Actually, the comics usually rely on Superman doing something stupid, so Batman can show off his super-genius and save the day.

That doesn't change the fact that anything that can threaten Superman will make a smear out of Batman. Batman has to rely on being smarter. However, players aren't going to neatly fall in line. Since system mastery is the province of the smarter player, you're more likely to have a super-genius Superman and a not-as-bright Batman, which just makes things worse.

like Joker & Riddler working together, Joker blowing up a building that has a Puzzle the team needs to solve from Riddler, all orchestrated by Lex...Green Lantern & Superman need to keep the building upright while Batman & the others solve the puzzle quickly, maybe a couple members evacuate civilians quickly to prevent casualties.

Yeah, that's fine... as long as Batman's player can solve the puzzle, and Superman's can't. Otherwise, Superman will solve the puzzle at super speed, examining it with super-vision while holding up the building with one hand.

That idea only works as long as Superman is stupid. Superman supposedly has a super brain, and can solve nth-dimensional equations in his sleep, but he can't figure out that a playing card is a sign of the Joker. He needs Batman to do it for him, because if not, the entire premise of the comic would fall apart. So, we get a lot of contrived plots and sheer stupidity so Batman can shine.

The same thing is true in role playing games. If there's a severe power imbalance, the only way the weaker characters can contribute is through contrived plots or sheer stupidity on the part of the powerful characters. If the players aren't willing to act like their characters are dumb, it becomes a lot harder for the weaker characters to contribute.

How quickly can you get someone up and running with Paranoia?

Is Wushu anything like Feng Shui?

It doesn't have to, though.

In my current DnD Game (3.5, Black Company Overlay, Harnworld Setting), I had a player who wanted to join the game. At the time, I had put it on hiatus, but decided that it would be cool for him to join, so I ran it on Thursdays, for him and my wife. Now, he wanted to start as a new character, at 1st Level, as the 5th Son of a noble. My wife was playing her original character (12 Level Wizard). It was one of the best games I have run in several years. The Young Noble eventually went on to earn a position of Nobility outside of his Father's iunfluence, and is now controlling a very major campaign arc. Yes, he started out 11 levels behind the Wizard. After a couple of years play, he is only a single level behind the Wizard, and actually has an impressive amount of authority in the campaign world. Had I forced him to start equivalent to the other characters in the game world, I am pretty sure the character development he received would never have happened. And he would not be the character he is now.

It is all about the fun.

Admittedly, it is easy to create a fairly powerful 1st Level Character with the combination of DnD 3.5 and Black Company overlay.

As someone who's run Marvel Classic super heroes, Mutants and Masterminds, and the new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, I'll disagree 100%. Hell, especially with the Marvel Heroic, where you're allowed to build a character at any power level you want, since the game completely throws away 'build points' or anything else for that matter. You choose your power package, you set your dice pools for them, you choose your skills and set your dice pools for those, you set a single flaw for each power set (and more if you wish), and choose what 'special effects' each power set has. Someone can make Superman right out of the box, while someone else makes 'Flat Man'.

And it works just fine. The thing is, you don't have to throw a person's weaknesses at them to create balance. You just have to know how to shift focus and make sure everyone has something to do - that's the game master's job. The mechanics can't support that - it isn't possible.

And, I have had a player make a time travel character in Mutants and Masterminds, and the players had great fun with it. There's absolutely nothing wrong with time travel powers in a game. Yes, what you're describing does sound like bad GMing - which is where things usually go south in a campaign (followed by bad playing).

Again, I disagree. A good GM gives everyone something to do, and ensures that there's a need for each person's talents. What if, for example, an NPC knows PC X, but not PC Y, and decides that he'll share his information with only PC X? What if PC Y is needing to talk to another NPC, or has to be in another part of town, when something comes up where PC X is?

For example, in my current Shadowrun campaign - the one with the 700 point karma disparity between characters. One of the uber characters is given a package by her boss, to figure out who it belongs to and to ensure it goes to the right place. She brings it to the technomancer to look at, and 'oh look', it's encrypted. The technomancer breaks the encryption, and discovers a name and address, as well as an incredibly complex spell matrix. They go to the person whose name is on the package (the new PC), and he looks it over, makes the appropriate checks, and identifies what the ritual might involve.

The uber PC notices the group's being watched, and the technomancer notices they're out of hacking range. The mage PC suggests the group goes someplace more private, then checks out the vehicle via astral projection. The technomancer tries to get information on the ritual and where it may have come from on the matrix, and the other uber PC keeps an eye out for trouble, and uses her contacts to arrange a meeting with the head of her magical order to perhaps get the mage introduced so he can join.

