james_davis_nicoll | What I have concluded about Marvel Heroic RPG

When I played Danger Patrol, we noticed the same thing; the Danger Meter seems to passively discourage trying to do anything interesting or exciting, no matter how the rest of the rules encourage gonzo action.

Sadly, I agree with your analysis. To maximize the effectiveness of dramatic action at the end of a scene, the characters need to be as undramatic as possible in the leadup.

Whenever characters do cool things during the buildup of a scene, this equates to adding more dice to the pool, which dramatically increases the risk of lengthening the scene, because it adds to the GM's resistance to defeat.

Whenever characters do boring things during the buildup of a scene, they minimize their risk of contributing to the pool, and thus maximize the effectiveness of their dramatic activity during the climax (when they deploy more dice to try to get bigger effect).

If this is the dynamic the game is intended to foster, that's fine, but I'm not sure I like it, because basically it just seems to contribute to the "the more fun you make combats the longer combats will last! because more cake is always better, right?! now eat more cake! EAT IT!" vibe.

I'd rather an economy that encouraged dramatic play/riffing/ideas and scene variety: I'm OK with tough obstacles, but to make the obstacles grow tougher the more fun the players are having seems to put a natural choker on fun...

I think I agree with you, but on looking at the rules (because this game frustrates the heck out of me: I don't seem to get out of it the results that should be possible), I see something important:

I'm not spending doom dice.

Essentially, anything the players can spend Plot Points on, the GM (er, Watcher in their terminology) can accomplish by spending Doom Dice...for most things, any die in the pool will do, but for other things, the die has to be a particular size (bigger than the relevant power if you want to interrupt a player with special senses or speed, create assets, resources, or complications).

I've been concentrating on getting high dice in the pool (partly because there's a rule that says the GM can have the villain escape by spending 2D12, though each player gets 2 XP for that...any time the GM spends a D12, the player affected gets 1 XP), but I think that's the wrong thing to do.

Build up a couple of dice, yes, because sometimes you have to interrupt Spider-Man in the order, but generally the GM should spend doom dice regularly. It's still true that the players should do their healing or resource creation at the beginning of an act when the doom pool is guaranteed to be low, but it should be lower than I've been having it.

(If the GM actually needs doom dice, the villain threatens something other than the heroes so they have to go rescue it or them; that's grandstanding, and it lets the GM add a d6 to the doom pool or step up the lowest die. They call it "grandstanding.")

So I have not been holding up my end of the bargain. I have not been presenting enough cool dramatic play on the part of the villains.

I'll try differently next time.

The problem here is that I think our group is quite capable of presenting cool dramatic play without all this dice pool economy arbitrage, and this, I think, actually presents a barrier to playing the rules-as-written.

What mechanical motivation is there for you, as GM, to actually follow the rules-as-written? "Because it will generate fun!" is not a mechanical motivation, imho, as long as your group is capable of generating the fun all on their own.

In fact, when the group generates fun on their own, figuring out the complex inter-relationships of all the die-pool hoohah seems like it could actually be antithetical to that.

The more we play these kinds of game, the more I'm falling into Zak Smith's camp. I'm not sure I want rules to deploy to "increase my fun". I need a slight rules-framework that gets the hell out of the way most of the time, and let's me quickly satisfy James when he wants to roll a die for some action. 8)

This could be an artifact of our ages: we learned how to have fun within the structure of games that didn't try to give us a fun-engine, and re-training those neurons is maybe not worth our effort.

This could also be an artifact of our average session length. I figure we probably play for about a third to a half of a typical group's session length. To me this logically leads to the conclusion that our fun depends on faster transitions from scene to scene; otherwise, we seem to get rutted in eating a lot of cake.

Comparing the MHRP experience to the D&D4e experience is interesting: 4e explicitly gave us the converse of MHRP -- we got a comprehensible tactical system where we could very quickly build a framework where we understood the actions and the consequences of them, so that we could reliably work the gears, and we ended up eating a lot of cake because the combats took so long and filled our evenings. With MHRP we seem to get an incomprehensible system that feeds back our riffing on itself to naturally lengthen the "things your'e doing that are fun". Which means we eat lots of cake. And spend so long in combat that fills our evenings. Same destination, different vehicles.

It's a property of role-playing games with detailed combat systems.

