I just posted our first game and was wanting some feedback. I haven’t run a comic book game in over 25 years so I’d like to ask if the feel of the game captures the feel of a comic book.
Thanks for any feedback!
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Well I know what I’m doing tomorrow!
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all right! 
I’m all for new recorded sessions!
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Interesting listen. Look forward to seeing where it goes. Two players is a small group to work with for scene design, but certainly not impossible. My usual table ATM is nominally five but we frequently have a missing body or two and sometimes three, which I’ve never let stop me.
Since you want feedback (ie you asked for it) one thing definitely mis-played was minions and the one lieutenants. They only need to equal the incoming damage to succeed in a save, not exceed it, so (assuming no mods are in effect) one damage will never hurt a lieutenant and d6 minions that take six damage have a small chance to live by rolling sixes. Also, once a minion degrades to a d4 they no longer degrade when they make a successful save, they just ignore the hit. You have to beat their save roll at that point, which usually isn’t hard but sometimes they’ll hang on through several low-damage hits.
Also seems like your shadow player is misunderstanding the abilities a little and picking what power or quality his are tied to each time he uses them, which isn’t how it works. You make the choice of what they’re tied to during character creation, which can be limiting but means you never need to pick and choose between which power/quality you’re using in a ability’s pool during play. For ex, if you have an ability that’s tied to Teleport that die is always in the pool but you can choose any quality you like, whereas if it’s tied to Stealth then you’d choose whatever power you like.
I think from something your brother said at one point there may be a misunderstanding about what die to read. If an ability (eg Flight) is linked to an ability, it’s always in the pool (along with a quality of his choice) but it might not wind up being an effect die. That all comes down to what the Max-Mid-Min values roll out to and which one(s) the ability call for, with Mid being the unstated default. Didn’t matter in play (his Flight die happened to roll the Mid effect number anyway) and you were doing it right yourself, but it seemed like he thought the linked die (Flight, in this case) was always going to be the die to read.
Once you all get more used to the mechanics and flow of combat you should really let the active player choose who goes next in the scene. Initiative manipulation is a pretty big part of the game, both for optimization and narrative. It’s not as impactful with so few players but sometimes forcing an opponent to go next is better than just doing the heroes back-to-back, particularly since whichever side went last on one round dictates who goes first on the next one. With larger groups you can really set up for a team beating, but even with two heroes you can go last on round one, then choose the hero on the top of two followed by him flipping it back to you, getting three actions before the villains respond. Of course, you better do well, because they can return the favor next round.
The scene tracker doesn’t have to go last either, although the environment turn always follows it. As the GM you can use that to bump the scene into another zone a little early if you want to give the PCs access to their later abilities that round instead of next.
Hope that all makes sense, and hopefully some of it’s helpful for next session.
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Thank you so much for all the feedback. We are loving the game and we needed this to help clean it up. After the game we caught the power issue with Danny. I generally won’t look up rules in game but will correct them for the next time. I don’t like to break immersion if I can. All the errors you mentioned will definitely help us!
Next game will be better and we will continue to adjust as we go.
Thank you for the help and please feel free to toss over any tips you may have.
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Second episode is up on youtube, for anyone else who’s following it. Bloody youtube notifications…
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I’m very pleased you turned us on to this series.
+1
I’ve enjoyed the first two issues of this. No idea who these guys are, and I occasionally mumble to myself “I don’t think that’s how that works?”, but it has been a very fun listen!
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Yeah, they do some mechanical stuff kind of weirdly (initiative springs to mind) and two players is an uncomfortably small group by my standards, but the pulpy WW2 era plot set in the DCU is interesting. Certainly curious to see how it turns out.
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I dropped them some feedback on the first episode, and a lot of it seems to have taken hold, so that’s pleasing. 
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Thank you all for watching our game. PLEASE let me know of any rules we are messing up. This game is very different than any game we have played before which is a good thing, but it still feels foreign.
@dprcooke Can you give an example of things we have messed up?
@Chief_Lackey_Rich Please let me know what we need to clean up. Initiative is handed off by the players, right?
@TakeWalker Your feedback was invaluable! Thank you so much and keep it coming!
