Clobberin' Time

Aunt Petunia's favourite nephew wants you to guess what time it is ...

As you can see I have, for now, decided to go with 'Clobberin' Time' as the name for my superhero game. I'm not worried about copyright/trademark issues as I'm not planning on doing anything commercial with the rules, it fits the idea that the game is purely about combat and it firmly establishes my personal bias with regard to which of the two biggest producers of superhero comics I like.

For something that started out as (someone else's) one-page rules, they have grown a little. They are up to eight pages long now, although at least two of those are sample characters and the ramblings that make up the Introduction and Design Notes. I'm not very good at one-page rules, as you can see; I prefer to explain precisely how things work, even if that means adding to the text. At the end of the day I prefer to eliminate ambiguity rather than length. But I like to balance that against coming up with rules that can be pretty much held in your head during a game, so you don't have to look anything up.

So when will I be posting them? Well, the plan was to stick them, in a purely draft form, on the Free Stuff section of this blog today or tomorrow, and invite comment, criticism, additions and changes. But I have been playing odd games in spare moments, and have started tinkering with a whole new mechanism I want to add for pinning characters. I'm trying to strike a balance between forcing characters to deal with enemies who are 'in their face', so to speak, and keeping the fluidity of the current game. Pinning gives a tactical use for those hordes of henchmen, of course; whilst they stand little chance of hurting a higher level character, their presence can delay and restrict an enemy. Anyway, I want to try out some ideas for the mechanism and then, if it seems to work, decide how to incorporate it into the text (most of it's still floating around inside my head at present). Whilst most of it fits neatly under Movement, there are exceptions and oddities which need to be built into the power and ability descriptions and I need to decide the best way of doing that. It's all about streamlining the text without losing anything important.

The desire to keep tinkering is a terrible thing.