M+M Session 7 - Metagame notes
So, I had a few metagame goals on this adventure: Pacing, Heroism, Action. Let's check these out in the order I prefer to engage them:
PACING:
This session was expected to run a little faster than the last one, since I figured we had gotten most of the exposition of the way. The adventure was basically a dungeon crawl, what with roaming minions, traps, a few bosses, and some hidden stuff - along with a number of skill checks likely to occur.
The first session was eaten up, as I said, but a lot of exposition and infodumping. The second session, unfortunately, had a little bit too much of this as well as I had to bring one player up to speed on what the other PCs knew already. More unfortunately, I didn't remember all of it and I had to occasionally revise/advise Untouchable's player about those details.
The session ran approximately six hours, which was about an hour, 90 mins longer than I would have liked given my schedule that night. This, probably as much as anything, led the final battles going in the direction they did. It happened to be a school night for me (figuratively), and getting home at 3AM was not gonna work with pulling a full day at work if I had to pull myself out of bed by 8AM (particularly since there was the matter of running my dogs for 30-45 minutes once I got home at 3AM). I found that the infirmary battle snagged things up - an issue partially of combat mechanics. However, what appeared to really slow things down is that several of the PCs were not actually engaging the minion patrols that were wandering around, instead breaking off into smaller groups to either escape or to search for things. Too many people wanted to do too many things. Of course, having one PC and one NPC knocked out for most of the Storage Hold/Armory encounter meant there was less action to move around.
Even still, the Infirmary fight dragged on a bit more than I would have liked, even though there really weren't any serious amounts of opposition going on. Yes, there were several enemy combatants, but they were mostly concentrating fire on Combined Attacks, so their turns and rolls went fast. I think if Untouchable had just starting punching things (seeing as he does as much melee damage as Coltrane), things would have gone faster. As it was, he was doing hacking and remote-piloting of some of the robots to assist the team.
The Big Boss fight went quickly enough once I decided to cut it off, but it had all the earmarks of going on MUCH, MUCH longer. There might have been an issue with how I stat'd out the Collider, but considering how easily the team has been taking out my non-minions I wasn't anticipating real opposition. I could have seen this as being a real problem for most of the team (being one person down as they were, and without their NPC backup - who was only PL8, but its another helping of friendly damage).
I continue to debate whether I should keep things quick and miniony for the fast action and excitement, or pare these down to make room for the more substantial and possibly sloggy non-minion boss fights.
ACTION: No real problems here. In designing this, I wanted to go with quick, fast action, keeping the PCs moving, while tying down some of the obvious troubles that had happened so far. I didn't need people sequence breaking where they went, so I found a way to curtail Agent Q's teleport spam, and keeping the action within the Hauteclere itself with closed in environments would presumably have kept Windtalker from doing his damned strafe and run tactics. If people were moving, they were moving quickly and providing an in-character deadline got people to move things along without a lot of debate and shuttling back and forth of potential strategies (which really weren't all that necessary, it was a rail-shooter adventure). I was throwing a lot of moderate blocks of minions at the team, but not enough to really necessarily slow things down for more than two rounds or so as long as they were efficient about taking them on. Even the traps I had set up (sentry guns, gas jets, forcefields) were pretty easily taken down.
Which reminds me: In order to keep things moving in the game, we avoided a discussion of how permeable the Force Field power was - a question I might put to the TD crew. The game mechanics indicate that it basically reduces the amount damage taken, but is it airtight? How large is it for the purposes of getting through small spaces? Can the field be physically touched and manipulated as part of the individual user? The mechanics give a option to make the ForceField selective, allowing the user to selectively permit some things to go through it and not others. It seems that having an airtight, physically-manifest forcefield would present as many problems as it solves. Right now I'm leaning toward the Force Field power being air-permeable and not physically "corporeal", but I'm curious how other people have played it. Of course, all of this might be just broken down into how the PC narrates their abilities.
