TV to Tabletop #1 Fellowship of the Session Zero

TV to Tabletop is a series in which I examine scenes in popular movies and TV shows and break them down into game mechanics. Essentially asking, “What if this wasn’t a scripted performance with big budget special effects, but a group of players sitting around a table rolling dice?” There are spoilers for Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring below.

*****SPOILERS AHEAD*****

Picture a group of players sitting around the table, meeting for the first time to discuss the epic series they are about to embark on. Maybe it’s a new roleplaying game they’ve never tried before, maybe it’s an old favorite with a new Game Master. They have some idea of what sorts of characters they want to portray in the coming months. They’ve got their dice and scrap paper laid out before them.

The GM enters and sits behind the screen and says, “Strangers from distant lands, friends of old. You have been summoned here to answer the threat of Mordor. Middle-Earth stands upon the brink of destruction. None can escape it. You will unite or you will fall. Each race is bound to this fate–this one doom.” This paragraph summarizes the quest that the Fellowship of the Ring is going to embark on and serves as an introduction to the tone and idea behind the series the GM has in mind. This is called Session Zero.

Not every GM uses a session zero, but I personally think that they’re the best tool in a GM’s arsenal to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Session Zero is part character design, part sales pitch, and part team-building exercise. Basically it’s the first time the players and GM meet as a group to discuss their next campaign. The Game Master will arrive with an idea of the game they want to run: an epic fantasy journey to destroy a dangerous artifact featuring ambassadors from every Free race in Middle-Earth for example. They will usually arrive at this session with some surface level notes about the nature of the world they’ve designed, the tone of game they’re looking to run, and the kinds of challenges the group will be attempting to overcome.

In the Fellowship of the Ring example, the Game Master probably brought the history of the Ring (Forged by the Dark Lord Sauron in a bygone time, the Ring was thought lost, but now that it’s returned the Forces of Evil are on the rise again), information on the Free Races of Middle-Earth (Hobbits live in an idyllic countryside called the Shire, they value comfort and home, are lucky, and usually go unnoticed by the larger races, etc.), and a brief synopsis of the current situation in Middle-Earth (Gondor has a missing king, the Elves are leaving for the West, etc.)

The players would then decide if this sounds like a game they would be interested in. There’s a chance that someone will say, “Well, this sounds a lot darker than when we were all dwarves trying to get our home back. I don’t know if I like the sound of this.” and that’s more than okay. Session Zero gives the group the opportunity to discuss their mutual interests. Players who are given the chance to talk about the game at this beginning stage will start to feel a similar sense of authorship as the GM, or they will say that it isn’t for them and no one’s time would be wasted. This will only strengthen the story for everyone involved.

Session Zero also allows the players to make sure their characters fit in the universe of the game. I mean this both tonally and in relation to the setting. This will let the players know that this isn’t the kind of game that calls for a hobbit drunkard who speaks only in fart noises or an orc slaver who collects elf kidneys and wears them as a necklace in Rivendell. Right away the GM has introduced a rich history and a certain expectation of gravitas. The players in this instance, are able to come up with characters that tie into that history (The Hobbit who’s life was upended when the Ring came into his possession, the lost King of Gondor whose ancestor was the one who allowed the Ring to survive the death of Sauron) and allows the players to figure out what sort of relationships they have with one another (The representatives of the Elf and Dwarf parties who immediately distrust and dislike each other, The son of the Steward of Gondor who doesn’t want the King to return, the aforementioned Hobbit’s gardener and best friend.)

In closing, I always use a Session Zero for any series longer than a one-shot that I run. They make sure that everyone is on the same page, they give the players a sense of ownership in regards to the world and story, and they are just a great way to communicate. You’ll be amazed at the stronger characters, the stronger stories, and the better games you play once you take the time to set the stage.

Step 4c for Writing Super Hero Adventures: Challenge Encounters!

Hello heroes! Welcome back to my writing super hero adventure series. Today I am continuing step 4, which revolves all around encounter design. Last time we talked about roleplaying encounters, but today is all about challenges! I’m going to pretend I totally planned for 4c to line up with Challenge Encounters on purpose…

Anyway, challenge encounters cover a wide umbrella of scenes. These can be anything from death traps, to natural disasters, heists, and everything in between. They are characterized by the PCs using their skills and powers to overcome obstacles that aren’t necessarily trying to punch them in the face. That isn’t to say that there aren’t challenges with fighting, but the combat in a challenge scene is handled in a narrative sense, rather than breaking out into full initiative order.

