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I've just put up the first post of a read-through of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying: Basic Game over in FATAL and Friends. I posted about the game over in the Indie Games thread, but I would reiterate that while it took a close reading and re-reading of the first few chapters before the system clicked with me, as it took shape I definitely got that warm feeling of inspiration as my mind started spinning out possibilities. My regular gaming group is about half and half with regard to comics readership, but we had a blast. Deadpool is somebody's favorite Marvel character, so she picked him, likewise for our Rocket Raccoon (who I cobbled from parts of Captain America, Cable, and others), whose player isn't much of a Marvel guy. The other two chose Scarlet Spider (Kane) and Agent Venom (Flash Thompson) from the list at Exploring Infinity. Needless to say, this is not the group that Brian Bendis assembled for the Breakout story on which the included adventure in the Basic Game book is based. I hadn't actually read the real story until last night when I remembered someone passed me some early New Avengers issues some years ago. Ours was better. Would anyone mind if I dumped a session report here? If I do, should I be careful about potential spoilers for a story that predates Civil War? I get that my session and how we went about things won't be yours or how you might do it, but I don't want anyone who's interested in playing the Breakout mini-event to get spoiled on any of the goings on baked into the thing. Quick edit to shamelessly promote part two of my read-through. PrincessWuffles fucked around with this message at 11:44 on Jul 12, 2012 |
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Jul 12, 2012 09:55
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JDCorley posted:Spoil away, anyone reading the RPGs is going to be spoiled anyway. A trip report would be great. JDCorley posted:... I can remember thinking as a kid how great it would be if there was a one-page scenario in the back of all the comics that was actually about what the comic was about. This because the Sentinel dark future crisis had been over for 8 years by the time the RPG scenarios came out. By that point we were all trying to figure out who the hell Madeline Pryor was and why we should care. Speaking of RPG materials, Part 3 of my read-through for FATAL and Friends is up!
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Jul 13, 2012 02:57
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ibntumart posted:I'm disappointed that confusion over the stones had anything to do with MURPG not being popular. That wasn't a particularly difficult mechanic and it worked so well for strategizing: no dice rolls or cards, you knew what you could do and what your opponent could do. ibntumart posted:...You could always put spoiler tags if need be. And yes, please do post the session report. Either way, I'm running Act 2 in an hour or so, so after that I'll write up the whole thing for the thread.
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Jul 14, 2012 00:42
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All right, well, here goes! Breakout! Act 1 Part 1 Although the story we're dealing with here predates Civil War, and the way we played things out is only marginally similar to the actual events, so maybe spoilers isn't the term, if you're concerned about spoiling yourself on the events of the mini-event Breakout, based on the first six issues of New Avengers … Spoilers follow. The scenario in the book had starting locations for all the heroes involved in the version that went down in the comics, so we had to wing it. I'm all about player agency, and I wasn't about to force my friends to play out a story that's already been done with for years now, so I asked them. A forewarning is also probably in order, that I run a pretty loose table, so it took us a while to actually get to the scenario. Rocket Raccoon was a tricky one to work in, at first, but we decided he had been unceremoniously dropped off on Earth by his Guardians teammates for some reason, and found himself in New York on the night of the blackout. Specifically, he was at a zoo, railing about animal rights. This was awesome mostly because this player is usually quiet and withdrawn, but something in the freedom of the story-game ideal must have sparked in him. Deadpool was watching Golden Girls in his apartment, when the power went out. Naturally, he did what any hero would do in a crisis, and leapt straight out the nearest window to get down to some serious looting. Why not just loot his own apartment building, I asked? Well, they know him there, and he's got all their good stuff already. Venom was working for S.H.I.E.L.D. on the Raft, so he was more or less on site when Electro busted out with Karl Lykos (AKA Sauron), and the big prison break began. He put down a mob of escapees, and his presence let me string out a few details about what was going on, but I didn't want to get things started too heavily until we had everybody on the island, so we did a lot of cutting back and forth until then. Scarlet Spider (Kane) was swinging over the city, and was the one who actually saw the flash of lightning as Electro blew a hole through the roof of the Raft. Kane here and Deadpool were the first characters to encounter each other, as Kane swung past Deadpool falling to the pavement from his impulsive leap to the looting. It was in that moment that Deadpool realized his predicament, and called for “Spider-man” to save him. The datafile we had for Kane gave him a milestone that would grant him xp anytime he acted indignant at being mistaken for Spider-man, so he sailed on by with all the power and none of the responsibility while we all had a good laugh. On the Raft, Venom continued to reconnoiter on the escalating prison break. He learned that a hole had been made on the upper levels, through which many prisoners were making their escape, or those who made it past the S.H.I.E.L.D agents anyway. Venom also got the first taste of combat when he fought off a mob of un-named villains with clubs. I don't want to cross too far into material I'll be covering in my FATAL and Friends report, but mobs are cool, in that they function as a single entity, like hordes in Deathwatch, although I chose to represent each of their D6 “Team” affiliation dice as a member of the mob, so every D8 of stress Venom dealt knocked one more bad guy out of the fight, so those remaining had their effectiveness reduced with the removal of one of the “Team” dice. I like that while he ended the fight, it didn't mean corpses. Most of the time, we would see going forward, there was the option to leave your opponent incapacitated but alive. Other than the definite possibility of crazy-good rolls, you only kill if you choose to take it to that level. Back in the city proper, Rocket Raccoon was making his way through the dark streets, on the way back to his hotel. Again, where else would he have a base under the circumstances? Anyway, with all this chaos, it wouldn't be long before he'd want firepower on his side, so back to the hotel for his guns was really the only option. A traffic jam in an intersection up ahead had turned into some kind of riot node, where crazies were dancing