Friday, September 09, 2016

Ideas Forming, Though Not As Quickly As I'd Hoped...

On point once more... I might be getting the hang of this again...

Been thinking about the superhero game and the system I am going to run/write here soon and came up with a few concepts to fold into the mix...

  • No sort of endurance/fatigue rules... Too much tedium and bookeeping in a genre that rarely lets heroes be seen as human. If there is a fatigue mechanic contained within, it'll be expending extra effort which will begin to wear on a character.
  • REEEAALLLLLYYYY slow experience build-up for characters, if any at all... The one thing I've seen kill too many games is that characters become so powerful that there is nothing left to challenge them that doesn't seem like the GM is cheating more than a little bit. Superheroes do change and evolve, but typically only at key story points (or change in the writing team).
  • Trying to evolve some form of dice pool mechanic that will eliminate the swing of single-die systems, or even exploding die systems. This one gets more difficult as I am trying to keep things simple and free-flowing from a mechanics standpoint. The thought seems like an oxymoron to me at this stage. Hmmmm...
  • Given that I want to run a more lighter and upbeat superhero game than I typically do, character death is never a result of a normal fight. A character will have to PURPOSEFULLY state something along the lines of "I am trying to kill him" in order for it to stick and have meaning, and even then, it will be at some dramatic cost...
  • Speaking of drama, trying to working a drama/karma system the can play off of the players and the GM where we can trade cool moments almost tit-for-tat... Thinking about a starting pool equal to the number of players that the players begin with having access to, and a smaller pool equal to half the players (round up) that the GM gets to use initially. Players can claim a drama point for themselves and spend it later personally, or they may leave it in the group pool where all PCs have access to it to do the same tasks, but at double cost. Points spent by the players end up in the GM pool, and vice versa... or something along those lines.

That's just off the top of my head currently... Hopefully more, and more concrete, stuff to come...

peace... GopherDave

2 comments:

  1. I like where you're going with this. You are dead on that giving out xps too fast can kill a campaign. Seen it happen many times.

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  2. Yeah, now all that remains is to craft a playable game out of a few vague concepts... =P

    Truthfully, though... I've done more with less...

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