Villains & Vigilantes is BACK!
- Thread starter HellHound
- Start date
Bretbo
First Post
UNIgames said:
Wait a minute...your doing new adventures in the V&V mold and using your brillant creations from V&V as well? Its' Christmas in June!
With all seriousness the work you and Jack Herman did was inspirational. Those adventures still hold up today and are easily the best superhero adventures ever done. Hands down! The news that your doing adventures is enough to get me to buy the game. I look forward to them.
buzz
Adventurer
In hindsight, even though I think that (no offense intended, Jeff) Champions was way ahead of V&V design-wise, V&V just felt more "fun" to me, and the art had a lot to do with it. I'd spend so much time just looking at the cover of the 2nd ed. box or reading the little mini-comics in the V&V books. They were inspiring. They made me want to game.Teflon Billy said:
Mark Williams' art for Champs at the time, though... no offense to him, but it certianly didn't channel a lot of "fun" for me. Its clunkiness made the game feel clunky, at least when I was trying to decide which one to pull off the shelf. Ditto for the really-quite-good Superworld (which I now wish I hadn't sold).
M&M is deifnitely channeling this vibe. I really love HERO, though, and wish they could manage the same sort of quality.
Anyway... I look forward to PoD for LL.
Gray Mouser
First Post
buzz said:(I only wish that it didn't take until 1997 for me to find the errata for the carrying capacity formula! That scewed us up so many times.)
Eh? What? Errata for carrying capacity? Where can I find that????
Gray Mouser
Mini-Review
I've been messing around with LL for most of the past week, and it looks like I might actually be able to get a game going in the near future. So I thought I'd post a mini-review.
Overview: 160 page PDF. The cover is full colour (as with all artwork in this book, it's by Jeff Dee), the rest of the book prints nicely in grayscale. About 3/4 of the book is character generation, the other 35 pages or so is game mechanics.
Artwork: not nearly enough of this, but what there is I like. Particularly the full page drawings - for example, pg 136 has an unused cover for V&V, and 146 has a page from the V&V comic book.
Mechanics: Those mechanics are pretty simple at heart - you roll a die, and attempt to beat either a fixed target number or an opposing roll. Type of die varies by your ability score, so you might find yourself rolling a d6 and trying to beat your opponent's roll with a d8. Modifiers can either change the type of die you're rolling, or just add/subtract from the roll. Some situations get more complicated than that - in combat, for example, you have to track hits taken and roll for knockback - but nothing particularly difficult. I found myself rereading some sections to make sure I hadn't missed anything because it seemed too simple, but it was in fact just as simple as it looked. From my brief solo playtests, fights seem to be fast and furious, always a good thing in a superhero game.
Character Generation: This is the more complex part of the book. On first read-through, it reminded me of both V&V and Champions, and that sense hasn't gone away yet. Characters are built using character points (CPs), which are spent on Basic Characteristics, Skills, and Powers. You can modify the cost of powers with enhancements and restrictions, and get more CPs by having one or more weaknesses. Sounds a lot like Champions, and a lot of terms are very reminiscent; the V&V flavour comes from the powers themselves, which mostly come straight from the V&V rulebook, and in the random tables provided for optional use.
It took me a few attempts to get comfortable with the point-based character generation system, but the learning curve isn't anywhere near as steep as Champions, and I can now stat up LL characters quite a bit more quickly than even Mutants and Masterminds characters. The random system is neat because it's presented in parallel with the point-based system, with the intent that you can use one or the other at any point and switch between the two. So if you're stuck for a concept, you could see what the dice give you, then either use that as-is or just as inspiration. A nice touch is that character origin and background is well fleshed out, with a lot of very superheroish touches that give a glimpse into the Living Legends world - there are Atlanteans, aliens, beings from a dark matter world in our solar system, time travellers, and so on.
My very first random character was a tech construct from the Internet, with an electrical energy field and the ability to travel to and from Cyberspace. Like a lot of old V&V characters, it was fun figuring out how his randomly generated powers all fit together (regeneration was self-repairing nanobots, intangibility was actually a projected hologram, etc.). An improvement over V&V is that since all powers have CP costs, it's much easier to come up with a somewhat balanced mix of characters, even if you go the random route. Most of the really powerful abilities in V&V (Heightened Speed, I'm looking at you) cost a lot of CPs, so there's a built in control on character power. It's still a good idea to have the GM review everything, of course.
There are a couple of things that bugged me about the character generation, but only in a minor way. These are:
- the skill list has some odd omissions. For example, there are no computer skills AFAICT. It's easy enough to add in anything that's missing, I just thought it was strange.
- anything that's not specifically a skill is lumped into the power list. So for example, if you want to have a permit to carry a concealed firearm, that's under the "superpower" Legal Powers. Until you get used to what's in the superpower list, this can make it a little difficult to find things.
