Spes Magna Games

Last post, I talked a bit about the ad-hoc superhero game of which I’ve run one session with a second session scheduled for this coming Wednesday. One of the superhero games I have but have seldom played is TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game (MSHAG) published in 1998 with primary game design credit going to Mike Selinker, who based his work on the Saga rules largely engineered by William W. Connors. Unusually for TSR’s games, MSHAG doesn’t use dice for anything. The Fate Deck, consisting of 96 cards divided into five suits, governs character creation and action resolution in much the same way dice do in other games.

All in all, it’s an interesting system. It’s attractively illustrated and written in that “Hail, True Believers!” style that helped put Marvel Comics on the map more than half a century ago. The last time I GMed (or, to use in-game terminology, narrated) MSHAG, I made up a team of Mexican luchadores who used their sweet wrestling moves and superhuman powers to defeat a wicked plot to take control of the Southwestern U.S. by means of black-magically altered cabrito, the consumption of which reduced one’s resistance to external control. It was a hoot of a game, even if we all found the system a bit clumsy at times. I’m almost certain that this systemic clumsiness had more to do with our unfamiliarity with the rules than the rules themselves.

Like a licensed superhero games, the core assumption is very much that the players will run Marvel Comics heroes as their characters against Marvel Comics villains controlled by the GM. TSR’s Marvel games, however, have always included rules that let players create their own heroes. This is pretty much the way we always played TSR’s classic FASERIP Marvel Super Heroes, although comic book characters did make appearances, usually as villains or at least adversaries. For example, back in high school, one of my characters was the Gray Fox, a reformed super-mercenary with a bloody past, who went toe to toe against Captain America atop a skyscraper. The Gray Fox won the fight by managing to hurl Cap off the skyscraper. While Cap fell, the Gray Fox escaped.

Ah, good times.

Anyway, I’ve had the adjacent picture of the incomparable Vincent Price sitting in a Pics folder on my desktop for months. I figure it’s about time I did something with it, so here’s an MSHAG villain created using MSHAG’s character creation rules.

Step 1: Concept: I’ve got one.

Step 2: Draw Cards: I draw 10 cards from the Fate Deck. I discard the 1s, 2s, and 3s, and redraw (because I’m using the powerhouse option). I sort the cards by suit: 5 and 6 of Strength; 4, 6, and 8 of Intellect; 5, 6, 6, and 7 of Willpower; and the 10 of Doom. I have no Agility suit cards.

Step 3: Ability Scores. Ability scores are determined by assigning up to three cards to each of the four abilities. The lowest ability permitted is 2. The highest is 20. The sum of the cards gives the ability its score. I assign the 6 of Strength to Strength, the Doom card to Agility, the 8 of Intellect to Intellect, and the two 6s of Willpower to Willpower. The number of cards assigned to ability (excluding Doom cards) that match that ability’s suit determine skill codes. Doom cards never grant skills, so my villain has no Agility skills.

Step 4: Skills. My villain gets two Strength skills (Climbing and Martial Arts); two Intellect skills (Law and Occult), and three Willpower skills (Intimidation, Manipulation, and Mesmerism).

Step 5: Hand and Edge Size. Since the game uses cards, these stats relate to how many cards a villain gets (Hand Size) and how easy it is to get more than one card into play at a time (Edge). Hand Size also determines how much damage a villain can take. I’ve got four cards left, one of them the 7 of Willpower. I use it to raise my villain’s Hand Size and Edge by +1 each.

Step 6-7: Powers and Stunts. The remaining cards are used for powers and calling (see below). Powers are divided by suit like ability scores are. I put the Willpower card into Ability Boost and the two Intellect cards into Alchemy. Since one Willpower card has been put into a Willpower power, my villain gets one stunt. Likewise, with two Intellect cards in an Intellect power, the villain gets two more stunts. Each stunt is specific to its power.

Steps 8-9: Limits and Hindrances. I skip these, but if I hadn’t, I might have drawn cards that would boost my villain’s abilities.

Step 10: Calling. I choose the Greed calling, discard the 6 of Strength, and draw a new card, getting a 2 of Intellect with the Soldier calling. This does not match my villain’s calling, so I’m done. If it had matched, the drawn card would get assigned to further raise one of my villain’s qualities.

