FINAL DAYS! -- The Awfully Cheerful Engine on Kickstarter! An action comedy RPG inspired by cheerful tabletop games of the 80s! With a foreword by Sandy 'Ghostbusters' Petersen, and VTT support!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8250158" data-attributes="member: 6785785">[USER=6816042]@Arilyn[/USER] I recently finished up a pretty long series of a super hero game using the Blades in the Dark system. So much superhero fiction has the heroes being very reactive  (threat then response), but Story Now requiring proactive players, it can seem like a bit of a mismatch. But, you just have to shift your thinking a bit. For me, I leaned on how Blades in the Dark functions quite a bit, and then used that to help in how I approached the fiction. So I established some villainous factions and then gave each one a goal of some sort. Based on the scope/scale of the goal, I created a clock, the greater the scope, the larger the clock. Then I thought about what each step in that clock might be. I didn't commit to all this, just kind of kept it in mind as an approach. So for example, I had a villain called Volt (blatantly ripped off of Spider-Man’s Electro) and I gave him the goal of “Absorbing All the Electricity in the City”. This seems to me like a pretty straightforward goal for him, without a lot of complexity, but I want to give it some space to develop and for the PCs to potentially get involved at different points, so I’ll make it an 8 segment clock.  So looking at that as a comic book arc with some rough stages, I can see it something like this:1 - Volt realizes he can absorb electricity2-4 - There are localized brown-outs as Volt hits power plants to drain their power5-7 - Volt’s power level becomes dangerous- his scale/potency have now increased and his powers are amplified. I increase his Tier to 2.8- The city loses all power as Volt drains it dry; his scale/potency increases again and he is now dangerously out of controlAgain, this is very loose and is kind of a vague notion of how things will go unless the PCs get involved. I don’t introduce the clock until it makes sense to do so. I then present some chances for them to get involved in this in some way. In between sessions, active clocks get advanced by a roll based on faction tier. Some clocks are more involved. Sometimes completing one clock leads to another, so Factions can have one goal that leads to another, and so on. All of this also depends on the PCs’ involvement and what they choose to do. So if the PCs never really focus on Volt, I don’t want the advancing clock to mean that I attempt to force this story upon them. Instead, it could just be background details. The brownouts and maybe eventual power-outage could just be flavor. Again, this is just one example. Ideally you intoduce a few factions and their clocks to give the PCs a choice of different kinds of things to get involved with. Keeping all these things kind of fluid until established in play is key, as well.</blockquote>

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