Emirikol and Honor Points

The other house rule I instituted before session 3 was Honor Points: The short form is PCs engaging in profligate spending appropriate to the swashbuckling nobles we're emulating are actually purchasing the equivalent of 'pick what it does when you need it' one use buffs in that mirror D&D potions. Honor Points require foregoing or pissing way GP value equal to 1.33x the normal potion cost (or 200 GP) because it can be traded for any skill buff potion at the time the PC needs it. Yes this removes some of the strategic/logistical aspect of the game but it also removes the heroes all carrying a half dozen potions, which don’t fit this genre. 

1 Point spent gives

• Athletics: +5 to Climbing and Jumping
• Hiding: +10 to hide
• Sneaking: +10 to Move Silent
• Swimming: +10 to swim
• Vision: +5 to Spot and Search
• Slipperiness: +10 to Escape Artist

2 points spent gives 

• Aid: +1 to hit, +1d8 temporary HP
• Bull's Strength: +1d4+1 for 3 hours
• Cat's Grace: +1d4+1 for 3 hours
• Charisma: +1d4+1 for 3 hours
• Endurance: +1d4+1 for 3 hours
• Intelligence: +1d4+1 for 3 hours
• Wisdom: +1d4+1 for 3 hours

One nice thing about these Honor Points from a GM perspective is that they keep the heroes from 'leaving money on the table', or failing to locate and wring value out of every last item discovered on their ventures. Rather than having them awash with cash I can just directly award them Honor Points (for winning duels or rescuing people) for doing things that nobles see as honorable and heroic. Rather than watching them try to negotiate sales of the goods in the pirates hoard they can sniff at the barrels of anchovies and bolts of fabric and leave it for the guard to sort out who it belongs to - earning one Honor Point for every 200 GP of value they don't see as worth their time. When they find artwork or magic items they don't want or can't use they can graciously donate them to the Paladins or some other charitable organization and convert them to the equivalent of potions.

Personally, I rather like this. One of the common tropes of the Musketeers and of other urban heroes like Fafard and the Grey Mouser are their boom and bust cycles, their ability to suddenly have the skills needed to respond to most situations. Honor Points support those, as some of the PCs wealth is constantly tied up in things that can't be sold or transferred for cash when their loansharks come looking for them. For anyone else looking to get a more free wheeling, less money grubbing D&D game going, I recommend it.

Emirikol First Blood and other Fencing Changes for 3E

One thing we ran into during the first official set of duels in the Emirikol game was that duels to first blood in D&D - if you count any loss of HP as first blood - are based way too much on initiative. We saw this in the first dual the PCs had where Bard 2 with improved initiative beat Ftr 2/Ari 2 because he rolled higher on initiative and a modest attack roll for 1 pt of damage. But technically damage! Or is it?

This is where the highly abstracted nature of D&D combat comes into play, and the perpetual question of “what is a hit point?”. To my mind Hit Points are all the characters combat skill in avoiding injury. They’re the dodging and parrying and leaping away injury. But since it is applied AFTER armor class in the flowchart of action, and that Armor Class is modified by dexterity, it can be hard for people to wrap their brains around that. And there were not yet in system game mechanics for “Bloodied” as there would be in 4E and 13th Age that gave a clear mechanical point for me to say “this is first blood.” 

I could have just stated something but I instead put in front of my players that we use the flexible concept of hit points to instead work with fractions of the character HP. 

• First Blood is actually 'drawn' when the character has taken over 1/3rd (round up) of his HP total. Since Cyble has 10 HP she actually gets cut or bloodied once she's taken more than 4 points of damage. Deitrich, with 17 HP isn't actually cut until he's taken more than 6. This might not mean much now, where a single hit with a sword is enough to take a 12 HP character past their 4 point first blood, but it would have extended Hiram's fight with his 18 HP opponent past that first rapier touch.

• Second Blood, or the desire to fight "until one is well blooded, disabled, or disarmed" is generally set at taking more than 2/3rds of your HP (round up). Cybele is well blooded once she's taken more than 7 HP of damage, Deitrich can hold out until he's at more than 12 points taken. This is the level of fighting Melas and his adversary were engaged in, which means his critical hit was needed to push the fellow up over the 2/3rd HP mark. 

• Fighting to the death is often considered 'concluded' once one of the opponents is at 0 HP. Of course, the terms of the duel can stipulate that no healers be present at the match but can be called later, which gives you a pretty narrow window between 0 HP and being dead. Unless it is specifically stated in the terms of the duel that one of the duelists will not leave the field alive it is ungentlemanly to strike an opponent who's already down (and such a duel is technically illegal anyway). 

This got a surprising to me amount of pushback. 

One of my concerns for wanting to manage it this was to protect the Rogue character class in duel, since their sneak attack if they have initiative in the first round ability was a big source of their damage potential, so I wanted to keep the rules for being flat footed before your first action. Tom playing the Rogue, said he was comfortable dropping flat footed for duels only, due to the formalized ritual of the event. Fair enough. 

Dave (as well as other people on Livejournal) were pushing for the 1 HP equals blood rules. Tom and Jim both pointed out that sticking with as written left Improved Initiative as the critical dueling Feat, followed by anything that was going to boost AC. 