Overall Impressions: looks pretty darn good. The proof of the game is in the playing, and I haven't yet, but I like it a lot better after reading it and messing with the mechanics a bit than I did when I first skimmed through it. I have a sneaking suspicion this game is going to be a lot of fun to play.
I've been messing around with LL for most of the past week, and it looks like I might actually be able to get a game going in the near future. So I thought I'd post a mini-review.
Overview: 160 page PDF. The cover is full colour (as with all artwork in this book, it's by Jeff Dee), the rest of the book prints nicely in grayscale. About 3/4 of the book is character generation, the other 35 pages or so is game mechanics.
Artwork: not nearly enough of this, but what there is I like. Particularly the full page drawings - for example, pg 136 has an unused cover for V&V, and 146 has a page from the V&V comic book.
Mechanics: Those mechanics are pretty simple at heart - you roll a die, and attempt to beat either a fixed target number or an opposing roll. Type of die varies by your ability score, so you might find yourself rolling a d6 and trying to beat your opponent's roll with a d8. Modifiers can either change the type of die you're rolling, or just add/subtract from the roll. Some situations get more complicated than that - in combat, for example, you have to track hits taken and roll for knockback - but nothing particularly difficult. I found myself rereading some sections to make sure I hadn't missed anything because it seemed too simple, but it was in fact just as simple as it looked. From my brief solo playtests, fights seem to be fast and furious, always a good thing in a superhero game.
Character Generation: This is the more complex part of the book. On first read-through, it reminded me of both V&V and Champions, and that sense hasn't gone away yet. Characters are built using character points (CPs), which are spent on Basic Characteristics, Skills, and Powers. You can modify the cost of powers with enhancements and restrictions, and get more CPs by having one or more weaknesses. Sounds a lot like Champions, and a lot of terms are very reminiscent; the V&V flavour comes from the powers themselves, which mostly come straight from the V&V rulebook, and in the random tables provided for optional use.
It took me a few attempts to get comfortable with the point-based character generation system, but the learning curve isn't anywhere near as steep as Champions, and I can now stat up LL characters quite a bit more quickly than even Mutants and Masterminds characters. The random system is neat because it's presented in parallel with the point-based system, with the intent that you can use one or the other at any point and switch between the two. So if you're stuck for a concept, you could see what the dice give you, then either use that as-is or just as inspiration. A nice touch is that character origin and background is well fleshed out, with a lot of very superheroish touches that give a glimpse into the Living Legends world - there are Atlanteans, aliens, beings from a dark matter world in our solar system, time travellers, and so on.
My very first random character was a tech construct from the Internet, with an electrical energy field and the ability to travel to and from Cyberspace. Like a lot of old V&V characters, it was fun figuring out how his randomly generated powers all fit together (regeneration was self-repairing nanobots, intangibility was actually a projected hologram, etc.). An improvement over V&V is that since all powers have CP costs, it's much easier to come up with a somewhat balanced mix of characters, even if you go the random route. Most of the really powerful abilities in V&V (Heightened Speed, I'm looking at you) cost a lot of CPs, so there's a built in control on character power. It's still a good idea to have the GM review everything, of course.
There are a couple of things that bugged me about the character generation, but only in a minor way. These are:
- the skill list has some odd omissions. For example, there are no computer skills AFAICT. It's easy enough to add in anything that's missing, I just thought it was strange.
- anything that's not specifically a skill is lumped into the power list. So for example, if you want to have a permit to carry a concealed firearm, that's under the "superpower" Legal Powers. Until you get used to what's in the superpower list, this can make it a little difficult to find things.
Overall Impressions: looks pretty darn good. The proof of the game is in the playing, and I haven't yet, but I like it a lot better after reading it and messing with the mechanics a bit than I did when I first skimmed through it. I have a sneaking suspicion this game is going to be a lot of fun to play.
buzz
Adventurer
Well, it was there in 1997. My Google-fu is failing me now. I could of sworn it was on Jeff Dee's website.Gray Mouser said:
IIRC, the forumla notation was wrong, but the explanation of the calculation was correct.
I.e.,
The book says: [(S x S x S + E) x W]/20
But the paragraph underneath describes: [ (S/10)^3 + (E/10) ] x W/2
My math-fu is not strong enough to determine if these really say the same thing, but the latter matches the descriptive text.
Karl Green
First Post
UNIgames said:
Hey if you do adventure packs and maybe some villain books like Opponents Unlimited I am sold!!!
Good to see that you are still around and GOOD luck with LL... I am not a huge PDF fan but I might have to pick these up... man I LOVED V&V back in the day and still use a lot of the adventures and villains in my games
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
"Print On Demand."bolen said:
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