Just Heroes: Redoubled
In case you’re coming in late to this story, here’s a quick recap: Just Heroes is my superheroic hack for Apocalypse World and it’s been through a number of iterations since its inception.
The last time we saw it (Just Heroes: Redrawn) I’d collapsed the double-playbook format, which covered the origin of your hero and the powers they had, into a standard single playbook format. Well, as you might guess from the subtitle of the current draft, the double-playbook format is back, but now the origins have a little more content to them, rather than just being a check-list of cliches about your chosen origin.
The really interesting thing I wanted to mention in this post is what happened to the superpower moves for the game: they got simple. Which is good. And… weird. Previously, the moves given for superpower styles were very mechanistic, with lots of bonuses to rolls or protection/exploitation of game resources like harm and Hx. It had tended towards that because of an explicit assumption I’d made in the hack: that if you were playing a certain type of super, it was a given that you had these basic powers that made them recognisable as a type. So, if you were a Speedster, then it was assumed that you were fast, whereas if you were a Tank, it was assumed that you were strong and so on.
For the Redoubled draft, I’ve deleted that assumption, so now you have to choose certain moves from your style-book in order to have those superpowers. This has lead me to be writing things like this tonight:
Grow: You can increase yourself to the size of a building.
That’s it: no bonuses, no in-game effects, just a narrative statement: you can increase yourself to the size of a building. What does it do in the game? Well, that depends on how you use it: I can think of a bunch of ways to use that move that allow you to do stuff that would get laughed out of the game if you said you were going to try them at human size.
So… some of the moves look odd, because they don’t specifically do a thing that means something within the mechanics of the game… but they do enable some special fictional positioning, which lets you narrate cool stuff you couldn’t do otherwise. It’s a shift away from my normal style for writing moves and its itching a little between my shoulder blades, but it could be the making of this superhero game.
That’s interesting. Does that mean you rely heavily on narrative truth or the fiction to resolve power conflicts? Like when Cap punches Hulk, do we rely on the fiction to say no? And then anywhere in-between where there is a gray area we go to dice and use one of your basic moves? (I haven’t read your playbooks.)
As I say, the moves allow for fictional positioning, so that you can use the playbook move to justify using a basic move in a situation where you otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
If Cap wants to punch Hulk, he can do so with a basic move (strike) but Hulk might have a move that protects him from attacks or adds to his stat for making them. On the other hand, if Hulk wants to pick up a car and throw it at Cap, then he needs a move that suggests he has the strength to do so, like ‘*Humongous:* you are much bigger and stronger than an ordinary human.”
As a result, there could be times when fictional positioning trumps basic moves, e.g. “There’s no way he could lift me off the ground, I’m Humongous!” but the hack encourages all players not to assume this and to weigh each case on its own merits.
Works for me. I think it’s a nice solve for fitting power levels into the Apocalypse World mechanics, and fits in nicely with the model of comics, where every character is just as powerful as an author needs them to be. If you consider a group of players and the MC all as authors and the dice as the ultimate arbitrator (+ maybe the MC) then it works nicely to model that. I have a system built for supers based on that principle using card play with no stats. The only thing I’ve found is the action tends to feel a bit too similar, particularly with similar characters (2 bricks). They have unique descriptive tags, but the core resolution is the same. In AW terms, the moves that get used would be the same, so maybe expand your basic move list to make the game play a little bit more interesting? Usually not something I’d care about, but might be good for a supers game anyways. For example, you could have a move about fighting to preserve your responsibilities or smashing another to smash your opponent with the environment. Good guys of course would want to use protect the innocent rather than smash the environment. 🙂
Do you have a link, btw?
The new draft is still a work in progress, there’s a lot to be done before its finished, but the old Redrawn version is still available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1iTjRUomaBXTDhEZE9aTTlwQVE/edit?usp=sharing