We are adding new players soon but the idea to start was a sort of DC version of Marvel Team Up where we would focus on 2 players. Since we play short games, I have found that fewer players work better for that format.
@dprcooke We were running DnD 5e and then Hyperborea (pretty much DnD 2e) for the past few years online. We were looking to change it up and play a different genre. We really stumbled on to this game by accident on Reddit. Very happy with it!
Thanks!
Trevor
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Yep, although the GM still decides who goes next when it’s an NPC going (including the scene tracker, which goes at the same time as the environment if there’s one in play). The GM decides who goes first each scene (which could be one of his NPCs or the tracker, letting him choose the second “go” as well) but after that whoever went last the previous round decides who goes first next round - which can be anyone (or thing, for the tracker) except their own character. There have been a few times where you seem to have decided who started each round, rather than each scene.
It’s important because there are some tactical choices to be made when it comes to manipulating who ends the round and controls the start of the next one. Also limits your desire to hog the initiative and just have your whole side alpha strike back to back, because your surviving foes are likely to repay that by effectively getting two turns each before you can go again. Neither side wants to let the other go last in most rounds unless they’re very confident they can take any potential big counterpunch.
Of course as GM, you also don’t have to make the best choices all the time. You can often cut the players a break by choosing the scene tracker early in a round when it would shift into Yellow or Red and then pass to a player, letting them use a more potent ability than they expected to. One caution I’d advise is not to just go with one minion or even lieutenant and then pass back to the heroes. It gives the villain side too much control over who ends the round since you can just outwait the heroes, so it’s better to go back-to-back with about H (= #of heroes) minions or 1/2H lieutenants before passing back, at minimum. Not a hard and fast rule, just something that’s worked for me in the past.
Glad you guys are enjoying the game! Always good to see more content for it online.
@RollingWithAdvantage For better or worse I listened to the first two episodes one right after the other, while working/running errands, so it’s hard for me to pin down specifics. I certainly had a lot less “Is that right?” questions during the second episode.
Player-created minions: Normally player-created minions act at the Start of the player’s turn. I think in Ep 1 you had the cosmic minions all attack immediately after Bucky created them. (They were also destroyed very shortly afterwards by Panzer, so I ended up appreciating the fact that they got to act).
Initiative: @Chief_Lackey_Rich got this.
I will say that I rather enjoyed how you hand off starting initiative at the beginning of a combat scene to whoever was moving faster/paying more attention (i.e. had initiative within the story). It works well.
Environment Turn: So this isn’t an actual error, but I did notice that in both of the first two episodes the environment turn consisted solely of twists. (Or maybe it only seemed like they did and I’m wrong?) That’s not wrong, and you can do that. But it’s not your only option when designing the environment.
Twists: Another not-an-actual-error is that, when generating twists as a result of the players’ actions, it seemed like only the twist prompts on the hero sheets were used. Again not wrong, but as GM you have other options if you want to use them.
Additional options include environment twists, mechanical twists (take damage / take a hinder based on Min die), or just make something up.
If my perception is off, or if you’re aware of these options but choosing not to use them, that’s totally fine.
One thing I’ll add: I think having you play Dr. Sasquatch as a sometimes-third-hero is a good solution to having only 2 players. He fits very well in the story, and it allows you to scale the fights to be more dramatic.
Can you give some examples on what else an environment can do other than twists? I must have missed that part in the book.
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Well, technically everything they do are twists, but a twist can be just about anything. All those suggested options on pages 244-245 are twists, and could either be employed as part of an environment writeup or when a player (or rarely, NPC) triggers a twist - and to confuse things further, the GM can pick an environment twist to go off from a PC doing something if it seems right. It might be easiest to look at as environment writeup as a menu of suggested twists that might happen in a scene, with at least one happening each round as the scene tracker ticks onward. Minor twists can be repeated if you like, majors (by definition) only happen once at most, and might not happen at all if you don’t think they fit.
All that said, fjur provided a bunch of nice examples of environments right here on the forum and if you go over to my blog index here and scroll allllll the way down you’ll find another nine samples to look at. Fjur’s is probably a better learning tool, he’s better about following the guidelines in the rulebook (pages 240-247) than I am - mine cheat more often and tend to be a bit harder than they should be sometimes.
