New on the blog, the first of two posts going over my process for designing an action scene. I’ve had a few requests to do more “gamemaster theory” (and in this case, practice) stuff and finally got motivated enough to do so. If there’s enough interest I’ll see about doing more of that kind of content in the future, although it does take quite a lot of typing.
Part two will be up sometime tomorrow.
And part two is up now, with all the crunchy mechanical prep work and some after action commentary. Bit long, but it does include two new villains, a lieutenant, three minions, an environment and various maunderings. Let’s see how much engagement it gets.
Nifty. I especially like the “What Produces Urgency?” section in Part 1. The SCPRG and its creators strongly recommend using a Scene Tracker in as many scenes as possible, but often there may not seem like there is anything in the scene that necessitates a ticking clock. And yet, usually trying to think of a time-dependent element adds an interesting twist (lowercase t) to the scene.
The Protoids are certainly cool, although describing them as the colour of “a livid bruise” is somewhat disquieting.
It’s interesting that you seemingly have heroes take a montage scene with Recovery actions at the end of an issue, as the rulebook says that all heroes are automatically back up to full health at the start of every issue. Your approach certainly does provide a different feeling, and I wouldn’t imagine that it would break anything, so I suppose which method to use is (like all things) ultimately up to the GM, depending upon what atmosphere and mood they desire to evoke.
Yeah, it’s an aberration for us too. Normally I’d do a full heal-up at end of issue/session, but I’d planned another ~2 hours of “content” including a short action scene where an old foe with a grudge was going to ambush them as they returned to their HQ and try to KO the hero they hate most, which was intended to be the proper end of issue and a hook for next session. We had a family thing come up with one of the players and his ride had to leave with him, so we called it early instead and did some card games instead.
So next session (which I ran a while ago, this is all past tense) opened with the ambush, which got more serious owing to them major twisting twice from Overcomes in the secret base. I didn’t really want to let them get the end of issue full heal because in story only a couple of hours had passed since the base fight and even before the amp-up the ambush was supposed to at least feel dangerous. I also didn’t want to shaft them too badly since I’d let the protoid battle go two extra turns while they mopped up after hitting the win condition. Those two turns actually did a lot more damage than I expected (one of the two heroes went Out from Yellow, and two of them went from Yellow to Red - hot dice for my flunkies) so I decided to wing it and give everyone one level of Recovery, then an actual montage scene to do what they wanted.
All but one of the players opted for a second Recovery, so we wound up three heroes full, one of the ones who’d been Out at the top Yellow, and the other hero who’d been Out opting to Overcome to dig for information in the computers (before the police showed up to raise any objections…), rolling a 14(!) and getting a big fat Boost as a “positive twist” for their trouble. That player likes to take this kind of risk - they love starting scenes in Red, which has resulted in them going Out in in round one or two in the past - so I’m wasn’t worried about that with rest of the team in pretty good shape.
Which they needed to be, since the ambush that was going to be a lone villain, a few lieutenants and some challenges replaced the lieutenants with two full blown villains thanks to the team’s twists. The PCs also got to convert their five hero points each before the ambush, although I forget exactly what everyone did with them.
Metatextually, the wrap-up issue of the “Perilous Protoids” storyline ran a little short owing to creative team being late with what was supposed to be the hook for the next arc, leading to the editors frantically stuffing in a backup story and two pages of Hostess Snack Cake ads to fill page count. No doubt fans were complaining about all the filler, although the Moseby Twins proved to be popular minor villains. 
Having done a walkthrough on how I design an action scene, I thought an addendum post on the blog about the pitfalls and plusses of the different types of scene elements you have to work with would be useful for newer game masters.
Multi-target abilities are much more punishing than single target ones . . . If you find a villain overperforming because of these abilities, remember that you don’t have to affect every target you could
Also, you simply flat-out don’t have to use a villain’s ability if it’s proving too challenging for your heroes. (E.g., If the heroes are getting utterly swamped by the villain’s multi-target Pulsar Beam Projector, you could take a turn of the villain just monologuing about how weak their nemesis is while taking a basic Hinder action against them.)
A few villains have access to very powerful healing abilities, with the Domain archetype being the worst offender. Be careful about using these abilities to stall out the heroes until the scene tracker expires, as it can easily feel like robbing your players of a hard-won victory.
True, although this does make me get the idea for a villain whose entire gimmick is stalling. The Adhesivist, for instance, would likely have only abilities that Hinder.
Your musings on lieutenants led me to wonder about scenes that are all (or mostly) lieutenants. My first instinct is that that’s a bad idea. When 
= 4, for a hero team facing only lieutenants, the book recommends × ÷ 2 = 8 lieutenants, or 2 per hero. Unfortunately, I don’t believe I have enough play experience to judge how difficult that fight would be. At = 5, it’s 13, which is almost certainly too much. If we replace one squad of lieutenants with an environment or challenge, it becomes 6 at = 4 and 10 at = 5.
