Marvel Heroic RPG

SMAX #174: Breaking the Broan

PETERMBALL Gaming , , , , , ,

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. 

SMAX #173: Panic on Earth-Adrift

PETERMBALL Gaming , , , ,

I was a GM before I was an writer, which means I occasionally awful affliction that many gamers suffer from where I get all Let me tell you about my game. I’m also a GM who’s had a few recurring items on my to-do lis like run better sessions, do better prep, and test drive rules from the upcoming Cortex Prime set that may do things better than the Marvel Cortex rules.

Since I’ve been running a superhero campaign on Thursdays for…gods, years now…I figure I may as well combine the above with that note on my to-do list that says write regular blog posts and start thinking about ongoing series of posts. 

With that in mind, I’m going to experiment with doing post-game reports here on the blog–giving myself a chance to reflect on what’s worked, and what doesn’t. Think through my thoughts about superhero gaming outside of the every-hundred-sessions-or-so list post (which, weirdly, continue to be the most read posts on this site).

This is something I meant to do years ago,  going by game banner sitting in the blog’s images file–it’s been a long while since two of those characters have been regulars in the game.

PREVIOUSLY, IN SMAX

So, lets get those of you who aren’t my player oriented: we’re in the middle of a story arc where the players are stuck on Earth-Adrift, an alternate dimension I’ve stolen from Mutants & Masterminds Meta-4 setting where there are no native superheroes or easily-accessible routes to other dimension. In their history they’ve only had two visitors from other worlds prior to the PC: a mad scientist named Professor Panic who figured it would be easy to conquer, and the trio of heroes who followed him and put a stop to his scheme.

The heroes went home. Panic stayed on Earth-Adrift, tried by warcrimes and locked in a prison sell since 1986. The Earth-Adrift governments only let him out a year ago, when it became apparent an alien invasion was immanent and Panic was the sole person they had capable of providing weapons that would let them fight back.

The last few sessions have been about those weapons–initially when Panic sent a robot named Damocles back to his home dimension to steal powers, then when the heroes of SMAX transported themselves and 200 meta-humans in cryo-tubes to Earth-Adrift while trying to stop the robot from blowing up.

Session 172 saw them hook up with the Earth-Adrift’s United Earth Military, meet up with Panic and learn about his plans to steal the powers of all 200 metas and install them into a robot army, and ultimately decide that was a bad thing when it was revealed the process would kill the 200 subjects (including some former teammates and friends). 

This meant I went into this session with some specific conflicts and goals, rather than coherent prep:

  • The PCs wanted to stop the deaths of 200 meta-humans. The United Earth Military wants those powers–and the ability to put them into robots that can be rebuilt and redeployed–so they can prevent the total destruction of earth at alien hands.
  • I wanted to seed the idea of getting back home and what it was going to take. Earth-Adrift was a detour rather than a core storyline–an opportunity provided by some player decisions and uncooperative dice–and it fit neatly with a period where another player was away. 
  • Focus on the particular archetype I wanted Professor Panic to fit: he’s never going to stand toe-to-toe with a superhero, but he’s a threat because of the things he invents and the situations he sets up.

This last one was on my mind a lot in this session: we’d ended the previous game on a flat note, when the reveal that his power-stealing device would kill the 200 metas was immediately followed by the Gadgeteer hero Sentinel digging for information about whose decision that was. The thought being, what if he’s reformed? Is he doing this against his will, or is he still the same Professor Panic who will be an even greater threat once all of this is over. 

Unfortunately, it was one of those moments where describing what the PC was doing didn’t make the player’s intent clear, and I wasn’t making it clear that Panic was totally okay with killing people (and, in fact, enjoying the fact that the hero would be going up against the military if he tried to thwart the plan).

THIS WEEKS 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.

HOW IT PLAYED OUT

Traditionally a Cortex game is broken down into specific scenes, which is one of those things I’ve never really adapted too as effectively as I should. With that in mind, I’m going to try and break the session down scene-by-scene here to start fixing the technique in my mind (and showcase it for the players who might read this).

SCENE ONE:  SHOWDOWN IN THE LAB. We start the session with the equivalent of a splash-page–Azimuth is trying to disconnect the cables that power Panic’s Power-Stealing machine, Sentinel is trying to talk down the guards who are about to open fire, and Professor Panic is cackling like a madman at the chaos that’s about to be unleashed.

The scene immediately goes to action, which is the type of scene that Marvel Cortex excels at: guards are taken out, the players set up a shutdown complication and start pushing it past a D12 to end the scene, and Professor Panic reveals that his shirt is actually a small swarm of self-replicating nanotech robots that can be used as a kind of omni-tool. He uses it to try keep the machine running despite Azimuth’s efforts, but it just results in him getting knocked unconscious.

This wasn’t a big fights scene–more a chance for the players to show off and push us into action after the flat ending to the last session–but I was also in possession of a doom pool loaded with d12s and D10s, so I spend one to create a complication to start the next scene…the damage caused has stopped the machine, but now it’s going to blow.

