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.

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."

This post is actually going to be very self indulgent. Recently the Atomic think tank upgraded and given that I'd been on there since 2003 I wanted to go through and document some of the ideas that have come out of my head and seen decent discussion. There is at least one item on this list where no one cared even a little. It is here because I want to delve into that item for some specific inspiration. If you're just passing through, no need to worry about a list of links but if you're curious to see what I get up to from time to time, well then here you go.

Hello Gamers and Geeky Friends,

I tend to wear my geek on my sleeve and spend a lot of time talking about RPGs. The sad fact however is that I haven't played in a game since April and rather than whining about it, I thought I would instead do something about it. With that in mind, I'd like to invite people over to my house to play a game of Mutants & Masterminds. They say do what you love right?

The game would be a 'Paragons of Freedom' style game meaning that it would be set in the fictional world of Freedom City but the style would be heavily influenced by television superheros in the vein of Smallville or Heroes.

I am hoping to start in September (August is a very busy month) meeting once every other month or so on the weekend for 4 to 5 hours. The kitchen table at our house in Bethesda opens up and should be able to support a number of players. I'm pretty relaxed at the table and think I tell a pretty good story that is heavily shaped by the player's desires and the character's actions.

One thing some friends did back in college was play a game called 'Crusaders' that I was always sad I never got to be a part of. The basic concept was that you played yourself, only with superpowers. I think that would be fun but only if everyone else was comfortable with it. At the very least, it should make things easier for anyone who is interested in playing but hasn't done this sort of thing before.

Please let me know if you're interested, I'd love to have you join.
-Bill

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: