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Where I'm coming from
There are two major hobbies from my childhood that I’ve retained and still indulge in my adult life. Comics and roleplaying. The peculiar thing is I’ve never successfully managed to blend the two. I have a large collection of gaming systems which I’ve been excited about, and I have an extensive collection of comics going back to the seventies,so I’m not short of resources. Truth & Justice is my latest attempt to get a supers game off the ground. Will this succeed where others have failed?
Lets look at what I see as the problems with SupersRPGs I’ve encountered so far. I want to play games that are just like the stories I read about in the Marvel universe. I don’t really read much else, DC leaves me a bit cold and indie comics are cool enough but they don’t make me want to play in their worlds. So far I don’t think I have an unreasonable set of expectations. The games I’ve tried have been ok at what they do, sometimes great fun, but they are not emulating the source enough for me. It’s just like that old discussion about how D&D is it’s own genre, well that’s how I see Champions, Golden Heroes, Marvel and all the other games I’ve got. I’m sure any of them could be bent to my will but there’s a limit to the work anyone should have to do to get the most out of their game. I’m looking to have the purchase do the heavy lifting, I want to tell the stories.
Genres of games run along a line from story based to mechanics based. The big hitters in the hobby tend to cluster at the crunchy end of that line. It’s what the gaming public want. It may even be what supers players want as M&M seems to be doing quite well. There’s arguably an even greater market for supers games that strip away the roleplaying element and just get stuck into the numbers directly, like Clix, CCGs, even collectible partworks. They all make the ‘comparison game’ their big selling points. Who'd win in a fight: Thor or Superman? Even M&M, which I have a huge respect for tends to my mind to concentrate on the numbers and the quantifiable powers more than the stories that could be told. And that is what the source material is all about, the story and the visuals, so it seems to me that there should be room for a game that hits both of those sweet spots. Of course there are plenty of contenders at the other end of the spectrum too, Capes being a prime example. They focus on the building narrative and consensual world of a group of players. That’s cool. What’s it like in the middle ground? A bit sparse really. Until Truth & Justice.
The book
For your $25 you get a paperback book, b&w throughout with a colour cover, running to 132 pages. There are very few typos. There’s a comprehensive contents page. There are sporadic sidebars but otherwise the book has a solid two column format that sticks to one font. The tone of the writing is conversational but not in an irritating way, I actually found it engaging. This is an easy read and that’s no bad thing. There are plenty of examples of play and each of them left me wanting to know what happened next, a pretty good sign. There’s a passion here. It shines through in the text, and to a lesser degree, the art. This is the work of a real enthusiast, Chad Underkoffler, and I found myself nodding in agreement with him as I read through the book.
I mentioned the art. It’s amateurish. At first this was a turn off. M&M 1st ed wins the art prize hands down and nothing I’ve seen in T&J looks like taking that crown. Given the source material, art quality has got to be a major factor in the success or failure of a supers game. Or has it? None of it’s visible during play itself, and actually, after a while I started to find I liked it. The visuals that comics rely on can never really be duplicated at the table as the pictures have to be ion the groups’ minds. The art herein has got a certain charm and it’s directly related to the text and the characters in the book. It does it’s job and then gets out of the way. Consider me converted.
The intro
Chad gives us his rundown on supers stories. What makes them work, what elements they contain all the usual stuff. This is a well thought out essay and I found myself nodding in agreement at the tropes and themes described, T&J also brings up the animated series as a source, which I’d not considered before. That’s a cool addition. T&J supports the essay with some little fluff paras which set the tone nicely, and start to get the creative juices flowing. It’s only later that you realise all these bits are connected and that the characters within them are statted up for your pleasure as we’ll see.
The notion of scale is introduced and it’s easy to skim straight past this on a first read. It’s incredibly important and actually I think it has revolutionised the way I think about supers gaming. Essentially it’s this: the strongest normal human in the world is still a little bit weaker than the least strong super in the world, because they operate on different scales. Obviously they can coexist , but there will always be a difference between norms and supers. This is one of the things that sets T&J apart in supers gaming, it’s already setting out it’s stall and saying, “here’s how we handle the impact of supers on the world you already know”. Then there’s the trick, norms can still bring down supers because supers have traits that are part of the normal scale. Love lives, alcoholism, careers, families, and all of these can be targeted in conflict. So, we’re only in the introduction and I can finally see myself running games that borrow heavily from Ultimate Spiderman.