Every character has a part to play in the game, even if they've got overlapping talents at vastly different dice pools. The backgrounds for the characters, their social standing, and their unique talents all mean they've got their own place to shine, and thus everyone enjoys themselves.

Same thing can be done in a super hero campaign. Superman, Batman, and Black Canary can all work together, and you'll have no problem if you know how to divvy up the tasks, and use each character's background to provide them things to do to contribute to the adventure as a whole. Nobody has to hold the idiot ball to do this.

Quoted for truth.

Tashiro, I think, is playing a very different sort of game from most GMs. I like his style, and would love to learn more about how to run it. He sounds like an excellent GM.

But certainly not the average.

Imagine I"m running a 20th-level party in D&D, and tossing in a new character into the group. And I'm running a pre-scripted scenario (which I think we can all agree is a reasonable baseline as 'average').

The 1st level fighter will either be irrelevant in fighting, or the enemies will be easy enough that the mage can take them out with his dagger. The 1st level cleric won't have strong enough spells to heal the characters' wounds. The mage, well ... you get the idea.

Of course, if you take a D&D party and thrust them into a social or exploration campaign, their skills become just about irrelevant, and so does their relative power-levels ... but at that point, you almost may as well not be using the rulebook.

SR helps with this a little because it splits up roles. In my campaign, my decker was very weak. So it was easy to reduce the challenge rating of decking, and that had no impact on the rest of gameplay.

We've already pointed out that increased rule complexity and options almost always rewards people who understand that complexity. I agree that priority system helps by channeling those options in ways that most players find quite acceptable.

Sure, if you split people up than everyone can have a chance to shine, if a low level character has lots of high level connections that provide things the group needs, and if NPC's will only interact with a chosen PC, you've made each character necessary, but those seem very artificial to me in terms of making a character valuable. "Sorry, face character your social skills are not useless here. This Johnson only talks to people named Larry. Fortunately for you, the new guy is named Larry. And since he's Larry Rickstein he gets +3 to his social roles for this scenario because this Johnson really likes last names that start with R."
"The spirit happens to track the group down just when the experienced mage and the street sam have gone out for coffee and ambushes the technomancer and the new mage by themselves. It's a good thing new mage was there to deal with it and use his abilities when he wouldn't be completely outshone by everyone more capable."

Even the scenario you've provided sounds like your players bending reasonableness to include a new player (which is good playing on their part, but still breaks reality). If your told to deliver a package to someone, you usually just give it to the person and move on. You don't hire them to be part of your criminal team because they could identify a package with their name on it. And it really doesn't seem like the new player was actually doing anything to contribute in that scenario, just having people he didn't know go out of their way to help him.

You're taking it to an absurd level. In this case, it's 'the scholar PC who works at the university wants to talk to one of the professors. Since he works there, the professor knows him, and is more inclined to talk to him, then, say, the L.A. Media Shadowrunner, or the Street-Level technomancer'. You don't need to make it artificial, you just need to make it realistic. Just like I'd not expect the university scholar to go down to the sprawl to talk to one of the mechanics who the technomancer works with regularly. That's for the technomancer to do.

Additionally, you don't need to split the people up - that kind of thing can happen naturally. Or, sometimes, something can come up where, as a group, they have to divvy tasks. One person hacks the locked door to get through, while one person keeps an eye on astral space for incoming spirits, while one person shoots the bejeezus out of the drones coming in. Each person has something to do, and even if there's a point disparity, they're not going to just relegate every task to a single person.



Try this again:
LA Media Bunny works for a magical order. She's given a package, and told to find out who it belongs to, and deliver it to them. Full stop. She finds out it's encrypted, so takes it to the Technomancer to decrypt. The Technomancer notices it is a complex magical ritual. Excellent. They look up the person they're supposed to deliver it to, find his 'FaceBook' page, and then arrange a meeting with him someplace neutral. Package is delivered, and the group notices they're being tailed. This tail could be for any one of them. So, they decide to work together.

The thing is, I'm not going to be running this as a 'criminal team'. All the characters have legal SINs. The LA Media Bunny works for a corporation as a media shadowrunner and as a social media star. The technomancer is a runaway from a Tir rich family, and her SIN has yet to be nuked (though she prefers to use fake SINs for getting around). The university scholar is just that... a university scholar.

