New post on the blog with some thoughts about how to use full teams of villains in a scene or story, since they tend to cramp your scene element budget rather badly.
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Neat post!
I recognise bullet point 1 as being used in “Off the Rails,” and bullet point 4 as being used in “Battle of the Bands.” It would be interesting to see what an adventure issue that used either of the other two options could look like. And bullet point 2 reminds me of the structure of many of the Silver Age JLA, JSA, and Avengers comics where they’d have to fill like five chapters and so have different members of one villain group go to different places and do things.
As a sort of combination of bullet points 2 and 3, one could throw a whole team of full villains at the heroes, even if it’s more than they can handle at once, but telegraph to them that they probably won’t be able to take them all down. Then the heroes can capture, defeat, or disable one or two of the villains before retreating, then rest up and maybe prepare a bit before confronting the remainder of the baddies again, and potentially repeating until they’re all taken down.
Another way in which one could mix up these ideas is to do bullet point 2 and have the heroes face off against a series of villains in different action scenes, and then for the big climax, use bullet point 1 and have the main baddie as a full villain and the others as lieutenants 'cos they’re less narratively important.
Or, do that in reverse order. Throw a scene with one big villain and a bunch of lieutenants at the heroes, but have the scene somehow involve the villains seizing more power, and then do a series of individual scenes with smaller groups of full villains, representing those who got away from the first scene powered up.
there’s nothing players hate as much as watching NPCs roll dice against one another.
Agreed. Another way to help minimise player boredom around this could be to just use average die values for the infighting villains’ actions rather than actually roll. (With something like saying that Mid = average value, Min = average – 2, and Max = average + 2 or something.)
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Yeah, you can mix-and-match approaches pretty easily. Real comics see 2+3 combined pretty often, where an initial team brawl sees the heroes defeated or fleeing, then the overconfident villains split up to do stuff (often ruling the world for a bit) while the recovered heroes run around studying the weaknesses in their schemes and hunting powers-ups, followed by a grand climactic brawl where the odds have changed (and maybe the villains are less cohesive and more backstabby) and our heroes win the rematch. You can play around with points 1 and 4 while doing all that if you want to really get tricky with things.
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Bullet Point 2 is essentially used as part of “Stolen Legacy”, with the introductory scenes involving Inductor and Tear wrecking havoc, and then joining Stygian in the third scene if they escaped from their initial scenes. There’s only the three of them, but the basic premise works pretty well there.
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I mean, we’re all drawing from the same original source material. A good comic script will usually make a good framework for Sentinels adventures.
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Rather wordy post today going through the process of designing a PC for someone else, showing how I translated a concept into game mechanics. Still a bit of a work in progress, but the crunchy stuff is done pending some decisions by the person who’ll actually be play the character.
EDIT: The player who’ll be using Doc has made his final decisions and tweaks to the character draft, and I’ve updated the post to reflect the changes in red text. Should be interesting to see how he plays out in action. I’m reasonably certain I designed a more mechanically interesting PC for him than my own (who’ll be up shortly).
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Another wordy hero build today, this time for my own PC in the pay-by-post game Doctor Demiurge was built for. She’s kind of a rare case where most of my action abilities aren’t so compelling that I’ll feel bad about doing creative Overcomes instead, particularly if I can get a Principle involved.
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Another new hero today, this one an experiment with the Struggling background, which really is pretty awful. Just look at those lousy die pools.
Be fun to roleplay this sap, though - with a little masochism.
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I love that story and concept, so evocative and with just the perfect amount of humourous nods to established tropes.
(Without wanting to open that balancing discussion again, I’ve found it works well to grant Struggling background a third principle, to further that roleplaying depth while staying true to the shoddy dice pools. Just throwing it in again because it fits so well with this guy.)
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I’ve seen a couple of experiments with improving Struggling in games other folks were running, including that one. The third Principle didn’t work very well in practice, since your weak dice pools make even Max die Overcomes pretty twisty. The player hated it anyway, which the GM “solved” by having them inherit a fortune during a collection rewrite and change the PC background to Upper Class. Not only funny, but they even kept their Responsibility Principle (Family, IIRC - one of those countless uncles turned out to be rich!).
The one I found most interesting was kind of an inversion of the Impulsive personality. Impulsive trades two steps of status dice for one step anywhere else (leaving them at a wretched 6/6/8 GYR status but probably turning a d10 into a d12), which is a pretty bad bargain. The Struggling mod traded its inherently bad dice for a die step bump to their Yellow status die, leaving them in the unique situation of having a possible d10 in Yellow, and no worse than d8. That actually seemed pretty okay, although I didn’t see it tested with the Struggling/Impulsive combo that would give you a 6/8/8 GYR and probably a d12 off of your archetype (assuming it had a d10 natively). I’d probably offer that to a player who wanted to go Struggling just to get some more testing in.