around trash can fires while the drivers of a knot of piled cars battled atop the wreckage of their vehicles. That's when it got weird. Walking by a broken-in storefront, Rocket saw something strange through the shattered window. Namely: Deadpool and his new gal pal: a lady mannequin. Rocket confronted Deadpool, who agreed the whole thing was a bit silly after all, and the two resolved to go to Rocket's hotel room, there to arm themselves from Rocket's arsenal. Ever-prepared, Deadpool brought along the shopping cart he'd used to smash in the storefront window. Deadpool's cellphone rang then to the tune of “Bad Romance” with a call from someone out on The Raft offering to buy his mercenary services in putting down the chaos at the prison. Kane, meanwhile, realized that the breakout at The Raft would be a good cover under which to get in and check up on Bob Reynolds (AKA The Sentry), who was, at that moment, locked away by choice at the deepest and most secure level of The Raft. If you don't know Sentry, the gist is that he thinks he killed his wife, and so he ordered Nick Fury to lock him up, and then used his phenomenal psychic powers to wipe all memory of his existence from the entire world, which is why he only (then) recently appeared in the comics. If you don't know why Kane of all people would have any connection to Sentry, well, that's more to do with the player playing Kane having chosen to pursue the set of Event Milestones relating to Sentry at the outset of the event. Anyway, he hitched a ride on a convenient S.H.I.E.L.D helicopter that was taking off from a nearby rooftop as he swung by. Using his invisibility, he took a seat in the back of the craft that would go empty anyway as the fourth member of this group of agents had left his weapons hanging on the coat-hook of a bathroom stall several floors below and had gone to retrieve them despite his compatriots assurances that they were indeed going to leave him behind. Did I mention things get a little stupid at my table? I claim full responsibility. Rocket's hotel room was the scene of him and Deadpool gathering as many weapons as Rocket's (mechanically supported in the system) obsessive-compulsive disorder deemed in proper working order into Deadpool's shopping cart. Deadpool's earlier phone conversation had scored him a boat ride to the prison, and we were at last on our way to having all of the player characters on the same landmass. Next time: Actual interaction with the scenario in the book from characters not named Venom!
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Jul 17, 2012 07:29
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I really ought to be ashamed to even show my face after abandoning my write-up in the FATAL and Friends (and even here in this very) thread, but I really had a blast running this with my group. If you've run more complex systems, like, well, anything almost, you should do fine running MHR. Like most any fiction-first hippie storygame, you (as player or Watcher) choose your action based on what the character would do. Only then does the question of statistical capability come into play. The whole thing is so lightweight and barely-there as a system that playing and running is only really limited by your and your player's imaginations, rather than system weirdness or arcane rules. I definitely found that it was most effective to just jump the hell in, and the rules made much more sense in play. If the Civil War book looks cool to you, and you can grasp the intention->build dice pool->action mechanic, the only other obstacle is getting creative with the Doom Pool. Rock out, and let us know how it goes, man!
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Sep 27, 2012 03:00
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ibntumart posted:I'm not quite sure I get all of the mechanic---I get the intention and dice building parts, but need to take another look at Distinctions and the Doom Pool---but I think this is one of those things that is probably obvious once you've done it a couple of times. Like you said, just jump the hell in and it'll all become clear.  .ibntumart posted:Oh, one more question: did you guys use the premade characters or venture into making up your own? If---scratch that, when---I put up my Civil War recruitment thread, I will be strongly tempted to let players make up their own superheroes (or hell, their own duos/teams). PrincessWuffles fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Sep 28, 2012 |
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Sep 28, 2012 04:33
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^^ Just a heads up, but signing posts is frowned on. ^^ This game does rock crazy hard. My group loved it, and I'm thinking about running more once I pick up Annihilation. neonchameleon posted:@Princess Wuffles, mind if I continue the MHRP write-up on FATAL and Friends? Jesus, I forgot about this thread. Go right ahead, man. No worries. PrincessWuffles fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Mar 9, 2013 |
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Mar 9, 2013 03:40
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Well, poo poo. I just popped in to say I'm finally updating again over in Fatal And Friends. New MHR post is here. I never did find a physical copy of either the Basic Game or the Civil War edition with the Operations Manual. Guess I still have a pdf and all kinds of fan-made material, but drat. I just started thinking about this game again, and now find out there's no more? It always looked like the Basic Game at least was pretty high on DTRPG's chart, although what that actually means in dollars and cents I don't know. People do have a big problem, I think, and I have it to, with paying a lot for pdf copies, when a lot of the things that add to the cost of an rpg book (glossy paper, high quality printing, large format, etc.) aren't really factors in a digital edition. License was, of course, a factor in this case, I do understand. I don't mean to say that the creators don't deserve the consumer's money, but I wonder if price may have been a factor in deterring sales? I don't know if that makes much sense, but it was a factor for me.
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Apr 30, 2013 10:36
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jivjov posted:I thought the premium event book idea was pretty inspired too. When I first got into the system, I picked up the core book, and the guy at the comic shop said "oh hey, you could get that softcover with the base rules, or you could get this cool hardcover that comes with that same rules book plus all the Civil War stuff". So I bought it. And the Civil War TPB. (Side note: Civil War was way cooler in concept than in execution). Also, Civil War would have been a lot better as a comic if they'd remembered to have all of the interesting things actually happen in the main book instead of scattered over all of the satellite titles. Gotta sell those other titles, too, though, I guess. VV I'm good with my pdf. A real live book wasn't something I need need need, but thank you for the offer  VV
PrincessWuffles fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Apr 30, 2013 |
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Apr 30, 2013 19:26
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