Experience & Effectiveness

[tenguitarz]

During the same conversation as the one that inspired the Targetting post below, my friend and I were marvelling at the fact that some characters like Storm and Venom, under the Durability/Regeneration system that exists, would have a hell of a time competing against, well, the character that we always seems to come back to is the Blob. As my friend was saying, between his high regen, Health, and Energy pool, he could be a real challenge for a large number of characters due to the fact he just takes a long time to drop and doesn't get tired too easily.

The idea we came up with, and this hasn't been play tested at all, was that your Energy Pool/Regeneration is based on Durability (or Intel as the case may be) + Experience (or Intel + Experience).

You get one experience per every 20 lines of experience (feel free to make that number whatever you like. 20 might seem small, I'm using it because of how infrequently our group plays, usually not over twice a month so far). The maximum number of Experience you can have is 3. For example:

Captain America has a Durability of 4 and an Experience rating of 2. So, he regenerates 6 stones of energy per panel and has a max pool of 18.

This also somewhat helps lessen the effect of the dreaded Death Spiral for Experienced characters (without removing the idea that a characters effectiveness decreases as they are injured).

For characters that are generally supposed to be really tough but maybe not so energetic (again, Blob.. no offense to any Blob fans out there , You could take a Challenge that started your Experience rating at -1 or -2 (the max number of Experience you could then have would by 2 or 1). I'd say 3-5w disadvantage at GMs discretion for that. This would allow for a tough character with not-so-great- regeneration (and make having the prospect of having a character with a Durability of 6 not quite so costly).

Anyway, just a couple more ideas we had. I'll admit that not too many people would probably take the Challenges, that would probably be more useful as a GM rule. Any thoughts?

[i3ullseye]

Well, consider this. the Blob HAS fought entire groups to a standstill. And where the X-Men and such are mostly one power, one trick ponies, Spiderman is not. And the Blob actually fought Spidey to a stand still in HTH combat.

Don't think the system is off, just think you have underestimated the Blob.

[beyonder]

I was actually thinking along the same lines recently. Not to be one of those "the whole game is broken" types, but if I had been one of the game designers, I would have taken a page from the MSH Adventure Game (SAGA cards, anyone remember?) and based Energy on experience, or Edge, rather than on Durability. Health would still be Dur-based, of course, but that one Ability would not be thrice as important as the rest like it is now. As it stands, there is little room for experience in the rules, leaving Cap, Spidey, Doom, and other very experienced characters somewhat lacking in, well, Edge. This is one place where, it seems to me, the creative team were not quite on-target.

(Speaking of targets, I'm certain that i3ullseye will rebut me here. Bring it on, mod-man!)

[i3ullseye]

Energy IS based on experience.

How?

You will have higher Mods and Higher action ranks with experience. Those higher mods are free stones to add to what you are doing. Now how you can add or increase mods is a bit sketchy, but one would assume Spidey did not start with his high level of reflexive dodge one would assume.

Ability is Actions. Expertise is Modifiers. Least thats how I see it.

[tenguitarz]

Well, thought about doing it like that too. The reason we ended up with the Experience idea is because there are a lot of modifiers (Toughness maybe, both flavors of Luck, any type of Sense modifier) that wouldn't make much sense to be able to increase for various reasons. And even ones, like Reflexive Dodge and Targeting, that would make some sense, wouldn't make sense to increase more than 2 or 3 modifier numbers.

Another reason is that it would somewhat lessen the problem that there's no point to having an Action Number higher than your Energy Pool. Back to Spider-man.. why have a Line in Acrobatics or Close Combat, from a game-mechanic perspective? He already has a total CC number of 13 total, and only 12 stones to ever spend on it (barring some sort of energy theft excess stones. Doesn't seem like something that would happen too often). This is one reason characters with a 3 durability will buy an action at 9 and take Can't Be Improved. And why not? It's not like improving the action does any good, in 50% of cases.

Anyway. Just giving some additional reasons for the original ideas. If one could come up with a way of increasing modifiers that made sense, I wouldn't be opposed to that either.

[i3ullseye]

Well, thought a bit mroe about this. Again I think experience does save energy in the long run already. It is not what actions or mods a character has that really matters, but how they use them. And when you add lines you eventually gain specialties. These can be anywhere from a 1 to 4 stone bonus!


How?

Blob will crush Captain America, we can all agree on that. Especially if Cap has lost his shield. But what if he keeps his distance and starts jabbing and boxing Blob? Instantly he gains a 1 or 2 stone bonus for his specialty. These are free shifts, not stones or mods at all. But he is 2 stones more effective.

Now what if Blob, with NO boxing experience whatsoever, decides he will have to adapt to get in close on Cap? Well, sure he can. But he boxes with a -2 stone modifier to try to circle left and come in for an uppercut. This makes him a total of 4 effective stones less than Cap.

Experience saving cap energy spent and yet making him more effective.

[beyonder]

Mods and Specialties=Experience and Action#=Skill is a sensible way to look at it, but this still doesn't explain to me why Durability is the most important stat in the game. (Note that I didn't say the only important stat! I know that Mods bypass Energy, for instance, and that a character can have a 10 Dur but never effectively use his 30 Energy.) One can think about it until it seems to make sense, but why should we have to? I still think that most players would more easily believe that experience is one of the most important forces in the Marvel Universe. It makes intuitive sense, and this game is supposed to be set up to encourage intuitive playability rather than statistical thinking. I think that's its greatest strength, but I think Marvel dropped the ball when they made Durability King.

[i3ullseye]

I dont think Durability is King. That is much like the argument in Champions that Dex is king. They are certainly VERY important, but that is why they also cost 3X as much as other stats. Further, they are the only stat that will regularly be impacted (or at least their resultant values).

I can certainly think of quite a few characters that have lower Durabilities and are still incredibly effective. Kitty Pride comes to the top of my mind.

[beyonder]

I said "King", not "Dictator". Sure, you can make an effective character with low Dur, but .... wait, I think we actually agree here.

(stats like MURPG Durability) are certainly VERY important

See? We agree on this point. My question is, WHY? What caused the designers to single out this one trait as the triply important one? Obvious answer: Because Effort=Energy=Physical Durability makes real-world sense. True enough, but should that have been the yardstick in the creation of a comic-book-reality game? To put it another way, what is the most obvious driving force behind most supers? The answer to that question is not, IMO, Durability. Therefore, again IMO, the designers should have made Dur=Health and created a different stat on which to base Energy. Like, f'rinstance, Experience or Edge or whatever ya wanna call it.

The proof of all this is in the players. Every new player in my group has, at some point, asked the same question: Why is the tough guy with the high Durability better than my guy with the high (insert stat here) ? He's not, of course, but I've had to explain why not more often than I should have. If we were playing GURPS or Champions, I'd deal with counterintuitive game rules .... but I'm a little disappointed that such a rule exists in this game, that's all.

[i3ullseye]

You are right, the high Int or High Agi guy IS just as good, or better. But the character has to learn how to epxloit the strengths and weaknesses that are there. so in effect, the system requires real world player experience to overcome these deficiencies and imbalances.

I for one don't really have a problem with that, but with some groups I can certainly see it being problematic.

Now the tricky part of this is the game 'SEEMS' incredibly simplistic. And at its core it is. But the real finesse is a bit more advanced than one woudl think at first with the basic rules usage. So once people start really manipulating situations to take advantage of sit mods THAT is when their character can really shine. But it is anything but a simple game at that point, and takes a lot of interpretive creative license and input on the GM AND the Players part to make it work.