Needless to say, these scenes cover a lot of ground, so my advice for designing them is going to be a little more general than what I usually provide. Here are some tips about building a solid foundation for memorable challenge encounters:

Generalization

I tend to find that challenge scenes are more exciting for players when you leave yourself a lot of room for their creativity. For example, say you want to create a skill challenge to simulate robbing a casino. I start by listing the various things that have to be accomplished in order to succeed in this task. The PCs have to case the joint, enter the casino, overcome the security, collect the money, and escape. Three groups of players given that list of tasks will come up with approximately 745, 290, 321, 092.5 ways of approaching the job. You could try to stat up all of those various options, but you’ll be a lot of work that will probably be circumvented by the heroes anyway. To avoid this overpreparation, I tend to keep things generalized and come up with blanket difficulties for the various stages of the task. Sometimes I’ll add one line about what I think this skill check can simulate if I need the guidance. I’ll show you what I mean below:

Casino Heist Challenge

• Casing the Joint/Gathering Information: Relevant Skills (Investigation, Perception, Deception, Intimidation, Expertise: Criminal, Technology) DC: 13 for expertise skills, DC: 15 for interaction skills, DC: 18 for observation, and DC: 20 for technological skills. Players who succeed on a DC 18 Stealth check will add a +2 circumstance bonus to one of their other skill checks in this phase.
• Entering the Casino: Certain Powers such as Teleport, Insubstantial, or Invisibility will give one Degree of Success to this challenge. Relevant Skills (Stealth, Deception, Technology) DC: 16 Stealth to sneak into one of the side entrances, DC: 18 Stealth to sneak through the front door, DC 16 for interaction skills, DC 18 Technology to pick electronic locks or forge fake security keycards.

Time Control/Montage

Another thing to consider when designing challenge encounters is how long the scene should take. Challenges are a tool in your GM toolbox that gives you the ability to control the passage of time within the game world. You can simulate the investigation, invention, or training montages that are so popular in superhero media. You can also create tense scenes that need to be accomplished in a short amount of time, like defusing a complicated bomb as the timer ticks down to zero. Always include a line in your challenge scene that tells the players how long each check in the challenge takes. Checks can take anywhere from one combat round (6 seconds in a lot of games) to one week or month, depending on the nature of the challenge you’ve built. Keep in mind that the heroes will be doing activities that overlap timewise. Basically each check happens at the same time, unless you specify that only one character can act on the challenge at a time. Don’t be afraid to let the heroes do other things not related to the skill challenge if a particular check takes a long time.

Spotlight!

More than most scenes, challenges can be a great time to shine a spotlight on specific characters’ abilities. Don’t be afraid to create portions of a challenge that are in the wheelhouse of a specific character. If one of your PCs is a hacker, create an opportunity for that character to hack into an important terminal or even seize control of the villain’s defense system. An avalanche challenge is an awesome way to give the ice-controller or fire bender on your team a moment to feel like they really saved the day. In this same vein, try to avoid coming up with obstacles that none of your players are able to solve. The idea is to make it challenging, not impossible. If there are things they can’t do, suggest that maybe they could hire someone who has the specialized skill they’re missing. That could lead to a fun roleplaying negotiation, or a whole other adventure to find the right person for the job.

Player Narration

Challenge scenes give you an amazing opportunity to turn the narrator hat over to the heroes. Since I keep the legs of the challenge general, I prefer to tell the player, “You have succeeded at this roll, what does this scene look like as your character deceives their way into the casino.” This gives the players a great chance to flex their storytelling and brings them fully into the story you’re telling as a group. I’ll even let them describe what a failure looks like once we’ve worked out the mechanics side of the failure. It really helps elevate these scenes from rolling dice to solve a problem to a cinematic experience.

That should be enough to get you started with Challenge Encounters. Keep them general, work out the time table, and give your players a chance to shine both mechanically and narratively and you’ll be well on your way to crafting memorable non-combat scenes. I’ve included a template I use for my challenge scenes below. We’re closing in on the end of this series. Thank you for reading so far and I’ll see you in the next one!

Example Challenge Encounter Template

Challenge Title:

Time per Check:

Phases of Challenge:
Phase 1:
Phase 2:
Phase 3:
Amount of Successes Needed
Effect of Successes: The effect of achieving the bare minimum amount of successes needed and any additional benefits the heroes can attain for overcoming that threshold.
Effect of Failures: A penalty incurred for failing in any phase. These can be phase specific or general. I prefer penalties to future checks or rolls to resist damage to simulate minor scuffles or death traps and the like.
Fail State:

Inspiration (or the lack thereof)

Greetings everyone! It has been quite a while since I’ve been seen on ye olde blog post, and, as I’ve made mention on stream, I was seriously lacking in inspiration on what to write! And that happens more often than one would like, trust me. But it’s not just blog posts that inspiration might dry up for, is it? Game ideas, NPCs, new characters, all of these things we need a spark of something to get the creative mind going, otherwise you might just be left with a shell of something that doesn’t truly interest you or your players. So, that’s where today’s post comes from; a lack of inspiration gave me the inspiration to put together some tips on what to do when YOU lack inspiration! So let’s dive into it.

Let’s start with a scenario: You’re already running a game, it’s a few sessions (or longer) in, and suddenly your carefully crafted story hits a snag. Players have done what players do, and left you scrambling for how to change your story to fit their actions. But alas, you’ve hit a wall and can’t figure out where to go next. So let’s see what we can do about that, shall we?

