Our group played our first session last night, and it was fantastic. I had done my homework, studied the play test materials, watched the videos on the Kickstarter page, and picked a villain from my old City of Villians days for the team to go up against.
Our group consists of four people, including me, and we decided we will rotate who is GM over time so we each rolled characters. An Outsider that the player ended up writing a 10+ page document (and is still working on) just for the details on the race, and drives a giant flying space squid. A Delinquent with the powers of illusion and emotion control, who instead of getting credit for his heroic actions prefers to remain invisible and use the illusion of a large pulsating crystal to represent him. A Doomed, named Doom, who lives in the basement apartment of an old library desperately trying to find a way to prevent her very life force being burned up to create a gateway to hell, letting loose enough demons to flood the Earth. And me, a Legacy, the third (well, fourth, we don’t talk about #2) Shadow Sentinel, with mastery over darkness and the very shadows themselves.
Our group went around going through their characters and backstory in more detail than I ever expected. We normally play D&D, and our group likes the story but often times ends up focusing more on combat and loot. Here people got fully into character, and painted a picture together of how they had met, how they became friends and the different relationships everyone has. For almost 2 hours that we barely noticed passing.
Finally we start to actually play. Our Delinquent is roaming the streets when, in the middle of broad daylight, stumbles across a bank robbery in process. He sends out a text message to the others, all but Shadow Sentinel quickly arrive (since I am GMing I didnt want to risk stealing the spotlight), and rush in to find…a mime. Completely unarmed, and making the tellers fill up a classic sack with a dollar bill sign on the side. They quickly find out this mime, known as the devious Mime Time, has reality warping powers, able to use “finger guns” as if they were real, create boxes and doors where there were not any, and even mimes throwing a tomato at one of their faces leading to an actual tomato appearing and splattering all over them.
Needless to say, the group is ready for a lot but not mime. They manage to halt the robbery (partly by the alien shapeshifting into something large and using the mime’s fake box as a weapon against him), but he manages to get outside and takes off in an invisible plane before they can apprehend him. I, of course, wanted this guy to come back from time to time.
After this another person in our group backed the kickstarter, and I raised my pledge. I have a feeling we will be playing a lot of this.
That’s awesome. I totally want to use Mime Time in one of my games at some point. Do you mind?
“The Mime’s gestures imply that you’re not dangerous, and are in fact mundane. Roll to resist his influence or move your labels.”
Colin Matter Not at all! He felt like a very Teen Titans side villain, and that was exactly what I felt we needed.
Adam Goldberg I honestly did not think of that, since he could not talk I did not try to use that mechanic. We actually had one of the players try to gain influence over HIM, but failed.
Mind posting your writeup of Mime Time?
Overall I kept Mime Time kind of simple, basically assigned labels (below) and gave him reality warping powers tied to his miming, which so far we have not seen the limits of. His power has allowed him to:
-Point his finger like a gun and shoot it, though he did run out of ammo after six shots and seemed comically surprised by this as he kept trying to fire.
-Open doors in walls (or ceilings) where there clearly were none.
-Throw a tomato at someone, which resulted in them getting actual tomato on their face.
-Create a box that with the team’s resources seemed unbreakable.
-Throw a grenade.
-Fly a plane
-Watched in horror as a piano fell down on someone (this turned out to be so obvious the hero was able to step aside before the actual piano landed)
His big downside is his personality, he is living the life of a cartoon-like mime, not simply using miming to create powers. He stops to mock people, he doesn’t realize when he’s run out of ammo, he carries a giant bag with a dollar sign making him very obvious. Given the chance he would even tie up a damsel to railroad tracks. He is small time, and on his own always will be (though I liked the idea of him later joining a villain team as soon as I came up with him).
Right now he looks extremely powerful, but I based this on early Teen Titans villains, they seemed impossible to beat but later they were able to be taken down by a single Titan when necessary.
His labels were as follows, feel free to adjust if you disagree.
Freak: +2
Danger: 0
Savior: -1
Superior: +1
Mundane: 0
I have not come up with any Moves for him, because with the materials I have so far I do not have any examples of villains so was not sure how closely they resemble the hero Playbooks. In the future I may revisit aspects like this, but it turned out to be a fun wacky fight.
Let me know if I didn’t address anything!