Have you ever played the DC Adventures RPG?
In 2008, DC Comics began its Final Crisis event to reshape the DC universe and bring about the New 52. Around the same time, I was contacted by Green Ronin Publishing to help write an upcoming project. I was asked because I was a prolific publisher of third-party licensed Mutants & Masterminds RPG Second Edition (M&M Superlink) products. The project was to help proofread a new DC Comics role-playing game using what would become the third edition of their Mutants & Masterminds RPG. Oh yeah, I’d also help write some of the supplemental content, along with a broad group of other talented writers.
The process had its ups and downs because Final Crisis and the resulting New 52 universe were throwing the DC universe into chaos. Some characters had their backstory change while we were working on them while others changed after first drafts were handed in. Staying on top of what would go into the DC Adventures RPG Heroes & Villains Volume 1 and DC Adventures RPG Heroes & Villains Volume 2 sourcebooks I was working on meant keeping on top of what was happening to my assigned characters in the comic books in that moment. It was a challenge. One of my assigned characters, Monarch, was Final Crisis’ main villain–his goals and identity were a mystery while we were writing the game. This resulted in Green Ronin putting me in touch with one of DC’s head editors to discuss what I should (and could not) include in my write-up. (Yes, this means I knew how Final Crisis would end before most of the rest of the world.)
Oh, and DC also sent me a bunch of free comic books as research material. That was great.
Everything was a learning curve because we had never worked with the rules before. In fact, no one had worked with these rules before. Things were changing as we were using them because we were raising questions and finding problems to be fixed. This happened even as we used the rules to create our characters. As part of this process, the writers were asked to create designer journal entries for the Green Ronin blog. We were assigned a topic and asked to write about our experiences. I was asked to write about how I was assigned some of the more unusual DC characters, and what that meant for designing their superpowers. It was posted to Green Ronin’s website as part of a series before the game was published. I recently came across my original draft of this blog entry while searching through an old hard drive. I decided to post it here to share again, roughly fifteen years later.
Looking back with fifteen years of working with the third edition rules under my belt, I see things I would have done differently with my characters. I also look at my writing (in the books and in the design journal) and cringe a bit, as most writers do when they look back and see how they wrote a decade or more ago. With that in mind, the design journal to follow is my raw, unedited draft. I left in all the typos, errors, and poor grammar out of a sense of brutal honesty.
Enjoy!
Putting Some Off-the-Wall Characters and Powers Under the Microscope
It’s not every day a writer finds himself assigned a job quite so interesting as cobbling together character stats for the likes of a talking gorilla in love with a brain in a fish bowl, or an interstellar mercenary with a weapon that can cut through just about anything (including reality), but that’s the situation I found myself in while working on DC Adventures RPG Heroes & Villains Volume 1. As you’d expect, unusual characters make for unusual power builds, and so I was faced with some … creative … and fun complications while approaching this assignment.
Expectedly, there are always challenges when working with a new game system, and DC Adventures was no different. Having written plenty of material for previous editions of the rules upon which this system is based, I came into the project with certain expectations and habits regarding power construction, but I immediately found many of these preconceptions no longer applied. The increasingly modular, “toolbox” approach to power building provided by DC Adventures Hero’s Handbook took some getting used to, accustomed as I was to the pre-built power constructs used in previous editions, but I quickly found my footing and even the unusual power concepts some of my assigned characters demanded ended up flowing from the new rules rather easily.
Deadman, by way of example, certainly qualifies as an oddball character with the potential for tripping up a designer operating within a new and not entirely familiar system. When first approaching the task of writing this ghostly character, I found myself scratching my head over his ability to possess people by displacing their minds and walking around in their bodies. Although previous editions of the rules presented a Possession power that would have fit the bill as is, DC Adventures’ rules contained no such animal for me to work with. I therefore approached the task by breaking the concept down to its core elements; by figuring out the crux of what the power was meant to do I believed I would find the solution to merging concept and game mechanics into a satisfying result.
I began with the realization that a ghost entering a living host in order to possess it was merely an ethereal (no joke intended) concept wrapped around the ability to take command of someone else’s body, and so the control aspect rather than that of possession was the perspective from which the task needed to be approached. The fact that it was an incorporeal, invisible ghost slipping on someone else’s skin like a new suit wasn’t really relevant to how I would need to build the power. Once I understood the new rules accommodated such a fluid approach to power building, I found their avoidance of nailing everything down in a unique and separate power to be rather liberating, and the possession ability I believed would be complicated became incredibly simple.