1. Look to the player’s backstories for inspiration: If you’ve had your players come up with details about their life outside of their adventuring/superheroing/spaceship captaining, look to pull elements of that into your next adventure. See if there’s anything there that can, if not fit the main story you are trying to tell, be a side mission for your players for a session or two. One, it will get the players more personally involved since it’s part of their character’s story, and two it will give you some time to divert from the main quest for a bit, and hopefully give you time to get something going for when you need to head back to it.
2. Depending on the system you are running, look to a short published module that you can insert into your game. Alex did this in our Netherwar game when the tone took a decidedly different turn than what we were expecting, and we spent four sessions running around different tv-inspired scenarios. It was a diversion from what we were usually up to, but it made us play outside of our comfort zone, and by doing that we had to think more on our feet with things. A pre-written module frees you up from needing to think about the nuts and bolts of the game (encounters, rewards, basic story, etc.), allowing you to focus more on how it fits into your overarching story. Plus, reading through it might just get you that flash of inspiration you were missing.
3. Spend some time not focusing on the game. I know, it seems counterintuitive, but sometimes when you’ve got a block the best thing to do is leave it where it is, go off and do something else before returning to it at a later point. Find a good book to read, a TV show you haven’t seen before (or an old one you love), play a video game, go outside, whatever it is, go and do it and don’t say, “I’m doing this to look for something to add to my game.” That will defeat the whole purpose of trying to clear the block by not focusing on it. Inspiration can be fickle, and if you try digging for it, you might just end up frustrated. By doing something else for a bit and not trying to look at it as research, your mind might gradually unlock, and give you what you were looking for.

I know the above tips were focused primarily on game running, so what can you do if you are lacking inspiration for a character? Well, #3 above is also a great way to get inspiration for a character. Outside sources are general building blocks for characters, as we can take elements of our favorite characters and their stories and try to weave them together in a new way for what we are trying to create. Another thing you can do: use the dice to give you random samples to choose from! Some core books already break things down into numbered tables that would allow you to pick up that sided die to roll on, and you can always go through the backgrounds/races and classes and assign a number to each, and then just roll those dice! You might land on something you didn’t expect, and bam, inspiration acquired!

Hopefully these tips and tricks will help you out, if you ever find yourself devoid of inspiration. Happy gaming!

Step 4b for Writing Super Hero Adventures: Roleplaying Encounters!

Hello heroes! Welcome back to my writing super hero adventure series. I hope your day is going well wherever you are logging in from. Today I am continuing Step 4, which revolves all around encounter design. Last time we talked about combat encounters, so today we’re going to pivot to something a little more peaceful. Roleplaying encounters are one of my personal favorite scenes to incorporate into an adventure. These can be quiet moments for the players to interact with one another, interrogations of NPCs, negotiations, fact-finding missions, and anything in between. Roleplaying is right in the name of the game genre, so it is important to make sure you account for it when outlining your adventure.

I start designing my roleplaying scenes by asking myself what the goal of the scene is. Am I trying to give the heroes a chance to react to a major plot reveal? Is this a mediation of a dispute between two parties? Is it just a chance to joke around and blow off some steam? I typically describe my roleplaying scenes with the following labels: Role-Play Shenanigans, Negotiation, and Interrogation. Role-Play Shenanigans is kind of a catch all category involving the characters getting the chance to ham it up or practice their acting skills. Negotiation is a discussion between parties for a specific good or service. Interrogation is any scene in which the PCs primary goal is to attain information, either from hearing out a kindly benefactor or intimidating a captured hench-person.

Role-Play Shenanigans

I don’t do a lot of planning for Role-Play Shenanigans, aside from setting the gametime needed. The players generally handle the ebb and flow of those scenes. I tend to take a backseat when they get into it—see my article about Listening as a GM for more on this idea—and I only weigh in if there is a NPC they drag into their shenanigans. It’s important to be present in these moments as GM because you don’t want the heroes to go on for too long, unless they’re having a great time. Keep an eye on the energy in the scene, or if the heroes are beginning to repeat their conversation beats so you can push them along as needed. Running a Role-Play Shenanigans scene is just about paying attention to everyone’s vibe and transitioning to the next scene when it’s appropriate.

Negotiations

Negotiations and Interrogations require a little more work on your part, but they are still fairly easy to prepare for. I start by listing the parties involved in the scene, for example: The PCs and their benefactor. Once I have the parties, I set aside the PCs because they are going to be responsible for themselves. If it’s a Negotiation, I take the NPC parties and I come up with three pieces of information: Goals, Offers, and Collateral. The Goal is what the character wants from the conversation. Some examples listed below:

• I want the heroes to do this task for me.
• I want the heroes to leave me in peace to do my nefarious plan.
• I want the heroes to surrender this prisoner over to my custody.
• I want the heroes to bring me a priceless bird statue.

The Offer is what they want to pay for the Goal. Think of it as the opening offer and the party’s best case scenario. Again, some examples below:

• 5 million galactic credits per hero.
• An upgrade to their secret base.
• A cool new vehicle that unlocks the ability for the heroes to travel into space.
• The location of a key clue in the heroes’ ongoing investigation.

