SMAX #174: Breaking the Broan

The most recent session of our Superhero RPG was an interesting one in terms of seeing the gap between our style and the nature of the system we’re using. With this in mind, I’m going to quote from the player notes Adam keeps from session to session on his gaming wiki:

We have a terrible plan to get inside the spaceship
This is true pretty much regardless which of our plans we use

Crow Road Campaigns, SMAX #174 notes

At the same time, this was the session where I started implementing some of the more narrative-oriented rules from the Cortex Prime draft. This assumes a lot of player control over the narrative–perhaps more than we’re used too–and a default assumption borrowed from the Leverage RPG that whatever plan they come up with is the right plan. 

In narrative terms, the heist is built around planning only so the viewer knows how things have gone wrong when they do. Executing a plan perfectly after you’ve detailed it is dull; breaking expectations is a source of conflict.

It’s something I’ve been pondering throughout this review. 

I really need to update that banner.

PREVIOUSLY, IN SMAX

There’s a lot of backstory in the previous post that I won’t repeat here. The key points for this session: the players are trapped on another dimension, on an earth being invaded by aliens. They need to steal the energy core from the alien flagship to power the device that will get them–and 200 meta-humans kidnapped to this dimension by a villain named Professor Panic–home.

At the end of the previous session the players decided to wake up two of the kidnapped metas to help with the plan: a probability manipulator named Shift, who had been a PC prior to being retired, and a recurring NPC speedster named Jenny Rocket (from M&M’s Time of Vengeance adventure) who has something to prove to the PC team.

THE PREP

I knew going in that this session was going into this session that it was all about the heist. With a lot of the villains already set up from previous sessions, I spent a good chunk of my prep time figuring out how to prep for the session.

Rather than thinking in terms of specific scenes to aim for, I listed the challenges to pulling the heist off:

• They needed to get past foot patrols and fighter sweeps around the vessel
• They needed to bypass a seemingly-impenetrable forcefield
• They needed to avoid detection as they snuck through the interior fo the ship.
• They needed to steal the power source without getting noticed.
• They wanted to avoid confrontation with major threats among the alien armanda, particularly the regeneration-heavy Primearch 

Their advantages were access to the Earth-Adrift military and its newly-built army of powered robots, the command structure of the Broan that promoted personal glory, and the fact that most Broan nobility have superpowers and the heroes were the first powered humans they’d encountered.

We also had the new escalating conflict rules from Cortex Prime to take for a trail run, which I figured would cover a variety of ills (hah).

THIS WEEK’S CAST

• SENTINEL (played by Nic): a rookie gadgeteer with a utility belt full of tricks and some low-key power armour that’s more notable for its sensor array and analytic AI than its weapon systems.
• AZIMUTH (played by Adam): A gravity manipulator who can shape powerful forcefields in much the same way Green Lanterns use a power ring. A reformed criminal whose hiding something.
• SHIFT (secondary PC): Nic’s former PC, retired a few months back. Basically a stoner with massive probability-control powers, constantly bewildered by the people who think he’s a threat because his powers represent a rewriting of reality itself.
• ROCKET (Secondary PC): A young speedster who first encountered the players when they were on their PCS, a pair of teen heroes who developed a complicated relationship with Jenny. This has continued as the team iterated and she joined a rival team, although the present PCs have none of that history and seem to be aiming towards friendship. 

HOW IT PLAYED OUT

SCENE ONE: DEFROSTING THE ALLIES & BUILDING A PLAN. The game opened with Sentinel and Azimuth defrosting their allies and explaining the situation, including the core challenges of getting to the energy source as laid out by the Earth-Adrift military (see the notes above). This segued into the long planning sequences referenced at the top of this recap, plus some questions about the morality of using lethal force in this situation.

I’m pondering the level of planing that kicked in here, and how it came about. None of the plans were necessarily bad, but I suspect the players felt constrained about the size of the doom pool (which kicked off with multiple d12s) and the fear of rolling to generate assets that might help since the tech hero wasn’t the player with a stack of plot points.

Partially, I suspect it was a framing issue on my part–we don’t fall naturally into the “you’re heroes of a story, assume things will work out” framework, and I’d put the option to the Players about how they’d like to start the session instead of doing what I’d originally planned–kicking off with a military-style briefing that could move the action forward and have an NPC approve ideas. 

SCENE TWO: HACKING A CAPTURED BROAN DROP SHIP. With the forcefield dubbed the most pressing of the problems, the heroes sent Sentinel and Shift to see what they could learn from the force field system on a captured dropship. This was a simple transition scene–one skill check, a plot point spent, and they learned enough about the system to get a D12 bonus when faking recognition codes and getting access to the mothership.

SCENE THREE: MORE PLANNING. Another Transition scene where the team starts talking through options, most of which are ruled out as improbably due to the size of the doom pool and the difficulty of rolling assets. This is definitely something I’m going to look at in the future–where at all possible, the doom pool shouldn’t be the primary thing to roll against and it may be worth considering some of the optional rules that remove it as the arbiter of difficulty.

SCENE FOUR: GETTING IN. The planning session ends more-or-less where it started and the PCs get into the drop-ship and fly. Their first major challenge lies in getting past the force field, but a D12 Fake Code asset means the escalating contest to convince the control they’re a real ship basically ends the moment they roll. They land in a hanger bay, send their speedster to find an airlock, and sneak in.

