Bay 12 Games Forum

What would people say to a Mutants and Masterminds game?  I've got some fun ideas but with a game like this I especially want to see what potential players want to do before I start committing to anything.  I'm making this thread now, very early in setting up a game, to see what the players want to make.

What the hell is M&M?
Mutants and Masterminds is a tabletop RPG using the d20 system.  Literally the only die used is a d20.  Since it's based on D20 if you've played Dungeons and Dragons you already know how to play, aside from learning the various options you have.  1d20+bonuses vs. the check's DC, easy stuff. 

As the name and banner image suggest, it's a game where you'll be playing superheroes fighting villains and saving the world and all that shit.  Within that framework the game is flexible enough to handle pretty much any superhero archetype and theme, from Golden Age dudes dressed like flags with no powers to Batman to X-Men all the way up to Superman and beyond.  The amount of customization is pretty staggering and a little intimidating.

So how do we do that?
I don't do play-by-post, so it's gonna have to be a get-together kind of thing.  IRC or Tabletop Simulator would work best, I love the tactility of TTS, but I'm open to other options.

Since I'm guessing most people who play will be new to the system, we'll probably dedicate a session at the beginning to character creation.  M&M is the kind of game where it's hard to create characters in a vacuum.  This thread'll be a place to conceptualize the kind of character you want to make. 

What kind of character do I want to make?
Good question!  One thing that's important, and part of the reason I'm making this thread so early, is that the game is very character-driven.  It's not like D&D where you can play a murderhobo with no personality and just enjoy the tactical challenge.  You really need to invest yourself in the character you're playing to enjoy it.  Luckily I've got a quick exercise you can do that'll both quickly develop a concept and give me things to work with when I set up the game:



We'll be starting off in the lower-middle of the power spectrum (PL10 for those of you who know M&M).  Due to the nature of the setting pretty much anything reasonable is on the table.  There are plenty of normal humans with minor upgrades, and you could be a super-smart human in a battlesuit or with a ton of gadgets, or a time-traveling warrior or sorcerer from some neato ancient culture.  Or you could be a heavily augmented human with high-caliber superpowers, an alien or an extradimensional entity, pretty much anything within reason.

Let me know what you want to be, preferably using the 3x3 character generation in the spoiler, and we'll see what happens. 

As far as times go, I have a pretty hectic schedule right now so I can't make hard predictions about when I'll be available.  Wednesday and Saturday tend to be my best days.

Here's another one that came out of nowhere, at least for me.  A cyberpunky boss-rush with boss designs by the guy who made Afro Samurai.  Take old-school DMC, God Hand, that kind of game, and distill it down to its quintessence, then rig everything up with neon lights and put on some synthwave and you've got Furi.  It's got the minimalistic storytelling that's so in vogue these days:  You're an unnamed swordsman fighting to escape a floating prison with the help of a guy in a rabbit mask.  Each layer is a single masterfully designed boss fight.

This is a game I didn't know I needed until I played it.  Amid all the inexplicable Dark Souls hype I was beginning to wonder if it was possible for a sword mans game to be balls-hard without resorting to incomprehensible gimmicky bullshit.  And then Dreadlock Jesus came, and the rabbit guy is his prophet.  The thing that really sets this game apart is responsiveness and readability.  Controls are about as tight as they can get, a hybrid between distilled beat-em-up action and twin stick bullet hell.  You have a set of moves that never changes and mastery of the game comes from improving your skills at using those moves, rather than finding better items or new abilities.  You can shoot, parry, swing, dodge, and focus, and all of your moves aside from parry can be charged for greater effect.

Additionally the game's readability is something every game should strive for.  You will never die to bullshit.  You'll never die because you didn't know some stupid gimmick (fuck you capra demon) or because the game sucker-punched you.  The crisp aesthetic and clear telegraphs ensure every time you get your ass beat (and you will, many times) you know exactly what happened.  Bosses have six health bars with a shield for each health bar.  The shield phase has free movement with a mix of bullet hell shootouts and up-close action until the shield is depleted, at which point you shift into a melee phase with a much smaller area of battle.  In this section the shoot button instead focuses, forcing you to stand still but enabling massive damage if you can fully focus and then land a hit.  Once a bar is depleted you go to the next shield phase and the stakes get higher with new movesets and abilities.  You have three health bars and losing one resets the fight at the most recent shield phase.