[Environments] are unusual because you’ll never use more than one in a scene unless something very peculiar is going on - maybe a string of major twists throws all participants into a whole new environment mid-scene?
Other possible peculiarities that could produce such a result include
That is certainly true, although to be honest I haven’t seen a situation where the villain(s) were doing so well that the GM needed to resort to basics with them to avoid a TPKO. It sure can happen through an over-strong combo of abilities (that Force Multipliers team almost qualifies thanks to being a crazy skew of spawners) or lucky dice, but for me my villains always get lucky when it’s too late to eke out a reversal. Someday I’ll roll all double digits on round one…
That does sound about right for the guy. I’d make the “cost” for the scene tracker running out lighter than usual for a scene built around a villain stalling it out.
It definitely seems to break down when there are an odd number of heroes, although as you pointed out you can diffuse it with an environment and one or more challenges. I tried running a scene sans environment with four heroes and eight lieutenants once (the concept being a simulation team-training battle with a bunch of D-lister villains) and the heroes did eke out a win with only one PC going Out, but if it had been five heroes and 13 baddies I think it would have been a lopsided slaughter. Most heroes can beat two lieutenants on their own, but only barely - and if the lieutenants have strong abilities even that might not be true.
Part of the problem is that the lieutenant damage mechanic makes them quite resistant to the traditional answer to being outnumbered, ie multi-target Min or (for the strongest Yellows) Mid die Attacks. Just can’t sweep them the way you do minions and you’re still behind on action economy.
Those all sound reasonable, assuming the powerful entities are each causing a twist of their own each round, either on their own turns or just before or after the environment turn.
In the case of a split-location dual environment situation you could probably just ignore the environment turn of any location that’s empty of heroes when it would go. Stuff is presumably still happening but the PCs are where the audience attention is focused, and you can just handwave the off-page events.
Another superhero, this time ported from a Tiny Supers character I did for a one-shot a while back. Also wrote up his nemesis so he didn’t feel lonely.
Yeah, they’re living cartoon characters from a fictional series of B&W shorts from the 1930s. Not my most serious work.
Agreed. For the Adhesivest specifically, I think I’d probably make the only consequence him—and whatever allies he has—making a clean get-away.
Right. I’d most likely give each powerful entity its own turn, distinct from any environment’s. (The scene tracker would still advance on the environment’s turn, of course, provided there is one.)
True, although a possible exception to that that I can envision is some minions being added to an otherwise empty environment without the players knowing, so they’re surprised the next time they return there.
(Although this does bring up the question of why they’d return to a (presumed) empty location. I suppose an unresolved challenge or some other sort of MacGuffin. (Or, perhaps more likely, a villain (or the heroes themselves) are simply fleeing.))
KO Clown kinda reminded me of Kid Eternity.
Wait, so you’ve added another meta-layer to the whole thing? KO Clown is from a fictional cartoon that exists in a fictional comic book universe?
He can’t conjure up anything really complex or boring (comic books but not a dictionary)
Really? Not even for a gag where he bashes it over a baddie’s head?
He may express concern about catching cooties when fighting female supervillains.
Does he also display the Wouldn’t Hit a Girl trope?
Description: A cartoon bad guy. He generally wears a black suit under a black overcoat and a tall, crooked stovepipe hat - black, of course. Short and scrawny with a hunched physique and arms so long his spidery hands drag on the ground. Carries a six foot long fountain pen that he impossibly tucks away in his coat when it’s not needed.
Yes, but does he have a long black handlebar moustache with which to twirl evilly?
If Sentinels Comics can have an animated series I can have Clown Town. Besides, you know Wager Master has to have either brought the animated characters to life or thrown the “real” heroes into the show at some point - or more likely, had the two swap places. There’s probably guise story where he manages to get stuck in a TV too…
He might go for that, but anyone examining the dictionary would find all the words are a ten-year old kid’s vocabulary repeated over and over again. And some will be misspelled.
Going by the ten-year olds I’ve known (and been) he’d sock a gal while roughhousing and feel bad about it afterward. She’d probably have to hit him first, though.
Part of what makes him so mean is an inability to grow decent facial hair. Sometimes he’ll go for an obviously fake beard and/or mustache though, usually as part of a disguise.
Maybe the heroes need to do something in environment A, then go do something in B, then return to A to finish the job? Even just something like "open portal from Niceplace to Helljail, fight through the place, grab prisoner, return them safely to Niceplace and close portal is a possible scenario.
