Tag: SMAX

Gaming

Almost Done: Some Thoughts After the Penultimate Session of a Very Long RPG Campaign

The most read posts on this website, year after year, are Thirteen Things I’ve Learned About Superhero Games After Running 30 Sessions Of Mutants And Masterminds and its follow-up Fifteen Things I’ve Learned About Superhero RPGs After Running 150 Sessions of My Campaign. They’re both RPG-centric posts about an ongoing superhero game I’ve been running since early 2011. Last night I ran session 199, and when we convene for session 200 last week it will be the last game of the campaign as it exists in its current format. One of the original players is moving interstate, and we’re hitting the end-point of plot elements originally set up somewhere in issue 20. The heroes just beat-up the Herald of a world-devouring galactic horror, and next week they’ll fight the ancient robot from the dawn of time trying to bring that galactic horror to earth. Which is not bad for a group of heroes that got their start chasing down escaped

Gaming

SMAX #174: Breaking the Broan

The most recent session of our Superhero RPG was an interesting one in terms of seeing the gap between our style and the nature of the system we’re using. With this in mind, I’m going to quote from the player notes Adam keeps from session to session on his gaming wiki: We have a terrible plan to get inside the spaceshipThis is true pretty much regardless which of our plans we use Crow Road Campaigns, SMAX #174 notes At the same time, this was the session where I started implementing some of the more narrative-oriented rules from the Cortex Prime draft. This assumes a lot of player control over the narrative–perhaps more than we’re used too–and a default assumption borrowed from the Leverage RPG that whatever plan they come up with is the right plan.  In narrative terms, the heist is built around planning only so the viewer knows how things have gone wrong when they do. Executing a plan

Gaming

SMAX #173: Panic on Earth-Adrift

I was a GM before I was an writer, which means I occasionally awful affliction that many gamers suffer from where I get all Let me tell you about my game. I’m also a GM who’s had a few recurring items on my to-do lis like run better sessions, do better prep, and test drive rules from the upcoming Cortex Prime set that may do things better than the Marvel Cortex rules. Since I’ve been running a superhero campaign on Thursdays for…gods, years now…I figure I may as well combine the above with that note on my to-do list that says write regular blog posts and start thinking about ongoing series of posts.  With that in mind, I’m going to experiment with doing post-game reports here on the blog–giving myself a chance to reflect on what’s worked, and what doesn’t. Think through my thoughts about superhero gaming outside of the every-hundred-sessions-or-so list post (which, weirdly, continue to be the most read posts on this site).

Gaming

15 Things Learned About Superhero RPGs After Running 150 Sessions Of My Campaign

So back in 2012 I wrote up a list of 13 things I’d learned running a Superhero RPG campaign for thirty sessions, and it quickly became one of the most read posts I’ve ever done. Now, six years later, we’ve just played session #150 of the same campaign, which definitely makes this one of the longest RPG campaigns I’ve ever run. Over the last six years we’ve switched systems, going from 3rd Edition Mutants and Masterminds to Cortex’s Marvel Heroic RPG system, and accumulated three additional players (although session-by-session attendance varies). In game, the duo of Shock & Awesome have grown to a full-fledged superhero team dubbed SMAX. The two original characters have gone on hiatus so the players can bring in new heroes, and the team now includes an alien circuit acrobat, a rogue winged monkey from the parasitic demi-plane known as Oz, and a Mexican speedster/shadow-sorcerer whose powers stem from a number of gods. This post is a

Gaming

Some Thoughts on Disconnection and Narrative in Marvel Heroic

I’ve been running a superhero campaign for a few years now, and tonight we hit ninety-seven sessions. In contrast to our usual approach, this one was dice heavy – the heroes raided the compound of an demonic ninja cult, fighting lots of guys in black outfits along with mystically endowed sumo-wrestlers, shadow-warriors, claw-wielding pretty-boys, and evil spirits possessing the body of a stone-and-iron golem. I spend a lot of time thinking about the system after sessions like this. We started the campaign using Mutants and Masterminds, back when the third edition was released. We shifted over to the Marvel Heroic RPG about nine months back, largely because it added a more dynamic element for folks who didn’t want to build their powers around hitting things, and it’s been… Well. It’s been great, and it’s been slightly nightmarish in equal measure. The Marvel RPG has a lot of moving parts, compared to the Mutants and Masterminds system. It handles comic-style action pretty