The Collateral is how far the character is willing to go to achieve the Goal. This is the extreme version of the Offer and isn’t always as magnanimous. Some examples below:

• 10 million galactic credits per hero.
• I will attack the heroes to take what I want from them.
• I will abduct their loved ones to coerce them into cooperating.
• I am willing to accompany the heroes if that convinces them.

These three pieces are the foundation of any negotiation. I don’t ever write a script for the characters involved, but having these key sentences written down helps me guide them through the roleplaying segment. This is more important than coming up with a fun voice or body language for the character, and it’s something anyone can do to make their lives easier.

Interrogations

I approach Interrogations in a similar manner to Negotiations. I break down the parties involved, but instead of Goals, Offers, and Collateral, I come up with Topics, Intel, and Resilience. It’s important to note that Interrogations don’t necessarily have to be an aggressive activity. Someone offering the heroes a job or a victim they interview at a crime scene are still being interrogated when the heroes ask them questions.

Topics are subjects about which the character is knowledgeable. Some examples include:

• Navigating the Kettle Nebula.
• Eyewitness to the bank robbery.
• Expert on obscure ornithology.
• Magical item identification.

Intel is what specific information this NPC has access to. It’s a deeper dive into the Topic, but importantly Intel is information that the PCs can actually use to inform their decisions:

• The Kettle Nebula is known to disrupt ship electronics and nav-computers, but I’ve been scouting out a shortcut.
• The villain that tore open the vault had sand powers and went that way with the money.
• These birds are known for their beautiful plumage and supposedly their tears can cure wounds.
• This magic item gives its wielder the ability to shrink down to the size of a fly and speak to frogs.

Resilience is how difficult it is to get the information from a certain NPC. This can be a resistance to interrogation techniques, or an ulterior motive to keeping the information secret. Some examples below:

• I don’t want the heroes to publicize my shortcut before I’ve had the chance to.
• The villain is my sister and I don’t want her to get captured.
• The bird is endangered and these costumed crimefighters might put too much stress on its heart if they try to capture it.
• I don’t identify magic items for free.

You might notice as we’re building these scenes out that Interrogations often lead to Negotiations and vice versa. That’s a natural progression of events so don’t feel too locked into one type of scene or the other.

Other Things to Consider

I included the “mechanical” stuff I do to prepare for a roleplaying scene above, but there are some more esoteric things to consider when actually bringing the scene to life. Your job as Gamemaster is to portray a LOT of NPCs. Making them all stand out and feel unique is a challenge, even for gifted Gamemasters. I find that having the mechanics sorted out helps with this challenge, but I’m including a few tips below that I use to further flesh out the actual roleplaying part:

• Voices – I know it’s sort of a stereotype for the GM to use a million different accents and voices for their characters, but it is effective if it is something you can do. I think a lot of GMs get in their own way when it comes to voices. They get nervous or self-conscious and don’t commit to the bit. I promise your players will match your energy. I have personally found that if I can fake confidence usually the performance will follow behind. I don’t always get it right, but I do always commit. Voices don’t have to be funny accents either, they can just be lowering your tone, speaking faster or slower, mumbling or over emphasizing your diction. Think about certain phrases or words and only use them for that specific character. Your players will catch on and will appreciate the effort.
• Energy! – Like I said above and I’ve said in other pieces of GM Advice, be energetic, be excited, and set the tone you want your players to give you back. The players are looking to you to help them know what sort of scene they’re heading into.
• PC Focuses – One thing I find that helps me, especially with improvising, is writing down how a NPC feels about each individual PC. I try to make them favor one PC and dislike one PC in the group while being relatively neutral about the others. I write these down and play up those feelings of camaraderie or animosity any chance I get. It helps make the NPC feel more like an actual character in my experience and gets the PCs chatting about them, even when the NPC isn’t around.

I think that is plenty to get you started on your roleplaying scenes. These can be some of the most fun encounters you design and can lead to whole sessions where the heroes just get to act like their characters and possibly not even roll a single dice. I’ll be back soon with another post talking all about Challenge Sequences, but until then, thank you for reading and have a wonderful rest of your day!

Running With a Tangent

In addition to being a father, a technical writer, and GMing City of Destiny here for the Untold Stories Project, I am also a part of the Society for Creative Anachronisms (SCA). The Household I am a part of has an official motto that is about being of service. But our unofficial motto is “If you beat a dead horse long enough, it becomes funny again.”

And so it came to pass that I was watching the recap of Netherwar Episode 48: A Selection of Sacrifices and the jokes that arose surrounding the Ferroberg Four’s Kid-Kid, and all of the jokes that arose surrounding him, such as his pet, Dog-dog, his car, Car-car, and his mentor, Man-Man. What those of you watching the stream didn’t see was the calls in our private Discord Channel where my players in City of Destiny were asking to fight Man-Man.

Now, “Man-Man” is about as stupid of a superhero name as you can get. Following the conventions of superhero naming, it would be a man with the power of… a man? Not much of a power, really. But it set my brain to thinking…

Man-Man could be an “everyman” type hero. A man with the ability to be literally any human. Kind of the ultimate spy and infiltrator. But could that be an effective PC? I thought it could. And so, my brain went down several strange roads, ultimately landing on the following.

