The Prologue: I started the game with a quick overview of Freedom City and how this world was different from our own. Specifically there was the bloodier American Revolution that culminated in the British surrender at Freedom City and detonation of the first nuclear bomb in Germany rather than Japan. After that I let the player's each describe an only slightly guided prologue for their character.

I have been talking about this game for a while. Getting it off the ground was a little bit of a hassle with real life issues getting in the way. In the end though, I was able to get three players together only two months later than the original start date. Here is how it went down.

When Wizards of the Coast moved Dungeons and Dragons from version 3.5 to 4th Edition the licensing of 3rd edition 3rd party products went away. For Green Ronin, the solution they came up with was to rebrand those old products as '3rd Era' and re-release them as PDF documents. One of the first I've seen advertised was 'The Psychic's Handbook', an alternate set of Psionics Rules for D&D. Seeing this come through put me in mind of psionics in general. I've always been a fan and if I play another D&D game (unlikely right now) I will definitely lobby to play a psion or related class.

I feel it is important when running a game to run a game that you'd want to play in. With that in mind, for my upcoming Paragons of Freedom game I took a moment to write up my own alter ego for the game. He will likely never show up in the game but that's sort of his powers.

For his background, I started with myself but then I stripped out computers and gaming from my interests and looked for common threads. It reminded me of a time when I compared my Stage Crew and Church work to being a Ninja.

"If I'm doing my job right, no one notices I did it."

In recent discussion, it has become apparent that my game group is very busy. Not a whole lot of time for getting together and even less time for actually running a game. As I've been talking about for a while I do have an idea for the next arc, but its going to require the players to create new characters. That isn't exactly in keeping with the plan to minimize effort that needs to be put in. So in one of my last emails I suggested that would could do character creation in game. For a four hour game, creating characters during the session could eat up a lot of game time. So I suggested M&M Lite...

Like a lot of gamers, I'm something of a fiddler. I've come up with a number of little house rules that at one point or another seemed like a good idea. I thought I'd throw them out there as a cohesive group related to combat in Mutants and Masterminds (character creation is a seperate post) and see what people think. I've also made this post on the Mutants and Mastermind's board to see what people there have to say.

Now this isn't a 'fix' just a few items personal to me that I was hoping the big brains here might shoot some holes in. I'd like to have combat feel a little deadlier(more street feel) and have defense shifting be a little stronger of an option(more batman types). In addition, if I can fix up a few little things that I have difficulty with like remembering to subtract out hits and making it easier to mark the 5 result step then all the better.

So here's what I have in mind:

I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone who is reading my 'On the Subject of RPGs' series that the ultimate goal is the creation of some sort of RPG framework. You have to look at what has come before if you are going to look ahead. I don't really have an illusions that anyone but me will want to play it but there is certainly a sense of satisfaction that I imagine coming from such an endevor.

Last time we expanded the definition of a test for sucess to include options beyond pure sucess or failure. This time we are going to expand that definition once more. If I have a character who wants to jump from one truck to another, there are a couple of items that need to be looked at first. Can the character jump? Does the character have time to make the jump efore the trucks are too far apart? Does the character have the energy to jump? All of these are resources that the character must possess and potentially expend in order to complete the action. Today we're going to look at the various types of resources available in RPG systems and the permutations on them.

So far in this discussion, I've been dealing with the 'testing' aspect of RPGs as "Character A attempts Action X and with varying degrees of chance either succeeds or fails. While not entirely wrong and certainly representative of any number of RPGs, it doesn't take into account all of the grey areas of success and failure.

In the last installment, I wrote about how 'modern' RPG design had taken to focusing on a single core mechanic for task resolution. While this has the benefit of reducing the need to look up rules (and slowing down the game), I think there are times where it is a good idea to break away from the main mechanic particularly if it helps emphasize a certain aspect of the game. For instance, if you're using a dice based mechanic for the majority of the game but you want to place particular emphasis on moral ascension (say the characters are fallen angels trying to get back into heaven) then you might use a deck of cards for modeling that just so that they player's "feel" like they're doing something special.