YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS THIS!  WE’VE REALLY OUTDONE OURSELVES, BRINGING YOU SOME OF THE MOST PROVOCATIVE, EXCITING PLAYSTORMING OF THE YEAR!  THIS BLOG POST IS DESTINED TO BECOME A MAGNIFICENT MILESTONE IN THE MARVEL AGE OF PLAYSTORMING!!

Whoa, sorry.  I’ve been reading a lot of old Stan Lee comics lately.  Let me start that over.

About a year ago, I decided I wanted to make a game based on something I love: Silver Age comic books.  We did a playstorm and it was good, but I felt like something wasn’t quite right.  The game was fun but it wasn’t quite doing the things I wanted it to do.  I put it on the back burner.  Then, six months later, we made MonkeyDome.  A game that, if you’ll excuse a boast, does some pretty awesome things.  Now I am revisiting my old idea and playstorming to answer the question: can I start with MonkeyDome and end up with the Silver Age comic book game that I am dreaming of?  READ ON, FAITHFUL FANS, AND FIND OUT!

Silver Age Comics and Me

When I was a kid, I loved going to the comic book store to pick up the new issue of Batman or Spider-Man or X-Men.  My dad would give me an extra couple of bucks to get him a back-issue of World’s Finest or The Flash or something from when he used to read comics in the 60s and 70s.  I would always read both and, before long, I was preferring the older comic books.  The newer comics consisted of Wolverine and Batman repeatedly showing off how bad-ass and serious they were, and for me that got old kinda fast.  But in the comic books from the 60s and 70s, there was never a dull moment!  Superman was competing in intergalactic Olympics on other planets!  The Avengers were battling Lava Men inside the Earth’s crust!  The Flash’s rogues gallery, consisting of Captain Cold, Mirror Master, Gorilla Grodd, and many others, were teaming up to defeat him!  Professor X and Magneto were competing for the loyalty of mutants with outrageous super powers!  How could a kid like me not love this stuff?

One specific thing I loved and still love about the Silver Age was how the super heroes would take a seemingly limited super power and come up with a hundred and one creative ways to use it.  Take The Flash for example.  The Flash’s super power is that he is super fast.  So obviously he can use his super speed to catch bad guys who are getting away, or knock out a bad guy before they have time to react.  But how about running across water?  Or up the side of a building?  Or through time?!?  How about running in a circle so fast he created whirlwinds?  Or (this one really stretches it) running so fast he has infra-red vision?

A Game is Born?

Silver age super heroes finding creative new ways to use their powers is a lot of fun.  So about a year ago I asked myself: would it make a fun game?  Lord knows that just because something is cool in a movie or a book or a comic doesn’t mean it will also necessarily be fun in a tabletop game.  Games need choices.  Games need tension.  Games need a lot more than a cool idea.

Well if you’ve got a concept for a game and you want to see if it’s got legs, there’s one quick and easy thing you can do: playstorm!

So I got together with Eppy and Jason for a quick playstorm.  I had some vague ideas for a pretty standard success/failure system with some mechanics added on top for creating new ways to use your power.  It was fun.  But as I mentioned earlier, it didn’t really fire me up.  So I forgot about it.  But a few weeks ago Eppy and Emily reminded me of my old Silver Age game idea over dinner and that got me thinking about MonkeyDome.

The Legacy of MonkeyDome

MonkeyDome is a game we made earlier this year as our annual “Game in a Jiffy” project.  You can download it for free!  MonkeyDome is somewhat unique in that it doesn’t use the dice to tell you whether your character succeeds or fails, nor does it use the dice to tell you who gets to roleplay or tell the story.  MonkeyDome uses the dice to put constraints on your roleplaying.  Specifically, it tells you if your character must have a zany reaction or a grim reaction.  Essentially the dice are there to inspire your creativity, and the game is all about coming up with creative reactions to different situations.  That sounds a little bit like what Silver Age super heroes were always doing: coming up with creative reactions (specifically creative ways to use their powers).  So this is starting to sound like a no-brainer: the Silver Age super hero game should be a MonkeyDome mod.

Within days of finishing MonkeyDome we were coming up with mods for it.  On the train ride to JiffyCon, we played a Western mod where Zany and Grim were replaced with “Young” and “Gun”.  Even now, Eppy is working on a sword and sorcery mod, replacing Zany and Grim with “Jovial” and “Glum” (and there’s a lot more to it than that - you should read more about it!).  But as we sat down last week to playstorm this Silver Age super hero mod to MonkeyDome, I wanted to explore uncharted territory.  I wanted the dice to have the same same general role (not a pun, I swear) of putting constraints on the players to inspire their creativity.  But I didn’t want the constraint to be the tone of your reaction, I wanted it to be something new.

The Playstorm

So at the cafe in the Barnes and Noble at Union Square, ISSers John and Eppy joined me along with our friends (and, in one case, wife) Michael Cooper and Terry Hope Romero.  Friends, lattes and playstorming.  Life is good.