The Devil’s Advocate (Vincent Wilcox)

6C Strength
10X Agility
8C Intellect
12B Willpower
2 Edge
4 (25) Hand Size

Calling: Greed
Personality: Cunning, revels in causing fear, boastful of his abilities, considers himself a lady’s man

History: Vincent Wilcox has always been both brilliant and unpleasant. His brilliance made him a successful lawyer, but his unpleasantness kept him isolated and friendless. He turned to the study of the occult and hypnosis, and these obsessive pursuits resulted him using his mesmerism to influence witnesses and judges. When the truth of his activities came out, Wilcox faced serious criminal and civil penalties. Disbarred with little to look forward to but a long prison sentence, Wilcox fled the U.S. for former Soviet Bloc countries, lured there by his occult studies into alchemy giving him hope of finding the fabled philosopher’s stone. Wilcox did find the philosopher’s stone, and he used an ancient ritual to absorb its properties, granting him remarkable powers, but not the immortality that he most craved. Wilcox adopted the pseudonym of the Devil’s Advocate and returned to the U.S., taking up a life of crime to finance his occult studies.

Skills: Climbing, Martial Arts; Law, Occult; Intimidation, Manipulation, Mesmerism

Powers: Ability Boost 5 (Dual Ability Boost: Strength and Agility); Alchemy 10 (Disguise, Explosion)

In Marvel comic book terms (circa 1998), the Devil’s Advocate has Strength equal to Cyclops or Black Widow, Agility equal to Captain America or Iron Fist, Intellect equal to Green Goblin or Arcade, and Willpower equal to Captain America or Professor X. With his Ability Boost power, his Strength rises to Beast or Tigra levels and his Agility to better than Spider-Man. The Devil’s Advocate is no slouch when it comes to a physical confrontation.

Tags: Marvel Super Heroes, superhero games

In TSR’s excellent Marvel Super Heroes game, movement is abstracted into units called areas, with each area being “about half a city block, or 44 yards” for game purposes. A character with Feeble movement moves one area per round, or about 132 feet in 6 seconds. This has Aunt May (Feeble Endurance) running a four minute mile. Mister Fantastic hits a mile in about two minutes. Kingpin (with his Incredible Endurance) would be even faster.

In MSH, Kingpin runs at 45 miles per hour, and Aunt May would qualify for the Olympics.

In fairness, for the years that I played MSH, this was never an issue. We just counted out areas on the map. I don’t recall anyone ever wondering why Aunt May could sprint half a city block in six seconds. I’m certainly not going to complain about a lack of realism in game that includes superheroes.

But, still, really?

Turning over to the third edition of Mutants & Masterminds, I see that an elderly person would likely have a -2 Constitution rank. If that translated to movement (which it doesn’t in M&M) that’d be one-fifth normal speed, which seems a bit slow. Half speed, or 15 feet per round, seems better for Aunt May. That’d put Aunt May at about 15 minutes to hustle a mile.

If I expand on this idea, here’s what I get for ground speeds based on Endurance in MSH:

Feeble Endurance: 5 yards/round (or Feeble speed)
Poor to Excellent Endurance: 10 yards/round (or Poor speed)
Remarkable or Higher Endurance: 15 yards/round (or Typical speed)

Continuing the table with ground speeds for characters with enhanced movement powers based on this progression puts Unearthly running speed at a decent 50 yards/round. While fifty yards in six seconds is pretty quick, but it’s not Quicksilver quick. Powers need to have their own scale, and I think MSH has the right idea here.

A character with even Feeble Lightning Speed should be faster than pretty much anyone without superhuman powers. Using the normal values in MSH accomplishes this goal. A Feeble Lightning Speed speedster hits a mile in about four minutes, which would be about three times faster than the fastest person without movement powers. With Good Lightning Speed, he’s clocking a mile a minute. In keeping with MSH, air speed is even faster.

As shown on the table below, considerations related to tactical movement quickly become sort of irrelevant when dealing with movement powers. The Human Torch (Excellent Flight) covers 1,200 feet in one round. This is a shade slower in terms of areas (9 rather than 10) if using the area system of movement.

When it comes to hitting a moving target with a ranged attack, a -1CS applies against targets moving up to 600 feet/round, a -2CS against those moving up to 1200 feet/round, and -4CS against anything faster (assuming in all cases the target is charging straight at the shooter).

Tags: Marvel Super Heroes

Back in the day, one of our favorite games was TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes. It was a simple, flexible system that handled heroes and villains of various power levels, from street-level crime fighters like Moon Knight to galactic defenders like Silver Surfer. TSR published several adventures for use the game. Almost all of them were pretty sparse if not closer to horrible, but they featured a variety of comic book characters. Part of the fun of the game was collecting the stats for published characters.