The players are somewhat tired of running the Shadows, so we'll be doing things differently - they have to experience how things operate in the halls of power, be it governmental, educational, or corporate, and they'll need to deal with backstabbing, conspiracy theories, and power plays. Their Shadowrunning skills will come in handy, but there is going to be a lot less shooting and combat than perhaps most games have.

One reason I love the expansion books for Shadowrun, is that they let you run games on different levels, and see how things play out. I'd love to see more information on the UCAS and how the nation itself operates. >.>

Also, D&D 3.X is actually somewhat self-correcting for level imbalances: given a party with three 8th level characters and one 2nd level character, an encountr of ECL 7 is going to be worth tremendously more to the 2nd level character, than to his 8th level compatriots. (That's because the 8th level characters each get 1-4 of the X award for an 8th-level party versus an ECL 7 encounter - whereas the 2nd level character gets 1/4 of the much higher award a 2nd-level party would get for the same encounter). It boils down to the high-level characters picking up several hundred XP, and the low-level character picking up a couple thousand XP. When Players A, B, and C get 600XP, but Player D gets 3,000 ... the XP gap between D and his peers is going to narrow itself, just by din't of D participating and surviving.

...

Skill-based systems like Shadowrun, however, can't have that sort of self-correction easily added in. A given run is worth X karma, whether you're fresh out of creation, or are a 500+ karma veteran. One supposes the GM could just slide 1-3 extra Karma to the low-total character each run until she catches up, but .... that's not as formalised right into the system as the XP-per-encounter-per-level setup of 3.X edition D&D.

What I'm doing for my Shadowrun game is finding the karma reward for the adventure, giving the 700 pt characters half, and giving the new character double. This has, so far, translated to 'you two get 4, and you get 16'. No complaints from anyone so far - though it'll take some time for the new character to catch up.

Very True... The Lower level character gets a bigger slice of XP, no doubt. But since I tend to not run Dungeons, this does not have that big of an impact. In this case, much of the game was centered around the Human and Elf (the wizard) and their personal interactions, while dealing with the politics of the time. The Nation was dealing with the complications of a civil war, and was trying to re-establish itself to keep their borders safe. This left a lot of opportunity for the characters to advance politically, and that is what happened. The Levels came out of that (and yes, there were combat encounters, just not Dungeons).

I don't have Paranoia XP, but in older editions I could get people up and running in a few minutes. But then again, we're talking about Paranoia; your stats don't matter because you're going to be dead in five minutes anyway.

Similar is style but not substance. Wushu is a super-light story game, where the more crazy and gonzo you get, the better you do. Unlike a traditional system, where you're penalized for doing something tricky, in Wushu it means you actually stand a better chance of pulling it off. It's so super-light and narrative-driven, however, that many traditional players have a serious problem adjusting to it and don't like it. The gaming experience is so different, it's simply not for everyone.



That's what I was referring to as plot contrivances. You can't simply set a challenge, you have to set separate challenges and hope each player plays along. Done wrong, this leads to railroading. In Shadowrun, I try to set objectives and allow the players to approach it however they like. As it stands, they sometimes bite off more than they can chew, which is fine since they chose their own path and are having fun. You have to work much harder if there's a power disparity, and it's even worse if the weaker character can't figure out the best ways of doing their role.


Oh, yes it is. For example, Marvel Heroic Roleplay is designed to cope with the power imbalances. Because you can attack mentally and emotionally as well as physically, Spider-Man can one-shot the Juggernaut by successfully taunting him. Your exact power levels aren't as important as the player's ability to narratively build dice pools. The mechanics are carefully designed to support a certain kind of balance.

This is more on topic. Even with adjusted karma awards, it takes a long time to fix any serious power imbalanced caused at character creation. While a good GM can compensate for it, ideally a good GM shouldn't have to. That's why a good system will provide consistent results in character creation. SR4.5 has entirely too much variability in starting characters-- it's severely inconsistent.

I wouldn't call it a contrivance. 'Get this encrypted package to the right person' isn't a contrivance - it makes absolute sense within the scope of the game. The runner could have done anything she wanted with it, but she took the path that makes the most sense for her, and it naturally flowed that everyone else got involved. I don't even have to force events to get the party to split up - they do it on their own (most recent session, the Technomancer went her own way once the meeting was done, and the LA Media Bunny and the Scholar Mage went off together to talk with the mage's contact. The Bunny went along, because she was expecting potential danger). I've noticed my Shadowrun group tends to do this - split up, do their own thing, come back and pool resources, then split off again. It's actually kind of neat to watch - very realistic.



Par for the course, really.