HEROISM: After comments/complaints that the last game didn't make the heroes seems enough like heroes, I figured that the team needed something bigger in scale to go with. As I've said before, the PL we're operating at doesn't really lend itself to Super-Police, but rather fairly major events. So, I figured a big brawly battle against robots and a sky fortress and a potential death ray (which, oddly, never got fired...there's a wasted opportunity). Basically, I wanted the PCs to have a Big Damn Heroes session that felt a bit more epic.
The session we got I think accomplished that, but not in the way I expected or planned. I had outlined several events I wanted to happen, based on hints I had given and what I expected the PCs to attempt to do. Obviously, several of these things did not happen due to the time crunch. The PCs never really did a indepth analysis of the Hauteclere's Engineering System. They didn't learn about the feedback loop between the DALEC and the Grav Drive, I only managed to hint at the fact that the DALEC had a living pilot who managed Weapon-Control internally. The PCs blew past this because of the IC time crunch they were under.
The Command Center battle was supposed to be difficult, but I didn't anticipate how much of a time sink it was likely to be. Possibly with the team at full strength it would have been different, since there would have been five- (or six-) to-three rather than four-to-three. Eventually, though, the Collider was going to take enough damage to warrant a Hero Point Escape - possibly multiple ones depending on how many the PCs had burned at that time (even given the fact that the Infirmary Fight Fiat had bumped them back up). This would probably be needed because of the events I was planning on after the fight:
1. The heroes have let time get past them and the Hauteclere is attacked by the USAF, and critically damages its propulsion engines.
2. The Collider, in typical supervillain fashion, decides that "If I can't have it, no one will", and begins tearing out the drive-elements for the Gravimetric Drive (preferably throwing them at the PCs as part of his Area Attack)
3. Either one or the both of these cause the Fission Reactor to suffer a catastrophic power fluxuation, resulting in the Reactor going into Failsafe Hard-Shutdown - which could only get rebooted after some scientifically-reasonable but plot-unfeasible period of time (say, 30 minute cooldown).
4. Iteration X, in a fit of pique, decides to hijack an attack submarine, and manages to launch a nuke at the Hauteclere
So, basically, even though they've managed to win, the Heroes are in a heap of shit and need to do several things:
1. Keep the Hauteclere from dropping like a lead balloon.
2. Stop an incoming Nuclear Missile.
3. Possibly get any remaining human survivors off of the Fortress.
I figured that Agent Q could teleport people off the fortress (now that the Grav Drive was not operational), Windtalker and Feather would use Air Control and Telekinesis to keep the Fortress from immediately crashing (probably with significant uses of Extra Effort and Hero Points), while the Untouchable made like Silent Bob (Fly, Fatass! Fly!) and rocketed off to hack a nuke while in flight. High tension, Michael Bay shit here, you know? Coltrane, on the other hand, would have been used to plug into the DALEC's piloting control (after they had, of course, discovered its DOA pilot and noticed the cybernetic interface contraption) and used his own power to partially keep the Grav Drive minimally operational to assist Feather and Q.
A lot of this played into how we set up Coltrane's powers, that he had a Continuous, Fades version of Super Strength we had rationaled as him using up "power cells" to Supercharge his already formidable Enhanced Strength. By burning these, we would have basically narrated that Coltrane was overclocking his own systems to keep the Hauteclere from crashing down and killing/irradiating untold thousands of people below. The result, after all was said in done? Killing Coltrane in a Heroic Sacrifice that reflected on the nature of heroism, courage, and the cost of protecting the innocent. Coltrane, ICly, is the most straight-heroic of the team and the logical choice if there was going to be one person who would selflessly sacrifice themselves.
But none of that ever happened, as you can see.
By the time we got to the Command Center battle, we were getting late into the session. I had to be up for work in about six hours and I knew the fight was running long and would run really, really long. Plus, all of the above was nearly guaranteed to run another hour. I had actually conferred with Coltrane's player weeks before and cleared this plot development with him. And yes, of course, Coltrane would be back eventually - this is a comic book world after all.
