Six Tips for Helping Your Players Create a Superhero PC

Hello heroes! Today we are talking about something near and dear to my heart: superhero RPGs and the player characters who populate them! Like most roleplaying games, a good superhero campaign relies on an interesting cast of heroes to follow and root for as they vanquish the forces of evil. However, such larger than life characters can be daunting to create. A lot of superhero games have incredibly customizable character creation systems and tend to eschew things like classes. This is an amazing opportunity for people to flex their creativity but this lack of cookie cutter options can lead to analysis paralysis if not handled with care. I’m here to help you help your players when this comes up!

1. Finding a Mold

The easiest way to help someone come up with a superhero concept is to ask them who their favorite superhero is or what superhero they would have in the real world if it were available. One of the reasons superheroes are so iconic is because they are larger than life figures who we can aspire to be and that aspirational element lends itself well to copying. This simple question also gives us a place to begin character creation that is slightly less wide-open than, “You can be whatever you want.” Ask your player what they like about this hero or power set. What do they think is their best quality? What are some of their opportunities for improvement? Do you like their personality but not necessarily their power set? I created Crucible from our City of Destiny stream using this line of questioning. I knew the adventure was going to feature regular people suddenly getting their powers so I looked at some of my favorite every man heroes and settled on Peter Parker. I wanted to emulate his attitude and how he is his own worst enemy a lot of the time, but I wanted to combine this personality with a power set I’ve always wanted in M&M: ferokinesis. Magneto has always been a favorite of mine and I just think the power is endlessly fascinating. So I mixed them up and came up with Emerald City’s favorite idiot.

2. Origins

Another way to develop a superhero PC is by focusing on a specific power source as a place for inspiration. This is sort of a macro level bit of creativity on the players part. Let them know where powers come from in your setting. Are there aliens? Are their mutants? High tech or magic? Knowing the big picture can help them think of how their character fits into the wider cosmology of your universe. It also helps if you leave room in these categories for player inspiration. If you have aliens in your setting, feel free to share some types of aliens with the player but ask if they have an idea for a unique sort of group. The DC Universe has Thanagarian bird people, Kryptonians, and little blue men. Each is an alien technically but they are so varied that any character concept can fit.

3. Secret Identity

If your player is having trouble with coming up with a power set for their character, leave that step behind and start figuring out who that character is as a person. What do they do? What are their hobbies? What’s their personality like? The human element can inform the power set. Maybe the character is a hot-headed stunt driver with a heart of gold. Their brash nature lends itself well to fire powers or if you want to be ironic give them ice powers. A paramedic might develop healing powers or become a dangerous vampire that needs to feed on the blood of her patients to survive. Look for connections to their job, their personality, or even their loved ones.

4. Team Building

If one or more of your players are having trouble coming up with a concept, you can ask them if they want to have a team-based group of heroes who all fit into a theme. Think of how the Fantastic Four all represent one of the four elements while still feeling very distinct from one another. You can really get abstract with this concept. Perhaps the heroes are all representations of characters from Alice in Wonderland or characters from Penny Dreadful novels. They could be a collection of metals who all have different abilities. Maybe they fell into a radioactive game of Candyland and now they’re really strange candy creatures. Tie them together and let the players collaborate on their ideas.

5. Secret Powers

One fun thing I’ve done to help players get through the power selection process is to just come up with a power set for them and not tell them what it is until they get their powers in the first session. We’ll go through creating their backstory up until the moment they get their abilities which I’ll do as our first session in the campaign. This does put a lot of the onus on you to make fair and exciting choices for your players and I would recommend only offering it to people you’ve played with before because it does require an element of player-GM trust, but it leads to some really cool roleplaying moments when it works out!

6. Mad Libs

The final tip I have to help you create a superhero character is to offer your player a sort of mad lib style exercise where you ask them for a list of colors, adjectives, and a list of nouns that they can mix and match to see if a concept leaps out at them. Ask them for 12 colors, 6 animals, 3 professions, and 3 verbs, write them down into columns and start drawing lines between combinations that sound promising. Even if they don’t like any of the combinations, the act of creating names and doing something imaginative will kickstart their creativity and they will find something they latch onto. A variation of this trick is to keep a notepad (physical or in your phone) and write down anything you hear or think of that sounds like a good superhero name and use that list as a jumping on point for your creativity.

There you have it! There are endless ways to create a superhero, but these six tips will help you narrow down the vast array of options or just get your imagination into gear. Please let me know any tips you have in the comments below!