Used to run a Rune Quest game; I was entirely willing to kill player-characters, RQ's critical hit system is *more* than willing to kill player characters, player characters did die, things would still turn into mostly-combat unless I got really creative.

("The seer who lives in the cave at the top of the 800 foot cliff around the five-acre island as is nothing but cliff wants a cow. You have a rowboat, maybe a 100 feet of rope, and no cow." That ate the whole night, but it also had some of the properties of combat.)

I think it's just a property of having the detail there. Time gets spend on whatever the system details _if the players will go for it_; one of the big problems of Ars Magica was the assumption that all this detail about solitary activity by wizards was something the players would go for, for example.

I think the detail in combat systems is there to prevent abruptly-decisive character actions ("I smite him; I iz glorious; he dies") that make the game too easy. I'm not sure it's the best way to make the game not be too easy for experienced gamers.

Weirdly, Traveler is the system where I found it easiest to keep things from being about the combats, because so much of Traveler turns out to be about fleeing overwhelming forces.

That sounds like an unconventional yet fun game. Did the PCs bring a cow to the seer or drag the seer off to see a cow? Was it important why the seer wanted a cow?

Creative solution: cow + catapult.

The requirement was for a live cow.

They had to go commit longshore piracy to get the cow; since they were in a feud with some folks on another island who had cows, this was pretty easy in a conceptual sense but had execution issues.

Once they had the cow (think wee highland coo), it was a combination of mountaineering and a mobile, well, _two_ mobile, and wasn't it funny when the need for the second one was recognized, cow platform that could be fitted to the cliff face and support the cow. (also, hay and buckets of fresh water because it took some time to get the cow all the way up the cliff.)

The seer charged the PCs a cow in return for a professional opinion about how to deal with something mystical and non-standard, I think the wraith-with-POW remnant of Eyvinder the Snake-hurler. (A man who died very angry indeed.)

Oh, and the PCs did not know why the seer wanted a live cow delivered to his dwelling. The leading suspicion (since the setting was vaguely Gloranthesque) was that the seer was engaging in a rash attempt to get a sky-bull to come down and breed with it, but why the seer would want to do that wasn't at all clear.

Edited 2013-04-19 11:19 (UTC)

Surely this could not be the prelude to anything that would trouble player characters ever again!

I think I agree with you about games that work to increase fun; I haven't seen any mechanics that I actually enjoy. (Okay, the Hero Games limitations and the ICONS challenges go a little way to providing hooks, but in neither case are you required to use them; you can go elsewhere if desire takes you.)

My inclination to tactical combat is quite different from yours. I found D&D4E deadly dull. What might have been an interpersonal thing became, in challenges, an exercise in dice throwing. And I was in a bad place, so I didn't particularly want to learn another set of fiddly rules, so the tactical aspects did not appeal to me. (I did not care about mastery.)

MHR has, somewhere in it, a game that rewards interesting tactical choices, but by only giving a few mechanical options, they end up all being the same, and confusingly so. ("Is that an asset? Or a resource? The heck with it, I'll hit him. Oh, he's protected by GM fiat.") I have the same problem with PDQ: I very much liked the setting in Jaws of the Six Serpents and the freedom implied by the casual rules set appealed to me, but it never came to fruition.

And thinking of it that way, maybe what I want to try is Savage Worlds. (Or not.)

There's a middle ground between "here are rules for combat; make everything else up" and "Here's a lot of dice hoohah that promises to increase your enjoyment but will instead suck the colour out of everything." I wish I could find it, though it might be a Pepsi sweetness problem.

Having been on both sides, I think 4e is better for the GM than it is for players. The GM is nearly always inVolved, providing opposition for all the players. The players get to do their thing and then sit and wait. I found it very HERO-like for all that, but I remember liking HERO more (maybe because PCs were basically at a set competency and the grow-stronger-with-more-things wasn't built in).

Fate seemed promising to me as a game that had mechanical hooks which got people involved rather than getting in the way, but it never really lived up to that promise until the latest version, Fate Core. (Specifically I got into the beta of the Atomic Robo RPG and ran a few one-shots which all turned out great. There's a writeup of one of them here: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?684170-Atomic-Robo-Action-Accounting!) The Fate Core base system itself should be available as a pay-want-you-want download in a month or so; you might want to check that out.