Almost immediately a cool idea was born.  We decided that the comic book we were about to create in our imaginations needed a cover, and we tossed ideas back and forth for a fun little system to create that cover.  We came up with 5 cover elements: the Menace (eg. a super villain), the Peril (eg. the danger that the super villain is creating), the Text (what’s written on the cover), the Dialog (what a character is saying on the cover - because back in the Silver Age there was dialog on covers), and an Obstacle (some issue that the heroes have to deal with in addition to the main Menace and Peril).  For each of those cover elements, a random player is chosen and comes up with something.  This is not only fun, it’s a quick and easy flag system to let the players guide the GM in setting up a story they are interested in.  Awesome!

Then it was time to really play.  They had made character concepts and a cover for the issue, so everything was ready.  In MonkeyDome style, I took the dice and began describing the beginning of the story, immediately putting the PCs in peril and then passing the dice to one of the players so they could roll for… what?  This was the moment of truth.  It was time to decide what the hell we were rolling for.  We paused the game to discuss.

It’s MonkeyDome-based.  So you’re not rolling to see if you succeed and you’re not rolling to see if you get to narrate the scene.  The dice are supposed to provide a flavor for your reaction.  It took a while of bouncing off and building on ideas, but we came up with this: you have your power and as you play you build a list of five creative ways to use your power (we’ll call these Abilities, though I think I’ll need a better name eventually).  When you roll, you roll a D6.  If you roll a 1-5, you need to use that ability from your list to deal with the current threat.  If you roll a 6, you come up with a new ability and replace an old one.

Ok, now we are getting somewhere.  The dice are challenging you to creatively apply an old ability or come up with a new one.  This was a good foundation but certainly there was room for more fun.  We started playing out the scene and more ideas entered the mix.

My favorite was “combos”.  Let’s say I have super speed and someone is shooting a laser at me.  I roll and get the ability “Create a whirlwind”.  I don’t see how a whirlwind is going to help me against a laser, so I declare that this is a combo and pass the dice to another player.  That player’s power is to change the chemical makeup of his body.  He rolls and gets the ability of changing his body into water.  So we decide that our combo is this: I create a whirlwind that blows his watery form in front of me, thus dispersing the heat of the laser beam!  And that’s how combos work.  Players who feel like the ability they rolled isn’t appropriate for the problem at hand can combine their abilities with other abilities at the table.  Pretty fun!

Other ideas came up too.  One idea was that you could roll two different color dice, one of which is the “Consequence” die.  If you don’t like the result of the first die, you can use the result of the “consequence” die instead, but then you take a consequence, just like consequences in MonkeyDome.  Another idea was that, instead of five abilities, you have four abilities and one flaw (like “arrogance” or “bad temper” for example).  If you rolled the flaw you had to describe how your flaw prevented you from dealing with the situation.  Another idea was that powers could evolve into greater powers.  So if you rolled a 6 you got a new power but it you rolled a 5 you evolved an existing power.

Lots of cool ideas, but shortly after we began the second scene, the announcement came over the loud speaker.  It was 10:45 and Barnes and Noble was closing.  More time would have been nice.  But I was very happy with what we had accomplished.

What’s Next for AMAZING TALES OF THE ASTONISHING?

Did I mention that the working title is AMAZING TALES OF THE ASTONISHING?  Most Silver Age super heroes didn’t debut in their own comic.  Spider-Man debuted in “Amazing Fantasy”.  The Metal Men debuted in “Showcase Presents”.  Iron Man debuted in “Tales of Suspense”.  So the super heroes that are being played in this game will debut in “Amazing Tales of the Astonishing”.  Anyway…

I am itching to playstorm some more.  We came up with what seem to be some pretty fun mechanics.  But we didn’t have much time to play around with them.  I think more playstorming would help to weed out the stuff that doesn’t work and generate new elements that do work.

Also I am tempted to add more.  Eppy did something really neat with his Swords & Sorcery game.  He used MonkeyDome as a foundation but then he built fun things on top of it.  Different kinds of scenes with different rules.  I think there might be room for that in a comic book game.  After all, not every moment in Silver Age comics was a moment of danger and peril.  The Flash went on dates with his girlfriend, Iris.  The Avengers held meetings where they discussed their next course of action.  Batman and Robin pondered the clues left behind by their nemeses.  The Fantastic Four argued amongst themselves until one of them left in a huff.  I feel like the genre is ripe with interesting opportunities for roleplaying!

So some more playstorming will be happening soon.  And I will post here when it does for you to read all about it.  Or, as Stan would say:

BE PREPARED FOR SURPRISES WHEN WE MEET AGAIN NEXT BLOG POST!  THRILLS AND EXCITEMENT AWAIT!  THIS IS OUR PLEDGE TO YOU, IN THIS, THE GLORIOUS NEW MARVEL AGE OF PLAYSTORMING!! (’nuff said)

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Amazing Tales of the Astonishing, MonkeyDome. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.