ICONS and the Adult Gamer: Actual Play/Review

A couple days ago, four of us got together to play ICONS - the new superhero rpg by Steven Kenson et al. The game is a cross between a cleaned up, old school TSR Marvel supers game and the more narrative and modern Spirit of the Century. The game includes information about several powers, but it's not crunchy - ICONS is heavily tilted toward random character generation and being able to sit down and play quick-like. While I love Mutants and Masterminds (Kenson's other, much ballyhooed supers game), ICONS is a different beast. It's not for the munchkins. Really, it's not for the gritty old schoolers or vampire narrativists either. It's for some goofy, quick fun with a splash of dynamic play and modern cool.

And that's how it actually played. Which was perfect for this particular night. Here's the origin story of said night:

My friends and I are late-20s/early 30s gamers with wives, long term relationships, careers, and in my case, a kid. We're not as grizzled as Old Guy Mike (glad you're back on the blogging scene!), but time is still scarce, and it has empirically proven near-impossible to have a steady campaign going. So, we've decided to make a set, biweekly game. Whoever shows, shows. At our first meeting, we had about 8 people (WOW!!!). Our second was sadly cancelled because of attendance issues. At our third meeting, Pat was supposed to continue his long-running old school, fantasy, sandbox, gritty, savage worlds campaign. But he bailed at the last minute because he had professional responsibilities (you know, like editing fantasy flight rpg books for real money).

I had ICONS sitting on my desktop, and it looked quick and fun. I downloaded the first adventure the night before our game, quickly skimmed the ICONS rules, read the adventure, and showed up with some makers mark for the game the next day.

The game was great. We randomly generated characters in 45 minutes. We played through about 3/4 of the adventure in a few hours. This was quite fast indeed. Much of this speed is due to the simplicity of the system: The GM doesn't roll dice, and only compares PC rolls against NPC stats. (A couple times, muscle memory kicked in and I caught myself reaching for dice when it was the NPCs' turns to attack, and rolling is FUN, but it worked well regardless.) The system was simple enough that I didn't really explain it to the players. I just translated the results of their die rolls for them. In the end, we had a few pretty cinematic combats, some cool between combat scenes, and ended up with what turned out to be some morally ambiguous superheroes (e.g. they wouldn't help a dying CEO/inventor live without a promise that he would sell his entire company - that he grew from his garage in the 80s- to a rival CEO... who was also player in the game.) Good stuff was generated in a limited period of time.

So here's the verdict: ICONS is goofy as hell, but it's also cool and surprisingly dynamic. It's a really nice blend of old school mechanics and new school narrativist ones. If you want a supers game built for long campaigns, you probably want to look elsewhere (like at Mutants and Masterminds). But if you're looking for a fun pick-up-and-play game with little prep needed, this is a great game for you. With our schedules these days, it was the perfect game for the perfect time.

West Marches via Savage Worlds?

If I ever get around to sketching out my West Marches-style sandbox fantasy game, I’ll probably run it using Savage Worlds. When it comes to crunch, Savage Worlds and D&D 3.X are about the same (despite SW’s claims to the contrary). But for my money, SW is so much more fun, what with its exploding dice and playing cards and hyper-intuitive character generation. Plus, with the $10 Explorer's Edition, it's cheap and easy to equip your group.

My enthusiasm for running a character-driven sandbox game got a big boost this weekend, when I got my hands on the Savage Worlds Fantasy Bestiary Toolkit and the free 11-page PDF preview of Goodman Games’ Points of Light. Really, that 11-page preview is about as much as I need right now; it includes a detailed hex map and several dozen three-sentence entries for various map denizens. Combine that with a handful of critters from the Bestiary and the game pretty much writes itself. Which is the point, of course: the GM shouldn’t be doing much planning. Rather, the players should be driving the game forward by looking at the vast, empty, unpopulated map and making decisions as to where to go and what to explore.

I’m thinking I could get somewhere between 6 and 10 players to make characters for this game, then I’d run a session whenever any combination of three or more of them could get together.

Anyone else tinkering with a West Marches-type game right now?

Setting unimportant for indie games?

Something struck me as I was browsing the indie games at Gencon. The most successful titles, the ones that stick with me for weeks after a quick 15-minute demo, aren’t the games with the epic, engrossing settings. Rather, they’re the games that hinge on one truly unique mechanic, something that’s so innovative that I smack myself on the forehead and say, “ Why didn’t I think of that?”

I think that’s where the future of RPGs might be. Not in voluminous settings that require small armies of writers and editors to produce (although there’s certainly something to be said for deeply engrossing titles like Dark Heresy or Blue Planet) but in stripped-down, minimalist games whose success rests on a single spiffy game mechanic. Web publishing makes these ventures exceedingly easy to create and distribute. Ben and I have been kicking around a game idea for a while, and it would certainly be an interesting exercise to restart the process through this paradigm.

The great rail(roading) wars

As a player, I can handle quite a bit of plot railroading as long as it’s interspersed with cinematic scenes and meaty roleplaying. Because of this, I probably inject a tiny bit too much control over the games I run — but then again, maybe not, seeing as how I’m so painfully conscious of it.

But there comes a point, even for me, when the game is lost; when the GM seems hell-bent on “running us through an adventure,” rather than crafting a nuanced, shared story with the players. This happened last weekend during a game I was playing (not GMing, thankfully). There was a crystal-clear moment when all the players caught each other’s eyes and shared a thought: “This is not working.” We were being force-fed the plot in huge, detail-starved chunks. Entire scenes would be glossed over in the GM’s haste to move us through the story — which, I should point out, was a premade adventure from the RPG's publisher. The thing was, I’ve been gaming with this group off and on for more than a year, and I’ve seen some fairly obvious instances of plot railroading from the GM before. This was several orders of magnitude worse. It was deeply unsatisfying, and a good object lesson about what not to do in an RPG.