I have never seen this as work. I consider it part and parcel of my job as GM. It is my job to ensure everyone is involved in some fashion, and having fun. The power disparity has never been a factor (says the guy who had 1st level AD&D characters in the same party as 100th level characters...) Now, if the player is having trouble figuring out how they can be of use - a proper GM should be willing to offer advice and suggestions. Again, I firmly believe this is part of the job description.



Having run this game, I'll disagree. There's nothing stopping a player from going 'Spend 1 PP / Add d6 to the Doom Pool / Degrade Power X to ignore Stress/Trauma of this type' and put it in their power set. It really depends on the character you're wanting to play. Now, yes, the game master can veto any specific SFX out of the box, but if the player has a solid concept, I see no reason why I should. I've had the PCs face down a Superman analog that I'd tweaked, and the fight was very, very one-sided (of course, the PCs weren't supposed to confront him directly....)

Actually, he had a very nice trick up his sleeve. He'd spend his Social Trauma as a special die for his actions (I'm ANGRY, *boom*), then I'd degrade a die from the doom pool to prevent his Social Trauma from upgrading (one of his SFX). He was like a mini-nuke ... the longer you fight him, the more dangerous he became...

Being a good GM is absolutely a lot of work, and I use the system to support me. As do you.



I've also run this game, and I've discovered that what makes characters powerful is the player's narrative ability. The more they know how to utilize their dice pools, the better they become. It's entirely possible for Squirrel Girl to emotionally stress out the Juggernaut if she's clever about things-- and guess what, that's part of the balance of the system.

.... and who said the GM couldn't or shouldn't assign a Challenge Rating to purely social challenges?

That ECL/XP table isn't just for dungeon crawls. Heck, remember, "traps" - including the road washing out from under your horse in themiddle of a torrential downpour, not just man-made traps - also get a CR and award XP.

You are quite pessimistic. It's Paranoia, not the Tomb of Horrors.

Indeed...

Naaah... Its okay, you have Clones to fall back on.

Like TJ said, that's why you have clones. Paranoia being what it is, I make it a point to unfairly and arbitrarily massacre each character five minutes into the game, because that's part of the fun of it.

I'd be a poor player for this game - I'd be intent on getting through each adventure on my first clone, and not screwing everyone else over. I'd be trying to play it as a serious game.

Not every game is for everyone. Paranoia, for me at least, is a fun parody game, a good break from more serious roleplay.

... which would be pretty directly contradicted by the RAW for Paranoia.

Just sayin'.

The rules make it so you have to backstab your companions?

The premise of the game does.

Kind of like, the premise of SR means that sooner or later, some Mr. Johnson you get hired by WILL double-cross the group.

...

Also, the editions of Paranoia that I remember playing? Someone was probably from IntSec (Internal security), and charged with rooting out all traitors - meaning, communists, members of secret societies, and mutants. Conveniently enough, EVERYONE in the party is a mutant, and EVERYONE is also a member of a secret society (typically, no two players are from the same one) ... and each PC has their own set of secret, only-for-them instructions from their Secret Society. Instructions which are carefully orchestrated to be at cross-purposes to at least one other PC.

Which means that, yes, backstabbing your "companions" is indeed part of the game. Unless yo find yourself in (or can manufacture) circumstances where you can get away with stabbing them in the FACE, of course.

"People who spend their days watching for a dagger in the back, usually find themselves stabbed through the chest"

While the premise encourage it, you're still free to roleplay however you like. What if your character opposes killing? what if he's second guessing his purpose?
Rules never force you to play a certain way unless your GM forces it, aka railroading.

Okay, um ... the name of the game is "Paranoia". Why do you suppose that is? :sigh:

I've had D&D campaigns with neither dungeons or dragons, what are you saying?

/facepalm

Don't be a troll.

I'm not, I'm saying that even in a game like that you always got options in how to play your character. If you didn't, wouldn't that kinda... miss the point of why you'd play pen and paper to begin with?

Paranoia isn't really a RPG. It's more a parody of RPG's. The usual goals of a RPG are chucked out the window in favor of good-natured backstabbing fun.

One of the comedy tropes of the game is that your character will die, painfully and humorously, as often as the GM can contrive it. That's why you have clones. You also can't cite the rules to protect you, since knowing the rules is treason, and treason is grounds for immediate termination. All in all, it's not a serious game in the slightest.

Personally, I like Paranoia for occasional one-offs, to lighten the mood. But for a long term game, I wouldn't be able to take it. It's designed to be all the worst aspects of gaming rolled into one and then mocked relentlessly.

Isn't that the BS game where knowing the rules as the player gets your character executed?