In our games, we never ran published heroes. Instead, we made up our own heroes, who the GM-of-the-Week pitted against a combination of original characters along side Marvel’s plethora of supers. In one fight atop a Manhattan skyscraper, my character, tired of Captain America’s moralizing, grabbed the Star-Spangled Avenger and tossed him off the roof. Another character went to toe to toe with the Rhino in a bare-knuckle brawl that ended in a draw.

And it’s that last point that leads to what I think is the one big flaw in the system. A hero with an Excellent (20) Strength does 20 points of damage with a punch. It’s simple. No dice roll required. Did you hit? 20 points of damage. You might get a Slam or Stun result, but you might not, especially if your foe has too much Body Armor.

Which was the problem in the fight with the Rhino. My character (an early version of the Mighty Jethro) was a nigh invulnerable cello player. He was kind of strong and sort of handy in a fist fight, but he wasn’t superhuman in either regard. Jethro squared off against the Rhino. Jethro couldn’t hit hard enough to hurt Rhino, and Rhino couldn’t hit hard enough to hurt Jethro. There were some clever moves (such as impaling a fire extinguisher on Rhino’s horn to temporarily blind him), and Rhino knocked Jethro through more than one wall, but, when all was said and done, neither character had inflicted a single point of damage on the other.

To an extant, this fits the genre. In a fist fight, no matter how hard he tries, Daredevil isn’t going to put a scratch on the likes of, say, Annihilus. Some villains are just too tough for some heroes to face head-on. That’s why the Avengers have relative light-weights like Black Widow fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with folks like Thor and Iron Man. Those two deal with the major threats, leaving Black Widow free to mop the floor with mooks and put her espionage skills into play.

In MSH, a d100 roll determines success or failure. The higher the number the better. I’ve been mulling over a way to add some variety to MSH’s static damage (and defense) values without adding more dice or dice rolls to the game. Here’s my initial idea:

Roll the d100. Determine success. Subtract the one’s digit from the ten’s digit. The difference modifies the acting character’s static value.

For example, the Mighty Jethro has an Excellent (20) Strength. He swings and hits with an 84. 8 – 4 = 4, and so Jethro’s punch does 24 points of damage. He throws another punch, and gets a 59. Still a hit, let’s say, but 5 – 9 = -4, and so his punch does 16 points of damage. Then, on the third round, he really connects with a 100. 10 – 0 = 10, and his punch does 30 points of damage.

I think this is a pretty solid idea. I’m also toying with the idea that the color result on the FEAT table would further modify the value. A white would still be a failure. A green would be no modifier, whereas yellow would equal +X and red would equal +X+Y. I’m not sure what X and Y would equal. Probably +5 and +10, respectively, just to keep the math a bit easier to mentally calculate.

Thus, with that 100 dice roll, Jethro would score a red result with his punch, adding 20 points to his Strength damage. For that one punch, he’d hit as hard as Spider-Man does with an average result.

Tags: Marvel Super Heroes

May is here, which means in a couple of weeks, I’ll have been married twenty-five years to wife Katrina. That’s half my life. How humbling to think that despite my many flaws that one person would stand by me for two-and-a-half decades. To help celebrate this event, all Spes Magna Games products are on-sale this month for 25% off their regular prices.

Elsewhere on the domestic front, the tutoring goes well. Nearer the beginning of April, I had zero clients. Starting a new month, I have three, which I see for eight hours a week. I’ve one school that seems interested in hiring me for the coming school year, and for certain the home-school program administered through Our Lady of Walsingham, my parish, has work for me, albeit in this latter case not enough to pay the bills all by itself.

Speaking of home-schooling, I’ve pitched an idea to the Powers That Be in said program to run a six-week summer course for homeschoolers called “Introduction to Story Games”. I think it’s a wonderful idea that’d give me a chance to not only teach more kids how to RPG, but would also help those kids by reinforcing targeted academic and social skills. If my “Introduction to Story Games” class gets approved, I’m considering using Skill Centric Role Play by David Holmes and Hero Kids by Hero Forge Games. Who knows? Maybe this class could become something like a regular source of income.

On the movie front, I’ve recently watched 1959’s ridiculous Invisible Invaders, starring John Agar, Jean Byron, and at least the voice of John Carradine. Brace yourself as Earth is brought to its knees by highly advanced aliens from the Moon who use their vast technological superiority to possess the bodies of the dead, creating highly radioactive zombies that, while they are slow, can at least walk without dragging their feet through the dirt.