Next up is a discussion of style and the differences between gritty and 4 color and so on. There’s a massively disappointing diversion into the critic Northrop Frye’s “Anatomy of Criticism”. It didn’t work for me. Here the chapter ends. I wanted to go straight into the GM's chapter, because it would have really worked and I could have seen how these ideas translated into play and scenario creation. Not to be. Put those thoughts on hold, we’ll be right back
The system
PDQ, Prose Descriptive Qualities. It’s the house system for Atomic Sock Monkey. You can find a free download of the basic system on their website.
It dispenses with the notion of stat skill that become so prevalent and instead combines all those separate functions into Qualities. You define these yourself with a pithy word or phrase like, 'Lava Burst' or 'Sucker for a pretty face'. You can have qualities that represent, well, anything really. Relationships, abilities , perks, drawbacks, whatever. Each quality gets a fairly large 'penumbra' of application. If you take 'Gun bunny' as a quality, in PDQ you'll be using it for shooting as well as locating your contact in the ballistics dept of the local police. Once you have your qualities they are rated from poor (-2) through average (0), good ( 2) and expert ( 4) to master ( 6). The numbers are the modifiers to your dice roll which is on 2d6. Your difficulties are set out at the same levels and run from poor (5) in steps of 2 to master (13). You can get positive mods for cool play called upshifts. This sort of thing makes me pause. Who gets to say whether what the player describes is cool or not? The GM obviously, it's a grand RPG tradition. Personally I see that as a bit of a throwback and I'd have liked to see a more progressive mechanic. However, there is a nice sidebar that goes someway to explain why giving out negative modifiers should really be a no no, and I agreed with the sentiment. It might have been easier to just ignore the idea totally rather than simultaneously argue for and against it.
And really, that's it. The rest is just variations and extrapolations. This is about a solid and intuitive a mechanic as you could ask for, and it's been around since the dawn of gaming. This simplicity is factored into the time and movement rules too, which are pretty much handwaved, and for this genre I'd say that's cool.
Conflicts
There's a couple of ways of handling conflicts with these rules, you can keep it simple and say that if your mod is better than the difficulty, then you can just say yes and move on. For more complex conflicts you'll need to roll and there will be consequences for the loser. Interestingly if your roll hits the difficulty exactly, both parties take a hit. I like this and I don't know why.
Initiative is 1d6 mods for each participant. Nothing ground breaking, but why is this roll not on 2d6, the rest of the game is? Stuff like this jars a little. I do like the idea of 'stealing' the initiative though. This is what happens when your pc gets punched so hard they fly across the city. When they return a few rounds later, it can be set up like an ambush with them soaring back into the fight. Very genre appropriate, very nice.
Now, here's the neat part. Damage goes directly to your qualities, there's no separate pile of hit points or wound levels. When you get hurt, you really feel it at a character level. This direct death spiral will have nasty and immediate effects on your ability but, like in the comics, you recover between scenes so it's not fatal. Damage isn't just bruising and bleeding either, because it's applied against your qualities it's more a measure of morale and confidence as you watch your powers recede. The conflict may, instead of damaging you, inflict failure ranks and this is where we see the mechanical differences between normal and super scales. To quote the text: “Lunar Woman cannot instantly fry Frogboy in one shot, she can blow up police cars all day long”. The player gets to choose where to take the hits, and the first hit in a conflict will generate a story hook that the GM can spring whenever they like. So if you take a hit on 'Hot Girlfriend', expect to see her abducted by DynoVillain pretty soon after. Once you've zeroed out on your qualities, that's when you go down and killing is always a choice, never a given, which is very genre appropriate.
There's an extremely long example of a super slugfest that gets right down to the nitty gritty of the rules and the discussion at the table. Check your printing, if it's 3ed or earlier you'll need the errata from ASM website. I love long examples, they are worth their weight in gold when it comes to solidifying the ideas you've just read. They also start to spin the wheels in your head about stories you want to tell. Of course, it doesn't hurt that it kind of proves the author has actually tried out these ideas himself!
