Post originally by Ralph Mazza at 2004-10-15 08:50:20
Converted from Phorums BB System

I doubt anyone is still reading this, but this was the earliest I've been able to get back to this and Jack raised some good questions.

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First, the concept of a game playing out just like a comic book sort of defeats the purpose of it being a rpg. Comic books are scripted out, beginning, middle, and end. Events are played out for maximum drama for a big payoff in the end. RPGs shouldn't be scripted out this way. I can see having a set beginning, perhaps some solid ideas for the middle, but the ending should be determined by the players' actions. By your description of combat, it sounds like the outcome is already predetermined, the players just follow the script.
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Its not at all scripted. Its paced.

Early on the odds are weighted against the players. They are weighted against the players by giving the GM more decks of cards to draw from (when the rules tell you to draw X cards you draw X cards from each deck you control, so by having more decks you're drawing more cards). Also some cards are wild. At the beginning the GM has many numbers that are Wild and the players have only one.

Each step along the story arc has a specific effect. I don't have my copy with me, so I can't tell you all of them, but some of them allow the players to claim one of the GM's decks. Others change which numbers are wild (giving fewer to the GM or more to the players). Others allow you do do certain things in the game, like recover as Aspect that had been previously devastated.

By the time you get to the final "act" the odds are now weighted in the player's favor. They have more decks and more wilds and are thus more likely to do well in the final battle with the villain.

There are more nuances than that, but I wanted it to be clear that there is no plot scripting.



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Now, about combat. I'm not too fond of using playing cards for conflict resolution, but I'll try to be fair. If the Hulk is battling the Abomination, and the player wants to have Hulk smack the villain in the head with a telephone pole, but the player doesn't have the suit that would allow that, does that mean the Hulk can't tear out the pole and hit the Abomination? By your explanation, it sounds like he can't. Maybe I misinterpreted this, but I don't think so.
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The suits are not at all tied to any specific category of action. Suits don't matter at all. All that matters is playing a higher card of the same suit as your opponent.

Hulk plays a 9 which he describes as punching the Abomination. The suit doesn't matter except that now the Abomination must beat a 9 in the same suit. If he can't beat a 9 in the played suit he can change the suit (which requires discarding a card of the suit being changed to as the price of making the change). Now that the suit is changed the Hulk must beat the card from the new suit.

Beyond simply changing the suit the player must describe how the fabric of the conflict has changed. It might be a dramatic change...here the player of the Abomination might describe the conflict changing from being a fight with the Hulk to trying to run away from the Hulk. Or it might be a change of venue or focus, etc.

It’s the act of changing the suit that matters not what the suit was or becomes.


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For the Aspect stuff, I now what it's like to sit in a four to five-hour game session and just play out one fight. A stress on role-playing is good. Having a stat for every piece of a character's background seems strange and unnecessary, though. Let's see if I can get this right. We'll take Captain America and his relationship with Sharon Carter. The ranks are mine, so the game's are probably different. Things start off well when they meet, so I guess the Aspect rank is good. He doesn't want her to stay in SHIELD, but she refuses to leave. Aspect-average. Sharon goes undercover and gets brainwashed by some of Red Skull's goons. Aspect-bad. She apparently burns alive and Cap sees it on video. Aspect-devastated. Years later, she is found to be alive and well. Aspect-good. She doesn't want to have a relationship with him. Aspect-average. Sharon gets mind-controlled by Red Skull and to break her out of it, Cap tells her that he loves her. He then socks her in the jaw. Aspect-bad. Is this sort of how aspects play out in this game?


Aspects are rated on two scales, their importance, which is how many cards they provide, and their state. All Aspects start InActive which means they don’t provide any cards. Activating an Aspect lets you draw on it for cards but makes it vulnerable to damage.

When you lose a conflict Aspects get damaged. I’m not that familiar with Captain America, but that sounds pretty close. For instance, if Doc Ock was threatening MJ and Spidey rescues her but suffers damage the damage might reduce the Mary Jane aspect to the Suffering state and be described as MJ realizing how dangerous having a relationship with Peter is and deciding to cool things off. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean Doc Ock injured her.




Why not just role-play and ditch these stats? It would save time and cut down on letting the character sheet rule the game, which is the objective of this game, anyway.
By this logic why have any rules for any thing and just roleplay everything free form? As a believer that there is no such thing as free form…there is only system that hasn’t been formally articulated…I think that would be a vastly inferior solution.

There is a strange dichotomy in gamerdom which suggests that its ok to have rules for determining the effects of combat with precision (whether with HPs or wound levels or the like) but everything else should just be “role-played”. Since that standard is purely the result of historical accident (that accident being that the first RPGs developed from minis wargaming rather than theatrical improv or another source) I find it odd that people still tend to repeat this rather than discard it as a very limiting assumption about how games should be played or designed.

Having rules to adjucate and quantify how badly Peter and MJ’s relationship has been hurt is conceptually no different at all from having rules that adjucate and quantify how badly you get hurt from being shot or stabbed. There is absolutely zero reason to even conceive of them them differently mentally let alone mechanically other than years of habit.