Presenting the Invisible Invader, first for Mutant Future and then for the Marvel Super Heroes Roleplaying Game.

Alignment: Chaotic
Movement: 90′ (30′)
Armor Class: 6
Hit Dice: 8
Attacks: 1 (weapon)
Damage: weapon
Save: L8
Morale: 7
Hoard Class: XV
XP: 1,060

Mutations: Animate Dead, Light-Refracting Force Screen, Sonic Vulnerability

The invisible invader is a highly intelligent (2d4+10 INT and WIL) alien creature that seeks to conquer inferior life forms. It can surround itself with a light-refracting force screen that renders it invisible to sight across the entire electromagnetic spectrum and absorbs 30 points of damage each attack made against it, unless the attack is sound-based. Not only do sound-based attacks ignore the invisible invader’s light-refracting force screen, such attacks also inflict +2 points of damage per die.

As its action for the round, the invisible invader may alter the subliminatory frequency of its physical form and merge with a recently killed creature that is approximately the size of a human. The invisible invader then animates the corpse, which becomes highly radioactive (Class 4 radiation in a 15-foot radius). Due to its imperfect control, the animated dead has its movement reduced by 25%. The invisible invader can use the corpse’s physical abilities, including mutations, but it loses its light-refracting force screen. Damage suffered by the corpse does not affect the invisible invader, unless the damage is sound-based.

In its visible form, the invisible invader resembles a squamous humanoid creature with large hands and feet with three phalanges each.

Primary Abilities: F Ty, A Ty, S Ty, E Gd, R Rm, I Ex, P Rm
Secondary Abilities: Health 28, Karma 80, Resources Rm, Popularity 0
Powers: Animate Dead (Am), Light-Refracting Force Screen (Rm)
Nota Bene: When the invisible invader uses its Animate Dead power on a recently dead creature approximately human in size, the corpse animates under the control of the invisible invader. Use the corpse’s original FASE, but apply -1CS to Fighting and Agility and +1CS to Strength and Endurance. The corpse emits Excellent intensity radiation. The invisible invader retains its own RIP and Karma. In its natural form, the invisible invader’s Light-Refracting Force Screen grants Remarkable levels of Invisibility and Resistance to all forms of damage except those based on sound. Whether possessing a corpse or in its natural form, the invisible invader is vulnerability to sound-based attacks (+1CS damage).

Tags: Marvel Super Heroes, monsters, Mutant Future

More fun with From Unformed Realms, this time using TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes.

Adventure Hook: The heroes receive an unexpected invitation (perhaps from a medical or science contact) to watch the demonstration of a new biotech trauma care system. Unfortunately, the Mad Thinker has tampered with the project as part of a scam to hold the technology hostage in hopes of sizable ransom. The Mad Thinker is holed up in an abandoned military bunker. When the biotech system is activated, it overloads and explodes. Several people are caught in the blast. They are transformed into chitinoids, which are motivated by basic instinctual drives.

Chitinoid
From the smoke and fire stagger several people, doctors, technicians, and nurses. They transform rapidly, flesh becoming metallic, covered with thorns and razor edges. They stagger about, clicking and humming, eyeless and inhuman.

Primary Abilities: F Gd, A Gd, S Ex, E Rm, R Fe, I Rm, P Ty
Secondary Abilities: Health 70, Karma 38, Resources Fb, Popularity 0
Powers: Body Armor (Rm), Claws (Ex), Lightning Speed (Ex), Slashing Missile (Ex), Sonar (In), Transformative Nanobots (Rm), Wall-Crawling (Ex)
Nota Bene: Chitinoids are blind. A living target that suffers a Stun or Kill result from a chitinoid’s Claws or Slashing Missiles must make an Endurance FEAT check against Remarkable intensity or else become infected with transformative nanobots. Every 1-10 rounds, the victim suffers a -1CS to Reason. When Reason reaches Feeble, the target turn into a chitinoid. Before transformation is complete, only highly advanced medical care or superhuman recuperative powers stop the process. The Mad Thinker’s ransom demands include the claim that he has the cure for “chitinoidism”. The stats above are for a typical human turned into a chitinoid. It’s up the Judge what abilities and powers a transformed superhuman might have.

Tags: Marvel Super Heroes, monsters, The Cthulhu Hack