Powers
The essential measure of a supers game, and strangely, the least best part of T&J. The game uses the standard qualities rules and drapes them straight over a powers list. Even this list is not prescriptive, it's just a starting point. You'll see the generic terms all comics fans are used too like Speedster and Powerhouse. So if you decide on say 'Lava Burst' as a power, you decide at what level you want it and then off you go. You get a similar penumbra as regular qualities do too, which is as large or small as you and your GM decide.
What if you want to try one of those cool tricks you see in the comics? That's where stunts come in. there are two types and they are essentially improvised ones (spin off) and the tried and tested type (signature). Spin off stunts tend to be at a lower level than your standard use but with a more defined effect, whereas signature stunts are better than usual quality use but at a hero point cost, of which more later. Using 'Lava burst' as an example, I could use the stunt system to attempt to push my character into the air on a column of magma. These improvised stunts are the sort of thing that happens in comics all the time, but they are so easy to implement in T&J that they will see lots of use and creative thinking. You won't be having to worry too much about setting awkward precedents or writing up a suite of rules to go with future uses. One of the nice things about this is that you can stunt off of top level qualities too, not just powers, so you highly trained heroes get to play with cool ideas too.
To get the most out of your stunts you are going to want to invest them with hero points. This is where you get to manage your resources in the conflict. The costs for stunts are initially a little confusing. The examples are correct, but they don't go far enough because the cost doubles at each rank. So when in the examples the pc uses 1 hero point and then bumps it up with a second to improve the rank you might think you get an upshift with every point. You'd be wrong, the next costs 4, the next costs 8. It's in the chart but it's definitely not obvious for the long examples.
Powers have their very own little chart to represent the levels of intensity. The categories are time, range, speed, area, weight, force, energy and money. It matches up against the qualities chart from before with 5 levels of power. Each step is almost exponential in effect. For example, energy, the levels go candle/campfire/bonfire/forest fire/volcano. These are big steps so you'll find no help here in comparing who's stronger out of the Thing or Hulk. The answers to that little conundrum will only come about in gameplay, which is entirely fair enough.
The recommendation given is for the group to really thrash out the scope of powers before play, and this can't be overstated. The need for everyone to be on the same page is illustrated nicely by the prospect of a Poor(-2) power. There's a decent amount of help from the book with this. Initially I couldn't figure out why, as the starter packages don't allow for Poor powers, but of course during conflicts the ratings are bound to change and this will definitely crop up. This is just one of the kinks of the system that needs to be addressed a couple of times in the book, but it never really becomes a game breaker.
You can put limitations on your powers as you would expect. However, don't be thinking you'll get more points or levels at chargen for this. Limitations only affect the game as it happens, it's impossible to min/max your way out of a limitation. I like this very much as it forces players to embrace their faults, and it just keeps generating more story around the table. Intense training covers your Batman types nicely by bumping up the normal qualities to levels where you can stunt off them. This doesn't quite sit with the notion of scaling and I can't see an answer to it. Does this mean that Batman's punches are always going to slide off Shadowcat?
Quasi powers are on the normal scale and cover your gadgets, cutting edge tech and so on. They essentially suck, from a mechanical point of view, but that's not a bug in T&J.
Vulnerabilities are a different beast to limitations, these are more like Kryptonite. You get hero points for these straight away, because they are a type of flaw, even though they are represented by a positive mod. That's right. You can have minus powers and positive drawbacks. Trust me it does work out alright and you only have to look at the example characters before all this clicks nicely.
Meta powers are defined as such by the group and will usually be the powers you see in the comics with potentially limitless applications. Dr Strange's sorcery would fit here as would Silver Surfers power cosmic. The only difference between meta and regular powers as far as I can see is that the GM gets to write the rules, has the power of veto, and if allowing it can give it to npcs also. Is that it? Not much there in the way of checks and balances really. Your feeling about this rule will tell you whether or not T&J is for you. You can either embrace the fiat or fear the flexibility. Totally your call of course.
