Secret Identity Action
So how much play will be had in secret identities in your ideal game? For characters like Daredevil or She-Hulk the things they do in Court are highly important (in their solo books), Hawkguys solo book has basically no superheroing in it. On the DC side of things its a bit harder but would you run burglaries with Catwoman?
I guess i am still not sure whether to run this game like a collection of Solo Titles or as a Team Book. And how good things like mentioned above would even work. Any imput or playtest stories for those things?
As a GM I will surely look to involve their private lives in the heroes’ stories. Personally I would talk about expectations of where the focus of the game may lie with my players, but if we find that we’re having more fun exploring the non-hero side of things for a bit, the so be it.
As to the solo vs team titles question, I think that’s the primary beauty of running a super heroes game, that is, that you can switch between the two constantly (I feel like team-ups is a 3rd category).
I will likely start my own game as a team title, but as soon as a player or two goes missing for a session, or someone wants to play an extra session, I’ll just go with it. Continuity isn’t such an important thing in comic books, you can have part of a hero’s story come out in one comic, and then become canon across all others, or not even. I will use this to the fullest, and find that the Apocalypse Engine must be an amazing fit for this type of game.
Not yet playtested, but I’m planning to do a kind of “Mouse Guard turns”: Action scene framed by EiC, followed by down-time scene framed by players (where the PC deal with their private lifes, take care of bonds, etc.), then again an action scene and so on.
So like marvel heroic?
Sure! Like Action and Transition scenes as in Marvel Heroic!
Cool! Yeah we’re going to have more of a write-up on this but our intentions were similar in terms of design. Just how much downtime would be up to the EiC of course but if you wanted to do a solo book type thing you could, conceivably, just have them make Fit In moves and bring in the dangers as needed, let them use Seek out Danger for stuff they want to pursue that you throw out, or totally ground the game in stuff in a character’s life each time and start throwing out soft moves from there.
As designers though we assumed team play but also wanted a chance for showcasing personal lives, goals, etc (they’ll want to work towards unlocking books and moves regardless) along with recovery after big stuff going down. Lots to do once the action dies down and the players can stop reacting to stuff and so start doing stuff.