasting away, and the bolts are zapping to the reader's left and right ... but you have no idea of whom they are actually fighting or why. I explained these, and then asked Peter, if the character were illustrated by a great artist (like Colan or Timm or Mignola, I was thinking), then who would be an appropriate opponent? I provided the contrast between something huge and otherworldly, vs. a human person who clearly operated in the same sphere of action or genre as the main character. He very emphatically stated that he saw his character opposing someone very much like himself.
As you can see, I only used two of the questions I listed above, during our dialogue. Privately, I added a third, which I didn't think would be useful for Peter but which helped me a lot.
Scratch Pad: while doing this, Peter talked a lot about how the character had turned his back upon being a profiteering, powerful person and was now utterly marginal
Asset/Power: Battery pack (Personal)
Asset/Origin: Formerly wealthy
Asset/Identity: Janitor (Personal)
Motivation/Duty: Protect youth from the abuse by the powerful
Motivation/Conviction: Personal gain is not enough (Municipal) (I quite liked the increased Scale on this one)
Motivation/Duty: The son I never had (this might do better as Asset/Identity, or as a slightly abstract Relationship, or it might not - whatever Peter wanted would be fine)
Asset/Identity: Ex-Omnicorp
(Note a bit of mis-play: I didn't realize at the time that all three major categories of character Aspects are supposed to be included, and the Negative's scratch pad lacked Relationships.)
I asked Peter whether a name had come to mind, and it hadn't. We entered into a kind of free-associative dialogue, focusing on the oppositional elements of a battery, polarity or circuit or something like that, or positive-negative ... "The Negative Man!" I said, and Peter kind of batted it around and arrived at simply, the Negative.
As Peter worked on his scratch pad, I came up with my Rogues Gallery:
i) Swift Justice - vigilante cop, a Dirty Harry stereotype* but with powers
Obsession: "Gotta take down the punks to clean up the streets"
Asset/Power: speed-shifts (I wanted a kind of super-speed that wasn't Flash-like, and thought more in terms of rapid, short-lived actions)
Asset/Identity: hero cop
Relationship/Romantic, sort of: a prostitute he idolizes
ii) the Devourer - rich occultist, corrupt and profitable, power-monger
Obsession: "What I want is all that counts"
Asset/Power: dimensional surrealism
Asset/Origin: extraordinary wealth & influence
Relationship/Lieutenant: enslaved hot cosmic babe
As with the hero, I came up with the names well after working through the other information.
4. Our game: Struggle and story
I asked Peter to come up with the Struggle. He decided upon Truth vs. Compassion, and moved onto choosing the relevant Aspects from his Scratch Pad. I asked that we stick to the minimum number, three, and he chose the Janitor Identity (Compassion), the Battery Power (Truth), and the "Personal gain is not enough" Conviction (Compassion). I mused upon Swift Justice as the possible villain in question, thinking that he might be a fine candidate for a Truth obsession, but then Peter chose the Strife Aspect: the "Personal gain is not enough" Conviction. Instantly I realized that the Devourer was the right villain for this Story Arc, and although it took me a few tries to arrive at how the Plan relied upon transforming this Aspect, I eventually came up with the very satisfying transformed version: "Power is enough."
I'm not explaining that quite right - choosing the villain and arriving at the Transformation of the Strife Aspect were more-or-less synonymous acts. I tried to stay true to the text's advice that the Plan chooses the villain, not the other way around.
I further specified the Devourer a little bit, by adding the idea that he'd seek to Transform the Conviction by taking whatever the Negative accomplished and twisting into some form that was "better" and more suited to the Devourer's powerful grip upon the lives and wealth of the city. It was obviously important that he could not simply treat the Negative as an obstacle to be crushed, but as something to be subverted; effectively, he was seeking to make the Negative into another lieutenant because he could not simply destroy him.
As you can see, we did the Scratch Pad and Rogues Gallery before identifying the Struggle, which seemed to work better for me. As I see it, the Color-first step is strong enough to sustain pre-Struggle creativity.
We moved straight from there into play, starting with Enrichment Scenes.
i) Peter's first scene aimed at Priming his Battery power. He began with the Negative in a basement somewhere, furiously cranking the Battery to re-charge it. I made the situation problematic but placing it in a building threatened by some kind of life-sucking void hovering over its roof, slowly killing the people sleeping below. To be clear, this wasn't a conflict scene and success against the void-thing was not at issue; the question was whether the Battery would itself cause some kind of disaster under such recharge-and-use stress. (The void was playing the same role as the thugs in Noir's Priming scene, in the book's example.)
I should re-phrase that: eventually I stated all that stuff. This was preceded by serious flailing on my part for a couple of minutes. I even started describing some other sort of super-character, and I couldn't decide whether it should be Swift Justice or not and so my description was lousy. For one thing, I was still a bit wrapped up with Swift Justice in my mind, and I was trying to avoid making too abstract an opponent based on Peter's earlier statement.
I probably should have realized that I could have used Peter's scene to Prime the Devourer's dimensional sorcery then and there, but I wasn't too quick with the options for Enrichment yet.
ii) My Enrichment scene primed the Devourer's lieutenant, now named "Agnetta" (I asked Peter for a Swedish name not commonly used in English). I described his scary study/laboratory in his mansion, at the top of one of those semicircular tower-type corner structures, and how he was baffled by the failure of the void-thingey. He asks Agnetta who that could be, and she, standing there all stiff-like, impassively says, "I do not want to tell you." Ooh, hinted back-story! The card-draw concerned whether he forces her to tell or not, and he won. So he raves horribly, and her head snaps back so her mouth faces upward, and he does this kind of drawing-out gesture above it. Unwillingly, she tells him, "This is the Battery, and your powers are as nothing to his." Which of course kicks off his Obsession big-time.