Man-Man aka John Dough

Man-Man (real name, John Dough) has 4s in all of his abilities. If you were to translate those 4s into the world’s most well-known RPG, that would translate to an 18, which is as good as a human normally gets, but isn’t superhuman. His defenses are bought up a little beyond that, giving him an 8 Fortitude and Will, and 10s in Dodge and Parry, with a Toughness of 8 including his Defensive Roll advantage.

As far as his powers go, Man-Man is a little light, with only 21 points spent on powers. And in this case, his powers allow him to change his body and face into that of any humanoid, and allows him to speak, read, and understand all languages.

It’s really in his advantages that Man-Man is made. Essential abilities for Man-Man include Beginner’s Luck, Eidetic Memory, and Jack of All Trades. Jack of All Trades allows him to make an attempt at using any skill in the game. With 4s in all of his abilities, that isn’t a huge bonus, but it’s more than enough to allow him to get by as an everyman. Eidetic Memory provides a +5 to remember things, including any and all Expertise skills, so Man-Man can get by with a +9 to most Expertise checks that would come up while impersonating someone. And his Beginner’s Luck advantage lets him spend a Hero Point to get a +5 to any skill for the duration of a scene (he doesn’t have more than 4 ranks in any of his skills) if he needs the boost. He also has Skill Mastery: Deception, letting him make a routine check for Deception under tense circumstances.

Rounding him out for combat, he has Improvised Weapons at Rank 5, Throwing Mastery at Rank 4, and both Close Combat, Ranged Combat, and Defensive Roll at Rank 4. This effectively gives him a +10 to attack checks at close range, a +12 at range, and an 8 rank damage effect as long as there is something close enough for him to grab to use as an improvised weapon.

That makes up the mechanical elements of “Man-Man”, but it doesn’t tell us who he is. In my experience, a character’s personality most often becomes revealed by their Complications. In the case of Man-Man, I thought that for a shapechanger who can be any person and knows a little bit about everything, it would be kind of interesting if he didn’t know who he really was. And so a background began to form. John Dough is an operative – I envisioned him as working for AEGIS, but it could be any group. His powers were granted to him by this organization, but they locked away his memories and his true identity, promising to restore them when he completes his work for the agency.

From a pure “game efficiency” point of view, Man-Man is a little underpowered both offensively and defensively for being PL10, but not so much so that he would be unplayable – and with a little experience, he could easily catch up. But Man-Man should also never be on the front line of a battle. He’s a spy, an infiltrator, and then has enough combat abilities to assist a team or get himself out of a scrape.

And of course, you could go a very different direction with the name. “Man-Man” could just as easily be the ultimate dudebro expression of toxic masculinity, full of stupid and muscles and beer.

It started as a joke, but the final character is one I would happily play in a “street-level” or vigilante campaign. I probably wouldn’t keep the name of “Man-Man,” but it was a fun place to start. All of which just goes to show that inspiration for a Mutants & Masterminds character can come from anywhere, even the stupidest of jokes. Your options are only limited by your imagination. Now, go out there and be heroes!

Step 4a for Writing Super Hero Adventures: Combat Encounters!

Hello heroes! Welcome back to the series I’ve been working on with general advice for Gamemasters looking to design their own super hero adventures. So far we’ve discussed brainstorming, research, villains, and outlines, what I consider the pre-adventure building blocks. These are the things you have to have in place to write a solid story. A story which consists of what I’m going to be talking about today: encounters!

As you may recall in the outline section, I tend to break my games down into a few types of encounters: Combat/Conflict, Challenge/Hazard, Roleplaying, and Investigation. Over the next few posts, I will be going in-depth into these types of encounters and offering you tips and tricks for writing your own. I feel each warrants its own post to make sure we can cover everything I want to for each type.

Today we’re jumping straight into the deep end with combat encounters. Conflict is often the meat and potatoes of not only super hero stories, but tabletop RPGs in general. Players design their characters around the neat ways in which they can stop evildoers. People love punching villains in the face and driving forth their minions with awesome abilities. That being said, every scene in your game should drive the story forward in some way. Combat is more exciting when it has some bearing on the plot and I’ve got more than a few ideas for how to write amazing fight scenes.

Goals

This might be tired advice at this point, but every participant in a battle is there for some reason and they want to win. Something has brought them to this specific fight and they are looking to accomplish their goal. As Gamemaster, it’s up to you to figure out what that driving force is for each participant in the battle and tailor their tactics around that goal. It isn’t exciting for heroes to get into a fight just because. Sure, defeating all of the heroes is a way for the villain to get what they want, but it is rarely the most efficient. I find it helpful for each combat to write down the main villain’s objective and what they’re willing to sacrifice to obtain it. I also write down what the minions are willing to sacrifice for their boss. Mercenaries are generally less likely to fight to the last man than an army of cultists. These goals don’t have to be complicated, but even a simple one will elevate the drama.