Because this power was tied to Deadman’s phantom state, however, I found it only natural to first construct his spectral body, an aspect of the character existing independently of his ability to possess people. Designing this power required combining a number of elements, resulting in a somewhat expensive combination that fit the bill rather handily.
Spectral Form: Insubstantial 4 (Not versus Magic), Continuous, Innate, Permanent; Concealment 10, Continuous, Permanent; Flight 4 (30 MPH); Immunity 30 (Fortitude Effects); Senses 4 (Vision Counters Invisibility, Auditory Counters Spiritual Concealment), Dimensional, Limited to Spirits/Astral Entities • 83 points
As you can see, Insubstantial covers his walking through walls, Concealment accounts for his invisibility, and Flight is … well … it’s being able to fly around like a ghost. His Immunity covers the full spectrum of just about anything one would associate with no longer being alive, such as the need to sleep or eat, whereas his Senses power represents being able to see other ghosts and the like, even if they are not fully on the same plane of existence. DC Adventures allows all the component powers to be linked under a single entry, “Spectral Form,” a handy design policy that makes power building much easier. This format also helps impose a context that translates into in an easy to read, understandable presentation that simply makes good sense.
Having decided how I would represent Deadman’s ghostly state, I moved on to the ability I initially thought would give me the most trouble: his possession power. Truly, the whole process became much more straightforward once I decided not make it a direct aspect of his Spectral Form. Once this conceptual decision was made, the actual write-up came easily.
Possession: Affliction 10 (Resisted by Will; Dazed, Compelled, Controlled), Concentration, Cumulative, Insidious, Subtle, Limited to Sentient Creatures • 22 points
The broad spectrum of possibilities now covered by the wide-ranging Affliction power (in my opinion, perhaps the most adaptable and useful power effect in the game) easily handled the controlling nature of Deadman’s possessing ability, whereas the simplified power modifier system took care of the remaining details. Because Affliction allows you to choose the conditions you wish to apply at each degree of success, I was allowed the exact result I was looking for in that regard, while Insidious and Subtle combined to represent the subject’s inability to recall that he had been possessed. Voila!
Once accustomed to the DC Adventures’ system, I found there wasn’t a need to pin everything down within the confines of rules, as the system naturally allowed the concept to wrap around the mechanics without fuss, thus completing how the end user views the power in a way that is both effortless to understand and easy to implement during actual play.
Even with such an understanding, similar concerns arose when it came time to design Warp, a character who has evolved his teleporting ability into an attack. By forming a warp portal across a target’s body, he can cut the person in two and transit one of the halves miles away. Conceptually this sounds rather complex and difficult to handle. Again, the solution came by realizing there’s a line to be drawn between the attack’s oddball concept and the desired result. By allowing the concept to do most of the work, all I really had to do was design a power build that could be seen as easily cutting through a body (or something else), allowing me to leave the “bye-bye body parts!” aspect up to the imagination rather than the rules.
Warp Split: Perception Damage 10, Penetrating 10 • 1 point
See how easy that was?
Although powerful, Warp’s teleporting attack only costs 1 point because I cached it as an alternate effect under Warp’s more traditional teleporting ability. As an alternate effect, the attack becomes conceptually linked to the far more obvious movement power, allowing the reader’s own imagination to do most of the work regarding how the attack is described rather than bogging the warp split attack down in additional mechanics intended to actually represent in direct game terms teleporting only sections of the target.
As was the case with Deadman’s abilities, the simplified, toolbox nature of power building in DC Adventures made a potentially complex, oddball power simple to create because the system not only takes one’s imagination into account, but goes so far as to encourage and even rely upon this relationship. People will find this comforting because, no matter how off-the-wall one’s power concept will be, DC Adventures will find a way to make it happen.
Steven Trustrum
Steven Trustrum has been writing in the RPG industry since the end of the '90s and publishing via Misfit Studios since 2003. Aside from writing and publishing role-playing game content, he ... dabbles ... in content and social media marketing.