I teamed Captain UK up with Marvel Girl. Their mission - to retrieve a canister of Maguffinite from a ruined research laboratory.
But the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants were also on the case, and Pyro and The Blob had also been sent to retrieve the canister.
There were three canisters along the centre of the table. One was the Maguffinite and the others weren't. Captain UK flew towards the central canister, whilst Pyro and Marvel Girl went for one of the others. The Blob lumbered forward, aiming to give Captain UK a good beating.
Captain UK checked the canister - it wasn't the canister she was looking for.
Pyro used a hand of flame to drop a rock in front of Marvel Girl in order to slow her down.
She moved it aside with her telekinesis, and moved to the next canister. But she didn't have a chance to check it.
The Blob confronted Captain UK.
She ignored him, and flew over to the final canister. That wasn't the Maguffinite either, so the one Marvel Girl was looking at had to be it.
Marvel Girl confirmed that the canister was the one they were looking for, and made a run for home. I applied a movement penalty for carrying the canister; Maguffinite is unstable stuff and has to be handled carefully - if it goes off, you lose the plot.
Pyro slowed Marvel Girl with a wall of flame, allowing The Blob to attack her. She blocked the attacks, but only just.
Captain UK to the rescue! She even scored a hit on the corpulent villain.
With Pyro looking dangerous, Marvel Girl threw him into a copse with her telekinesis, then continued her escape.
The Blob pursued her.
Pyro pulled himself out of the bushes, and confronted Captain UK, but she easily evaded his binding flame tendrils.
Captain UK then interposed herself between The Blob and Marvel Girl.
Pyro, however, was literally on fire. He used a bonus action to surround Marvel Girl with a wall of fire.
It took all her power to escape ...
... whilst Pyro advanced even closer and building a hand of flame ...
... picked up the telepath and dropped her right into the waiting arms of The Blob.
By sheer luck she evaded his attacks, and used her powers to drop a rock in front of him, slowing him down.
The Blob simply picked it up and threw it at her, but she blocked it.
Pyro was proving very annoying, so Captain UK decided to give him the drubbing he deserved.
But he dodged her, and ran off in order to intercept Marvel Girl. Meanwhile The Blob attacked Captain UK.
Marvel Girl was close to her board-edge and safety, so the fight became a lot deadlier. Both characters now fired damaging attacks; flames from Pyro and telekeinetic blasts from Marvel Girl. Neither made much of an impression on the other.
WHAM! A mighty punch from The Blob downed Captain UK.
Marve Girl was almost home, but was still in trouble. Pyro used another hand of flame to move her ...
... closer to The Blob.
This time she didn't survive his punch.
The villains were victorious.
I tried a few changes to the published Clobberin' Time rules. Firstly I added knockback, which seems to be a mainstay of superhero rules and which I'd avoided up until now. At present I am working a simple system which uses existing die rolls. When a character rolls to block hits look at their lowest defence die roll; if it is equal to or less than the number of hits the attacker rolled, then the character is moved back 2" for each pip on the dice. There's no knockdown or damage from hitting things, as I don't think that the rules are granular enough to handle it; the figure is just moved back. Secondly I changed how things are picked up and thrown, which includes telekinesis, but I'm still working on that, so won't present it here just yet. Thirdly I gave up trying to come up with a rule for Telepathy, and simply merged it with another new ability I've been trying out - Tactics. Tactics works like this: after cards are dealt, the side with the highest single tactics score rolls one D6 for each point they have above the next highest. Each 'hit' (4+) allows that side to discard a card, and draw another, if they wish. Essentially it allows you to ditch low cards (or high cards sometimes) from your hand. Finally I added in the Jokers. These are now left in the deck. If a side draws one, they keep it to one side and draw another card to replace it. After any character takes their activation, the Joker may be used to give them an additional activation, consisting either of a move or an action, but not both. In this game Pyro used Joker actions on two consecutive turns to slow don Marvel Girl at a critical juncture.
Since people like to know, the characters were:
Marvel Girl - Tactics, Ranged Attack (M), Telekinesis (M)
Captain UK - Flight +3", Strength, Block
The Blob - Super-Strength, Resilience, Heavy
Pyro - Ranged Attack (M), Hinder (M), Telekinesis (S)
('Heavy' simply deducts 4" from any knockback, and makes the character harder to move with Telekinesis)
Very cool, Kaptain. An unexpected result though.
ReplyDeleteRegarding using the Fury in any game, you could start the game with 4 1-dice chatacters, one of which is the recently arrived Fury. It has to assimilate the other three in order to gain it's total dice and the heroes have to prevent this happening, before it becomes unstoppable. Obviously the heroes don't know which of the four civilians is the Fury until they check.
That's an interesting idea and I'll have to think about how I might implement it. The problem as I see it is stopping the heroes finding the one dice Fury early on and battering him to a pulp before he gets to the other civilians.
DeleteI have kind of worked out another possible way of running The Fury, based on a test game I did a few years ago involving The Hulk and two competing groups of mercenaries.
Great report Kaptain. I'd introduced a knockback into the rules as well, but it was a standardised range and I like your idea better. I agree with you regarding Power Legion - I wanted to like it, I played it twice but it was akin to sitting a maths exam if I am honest with myself. I look forward to updates to the rules.
ReplyDeleteAnd by the way - great job on Captain UK!
I'm sure that once you get the hang of Power Legions it rattles along, but there is a fair bit of detail to remember, and I suspect that you have to do a good job in balancing the assigned dice values in order to prevent characters being either too strong in offence or defence.
DeleteIf I redesigned Clobberin' Time (and that's a remote possibility, as my updates begin to expose more and ore limitations in the basic system) then I would certainly be drawing some inspiration from Power Legions.