I particularly like setting goals that the players can catch on to, because it modifies their tactics and encourages them not to root in place and punch bad guys until everyone is unconscious. If a villain wants to grab a thing and escape, show the players that thing so they can start to play keep away. That is unless your villain is sly and their goal is to distract the heroes while my invisible minion grabs the thing and escapes. Imagine three rounds of combat passing before the villain inexplicably leaves. The heroes will immediately begin investigating the area to see what they missed.

I tend to think of goals as item-based, time-based, location-based, or distraction-based. That is the villain wants to take something, they need to be in a certain place at or for a certain time, they need to occupy a location, or they need to keep the players’ attention off of something else. Each of these goals can apply to any level of villain from lowly henchman up to mastermind, and can be mixed and matched within the same combat for different groups of characters. Tie that goal to the villain’s motivation and you’ll create fights that matter in the grand scheme of the story.

Location, Location, Location

More than most types of encounters, location is vital to combat. Every scene benefits from an interesting setting, but in combat the location should almost be a character in its own right. This is especially true for super hero games where PCs can traverse miles of terrain in a single move action. No one remembers a combat encounter that occurs in a 60×60 square box, but your players will always remember the fight they had in the erupting caldera of an active volcano.

Be on the lookout for opportunities to add a twist to your environments. These can be natural hazards or traps laid by the villain in advance. If the heroes are facing an ice villain, there’s a good chance that character has created slippery floors, walled off areas with glaciers, and generally made the terrain inhospitable to others. The heroes suddenly find themselves in need of cold weather gear, snow shoes, and they might have to resort to alternate routes to get where they want. Routes that no doubt lead to chokepoints the villain has layered extra defenses over.

Not everything has to be a benefit to the villains however. Clever heroes should be able to make use of terrain benefits just as much as their cunning adversaries. These location-specific features can be great moments to highlight and reward characters with unique skill sets. The inventor just so happens to bring the assembly line back online and now robot arms grab villains each round or the magic character can translate and modify the ancient runes on the ruin wall to create a circle of protection for their allies.

I have found it helpful in some of my more iconic locations to actually give the area a pseudo-character sheet and a turn in initiative to make sure the environment is given its due in combat.

Variety

One of the best ways to keep players on their toes is to add a wide variety of combatants with different capabilities. Support your big evil bad guy with all kinds of minions, not just mooks with guns. Minions with strange movement powers like flight or teleportation. Henchmen with effects that disorient or poison the heroes. If the main villain is a big bruiser type, give them a lieutenant that focuses on mind control or illusions. It will go a long way to making the heroes consider their tactics if their opponents occupy different zones of the battlefield and have different strengths to bring to bear. The heroes will have to divide their attention and resources, giving you the chance to design moments for specific characters to shine in each combat. This should be the case in every level of hero game, even street level heroes can face opponents with melee weapons, automatics, shotguns, and rocket launchers.

Variety also gives you the chance to show that the villain or group in question is dynamic. If they have a wide selection of responses to given threats they seem competent and more threatening than just a horde of faceless goons all with the same attack powers. A lot of GMs bring this attention to groups of equal villains, but it should apply to villains with lesser minions as well.

Fail Forward

One final piece of advice that bears mentioning for super hero combat is to remember that heroes are rarely killed by supervillains, even when they lose. In fact, most super hero stories start with the villain beating the hero quite handedly and leaving their body and ego bruised. If a situation arises where the bad guys start winning, don’t initiate a TPK. Have the villains capture the heroes so they can put them in an elaborate death trap and walk away. Make the villain stop for a moment to gloat and monologue about how awesome their evil plan is as the heroes catch their breath. Even in cases where the whole party is knocked unconscious, have them wake up as prisoners and give them the chance to escape. The villains want to win but they understand the value of keeping the heroes alive, and most of them like to get their brag on.

I never let the dice decide when a character dies. Death in super hero stories is supposed to be dramatic and world-shaking. They should not be caused by poor poor die rolls on the part of the players. If a character does fall because of a tough combat scenario, make sure that death is suitably epic. I like to give a player character that is about to die one action before they shuffle off. They can’t use this action to prevent their death, but they can use it to do just about anything else. It lets the player go out in a way that is satisfactory to them. They can get one final attack on the villain, send their allies to safety, and give a badass inspirational line. Anything to give that death more weight.

That’s just a few ideas to get you started building more exciting combat encounters. If you pair this with the article I did about How I Balance My M&M Encounters you’ll have everything you need to begin experimenting in Mutants & Masterminds. The easiest way to get better at designing combat encounters is practice. So I encourage you to take these tips and start playing with your players.

Thank you again for reading and as always, may your hits be crits!

The Multiverse and RPGs #1: Into the PC-Verse

Hello heroes! I wanted to start the new year off with a topic that has not only become near and dear to my heart, but has taken superhero media by storm. The multiverse! This isn’t a new concept in superhero stories, but it does seem to be nestling itself within the zeitgeist at the moment. It seems like there are infinite universes everywhere you look; from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Legend of Zelda, to Flashpoint, to the Jimmy/Timmy Power Hour. It’s not hard to see why this idea appeals to so many. Writers can showcase new versions of iconic characters. They can introduce scenarios that change the established status quo without consequence to long-standing canon. Fans can finally get the answer to the question, what if Spider-Man was a cartoon pig?

