Ryan Macklin (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} macklinr) wrote,@ 2005-08-01 15:45:00 |
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Truth & Justice: review, with post-play comments sprinkled in
I mentioned earlier about Truth & Justice winning the Ryan Macklin Future Memorial Award for Truest Superhero Game That Does Justice To The Genre!
So, here's my T&J-only post (mainly sochadu has something to link to).
Preview of Truth & Justice, the Dial S for Superhumans freebie, and PDQ core rules may be downloaded for free at:
http://www.atomicsockmonkey.com/freebie
I have run Truth & Justice twice now. I suspect that this is only the beginning, as my players are digging on the game mechanics, the character design, and the overall "feel". These three things are the core of that makes T&J, by far, the best superhero games out there.
[I will comment (again, for those who have been reading) that I have never really liked superhero games. I have wanted to like them, for their Mad, Beautiful Ideas (to riff off of a well-written section on the tropes of superhero stories in T&J), but they were far too often bogged down into too much detail, too much fiddling with character creation currency, and in execution seems to fall short of achieving the stories we read and watch. Truth & Justice hits every one of these points brilliantly.]
The game mechanics are simple -- which is good, as both times I've brought in people who have rarely gamed. (One, in fact, who didn't really dig on gaming, and I convinced him to try T&J when he said the only gaming he did was old D&D with an assclown GM. He's been interested in further gaming with me since.) The system is based on Chad's PDQ (Prose Descriptive Qualities) system. I won't go into it too much here, as there is a freebie "PDQ core" rules available at:
http://www.atomicsockmonkey.com/freebie
While I said I wouldn't go into it too much, I will highlight some of the most impressive parts of the mechanics -- that's what a review's for, right? You have a number of Qualities (ranging from Poor [-2] to Master [+6]) and Powers (similarly ranging). Damage is abstract -- there are no hit points to keep track of, no measure of "how long can I last before I'm hurt". As you take damage, you lower your Qualities and Powers -- you become weaker -- which fits the genre. This abstraction provides an interesting twist on damage systems that T&J utilizes to make some superhero stories more effective: you can use this for any sort of conflict -- a battle of wits, a race, a math test, an IRS audit, whatever.
Here's one recap from the first session I ran: One of my PCs played The Challenger from Dial S for Superhumans (the free T&J supplement). She was knocked out, captured, and bound by villainous Biomechanic (also from Dial S...). When she came to, she found she couldn't free herself with strength, so instead she taunted her foe -- the resulting battle of wits incurred enough failure ranks for Biomechanic to reduce his relevant qualities, and he ended up knocking some equipment aside and stormed off, buying her time!
T&J handles this smoothly, while other systems would clunk a bit over there and require more cooperation from the GM.
Character creation in Truth & Justice is quick and simple. Once you have an idea for a character, you can make one in 15 minutes -- maybe longer, if you have a particularly complicated idea, but not by much. Creation is concept based, rather than currency based -- by that I mean your concept is what drives the generation. Your background and origin are important, because they help determine what scenes in the game are appropriate for you to improve. Your motivation is a very important part of the character, as through following your motivation, you gain Hero Points, allowing you to fuel your powers and become a better hero.
To illustrate, at the end of this, I'll post up a character I did for a player. He wanted to "play a lot of small people", and further described it as about 80 little, 4-inch tall green men, who, after crash-landing on Earth, took a vote and decided to beat up on villains to show these 'giant people' what they're made of."
Other game systems that make the claim of working with the supers genre would choke on this idea, as it's difficult to quantify, and if it can be accomplished by enough wheeling and dealing with the system, such executions tend to fall flat of the original idea.
The feel of the game is best captured with how Chad uses Hero Points in the game. Like many other systems, Truth & Justice has a "spend a point, do something cool" mechanic, called Hero Points. You use Hero Points to fuel your various Stunts (innovative uses or techniques based on a Power), to increase die rolls, recover from damage, find clues, or other uses -- some inspired by Adventure!'s Dramatic Editing (and if you haven't picked up a copy of this game, and like the Cliffhanger style of gaming, you need to dash to your nearest secluded, perilous store and haggle with the shopkeeper whilst keeping the natives from running you through for a copy…after buying Truth & Justice, of course).