SCENE FIVE: GETTING THE LAY OF THE LAND. The plan, once they’re in the airlocks, is to follow the improbably-lucky Shift and hope his choices get the to the power source. This is the first serious escalating contest of the game, pitting Shift against the doom pool, and I’ll admit to doing a horrible job with the mechanic.

A bunch of 1s on the first roll sees them run into SECURITY MEASURES D8, and a wrong turn dumps the heroes who can fly in a sewerage tunnel that leaves them all tagged with an INCREDIBLE STENCH D6. In narrative terms this should be seen as the first step–the thing that makes the plan harder to pull off–but instead it became a reason to abandon plan A and look for alternatives. 

SCENE SIX: NETWORK ACCESS. The heroes backtrack along the airlock until they find a computer control room, occupied by bored tech officers who complain about the smell from the airlock. They’re quickly taken out and Sentinel tries to hack the alien systems–another escalating contest that falter early, although he creates a ENERGY CONDUIT MAP D8 asset a result of the first roll.

The plan goes back to using Shift’s luck–this time with the conduit map asset–and this time they find a door that is loaded with guards. The escalating roll results in a D10 EXPLODING FUEL DUMP complication agains the aliens– we write up as Jenny rushing back to the hanger and sparking off a series of explosions–and I choose not to escalate further since the mechanic hasn’t found its feel as a source of tension. Guards run off, the heroes break through the doorway, and find the ships core reactor.

SCENE SEVEN: BIG PROBLEMS. The energy reactor powering a ship the size of a city turns out to be pretty big–about three stories tall and locked into a high power energy conduit. Fortunately, Azimuth’s forcefields constructs can lift something that heavy and allow them to remove the device without taking damage.

Of course, the ship immediately starts to list sideways as critical systems power down and the engines shut off. Sentinel: “I know you didn’t need to hear this, but I really didn’t think of that during planning.”

SCENE EIGHT: EXIT STRATEGY. Azimuth gets the job of transporting everyone–and the energy core–out of a the city-sized spaceship about to crash into the ruins of Melbourne. She throws up a forcefield and starts bursting through decks, and we make our third attempt at an escalating contest for the evening.

This one sees the heroes getting bounced off bulkheads (KNOCKED ABOUT D6) and knocked off-course when a part of the ship collapses and collides with them as they’re rising (FAILING INTEGRITY D8). On the plus side, the heroes manage to follow Broan attempting to ABANDON SHIP PROTOCOLS D10 which get them close to the surface, and find an easy DETOUR D12 through a massively empty dining room that sees them clear a lot of space very quickly. 

Since the night was wearing on, and the doom pool was still massive, I elected to spend 2d12 to end the scene. The upside: the heroes burst through the side of the ship intact and deliver the energy core to the waiting arms of some combat robots and a Earth-Adrift patrol.

The Downside: the Broan Prime-arch (this reality’s version of Sovereign from M&M’s Crooks supplement), launches his escape ship and pursues the heroes, actually climbing onto the cockpit with his Harbinger Spear to “finally do battle with this planet’s worthy foes.”

SCENE NINE: FIGHT! The most important thing is getting the energy cell and the 200 metas home, so the heroes split up. Shift and Azimuth stay to fight the Primearch, Sentinel and Jenny head back to the military base to start working on the dimensional portal generator.

The Primarch fight proved to be messy–the core rules from Cortex Prime are different enough from the Marvel Heroic rules that a lot of things become counterintuitive, and it’s not the best switch to make at the end of a session. We end up reverting to the rules we know for the sake of making things easy.

He bellows and postures a lot, but ultimately gets pinned by his own spear after throwing it at Azimuth, and he’s left there to get crushed beneath debris from his ship. Not enough to kill him, given he can regenerate from anything, but good enough to take him out of the fight.

SCENE TEN: FOND FAREWELLS. With the alien ship down and powered robots in production, Earth-Adrift’s military forces are confident of their ability to hold their own against the Broan.

They also elect to keep Professor Panic on their earth, despite the PCs fears that it will all come back to haunt them. It’s suggested the authorities keep the portal generator running, so they have access to super-powered help in the event that Panic’s robots go rogue.

Farewells are made, the authorities are told they’r probably idiots for underestimating panic, and Sentinel gets the machine up and running. There’s a bright flash as it operates, a circle of energy spreading out to capture all the heroes and the unconscious metas in its wake. Its bright enough that it can be seen spilling out of the mountain that houses the base

And then, on the final page of the issue, we get a shot of Shift looking up from the patch of bush where’s he’s snuck off for a cigarette, realising that he’s been left behind. 

POST-GAME

This was not the successful trial run of the Cortex Prime rules I’d been hoping for, but I’m not sure whether the fault lies in the rules themselves, the way I’m framing the scenes (which, admittedly, is a thing I’ve got flagged to work on), or a combination of other factors including the godawfully huge doom pool (now used up). I remember having teething problems when we first started with Marvel Heroic, so it may just be a case of normalising mechanics for players and GM alike. 

That said, the big challenge to work on for coming session will be scene framing. Getting used to thinking of them this way helps, but I think the escalating contests–in particular–will be helped with a better framing of what’s going on and what the break for a new roll means. Part of my challenge for future sessions will be making the break feel like a moment where tactics need to be adapted, not abandoned. 

On the plus side, we’re through the unintentional alternate-dimension adventure and one of our absent players returns after a three-session absence. 

After all the big, world-shaking stuff I’m thinking there needs to be something simple in the coming session. Costumed crooks performing a bank-job maybe. Something very back-to-basics.