Of four duels only Melas' got that effect, and that was because having seen the others I had his opponent make bad tactical decisions (using all his Expertise + fighting defensively) to boost his AC and reduce his chance to hit. As a result Melas scouted out holes in his enemies armor, leaped from ground to bench, watched his foe do the same, parried and dodged, saw his foe jump to a nearby table and ultimately landed a telling blow. That's what I want to see - if I hadn't done that his opponent's initial attack would have been at +5 to hit rather than -2, and he would have scored first blood right after the initiative roll. If we had made first blood equal to more than 1/3rd Melas HP that initial attack probably wouldn't have done enough to count, and the duel could have continued.

Ultimately the rules for any changes other than abstraction of hit points would have had too many long spillover effects across combat, and I settled on those. But  we also never had any more one on one duels to first blood so it didn’t matter. This is how game mechanics change and are never used….

Emirikol: review of session 2, planning for session 3

 Taking things in order of occurrence from the second session 

1) The 3E encounter design rules worked really well for what I wanted here. The mass of kobolds vs. the already battered PCs worked exactly as planned. This comes in part form the players inside the line character creation. I know from experience that playing an 18 Str Barbarian with Cleave just let you rip through encounters like this, throwing off the challenge rating math by maximizing your ability. 

2) Also, the lack of specificity let us provide the detail where we needed. This is one of my important rules for game mastering, which is that when people miss, they miss for a reason. It’s not that the PCs were inept, it’s that circumstances got in their way; it’s not that the villains are inept, it’s that the heroes are just that good. 

3) I was very curious as to how the players would react to the scene with the non-combatants, but the rules of the game universe (chaos beasts vessels for captured souls of this realm, being tortured and twisted by alien forces) meant that the future Paladin was right to do as he did. This is one of those cases where knowing the world also helps with Gygaxian Naturalism. I could have done the “these things just bubble out of the ground) but I wanted to emphasize the almost Lovecraftian horror of the chaos cults and that the chaos beasts are unequivocal bad guys. 

4) More Spiders Trying To Kill Melas! This is one of the perils of a limited number of classic lower level monsters being recycled in these old adventures

5) I love how the players immediately grasped the idiom of politics and connections, urging their host to take political action to prevent a recurrence of the chaos infestation on Vulture Point

6) I did get the chance for Ambleer’s staff to mess with Hiram’s head re the Ghost. This is one of those cases where 3E gave the PC a chance to see through this, but didn’t. What I had not expected with Dave’s fervent, absolute desire on Hiram’s part to not take part in a ghost story. Nope Nope Nope Nope! So they partied all night rather than risking another encounter with Lorell Ambleer. It didn’t matter to me one way or the other, we could come back to this later, or not. We never got back to it. It was a great character moment.

7) The magnificently evocative treasures from the Vulture Point module did exactly what I wanted in piquing the PCs interest, and I was even able to stat out the value of the Wand of Petrification with 1 charge level for the Cockatrice Feather; the detail level of 3E helped a lot there. 

8) The descriptive introduction to the city worked well, and while Dave continued to joke around with things like the Petros the Pugilist Sextet as a stand in for Rocky, it all worked. Likewise, the introduction of Dietrich’s house hit just the right Phoenix Guards note. 

9) Of course the PCs immediately let themselves get insult-goaded into a duel! Again, this is where having the players all on board with the genre conventions. There was a long talk in and around the game as to what “first blood” should mean in a duel after Hiram’s first round hit for 1 point of damage on a Figther 2/Aristocrat 2, but I ceded at the time because his using Sunder as his first round attack to shatter Hiram’s sword made for a great long term rivalry. More on this later. 

Going into session 3, I had asked the players what they wanted to accomplish, and then I tossed in what I wanted to accomplish. 

Player Agenda: 

• Drink/Dine with Florian and Donato de la Ballesteros in Scornbul

• Visit with the Paladins and possibly the Cardinals of the Endless Ocean over the remains. 

• Explore the city as gawking rube; Visit a local theater. 

• Visit Raul's solicitor concerning Hiram's broken sword. 

• Visit the Ferrantino Library as per the invitation by the Loremistress d'Ferrantino

GM Additional Agenda

• Learn that there are tales of someone going into Hightower Tor

• Witness actions of 'East Cardinal Sebastian d'Ferrantino' (actually his double Reme Collbras) 

• Have Cybele get isolated and braced by her halfling mobsters.

Everything on the player end is immediately following up on subplots from the plot elements dropped in the last two sessions, which is fine because my prep work already has answers and NPCs for most of these cribbed from other modules. On my end I want to set up for the events of the Last of the Iron House, which is being placed straight in the city rather than being some strange roadside event placed outside the city whose events it’s supposed to be influencing, irritate Rebecca’s PC with the halfling mobsters, and generally keep their first session adventure in motion. 

So far my lightly modified 3E was doing everything I wanted it to in terms of how adventures played out, how skills worked in the system, and the adventure long attrition aspect of hit points. Would I have preferred something like 13th Age where your HP swing a lot more over the course of an adventure? I don’t know. It might have worked better, but it might also have had too much detail on each fight. Making the combats last longer.

New Salem: Renaissance - ...The Universe...

The second in our trio of powers that need modification, Cosmic Awareness. This one needs tweaking because first of all it's not a great adaptation of how the power appears in the comics, and also because it has a degree of meta play that doesn't let it translate as an NPC ability (which is very unusual for V&V)

That's a lot of highly specific text for a power that certainly seems to be designed to not be used, and when used gives a minimum effect. "Correct answers to Yes or No questions" is definitely not worth it for an average charisma hero asking even a single question: that's a 50/50 chance of being messed up. So the player needs to spend a massive amount of Power, say, 25+ points, to get even a 75% chance to to make an attempt. And even then the chance of finding something is, for an average hero, 1 in 3. 