How to Write a “One Shot”

Hello heroes! We’re getting back into the swing of things here at USP and I figured it was a great time to talk about a topic near and dear to my heart: one shots. These are self-contained adventures that have a wide variety of uses. They can be for gaming conventions, demos, palette cleansers, or a way to celebrate some of your favorite settings without the commitment of a long form campaign. I’ve run a lot of one shots over the years. My con game database alone contains over 50 adventures, and those are just the ones I could remember when I sat down to create the database this year. It’s hard to believe after seeing my performances on stream, which tend to be called one and a half shots or limited miniseries these days, but I do know how to construct a game that can be played in 4 hours or less. I promise! I have presented my general outline for constructing a con game. This is the order I tend to do things in, but as long as you put some thought into all of these bullet points it doesn’t matter what order you follow.

Idea

This is usually my first step and it is one of the most difficult to grasp. Ideas are ephemeral things that can be a challenge to summon at will, which is why I don’t tend to actively think about them. I prefer to be surprised by my ideas, sort of those flashes of inspiration that I jot down on a napkin or as a note in my phone when they strike me—typically somewhere inconvenient like in the shower or as I’m driving. That, however, is not helpful advice to people who are trying to prepare a one shot. If you do find yourself in the unenviable position of having to manifest an idea purposely, I have a few tips to get your creative juices flowing.

• Add limitations. I know this sounds counterintuitive for exploring creativity, but a limitation of some kind gives your imagination parameters to start working with. This limitation can come in a lot of forms. If I’m trying to create a slate of adventures to run at a convention I like to think of which settings I want to cover. At Origins each year I sit down and I write out a list of IPs that people have requested from me or settings that I know go over well. I’ll mark down the five days of gaming and make notes like: “I like to end the con with a Justice League game because Scott and Kyle usually sign up for that each year before they hit their flight home.” “I need at least one Titan City game on the schedule because that’s my setting and I want to sell some books while I’m at the con.” “Suicide Squad, Gotham City Misfits, and Guardians of the Galaxy all have a fun zany quality that makes Saturday night low-stakes shenanigans. I did Misfits last year so I’ll swap in the Guardians this year.” Now I know I have three games that need ideas, one Justice League, one Guardians, and one Titan City. That puts a sandbox around the possible stories I can tell. Another great limitation is a shared theme or plot element for each adventure. “I’m running five games this year and I want them all to feature dragons prominently,” gives you a place to start with your ideas. A dragon story featuring the Avengers is going to be very different from an East Texas University dragon story, but now you have something to anchor your creativity to.
• Mash-Up: Another thing I like to do for idea generation is come up with pun titles related to movies or songs and think about how that title can be reflected in an adventure. Titan City: Big Trouble in Little Moscow and Guardians of the Galaxy: The Hangover are two of my favorite scenarios and they started just with mashing a superhero team up with a classic movie of a similar vibe. You can also just mix and match toys from different universes to see how they gel. My Superman for All Seasons adventure brings over 20 paragons from across the multiverse together and it’s always amazing seeing how different properties match up.
• Characters: After I have my idea, I choose the characters I want to focus on for the story. If it’s from a licensed universe, I’ll review the cast of characters to see who my favorites are, or who I think would be the most dynamic inclusion for the idea I had. You don’t have to worry about this step as much if you’re running a one shot for your regular gaming group—they’ll probably play their usual characters. Now you decide how the characters are going to be generated. Are you going to make a group of pre-gens for the player’s to choose? Will you assign characters to your friends to make before the game starts? Are you using their existing PCs and it’s a non-issue? Whatever you choose, make sure it’s fair for everyone involved. The characters should be on a fairly even playing field, or if they are of differing level/ability/power level make sure the game is an even playing field and everyone has something important to do.

Synopsis

This is an elevator pitch for your adventure. Most conventions ask for them as part of their event organizing process, but even if this adventure is for your home group I encourage you to come up with a short and dynamic explanation about what the adventure is. This should ideally be 30 words or less (about 1-2 sentences) that drive the point of the story home for someone. Anyone who hears this synopsis should think that the adventure sounds awesome and should know generally what they have in store. This is something that takes practice, but here are a few of my personal examples to get you started.

