Another Day, Another Crisis
JeffR:
Initial Thoughts
So, after deciding to abandon my first idea as "something I wouldn't find particularly fun" (A psychological game of madness and loss that would probably have been called "Diogenses in Bedlam"), I think that I'm going to go for the 'obvious' superhero interpretation of some (or all) of the fixed ingredients. (I might go with all four right there, but if I can make my game funny I can get one of my threads in and at least two others have some ideas that might end up being applicable to the design.)
Anyow, I'm looking to play with the ideas of retcons, reboots, and revisions; the idea that the hero's core concept is going to stay the same, but almost anything may be subject to change. And I've been wanting to trying something along the lines of Dominion-style deckbuilding as an RPG mechanic for a while [your deck is your 'character sheet'] for a while; this may be an opportunity to actually try it. Probably with the added dimension of being able to write on the cards at least some of the time when they come up.
Not sure yet about number of players and GMfulness. (Could go for one-on-one, could go for multiple players and assigning most GM duties to another deck of cards.) Pretty sure I want a multi-act structure centered around multiple end-of-the-world unverse-rebooting events...
May or may not go meta- enough to have 'readership' as a tracked statistic, will see.
UserClone:
I like where this is going.
jackson_tegu:
Really excited about the retcons & reboots. I had a game where we manually joked about that a little, a game of super crew - to be clear, that system doesn't incorporate either of those at all, we just mixed a little in manually.
Also totally stoked about the Dominion-style. Yeah!
JeffR:
Second Thoughts
Okay, at his point I'm leaning very trongly towards one-on-one, at least as the default paradigm. (With multiple players and no GM I'd be too tempted to go competitive, and the danger is too great of moving further away from rpgs and toward boardgame than I want to go. Besdies, the source material fits better with single-hero as the default.)
But the GM role will be strongly constrained by the card mechanics. (But also empowered by them. I've always thought that supers as a genre really requires some extraordinary levels of GM power to emulate lots of the stories, and this should let me do that sort of thing.)
So, your basic cards that the mechanics will be built on will be in four 'suits': Violence, Motion, Wits, and Gimmicks. The character decks will be some permutation of these, plus a few special cards (Origin Flashback will be in every deck. Earned adversity cards will be here too.) I'll probably have a handful of starting dck archtypes in this version of the game, and leave balancing a points-build custom hero for a post-GC draft.
Card names bouncing around: Everything you Know is Wrong, Hated and Feared, Power Loss, Somebody Dies!, Power Surge, A World you Never Made, and, of course, The End of the World.
JeffR:
Thinking Out Loud
Okay, the next thing to do is to figure out how the mechanics work. And particularly how to make them strong enough to drive a story while not making them so strong as to take over for the story. [Part of the GM's role, I think, is going to be to actively stop the game from turning into a card game rather than an RPG. Since the GM's role in a pure card game would be minimal and probably not too much fun, he should be adequately incentivized here.]
The ideas I'm working with right now: the player starts out with a 12-card deck, shuffles it, and draws 4 cards into his hand. The GM is doing roughly the same thing with a different deck; the numbers may vary more here. And we probably have a third type of cards to represent villains (or other challenges, like natural disasters or crime waves and such; let's call the whole type of card Threats), with three or four of them face up at any given time.
If the player has any Adversity cards (These get added during play, and each deck starts with at least one), he gives them to the GM and draws replacements.
The player then picks one of the Threats and tries to beat it. The Threats will have a number of total strength, and probably weaknesses or resistances to some of the four elements [Violence, Gimmicks, Wits, and Motion], and the player will pick some of the cards from the hand and play them. I think, though, that I need a non-deterministic resolution to this, probably involving some rolling of dice. The fight gets role-played, and this is where the GM will play cards, and if the player has cards left they might get played to counter them.
Afterwards, either the Threat is beaten (and replaced with a new one for the next round) or it isn't, in which case it stays there. Also, the player will get to upgrade one of the cards used into a Signature Move, and might end up picking up a new piece of Adversity as well. I'll need to try and figure out a way to either avoid out of control upward or downward power spirals here, or else use them to trigger reboot events before they reach a boring/unfun level. (Player Adversity goes back into the player's discard here, too)
Other floating ideas: special combo cards matched to the starting deck's Adversity cards that go in the GM deck and make things happen if the GM has that and the matching one from the player's deck at the same time. The two Cosmic-level villains of the setting, both too powerful to confront directly, are Coyote [a Mr. Myxtlplk-like trickster who does strange transformations and reality-bending tricks when he shows up] and Doctor Diogenes, [whose Lantern of Truth will probably retcon everything you ever were away]
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