Essentially as written the power is useless without some combination of Heightened Intelligence and Heightened Charisma. Worse, it doesn't really match what Cosmic Awareness did in the comics, with the best known practitioner being Captain Marvel, who was literally granted Cosmic Awareness in the run on his series. This provided him with a general sense of oneness with the universe, let him detect and locate cosmic level threats, and acted similar to a 'spider-sense' in terms of predicting physical harm. I don't know that the term existed in comics prior to that, even if there are other people who have displayed some version of it, including Spider-Man, whose spider-sense might as well be a low level Cosmic Awareness. 

The problem is that almost any other implementation of Cosmic Awareness is just Heightened Senses. Even this iteration of Cosmic Awareness is just "asking questions of the GM" carved out so it's not taken as a Heightened Sense. 

So what do we want Cosmic Awareness to do? I think the general answer is that the character is passively aware of threats to the cosmos and can learn things they would have no way of knowing.

Mechanically this means:

If there is some threat to the cosmos (or the planet, continuity, whatever) the Gm treats it like any other sense: if it's likely big enough for the character to sense it as they would any other stimui, they do. Less obvious cosmic threats, they have a chance equal to their detect danger to sense it. Cosmic Awareness also helps characters using any other senses, letting them re-roll any missed Detect Hidden or Detect Danger checks due to their cosmic senses. 

If the player wants to learn something specific, it's a d% save vs. I * 3, and if successful the GM will give them some level of information about it. The character can spend 1 point of power per 1% added to their chance of success, so this can be exhausting. Failure means no meaningful answer, but not incorrect information; the character knows they can't interpret what they are sensing. Failure by more than 20% causes the character to get lost in the universe - treat this as Paralysis Ray with a d% save vs. Charisma to recover themselves - and if they miss the roll by more than 40% they also take 3d10 Power damage as if hit by Devitalization Ray. 

I think this is a lot cleaner in the concept of the power being a general information feeder, a double for danger sense, and a way to get something closer to an Augury from D&D as opposed to a set series of Yes/No questions that has to be gamed out. 

New Salem: Renaissance - New Psionics Tables

Continuing on last week's discussion on the Villains & Vigilantes (available at finer on-line game stores everywhere) power generation tables, and how we can modify them. Here's the expanded Psionics table, separated out from the Magic/Psionics table to give more options for people aiming at being mentalists from the jump. 

All the powers other than Magic Spells and Flight from the original table are on here with 7% chances (except for Cosmic Awareness which was boosted from 1% to 4%), with another 12 powers added that to me, at least, feel like Psionics based powers. You will note that I have added "Companion" to the "Pet" power, just because I like expanding the concept of the power in the players mind. 

Some of these, like Animal/Plant Control, Heightened Senses, Emotion Control, Illusions, Mind Control, and Teleportation, are easy adds. Yes, there are all ways that these powers can be non-psionic in nature, but they are also all powers that are readily equated to psionics. OK maybe not Plant Control, but given the open ended nature of V&V 2E's power design it's better to just list the power and not try to limit them at the jump. Teleportation was the one I struggled with most as adding this at 4% or 1%, but remembering the Tomorrow People I went with the 4%

Keeping that in mind, I added six more powers at 1% - Absorption, Devitalization Ray, Dimensional Travel, Flame Power, Force Field, and Paralysis Ray - that I felt hit the general psionics profile but aren't as often seen in that space. Absorption could always be used to duplicate or steal mental energy, memories, psionic powers, and so on; Devitalization Ray and Paralysis Ray are some form of stunning attack; Flame Powers is Pyrokinesis, and if the 'human torch' equivalent of the power doesn't fit the players conception we can trust them to not pick that one; and Force Field is easily an offshoot of telekinesis. 

I admit Dimensional Travel is a stretch, but none of the other powers in the game quite fit my psionics profile; It might have been better to drop it and increase Fame Powers a 2% chance. Or move Cosmic Awareness back to a 1% chance, dropped Dimensional Travel, and increased Flame Powers, Force Field Devitalization Ray and Paralysis Ray to 2%, leaving Absorption at 1%. While this is all noodling around the edges, it does make Psionics feel like it's own thing, and specific for my campaign world (albeit highly generic). 

I was hoping to get Magic done today too, but that;s for another day.

Henchmen and Hirelings in Under the Giant's Shadow

Sunday was the first session of Under the Giants Shadow where the human PCs made use of the "human dungeoneering" power: they hired and brought along henchmen. 

Each of the races in my B/X variant has a racial power that is useful for adventuring - Dwarves have Cavesense (follow trail back* + usual dwarf underground detects). Elves have Elfsight (improved detect secret doors and illusions). Halflings have keen ears (improved hearing at doors/resisting surprise). Humans have Naturally Social, which means not only do they NOT have any reaction penalties for other races (as all the others do), they get to reroll one Henchmen action each round. I felt this was a good balance of a dungeon delve special ability. It's taken over a year for the people with human PCs to make use of it. 

Now, part of this is because the players have been super-secretive about their venturing under the Giant's Shadow to loot one of the destroyed cities there. They suspect that once what they are doing becomes public they will face pressure to stop OR their success will generate competition. In this they are not wrong, but it has made it very difficult for them to get help. (It's also forcing them to make a commercial trading business to hide where their money is coming from; they now own a mule farm... which means by extension they own donkeys and horses and it all gets complicated.)