Boss design is also great with stylish and unique visuals.  The three-faced jailer taunts you as he's bonking your ass with his staff, while the second boss is straitjacketed and fixed to a motorized wheel, howling feedback and tearing through her restraints as she gets angrier.  Every boss is outrageous and climactic in its own right, and like Shadow of the Colossus the limited number of fights hardly makes it a short game.

Anybody else play it yet?  Is it not fuckin sweet?  I'm mainly happy with it because of the dark souls comparison above.  It's nice to have a game that's tight and readable but still controller-throwing hard in an era where "difficulty" seems to be synonymous with "bullshit."

I'm not sure what the rules or protocol for this are, but I'm interested in running a game and want to widen my coverage a bit.  The main thread is in Play With Your Buddies which doesn't have the same traffic, so I'm making this thread to link it over here. 

Come say hello!

I'd rather you direct your posts there.  If that doesn't happen for whatever reason I might close that thread and stick to this one, if it's obviously got way more traffic.

TL;DR for setting:  1990.  New York.  Dreary rust-belt town (think mini-buffalo).  A family member has gone missing. 

Tabletop Simulator is a physics-based sandbox that lets you play various board and card games, up to and including the part where you get mad and flip the table, sending all the pieces flying away.

It's not immediately obvious looking at the store page just what this game is capable of.  By default it's mostly a silly physics sandbox where you can play chess or backgammon and throw the pieces around, it's also fully moddable.  You can replicate almost any board game in TTS with a little creativity and lua-fu.  Risk?  Check.  Cards Against Humanity? Check.  Catan?  Duh.  Secret Hitler? Only about fifty god damn servers of it.  And many more!  Games that are out of print, or hard to find, or crazy expensive.  A few minutes in steam workshop and you'll have a virtual shelf that'd cost you thousands of dollars in the real world if you could even find half the games.  The potential value of this game is outrageous.  Copyright issues abound but maybe due to the niche market of a lot of more serious board games only a few companies have actually taken any kind of action.

Given all that, it seems like this would be right up Bay12's alley and I'm interested in finding out if anybody would be interested in a Bay12 game night some time.  I'd be willing to create a steam group for it (Maybe I already did?  I dont' remember) if there's interest.  I also have a friend, and possibly that friend's wife, who'd be up for something.  I'll list the games I have or know down below, organized roughly by complexity.  What are you guys up for?

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Guillotine:
This is one my friend showed me, a simple card game.  You play as executioners during the French Revolution.  Twelve nobles line up and at the end of each player's turn the noble at the front of the line is beheaded and added to your score pile.  Use action cards to manipulate the line and maximize your score or force the other players to behead martyrs and heroes of the people and lower their score.  A pretty fun party game that moves fast and only takes a minute to learn. Also good for learning the TTS controls.

Epic Spell Wars:
Basically Be Aggressive in card game form.  A group of wizards explode the shit out of each other with modular spells.  Combine three component cards to form a spell and resolve each of their effects in turn, claim the tower for extra points, be the last wizard standing to get a token, get two tokens to win.  Silly and a lot of fun, great art style.  2-6 players, best with at least 3.

BattleCON:
I've sort of played this and can teach the basic rules.  A card-based fighting game with pretty fun mechanics.  Combine basic moves like punch and dash with character-specific modifiers to create your attack for the turn and reveal them simultaneously to see what happens.  A few dozen characters with lots of unique mechanics and a ton of variant rules.  2-4 players but I don't know the 3+ rules so I can't teach them.

Betrayal at House on the Hill:
A group of teenagers decides to spend the night in a haunted house and all hell breaks loose.  Explore the house and gather supplies by laying down tiles to build the game map.  When the Haunt is triggered one of fifty spooky events is selected and one player becomes a traitor of some sort with a set of secret goals, while the other players have to find a way to stop them.  Haunts range from evil cultists, serial killers, flaming bats, and weirder shit.  A lot of fun, really chaotic and unpredictable.  3+ players but only really comes into its own with at least 4.