This scene could have Primed the dimensional sorcery too, if it hadn't been already, and probably should have.
iii) Our single Conflict Scene
Cards & Aspects: Peter stated the Negative, in full Janitor get-up, was infiltrating Omnicorp to investigate its records. He Readied (Primed) the Janitor Aspect, which he later brought to Risked for more cards during the conflict. I opposed with Extraodinary Wealth & Influence too, Priming it, and later brought in Agnetta, Assessing her to Risked.
The conflict began with the Negative in disguise, making his way through security and safeguards, then changed into more of a sorcerous-scary personal confrontation with Agnetta. Ultimately, Peter yielded, bringing Janitor to Threatened.
Card-play itself: Although I fumbled a bit of the card-movement rules (see below), for the most part this went quite well. We used Escalation and Changing Style without any trouble with the concepts. I eventually realized that, for a given Page of Conflict, that the conflict will only include four specific combinations of the Style options. I really like that! It makes every conflict just constrained enough be unique in pure visual terms, and still broad enough to make robust card-play possible.
Peter yielded the Conflict, eventually, and said that the Negative is now trapped in Limbo/whatever.
Narrations and Suffering: As I saw it, by the end of the conflict, the Janitor Aspect was conceptually brought to the point of being a pose or affectation. In visual terms, it means the clothes and tools were blasted mostly away. The Risked status for Agnetta, at the outset, let me think in terms of playing her as very obviously dichotomized in her words and actions. Although her actions were all about zapping and capturing the Negative, her dialogue was curiously non-hostile.
I take the text's advice to really make Suffering matter very seriously. As I see it, narration that increases Suffering can do horrible things to Aspects, because the only pre-Devastation constraint is that they can return to normal later. So to me, "Threatening" an Aspect isn't just having the villain go "Ha ha, I shall steal your power" ... it means the power, for the moment, stops working, or is totally impotent in this fight, or anything equally nasty, up to apparently being destroyed (like armor shattering). At this moment, in this game, as I see it, the reader should realize that the Janitor identity really is threatened as a possible story outcome.
I forgot to mention the Story Arc at this point in play, but it seems reasonable that Peter might have wanted to advance it after yielding this conflict.
As I see it, the next scene would obviously be a two-participant Enrichment scene, and I also would consider including two Aspects for the Devourer, both Agnetta and the Plan.
5. Some mis-plays and other reflections on procedure
1. Obviously, since the Negative has no Relationships on his Scratch Pad Relationships resulted in no in-play Relationship Aspects. Upon looking over the book the next day, I discovered that the Aspects chosen for play need to include one of each of the three main categories.
2. We used one of Peter's cards to oppose mine during GM enrichment scenes, instead of flipping the top card from my deck.
3. I really, really should have Primed the Interdimensional Surreal Sorcery as well as Agnetta in the GM Enrichment scene. That stuff just couldn't be kept out of the story in that scene or in the following Conflict scene, and it wasn't even Primed yet.
4. We both had a little bit of trouble regarding Pages and Panels, but although I didn't understand it 100% at the time, as it turned out, we did it reasonably correctly after all.
5. We mis-played discard/keep during Changing Style, partly because we weren't using a Conflict Sheet, partly because I was a little iffy about discarding in general (see below). Fortunately I understood the ranking card rule well enough and our conflicts were simple enough (one GM, one player) to do everything else without trouble.
(more in the next post)
Ron Edwards:
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.
Paul Czege:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on July 30, 2010, 06:24:18 AM
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.
Is this an invitation to talk about pain?
Back in the 90s a group of us did a lot of talking about gaming, and some planning for games, but actual gaming was pretty rare. And there was a standing rule for one specific friend that you never agreed to character creation before he had done any groundwork or prep for a game he was pitching to run. This because you'd done chargen for so many of his proposed games before and he almost never followed through with the work of prepping and running anything.
Well, me and two other recruited players broke that rule early one Saturday afternoon when this friend was proposing to run Champions. He insisted he needed characters before he could create a scenario. So we got together in his basement and started talking character concepts. First we started riffing on team names. Not a few of the suggestions were silly: "Piss & Vinegar". And of course Piss would wear a white leotard that had a brilliant yellow stain on the front from navel to mid-thigh. This went on for hours, with the prospective GM getting more and more irritated.
Ultimately he had sequestered himself at another table with his rulebooks and you could cut the tension in the basement with a knife. So us three recruited players decided to go out for ice cream. We invited the prospective GM, but he was in no mood and declined.
Well, at the ice cream shop we had an awesome creative conversation. We came up with an idea: Cthulhu mythos-derived heroes! A secret government lab was doing stuff like extracting ichor from Nyarlathotep and injecting it into people to transform them with surreal powers, and then sending them on dangerous missions. Cthulhu meets Alpha Flight. It was a pretty exciting idea and all three of us easily came up with cool character concepts. My guy had submitted himself to the program in exchange for the government fixing it so the court granted him custody of his daughter instead of his crazy ex-wife. But of course the injections of blood from Y'golonac were now making him a pretty unstable dad. And how do you comb your daughter's hair for school when your hands have creepy, bony guillotine cutter things embedded in them?
So we went back, worked at patching things up with the dubious prospective GM, and spent the rest of the evening in the basement making our characters.
And you can guess how awesome the game was, right?
Paul
Ron Edwards:
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
Jaakko Koivula:
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.
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