You get Hero Points for being heroic, both as a character, and in some ways as a player (when you help the plot along, or when you bring a great amount of enjoyment to the table). You also get Hero Points for following your motivation; indeed, if you must go against your motivation, you need to spend a Hero Point to do so, putting yourself in situations of tense drama and consequence. Beyond that, there's one more interesting way to get Hero Points, and that's if the GM ends up hosing you for the plot -- such as knockout-gas (or what I used in the last game against a robot superhero: EMP discharge). That was always one difficulty of superhero gaming in other systems: the stories of heroes going through some major set-back gave them something to persevere over, but in a role-playing game, that's frowned upon as the GM being a jerk. Chad brings the option back as something palatable to both players and GMs.
Hero Points are more than just fueling neat powers, though! As you gain Hero Points, your maximum (or just Max) slowly increases, thus encouraging players to gain Hero Points not only to do cool stuff now, but do improve their character overall. When improving a character, you actually spend that Max, lowering the amount of Hero Points you can hold at a time, in order to have new Stunts, Qualities, or Powers. To further add to the support of the superhero feel, your Max is increased during game play, rather than as some award at the end of a session, and you spend Max during the session (during relevant scenes, especially for increasing your Powers) rather than doing it as after-session bookkeeping. You are a Hero. Heroes improve on-camera.
All in all, Chad did an excellent job. The only thing it lacks is an index, but as I've commented to some people, I (a) the table of contents is well done, (b) the bibliography is, without question, one of the best ones for a gaming book (those who are familiar with GURPS bibliographies will not be disappointed), and (c) I recognize that an index is time-consuming (thus expensive) to build, and I would rather have no index than one that's, well, White Wolfish.
I encourage people to at least look at the freebie material, and consider Truth & Justice worth your $13 investment (or $25 for the Print on Demand, which I believe includes the PDF anyway).
As promised, here's one Mad, Beautiful Idea that I couldn't have created without Truth & Justice:
Premise: "I want to play a lot of small people."
After some discussion to clarify, it became "about 80 little, 4-inch tall green men, who, after crash-landing on Earth, took a vote and decided to beat up on villains to show these 'giant people' what they're made of."
Codename: The Committee
Real name: There are 80 different ones, and they've lost that individuality over time.
Background:
The Committee are a race a normally peaceful aliens, around 4 inches tall, who have traveled the galaxy and have come to know many things about Space and her alien cultures.
As their homeword was being destroyed by the Great Giant Witch of Neldar, only 80 members of their race escaped in a single ship. It was a very small, cramped vessel, but that allowed the ship to flee unnoticed by the Giant one. It crash-landed on Earth about a year ago, and since then they have been stranded in this land of ugly, giant people.
Motivation:
Prove they are better than the silly, foolish giants -- particularly those called "Supervillains", as their studying of Earth showed that they tend to be easier to defeat.
Qualities:
Expert [+4] Alien Martial Arts
Good [+2] Space lore
Good [+2] Dexterous
Good [+2] Tactics
Poor [-2] Obviously not human
Origin:
As they fled their burning homeworld, the combination of the trauma of everyone else in their race dying and the horrible confined quarters unlocked their primal abilities, thought to be lost long ago. They had become psychically fused together, and able to wield their rage like a weapon. They speak as one, think as one, and fight for the miniature justice as one!
Powers:
Good [+2] Super-Senses (80 pairs of eyes, ears, etc, that can look in different directions and roam freely, plus occasionally able to use "alien sense" as the plot calls for)
Expert [+4] Wee People
[When all the members of the Committee are together (within Touch), their psychic energy can be focused into an Expert [+4] Blast of Rage (Limitation: only affects things with emotions). When separated, they can communicate with each other telepathically up to Far away, and have Good [+2] Super-Armor (representing their difficulty in being hit & seriously damaged as a group when they're spread out)]
Stunts:
Field of Rage (Signature, Average [+0], 2 HP) when close together, they can turn their Blast of Rage into a defensive field that forms between their bodies, like a net or wall of miniature fury.
Post-play report:
He had a lot of fun playing this guy, and he was pretty ingenious when it came to using the powers. He used his Field of Rage to do some neat things, including binding henchmen and being a parachute for another character.
I mentioned earlier about Truth & Justice winning the Ryan Macklin Future Memorial Award for Truest Superhero Game That Does Justice To The Genre!