Pandemic:
A co-op game where you try to cure four simultaneous disease epidemics before they overwhelm the world.  The disease mechanics are pretty neat, disease spawn via city cards and when the pandemic intensifies the city discard pile is shuffled back onto the top of the deck so the disease tends to spread naturally instead of appearing at random all over.  Actual gameplay is weird and abstract and mostly consists of shuffling cards around to make flushes.  Somehow it works and ends up being really tense and fun.  Also lots of expansions that add additional difficulty and content but I haven't played them yet.  2-4 players.

Fury of Dracula:
A hidden movement game, similar in some aspects to Arkham and Eldritch Horror.  Dracula moves through Europe in secret, leaving monsters and vampire spawn in his wake.  Vampire spawn mature over time and eventually escape to terrorize the countryside and advance the doom counter.  Vampire Hunters have to find Dracula's trail and clear his hideouts, gathering supplies to find the big guy and put him down for good.  Hidden movement mechanics are done well and add a nice logical aspect to it.  Dracula was in this city three turns ago and he was moving west.  Which cities could he be in and how can we arrange our hunters to box him in? 2-4 players vs 1 Dracula.

Arkham Horror: 
The original Cthulhu board game.  One of the elder evils is trying to return by opening portals around Arkham.  Investigators have to make their way through the increasingly monster-infested city to gather supplies, close portals, and stop the old one's plan before it's too late.  This one's kind of showing its age.  The goals are pretty limited, you want to get clues and then close portals when you have enough clues to seal them.  Gameplay is very random and while characters are specialized to be good at certain things there's no real way to focus on those things.  If you play an old professor expect to get attacked by a shoggoth.  If you play a meathead gangster expect to have to solve the sphynx's riddle.  Etc.  2+ players

Eldritch Horror:
An updated version of Arkham Horror.  Now the entire world's in play.  There's a lot more to do in this version.  Winning is via mysteries, which are unique to each old one and vary a lot.  Characters are more distinct and with more things to do it's easier to focus on what you're good at.  Also, my favorite feature, this one has double-sided cards.  Cast a spell, then flip the card over to see what consequences your sorcery has wrought.  You found a mysterious relic in a tomb, who knows what'll happen when it reactivates?  Still very difficult, still occasionally frustrating, but overall a much better game than Arkham Horror.  2+

Mage Knight:
Technically a deckbuilder but you wouldn't notice if you weren't paying attention.  A group of extraplanar demigods invade a fantasy kingdom and have to take it over in three days.  Move across a modular map, fight monsters, and influence the natives by playing cards in a weird deckbuildery system, recruit an army, gather treasure, spells, and new techniques, and finally attack the heavily fortified cities.  Players can work together, stick to themselves, or directly attack each other as they see fit.  That dragon would be easier with some help but only one player can win at the end.  2-4 players.  WizKids isn't happy about this being on TTS so all the publicly available mods are broken.  I know a workaround though.

Kingdom Death - Monster:  Dark Souls-flavored Monster Hunter set in the eclipse from Berserk.  Hunt pseudo-AI controlled monsters to take their body parts and use them to craft gear and improve your makeshift settlement.  1-4 player co-op, no GM.  Plays surprisingly fast for a game this huge, lots of bookkeeping though.  Campaign-based but there's little need for the same players each session, and characters and gear are a shared pool.  Also kind of gross.  Tries for the uncomfortable sexuality of Giger/Aliens and doesn't always pull it off.