• The Justice League is forced to play in Mr. Mxyztplk’s D&D game when they ruin his Saturday night plans.
• The Collector hires the Guardians to recover a priceless bird statue from the wreck of a Kree warship.
• Titan City 1922, Popov’s Russians are smuggling monsters into the city, it’s up to a group of misfit Titan City citizens to put a stop to it.
• Emperor Palpatine has put out a call across the Outer Rim for bounty hunters willing to hunt down a dangerous Jedi in hiding.

Plot

This is where I tend to fall down when creating one shots for our streams and where I get my reputation as a writer of 1 and a half shots, and the reason for that is a try to stuff too much plot into a 3 hour time block. It goes better when I run at conventions because those tend to be 4 hour blocks, but whatever time slot you have to work with, the important thing to keep in mind is that this is a contained story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end and it should be fairly straightforward. That doesn’t mean simple, but it does mean that your players shouldn’t spend a lot of time asking themselves, “Where should we go next?” One shots are meant to be explosive stories that can be resolved in one sitting. Don’t be afraid to trim some branches off the villain’s plan tree, or leave what you think are obvious clues—I call these clue by fours and players still spend time agonizing over them for a lot of the time. If you’re working from a plotline it should be a lot more diamond-shaped than flow chartesque. From left to right it should read:

• Plot Point 1: Thrust the characters into an interesting opening scene. This can be an in media res fight or challenge, the end of an adventure they started off-camera, or a quiet roleplaying scene to get everyone in the headspace for the adventure. Point them somewhere specific at the end of this scene, either with a mentor character—or Amanda Waller—sending them on a mission, a cry for help that pulls them somewhere, or an obnoxious imp sending them to TV land.
• Plot Point 2: The first scene of the adventure proper. The heroes arrive at the location they were pointed at and have to contend with an issue. If you didn’t start the story with a fight, this is a good place for the first fight scene, but I tend to enjoy using this scene as an investigation/roleplaying beat. The heroes overcome this plot point and find clues pointing them to 1-3 locations (generally 2).
• Plot Points 3 and 4: The heroes go to 1 or 2 of the locations from the clues and solve some sort of technical issue. This can be a skill challenge, an interrogation, a riddle, a puzzle, anything you like, but I advise against making either of these a fight. They figure out the antagonist’s end goal or uncover the danger of the story and find out where to go to stop it.
• Plot Point 5: Big fight with the antagonist or the ultimate danger. This is the only combat in some of the games I run, but it should be bombastic and intense. See https://untoldstoriesproject.com/step-4a-for-writing-super-hero-adventures-combat-encounters/ for tips on writing exciting combat encounters!
• Epilogue: A small scene for each player to close out their time with the character, usually a what does your character do now that they’ve defeated the villain or fallen to the alienation of the dread Cthulhu?
• Special Note: Should you find yourself in the position where your players have arrived at the big ending fight way ahead of schedule—I know it’s shocking to think that a one shot might end earlier instead of bleeding into 3 extra weeks of story—all is not lost. I use a technique I call “Russian Nesting Doll Endings.” Basically Plot Point 5 has an ending, and if it’s on time, that ending is satisfying in and of itself, but if it’s early, there’s actually a twist. This can be a “final form” for the boss that is triggered by its first defeat, a surprise betrayal from a trusted ally, a surprise exploding base because the boss was a load-bearing villain. Whatever the case may be, it’s an additional bit of content to eat up more of the time slot and reward industrious players who are too clever for their own good. This actually happened at U-Con this year during my Gotham City Misfits game. The players found a clever way—albeit a gross food-poisony way—to avoid the big fight in the middle of the adventure and with some hot dice rolls found themselves at Warworld with 45 minutes to an hour to go. Fortunately, I had a scene planned at Warworld in case a group ever made it there before the time slot was over. Mongul gave them the choice of fighting the Legion of Doom for the right to represent Earth in the grand melee or to take a consolation prize from his vault. The Misfits chose the vault and then proceeded to backstab and obliterate Mongul when he had his back turned. It was a blast.

Scenes

This is molded into the plot point, but I feel it warrants its own inclusion. Once you know how many plot points you have, you want to come up with scenes for each of those and you want to make sure you offer a variety of scene types. I find combats tend to take up the most time in a given game system so I advise GMs to have 1 or 2 combats per adventure and dedicate the other scenes to things like roleplay, skill challenges, investigations, and the like. The goal is to make sure there is something fun for everyone and to come up with ways for specific characters to shine, especially those who aren’t the best at beating up bad guys. Everyone comes to roleplaying games for different reasons and as the GM it’s up to us to accommodate a wide variety of tastes and personalities.

