The Training Room (Discussion)

We need rules for a training room, so let's get them hacked out here.

Maximum Occupency: 8, plus any on an adventure in a training room.

Opponents: NPCs, either based on known abilities of opponents, or the Inconic Heroes from the M&M 2.0 book

Damage: Injuries from an aborted training fight (left to do a mission) will be halved. Bruise damage will be removed completely.

Recruiting: The training mission can be aborted. However, those in the ready room have first crack at joining.

Judging: Salix is being volunteered for will volunteer to be the training room judge for now.

Threads: The Training room is it's own thread. Adventures that deal with a training room will be seperate.

Adventures: Yes, but idealy they should not be a common thing to have adventures based around the Training Room.

Experience/PP awards: No, unless it is in an actual adventure.
Input is much appreciated.

Maximum Occupency: I think there should be one. Maybe 6 or 8. Occupents MUST be approved, either way.

Opponents: I think that initialy there should be only PCs, but I could see allowing for robotic or hollographic opponents.

Damage: I'm either for simulated damage, or real damage that can be healed fairly quickly.

Recruiting: Current precident is that you aren't available (You're not in the Ready Lounge), though that was more an excuse for me to not have my own character run in a game. At the moment, I don't think it should be a problem to recruit from there, but I'd ultimately rather not allow it in the furture. If you're ready, you're in the ready room. If not, you're not.

Judging: I wouldn't mind electing a single training room judge to manage and rule over that thread. As for dice rolls, I think either the Judge takes care of it, or we use Invisible Castle.

Threads: Single thread.

Adventures: I think adventures should be banned from there, or at least from using it as a focus point of the adventure. The "Training Room problem" adventure is too overdone in my oppinion.

Experience/PP awards:No, if we allow a training room, it's now allowing awards.

Overall: I'd be worried about letting characters duke it out here, or at least letting them do it whenever they want, as I don't want Living Supers to turn into a "Let's create heroes to fight" environment. So any way we can allow this to be used without encouraging all non-adventuring players to be in here on a constant basis is a good thing.

Maximum Occupency: I think we should have a "maximum designed occupancy" set by the UN, meaning that the place is designed for training scenarios of no more than X occupants. Of course, under special circumstances, the actual limit of how many bodies can cram in there should be much higher.

Opponents: I see this heading very strongly in the direction of robotic opponents, with PC vs. PC in both canned scenarios ("Ok, Magnetron, in this exercise, you'll be playing the part of Grimlock. Use this device to simulate his disintegrator ray..."). Also PC vs. PC to hash out intra-team conflicts, etc.

Damage: Oh, definitely real (but non-lethal) damage, normal healing. Lethal damage allowed in the "Training Room Problem" scenarios (and I agree with Bront, these need to be limited). Healing shouldn't be a problem, given the passage of time...if someone completes a scenario in the Training Room, then enough game time should pass in the Ready Room before their next adventure to heal them up completely. If an adventure starts in the Training Room and continues outside of it ("No wonder Superspinner was hurt...one of Evilor's henchmen tampered with that training robot...let's go get him!"), then the GM controls the amount of healing between the training room and the rest of the adventure.

Recruiting: Generally, no. Any significant training exercise is a mini-adventure in itself, or part of a larger adventure. We might make an exception for PC-initiated training...that's something to talk about.

Judging: I agree with Bront on this one.

Threads: I agree with Bront, this should be a single thread. HOWEVER, it might be that more than one activity could be going on in there at once. We might consider a second thread for that.

Adventures: I think we should allow adventures to happen patially or completely in the Training Room, but there should be a clear understanding that adventure proposals requiring the use of the Training Room will receive extra scrutiny from the adventure judges. Meaning, you might be required to remove the Traning Room scenes from your adventure, or that it will be disapproved completely just to keep the Training Room from being overused, or maybe there'll be a limit of X number of adventures taking place in the Training Room per year.

Experience/PP awards:If a GM runs a scenario in the Training Room, then that GM should be able to award experience. Simple PC vs. PC stuff should award NO experience, no matter how strenuous it gets.

Overall: If we find there is too much PC vs. PC stuff for our tastes, we can always require PC's to reserve a slot in the Training Room...meaning, there's a sign-up sheet managed by some UN flunky.

Maximum Occupency: Max 6. It might be slow enough like that.

Opponents: It could be PC vs PC, PC vs. NPC or PC vs. canned PC...

Damage: Agree with El-Jefe

Recruiting: I think the people in the training room should have an access to a commlink to the Recruitment room. Which mean that someone can leave the simulation if something is happening in the training room. I wouldn't like to see an adventure recruitment passing and miss it because I am stuck in a simulation when the adventure will give PP and not the simulation.

Judging: One judge could be fine at condition it wouldn't prevent the judge to using the room (only exception of a judge judging himself) as there is no award at the end, it should be ok. All dice rolls on invisible castle.

Threads: Single thread.

Adventures: Honestly, I don't mind, as long as it doens't become an habit from master to use it, but one adevnture in there, partially, why not.

Experience/PP awards: If there should be an award, it should become a mission. nothing prevent someone to create a mission that happen in a training room.

My rational for not allowing missions in the training room: "Gee, I'm bored, and there are 4 of us in the training room. We should make a Training Room mission just for the heck of it."

My Maximum Occupancy is for people outside of a mission. I have no problems with missions exceeding that (or using other training rooms, etc).

And experience should be limited to approved missions, so barring the training room being used in a mission (and therefore, seperated from others), no experience for using it. I firmly believe that.

Once we get a little more feedback, I'll try to draw up a better proposal.