So, here's my T&J-only post (mainly so
chadu has something to link to).Truth & Justice
Published by Atomic Sock Monkey Press
Written by Chad Underkoffler
Cover by Greg Holkan
Interior Art by Greg Holkan, Scott Kane, Randy Milholland
133-page black & white perfect bound book; $25
or 7 meg PDF from e23 and RPGnow; $13
Published by Atomic Sock Monkey Press
Written by Chad Underkoffler
Cover by Greg Holkan
Interior Art by Greg Holkan, Scott Kane, Randy Milholland
133-page black & white perfect bound book; $25
or 7 meg PDF from e23 and RPGnow; $13
Preview of Truth & Justice, the Dial S for Superhumans freebie, and PDQ core rules may be downloaded for free at:
http://www.atomicsockmonkey.com/freebie
I have run Truth & Justice twice now. I suspect that this is only the beginning, as my players are digging on the game mechanics, the character design, and the overall "feel". These three things are the core of that makes T&J, by far, the best superhero games out there.
[I will comment (again, for those who have been reading) that I have never really liked superhero games. I have wanted to like them, for their Mad, Beautiful Ideas (to riff off of a well-written section on the tropes of superhero stories in T&J), but they were far too often bogged down into too much detail, too much fiddling with character creation currency, and in execution seems to fall short of achieving the stories we read and watch. Truth & Justice hits every one of these points brilliantly.]
The game mechanics are simple -- which is good, as both times I've brought in people who have rarely gamed. (One, in fact, who didn't really dig on gaming, and I convinced him to try T&J when he said the only gaming he did was old D&D with an assclown GM. He's been interested in further gaming with me since.) The system is based on Chad's PDQ (Prose Descriptive Qualities) system. I won't go into it too much here, as there is a freebie "PDQ core" rules available at:
http://www.atomicsockmonkey.com/freebie
While I said I wouldn't go into it too much, I will highlight some of the most impressive parts of the mechanics -- that's what a review's for, right? You have a number of Qualities (ranging from Poor [-2] to Master [+6]) and Powers (similarly ranging). Damage is abstract -- there are no hit points to keep track of, no measure of "how long can I last before I'm hurt". As you take damage, you lower your Qualities and Powers -- you become weaker -- which fits the genre. This abstraction provides an interesting twist on damage systems that T&J utilizes to make some superhero stories more effective: you can use this for any sort of conflict -- a battle of wits, a race, a math test, an IRS audit, whatever.
Here's one recap from the first session I ran: One of my PCs played The Challenger from Dial S for Superhumans (the free T&J supplement). She was knocked out, captured, and bound by villainous Biomechanic (also from Dial S...). When she came to, she found she couldn't free herself with strength, so instead she taunted her foe -- the resulting battle of wits incurred enough failure ranks for Biomechanic to reduce his relevant qualities, and he ended up knocking some equipment aside and stormed off, buying her time!
T&J handles this smoothly, while other systems would clunk a bit over there and require more cooperation from the GM.
Character creation in Truth & Justice is quick and simple. Once you have an idea for a character, you can make one in 15 minutes -- maybe longer, if you have a particularly complicated idea, but not by much. Creation is concept based, rather than currency based -- by that I mean your concept is what drives the generation. Your background and origin are important, because they help determine what scenes in the game are appropriate for you to improve. Your motivation is a very important part of the character, as through following your motivation, you gain Hero Points, allowing you to fuel your powers and become a better hero.
To illustrate, at the end of this, I'll post up a character I did for a player. He wanted to "play a lot of small people", and further described it as about 80 little, 4-inch tall green men, who, after crash-landing on Earth, took a vote and decided to beat up on villains to show these 'giant people' what they're made of."
Other game systems that make the claim of working with the supers genre would choke on this idea, as it's difficult to quantify, and if it can be accomplished by enough wheeling and dealing with the system, such executions tend to fall flat of the original idea.
The feel of the game is best captured with how Chad uses Hero Points in the game. Like many other systems, Truth & Justice has a "spend a point, do something cool" mechanic, called Hero Points. You use Hero Points to fuel your various Stunts (innovative uses or techniques based on a Power), to increase die rolls, recover from damage, find clues, or other uses -- some inspired by Adventure!'s Dramatic Editing (and if you haven't picked up a copy of this game, and like the Cliffhanger style of gaming, you need to dash to your nearest secluded, perilous store and haggle with the shopkeeper whilst keeping the natives from running you through for a copy…after buying Truth & Justice, of course).