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Yes, that’s a good technique. If the PCs are all screwing around and not paying attention the baddies get the jump on them, but usually someone’s listening to your scene description and they get rewarded for it.
My usual solution to small player groups is to give each player a reasonably tough lieutenant or two to control as they like (within reason - GM veto for suicidal stupidity applies). They could be minor heroes, or a “casual” sidekick or hanger-on, or a mundane ally like a literal police lieutenant or neighborhood watch captain, or even a minor villain who’s got common cause to work with the hero for a bit against a greater threat - whatever fits the story at the moment. You could do a larger group of minions instead, but I find lieutenants (especially if you roleplay them well as NPCs) get the players more invested in their well-being since they last longer. Let 'em heal a die size every time a hero would heal a zone and help out with healing in montages and they may even survive a session while helping the PCs stay in action.
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The most recent issue I ran involved my players sneaking through a prison. So at the start of each environment turn, I made whichever hero had acted most recently in the scene roll an overcome to not be discovered/raise suspicions. Failure would advance the scene tracker an extra space.
In another issue, this time involving an invasion through inter-dimensional portals, I used the environment scene to add new villain minions to the scene every round as long as the portals remained open.
I think what’s confusing is that environment design is about coming up with the dice pool and the potential environment twists. But how the environment acts, if at all, is determined as part of the rules for the Scene. So the question “what does the environment do on it’s turn?” isn’t actually answered in the environment design section of the rulebook.
Note: When it comes to Initiative/Turns, I cheat and have merged the environment and scene tracker. It’s simpler: Pass to the environment → do environment effects per Scene → environment minions [if any] act → advance scene tracker → Pass to [next]. It’s okay to cheat in this game!
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Here’s a couple from some of the various adventure issues put out by GTG:
Actually, after scanning all of the issued adventures, the scene rules all contain either
- Add a threat/minion to the scene, or
- No environment turn rules at all.
In the case of 1, the “add a threat” environment turn rule is listed right after the environment description.
Well, yes, but an environment by default always activates one of its twists if there’s at least one active threat in play. Most environment writeups (including the ones in the rulebook) just fold the threat generation part into the twist menu, eg the Storm Portal major twist on page 246 dumping minions into the scene. Adding threats is really just a type of twist, and the bit about adding a threat is there to ensure you pick a GYRO-valid twist that generates a threat if there isn’t one out already. That Storm Portal twist would go off the first time the environmnet acts in Yellow with no environmnet threats in play, but even if that situation recurred (because the heroes defeated all the Storm Imps) it would trigger again because its a major twist. Minor twists that introduce threats can recur if the scene is “empty” of environment threats, but you can always cheat/give the heroes a break and ignore that.
Think the design intent is to give the PCs something to use their “target a minion” abilities as often as possible so they don’t go dead early in a fight, but I might be wrong.
That’s not really a cheat, it’s almost exactly what the rules tell you to do on pages 157-158. The order they recommend is advance scene tracker > environment threats all act >introduce new threats if there aren’t any > activate an environment twist if you didn’t introduce a threat but your sequence won’t change much. Might change someone’s status die “late” if the scene went to a new GYRO zone this round, but the impact is going to help as often as it hurts if it matters at all. Scene and environment are always one connected turn.
You can script in more stuff to happen (like the flood of minions you get in that outdoor press conference you cited) but that’s a scene-specific rule, not how environments generally work. That scene’s very light on opposition and starts with some semi-friendly minions as well, so it gets a lot of hostile minions added in over time to offer a challenge. Even at that it sometimes needs some tuning - a team with no multi-target Attack or Hinder abilities is going to get swamped if you use their recommended numbers, while a team with a really efficient minion-sweeping setup may call for some robot cops getting updated to lieutenant status just so something survives to attack.
Also important to remember that new threats never act the turn they’re introduced, barring some specific twist effect saying otherwise. I still forget that one myself sometimes and get yelled at by my players for it.
Episode 3 is up. It was a shorter game because Roll20 had server issues. It’s good to finally be able to play again after the holidays!
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
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