It avoids the, "Is it an asset? Or a resource?" problem quite nicely, and it has great frameworks for non-combat challenges. It does go the other way though, making every mechanical option really exactly the same. It's not much about tactical choices at all, which rubs some people the wrong way. Mechanically, it's about bidding: just how much do I want to spend to do well on this particular roll / avoid this particular consequence. Pretty much any tactic will work as well as any other (beyond the very basic, "Try to use stats you have a high bonus in") since your effectiveness is based on how many points you choose to spend.

A completely different approach that I've seen people rave about is Apocalypse World and its fantasy spin-off, Dungeon World (which was released under a Creative Commons license so you can find a free download of it easily.) As far as I can tell what makes it cool is that whenever you take an action you only fully succeed on a critical success: more often, actions look like this:

On a roll of < threshold, something bad happens to you (or you simply fail)
On a roll of >= threshold, you succeed but something bad happens as well
On a roll of >= high threshold, you succeed with no sacrifice needed

Often this is phrased like:

Scry spell: You gain a flickering, fragmentary vision of a subject of the GM's choice, lasting for several seconds. Roll the dice:
If you roll < threshold, pick one of the following.
If you roll >= threshold, pick two of the following.
If you roll >= high threshold, pick three.
* The vision is of a target you choose.
* The vision is clear and lasts for several minutes.
* You do not attract the attention of a hostile other-worldly being.

Which seems like a fun way to present choices.

Apocalypse World, and its derivatives fall squarely into the realm of "here! we give you mechanics to bring the awesome!! SYSTEM DOES MATTER!!!"

Which is cool and all if that's what you're in to.

But I kickstarted DW and have read it, and followed the chitter-chatter, and I have to say I rather agree with the old-schoolers on this one -- if your group already knows how to fave fun, then, really, go play D&D if you want an homage to D&D.

AW at the very least has the advantage of not having too many "gritty post-apoc world" antecedents...

As someone who's played Savage Worlds, I'll say give it a shot. The only book you really need is only about ten bucks (American) and if it doesn't suit you you're not out much. It's a nicely lightweight system that's detailed enough for doing most things. The superhero genre is a special and system-stressing one; there's a Savage Worlds expansion to cover actual superpowers (and a generic 'powers' system in the basic book), but I've never actually played a SW Supers game.

Just from reading MHRPG (and deciding I had no interest in running the thing, although I'd be interested in playing sometime to find out how the incomprehensible rules actually work out in play) it seemed to me to be basically a much more intricate version of Fate, except instead of aspects and Fate Points you have a million different types of aspect-like thing, and dice pools with different sized dice.

Which makes me suspect in play it would feel a lot like Icons with more fiddling to figure out what goes into each roll. Does that seem about right?

The game does manage to do some clever things with all the chrome.

I like the idea of die-stepping and that's something that Fate doesn't offer.

Die stepping and the "oh noz! rolling one gives bennies to the opposition!" thing make the math kind of interesting. I'm not entirely sure that the math really holds up, or has the salutory effect that many groups really want, but it's still interesting. Fate, by contrast, has a fairly flat curve and not much in the way of interesting math going on: which is fine, really -- because it can mean the system gets the heck out of the way well.

But really, beyond the die-stepping and the "you get experience for doing meaningful story tasks for your character that fit into this story" (which is also a blessing and a curse), I'm coming away feeling it has too much chrome and not enough just plain comprehensible "so this is how good I am, and this is what my chances are" value points on the characters.

It could just be that over the years I've come to really not much like dice-pool games. That's entirely possible.

Edited 2013-04-19 23:30 (UTC)

You know, I dropped into a thread which was debating, "What would a gate halfway between Fate and Cortex+ look like?" and I jokingly said, "Chronica Feudalis", knowing nothing about it except that it was inspired by Fate and used step dice. The creator of Cortex+ arrived and said I was exactly right. So you might give that a try.

Someone must have done the math, right? (This, typed by a guy who had to run the Savage Worlds numbers himself...) I've never googled for that.

After reading the above comments, and I know I'm two weeks behind right now sorry, does the GM's use of Doom Pool dice give bonuses back to the PLAYERS, mirroring the mechanic going the other way? Cuz if so, then there's your motivation to use them rather than saving them - give the players MORE ROPE to roll themselves up in...

(We can, with proper scientific study, turn this into an RPG DICE LASER, correct?)

Dave, speaking of which, the docfuture tumblr story is going nicely long and strong

What I have concluded about Marvel Heroic RPG

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