But what does this all mean for tabletop roleplaying games? Is it possible to bring elements of the multiverse into your games? The answer, as with most concepts, is absolutely. The multiverse is a tool you can use to keep your players on their toes, to inject new drama into your stories, and to experiment with fun concept adventures. I’ll be breaking down several multiversal threads that can improve your game over the next few essays.

I first want to talk about a concept which seems to apply to Spider-Man a lot (see Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions and Into the Spider-Verse.) Essentially, creators tap into the wellspring of nostalgia by having a character team up with themselves. This idea of every character being a version of the same character has always fascinated me from a RPG perspective. I remember hearing about a game at Origins Game Fair where every PC was a character portrayed by Harrison Ford (Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Rick Deckard, Jack Ryan, and a few others) and they were assembled to stop a bunch of Christopher Lee characters. It blew my mind, and got me thinking about what sort of effort would need to go into making something like that happen outside of a con experience. I’ve worked up some advice that I will list below:

Session Zero/Player Engagement

Much like anything else in Gamemastering, preparation is key. First you need to check with your players and see if the idea of playing variants is even interesting to them. If they’re interested, great, we can move on to the planning side of things. You’re going to want to schedule a large chunk of your session zero to discuss the hero everyone is based on. Treat this base character like a group PC. Everyone should have some say in regard to their personality, powers, origin, costume, anything that makes a superhero work. You also want to make sure that this hero has a wide enough archetype that players can take their re-imaginings in a lot of different directions. This shouldn’t be a gimmick character, unless your group is planning on tweaking the gimmick to create their variants—I’m picturing Condiment King, Seasoning King, Deep-Frying King, and Potato King for some reason. I would also have each player pitch a supervillain that this hero goes up against on a regular basis, to give you as the Gamemaster characters that you can make variants of.

In my notes I would say Player A came up with Villain A and I’m going to make a variant of them from Player C’s universe. You won’t have to work as hard if this is a licensed character like Loki or Spider-Man, but it’s vital that you make sure everyone has a firm grasp of the foundational aspects of that character. Nailing this down collectively, ensures that your players can make intentional choices with their changes to the character in ways that are dynamic and true to who that character is. This helps you avoid players coming up with characters that are only connected in the tiniest of ways.

Points of Variation

Good variants live and die based on their point of difference from the original character. Encourage your players to review the foundations of the base character and work on their concept from one slight difference. Power origin is a great place to find a thematically different version of a character. If the base character is a mutant, consider a variant that gains their powers through magic or technology. Move the character into different time periods—medieval, the far future, sword and sandal, or noir are great ideas. Tell the players to consider a genre shift. If the base character is a four-color comic hero, what would they look like as a cartoon character or as a survivor of the post-apocalypse? How do their powers function differently than the base character? Are they the same person as the base character? Are there any NPCs that could be a fun switch ala Spider-Gwen? What animal would be the funniest when combined with their power set? These points of variation are excellent conversation starters that will get your players’ minds churning with possibility.

Specialization

One thing to consider, both from a character and game design perspective, is that each of these characters should have a unique ability they bring to the team up. Even though they are ostensibly the same person, you still want to be able to create scenes that individual players can shine in. This is also a pitfall to avoid in instances where all of the characters have the same power set—like in a Green Lantern campaign for instance. Encourage your players to think of something that only their variant can do and write scenes that are made easier by those abilities.

Sometimes this will be obvious, like giving magical knowledge to the variant with a mystic background and technology to the super science variant, but sometimes it’s more subtle. Perhaps one of the variants is an older, more mature version of the character that has some leadership abilities. Give that character a scene where they get to rally their comrades and help everyone play to their strengths. In terms of character design, you can help your heroes by having them each select a combat role in the group and then build their variant in that direction.

Say the base character is a genius in a battlesuit called Maceria. The base form is a blaster who focuses on ranged attacks. One of the variants can be Maceria-Noir, a hulking monstrosity of steel and steam that tanks damage like none of the others. Then there is Dr. Maceria, an experienced artificer from a fantasy realm who specializes in healing magic. Finally, there’s MAXceria, a brawler from a future where fighting robots are king and he’s outfitted his fists with razor sharp claws and karate chop action.

In conclusion, it can be very exciting for players to delve into variants, either for one session or for a whole story arc. With a little communication and good planning on your part it doesn’t even have to be that difficult to pull off. Keep checking here at USP for more multiverse content coming soon. Thank you for reading and as always may all your hits be crits.

Messing Up As a GM

There is an incredible amount of pressure placed on the Gamemaster in a tabletop roleplaying game group. The GM wears a lot of hats: from storyteller to referee to improviser and many others. When anyone is juggling that many plates, eventually they will drop one, splattering the folks watching and making a big old mess. GMs are human, and humans are imperfect creatures. That doesn’t mean the campaign or even the session is ruined, it just means that you have to pick yourself up and get back to it. No one is the perfect GM all the time, it doesn’t matter how much experience or how much trust your players have in you. I actually messed up in our Netherwar series recently, and I figured it would be helpful to GMs out there to hear what happened and what steps I took to address the issue that I caused.

