M&M First Session- Advice Needed

[buzz]

Good stories.

In the Champions campaign I've been in, my PC has to regularly deal with:

• A son who's starting to manifest powers
• An ex-wife who finds this idea abhorrent
• Residual relationship stuff with said ex-wife
• Growing into his role as leader of his super-team
• Trying to handle PR for said team, which all too often causes a lot of damage
• Skin cancer that's mutating
• Working on improvements to his power armor
• A budding romance with a super from another city
• The catastrophe of the week

All the best supers comics deal with the characters' personal lives. They deal with battles both internal and external.

My advice is to start the campaign with an adventure that helps to bring the PCs together (a comic staple). Then, let them grow as a team, each finding their niche in the group. Set up interesting master villains that pop up now and again. Let individual adventures have repecrussions.

Basically, don't look at it like a spandex dungeon-crawl. Look at it like real life complicated by being a person who runs around in tights fighting crime.

 

[DMScott]

My problem is this: how do I run a superhero campaign such that it doesn't become monotonous (i.e., simply a series of encounters/challenges)? What kind of roleplay is there in which a group of superheroes would want to participate?

The more important question is what sort of roleplay do the players want to participate in(1)? If you pick up a few issues of just about any team-based comic book, you'll find a ton of non-combat stuff going on that can easily fit into a campaign - most comic books have a lot of soap opera in them. It's mostly a matter of what the players are interested in.

Some ideas:

- in Ultimate X-Men, the characters have to deal with being the focus of prejudice and at times genocide, being the agents of a utopian agenda that they often doubt, and all the usual angst that goes with high-school age kids. All on top of the usual world-beating villains.

- in Fantastic Four, the fact that the group are a family is always in the background, and often in the foreground - it's not uncommon for them to have to deal with emotionally-charged family issues in the middle of superheroics. There's also a subtext of being outcasts due to their powers (particularly for the Thing).

- in JSA, the team is a mix of older (i.e. middle-aged) heroes from the Golden Age, and younger heroes carrying on the legacy of other Golden Age heroes. The older heroes have to deal with their role as living icons, the way the world has changed around them, the realization that the youngsters actually have a lot to teach them, etc. The younger heroes have to deal with age issues, with living up to their legacies, with the opinions of those who have met multiple versions of the same hero, and so on.

Other teams have their own issues, some the same and some distinct to each team. The trick is to find out what kind of non-combat play your players are interested in, and then work the campaign concept and playstyle around that. If your players want to be the World's Greatest Heroes and deal with the pressures of saving the world and high-level politics, they'll be disappointed if the campaign features outcast teenagers hunted by every government agency, so finding a fit is important.

(1) Refusing to end a sentence with a preposition is the sort of teachery nonsense up with which I will not put.

 

[Faerl'Elghinn]

Basically, don't look at it like a spandex dungeon-crawl. Look at it like real life complicated by being a person who runs around in tights fighting crime.

Precisely my aim. These examples are setting my gears into motion. I don't want to "steal" anything, I just need a good swift kick in the right direction. Without any real experience with the genre from which to draw, I need to assimilate the experiences of others in order to flesh out my campaign to my satisfaction. Thanks to everyone who has contributed thus far- I'm much further along with my plot devices than I was a few hours ago.

 

[Faerl'Elghinn]

(1) Refusing to end a sentence with a preposition is the sort of teachery nonsense up with which I will not put.

hehe... Sorry, the pathetic attempts at proper English sentence structure are a habit with which I cannot easily part...

 

[Thotas]

What you're looking at is some decision making that every campaign goes through, you're just a little thrown by the unique spin of the genre. Every group's roleplaying is dependant on the set-up, as others have more or less been saying.

D&D type games have been around long enough we all know the standards there, but supers haven't been as popular so the reference is not so common. Previous poster made a remark about a set-up like the Justice League, where no one has much of a personality ... not quite true. In the JLA, most of the characters have independant adventures that focus more on their personalities and plotlines. It complicates the comics a lot less for readers, writers and editors if that sort of thing is left "at home" and JLA adventures focus on big time threats while trying not to be inconsitent with the regular title material.

So if your group is pretty much independant of each other when they aren't helping each other vs. the villians, you either have less roleplaying or you have individual sessions that focus more on roleplaying (but of course can still have plenty of adventure).

Otherwise, you need to have an organizing principle so that the heroes have a reason to be around each other in times not of crisis. It's a question of which limitations you want to live with.

 

[DMScott]

...I find myself leaning more towards a world where superheroes/villains are extremely rare, and anything even remotely smacking of phenomenal cosmic power would be national (read: National Enquirer) news.

Maybe the superheroes could have met through the internet or somesuch, and just fly around the world defeating evil wherever it rears its ugly head? Then they wouldn't have such a problem with the local population discovering their true identities...

Another option: in the Marvel and DC universes, one of the reasons superheroes and supervillains do all the classic comic book bits (like costumes, secret identities, having over the top villains who are associated with a particular hero they try to best, etc.) is because of tradition - super-powered types have been around since at least WWII, and the current generation is just carrying on.

