Dynamo playtested extremely well last night. I ran the group through a pretty basic interrupted job / track down interrupters / uncover villainous plot adventure format and the system was more than adequate to the task. Early on there was some questioning about the points system - if I can dump all my points into my attack and defense stats, why wouldn't I? - but the reason for taking a secret identity became quickly apparent when the first combat ended and the party were stymied by their own almost total lack of skills for doing anything but fighting. I explained early on that, yes, you can make a fight beast, but that's all that character is going to be good for.

There was also some question about what actually counts as using your power and, since this was the first full play test, I decided to just let narrative lead and not play hard to the rules.

But once we got into the flow of players narrating their own portions of the story during combat, they started to see what the system is intended to do - let people tell super hero adventures without worrying about power levels or any of the stupid mechanics stuff super hero games entail.

There were more than a few comparisons to WuShu which, I'm not going to lie, was neither an insult nor an indictment. When I want to play a game where stuff goes crazy and the action is over the top, WuShu is my go-to system, so, yes, it's been an influence on the direction Dynamo has been going, particularly the combat.

My next task is to put together some sort of structure guide on cooperatively narrating the story. I want the GM to be able to set up the villain and then let the players build the story that gets them to the final climax. I need to take a look at how the more narrative games handle that kind of cooperation and then think about what I want out of a cooperative super hero narrative.