The Operational Art of War 3 is the big daddy of operational-level wargames.  With an open-ended system designed to support any real or hypothetical modern conflict and the extreme fidelity required to (mostly) capture the unique aspects of various time periods, this is some hefty shit.  Every squad and piece of equipment in a unit is represented and simulated, different types of units and weapons interact the way you'd expect, like some of the other stupidly detailed wargames (Gary Grigsby's, for example, I believe War in the Pacific was LPed on here once) this has a weird effect of making a lot of it almost intuitive.  Once you get past the technical barrier of understanding the controls much of the details of combat behave in realistic and intuitive ways.  There were some hiccups along the way (something about jeeps fighting panzers) but those have been smoothed out.  Real life tactics work, you can often use historical material as suggestions for your own strategies, effectively the game allows for real world logic, rather than game-specific logic (compared to something like chess, which doesn't behave like anything except itself)

I think that, and the sheer number of possible scenarios, makes it very suitable for a let's play.  All the crowd really needs to know is how the round-based-combat works, something I don't think I've ever seen in another game.  Aside from that, the real strategy tends to be intuitive.  If you think an armored blitzkrieg on a thin left flank would work, you're probably right.  If you want to airdrop commandos behind enemy lines to destroy railroads and disrupt supply, well I don't know how we'll fit commandos on a Yak-9 but in theory it's perfectly valid.

So enough wanking about the game, let's do a Let's Play!  I'm going to be playing the Korea 50-51 scenario as North Korea.  The real war ended in a stalemate and ceasefire, but let's see if we can't do a little better.  Fair warning:  I'm not very good at this game.  I've only just started playing.  Korea 50-51 is technically a tutorial scenario but I've already completed the tutorial.  While I have a basic grasp of the controls there's some things I'm not clear on how to do.  That's part of where you guys come in.  The problem with these high-fidelity wargames is that a lot of times there's stuff you just wouldn't think to do because it's not normally an option.  Maybe with people who don't play the game giving suggestions I can get a wider pool of suggestions for how to go about crushing the capitalists. 

Without further ado, let's begin.  I'll explain the details of the combat system after we're briefed on the situation.


Here's a composite pic of RoK (Republic of Korea) and the southern half of DPRK.  We shouldn't need to see the rest of DPRK unless something has gone very wrong.    The NATO chits are confusing so I'll translate.  Red on red is DPRK, red on blue is RoK.  Later we'll see tan on green and black on green which are USA.  We may also see gold on red Chinese units if the US pushes into DPRK and if things go completely fcuk then green-on-red Soviet units may also intervene.  X is infantry, oval is armor, M is engineer, triangle is anti-tank, and dot is artillery.  On the east coast we have marines represented by an anchor, a motorcycle recon unit represented by a slash and two circles, and commandos with crossed arrows.  Armies are divided at the division level, different divisions don't work very well together so where possible we should keep the different divisions separate and avoid mushing them together.

To cover the state of hte various armed forces in the game:  The DPRK has a very powerful military right now.  We will continue to receive new infantry divisions frequently throughout the early part of the war, which should help keep us moving.  Our armor is from the Soviets and very strong as well.  Our biggest weakness is our air force which is composed of vintage Yakovlev and Lavochkin props against US jets.  Enemy interdiction on our troop movements will be a continuous problem that we won't be able to do much about unless the Soviets intervene.

The South Korean army is pretty crap at the start.  They have large numbers to draw on but they start out undermanned and outgunned.  With good tactics we should be able to destroy most of the RoK military in the first few turns. 

The United States is at the nadir of post-war demilitarization at this point and when they start out they'll be low morale and low readiness.  They'll quickly grow however and if we can't crush as much of them as possible early on they'll quickly become overpowering.  The main US beachhead is Pusan in the southeast and most of hteir troops will come from there. 

EDIT:  I forgot the other potential forces.

The Chinese are basically human wave.  They're extremely  numerous and highly motivated, but poorly armed and trained.  They're not likely to break but they're not likely to do anything useful, either.

The Soviets haven't demilitarized after world war 2 and are still a terrifying force.  In 1950 the soviets are the most powerful military in the world.  The only thing the US has on them is nuclear power; the Soviets have only just in the last year detonated their first atomic bomb.  If the nuclear cat comes out of the bag the soviets will have no reason not to start something and they're extremely strong even next to the fully militarized US.  At the same time, while I'm technically playing the Soviets if they get involved, we the players are fighting for the DPRK, not the USSR.  If America and the Soviets duke it out, we're just collateral damage.  That means we lose.

