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[lurkingowl]

I've been picking through a PDF of the Smallville RPG. I can't help but think that this is the perfect system for Chris. Supers where the powers mostly fade into the background, a simple core system, and lots of mechanical drivers for beliefs and relationships. I wonder if decades from now, playing with our kids, I'll still be thinking about

Comments

[cerebralpaladin]

Some friends of friends from college have made a living as professional poker players, principally (although not exclusively) online. It's not an entirely positive story--you can view many of them as giving up strong potential for highly productive careers to make more money (or to continue with a devotion to) play poker instead. If we view professional poker as not very productive, which I'm inclined to, then there are real costs there.

[lurkingowl]

True, there is a cost. It's the same cost we have from sending so many people and profits into finance, I would say. My gut says someone bright going into poker is less damaging to society than someone going into finance and making the same amount of money. Mostly because we don't feel a compulsion to bail out poker players. But also because poker players can't cause recessions. :)

I think they're both a symptom of wealth disparity skewing the economic system away from optimizing utility across society as a whole to optimizing utility across society weighted by wealth. Which, I think, is the core tension between capitalism and democracy.

[cerebralpaladin]

Sure, there are other more destructive things they could do with their time. And (to the extent that they're happy) people making a living doing jobs that make them happy has some intrinsic value. I just worry that, like too much emphasis on finance, it drains talented and smart people away from more productive endeavors.

And you're totally right about skewing the economic system by wealth. The fundamental problem with capitalism is that, because utility is incommensurable and to create incentives, we try to maximize wealth instead. Wealth is commensurable, but relying on allocations by wealth is often inefficient on a utility perspective, even if it's efficient on a wealth basis. But we don't have many good choices--we have to create incentives and make allocations, and somewhere in the broadly speaking "capitalist" approach works better than all of the other approaches we've tried (noting that I'm including social democratic market systems as within the broadly capitalist approach).

[stolen_tea]

skewing the economic system away from optimizing utility across society as a whole to optimizing utility across society weighted by wealth

Oh, bingo, that's it. Thank you!

[lurkingowl]

Do it online so I can play!(!!)

You don't "need" a system for anything, but it dramatically changes player's expectations. Smallville has you rolling three dice for most things, one is a motivation and one is relationship. I think that conveys to the players nicely that the game is about motivations and relationships.

I'm also curious to see how the kind of PvP structure they've described plays out in practice. Setting up a game to drive conflict between PCs and get them arguing over methods, goals, etc is a nice idea, but definitely a change for most players. I do like the idea of a supers game where having foils/ antiheroes/ "villains" as PCs (but still PCs deeply connected to the other PCs) is encouraged.