In a world without that tradition, supers could well do things differently. More modern takes on a superpowered world often have:

- linked origins - everybody who has superpowers gets them in much the same way, rather than the zillion different power sources of Marvel and DC.

- uniforms instead of costumes - those supers with distinctive costumes are often part of an organization related to their origin, and wear functional uniforms (with some armour, standard gadgetry, a similar look, etc.) rather than spandex costumes. Supers outside of those organizations often create outfits inspired by military garb.

- full-time supers. Supers probably don't juggle a normal life and also crimefight; they probably conceal their identity, but any normal life they maintain is just a cover for their super activities.

- competing agendas rather than heroes and villains. Both the bad guys and the good guys are pushing their own ideals, and fighting people who oppose those ideals. Which are the bad guys is determined by the nature of the agendas and the lengths to which each side will go in defense of theirs - to those caught in the crossfire, it might be hard to tell whose wearing the white hats.

- conspiracies run rampant. Even though the supers are often associated with an organization, they usually can't fully trust anybody. Businesses, espionage organizations, governments, and so on all have their own agendas, and outsiders or contractors are rarely privy to what's REALLY going on.

In the Champions genre book (for the Hero system, but with a lot of material that applies to any superhero RPG) campaigns that focus on these sorts of issues are called Iron Age, in contrast with the more four-colour Golden Age and Silver Age campaigns (Freedom City is pretty much a Silver Age setting). If this is the sort of game you and your players prefer, you can come up with a lot of RP material by looking at each point and fleshing it out a bit. If the PCs are an independent group of supers, various organizations will certainly be interested in them - how do they keep B.I.G. Megacorp or the FGSA (Faceless Government Security Agency) from messing around in their lives? What do they do if they find out those organizations have been manipulating them in various ways? Or if the PCs work for the FGSA, what happens when a nosy reporter starts snooping around, or they get an anonymous tip that the FGSA is not being straight with them?

And so on. The roleplay elements should follow from the sort of campaign you and your players enjoy. I find the best ideas occur when the players ask the questions and the GM runs with it... that can make the PCs believe they've stumbled onto a subtle and far-reaching plot when in fact the links are only there because they speculated about them after last weeks' session.

 

[buzz]

DMScott, I've been toying with an "Iron Age" concept like this for a little while. I'd like to try a game where the PCs are basically the *first* supers the world has ever seen. The event that triggers their origin is essentially something that happens around when they were born. Ergo, we're looking at the dawn of the first generation of supers. Most of the fun would simply be how the world reacts.

 

[DMScott]

Yeah, Buzz, I know what you mean - it's an attractive concept. Greg Bear has a novel called "Darwin's Radio" that puts modern humanity right in the middle of a very sudden speciation event, that ultimately results in a new generation of a new human-like species being born. It's a neat read, because the general idea is very comic bookish at heart, but he approaches it from the point of view of how the government, competing scientists, political pressure groups, and so on all react. There's a sequel, but I haven't read it - the first one has given me a bunch of ideas for modern day supers and government reaction to same, and the sequel seems to portray the next generation in a more scientifically plausible manner than I usually like my supers .

White Wolf had a superhero game called "Aberrant" that's recently been released in a d20 version. The rules are a little clunky, but more than half the book is background, and that background is all centered around a worldwide event in 1998 that triggers supers - it's got some interesting (and stealable) ideas. IIRC, Marvel's "New Universe" used a similar idea, the normal world went through a "white event" in the early-mid 1980s that made super powers possible - mostly wasn't well executed, unfortunately.

I've also got some random notes on an iron age setting, but it doesn't rely on a single event to grant powers. Instead, clandestine government organizations and age-old secret societies have always worked on things beyond the knowledge of mortal men, but in the past it's all been kept fairly hush-hush. The advent of the information age has made it harder and harder to keep such secrets, so one govenment agency has finally decided to go public and introduce a team of meta-powered agents to the world. So for a while, they're the world's only publically-known supers, but that doesn't last and they soon become aware that there's a whole clandestine network out there...

My power categories are pretty much the usual super-soldier ideas - genetic modification, cybernetics, nanotechnology, and ancient training secrets that unlock human potential. I'm thinking of having some magic available as well, as a source of power that's an even deeper secret - some shadowy Illuminati-style organizations that run all the "lesser" conspiracies to further their own agendas.

 

[WayneLigon]

DMScott, I've been toying with an "Iron Age" concept like this for a little while. I'd like to try a game where the PCs are basically the *first* supers the world has ever seen. The event that triggers their origin is essentially something that happens around when they were born. Ergo, we're looking at the dawn of the first generation of supers. Most of the fun would simply be how the world reacts.

I finished a mini-campaign based on that premise a few months ago.

There's a nice campaign-in-a-box in an online issue of Pyramid where the PC's are super-powered persons in the neolithic past. That would be very cool.

 

[buzz]

White Wolf had a superhero game called "Aberrant" that's recently been released in a d20 version.

Yeah, Aberrant did come to mind as I was writing. My campagn would be a little less filled with postmodern angst, though.