But another part of it is the psychology against Henchmen that's rooted in post Hickman Revolution play. As the guy playing one of the Dwarves who has been playing since the 1E days said, "Every time I hire a henchmen to do something for me it feels like I'm denying myself the chance for my character to do a cool thing and handing it to this NPC." 

When I was a kid playing B/X and AD&D we never used henchmen; from 1981-1984 it seemed like too much work to have to run the additional characters, and we didn't have a lot of structure to those games. Post 1984 when I started playing with someone who was already running for sweeping plot arcs (and then we did some Dragonlance, and we were all theater kids into our character psychology), having henchmen as back up characters, or anything that smacked of decentralized power, just wasn't comme il faut. 

Since Under the Giants Shadow is specifically leaning into the Exploration and Shenanigans pillars of D&D and not as deeply on the Role Playing and Combat pillars I wanted explore how they would work in play. Making it the human special power would help, I thought. Hopefully after this the players will start to see their value. Unfortunately the three human PCs have Charisma scores of 7, 8, and 10, limiting how many Henchmen they can have in play and how loyal they are. 

The UtGS rules are built for x in 6 chance, so monster armor classes are None (8), Leather (11), Chain (14), Plate (17) or Adamant (20), which are 4-in-6, 3-in-6, 2-in-6, 1-in-6, and 0 in 6 chances. So Henchmen attacks can be handled with a single die roll - d4 if they are not a combat oriented Henchman, d6 of they are - and the damage of their attack equals the die roll. Does this mean every time they do hit someone in plate armor they do 6 damage? Yes, but its also super simple so there you go. 

Finally, Magic-Users can skip the rules for finding and hiring normal henchmen all together and summon and bind creatures to work for them. This process that takes as much time and resources as trying to get conventional henchmen, but their summoned creatures can be incredibly dangerous for everyone. These creatures roll d8 or even d10 in combat, letting them tear through even Adamant armor for potentially massive damage, but they also have an (unknown to the Magic User) maximum number of times they can roll higher than a 6 before the binding snaps and the summoned creature turns on you and your allies.

The Magic-User player thought long and hard about this, but ultimately she opted against it for now. Instead they traded a magic item with inconvenient-for-them side effect to a horseclan leader who wouldn't be bothered by it to get a trio of his men to assist in cleaning out part of the dungeon. Each of the human PCs had a fighter type henchmen with them, and it made the "4 PCs vs 1 Acolyte + 12 Berserkers" fight something they could (and did) win. The 3 human PC players got into having the bonus d6 attack rolls from the Henchmen, and being able to reroll the miss from their one Henchman each should they occur. Never mind the Henchmen soaking up attacks from the berserkers - a huge advantage. 

Is this something they're likely to do again? Time will tell, but as a test this worked great. 

Villains & Vigilantes and Charismatic Involvement

I commented on this in the discussion of mutations/power generation, and felt it needed its own post as it's something that MIGHT end up fitting into New Salem. Probably not, but I wanted to kick the idea around. 

Villains & Vigilantes 1.0 includes the origin type of Charismatic Involvement, which is... well it's hard to explain. Here, just read it 

So essentially there is a 10% chance that your PC in a super hero game is going to be... Snapper Carr. Or Rick Jones. Or Jimmy Olsen or Lois Lane. This is, well, kinda nuts and kinda awesome. 

I mean, mostly it's nuts. 

So your advantages for being a Charismatically Involved character are 

• Your Charisma is permanently set at 17. This nets you a +10% on your reaction roll with vigilantes and... well that's it really. OK not entirely, but charisma doesn't net you much.
• You have A 5% chance of a single super power from a table that has some awfully weird outcomes as it is the same table used for Mutants and Extraterrestrials and includes pretty much ever power 
• And you can train without taking time away from adventuring up to a 16 (knowing that 20 is the maximum score for training). This is a legit advantage but needs unpacking. 

This gets weird. In the section on gamemastering the rules advise that the GM at least vaguely stick to the real time = game time rule, with one weekly session covering about one week of time, because they also recommend that you not use the Marvel or DC universe as your backdrop but instead stick to the real world, as newspapers and headlines make great sources of inspiration. So if V&V 1.0 is dealing with the AD&D Gygaxian mandate of "You can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept" then trying to train "rapidly" removes your PC from play, and doing it alongside patrolling means it takes 6 months to a year in game, which should also be of PLAY, per point of increase in a single characteristic. 

This get weird because if you do drop out of patrolling/adventuring to train, you don't have another PC to bring in. What makes the Gygaxian comment work is that the player has several PCs and can have the fighter train to go up a level and the wizard do spell research while they play their Monk in whatever is happening now. Time can be tracked across multiple PCs while the players stay engaged. But in V&V, where the PCs is based on the player and the rules for additional characters are under NPC construction, this makes no sense. Shrug Emjoi

In any event, a Charismatically Involved hero doesn't have to do that: they are constantly improving in 2 of the four characteristics they can change, since their Charisma is fixed at 17. Over the year of play sessions that it takes any other hero to increase, say, Dexterity by a point, they can increase their Dex by 3 and their Constitution by up to 6, assuming capping out at 16. This actually turns into a significant advantage if you're playing regularly and start with modestly above average characteristics - After a year of play you'll probably be powerful, very healthy, brilliant, and dexterous if the terminology to score part of the charts is to be believed, with 64 Power and +4 HP per level. 

