Big Game Wednesday - A Super Second Chance

Yes, it's late, but still Wednesday.

So as old Dungeon Masters were leaving and new Dungeon Masters coming in, I decided it was time to take another shot at being a Game Master myself, and when I was visiting the game store, I ran across a couple of superhero RPG's that presented me with a fascinating dilemma.

On the one hand, there was Champions. I had read good reviews of the system, but when I looked at the book, I was less than impressed. The art and production values were crude. Even the typesetting looked cheap, almost as if the book had been typed up in someone's back room. And when I looked over the character sheet, oh my God. Fourteen stats. Fourteen.

On the other hand, there was the second edition of Villains and Vigilantes, with slick cover art by game co-designer Jeff Dee (and in a bit of subtle coolness, the heroes on the front of the book are much improved versions of the heroes on the cover of the first edition). I went back and forth for quite some time over this strange, ugly-looking game book that I'd heard good things about and this slick presentation of a game whose first edition I hadn't much liked. In the end, I chose V&V again.

Why?

Well, for several reasons. Number one, I figured it couldn't be too different from the old game, which meant I would be familiar with the way the game operated. And I might be able to more easily convert some of my old characters. And then there was the fact that new supplements were coming out, like Willingham's Death Duel with the Destroyers.

Basically, as far as I was concerned, V&V looked like it would be easier to learn, better supported, and simpler to run. And in the end, I think it was the character sheet that decided me, with only five basic stats compared to Champions' fourteen. It just looked a lot less complicated.

Ha. Little did I know.

So I bought the game and started playing with the new character design rules. And here's the thing: if you thought Hero was complicated, you never tried playing V&V. Yes, you only had five basic stats (and one of them was Charisma, so it was really like only having four). But every stat had multiple game effects.

Take hit points. Instead of rolling a certain number of hit points per level like the old game, in new V&V, your hit points were calculated from your stats and your weight. Your weight in lbs. divided by 50 yielded your basic hits, which were then modified by stats and powers.

Say I had a character who weighed 150 lbs. with Str 9, End 28, Agi 13 and Int 23. That weight would yield 3 Basic Hits. The stats give hit multipliers of 1, 3.4, 1.4 and 1.3. Multiply them all together and you come up with 18.564, or 19 hit pts.

Damage was even worse. Hand-to-hand damage was based on carrying capacity, which was determined by a freaking algebraic formula. Even worse, the formula was wrong. Here's the relevant section of the rules.

As you can see by the hand-written addition, the formula does not match the plain English description given below. For my character listed above, the formula as written in the book would yield a carrying capacity of 5,677.5 lbs, while the formula as described (and hand-written) would yield a carrying capacity of 264.7 lbs. For my 150 lb. hero of great toughness, but average human strength, which is the more believable result?

On the other hand, combat simplified a little. Now the power combat matrix only covered half a page rather than a full page.

Anyway, I gave it a valiant try. I ran several adventures in second edition, stealing shamelessly from X-Men and Teen Titans comics, among others. I ran a few of the published modules, but also several of my own adventures. An assault against a secret military base inside a mountain, taken over by a vampiric sorcerer who also happened to be a mad scientist. A battle against a cult called the Children of the New Sun, led by a deranged goddess named Aureole. A string of battles against a horde of insectoid aliens.

We had some fun, and I wasn't as horrible a Game Master as I'd been on my first try, but I still wasn't very good, and it was really frustrating. So I ended up quitting and letting some other guys take their turn. One guy I barely knew and the other guy was a big dork, so I wasn't expecting much.

But it turned out, both guys were really good Game Masters, and I learned a lot from them.

Big Game Wednesday - You Can't Run Before You Crawl

So after the aborted Starships and Spacemen idea, I ran across another game from FGU, this one titled Villains and Vigilantes, (a game I've mentioned before). It was a game of superhero adventure by a couple of guys named Jack Herman and Jeff Dee. I've mentioned Jack Herman in Out of the Vault before, because of his scripting work on Eagle; he also did lot of scripting on Elementals. Jeff Dee was an artist who did some work for TSR and even took a shot at some comics work.

As soon as I saw the game, I knew this was the one I wanted to run. It was such a natural fit for me. I loved comics and superheroes, and I knew a lot of the history and background of both of the major comics universes. I had shied away from trying to run Dungeons and Dragons because I didn't have the encyclopedic knowledge of the genre that some of my fellow gamers had, but I would measure my comic-book chops against any of them.

So I bought the game and started reading through. Like Starships and Spacemen, Villains and Vigilantes followed the standard D&D pattern of rolling stats on 3d6. Instead of choosing a character class as in D&D, you would roll your origin type, which would determine what types of powers you could have. Then you would roll how many powers you would get, then consult another set of tables to roll the powers themselves.

If that sounds like a prime recipe for getting dice-raped, you're right. D&D's random stat rolls could leave you in the hole right at the start, but at least their character classes gave your character some balance. In Villains and Vigilantes, one guy could roll up a character with awesome stats who rolls a 6 for Mutant Powers and ends up with Form Change, Heightened Attack, Heightened Defense, Flame Powers, Regeneration and Force Field (so he can turn into a fire-breathing dragon or flaming demon or something cool), and another guy with crappy stats who rolls a 1 for Sponsored Powers and ends up with Radio Reception.

But at that point, I didn't know of any other way to do it. And really, though I've derided the Blank & Blank games as being simple copycats, at that time, the similarity to D&D was not a bug for me, it was a feature. If the stats and hit points fell in similar ranges, then I could easily adapt any number of things from Dungeons and Dragons for use in my V&V campaign, since there was precious little support material out there, as in none, apart from one sad scenario from Judges Guild titled "Break-In at Three Kilometer Island," published on cheap pulp paper with stats that seemed to reflect a rather... unconventional interpretation of the game rules, if I remember correctly.

Didn't matter anyway. I didn't want to run a pedestrian game of costumed crime-fighters. I didn't want to run Batman fighting crooks in Gotham. I wanted to run the X-Men versus the Brood in outer space. I wanted to run the Kree-Skrull War, or the battle against Thanos of Titan. I wanted Cosmic, man. With a touch of gritty Stephen King-style Firestarter thrown in.

I had a vague notion of a cosmic battle for all the planes of existence, Moorcock crossed with Kirby's New Gods crossed with King's The Stand. But of course, I had no idea how to get there. I had several ideas that I thought would make cool scenarios. I put down some notes for a secret government conspiracy the characters would run afoul of, and I had a list of neato gadgets and item loot that I wanted to show off to my players. But I had no idea how to structure actual adventures, which became obvious when we started playing.

The complex combat rules didn't help. Although the stats were generated fairly similarly to Dungeons and Dragons, the combat ran on a completely different system. To attack someone with super-powers, you had to consult this freaking huge matrix table with every single attack and defense type listed, and you would basically cross-reference the power against up to five defenses.

So say I've got a Human Torch-type character who's attacking an Elongated Man type, with Stretching Powers, Heightened Dexterity and Heightened Senses. The base chance to hit with Flame Powers is 15*5, or 75%. But consulting the table, I see that Stretching converts one of those 15's to a 14, and Heightened Dexterity converts one to a 10. Heightened Senses has no effect on the chance to hit. So my base chance to hit, not counting Dex or level or range bonuses, is 15+15+15+14+10, or 69%.

Dude.

The entire experience was painful, for the players and for me. I was lame, man. If you want to know the name of the worst GM I ever played with, it was me during those first painful attempts at running V&V.

I gave up on that first campaign pretty quickly. It was going nowhere I wanted it to go.

But I didn't give up for long.