The New Centurians - BASH Edition

[Baelor]

One of the players in my campaign has been posting session reports for the game - The New Centurians - on his gmaing blog:

http://www.rickneal.ca/?cat=343

Baelor

[BASHMAN]

Thanks, looks cool. Sorry the last session was frustrating for the group, but glad to hear that it wasn't a mechanical issue. Sometimes, because supers is such a free-for-all genre, it's hard to plan party involvement in adventure hooks short of having giant robots or aliens attack the city...

One thing I do to prevent this kind of blockage is have players roll some sort of skill- and have even low results yield the necessary info to advance to the next plot-point- but higher results reveal more additional info.

So if the PCs do a Investigation/Find Clues check, and the highest roll is an 8, I might say "You see footprints heading that direction" leading them towards the bad guys. If they got a 10, I might add "you can tell there were about 7 of them", for a 20, I'd say "the biggest of them was well over 300 pounds, and probably over 7 feet tall". If someone got a 30, I'd reveal some really detailed info, like "Based on the granules you find in the foot print, it is apparent that they had recently been at a rock quarry that mines a particular pink quartz. There is only one such quarry in the tri-state area, and it's a few miles up the road".

So in the case of Heroes having to find a missing briefcase, I might have the people the PCs shake down have enough info to get them to the next scene no matter what- but higher rolls get more information.

Also, the Narrator can always feel free to use characters own powers & skills, and ask them to make rolls- then reveal information to them. NPCs may even come up to them and volunteer info (though it may not look that way in game, if a suspicious looking NPC sees the PCs and immediately darts away. The heroes chase him and catch him, and he squeels on the bad guys who hired him to follow the Heroes...) Planting NPCs like that can also be useful to a stuck party.

Something else about Supers as a genre, is you cannot always be prepared for what the players do- and may have to wing it! If you have a trail of bread crumbs leading to badguy #1's lair, to #2, to BBEG... they may skip #2 and make it straight to the end. Be prepared that things like this may happen.

[Baelor]

I had a few issues with that session.

Firstly, I had a plot thread that was related to an ongoing metaplot that got involved and one of the players came to the conclusion that it was the solution to the current dilemma. She followed it relentlessly, and it provided cool stuff, and will be totally relevant to the metaplot, but was not immediately satisfying. You see this in comics all the time, but it does not always work in games, mostly because the players are not privy to the script the way that comics characters are.

Second, I wanted to give the players a chance to get involved in their skills and their back-stories. So I wanted to have an investigative period where people could talk to NPCs, make contacts, invest in the neighborhood and tick off the local gangsters. Because it is still early days in terms of the game system, some of the players did not think they could contribute to this phase because they did not invest in skills like Investigation and Streetwise. It took me a while to realize this and point out that skills like Computers, Commerce, Deception, Security, even Advantages like Appeal, Contacts, Jack Of all trades, Police Powers and Security Clearance all gave ways to be involved. I think the players were in a more D&D mentality, where you don't split the party, and had neglected the fact that many of them can travel a mile a minute or better.

A lot of it was my fault directly. For instance, I had intended to have one character see her mother [her Ward] selling trinkets at the festival of San Gennaro, so that she could rescue her mom later on. I had the perfect time to introduce this when the group went to talk to the Mob Boss, but I just forgot. So then I dropped it on her later [in the next session] just as the big fight was about to start. Sub-optimal.

The main issue that I had though was one of timing more than anything else. I knew that once the fur started to fly it was going to be a big, long, running fight [2 fights actually]. Due to one thing and another, by the time the players were beginning the investigation portion, the evening was more than half over. I knew that unless I jumped them straight to the fight, and totally hand-waived the investigation and a lot of the role-playing, we would have to stop the fight in the middle [which I hate to do]. Few of us are 19 anymore so we just don't play til 3 AM like we used to. So I let the investigation spin on too long and things floundered some.

The next issue was enjoyed by all, and some of that was due to the investigation that was done the session before. They all had a love/hate thing going on for Lady Crimson, dislike the Mob Boss [who I played like Johnny Marcone in the Dresden Files], sympathized with the Hispanic gangstas who lost the briefcase in the first place [the cash was to insure that power and utilities continued to go to their territory for the next year, thus making the lives of the 6000 people who live in La Familia territory bearable].

Taken together, the two session work better than separately, but I am going to work to avoid making the same mistakes again.