My worry about recruiting in the training room is it then becomes a "Why should I leave the training room?" scenerio. Not that I like limiting recruiting (We still need more game masters btw), but I think the RP in the ready room is a good thing as well. I guess that's something we can address later if/when it becomes a problem.

For missions, I was more thinking to allow to have a mission that use the training room more than having in the training room (Subtility in the words... a scenario in teh tarining room, nope. A technician stuck in the room when it starts on dealy mode... why not? A group of villain invade the headquater and use the training room as a mission? Classic, and classic are good if not ubused.) But as usual, a mission must first be approved and such mission would need a better review from the judge before having a chnace to be accepted.

For the "Why should I leave the training room?" scenario will be changed by the "Why should I go to the training room?" if we don't allow recruitment when you are in the training room. And also, how much time have you seen in a comic that the action start in the danger room and suddenly, all dissapear. "Kids, we have a problem, come up here." and how much time have you seen "Sorry, but you won't have the help of Wolverine, he is too occupied at destroying our danger room."

Reading over the last couple of posts, I think all the concerns can be met with a couple of rules:

1. No PP awarded in the Training Room unless someone is on an approved mission.
2. Missions run in whole or in part in the Training Room must have (judges opinion) sufficient justification. "Just because", "We're bored", or "I think it would be cool" isn't enough.

Okay, here's my input...

Maximum Occupency: 6-8 sounds fair to me

Opponents: I think PC vs. PC should be allowed. PC's vs. NPC's (monsters/villians from the back of the book) should be fine.

Damage: Non-lethal damage that is auto healed unless it's part of an actual approved mission, then it has to heal like normal. Maybe if the character is damaged too badly, they HAVE TO return to the ready lounge for a bit before they can come back and practice more in the training room.

Recruiting: 'What happens when you're in Training and there is Recruiting?' The klaxon goes off and the red alert lights come on and everybody gets summoned to the ready lounge to hear about the latest emergency. I think you can get some good RPing done in the training room as well as the ready lounge and I for one wouldn't mind some practice using the combat rules before being in an actual mission.

Judging: One judge sounds good. Unless it becomes a burden and needs to be passed around sometimes. Dice rolling could be Invisible Castle or whatever.

Threads: One thread for the non-mission training room stuff. If an approved adventure starts in or uses the training room in it's scenario, that should be in the seperate adventure thread as usual.

Adventures: Again, adventures should be possible (if approved as usual) that use the training room for all or some of it. But not just having people in there messing around and call the fighting of robots or holograms an adventure.

Experience/PP awards: Not for practice runs. But if it's an approved adventure that happens to be in the training room some or all the time, then yes experience is awarded just like any other adventure.

Maximum Occupency: ??? (Should there be a max?)Up to 8

Opponents: Only PCs? Will there be other potential simulations?
I initially thought of only having robotic or holographic opponents that are based on known villains and threats. Maybe the real villain can do more than the UN knows so all of their powers might not be revealed. A good example is the big rock elemental mentioned in the LS background. He could be rolled up, put in a “for GM eyes” only thread (Rogues Gallery) and then used for training. I have a villain in mind that figures into one of my NPC’s background. As we have adventures we would get a bigger pool of known threats.
I don’t think it is a good idea to have PC vs. PC combat, especially since not everyone is at the same level. It will lead to hard feelings for at least one person, and I don’t think we need that on the board.



Damage: How will damage be handled? Is it all simulated? Is it real but there is real healing? Is it real and you just have to live with it for a day?
This would depend on if the threat was holographic or a robot. Robotic: it’s real, holographic: not real

Recruiting: What happens when you're in Training and there is Recruiting?
Training room shuts down and recruitment announcement goes out to the people in the room.

Judging: Will there need to be a Ready Room judge? How will rolling be handled?
I really think we should have one person as a judge, dice should probably be IC

Threads: Should there be a single training room thread? One for each encounter?
Single thread-encounters should be short. If they overlap, just put the encounter name in the title.

Adventures: Should we allow adventures to take place in there? I wouldn’t it’s not a very rich environment compared to having the whole US with the issues of protecting civilians, introduction of new villains, etc.

Experience/PP awards: Should we allow them? NO
I echo what Bront says here:
Overall: I'd be worried about letting characters duke it out here, or at least letting them do it whenever they want, as I don't want Living Supers to turn into a "Let's create heroes to fight" environment. So any way we can allow this to be used without encouraging all non-adventuring players to be in here on a constant basis is a good thing.

My original idea was really straight up combat against simulated enemies rather than PC vs. PC. Nothing too elaborate, but a good training ground for new GMs and Players alike who have used the rules yet. I do think we can do some decent roleplaying in there. It would also eliminate a lot of the “what can you do” stuff before a mission, it makes sense that the PCs would be training together before heading out to the real thing.

So, what I'm getting from people so far is...

Maximum Occupency: 6-8

Opponents: Mixed, most like NPCs, some dislike PCs specificly.

Damage: It's healed when you leave the room (Barring being recruited?)

Recruiting:You're elegable.

Judging: One Judge should be ok, Invisable Castle for dice rolls.

Threads: Single thread.

Missions: If they're accepted as proposals..

Experience/PP awards: Only on missions.

Click to expand...

Specifics I'd like to address:

Damage/Recruiting: How's this. If you're wounded in the training room and in the middle of a combat, half of your wounds heal and the rest must be delt with in the adventure. Since in general, nothing stronger than bruising will be allowed in the training room, it shouldn't be too bad.

On the opponent issue, I am trying to figure out a good in game reason to allow for NPCs in there. I think limiting it to interPC sparing might be ok, assuming it was run well. However, I'd worry about potential hard fealings as well (And don't want to turn this into a "My character can beat up your character) match.