SCENE TWO: SHUTDOWN SEQUENCE. The heroes go to work: Sentinel works to vent all the energy and Azimuth creates force-fields to channel it into a place it will cause no damage. It’s a scene that ends up feeling flat because, frankly, I’m starting to realise that the version of Cortex we’re using is Marvel Heroic and it handles fight scenes incredibly well and other dramatic situations…not so well.

The guidelines for stuff like this is minimal: you either treat it like a fight scene, wave it off altogether, or treat it as a single check. None of these have really been satisfying, and a week later it occurs to me that it’s the kind of thing the escalating contest used in other Cortex games would be ideally suited for. 

SCENE THREE: SAVING THE METAS. The focus shifts to holding off the military and freeing the meta-humans in stasis tubes. The conflict here is pretty simple: Azimuth and Sentinel want to save everyone and figure 200 metas should be able to stop the Broan invasion; the military still prefers the robot solution, even with the risk that Panic may take control, and sees the deaths as acceptable casualties.

It’s not, however, a conflict that I gate a lot of focus too. When the heroes go to work it starts with Azimuth holding the military at the control room–a viable tactic when you’re a superhero in possession of nigh indestructible force fields in a world with nothing but conventional weapons–and Sentinel goes to start unhooking the machines.

Instead, I largely use this scene to call back to our impasse from the previous session: Sentinel discovers that the part of the machine that will kill the metas isn’t a core component, but something that’s been put there intentionally. Panic is looking to kill off any powered beings, leaving nothing but the robots he designed, and is entirely the evil genius the heroes suspected him of being.

They use this information to negotiate a solution with the local general, agreeing to repair the machine and deliver the army after the system that would result in 200 deaths are dismantled. It’s not perfect from the military side, but the General they’re negotiating with agrees too it in the interests of getting something rather than nothing. 

Sentinel goes to work rebuilding the necessary systems, while Panic is carted off and returned to a cell where he can do no damage.

SCENE FOUR: FAMILIAR THINGS. The basic narrative rule of “skip to the interesting stuff” comes into effect here as we do some short bridging scene. The first involves Azimuth doing a computer search for her civilian identity on Earth-Adrift and finds nothing; then, she googles a second name…and learns that this person is missing, presumed dead.

It’s a nice bit of foreshadowing for one of Azimuth’s subplots, which Azimuth’s player has been keeping in the mix through scenes like this. 

SCENE FIVE: THIS TECH MIGHT BE BEYOND ME. Meanwhile, Sentinel is trying to repair the machine and get the robots into production. This is done as another bridging scene, which is kind of unfortunately: Nic threw in some nice details about Sentinel working without sleep, getting frustrated by the fact that Professor Panic is a legit super genius, but Sentinel is actually the kind of guy who works as the super genius’s assistant.

As the GM, this is actually one of the most interesting parts of the character: he’s legitimately smart and capable of brilliant things, but he doesn’t innovate on the same level, works considerably slower, and rarely feels like the smartest guy in the room given the company he keeps.

It would have been nice to do repairing the machine as something other than a quick cut scene–something that would have felt like there was a struggle involved, and a sense of achievement at the end.

SCENE SIX: CHECKING IN. We also did a short moment in among all this where the heroes checked in on Xochitl, the teams resident speedster/shadow-magic sorcerer who has been unconscious and in critical care since their arrival on Earth-Adrift.

Neither player is actually worried about this, since Xo’s player hasn’t been able to make the game, and both made jokes about her coming too in time for the next session even after getting a reminder that Xo has regeneration powers and spending this long in critical care is…odd. 

SCENE SEVEN: THE DEAL. With Sentinel on the verge of finishing the machine, we but back to Azimuth as the military lets her know Professor Panic would like to talk.

Panic goes into full super-villain mode, trying to cut a deal: he has a device that should be able to get Azimuth and everyone else back to Earth-Prime, but it would take more power than humanity can generate on this planet. He knows how to make it work, but it’ll will need Azimuth’s help and he wants them to agree to take him back–

Azimuth doesn’t have time for this. She’s not interested, leaves him in his cell, and goes back to bed.

SCENE EIGHT: SUCH WONDERFUL TOYS. That does get Sentinel and Azimuth interested in the some of Panic’s old gear, and they organise to take a look at all the confiscated devices. The tech there is well beyond most of Earth-Adrifts scientists and their conventional approach to physics and such, but Sentinel recognises one as the original portal generator which used a kind of element unknown to earth as a power source.

Fortunately, there’s a bunch of alien ships on the planet, including an alien flagship the size of a city. The heroes start putting together a plan to go steal it as we close the session. 

POST-GAME

I’d been putting off doing anything extensive with the Cortex Prime rules mailed out to Kickstarter backers because it never felt like I had enough time to process a new rules set and figure out the options. There were similarities to the Marvel Cortex rules, but enough differences that it would involve close reading and making a note of significiant changes.