• The final advantage is that the Vigilantes have to come to your aid if you get into trouble: they are literally obligated to and they suffer charisma loss if you die. Yes, it's another case of Charisma loss being a stick that is supposed to drive PC behavior. But I want to dive more into this, because it never says that the vigilante or group of vigilantes HAVE TO BE THE OTHER PCS. In fact in a solo game they can't be. 

The charismatically involved hero can jump from vigilante to vigilante, so Rick Jones is clearly the template for this, moving from Hulk, to the Avengers, to Captain America, to Captain Marvel, to Rom, and back and forth. But does this mean that the player can force the GM to come up with NPC Vigilantes who the HAVE TO back the charismatically involved character? Where the original Avengers are Thor, Iron Man, Ant Man, Wasp, and Rick Jones, who is Charismatically Involved with the NPC Hulk? And then pick some NPC Hero like ROM and make the GM come up with adventures for Rick Jones to have with a spaceknight? 

Of course, Rick Jones never had his own solo book, unlike Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen, who could have perfectly wonderful and bizarre adventures with the hook that he can summon the best hero in the world at a moment's notice with his watch as the ultimate get out of jail free card? 

I fully understand why this didn't survive into 2E, because it's a very specific character design. It's not like playing a proper "sidekick" who is just a younger version of the hero with a substantially similar power set. It's playing the normal person insert character. It's possible to play this in 2E, if you roll Pet or Animated Servant or in a pinch Vehicle, take any other rolls on the Skills table, and then define the Pet/Servant/Vehicle as a badass monster/hero/transformer who you tag along with, act as the front person for, do all the talking, whatever. It can be a hella fun design, but its not 10% of all PCs. 

How would this work in New Salem? Well either in the design I just set up where the PCs is the heroic investigator of some sort and their created by a power roll hero is a dark knight vigilante who shows up when needed to even the odds in a fight or escape - we already have one of those in Ernie Souchak, who could just become a PC - or you could build an all skills PC and state that they are the Serpico/Jim Gordon style one clean cop working in secret with the other PC heroes. Its an interesting angle. 

Eclipses and Heroes

First off, yesterday (4/8) I was lucky enough to be able to take the day off work and drive the older kiddo up to Vergennes, VT to be in the path of totality. Lovely little farm town, old school Main Street, pleasant people, amazing astronomical event. as XKCD put it, a partial solar eclipse is cool; inside totality it feels like someone broke the sky. 

Camera Phone, but still not bad

The whole event got me thinking about the Heroes TV show, which was a big hit in its first season, got crippled by both the writers strike and the creators attempt to broaden out to tell new characters stories that the audience rebelled against for the truncated season 2, and then limped along for a bit after that. 

Obviously (and of course I would say this), V&V 2.1 is the perfect game system for this sort of thing because a) you can base it on players easily if you want that real everyperson gets powers sense, b) you it scales really well for the 'normal to athletic person with 1 super power' setting (which is why I use it for Legion of Super-Heroes), and c) the random power generation works well for the sense that the powers aren't matched to the personality. 

The show worked in the first season due to the puzzle tension of the overlapping precognitions - the time/space manipulator both seeing the immediate nuclear explosion in the future and traveling back to warn against the events after that, and the canvases of the precognitive painter giving a different lens on those events and other smaller ones - providing a way for the audience to anticipate scenes, and the parallel conspiracy adding yet more puzzle pieces for the audience.

Several aspects of the longer plot were clearly adjusted on the fly - Mrs. Patrelli going from a grieving embarrassment shoplifting to feel alive to a key part of the conspiracy makes no sense when you binge watch it but you kind of forget when it was on weekly. 

Note that I keep saying "audience" because the nature of following a dozen or so characters who only all get in the same place at the same time in the last episode means the audience always knows more about what's happening than the players do. That, combined with the precognitive flashes and larger conspiracy, make the also want to run this in some form of Gumshoe. Mutant City Blues wouldn't quite work because so much of the power rules are making the powers things that can be forensically analyzed - critical for a police procedural, not so much for this - but the basic Gumshoe mechanic would be very helpful. 

Of course, this is a springboard for trying to merge some of the helpful bits of Gumshoe into V&V for New Salem, since unravelling a conspiracy and investigating the opposition is a core part of the New Salem design. Anyway, the first season of Heroes is pretty solid. watch it if you have some time. 

Earth 10: Metaphors and Comic Books

There are a couple of other things about the characters that I want to touch on.

Metaphor

First is that each one of the characters as a metaphor – some aspect of American life that they embody. This is a narrative device more than anything else, but it takes the place of ‘alignment’ in the classic super hero universe. (Another way of replacing alignment is having each hero represent a certain part of a group psyche, but everyone being a metaphor is a bit bigger than that, and the JAA is a game of big things).

In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about here, the idea of the metaphor is “being a superhuman is like being X”, with X variable for the setting. In the X-Men books it went from being a mutant is like being a teenager’ to ‘being a mutant is like being a member of a minority’ to, the Bryan Singer movies, ‘being a mutant is like being gay’. The 1980’s Teen Titans books are an even better example, where being a super-hero was like being in a parent child relationship, and everyone had a different flavor of it: Cyborg’s scientist dad so wanted him to become an engineer that he literally turned his son into a machine; Raven is the ultimate child of an abusive father; each of the characters can be mapped on a particular parent/child dynamic.