But what the PCs did was to circumvent a lot of that by taking the heroism into their own hands. I really didn't expect that the PCs would try to pull Collider out of the Mind Control done to him (taking out the Master Control Unit wouldn't have done this, he had internal programming and was intended to come back later as a recurring villain). The zeal they put into trying to redeem the Collider was both admirable and ingenious. And, as I realized, a perfectly good way for the players to achieve something on their own terms rather than just reacting by rote to obstacles that I had put in their way. At which point I realized: it doesn't matter how I wanted to end the adventure, the PCs wanted this as their victory scenerio. Bringing in the fiats I had planned just to "make things exciting" would have come off as contrived, vindictive, and petty.
So I let them have their victory. Collider shrugs off the Mind Control long enough to rid the team of one of the larger, more difficult opponents - and the narration did the rest. I didn't need a bunch of Michael Bay action and "OMG CAN THEY DO IT???" Tension/Drama to instill a sense of heroism. They had done it themselves and by doing that, allow me to succeed in what I had attempted to do.
The final part of the adventure, about the new Superjail was just to introduce the idea that the government now will have a place to put the bad guys they have (rather just in holding in the basement of ProAll). There were a few more things, facts that there is a second-site for the Cistern (for metanaturals who have powers toxic to the environment), being euphemistically called a "Toxic Waste Dump" (itself a chiding nod to Windtalker's incessant bitching that the Gov't was putting a toxic waste dump on reservation land). Untouchable OOCly found that the idea that there is a submerged prison in the reservoir for the hydroelectric dam that supplies most of the water and power for the western part of the US to be ridiculous, but laughed it off as being consistent with how screwball things were in this 'verse's government anyway.
Anyway, so now I have a narrative that has gone slightly off the rails from where I thought it would be and kinda jacks up where I was planning to go. More about this in the next installment I'll be putting up on team_disaster - where to go from here? How do you run a session with very un-fun things happening in it which are plot-necessary and that gets necessary-infodumping and foreshadowing to occur? I'll go into detail later.
-12th
PACING:
This session was expected to run a little faster than the last one, since I figured we had gotten most of the exposition of the way. The adventure was basically a dungeon crawl, what with roaming minions, traps, a few bosses, and some hidden stuff - along with a number of skill checks likely to occur.
The first session was eaten up, as I said, but a lot of exposition and infodumping. The second session, unfortunately, had a little bit too much of this as well as I had to bring one player up to speed on what the other PCs knew already. More unfortunately, I didn't remember all of it and I had to occasionally revise/advise Untouchable's player about those details.
The session ran approximately six hours, which was about an hour, 90 mins longer than I would have liked given my schedule that night. This, probably as much as anything, led the final battles going in the direction they did. It happened to be a school night for me (figuratively), and getting home at 3AM was not gonna work with pulling a full day at work if I had to pull myself out of bed by 8AM (particularly since there was the matter of running my dogs for 30-45 minutes once I got home at 3AM). I found that the infirmary battle snagged things up - an issue partially of combat mechanics. However, what appeared to really slow things down is that several of the PCs were not actually engaging the minion patrols that were wandering around, instead breaking off into smaller groups to either escape or to search for things. Too many people wanted to do too many things. Of course, having one PC and one NPC knocked out for most of the Storage Hold/Armory encounter meant there was less action to move around.
Even still, the Infirmary fight dragged on a bit more than I would have liked, even though there really weren't any serious amounts of opposition going on. Yes, there were several enemy combatants, but they were mostly concentrating fire on Combined Attacks, so their turns and rolls went fast. I think if Untouchable had just starting punching things (seeing as he does as much melee damage as Coltrane), things would have gone faster. As it was, he was doing hacking and remote-piloting of some of the robots to assist the team.