Let me start by briefly summarizing what happened and explaining how I really stepped in it this time. At the end of Episode 71: Drop the Jupiter, I left my heroes on a cliffhanger. This isn’t unusual for my GM style, and I was heading to New Orleans for my honeymoon the following week, so I really wanted to stick them with something juicy. I had the episode end with Andy’s character Resonant learning that her mother was in trouble in her home dimension of Leifandi and with Jonesy’s character Mortis learning that his fiancé Nick was seemingly taken by force from their home. As a storyteller, I thought this would create an interesting dynamic in the group where they would have to tackle the emotional stakes of who they would help first or force them to split up to try and do both at the same time. I thought that would be a spicy story with lots of potential drama and roleplaying, and that would have been fine if I were writing a book.

Unfortunately, what works when you’re writing a book, doesn’t always come out that way in a group storytelling situation. So I stuck this grenade in their laps and went away for my honeymoon, none the wiser.

When I got back, I settled in to plan out the next stages of the story, thinking about the various ways the heroes might attempt to solve the problem I’d placed before them. I planned possible NPCs that the heroes might enlist to pad out their numbers in case they wanted to split up. I also wrote out some consequences for following either of the leads in different orders. Not with the intention of harming one of the beloved NPCs, but ways that the investigations would be more difficult for whomever was chosen second. Unfortunately, this whole session was going to be tougher than I thought, and was not my best work.

Thirty minutes before the session began, as we were doing our audio/video checks, one of the players said to me that they were frustrated as a player, not as a character. That was not my intention with the split. It is never my intention to frustrate the players. At the end of the day gaming is meant to be a fun escape and chance to tell stories with your friends. What they said really struck me. The player elaborated, stating that they were upset that their character wouldn’t be able to see all of the story beats if they decided to split up. The party would be separated and wouldn’t get to see the insight into either Resonant or Mortis’ backstory, and they believed that what was at stake was forcing them to have to split up.

That all made sense to me, so at that moment I started devising a way that everyone could be in two places at once. We’re playing a magic super hero game, anything can be possible. This was an important decision, because it showcases one of the things I always stress to GMs. Don’t fall so in love with your story that you deprive your players of agency. I could have told the player, I’m sorry, but this is what I have planned, suck it up. But that wouldn’t have resolved the issue, and could have affected that player’s trust in me. So, I came up with a way to progress the story so everyone could see every plot point, but I added a consequence to this solution.

The heroes uncovered a spell that could duplicate them, allowing two parties of PCs to head after both leads at the same time. However one of those groups was Freaky Friday-ed. They had swapped bodies so when we get to that group, they will be playing with one another’s powers, which I think is going to be a blast.

Improvising and adapting to the player’s mood is so crucial as a GM. At the end of the day, if your players are having fun you are doing your job as a GM. I took a situation that was frustrating and I turned it into an opportunity for a fun story beat. The way to do this is by saying “Yes, and” or “No, but” more often than you say no. Don’t be afraid of the ideas that come out of the void and trust in your creativity. Some of my favorite moments in gaming have been off the cuff sparks of inspiration. Improvisation is actually how I got my start working in the TTRPG industry as a writer, but that’s a story for another time.

Unfortunately, the disastrous cliffhanger wasn’t the only issue I had while running the game that night. As I said, it was not my best work as a GM. When we eventually went to Leifandi, I felt personally that I let Andy down. He wrote an amazing blog post about Leifandi which you can find here. A blog post which I should have read closer when I was doing my preparation for the adventure that week. I stress all the time that GMs should include their players in the world-building for the campaign. It helps build player investment in the story and the world, but that only works if you take what they give you and learn it. Ask questions, look for clarification, and do it before you get to the table.

In that session, I leaned on Andy, asking him to describe things, partially because I wanted to give him a chance to show off this shiny thing he made, but also because I didn’t know the material as well as I should. I also got the names incorrect on a few major NPCs which added to this feeling of indifference on my part. I felt after the session that Andy was offended, and rightly so. This leads to the next lesson in cleaning up GM messes, communication and accountability.

In the days after that session, I reached out to Andy so we could have a one on one video chat, so I could A.) Apologize and B.) Get clarification of details so I could fulfil my responsibilities as GM and write accurate flavor text/plotlines. There’s a lot of ego tied up in being a Gamemaster, and you can use that ego to go on a power trip with your friends, or you can admit when you’re wrong and take steps to correct it. Andy was very generous with me, giving me information that I needed and brainstorming the trajectory of the Leifandi story arc that we’re still playing through.

Your players want to have a good time, just as much as you, and it is never you against them as a GM. That little bit of communication and owning the mistake prevented the situation from spiraling further, and I think in the subsequent Leifandi adventures, we’ve hit our stride again as a group. More importantly, I think I have maintained the trust of my players, which is paramount when running an ongoing campaign. I hope my example can help you, if you’re going through a tough time as a GM. Thank you for reading and may your hits always be crits.