Villains and Vigilantes was like Champions in my 80s gaming group- we'd all heard about it, but none of us had played it. Despite both being popular games beloved by the grognard community, for some strange reason neither ever caught on with any of us, so I didn't try either until I was much, much older. As of this writing, I've played one extremely shaky and uncertain game of Fantasy Hero, and five extremely awesome games of Mighty Protectors - which is the title of Villains and Vigilantes 3.0. What was the difference? Well, for starters, all my Mighty Protectors games have been run by Jeff Dee and Jack Herman, the original creators. That attempt at Hero was me not knowing any of the rules.
Mighty Protectors has a very interesting history getting to market. To sum things up, authors Dee and Herman had to fight for the rights to their own game, which were being squatted by the former publisher. A long legal battle ensued, with our intrepid writers at long last emerging victorious. I missed out on the initial Kickstarter, but jumped in as a late backer. After all, this was RPG history, a classic game coming back from its original authors. But I needed to get some experience with the game, and how better to do that than with those same authors? So, at North Texas RPG Con, I jumped into games run by each of the two, and had a great time.
Mighty Protectors has some really interesting mechanics, if I had to pick one to call out as the most awesome, it's the ability to use Power to reduce injury. This just seems so appropriate to a comic book game. So, Power represents the juice many heroes use to power their abilities, but it also represents a pool of resilience and will even for those heroes without Power-consuming abilities. That means when an attack hits, a hero can reduce that damage a certain amount determined by current Power in exchange for spending an amount of current Power. This makes heroes able to take the kind of punishment we see in comic books before they start taking severe or debilitating injuries. I really liked that this was an elective ability for all heroes, regardless of their power portfolio. It just made things feel suitably super-powered.
My very first game of MP I played Shutterbug, a young hero very much in the vein of Spider-Man. I had a blast. We were playing what I now know to be a classic adventure module for the original V&V, Crisis at Crusader Citadel. Come to find out, once I got the book in my hands, there's an amazing comic book reality decades in the making for Mighty Protectors. It has its own history and cosmology, its own aliens and races, its own pantheon of heroes and villains. And a rippin' good one. I had such a great time on this game, that I selected Shutterbug from the pregens the next time I played, too. I also had the opportunity to help shape another group's Mighty Protectors campaign. Jeff Dee had a situation where he needed to determine what occurred "off screen" to his group's game, so he dropped by a Royal Dragoon Guards meeting (He and Manda are part of our Home Guard) and let us play the offscreen characters. It was really bitchin' to get to play such an epic battle against a powerful monster, but even cooler to know that our exploits would have a direct effect on other characters in the campaign world.
So far, I've only played pregens, all of which are iconic characters in the Mighty Protectors universe. So let's dig in and make a new character.
Character Creation
You folks know how I have a nostalgic love of random things. Random lifepaths, random events, random ability scores. Mighty Protectors has a robust system for generating random characters as well as a point-buy system for building custom characters to order. My dice are itching to go, to I'm going to go completely random and see what sort of character comes out the other end. Power Level is our next choice, we'll go with Standard.
Birthplace: Local. So the character is from wherever the campaign introduces them, in this case, somewhere in the US on Earth. We'll go with Austin, TX, because... Austin.
Species: Human
Culture: Modern
Age: 12 (I rolled double 1s.)
Gender: Man
Biological Sex: Cisgender
Attraction: Straight
(I love that they have separated gender and biological sex, I have several players for whom this is a very affirming thing, which it is in general.)
The Basic Characteristics in Mighty Protectors are Strength (ST), Endurance (EN), Agility (AG), Intelligence (IN), and Cool (CL). Each Power Level of campaign has an array of scores set for it, and a random die roll places that array of scores. Sour 18 goes in- IN. 16 in CL, 14 in ST, 12 in AG, leaving 10 for EN.
