With Great Power

[avram]

drcpunk picked up a bunch of cool indie RPGs at this year’s gaming cons, so we (and mnemex and kent_allard_jr and Erik) got together to play something. I’ve been wanting to play Dogs in the Vineyard for a while, but we figured that would take too long. Kent suggested Ghostbusters but we wanted something new. I offered to run With Great Power, a superhero game, but the rules made my brain glaze over, so Mnemex, who’d seen it played before, ran it.

We wound up playing the Masterson family. Kent and I played the teenaged siblings — he was the weather-controlling sister Drama Queen, I was magnetic-powered brother L04D570N3. Erik played the father, who was secretly a super-villain, building robots in his secret lab, where he spends so much time that his kids have gone out and become super-heroes in a bid for attention. Dr Cpunk played a robot cat who watches over the kids.

The character creation is pretty simple and quick, without much constraining the imagination. You pick at least three Aspects, which can be powers, motivations, relationships, whatever, anything that can generate plot complications. In the course of game play, each Aspect can gain Importance, which means it lets you draw more cards in conflicts, but using it carries the risk that it will be damaged, eventually becoming unusable. But the more unusable Aspects you have, the more wild cards you get, and you have the opportunity to recover your damaged Aspects in the climax.

In addition to Conflict scenes, you also have Enrichment scenes, which is where you add Importance to your Aspects. Unfortunately, these are just the sorts of scenes where we like to role-play without mechanics, so the card-play was awkward here.

The rules are designed to reproduce traditional comics stories, where the heroes lose a bunch of fights before they get their act together and save the day, and yeah, the rules do coach you to develop an Author stance, where what you as a player want might not be the same thing that your character wants. They work for this — I found myself looking at my cards and trying to figure out what interesting things I could do with what I had, rather than trying for optimal tactics like I usually do, and deliberately failing some tasks for plot advancement and Importance points, which is just how it’s supposed to work.

The game’s still in beta, and it shows. The rules descriptions are clunky and over-long, and starting out with all Aspects at zero Importance (as the rules say to do) requires starting out with Enrichment scenes, which precludes in media res combat openings, a classic way of grabbing player attention.

I still wanna play Dogs in the Vineyard.

Comments

[stormsweeper.livejournal.com]

The aspects remind me of the spiritual attributes from The Riddle of Steel, but those start with points in them. They're also far and away the best thign about the system - the combat itself approaches Rolemaster in tedium.

I'd have to hear more about it, but the card resolution sounds a lot like the magic system from Castle Falkenstein.

[mneme]

The card system:

Not that similar. It's a spaces-like system with RP chrome and a suit changing rule, IIRC (and no trump suit). The initiator of the combat plays a card. Their opponent (or opponents -- multiple-on-multiple combat isn't actually handled all that well in the rules, though there are several obvious fixes) must yeild (I'm ignoring the card drawing rules, which exist), play a higher card in the same suit (indicating that they are responding to the original action), play exactly the same card (indicating that they are preventing the original action from happening; countering it), or play two cards in a different suit, changing the conflict to the new suit (indicating that they are moving the conflict to a different realm -- taking to the skies intstead of the ground, or setting the building on fire, or turning it from a battle of wits to a battle of fists, or whatnot).