If we can be cheeky and capture Pusan early we may be able to win the war in one swoop.  We may also start world war 3.  There's a few special events to consider.  If the US pushes into Korea then China may intervene with increasing odds the farther north they reach.  If China intervenes or Communist forces occupy the Pusan anchorage the UN may authorize atomic strikes.  Atomic strikes will almost certainly lead to Chinese and Soviet intervention and open up the use of chemical weapons.  If we use chemical weapons the UN will as well.  It's a very precarious war and the wrong decisions could be devastating.  While it would certainly be fun to see, we're here to win and in World War 3 nobody wins.  There's also some logistical and strategic concerns to cracking the Pusan perimeter early and I'll cover those in my third post.


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I will now be getting drunk.  People can discuss their ideas about how to go about winning the war if you want and I might come in to try to type something as well.  Once I've sobered up I'll cover how combat works and start discussing what our strategic options are.  The start is pretty straightforward, it's only after we crack the 38th parallel that things really open up. 

Some of you might remember a thread on a silly roguelike expedition game with some vague promises of a playable version some time soon.  That playable version is finally out after more than a year and it's reasonably cool for twelve bucks.  Much of the gameplay feels placeholder right now and I'll talk more about that in my impressions but what's there is pretty fun.

The gist of the game is a mix of Oregon Trail, Indiana Jones, that Ultima Ratio Regum game on here, etc.  You choose one of ten or twelve famous characters ranging from Charles Darwin to Nikola Tesla to Amelia Earhart to Aleister Crowley, with various special bonuses.  Currently the bonuses are placeholders and there's a lot of overlapping.  Instead of substantial abilities like Tesla's lightning gun they just have passive bonuses like a reduced sanity cost for movement or faster compass growth (more on that later).  You pick your character, gather a party of generic characters ranging from packmules to cooks to soldiers to priests to translators, and buy items.  The items have a lot of uses but the characters are mostly just vehicles for passive bonuses unless you start roleplaying them.  They have a couple traits (like racism which leads to negative events with natives) but this is another placeholder element it would seem.  Then you travel to a randomly generated foreign wilderness and try to survive the harrowing dangers of a hostile country.

The goal of each expedition is to find a golden pyramid.  When you find it you earn fame depending on your achievements and speed of completion.  Then you can start a new expedition in a harder region, spending your fame on more equipment and choosing new characters to replace any that died.  Completing a single expedition is pretty easy as far as roguelikes go, but they get successively more difficult and completing a good streak of expeditions is pretty hard.

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As far as the actual gameplay and state of the game go, like I said, there's a lot of placeholder elements.  The main concern is Sanity.  Sanity is a general representation of hunger, morale, faith in the expedition, etc.  When it hits zero bad things start happening, people start fighting or developing negative traits or eating each other.  Every move has a base sanity cost plus terrain penalties and such; it's generally a good idea to move as far as you can with each movement to minimize the base cost (Two tiles might cost 2 san each but moving one at a time will also cost you the base cost twice.)  Most of the character bonuses are based around sanity.

Combat right now is a placeholder, the combat system you saw if you paid attention the last time the game came up isn't implemented yet, it's just "spend bullets to beat this monster or suffer a penalty."  Native interactions are also pretty limited, when you interact with them you lose some standing which is a flat number that determines whether or not they'll help you.  Stealing from them or otherwise causing them problems will lower your stamina also.  There aren't many of the fantastic elements we saw; I haven't seen any dinosaurs or giant lobsters or anything.

Overall though I like what they've done with it so far.  The placeholders mean the game's very playable even if limited, there aren't many bugs and the mechanics still in the game work just fine.  The paid alpha is 12 bucks right now and I'd say I got my money's worth so far.  Has anybody else played it and want to share their thoughts?  Discuss gear choices and party selection?

Right now I think the packmule is essential.  Scottish Soldier gives bonus sanity for drinking whisky  which you will be doing a lot, so I take him  every time too.  The cook I don't think actually works right now, so don't pick him.

DoorKickers, a top down real time strategy game putting you in command of a SWAT team, has just been released, and is beautiful.

