Steve Kenson's ICONS: Superpowered Roleplaying from Adamant Entertainment

[Relique du Madde]

Here's one character I randomly created...

[sblock="The Marbro"]
The Marbro
Origin: Transformed

PROWESS: 3
COORDINATION: 4
STRENGTH: 5
INTELLECT: 6
AWARENESS: 5
WILLPOWER: 5

STAMINA: 10
DETERMINATION: 2

POWERS:
* Elemental Control (Shape Earth, Attacking, Defending): 7
* Device: Hammer ([Bashing] Strike): 4
* Alternate Form (Stone): 7


SPECIALTIES:
Art (Sculpture), Weapons (Bludgeons), Martial Arts

ASPECTS:
Catchphrase "You can't phase a bother who's as Hard as a rock."
Epithat: "Construction Crusader"
Motivation: To take down the mob.
Connections: The Masons.

CHALLENGES
Enemy: The Mob.
"Stone cold."
Permanent Stone Form.

BACKGROUND:
James Tyrone Smith, was a bad mamba-jamba who was into the industrial arts and spent his free time working in construction. One day, Jame's life came to a crashing stop when the mob decided to make an example of James by tossing him into a cement mixer after his foreman refused to pay protection money.

That day, James Tyrone Smith became the Marbro![/sblock]

 

[mxyzplk]

d6-d6 always worked out great in Feng Shui. It has some huge advantages:

1. The average roll is equal to your skill. Therefore you know that if you have a skill of 10, on average you can accomplish a task of difficulty 10. This is very valuable for transparency.

2. Subtraction isn't that much harder than addition, and certainly not harder than multiple additions. We always used a green die for good and a red die for bad and bang, takes half a second. Feng Shui was designed to be a really fast action combat game.

3. The two die thing was also great in that rolls were more normalized than a flat d20 kind of roll, but not as much as 3d6 or more extreme methods. (Plus, in Feng Shui, the dice could explode, so you could have more than a +5/-5 swing).

I ran plenty of FS convention games and "this one minus that one" never required additional explanation.

Heck, if I wasn't sold on ICONS now, hearing it uses a mechanic similar to the one I loved in FS and wished more people would use has cinched it.

 

[mxyzplk]

Heh, I have a kid too, so I did some quick dice trials over breakfast. Eight year old girl just done with second grade.

"Try rolling each of these kinds of dice three times and tell me the sums, I'll time you. Then tell me which ones you thought were easier."

None of the methods took a "long time" even when an interesting part of the cartoons that were also playing was on. Short means about 2 seconds, medium means about 4 seconds, long means about seconds.

Results in the order she rated them as "easy:"
Dice pool: 5d6, count 4+ as successes: ranked as easiest, was one of the slowest methods though
d6-d6: 1d6 (green) - 1d6 (red) + skill of 5. Took a short amount of time.
2d6 (pips): 2d6 (with pips) plus a skill of 5. Took a short amount of time.
d20: d20 + skill of 5. One error (no errors were made with other methods), was medium speed.
2d6 (numbers): 2d6 + skill of 5. I did this on a whim because I had both kinds of d6es, and strangely ones printed with numbers were considered harder than ones with pips (I imagine because "counting up" is easy and probably practiced in school at this age). Took a short amount of time.
3d6: Add 3d6, compare to skill of 5. Considered hardest and took the longest.

So interestingly, speed != sense of easiness != error rate.

When I asked "So if daddy was to make a game for you to play in, what of those ways was your favorite?" the answer was "the one with the good die minus the bad die." When asked if she knows why, she says "Not really, I just like it and it's pretty cool."

So perhaps preferring specific dice methods is genetic is what we've determined here.

 

[Punnuendo]

The mechanic itself comes from the system's basis in FATE/FUDGE. In those games you roll 4 FUDGE dice which are six sides with two minus signs, two plus signs, and two blank sides apiece. You roll the four of them and add up all four, generating a number from -4 to +4 with distribution heavily weighted towards the middle. An alternate way of doing that has often been the 1d6-1d6 method which gives the -5 to +5 distribution and is much less weighted towards the middle. Which for a supers game probably makes the most sense.

 

[mxyzplk]

That FUDGE dice nonsense is one of the main reasons the system languished away in obscurity for like ten years. Needlessly cutesy.

 

[Punnuendo]

I don't know, I think the slightly more free-form and narrative style of the game has a lot more to do with it not being super mainstream (for gaming anyway) than the dice mechanics.

 

[Woas]

Actually it was JoeBlank who ran me through chargen. Hopefully I'm not leaving anything out... I'll try to follow Relique du Madde's outline.

Zukitata
Origin: Alien/Not From Earth

PROWESS: 7
COORDINATION: 5
STRENGTH: 7
INTELLECT: 3
AWARENESS: 4
WILLPOWER: 2

STAMINA: 9
DETERMINATION: 2/7(Good Luck)

POWERS:
* Life Drain: 4
* Probability Control (Good Luck): 7


SPECIALTIES:
Martial Arts, Acrobatics

ASPECTS:
Motivation: Armsmaster (another person's character) sworn defender
Quality: Anime hair

CHALLENGES
Temptation: Earth woman.
Health Issue: Insatiable appetite.

BACKGROUND:
Zukitata came to earth with a many-armed robot killing machine named Armsmaster which he must protect. He is a super saiyin emo vampire. I really didn't put too much thought into this, it was just a sample character.

 

[JoeBlank]

Actually it was JoeBlank who ran me through chargen.

Glad to see this character posted. We ran thru chargen in chat, and neither of the two players had seen the rules at all. Even with having to explain things it went pretty quickly.

That reminds me of a question: If you are running a "pick-up" game of ICONS, where you are going to introduce the game to several new players, roll up characters and then play a session, would you roll up the characters together ("now everone roll 2d6 and tell me the results" etc.) or would you roll up the characters one at a time? Anyone have actual experience with doing this, either live, in chat or PbP?

 

[jaerdaph]

That reminds me of a question: If you are running a "pick-up" game of ICONS, where you are going to introduce the game to several new players, roll up characters and then play a session, would you roll up the characters together ("now everone roll 2d6 and tell me the results" etc.) or would you roll up the characters one at a time? Anyone have actual experience with doing this, either live, in chat or PbP?

You could probably have the players roll up their characters at the same time, everybody rolling for abilities, number of powers and number of specialties, then go "round robin" concentrating on one character at a time for picking powers, picking specialties and coming up with aspects (qualities and challenges). Having a familiarity with other characters by doing it together will not only save some time, but facilitate the next step: team creation.

 

[jaerdaph]

That FUDGE dice nonsense is one of the main reasons the system languished away in obscurity for like ten years. Needlessly cutesy.

I'm glad they chose to use standard d6s for Icons instead of ultra-specialty FUDGE dice - everyone has d6s lying around. And unless you've played RPGs before, odds are you don't have d20s lying around either.