20 thoughts on “Which PBTA game would you use to run Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD?”

  3. Yeah, I wouldn’t use Hood. Characters only have 2 “HP” in that game, and it would require jettisoning the entire debt mechanic for a game that doesn’t care about scraping out a living, and at that point why are you playing Hood?

    MotW would be perfect for this kind of game, with the Magic move tinkered to represent weird science probably?

    Additionally, Worlds in Peril would do this well enough. There’s no reason that skill, training, and gadgets can’t count as Powers — players would just build their hyper competent agents like you’d build super heroes in other WiP games.

  4. I agree with Alfred Rudzki​ – MotW even explains how to run an “agency” style game.

    Recontextualizing Use Magic to Use Tech would make everything fall in place.

  6. Interesting. BTW when I said “elements of monster of the week” I wasn’t referring to the pbta game (although I’m very familiar with it, and actually am currently running an ongoing game of it!) I was referring to the structure of the TV show 😀

    However, whilst it did not initially occur to me, Monster of the Week might be a good fit. I can see that it would work structurally, but you might have to do a lot of work to make the character moves work to fit the feeling of AoS rather than a Supernatural inspired feeling.

    So does anyone think With Great Power would work, if you kept the superpowers low level?

  8. Not read Monsters of the Week so can’t comment on that. Still think Masks could be a good fit if tweaked a bit. Will read Worlds in Peril tonight to see if that could work.

  10. Explain how Night Witches?

    That’s nowhere near my first thought, but I’m interested.

    Second pass thoughts: I can see how the alternating mission / HQ pace fits, but wouldn’t you want more freedom to move on the missions than the bombing run structure allows?

  13. For me I would want an Agents of SHIELD game to focus on twisty plots where people are playing deceptive games within and external to SHIELD, double-crosses, danger, investigation, action, inter-character drama and angst, some low level super powers.

  17. James Mullen Looks pretty cool. I like how you’ve got pre-combined origins/styles (aka Costumes) as well as combo’ing an origin with a style.

    One small thing – the Gadgeteer has 5 total “take a style move” advances (from origin & style), but only 2 moves left to take after the mandatory “Gadget” move. It either needs more moves of some “take a move from another style” advances

    Drew Harpunea Just Heroes could be a good fit, the “Expert” costume could be the equivalent of Coulson or May leading the team, with “Gadgeteer” as a Fitz (if we wanted characters like those). The Urban Shadows Factions (or Worlds in Peril Bonds) could be tacked on to show the characters relationships with the various factions in play. Quite like the Team Pool rules from Masks and think I prefer gaining xp when rolling a miss rather than from highlighted stats.

  19. Paul Drussel  Yes, the Gadgeteer does have more ‘take a style move’ advances than she does style moves, but she can take the Gadget move multiple times, as it says at the end of the move description.

  20. Drew Harpunea Stat highlighting for me leads to move farming for xp (at least it normally did for Michael Harrington in our AW game!), not necessarily for the narrative, but for the xp check. XP on a miss means you have the freedom to choose whichever move you like and softens the hard miss result some. but we can chat about it on Thursday 🙂

    James Mullen Aha! That makes complete sense now 🙂 That’ll teach me to skim read

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