Heroes of the City 3.0 play report.
For those of you just joining us, HotC is a hacked DW game. http://bit.ly/2da0QF9
I’m feeling good and happy. Our Monday play group decided we wanted to do the superhero genre for our next game, so I decided to try out my DW hack. It worked and did everything it was supposed to do. We sat down a little after 8 and were playing before 9. It required minimal rules explanations and I had to clarify very few rules during play.
I can see the powers system still needs some tweaking, but overall things were specific enough that they didn’t break the game. I’m going to let play continue until everyone hits level 3, before making any modifications to 3.0
One thing I do want to work on now is a GM reference sheet. I’d been winging it with the one from DW, supplemented by the one from Masks. Time to make my own customized version that clarifies and directs what I want to accomplish with HotC.
I find it hard to express in words how proud I am that this worked. 🙂 🙂 🙂
Team Rabble is composed of Comet, a Science origin Super Reflexes/Fiery Melee Tanker, Counter Shot, a Technology origin Guns/Devices Blaster, UNIT 1482, a Technology Blades/Super Reflexes Scrapper, Pulse, an Energy/Energy Blaster, and Zero Point, a Magic Gravity/Kinetics Controller.
They’ve been gathered by Azuria from the Modern Arcane Guild of Investigation (M.A.G.I.) to look into a disturbing text message she got from one of her contacts. After patrolling for suspicious activity they spotted two men coming up from a sewer hole carrying a large package. They had a disturbing and strange symbol on the back of their leather vests. After dispatching them and four of their companions below (hijinks, we had terrible rolls, so there were many hijinks), they checked out the package and interrogated the only survivor. Inside they found an Ushabati, an ancient Egyptian statue designed to serve the dead in the afterlife. They also found a clue pointing them to a closed City of Gyros shop. More powers hijinks ensued, but they managed to bust their way in and defeat the welcoming party. Just as they were catching their breath they overheard some loud banging sounds from the back room…
Would be awesome for you to include the various zones? GM moves? How to build missions based on how missions were generally built. some baddies by level.
I need ti spend more time looking through what you have, but loved CoH.
How are you handling travel powers?
Background is easy. Copy and paste from Paragonwiki. I think I’ll have a GM moves sheet done today for the game tonight. I have Hellions, Skulls, Tsoo converted. I want to write some cool moves for them, but so far they’re just baddies with stats. I’m running them through an arc where they discover Hellions are hoarding and stealing magical artifacts, which them leads them up the chain to the Tsoo. Next story arc will be about the Skulls and Superadine and how it leads up the chain to the Family. They’ll hopefully have enough clues that they can do something like pitting the Family vs. Tsoo or they may go off on another tangent all together. I’ll be dropping hints of other things going on “Man I may be a Blood Brother, but at least I’m not a psycho like those Freakshow putting machines into their bodies.” “Buddy disappeared, but then I heard he showed up again with a bunch of homeless guys. He looked… different.”
I’m still trying to wrap my head around travel powers. My players have given me until they get to level 3 to figure something out. I’ll probably treat them as moves you can access, like multiclassing moves in DW.
First Draft
Agendas
* Portray a world where anything is possible, the weird, the outlandish, the alien, and the fantastic
* Fill the characters lives with issues only heroes can solve
* Play to find out what happens next
Principles
* Address the characters, not the players
* Embrace every trope in the genre
* Make a move that follows
* Never speak the name of your move
* Give every villain life
* Name every person
* Ask provocative questions and use the answers
* Be a fan of the characters
* Think dangerous
* Begin and end with the fiction
* Think offscreen, too
* Make your move, but misdirect
* Make threats real
* Treat human life as meaningful
* Encourage action
Moves
* Use a villain, threat, or environment move
* Reveal an unwelcome truth
* Show signs of an approaching threat
* Deal damage
* Use up their resources or take away their stuff
* Turn their moves back on them
* Separate them
* Give an opportunity that fits an archetypes abilities
* Show a downside to their archetype, appearance, equipment or origin
* Offer an opportunity, with or without cost
* Put someone in a spot
* Tell them the requirements and ask
* Reveal the future subtly or directly
* Make them pay a price for victory
* Change the environment
* Reveal dark secrets
* Give them exactly what they need at a cost
* Capture someone
* Inflict a bad reputation on them
Power Moves
* Put innocents in danger
* Show the costs of collateral damage
* Reveal a terrible truth of their powers
* Make their powers flare out of control
* Show a downside to their powers
Love the power moves
I feel Travel Powers should be fictional unless using them during danger.
Apart from sticking to the source material (somewhat arbitrarily in this instance, if I might be so bold), is there any reason not to provide access to travel powers from level one? My personal, super-simple take would be to have travel powers as a third category to pick from when you create a character, and write up stunts for each one like you have with the other powers.
When not in a tense situation, they just provide a way to get around the city, no roll needed, and when you need to use them in a more cinematic environment you just use the same basic moves as you do with everything else.
Also, side-note, but it might make more sense to have the associated attribute for “Use a Power” be based on individual powers, rather than class? I say this because I made a ninja-esque Scrapper, and it seemed very weird that Super Reflexes was based on Constitution rather than Dexterity; I’m sure there are other odd cases like that. Further thought: maybe each power has two possible attributes, and you’re free to pick which one you like but you can’t have both of your main powers keyed to the same attribute.
Spaghetti-tossing aside, I like this hack. Sadly missed out on City of Heroes, but I wouldn’t mind taking this for a spin.
I’m inclined at this point to just treat travel powers as fictional. It’s against my design philosophy to have too many choices in the beginning, as it slows down character generation and increases complexity. I’m trending away from making a third class of powers with stunts at the beginning for this reason.
I am running into players using Charisma as a dump stat. I like your idea of having some powers based off of different attributes (SR-Dex), but again I run into the complexity issue.
I’m thinking of adding additional archetype moves to cover the powers that were Pool Powers in CoH. That way as you level up, you’ll still be able to use your primary and secondary power, but will gain additional moves like being able to become stealthy or invisible, be a master tactician for the team, perform first aid, etc.
Maybe I’ll just come up with a bunch of moves that represent pool powers and make the moves available to all all archetypes as they level up. Slightly more complexity, but at least you can begin playing your character right away and read more carefully the next moves you’ll be able to take between sessions.
Third category of moves sounds like the most workable. My players are just now getting to levels 2-3 after 3 sessions and most should be 3 after our next game on Monday. I don’t have much time to work on the moves until after mid Nov. I’ll just toss it to the back of the pot and let it simmer for a few weeks.
Why not treat travel powers like defy danger?
When you use your travel power to get somewhere fast, roll +dex? When you X, roll+Y?
Jason Brannen, curious on your next version? I may start running a group with it.
I’ve got 4.0 in my head. It modifies 3.0, as we found things that break the game and I’m adding power pool moves. It drops Inspiration (no one has used really used it in three games). I was sick last week and didn’t get anything done I wanted to on any of my RPG projects. No ETA. 3.0 is runnable as-is, but if you do decide to run it I can give you a heads-up on a few things we’ve found so far.
I made a collection for all the HotC posts. https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/gDW7nB
URL seems to be broken.
I seem to have set it up for followers only. Follow me if you want and you should have access to it. I post very infrequently, and even then it’s almost always about RPGs.