The Big Boss fight went quickly enough once I decided to cut it off, but it had all the earmarks of going on MUCH, MUCH longer. There might have been an issue with how I stat'd out the Collider, but considering how easily the team has been taking out my non-minions I wasn't anticipating real opposition. I could have seen this as being a real problem for most of the team (being one person down as they were, and without their NPC backup - who was only PL8, but its another helping of friendly damage).
I continue to debate whether I should keep things quick and miniony for the fast action and excitement, or pare these down to make room for the more substantial and possibly sloggy non-minion boss fights.
ACTION: No real problems here. In designing this, I wanted to go with quick, fast action, keeping the PCs moving, while tying down some of the obvious troubles that had happened so far. I didn't need people sequence breaking where they went, so I found a way to curtail Agent Q's teleport spam, and keeping the action within the Hauteclere itself with closed in environments would presumably have kept Windtalker from doing his damned strafe and run tactics. If people were moving, they were moving quickly and providing an in-character deadline got people to move things along without a lot of debate and shuttling back and forth of potential strategies (which really weren't all that necessary, it was a rail-shooter adventure). I was throwing a lot of moderate blocks of minions at the team, but not enough to really necessarily slow things down for more than two rounds or so as long as they were efficient about taking them on. Even the traps I had set up (sentry guns, gas jets, forcefields) were pretty easily taken down.
Which reminds me: In order to keep things moving in the game, we avoided a discussion of how permeable the Force Field power was - a question I might put to the TD crew. The game mechanics indicate that it basically reduces the amount damage taken, but is it airtight? How large is it for the purposes of getting through small spaces? Can the field be physically touched and manipulated as part of the individual user? The mechanics give a option to make the ForceField selective, allowing the user to selectively permit some things to go through it and not others. It seems that having an airtight, physically-manifest forcefield would present as many problems as it solves. Right now I'm leaning toward the Force Field power being air-permeable and not physically "corporeal", but I'm curious how other people have played it. Of course, all of this might be just broken down into how the PC narrates their abilities.
HEROISM: After comments/complaints that the last game didn't make the heroes seems enough like heroes, I figured that the team needed something bigger in scale to go with. As I've said before, the PL we're operating at doesn't really lend itself to Super-Police, but rather fairly major events. So, I figured a big brawly battle against robots and a sky fortress and a potential death ray (which, oddly, never got fired...there's a wasted opportunity). Basically, I wanted the PCs to have a Big Damn Heroes session that felt a bit more epic.
The session we got I think accomplished that, but not in the way I expected or planned. I had outlined several events I wanted to happen, based on hints I had given and what I expected the PCs to attempt to do. Obviously, several of these things did not happen due to the time crunch. The PCs never really did a indepth analysis of the Hauteclere's Engineering System. They didn't learn about the feedback loop between the DALEC and the Grav Drive, I only managed to hint at the fact that the DALEC had a living pilot who managed Weapon-Control internally. The PCs blew past this because of the IC time crunch they were under.
The Command Center battle was supposed to be difficult, but I didn't anticipate how much of a time sink it was likely to be. Possibly with the team at full strength it would have been different, since there would have been five- (or six-) to-three rather than four-to-three. Eventually, though, the Collider was going to take enough damage to warrant a Hero Point Escape - possibly multiple ones depending on how many the PCs had burned at that time (even given the fact that the Infirmary Fight Fiat had bumped them back up). This would probably be needed because of the events I was planning on after the fight:
1. The heroes have let time get past them and the Hauteclere is attacked by the USAF, and critically damages its propulsion engines.
2. The Collider, in typical supervillain fashion, decides that "If I can't have it, no one will", and begins tearing out the drive-elements for the Gravimetric Drive (preferably throwing them at the PCs as part of his Area Attack)
3. Either one or the both of these cause the Fission Reactor to suffer a catastrophic power fluxuation, resulting in the Reactor going into Failsafe Hard-Shutdown - which could only get rebooted after some scientifically-reasonable but plot-unfeasible period of time (say, 30 minute cooldown).