Now that these are set, the wonderful Excel character sheet (available
HERE) does the work of calculating the stats that are based on the Basic Characteristics. Carrying capacity, Base HTH damage, Save numbers, etc. Rolling for weight, we get 80lbs (12-year-old kid) and that yields a mass of d3.
Now, we roll for Background. Roll three times, and keep two. Let's see what we get. Accounting/Finance, Commercial Art, Psychology. Hmmm. For a 12-year-old, let's say a parent was an accountant, and the character himself did fan art and sold it online and at conventions.
Now we roll for Motivation - Glory Hound. Sounds about right fort a 12-year-old. Wealth starts at d4, Luck roll at 10-, and then we roll for Origin. Mystical Training. This just got even more interesting.
Now we roll two Offensive Abilities, two Defensive Abilities, and two Miscellaneous Abilities. Here we go:
Natural Weaponry
Force Field
Non-Corporealness
Density Change
Mental Ability
Telepathy
Out of this six, we pick four Core Abilities. Since we're training in the Mystic Arts, we'll take Force Field, Non-Corporealness, Mental Ability, and Telepathy. Each of these receives 20 CP. Now to roll two random Weaknesses.
Phobia, and Low Self-Control. Both sound appropriate. Let's take Low Self Control at -10, allowing us to put 10CP into Density Change.
We're ready to rock and roll.
The Character
Jimmy Malcolm was a twelve-year-old geek for all seasons. Stunningly intelligent, and a voracious reader, he avoided the trap of focusing all his time on academic pursuits. He loved the outdoors in addition to his books, and loved to camp with his family. One weekend on a trip to the lake, he came across an old leather backpack lying near the shore in a stand of trees. Opening the pack to check for any indication of who its owner was, Jimmy found nothing but a large hardbound book that reminded him of his older brother's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons manuals. He kept the book, and took it home.
Within days, Jimmy had taken to devouring the old book with every waking hour he could. After school he eschewed his Atari and comic books to read more of the strange contents of the volume. And as he read, he began to understand - everything. The world was surrounded by an arcane fabric that could be manipulated by those who knew how. And Jimmy knew now. He could visualize every single word of the book he had read, every book he had ever read, and his first attempts at weaving spells showed real promise. He could protect himself with a shield, he could throw bolts of force, he could walk through walls and read people's thoughts. Though this last wasn't always pleasant.
Just weeks short of his 13th Birthday, Jimmy had mastered the contents of the book. He knew he had powers now- and he'd been a fan of superheroes all his life. The time had come to be one. He took on the name Kid Kinetic, for his ability to wield force fields and force bolts. He applied for a superhero license, and watches the mailbox each and every day.
My Thoughts
OK, so, I loved the random creation process, but it did leave out one concept in Mighty Protectors that is incredibly awesome. Vehicles.
The Super Vehicles in Mighty Protectors are built on points, with an integration of modular spaces called "system spaces", each space having a function and filling a spot on a floorplan of the vehicle. The end result is each super-vehicle ends up with a deckplan of sorts, helping players imagine the layout and size of their vehicles.
You can do pretty much anything with this system from motorcycles to jets to flying carriers. It's fun to read through the list of things possible with vehicles, and wondering why the designers of the USS Enterprise didn't splurge the 5 CP for "Won't Explode" on all the bridge consoles.
I will say that I found the complexity level of Mighty Protectors to be far less to my eye than most supers games that use a point system. I also found that combat runs more smoothly in MP than in a couple of other supers games I've tried. Again, I love being able to trade Power points for absorbing damage, it just seems like a neat way to wear down a hero slowly, allow them to take heroic amounts if damage if they are willing to trade away the juice with which their powers operate. Risk/Reward in a game is always fun.
This is a game I'd like to explore more, and try my hand at running. It's going on my (admittedly long, thanks to the pandemic) list of games to run when I can get at a table with folks again, or at least through Zoom or Discord. This game is quite a bit of fun to read, and the universe created by Jeff Dee and Jack Herman is a pretty cool place to visit.
No comments:
Post a Comment