This session (and a few that proceeded it) got me invested in actually setting aside a weekend to figure out what might be useful. Intriguingly, there was an aside on the topic of heroes and villains that really honed in on the frustrations of doing non-combat scenes in a meaningful way:

In a heroes vs villains set-up, action order is crucial for larger set-piece scenes with multiple antagonists and every player character doing something different, sharing a spotlight. Use escalating contests occasionally for one-on-one duels

Cortex Prime Game Handbook (September 2018 Development Draft)

This wide-focus, every-player-gets-a-spotlight approach has been a default assumption of gaming combat for decades, and the idea of including everyone and giving them a chance to shine makes sense in a group game. It also makes perfect sense for the Marvel approach to Cortex, where the focus what meant to be on swapping between characters and showcasing the marvel universe (and particularly the cross-over events) rather than building your own characters and stories.

But the lack of structure around things that aren’t big combat means your focus gets pulled towards that, and the stuff that isn’t the next fight scene lacks the same kind of drama simply because the system goes from “big complex system” to “make a single die roll.”

The escalating contest mechanic Cortex developed for systems Smallville and Leverage, may provide a useful middle ground between those two mechanics. 

And, fortunately, the heroes did just decide they’d like to break into a giant alien command ship in tonight’s session, just in time to give that system a a trial run…. 

Some Thoughts on Disconnection and Narrative in Marvel Heroic

PETERMBALL Gaming , , ,

I’ve been running a superhero campaign for a few years now, and tonight we hit ninety-seven sessions. In contrast to our usual approach, this one was dice heavy – the heroes raided the compound of an demonic ninja cult, fighting lots of guys in black outfits along with mystically endowed sumo-wrestlers, shadow-warriors, claw-wielding pretty-boys, and evil spirits possessing the body of a stone-and-iron golem.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the system after sessions like this. We started the campaign using Mutants and Masterminds, back when the third edition was released. We shifted over to the Marvel Heroic RPG about nine months back, largely because it added a more dynamic element for folks who didn’t want to build their powers around hitting things, and it’s been…

Well.

It’s been great, and it’s been slightly nightmarish in equal measure.

The Marvel RPG has a lot of moving parts, compared to the Mutants and Masterminds system. It handles comic-style action pretty well, when everything’s working correctly, but getting it working correctly is an uphill battle. Partially this is a flaw with the layout of the book – information is spread across multiple sections and comparatively simple things like “how does the villain escape spider-man’s webs” are half-hidden in sections that don’t make instinctive sense to you’re scanning for a rule on the hop.

For instance, we’ve been using the rules for about nine months now, playing weekly, and I spent last week compiling a four thousand word document on all the things we’ve been getting wrong that have a major impact on how the game works. It becomes problematic to change things, now, because habits have become burned in and need to be relearned.

The other place the moving parts have the potential to get frustrating is in the shared understanding of a character’s powers, personality, and flaws. What’s possible and what’s impossible is largely a matter of everyone agreeing that, say,  Spiderman can do X with his spider-sense, but he can’t do Y. Earning XP is based on mimicking Spiderman’s core traits, following the kinds of sub-plots that fill your average Spiderman storyline.

Which works great, if everyone is familiar with the character and the world.

It’s less great in a game world built from scratch, when figuring out what’s “normal” is a process of negotiation until everyone involved is on the same page. There’s a lot of very straight-forward powers – Super-Strength, for example – but start reading comics and you’ll quickly find a whole bunch of power sets where what’s possible and what’s not is basically at the mercy of the narrator.

For example, Stan Lee thought it was perfectly reasonable for The Human Torch to create Fire Sonar in some of the early Fantastic Four comics. Also, creating a fire-radio to broadcast messages. Basically, if a solution was needed, make it out of fire and you’re done.

Try doing that with a similar character in a superhero RPG – particularly one that’s not designed to replicate the goofier aspects of early comics books – and there’s going to be a moment of disconnect between the way you see your powers working, and the way everyone else does.

Disconnection is the bane of your existence when running game. Disconnection is where people start feeling cheated, because their understanding of the world doesn’t mesh with what’s actually happened. Disconnection is where people find themselves frustrated, because players find themselves in a narratively weaker position than GMs when it comes to figuring out how the game world works.

Disconnection, in essence, becomes the reason games that rely heavily on “shared story” mechanics are much, much harder work than things like D&D (particularly the third edition, which went out of its way to try and empower players and eliminate hand-waved narrative reasons for things).

Marvel relies heavily on shared-story mechanics. The complexity of the moving parts also means that I’ve ended up holding far too much control over the way powers are represented on character sheets.

The sessions of the Marvel RPG I’ve enjoyed the most have been the ones with the least disconnection. Tonight…well, I don’t think it was one of those, both because I’d shifted the rules on people in an effort to get them right, and because we exposed some instances where the way I saw someone’s power working probably didn’t mesh with the players understanding of it.