This probably isn’t what you had in mind, but your description reminded me of the infamous Super Dictionary.
Heh. KO Clown would have been thrilled to face a villain who was foolish enough to try stealing forty pies on his watch.
One of my lingering regrets is that I’m just slightly too old to have owned a copy of that thing. One of my younger sister’s friends got one through some school book club thing, but I was past the grades where they had those by 1978. On the plus side, I did get a bunch of those big oversized DC treasury comics that year as reading material for a road trip to Florida. To this day I remember Superman vs. Muhammad Ali and the Batman vs. Ra’s al Ghul stories better than going to Disney.
It does seem like all three of the alternate options are probably more powerful than the default. Interesting . . .
I definitely agree that Sidekicks are the most narratively interesting alternate rewards. In general, I enjoy whenever a game system provides mechanics for players to “gain” allies — it’s not necessary, usually (as allies can simply show up without being connected mechanically to a PC), but it does encourage players to become more invested in them. GURPS, for instance, does this. (Although in a . . . less than elegant way, as that’s how GURPS does most things.)
One oddity about favors is that they can’t be used for Boost or Hinder actions. I assume something in playtesting caused a problem with them, but for the life of me I can’t see what it would be. A GM who wanted to make favors more versatile and a little better could let a hero use them to Boost/Hinder as well as Attack, Defend and Overcome as a house rule and I don’t think anything would break down - the game has plenty of reactionary mod producers already.
I can’t see anything wrong with allowing them to Hinder, but I believe that the reason they can’t Boost is because it’s simply sub-optimal — 5 Hero Points can either equal a +5 bonus, or a 
dice pool that, when rolled to Boost, will only create a +2 bonus on average. That’s a pretty crummy deal.
It’s really the third category (temporary ability improvements and dice size bumps) that stands out to me, although obviously sidekicks can easily be stronger than a 1-time exclusive bonus if they don’t get immediately blown away by a villain with a multi-target Attack. Favors are probably pretty equal - they’re less predictable in terms of what they’ll do but (even as just Attack/Defend/Overcome reactions) more versatile than straight bonuses.
That’s certainly true at the highest end of the scale, but at the low end 3d4 costs the same HP as a +1 bonus does and generates a marginally better average bonus (assuming at least two of the dice roll 4 and get you a +2) - and one that isn’t exclusive either, but at the cost of a reaction. The other three tiers aren’t as good for Bonuses, getting steadily worse the more you spent.
And of course a favor can be used for other things. Using a favor for a bonus is generally suboptimal but if you really need to squeeze out a little more oomph on a key roll the fact that the bonus could stack with an exclusive one and be applied as a reaction to own roll if need be is meaningful.
Still, favors might not need the help of more options. One of the people I play with has taken all their HP as 3d4 bonuses a few times and it seemed to work pretty well with just the official three action choices.
Narratively it represented a severed magical hand her PC cut off a demon a while back, with one of the digits curling up as each favor got used, all monkey paw style. Every now and then the GM has let her recharge the thing by thumping on cultists and other related mystical threats, whereupon she does another session full of favors. We are all terrified to see what happens if she tries to use one of the thing’s favors for an Overcome and has to twist for success. Hasn’t happened yet but we know sooner or later we’ll be desperate enough to try.
Huh. How did I not already do a hulking crab-man mutant villain bodyguard? Easily fixed…
And as long as I’m at it, how about a nice generic alien troop transport for all your world invasion needs?
That last one’s designed to be easily re-skinned. Also an interesting Creator/Titan build that relies entirely on it deploying its payload of troops (minion and lieutenant creation abilities in game terms) for effectiveness. All its other abilities are defensive inherents and reactions that make it tough to take down.
Both of these are cool. Nice job with the “Ro-Man” name especially — 'tis very Silver Age. : )
Gender: Male Age: 74 Height: 5’7" Eyes: Glittering Red
Hair: Mousy Brown, Thin and Graying Skin: Wrinkled Build: Bony
I don’t think you meant to write that.
The pun was irresistable. Also a Robot Monster reference, of course. A wonderful terrible film.
Indeed not. Fixed. Copy and paste in haste, repent at leisure.
Yet another villain with an odd schtick, as well as a nod to fine old SPI solo game from the days of my youth.
Timetripper, Temporally Discombobulated Villain Who Fights Alongside Himself
And another “villain” in the form of high-end robotic guard for super-prisons and high-security facilities:
Timetripper is certainly a unique way to make a duplicator villain. Most such baddies are Creators, Legions, and/or Overlords, of course, but having a villain without minion-making abilities who just shows up with multiple copies is quite new.
The Peacekeeper robots are also interesting in that one of their gimmicks seem to be that their AI is not smart, whereas most villainous robots have superintelligence as a schtick.