What to do When Time Runs Out

It is inevitable, at some point you will run a one shot that runs out of time. It happens to the best of us—some more often than others. Don’t worry, there are options! The easiest thing to do is to ask your players if they are willing to play the story through to the end, even if it runs a little longer than usual. This can be sort of dicey in a con situation where some players have their slots back to back, but if they’re having a good time, generally players are excited to keep playing. If you’re with your home group you can ask them if they’re willing to play one more session of the story—as seen in this month’s Titan City miniseries that began as our Thanksgiving special. Finally you can ask your players if they want to quickly summarize a plot point to get to the end scene, rather than playing out the whole scene, or if you’re players are really enjoying the investigation and roleplay you can ask your players if they’re okay with you giving an abridged version of the finale’s events. This looks a little bit like, “Thanks to your tireless investigation you and the heroes are able to track Dr. Simian to his lair and quickly dispatch him. Please give me a brief description of something that happens during the climactic fight.” I’ve had this ending a couple of times in my career and it is still fulfilling for players if the rest of the adventure was a blast to play.

And there you have it. My sure-fire way to write a one shot that will definitely end in one session and not go on to become additional adventures or commitments. Who am I kidding? This is my version of the best laid plan that goes to hell when people start having fun, and the whole point of playing tabletop RPGs is to have fun! Show up with your plan in mind, have a good time with your players, and if you need to run a second session, give yourself the grace to do so. I’ll see you next time!

For more content like this, be sure to check out our blog posts about game theory like these ones:

• Five Tips for Writing a Holiday Adventure
• Creating Player Characters for Con Games
• Inspiration (or Lack Thereof)

And if you want to support our growing network, the best place to do so is our Patreon where we share statblocks, fiction, opportunities to play with the cast and crew, and many other wonderful things!

Five Tips for Writing a Holiday Adventure

Hello heroes! It’s that magical time of year again. People are feeling festive, carols are playing in every grocery store, and the steady arrival of Amazon packages are a constant reminder that the holidays are upon us. We here at the Untold Stories Project love to dedicate these last few months of the year to our annual Holiday One Shots Limited Series!

We’ve been doing this for three years now and I like to think we’ve gotten pretty good at this whole holiday game thing. I wanted to share some of our advice for those of you running games this holiday season:

1. Follow the Fun: This one probably goes without saying, but holiday games are meant to be a fun occasion. Give yourself permission to indulge in some silly nonsense. This is a great time of year to run a pallet cleansing session based on a hilarious premise. Want to run a whacky, Clue-style murder mystery at the North Pole? Do it! Have a villain steal Christmas, turn everyone into snow people in Florida who need to figure out how to change back before they melt away. Get whacky and so unserious!
2. Indulge the Pun: One of my favorite things to do when I’m designing a holiday one shot is to come up with a pun title and build the adventure around that. We have Slay Bells Ring, The Fight Before Christmas, and Silenced Night here on the channel. I’m also running a little game called Batman Got Run Over by a Reindeer too. A pun title inspires story beats and sets tone all before you write down any notes or roll any dice.
3. Keep it Low Stakes: Adventures from this time of year shouldn’t be the stories that your whole campaign hinges on. Make it a side mission with a whacky villain and a scheme that ultimately doesn’t hurt anything more than holiday cheer and possibly a gingerbread village. Players are looking for a chance to cut loose and relax, give yourself some grace and keep the stakes low.
4. Let the Villain Get in on the Festivities: The villain of this story does not need to be Xanathar the Xecutioner with a massive axe and sawed-off shotgun, plundering her way through the winter wonderland sowing orphans and misery in her wake, unless your group is into that. Consider instead using a twist on a holiday figure: Jack Frost, Frosty the Snowman, and Krampus could be excellent candidates. Perhaps the Yule Cat if you’re feeling a T-shirt hating kaiju or a pack of reindeer bullies that need to learn some manners. Andy had us fight a guy who was basically a living chimney who took Santa’s sleigh for a joyride in this year’s Power Rangers event. The only limit is your imagination and your willingness to make festive icons naughty instead of nice.
5. Share the Good Times: One of the great things about a holiday adventure is that you don’t have to tie it into the wider events of your ongoing campaign and thanks to the amount of people traveling for the holidays you probably have access to friends and family you don’t usually get to play with (as do your players.) It’s a wonderful chance to bring in an extra player or two for a fun session.
6. Super Special Bonus Tip as a Little Holiday Gift From Me to You! One fun thing I like to add to any holiday game gathering is a Secret Santa or White Elephant gift exchange. It’s a fun way to add some additional festivity to your game group but everyone gets to feel included. One of the groups I play with regularly is doing a White Elephant dice exchange this year. Each of us is bringing a set of dice and our GM has worked up an initiative system and Sleight of Hand test for us to steal from die each other. I’m looking forward to being one of Santa’s dice goblins for that!