You get Hero Points for being heroic, both as a character, and in some ways as a player (when you help the plot along, or when you bring a great amount of enjoyment to the table). You also get Hero Points for following your motivation; indeed, if you must go against your motivation, you need to spend a Hero Point to do so, putting yourself in situations of tense drama and consequence. Beyond that, there's one more interesting way to get Hero Points, and that's if the GM ends up hosing you for the plot -- such as knockout-gas (or what I used in the last game against a robot superhero: EMP discharge). That was always one difficulty of superhero gaming in other systems: the stories of heroes going through some major set-back gave them something to persevere over, but in a role-playing game, that's frowned upon as the GM being a jerk. Chad brings the option back as something palatable to both players and GMs.
Hero Points are more than just fueling neat powers, though! As you gain Hero Points, your maximum (or just Max) slowly increases, thus encouraging players to gain Hero Points not only to do cool stuff now, but do improve their character overall. When improving a character, you actually spend that Max, lowering the amount of Hero Points you can hold at a time, in order to have new Stunts, Qualities, or Powers. To further add to the support of the superhero feel, your Max is increased during game play, rather than as some award at the end of a session, and you spend Max during the session (during relevant scenes, especially for increasing your Powers) rather than doing it as after-session bookkeeping. You are a Hero. Heroes improve on-camera.
All in all, Chad did an excellent job. The only thing it lacks is an index, but as I've commented to some people, I (a) the table of contents is well done, (b) the bibliography is, without question, one of the best ones for a gaming book (those who are familiar with GURPS bibliographies will not be disappointed), and (c) I recognize that an index is time-consuming (thus expensive) to build, and I would rather have no index than one that's, well, White Wolfish.
I encourage people to at least look at the freebie material, and consider Truth & Justice worth your $13 investment (or $25 for the Print on Demand, which I believe includes the PDF anyway).
As promised, here's one Mad, Beautiful Idea that I couldn't have created without Truth & Justice:
Premise: "I want to play a lot of small people."
After some discussion to clarify, it became "about 80 little, 4-inch tall green men, who, after crash-landing on Earth, took a vote and decided to beat up on villains to show these 'giant people' what they're made of."
Codename: The Committee
Real name: There are 80 different ones, and they've lost that individuality over time.
Background:
The Committee are a race a normally peaceful aliens, around 4 inches tall, who have traveled the galaxy and have come to know many things about Space and her alien cultures.
As their homeword was being destroyed by the Great Giant Witch of Neldar, only 80 members of their race escaped in a single ship. It was a very small, cramped vessel, but that allowed the ship to flee unnoticed by the Giant one. It crash-landed on Earth about a year ago, and since then they have been stranded in this land of ugly, giant people.
Motivation:
Prove they are better than the silly, foolish giants -- particularly those called "Supervillains", as their studying of Earth showed that they tend to be easier to defeat.
Qualities:
Expert [+4] Alien Martial Arts
Good [+2] Space lore
Good [+2] Dexterous
Good [+2] Tactics
Poor [-2] Obviously not human
Origin:
As they fled their burning homeworld, the combination of the trauma of everyone else in their race dying and the horrible confined quarters unlocked their primal abilities, thought to be lost long ago. They had become psychically fused together, and able to wield their rage like a weapon. They speak as one, think as one, and fight for the miniature justice as one!
Powers:
Good [+2] Super-Senses (80 pairs of eyes, ears, etc, that can look in different directions and roam freely, plus occasionally able to use "alien sense" as the plot calls for)
Expert [+4] Wee People
[When all the members of the Committee are together (within Touch), their psychic energy can be focused into an Expert [+4] Blast of Rage (Limitation: only affects things with emotions). When separated, they can communicate with each other telepathically up to Far away, and have Good [+2] Super-Armor (representing their difficulty in being hit & seriously damaged as a group when they're spread out)]
Stunts:
Field of Rage (Signature, Average [+0], 2 HP) when close together, they can turn their Blast of Rage into a defensive field that forms between their bodies, like a net or wall of miniature fury.
Post-play report:
He had a lot of fun playing this guy, and he was pretty ingenious when it came to using the powers. He used his Field of Rage to do some neat things, including binding henchmen and being a parachute for another character.