In any event, in this game being a member of the JAA is like being an American (as it should be, otherwise they’re just the Justice Alliance). Vigilante embodies the reconstruction amendments: he has spent 150 years fighting for voting rights and equal protection under the law. It’s what he does, it’s who he is.

Firestorm is the question of integration: His fusion of an older, foreign born Asian cultural archetype with a younger, native born, barely tied to his parent’s culture epitomizes the struggle to keep the cultural identity while embracing the American experience.

The Question is the obsession with Conspiracy Theory: you can’t understand the 20^th century without understanding the nature of conspiracy theory, the need to find connections and deeper truths.

Aquaman is the spirit of exploration – as with Star Trek where the aliens were really about human problems Aquaman is exploring a whole other realm but the aliens are humans.

Jason is still noodling on Superman’s metaphor right now (he’s been a Populist, an Immigrant, the Secular Humanist Savior, a Reagan Democrat and various other things depending on when it was). Secular Humanist Savior may come back, or the spirit of compromise, or Generation X.

Comic Book Titles

The other idea I’m playing with here is what comics the hero is appearing in that aren’t the Justice Alliance. These sorts of team books have heroes who have their own books and those who don’t, where those who don’t get more screen time and subplots because this is the only place they’re showing up. This is why in the Avengers we spend so much time with the Wasp and Ant Man relationship, or the Vision Scarlet Witch Quicksilver Wonder Man dynamic. It’s not as visible in Morrison’s run on JLA where six of the seven core heroes have their own book or books, but it was very evident in the Silver Age were the Hawks, Elongated Man, Zatanna and Red Tornado kept their subplots confined to JLA.

To capture that vibe in this game, as well as to bring in some more narrative mechanical ideas, is that players have scene framing chips that let them pull away from the GM’s planned plot (yes, I’m old school enough to still have one of those) for subplot scenes with another character. Given that these mechanics are designed to produce single session games most times I want to be able to limit the number of subplots kicking around to avoid subplot kudzu, so there can’t be a ton of these.

My original idea was that if the player chose to have their character appear in one or more other books they got extra character points to build them but fewer subplot chips – they have more potential spotlight for planned scenes but less spotlight time for subplots. The problem is this runs counter to the pretty smooth hero point mechanic that I already have, where the more powerful characters become more tightly constrained by negative hero points. That makes scenario plotting a ton easier and I refuse to give it up.

Since it’s a general reality that some players love emotionally powerful subplots and some see them as either awkward or a distraction from play we’re going to build on that. The player decides how many books their hero is in every month, and that does two things: First, It broadens their rogues’ gallery: More books equals more bad guys (6 per book, 3 or so callbacks and 3 new), and more things for the GM to draw on or call back to. Having your villains show up as part of the plot increases your spotlight time almost by definition. Second, tt determines their subplot tokens.

If your hero ONLY appears in JAA you start with one initiating token and one joining token. You are allowed to play your initiating token and frame a scene that includes anyone who has joining tokens left to spend. If your hero also stars in their own title you have a joining token but not an initiating one, and can be part of one other character’s subplot. If your hero stars in 2 or more books a month he doesn’t have either, and can’t/won’t be pulled into subplots – he’s the guy who is so busy he is never hanging around the base

If there aren’t any heroes with initiating tokens remaining then either you have no subplots or two or more players can initiate simultaneously with their joining tokens, sharing the scene framing and having a quick interpersonal scene.

Since this is entirely player driven I’m not stating anything about the starting heroes – if you have a group of players who all love subplots then none of them have their own books and they look like the Detroit era JLA. If everyone wants just pulse pounding action with no subplots then everyone is in their own book or books and there are no initiating tokens and few joiners, which looks like Morrison era JLA. If it’s an even mix then you’re in the Silver Age team where we watch Red Tornado muse about his humanity to the Hawks who worry about losing their culture white Zatanna starts dating the recently widowed Flash. It all depends on what your table dynamic is like. 

Earth 10: Powers

The original DC Heroes powers cost out was both logical and a little perverse. To explain, every power had an Active Point level to describe how potent it was, just like the stats and skills. (I’m calling this Potency because I’m a member of RUAGD, Remove Unnecessary Acronyms in Game Design.) It also had a Factor that, like the skills, determined how versatile the power was in a general framework, but that framework was pretty rigid – for instance all Defenses had a Factor of 5, whether they protected you against all physical damage (incredibly common) or just, say, Cold. Finally it had a Base Cost which was both an indicator of how rare this was in the DCU and how much more powerful it was than the baseline ability.

To give an idea on how this worked out, Cold Resistance and Skin Armor both had Factors of 5, but Cold Resistance had a base cost of 5 and Skin Armor was 50. In practice this meant you could by 1 AP of Skin Armor for what it cost to buy 8 AP of Cold Resistance. OK, that makes sense. But it also means that at 16 AP of Skin Armor you can buy… 16 AP of Cold Resistance. That’s perverse.

My solution is to loosen up the factor costs for the most common powers, of which I give plentiful examples below. Cold Resistance now would have a factor of 2, Skin Armor of 5, and Skin Armor would always be 2.5 times more expensive. It just feels better to me.

