Originally published at /var/log/vadept.log. Please leave any comments there.

So I havent wrote about the M&M game much over the past weeks.  Here is a recap:

I had the players go into this time-warp alternate-reality where the world (as they saw it) had been destroyed by an alien force.  They wake up without powers.  I wrote this awesome script to take everyone’s powers, randomize them, then assign them back to the players, so as time progressed, “random” powers started to manifest.  My original intent was to make them realize that sometimes throwing powers at a problem was not the only way to solve a problem.  Plus I was curious to see how the players would cope with not having the safety blanket of their powers at their immediate disposal.

Well, party morale seemed to drop considerably after that happened.  So this last game they did some events that allowed them to regain their powers again.  It was an interesting experiment, however I think my delivery was sub-par and really ruined (or didn’t get the message across) the experience.  Oh well, live and learn.

This last game however things started slow, but towards the end we ended up running past the allotted time of midnight to get to an ending point.  I think that the party could of ran for another hour or two but I had to cut it short due to myself having to work in the morning.  There was an obvious morale improvement as the powers were regained which made me happy.

As random things happen for random times, as I was at Starbucks with a player who is home on summer break (and thereby an active player yet again), we met a starbucks employee who is a UOP grad and what seems to be a die-hard tabletopper.  I shot him an email to see if he wants to jump into the M&M fun, so we’ll see how that turns out.  He recently graduated UOP with a degree in physics, so it would be a welcome addition to get another hard-science major in the gaming group vs all of the fruity soft-science (yes, that means you Brandon) majors that we have.

Originally published at /var/log/vadept.log. Please leave any comments there.

After over a year of running the Mutants and Masterminds (MaM) game, our Storyteller Sky has decided that he has had enough.  He wants to play for a change so he put his game up for grabs to whomever wishes to continue it.

Needless to say, after my latest Shadowrun game exploding and collapsing, I was a bit hesitant to take the torch.  However, most of the Shadowrun players (some who play in the MaM game as well) told me that running the MaM game would be an excellent experience for me, so I gave it some serious thought.  After discussing time issues with Tiffany (whom if I was not running MaM, I would be there playing anyways), you are looking at the new Storyteller of the Mutants and Masterminds game.  Uh, yay?

I start in 3-4 weeks.  Melinda wants to try to run the game for 3 weeks as a transitional ST while I get some things prepared, but I think i’m capable of starting as soon as tomorrow night with some preliminary story/tying up loose threads from Sky’s game.  Everyone is keeping their same characters, time will just march on under my compassionate hand instead of Sky’s.

However the million dollar question is that I’ve been handed this running game of ambitious, good natures, fun-loving players who really dig their characters.  A part of me wants to turn the game from less zany/comic-bookish into a darker mood game.  Like turning  Adam West Batman into The Dark Knight movies.  I setup a quick survey on our internal gaming website, a few want a change, but the majority was right in the middle (and not everyone has submitted one yet).

Do I make this game darker, give the players more realistic challenges, more evil villains, and have them actually make planned decisions  as to what course of action they will take?  Or do I keep the same zany, wacky, no-real-fear-of-dying that we have had for the past year.  I can do the scientific way and make the game dark until people start to bitch, then back off 10%.  Not sure if there is a good way to do this that will make everyone happy.

I think I need to take a serious look as to why I like to play in the MaM game and what makes it fun for me.   I think I’m going to start writing about the MaM game more here to document how things panned out.

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Originally published at /var/log/vadept.log. Please leave any comments there.

Many of you have asked “What is this Mutants and Masterminds game you always tweet about?”

Its a role-playing game that I play every Sunday with a group of people.  Its a game where you play a comic bookish superhero.  The rule books have every single power from every superhero in existence and allows you to pick and choose ones to fit your character.  The rules are quite ambiguous and at times outright confusing, however we make the best of it.

A really dark form of the Mutants and Masterminds genre can be seen on the TV show “Heros” where ordinary people get super-human powers.  Our game is no where near that serious/dark but more slapstick, goofy and funny.  The setting takes place in modern day Stockton, and we are to play ‘ourselves’ but with superhero powers.  Needless to say, this gets quite interesting.

I play ‘Dr Gizmo‘, a pharmacist exposed to a unique mixture of drugs during a pharmacy “incident” which gave him super-human powers.  Dr Gizmo’s power is ‘Gadgets’ meaning that he can create pretty much a gadget or gizmo that does anything.  To keep in the pharmacy paradigm, his gadgets must be explainable in medicinal terms (an injection to allow water breathing, or bandages to heal otherwise lethal wounds).  Yeah, I’m basically Inspector Gadget but a ton cooler.  Did I mention that Dr Gizmo has to wear his underwear on the outside of his pants for his powers to work? Its true, all superheros have their underwear on the outside of their pants.

Dax plays “Apollo”, a half-god of (you guessed it) Apollo.  Dr Gizmo’s theory is that he’s just delusional, and he got his powers not from a “God” but from some silly dental accident involving the x-ray machine.

Brandon plays “Brenden”, an “Alien” that has the ability to self-replicate.  His character is the most zany and absolutely psychotic in the whole game.  We have done everything to a Brenden replicate, cooking, launching, shooting, zapping, experimenting on, etc.  Crazy. Dr Gizmo thinks that he’s just a regular guy with some delusion of being an alien from another planet, although having a crashed space-ship on the moon as a base isn’t jiving with the ‘regular guy’ theory.

Other people play, but I really have no attention span at this moment to list -everyone- and their powers.  Maybe later.

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