[With Great Power ...] Brief but strong play in Sweden
Paul Czege:
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 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
Ron Edwards:
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
James_Nostack:
Quote
This game is absolutely made for long-term play and I keep getting mere tastes!
With Great Power... is definitely a long-form game. We did a full, slow-paced arc which was very satisfying, but took about 5 sessions. Multiple arcs would presumably require 15-20 sessions. That's a hard thing to arrange! People can't even do it on-line, because the mechanics depend on swapping cards around the table.
Quote
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
Agreed. The really memorable super heroes are basically Powers + (Other Genre). Batman = Powers + Noir, etc. As a gaming pitch, "Powers!" won't do much because there's no context.
Quote
I did a thought-experiment using Codeflesh as the model, which was very helpful in organizing my thoughts about it
Do tell!
Quote
Perhaps the deck mechanics will be less "bouncy" with just one person on each side.
Running a 1:2 game, I felt the GM's hand was extraordinarily powerful, even in light of the game's intentional imbalances. I could have crushed them if I hadn't limited myself to devastating only one Aspect per scene.
Quote
I asked that we stick to the minimum number, three
This is probably wise. When I played with six aspects, I never really felt pressured, because at least half of my sheet never came under stress. On the other hand, playing a full, slow game with 2 players, limiting them to 3 aspects may have been too limiting.
Quote
I tried to stay true to the text's advice that the Plan chooses the villain, not the other way around.
It's very good advice as far as letting go your preconceptions, but very hard to follow!
The Plan is always going to be a ramshackle Rube Goldberg type of thing anyway ("I need . . . Pym Particles, Sif, and a King's Duty to Wakanda"), so really you could probably choose the villain first without doing too much harm, but that may a temptation.
Quote
The card-draw concerned whether he forces her to tell or not, and he won.
How did you play out the GM enrichment scene? I handed the players control of the supporting cast and told them to play against me aggressively, but the text is quiet about this and I'd be curious to know how other GM's solve the "playing with yourself" problem.
Quote
I eventually realized that, for a given Page of Conflict, that the conflict will only include four specific combinations of the Style options.
I'm not sure I follow. The suits have no memory.
Quote
I take the text's advice to really make Suffering matter very seriously.
Careful, IME playing "nutball" with With Great Power... gets old fast, because you have to do it 9 freaking times to Transform the Aspect.
Quote
Do you sort the cards by deck for discard purposes?
That's how we do it, but the text isn't clear. At some point, you're going to run out of cards in a deck, and you need to keep the decks distinct because they'll swap ownership.
Quote
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.
I think that's right, with the proviso you mentioned about being able to re-start a scratch pad from scratch.
Michael S. Miller:
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.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on July 30, 2010, 06:24:18 AM
1. Color-first is key
You're absolutely right. While conceiving of the game and writing it, I used Struggle-first as my organizing principle. And while it works sometimes, it doesn't work every time. My play post-publication has only been reliable when Color or Situation comes first. Your suggested questions are great, and I'll likely incorporate some sort of Color-first procedure into the revision.
Quote
2. Scratch pad vs. character sheet
This is exactly what I conceived of when writing the game: The scratch pad as an evolving document, with the character sheet being a sort of outline for what parts of a character are "in the fray" for this particular issue.
I can't comment on how it actually works in long-term play. I haven't been able to sustain long-term play for a variety of real-life reasons.
Quote
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 think you're right that two-person play has a lot of potential. All the card decks make scaling up difficult, but I don't suspect that scaling down would be a problem. Personally, I'd miss the troupe-style playing of NPCs in Enrichment scenes, but that's one of my favorite parts.
More later...
Ron Edwards:
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
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page