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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