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Haven’t done a villain in a while, so here’s a specialist design - a baddie whose abilities are specifically meant to put him on a death spiral of self-inflicted damage. He hits real hard, but the more he does so the faster his own Health drops. Bit of a puzzler for the players if they haven’t heard about him since he seems absurdly hard-hitting and impossible to slow down - right up until he runs out juice and short circuits spectacularly.
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Oh my god, I love him.
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I got to run him in a one-shot the other day and the players freaked out the second time in a row he hit someone for 2d12+d8 electrical damage - and for once there was no one with an electrical damage inversion ability looking for power lines to suck on during combat. When he did it a third time they were calling the fight unwinnable. And then he blew his own fuse the next round, and they proceeded to mop up the few d6 minions still standing with three hero turns remaining. Admittedly, everyone was in the Red by the end of it but that’s how it was supposed to work. Almost took one gal out but a defensive Reaction left her at 2 Health for the rest of the scene. Most memorable “easy tier” fight I’ve run in a long while.
When I tallied it up Omegavolt had done more damage to himself than anyone, but the team Gadgeteer had the second highest total thanks to a round one P+E penalty and a steady stream of “temporary” penalties that effectively became DOT effects thanks to his silly reaction. Penalties really become an exercise in factorial damage calculation with this villain.
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I always like characters who start out from somebody just trying an odd mechanical build.
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New hero writeup today:
This one started out as birthday request from a fellow player and got way out of hand. Much harder concept to explain than to play. Think “Emperor Augustus founded a super-soldier program that basically did what the God Learners did in Runequest’s Glorantha, and this guy wound up being their A Number One heroquester” and you’ve pretty much got it. He’s also temporal sinkhole so folks going back anywhere between the days of the Roman Empire up until yesterday are likely to run into him eventually.
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New villain today, this one a demonstration of how much trouble Charged Up Blast can be when it’s on the villain’s side of a fight. We had a very impressive display of a PC using it in our PbP game recently, and a reminder that the baddies can do that sort of massive single hit was worthwhile.
Any Inventor villain can choose to take Empowered Destruction, but the way they use it in play can be quite different. KILL-A-BOT there relies on always having a bonus to fuel it thanks to her reaction, relying more on mass HInders and inventions (specifically her KILL-O-BOT minions) to keep her status die up and not caring so much anyway because she can generate a constant stream of fire if she wants. There’s some limited counterplay in the form of Reality Shaper’s Never Happened and some Red abilities, but those are rare or come too late to help much.
Contrast that to Carronade and his reliance on a reaction to charge up out of turn to do sustained fire. This offers more counterplay to limit him to(at best) alternate turns with the big shot. Don’t attack unless you have a no-reactions trick, and remove his bonuses with Overcomes and countering Hinders every chance you get.
And since they’re all massive single-target damage dealers, Omegavolt leaves Inventor out entirely and relies on Overpowered for an all-dice Attack instead. He winds with twice the base health as the other two, but he hits for slightly less and deals himself so much damage that he burns out very quickly indeed.
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Another new hero today, this one another experiment in a “healer” build coupled with a really hard skew into team support in general. Costs them almost all their Attack options (as in only two of them, neither bigger than Mid die, and one is optional while the other is downright accidental. Probably would not want to play this one myself, but that’s more due to that Nurturing 6/6/12 status spread than anything else and that’s very easily fixed by swapping to any of the many 6/8/10 options.
There’s also a brief comparison with my other attempt at a “cleric” build in the design notes, which also didn’t thrill me but can at least kick some butt personally when he needs to.
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Yeah, Nurturing is a tricky one. D6 Yellow really hurts if you don’t deliberately build around it.
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And the inevitable high base Health means you have to suffer with it forever. 34 Health is not all that helpful when you spend 22 of it with 6 status.
I’m not convinced such a focused support build is going to pull their weight even with a 6/8/10 spread, The healing is almost a sideline most of the time, you really want the mass Boost going off again and again and I have my doubts how many chances you’ve have for that. Unless your allies can leverage that +3 or +4 as often as possible healing them constantly won’t matter, the scene tracker will time out on you too soon.
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Couple more super-thugs I’ll be needing for a future post, so here they are in all their dubious glory. Includes the duo, an alternate solo writeup, and a lieutenant version for when they’re just background singers for the main villain.
OGRE himself is also an homage to the combat example in Champions 1e.