denagh design

My friend Jason asked a question about handling initiative in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying when there is an allied Watcher character. When the heroes choose that character, does the Watcher get to choose who should act next as if a hero player was choosing, or as the Watcher?

My preference when running a roleplaying game is to do as little work as possible. In this case, where there is an ally – let’s say Black Widow is tagging along with the heroes – if I controlled her as a character, I’m basically playing a dice game with myself. I’m making her attack rolls against the villains; I’m making the villains’ reaction rolls against her; the heroes are just sitting around as I’m rolling dice against myself. Instead, I would just place Black Widow on the board as an asset for the team rated at… well, she’s got a lot of d8s there, maybe a Black Widow d8 (asset). That way, I can use a version of the rules on OM53 (Support and Recovery Actions by Watcher Characters) and just say that whatever assistance Natasha uses, she’s doing support actions at d8.

But what if the heroes want Natasha to go after Bullseye while everyone else is tangled up with other opposition? Swap out the Black Widow d8 (asset) and turn that into a d8 Black Widow is all over my ass! (complication) and stick it on Bullseye. So no matter what Bullseye does – maybe he’s taking a pot shot at Iron Man, maybe he’s reacting to Iron Man slamming him into a wall – Black Widow’s  complication is always hindering him.

I am amazed at how much I really enjoy the new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game^[1]. When I look at my game play history, the superhero genre never really excited me.  Maybe it was those first few attempt at playing supers games.

I attempted a brief run of Champions back in high school. In the one session we played, one of the heroes was “about two minutes away” from the scene were the battle was going on. It took him about three hours of play time before he arrived on the scene. That sort of sucked. Another Champions game had me playing a hero that grew like your Giant-Man/Goliath/Atlas characters. Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that the growth power didn’t come with added resistance from being shot with a gun, so Tower just grew 40′ tall and was taken down by an Uzi. That sort of sucked, too. Oh, and I played one game in the old Marvel FASERIP game that everyone seems to love: I was playing Captain America and the rest of the Avengers were going into Ultron’s dungeon crawl fortress and there was a covered pit trap and everyone managed to jump over the pit. Except Captain America.^[2]  That was just stupid.

Continue reading “Marvel Heroic Roleplaying: Handling Action Scenes” »

1. By Margaret Weis Productions, Ltd. Go buy it! [↩]
2. If there’s one superhero that doesn’t fall down pits, it’s Captain America. Dice tell shitty stories. [↩]

When developing the movement system, one of the questions I had was why use it at all? After all, if my ‘Mech is dug into good cover, why would I ever leave and expose myself to enemy fire? The answer is in the actual BattleTech miniatures game: there are missions, and those missions have your force doing something. So why move? Because you have a mission to advance to a target. Or because you need to get into position. Or you need to search for an objective.

Continue reading “The BattleTech DMG: Missions” »

One of the comments from the demo of the BattleTech DMG at GenCon last year was about getting more of the tactical aspects of the BattleTech game into the DMG. The proof of concept game was really a slugfest: two ‘Mechs pounding it out on the battlefield with Take Cover or Dodge cards allowing ‘Mechs to avoid getting hit. It really wasn’t much more than playing an occasional card to adjust your opponent’s chances of hitting. Playing the miniatures game, a lot of the gameplay comes into maneuvering your ‘Mech around into a better position, hoping to get flanking or around to where the enemy cannot react to your attack.

Continue reading “The BattleTech DMG: Movement and Positioning” »

One of the funnest RPG campaigns I ran was MCU: Gotham, basically a police procedural drama set in Batman’s Gotham City. Now, thanks to the imminent release of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and a misheard line on this week’s Castle, I want to run a similar game, set in the Marvel universe: Freakshow. Where MCU: Gotham’s villains were nicknames that the cops or press used for more-or-less ordinary criminals, the cops in Freakshow know that they’re not just dealing with men in tights. A simple bank robbery could just be a standard call, but there’s always the possibility that the perp can breathe fire. We’re talking more like Bendis’ POWERS comic book than Rucka’s Gotham Central.

Continue reading “Freakshow: MCU Gotham in the Marvel Universe” »