Base Cost is being renamed Scarcity, and it starts at 5. I’m charging a nominal fee for every power just to mark how they are different from skills, but otherwise the Scarcity cost is determined by the player who first buys the power (or the GM if I snag a power first) and it’s a way to flag the power as being something you want to be unique to your character. You’re essentially spending some character points to make sure that the world isn’t full of people who are just like you. The higher the scarcity, the more rare the power. Other characters have to pay that Scarcity to also have the power, but also it’s just a reminder to the GM to not go nuts with the power. Superman but a scarcity cost on his Time travel and his Super Breath because a) wants to not have a ton of time travel villains and b) super-breath is a Kryptonian ability. The Question put a high Scarcity on his Facial Chameleon so that disguising shape changers are rare and therefore people don’t defend against them, making the power more tactically useful.

Anyway, here is the base rules for most things; the rest Gms can pretty clearly ad hoc

Power Types	Description	Factor
Movement	Powers that add on to an existing movement with a special edge have a Factor of 1. The Potency does not determine speed, but some other aspect; like maximum height for Trickster's air-walking, or the amount you can carry with you for Vigilante's clinging.	1
Movement	Powers that accelerate existing human movement, i.e. Running and Swimming. Potency determines speed.	2
Movement	Powers that give you a whole new movement type, i.e. Flight and Tunneling. Potency determines speed and you will note that this has the same cost as putting a +1 factor add to the base movement.	3
Movement	Powers that give you a whole new movement type and let you evade obstacles or give you some other concrete advantage, i.e. Teleportation	4
Movement	Powers that can be used as an attack or defense on their own, such as Super-Speed or Warp Generation.	8
Movement	Powers that suffer a limitation on where they can be used, such as Superman's FTL Flight and Time Travel needing to be outside Earth's gravity well, or the Hawk's flight device needing to be in air. (And yes, you can usually 'fly' in water, but at -2 AP; because comics.)	-1
Combat	Powers that let you do more damage at no range, such as Claws. If another more versatile power has increased melee damage potential (such as Omni-Arm or Icing) this becomes a +1 to their Factor	1
Combat	Powers that let you do damage at range, such as Flame Projection or Lightning. You can always choose to use this as your damage in close combat as well.	3
Combat	If the power gives you a distinct, longer term advantage in combat, such as the ongoing damage of Poison Touch or the reduced healing of Disintegration, the Factor increases by 2 pts. This does not include helpful side effects like being able to melt things with flame projection or reduce fires with cold projection.	+2
Combat	If the attack power doesn't actually do damage you can reduce the Factor by 1 pt. This is for things like the blinding effect of Flash, or the fear effect of Aura of Fear.	-1
Combat	If the attack can have a radius or some other broader area (usually set at Potency-2 AP distance) increase the Factor by 2. This includes Flash and Super-Breath, for example.	+2
Combat	Very few powers let you modify your acting stat (Dex, Int, Infl), but if they do you REPLACE your Acting stat with the power, and it has a factor cost of +3. Normally you would buy a Combat skill with your super-powers, but doing it this way means it's not learned by you but that the power is innately more accurate.	+3
Combat	Just to math this out, the Questions fear gas starts out as working with no range (Factor 1) but has a radius (+2, now it's Factor 3). It does no damage (-1, now Factor 2) but gives a long term beneficial effect (+2, now Factor 4)
Defense	Your baseline defensive powers adds to your Resistance stats (Body, Mind, Spirit). Defenses cost more than attacks - This is in part to prioritize action over inaction, but also because attacks have two components in the hitting and the damaging.
Defense	Narrow defensive powers, such as resisting Cold, or Gas, or Fear, or Mental Detection, have a factor of 2	2
Defense	If you broaden that a little, such as Temperature, Gas/Radiation, Emotion Manipulation or Mental Detection and Mind Reading , increase the Factor to 3.	3
Defense	If the power defends against an even broader array, such as kinetic attacks, energy, elemental magic, all mental controls, etc. increase the factor to 4	4
Defense	If the power defends against everything in a particular realm - all Physical, Mental or Spiritual - increase the factor to 5. This was where the original game factored nearly all defenses. Now, if you already have a high body this is kinda irrelevant, but it's a cheaper way to be able to bounce attacks but not soak as much of what gets through.	5
Defense	If the defense lets you soak more rather than resist more, such the ability to keep acting even if at 0 Body from the Hawk's Mind over Matter has a Factor of 1	1
Defense	If the Defense lets you recover faster (which people underestimate how damn useful this is) in one realm it has a Factor cost of 5. Increase it to 7 for two realms and 8 for all three. Your AP determine how much more often you get to make recovery checks	5+
Defense	If you can use the power to defend someone else in 0 AP (5'), increase the factor cost by 1	+1
Defense	If you can use the power to defend someone else at AP range, increase the factor by 3	+3
Defense	If the defense carries a touch range counter attack (such as icing, which only protects against cold but damages anyone who touches you) increase the cost by 2. This is more expensive than the usual no range attack because it is assumed to not cost you any time to do	+2
Defense	If the defense carries a ranged counter attack, such as a mental field that damages people making psychic combat, or an energy pulse that lances back up a ranged attack, increase the cost by 4	+4
Defense	If the defense offers some other tangible advantage, such as the ability to go extended periods without breathing from Sealed Systems (otherwise it's Gas/Rad defense) or the ability to pass through solid objects like Dispersal increase factor by 2	+2
Defense	If the defense has some special vulnerability (such as Armor that protects vs. everything except Fire) or requirement (Vigilante' Inevitable comeback only works when he's unconscious) reduce the Factor by 1	-1
Defense	If you can't attack at all while using the defense reduce the factor by 2	-2
Defense	If you can't attack in the realm you're defending against while using the defense, reduce the factor by 1	-1
Senses	Sensory powers that increase one of your existing senses generally have a Factor cost of 1 - telescopic or microscopic vision, ultrasonic, super-sensitive of long distance hearing, hyper-sensitive touch or taste, analytical/tracking scent all fall into this category.	1
Senses	Sensory powers that let you do something really weird - under your control - have a Factor of 3. This is x-ray vision, precognition, clairsentience and other things that seriously change your sensory array	3
Senses	Sensory powers that let you do something really weird but that are under the GMs control, such as Cosmic Awareness or Precognitive Dreaming and other things that feed story clues ave a Factor of 1	1
Senses	To save space on the character sheets I lump as many of these as possible together under a single power and add up the factor costs. Hence Superman's telescopic microscopic, x-ray vision + his super ultrasonic hearing have a combined Factor of 7

