Barf Forth Apocalyptica

barf forth apocalyptica => brainstorming & development => Topic started by: DannyK on August 11, 2010, 08:37:26 PM

Title: Apocalypse Mutant World!
Post by: DannyK on August 11, 2010, 08:37:26 PM
I was just reading Joss Whedon's run on the comic Runaways, about a group of teenage mutants and aliens who have all run away from their supervillain parents and are now taking care of each other as a little family.  It's fun because they're not really heroes or villains and they're not very good at doing either, and regularly get chumped and have to run away from situations they can't handle.  Also, they're constantly trying to figure out their identies and sleeping with each other and all that adolescent stuff.  It made me think of the sex moves from AW. 

So it hit me that AW would rock for a superhero game that was both about trying to survive and make difference in the world, and also about trying to figure out yourself and your friends.  I think you could still use playbooks as character types, just morphing them into archetypal superhero types.  Since Darkpages isn't coming out anytime soon, the world really needs an archetype-based superhero game. 

I'm tempted to switch weird to psionics, since so many mutants have some sort of psionics-based powers, but it doesn't feel quite right.  And since every character will have some kind of power, it can't map to "powers" either.  Maybe alien-ness?  The trick is that comic books like Runaways and New Mutants tend to have a mix of character types -- somebody whose mutant power is running really fast or turning to stone, and then an alien teenager who ran away to Earth, and a witch-in-training.  I'm not sure AW can handle this, it's really the opposite of an effects-based system.  (I mean that it's more like Sorcerer than Hero).
Title: Re: Apocalypse Mutant World!
Post by: fnord3125 on August 11, 2010, 09:54:10 PM
I'm don't really read comics so I could be way off base, but I would guess that the crucial thing to consider is different types of roles character's have.  If one character shoots fire blasts out of his eyes and another is super strong and can wrap light-posts into pretzels, but they both tend to use their powers in a straight-foward, beat-down-the-bad-guys kind of way, I would guess they're using the same playbook, possibly with different moves, and possibly with the same moves flavored differently.

But again, I don't really know what I'm talking about with comics.