Gamemaster Burn Out

Hello heroes! I hope you are having a wonderful day out there in gamer land. I wanted to take some time today to talk about why I needed to take a break from our weekly streaming schedule (and the other games I’ve been running for the last year or so.) As you know I have been running at least one weekly, ongoing campaign since 2019. I’ve missed a few weeks here and there, but I have been continually churning out stories from Heroes Incorporated to Heroes of the Mist to our Titan City Serials to Fallout to NetherWar to Guardians of Haven back to Titan City and shortly we will be diving into the Multiverse of the Master Mage. On top of that I’ve been a player in quite a few streams and I’ve continued to run games off-camera with my home groups, my work group, and at conventions. In a nutshell, I get to play a lot of RPGs, which is a great problem to have!

I love this hobby, so much so that I went and made it a career, but lately I have been feeling stretched, like butter spread over too much bread. It has been harder for me than I’m comfortable with getting the energy to sit down and prepare my stories each week, and increasingly I have felt as though I have been scrambling just to keep up with the output. It’s not something anyone has commented on, to my knowledge, but personally it feels like it has affected my performance as a GM negatively. I pride myself on being calm and collected as a GM, but I have not felt that serenity in a few months. And to be honest my passion for the work has diminished as these feelings of stress and unpreparedness have crept into my mind. Running games is usually my happy place, something I do because it brings me joy and it gives me an opportunity to pass that joy to my players and the viewers. I have had trouble finding that joy and I don’t want that to spill over to you or the people who sit at my table every week.

To put it plainly, I’m burned out.

Burn out can happen to anyone and it is a serious specter hanging over a lot of Gamemasters in our hobby. GMing (when done properly) is a lot of work and a lot of the people who gravitate towards the position are naturally giving humans. I love that I can provide an escape from the world to my players for a few hours a week. I create a place where they are powerful and where their actions can truly help triumph over evil. It’s a really wonderful thing, but it’s a lot of work. Any given week a Gamemaster is a storyteller, a referee, an actor, a prop maker, a programmer, a world-builder, a counselor, and so many other jobs. RPGs are a group storytelling exercise, but that story has to begin somewhere and someone has to develop and play the non-player agents in the story.

Traditionally, I’ve never been good at boundaries or delegation and I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to my tabletop games. I want to build bigger and better experiences for my players and I always want to be better than I was yesterday. This is something I’ve been working to improve over the last few months and this mentality is ultimately what led to my deciding to take a break for a few weeks. I’ve scaled back some of my responsibilities to make room for healthy growth and self-care. I’m incredibly grateful to Calvin for being able to take on some of our streaming duties, freeing up some of my producer time to focus on things like blog posts, YouTube videos, and some of the storyboarding elements that take place behind the scenes, and I am so grateful to my players for being willing to give me this time and not have it affect our in-universe momentum.

If you’re a Gamemaster experiencing burn out, I recommend asking your players for some time away from the table. You can still gather on your regular game night, but ask if someone else has a game that they’d like to run, or break out some board games, or go out and touch some grass together for a session. Use your break time to rest, but also to engage with the genre in other ways. Look for inspiration and for new things that can get you excited about your game again. If you run a superhero game like me, maybe check out what’s happening in superhero video games or go see the new movie that’s undoubtedly coming out in the genre. Read some comic books, just do the things that you love.

Make space for yourself as a creator and listen to your body when it’s telling you that it needs a break. It’s okay to make room to take care of yourself, you’ve been taking care of your players for a long time and they will understand. Asking my players for this break was difficult for me. In my brain I knew that they would understand, but there was a little voice in the back of my mind telling me that if I stopped providing this GM service for them, they would hate me. It’s not rational and it would never be true, but it is something I had to push past. If you’re looking for a sign that you might need a GM break to rest and recharge those creative batteries, this is it.

I appreciate all of you so much and I cannot wait to come back in February to start a new game with fresh eyes and an unburdened heart.