Earth 10: Skills

I want the skills to be pretty broadly defined, but in the main they work by replacing the acting, effect or resistance stat with a similar aspect of the skill. This means, theoretically, that skills also need three ratings; not sure on that. But the applications of skills are pretty simple – if you’re trying something that is covered by the skill, use the skill instead of your stat.

I went through a designed a new list focused on what the character is trying to do, rather than necessarily how they do it, with a several different information gathering skills to go along with the combat and action skills. 

New Name	Factor	used for
Acrobatics	5	You may replace your Dex with Acrobatics for climbing, or your Influence to impress people with a gymnastics routine. If you choose to dodge in combat you may replace your Dex with Acrobatics for defense. When taking damage from falls you may replace your Body with Acrobatics to resist being hurt.
Combat	5	Pick one combat technique (such as Unarmed, Medieval weapons, Asian weapons, Firearms, Archery, etc.); you may use your AP in the skill to replace Dex or Str (or the base weapon damage) or Body (indicating parrying, blocking & rolling with attacks to reduce damage) each round. You may also buy it more than once to have skill in more than one technique, or increase the factor (by 3) to replace 2 stats a round
Connive	5	This is skill with deceptive thievery - it covers picking pockets, slight of hand, disguise, impersonation, forgery, grifting and other techniques. You may replace your Dexterity with this skill for any slight of hand, replace Int/ Will for producing forgeries or faked documents, and Infl/Aura when trying to disguise or impersonate. This can also be rolled to find contacts in the fields you're skilled at.
Influence	7	This skill lets you change people's decisions or behavior through social interaction. Replace your Infl/Aura with the skill when trying to convince people to do something. This can be becauser you're heartfelt and earnest or scary as hell (Superman v. Batman) but the mechanics are the same. This should not be used to do a 'tell me everything' to replace the Interview skill.
Interview	5	This is the skill for gathering information from talking to people, and it replaces your Infl/Aura when you do so. It functions a lot like Investigate but for people rather than things. It's not just getting people to talk but getting them to say things they don't realize they know, remember things they had thought were irrlevant, to expland upon their prior statements, and apply their own expertise to the questions at hand.
Intrusion	5	This is the ability to move about undetected and enter places despite security systems. You may replace your Dexterity with Intrusion when trying to avoid being spotted (normally this is Dex/Dex roll against potential observers Int/Will). You can replace your Int and Will with Intrusion as needed to spot and circumvent locks, traps and security systems. You can use Thief in place for Dex/Str to fit through tight places or escape binding.
Invention	8	This skill lets you invent things that mirror super-powers (and heck, doesn't everything mirror super-powers if you look at it hard enough?) It comes in three flavors - Gadgeteer for technological devices, Enchanter for magical devices and Ritual for ritual magic spells (which don't need a device but do need time). They let you replace you Int/Will or Infl/Aura with Invention when doing that creation, or when exploring how devices operate, and it can also be rolled to find contacts. You can buy this more than once (magical types often do).
Investigate	5	This is the key skill for analyzing clues and drawing accurate conclusions. It has several different types (Forensics for police procedure, Science for a flavor of high tech review, Divination for a check of magical factors) which each need to be purchased separately - science should then be flavored a bit for your preferred science. You may replace your Int/Will (or Infl/Aura for Divination) with Investigate when trying to figure out what happened somewhere and how it relates to the crime/mystery - each type will have differing situational efficacy. This Skill can also be rolled to find contects in the fields you're skilled at.
Medicine	5	This skill lets you heal damage to another character, and comes in three types - Physical, Mental and Spiritual - indicating the difference between biology, psychology & philosophy. You start with just one, and each you add increases the Factor by 1. This covers short term 'field' medicine, medium term 'surgery' and long term recovery, as well as giving you contacts in the fields of medicine.
Profession	3	This skill lets you do a job; you get to pick the job - reporter, soldier, truck driver, florist, insurance adjuster, lawyer, whatever - and replace any stats needed with the Profession skill when you use it. What Profession can't do is overlap any of the other skills, so if you job is as a police detective you likely also need Investigate and Interview, but those are the breaks. You may also use this skill when trying to find contacts in your field.
Vehicles	3	You may replace your Dex with Vehicles for operating one vehicle type (land, sea, air, space, animal). You may replace your Int and Will (or Infl and Aura) with the skill when it comes to repairing and modifying (or healing and training) the vehicles. You may add additional vehicle types at a +1 Factor for each (having all 5 is Factor 8)