Nick's Thoughts Hi all, since I won't be able to join you tonight -- and am trying to push off my work for a few minutes -- I thought I"d write a few of my campaign thoughts down. This is just one man's opinion, so take it with a heap of salt. But, I try to be at least thoughtful about it. My general sensibilities are pretty in line with the "modern" comics' sensibility. Full on Silver Age seems too lighthearted for me; it's hard to set the emotional stakes high enough to really grab players and PCs. And, in this genre, I think those stakes (e.g., lives of innocents, Gwen Stacey hanging upside down) are extremely important. On the other hand, grimdark gets kind of exhausting real fast. Only Warhammer 40k seems not to suffer too much from that. M&M"s Freedom City setting, if you're familiar with it, does a nice job of being sort of Silver Age-inspired, but without the kind of Superfriends-syndrome I'm alluding to. That, the recent set of films, the DC Animated Universe (controlling for the fact that they are aimed essentially at kids), and any number of classic comic book runs are all solid for me. The only thing that I think is really important is that I think we should build the PCs with an eye towards the troupe/team/party they are supposed to make up. In some of the M&M games I've played, especially online as opposed to in person, there's been a tendency for the players to make their characters in a kind of hermetic seal. So, while they make cool, interesting characters, the characters don't really fit together. You don't so much have a "team" but "a bunch of superdudes who occupy the same space." The gold standard is, I think, stuff like the X-Men or the Fantastic Four. You end up with the potential for interesting intraparty conflict, conflicting philosophies and worldviews, but it also doesn't strain credulity that these people are working and striving together. The FF snipe and conflict with each other all the time, but they are family. I picked those books as examples b/c they are inherently ensemble pieces, which fits the model of a gaming group, as opposed to the Justice League. The Avengers are kind of 50/50, I think. So, short version: I'd like to get as far from the equivalent of meeting in the super tavern as is practicable. That way, we can start the game with characters that make sense working together and also seem to come from the same universe. It helps if I'm not building a character thinking that we're playing "Spawn" while you're building one thinking we're playing "Superfriends." One other thing is just a naked bias: I don't like spacefaring comics characters. Aliens stranded on Earth are probably ok, but I'm not a fan of including something like the Green Lantern mythos. That's what Star Wars is for. The more considered reason, though, is that I think it makes the rest of the campaign feel smaller, less important. How can one city or one bank in a city feel important compared to the cosmos?
