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.

Breaking up is hard to do

I quit my Mutants & Masterminds game this past July after more than a year of reliable, bimonthly campaign play. I just wasn’t jazzed to play a superhero game any longer — and this ran contrary to the rest of the group’s members, who all wanted to continue M&M for the forseeable future.

So I quit — nicely, of course, but I still shocked the GM and a few players who didn’t know me quite so well. The rhetorical question I didn’t pose to them at the time was: What alternative would you have me do?

Do I stick with a game that’s just not my cup of tea right now, hoping that enthusiasm grabs me again? Do I bumble my way through the next few months of play, waiting for the GM to get the hint and start catering to me? In my opinion, that’s doing a disservice to the rest of the players — especially when they’ve expressed satisfaction with the direction the campaign is going and I’m the odd man out.

Luckily this wasn’t my only gaming group at the time, and I’ve since been able to play a bunch of new, cool games with friends new and old, to say nothing of my own impending fantasy campaign.

But what do you think? Is there some sort of unspoken gamer etiquette I trampled when I departed so precipitously? Would you have stayed?

Dr. Manhattan is naked, blue and perfect

I’ve never been so happy to see a naked man.

Wait, wait, let me explain. I’m referring to Dr. Manhattan’s appearance in the first Watchmen trailer, which blitzed the internets Thursday ahead of an official theatrical premiere before The Dark Knight.

Watchmen is easily my favorite graphic novel, but the beloved series has had a rough ride through Hollywood over the last dozen years or so. As such, I’ve been following the development of Zack Snyder’s adaptation very closely. At WizardWorld Chicago last month, I browsed a gallery of Watchmen toys and statuettes — noting with apprehension that Dr. Manhattan’s merchandise was conspicuously absent from the lineup. I asked a guy from DC Direct about this omission, and he told me he was sworn to secrecy about the visual look of Manhattan.

This was troubling to me. See, Dr. Manhattan’s most identifiable characteristic is that he spends most of the series naked. It’s not a fashion statement; rather, it’s meant to illustrate the fact that’s he’s so far beyond human comprehension that trivial things like clothing doesn’t concern him anymore. He watches quarks and muons flicker through subatomic nuclei; he walks on Mars and assembles microcomputers with his mind. He’s a being who has more in common with God than with humans, and clothing is simply an afterthought.

All this played through my head as I considered what Manhattan might look like — because clearly some decision had been made, otherwise why not show him along with the rest of the character photos that were released earlier this year? And now his toy is absent from an important merchandising lineup? I was worried, to say the least.

Then I saw the trailer. And I saw Manhattan, in all his blueberry-nude glory. And I rested easy that night, knowing that Watchmen — my Watchmen, thank you very much — is in good hands.

Fightin' crime in the sandbox

Jeff Rients’ post about sandbox-style play for superhero RPGs got me thinking about the possibilities – and pitfalls – of this sort of gaming. Here’s his idea in a nutshell:

[Y]ou could assign each neighborhood some stats. A make-your-trait system like Risus can be handy for this.

Argentville
declining neighborhood trying to recapture former glory(3) domain of the O'Bryan Mob(2) best bakeries in the city(2)

Heck, you could probably get a lot done with just some encounter tables with built-in change conditions.

This is intriguing, because in my experience superhero gaming has been all about the push-pull between the players and the GM. The players typically strive to live up to their righteous ideals by patrolling neighborhoods and confronting villains before they have a chance to poison the city’s drinking water or plant bombs at the children’s museum. That sort of thing.

The GM, on the other hand, is responsible for driving the story forward with some semblance of a plot. When considered alongside the players’ ongoing superheroism, an overarching plot can sometimes feel like a story railroad that detracts from the players’ own goals and motivations.

Jeff’s idea of sandbox-style play ties this up neatly, especially for gritty, street-level games. Sure, players will eventually want to confront of the head villain behind a particular gang, but sandbox play ensures that they’ll have the proper context and experience when it’s time for the big showdown.

The only potential problem I can see is lack of social encounters to satisfy cerebral gamers – but really, this is sort of endemic to all superhero RPGs, especially the Silver Age ones I’ve played lately. Nice, meaty social roleplaying and intrigue is best packaged as part of a larger plot, which needs to be balanced carefully alongside the players’ motives.

Old-school worldbuilding

It's really tough for me to claim the "old school" mantra for pretty much anything relating to gaming, seeing as how I picked up my first game book in 1995 (Star Wars d6, 2nd ed., revised & expanded). That's hardly old school. But looking back over my comparatively brief gaming career, I was out front in at least one trend: collaborative worldbuilding.

Games like Burning Wheel and Shock make a lot of hay over the opportunity to sit down with your buddies and build a complex gaming world from the ground up, and rightly so: It ties the players intimately to the setting and equips them (early on) with the tools they need to push the story forward.

For me, the opportunity to try this out came in 2002. I was in college at the University of Missouri and my local group was jonesing to try out Silver Age Sentinels, which most folks remember as the precursor to Mutants & Masterminds. At the time, we wanted a setting considerably darker than the Silver Age fare offered up in SAS. (Really, we wanted to play Watchmen.) We started tossing around ideas for the ideal setting, and before too long we were caught up in a full-blown collaborative worldbuilding effort.

The result was the world of the Sovereigns, a hard-edged team of supers who mixed 21st-century sensibilities with the heroic ideals of times past. I'm going to start posting bits and pieces of what eventually came to be known as our Sovereigns Sourcebook. It'll be tagged "Sovereigns," for ease of searching. Look for more over the weeks and months ahead.