Matt Rossi reminds me that it’s worth thinking big when planning a superhero campaign. This made me think of Jack Kirby, who did “big” better than anyone.
And googling for Kirby I found the weird comic The Zone Continuum, which reminds me of the art of Guy Davis, particularly on the comic Nevermen.
Jesse’s Bookmarklets Site has lots of nifty browser widgets. I liked the Web development stuff, including a Javascript interactive shell that has command history and tab completion. But there might be something actually useful there as well.
Many of us are to one degree or another uncomfortable in standard social situations. The entire roleplaying form can be seen as an alternate mode of socialization in which the boundaries of interaction are mathematically codified – and plus, you get super-powers.
It is therefore the ultimate form of entertainment for smart people who distrust emotion and have boundary issues.
Except when the games come with persuasion mechanics. They smash the boundaries, dredging up feelings you’d rather not deal with. To lose control over your PC is like losing control over yourself. Worse, the things your PC does while persuaded or controlled are highly likely to be, if not unsettling, embarrassing. They get you worked up, and steal the power you’ve come to the gaming table to experience.
I like this – Boaz‘s idea of how our superhero campaign (starting a new one, as we often do…) should look like:
I liked the secret societies angle – the Benandanti and the vamps’ clans, for example. Keepers of masquerades, and 0wners of government agencies. Men-In-Black sort of outfits.
Aliens? Extra-Dimensional beings? They surely affected humankind, probably bred into humanity – hence – supes.
Think Marvel or DC universes in all their possibilities and adopting every myth possible, think no skin-tights or glowing blasts, think masquerade. Think gods walk among us and have to deal with insane guys with gadgets and martial arts, people born far away dealing with their 8th generation offspring that have been here for awhile. In a world where a skilled cat burglar can hang out with someone who can cause genocide just by being cranky in the morning. A world where you can escape your bunny-boiler ex using that nicely disguised spaceship that people have been thinking was their water tower for years. A world where one Bartender from the Village can make a difference in a galaxy scale millennia ancient feud, just by giving a good advice and making a killer Bloody Mary.
How’s that sound?
My incoherent thoughts evoked two comments, one by Cary (don’t know him from Adam, but the Internet is funny that way) who suggested Universalis, and one by Shiffer who suggested I look at Polaris. Now, I haven’t read either, but judging from what I’ve read about them, neither sounds like what I’m looking for.
Universalis seems to involve competative manipulation of the setting, through the currency of coins – spend coins to create new components of the setting, or to control components others create. I worry that this put the players too much in the GM author/director position, and less in the player/actor/immersive point of view. Furthermore, the competitive aspect worries me – it reeks of Shmulik’s play style.
Also, the expenditure of coints seems to involve some book-keeping, reminding me of Ran‘s G_DS game (system designed with Jake), where a lot of book-keeping seemed an irrelevant break in the action (G_DS, a game of supernatural entities playing at being Gods and uplifting worshippers from the ooze, is perhaps one setting that something like Universalis could really fit. Ran was a brilliant GM for this, although our short-lived campaign did involve Shmulik, and I cried like a baby when my character died, soul-sucked into oblivion while fighting a Spider-god from another dimension).
Universalis does appear to have a mechanism I rather like, which involves buying more coins by adding complications to the setting. Although in the competative atmosphere, I suspect this might be another option for abuse.
But yeah, my “vision” of GM-free play is not “make everyone a GM” so that all the players are doing the god-game, but rather let the GM go down into player-land and immerse in character, with the system – and the join creativity of all the players – bringing up complications.
The desire for immersion is probably why I’m not keen on Polaris either – the entire ritual-based system is oriented on creating a distancing effect – which is excellent for the purpose of evoking the remote, long-lost fairy tale or legendary mood of that game’s setting, but isn’t quite what I need for running the sort of games I run to my peeps, or the sort of games I want to play in.
And sneaking into player-land is really what this is about.
Or maybe forget about GM-less play, Tarot cards and XP for plot-complications or whatever unformed ideas I’ve got, and instead focus on the old trick of inserting a character that serves as “the GM’s PC”. I never really liked that technique, really.
Pauline – the plot-device that walks like an underwear model (but with glasses) – might be the closest I got, and that’s not very close at all.
Oh, yeah, there’s also Capes, which is GM-less and also Supes. Worth looking at, perhaps.