Taking cues from SWAT 4 and Old Rainbow 6 with a presentation and gameplay style more akin to a streamlined Frozen Synapse, you guide your troopers through drug busts and hostage situations using a real time interface with an active pause system that lets you plan out your engagements ahead of time.  With three go-on-signal hotkeys and a simple but comprehensive set of pre-plannable commands, it's possible (and worth bonus points!) to completely plan out an entire mission and execute it in one long string of commands.

You've got ten customizable dudes with their own names, classes, and callsigns, and successful missions earn you squad XP and gold stars which you can spend to unlock equipment.  There's also combat doctrines you get as your squad levels up which work similarly to talents in MMOs.  You can customize each trooper to fit certain situations and swap them in as missions change.  There's a huge pile of single missions which are unconnected from each other, as well as three campaigns where your squad persists between missions.  If somebody dies in one mission he's dead for the rest of the campaign.

It's pretty sweet once you get the hang of it but some of the missions are very tough.  There's a few mechanics that aren't clear at first (Troopers have to raise their weapons to fire and this can lead to delays when opening doors that get people killed.  Doors in general take a lot of practice to get good at.  The cone-shaped zone behind a door is called the "fatal funnel" for a reason.) and the pathing mechanism can occasionally be awkward, but overall the gameplay is super tight and well done.  It's easy to learn but hard to do perfectly.

The one issue I mentioned in the name though is that actual police combat doctrine is... loose...  If you're familiar with games like SWAT 4 you know there's rules of engagement.  You can't shoot a perp unless he's pointing a gun at someone and generally the police prefer to take people alive where possible, employing a variety of less than lethal tools to do so.

This SWAT team doesn't give a fuck.  This SWAT team has a special combat doctrine that teaches you where to shoot perps when they don't know you're there.  This SWAT team has non-lethal ordnance but only uses it to stun enemies for easier killing.  This SWAT team uses breaching charges to kill people.

This SWAT team is fucking awesome.

Anybody else get this yet?  Share your strategies!

The Occult Chronicles is a Lovecraftian horror roguelike by Cryptic Comet, makers of other strange and confusing games like Solium Infernum and Armageddon Empires.  So you know it's gonna be really cool but also really confusing with lots of strange rules. 

Boy does it deliver on that front.  The game is a sort of hybrid board/card game with heavy roguelike elements.  When you first play it will make no sense at all.  I'll try to illuminate a bit.  You play an investigator who's sent into a mansion to complete some kind of task, of which there are several.  To win you have to explore the mansion, find clues, equipment, skills, etc. to increase your strength, and eventually delve into the depths of the mansion to confront the Supreme Horror.  If you're prepared, you'll defeat it and leave a hero.  But you're probably not prepared.

You make your character by choosing from a few stats corresponding to Tarot suits.  You've got swords for combat, cups for physical tasks, wands for mental tasks, and pentacles for magic.  You also have health and sanity.  these can go up and down mostly infinitely, you're not setting max values or anything.  If either goes to zero you lose.  It's generally best to specialize.  You can usually pick the types of challenges you undertake, so it's better to be great at one thing than mediocre at everything.  You also choose a background with various bonuses, a "bone" or die, which determines what kinds of special abilities you can use, and an "edge" which does various things.

As a quick suggestion before I try to illuminate the very confusing challenge system, I suggest starting off with a Wands character.  4 wands 1 pentacles, everything else in health, mentalist background, and a psychic talent of some sort.  Horror challenges are frequent and unavoidable.  A strong-minded character can resist them easily and they make a great source of easy advancement points.  Low-wands characters tend to lose a lot of sanity and miss out on those advancement points.  The health is because you'll have trouble in combat encounters.


There's a lot more to it than that, but I don't want to spoil too much about it.  It's a lot of fun just playing around and seeing how the rules interact.  It can be very frustrating too though.  The card element means it's very random, and sometimes you just can't seem to win a challenge you have no business losing.  As the link above describes, sometimes you'll go insane trying to unlock a door.

But losing is fun, right?

Anybody else play this?  What's your favorite strategy?  The game isn't free, but there's a demo that lets you play through 75 turns.  Give it a spin, it's cool.