4. Iteration X, in a fit of pique, decides to hijack an attack submarine, and manages to launch a nuke at the Hauteclere
So, basically, even though they've managed to win, the Heroes are in a heap of shit and need to do several things:
1. Keep the Hauteclere from dropping like a lead balloon.
2. Stop an incoming Nuclear Missile.
3. Possibly get any remaining human survivors off of the Fortress.
I figured that Agent Q could teleport people off the fortress (now that the Grav Drive was not operational), Windtalker and Feather would use Air Control and Telekinesis to keep the Fortress from immediately crashing (probably with significant uses of Extra Effort and Hero Points), while the Untouchable made like Silent Bob (Fly, Fatass! Fly!) and rocketed off to hack a nuke while in flight. High tension, Michael Bay shit here, you know? Coltrane, on the other hand, would have been used to plug into the DALEC's piloting control (after they had, of course, discovered its DOA pilot and noticed the cybernetic interface contraption) and used his own power to partially keep the Grav Drive minimally operational to assist Feather and Q.
A lot of this played into how we set up Coltrane's powers, that he had a Continuous, Fades version of Super Strength we had rationaled as him using up "power cells" to Supercharge his already formidable Enhanced Strength. By burning these, we would have basically narrated that Coltrane was overclocking his own systems to keep the Hauteclere from crashing down and killing/irradiating untold thousands of people below. The result, after all was said in done? Killing Coltrane in a Heroic Sacrifice that reflected on the nature of heroism, courage, and the cost of protecting the innocent. Coltrane, ICly, is the most straight-heroic of the team and the logical choice if there was going to be one person who would selflessly sacrifice themselves.
But none of that ever happened, as you can see.
By the time we got to the Command Center battle, we were getting late into the session. I had to be up for work in about six hours and I knew the fight was running long and would run really, really long. Plus, all of the above was nearly guaranteed to run another hour. I had actually conferred with Coltrane's player weeks before and cleared this plot development with him. And yes, of course, Coltrane would be back eventually - this is a comic book world after all.
But what the PCs did was to circumvent a lot of that by taking the heroism into their own hands. I really didn't expect that the PCs would try to pull Collider out of the Mind Control done to him (taking out the Master Control Unit wouldn't have done this, he had internal programming and was intended to come back later as a recurring villain). The zeal they put into trying to redeem the Collider was both admirable and ingenious. And, as I realized, a perfectly good way for the players to achieve something on their own terms rather than just reacting by rote to obstacles that I had put in their way. At which point I realized: it doesn't matter how I wanted to end the adventure, the PCs wanted this as their victory scenerio. Bringing in the fiats I had planned just to "make things exciting" would have come off as contrived, vindictive, and petty.
So I let them have their victory. Collider shrugs off the Mind Control long enough to rid the team of one of the larger, more difficult opponents - and the narration did the rest. I didn't need a bunch of Michael Bay action and "OMG CAN THEY DO IT???" Tension/Drama to instill a sense of heroism. They had done it themselves and by doing that, allow me to succeed in what I had attempted to do.
The final part of the adventure, about the new Superjail was just to introduce the idea that the government now will have a place to put the bad guys they have (rather just in holding in the basement of ProAll). There were a few more things, facts that there is a second-site for the Cistern (for metanaturals who have powers toxic to the environment), being euphemistically called a "Toxic Waste Dump" (itself a chiding nod to Windtalker's incessant bitching that the Gov't was putting a toxic waste dump on reservation land). Untouchable OOCly found that the idea that there is a submerged prison in the reservoir for the hydroelectric dam that supplies most of the water and power for the western part of the US to be ridiculous, but laughed it off as being consistent with how screwball things were in this 'verse's government anyway.
Anyway, so now I have a narrative that has gone slightly off the rails from where I thought it would be and kinda jacks up where I was planning to go. More about this in the next installment I'll be putting up on team_disaster - where to go from here? How do you run a session with very un-fun things happening in it which are plot-necessary and that gets necessary-infodumping and foreshadowing to occur? I'll go into detail later.
-12th