Another RPG campaign that never got played. This one was for Mutants & Masterminds. The central idea was that this would be an episodic campaign using pre-generated characters representing the major Marvel super-heroes. Each game session would be like a comic book issue, with each issue introducing plot points and puzzle pieces leading to a big finish to the campaign. So, I created an outline of six “issues” for three different Marvel groups: the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and the Avengers. I figured an advantage to that approach would be that whatever players were playing that session would have a choice of the three. Once enough of the “issues” got played, there would be enough story elements revealed to play the grand finale. Each “issue” would be short enough that two of them should be playable in a game session.
We actually played Avengers #1 at a TimCon in 2008, but some critical flaws kept the campaign from ever getting off the ground. One: I didn’t have any players who were able to play with any regularity. Two: the rule-set for Mutants & Masterminds (at least, the second edition) turned out to be not all that much fun. It was a great system for building super-hero characters, and the combat system made logical sense, but it wasn’t good for any kind of dramatic action scenes. The killer, in my mind, was that every attack had two rolls: one to hit, and one to damage. That makes a kind of sense – Captain America is hard to hit, but easy to damage; the Hulk is easy to hit, but really hard to damage – but that’s a lot of dice-rolling in practice. Add to that any kind of saving throw (which are common with any kind of super-power effect). It just didn’t work for me. Three: there was a conceptual flaw to the whole campaign idea. Eighteen issues with pre-gen characters leading to a big finish? That’s a lot of railroading and not a lot of fun to actually play. Nor was there much room for character development or ways for the players to put their individual stamp the characters, since they were all pre-gens.
So, it never happened. It was a lot of fun writing up the campaign materials, though. Looking back on the stuff I’d written in 2008, it’s weird how many little bits wound up being echoed in the comics, cartoons, and movies since then.
Character Sheets, in various states of completion (Captain America, Colossus, Giant-Man, Hulk, Human Torch, Invisible Girl, Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, Nick Fury, Nightcrawler, Phoenix, Punisher, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Storm, Thing, Thor, Wasp, Wolverine) Huh. Just noticed the Word viewer doesn't display these sheets properly unless you go into edit mode, at least for me.