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.

Tonight we're ready for the first playtest of Dynamo!

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Yesterday, I'd planned on taking Dynamo to gaming and doing a play test. By yesterday afternoon, however, it was clear that all I'd really had in cohesive form was a set of mechanics. Character creation was lacking as I've still not completely defined what the characters are actually supposed to be.

Although we didn't play, however, we did do a Q&A on my ideas and, much like with our play tests of Vihara, talking about the game out loud with my players helped me weigh the pros and cons of different ways to do things. It gave me a bit of focus and helped me reshift my thinking toward the things that are going to make Dynamo different than other games.

I realized that Dynamo heroes will be fairly low-level, more Golden Age style characters. At the same time, I think the narrative format lets you create characters of any power level because they still have to interact with the story in a limited, physical way. I'm not really worried about power gamers trying to make a Supreme; go ahead! If that's the character you want to play. Just remember you still have to do things in the story and roll dice.

But I'm going to be focusing on physical effect super powers. That means I'm doing away with psychic and magic powers and leaning more towards a philosophy that all super powers are just different forms of mental manipulation of matter - the way super powers work in the Wild Cards books.

This has also helped me strip down the characters from two ability lines, each with their own attack and defense to one attack and one defense per character.

Today I'm working on character templates - this is going to work sort of like D&D character classes, but not quite. My idea is to have a set of options that you can mix together to create most any kind of super hero. You pick a type of character you want to play - your type sets your base attack and defense and some modify your Pluck as well. Then you pick a secondary description that modifies how your power actually works. I've been playing around with it this morning to create a few knock-off characters.

 

Downpour

Type: Summoner

Secondary: Flight

Downpour can alter weather in the local area. She uses her summoning ability to create weather effects such as lightning, rain, and wind - all of these can be used as attacks, and the wind gives her the ability to fly.

 

Captain Barnabas

Type: Summoner

Secondary: Rechargeable Power

Captain Barnabas has a magical glowing bracer which holds energy for his power which he can use to summon temporary objects such as weapons, vehicles, even giant hands. Barnabas has a hurricane lamp on his ship which helps him focus his powers during meditation to recharge the bracer.

 

Eric the Red

Type: Weapon Specialist

Secondary: Toughness

Eric the Red is a giant, hairy, berserker viking with a massive braided beard and horned helmet. He carries a massive battle axe called Torrblot which he can throw at his enemies and it always returns to his hand.

 

Rhodes

Type: Rock

Secondary: Activated Power

Rhodes is a colossal man, easily seven feet tall. When he activates his power, his skin becomes as dense as bronze, complete with a lovely speckled green patina. Rhodes likes to punch things, and is strong enough to throw smaller heroes at enemies.

 

Night Squirrel

Type: Gadgeteer

Secondary: Acrobatics

Night Squirrel has a flowing cape of squirrel fur which allows him to glide short distances. He uses this ability to drop down from rooftops onto unsuspecting criminal types to beat the crap out of them. He carries an array of "nuts", which are small metal canisters he keeps on a bandolier. Each nut has a different effect - some contain knockout gas, some explode into nets.

 

The hard part is deciding which abilities count as primary and which as secondary. I need to balance that so that powerful abilities can't be paired together.

If you're following the public Dynamo document, my apologies. A lot of what I'm working on is in my head and not on the document, so things'll be jumbled until I start making actual sense of the ideas I've got.

Now that my 25 hour Game-a-thon for Children's Hospitals is over, I can get about the business of writing down and developing my ideas for my National Game Design Month entry -

 

DYNAMO

I've developed a recent fondness for "loose", rules-light systems like Daniel Bayn's WuShu, and I've always enjoyed analyzing genre stories and breaking them down into their constituent parts. So I've been considering combining those two things into a role-playing.

 

Enter DYNAMO - my idea for a rules-light(ish) superhero role playing game. I'll be writing down my ideas for DYNAMO throughout NaGaDeMon and publishing them in the above Evernote entry.

 

A few notes on where I plan on going with DYNAMO -

 

1. The system won't be completely narrative. Instead, players will take their characters through a formulaic comic book plot, with pre-determined scenes. In those scenes, players and GM will trade off story influence to gain bonuses on later rolls.

 

2. Combat and skills will use something I'm calling the CURRENT System - FUDGE dice are rolled, and every +/- combination counts as one success.

 

3. What the characters' super powers are counts less than how they use them. The more powerful a player makes their character's abilities, the more limited they are in how those abilities can be used. Game play will encourage a heroic, indomitable style of character behavior over fists and weapons.

 

There's not much up there now, but if you want to follow my progress on DYNAMO, the system document can be found on my Evernote page.