Finally we get to the traditional big list of powers. The list includes qualities too if they are deemed to be power like enough to merit inclusion. The names here are all very bland and functional, just so everyone knows whats what before the creatives start rewriting all the descriptors to embrace their Skrull backgrounds. There are 45 powers listed which sounds like a fair sized list. Then you see that 'Ray' refers you to 'Bolt', as does 'Blast' yet not 'Beam'. Not so many powers after all. Even being in an alphabetised list doesn't really work out as 12 of the powers start with 'Super...'. It's irritating at worst and a simple table would have really helped out. Of special note is the section on gadgets and gadgeteering. The author sets out a nice explanation of why super tech doesn't totally change the campaign world overnight. Its nice to see this question addressed, as in my experience there's always a smart ass player who will try to become the new Tony Stark or Reed Richards just so they can make a mint on the stock market. The powers themselves are described in a pretty functional way, and often seem a little apologetic. By that I mean there's a lot of 'sort it out amongst your own group' advice. Fine, can do, but then what am I paying for here? I think something firmer would be better. For example, Invisibility, what the difference between average and master levels? How about Immortality? Surely some powers are either on or off, not on a sliding scale? I'm sure my group could answer these questions just fine, but it would be nice to know some guidelines first, and they are absent. Except, sometimes they're not. With Phasing there's good advice on how to stop the power being abused in game. Good, because that sort of playstyle has derailed a bunch of supers games for me in the past and I like to see it recognised and some help offered too. I wish this had been done through the rest of the powers.
Some of the powers rules look wonky too. Some powers give you upshifts equal to your mod. That's a bunch of shifts when there's only 5 steps on the ladder in the first place! Then there's the idea of a super quality, which really dilutes an otherwise great game concept. Finally theres the traditional game breaker, Superspeed, which gives you extra actions. Sigh. I wish this were handled better, but then, I've not seen it addressed very well in any game so perhaps I'm being too harsh.
Hero points
The currency of the game and I suspect you know exactly the sort of things they do for the game. There's 6 ways to get them and 12 ways to spend them, which is so many that I can see both players and GMs forgetting about this in the heat of the game. Its actually very important that the GM keeps a handle on this because there's an effect on longterm play with MAX, which is the maximum hero point rating a PC has and it's needed for advancement. Some hero point gains give you back multiple points like 2d6, so you can see some crunch sneaking in at the edges of the system.
Villains get their own points too but at least you don't have to worry about them too much during the game. After the game these points power the inevitable return element that the comics writers love to use so much.
Chargen
This is a 9 step process, pretty simple stuff and the book gives you two fully worked out examples that hold your hand as you go along. You get 5 quality packages to choose from in chargen which vary from loads of low powered qualities to less but more powerful qualities. Easy, and there's a point buy option too. There's nothing else to say about this as so many of the choices are offered in the powers chapter.
Gamemastering
This is what I wanted straight after the great stuff in the introduction. Here it is. It opens with a big old box out about T&J being a high trust game, which as we've seen from the rules sections is spot on. Not entirely sure what a low trust game looks like but never mind. This is about more than just helping your players with their chargen, you all need to set out the ground rules with your campaign styles too. What tropes are in? Which ones are out? Setting expectations works for every game, but with a genre as wide open as comic books this is essential advice.
There's lots of little gems in this chapter. Three paragraphs gives you everything you need for headquarters rules. There's MacGuffins, Plot Devices and Trophies, which actually matter in game. I've never seen this addressed before and it's excellent. This lets your group use there HQ to store stuff from the heroes pasts that they can bring to the current game. This is a beautiful idea and surely should be in the players chapters rather than hidden away like a secret? My favourite Doomsday device ever is now, officially, Apocalypse Ants. If you read it, you'll understand why.
Vehicles get a quick and dirty rundown. This suits because they are not a huge part of comic books outside of the iconic vehicles, and even then they don't do a great deal to the story. In T&J they are treated just like characters so you can have conflicts with them. That really makes them a form of armour for the characters.
For NPCs the advice is: “In T&J everyone should be a unique and special snowflake – even if he or she is a very small snowflake”. What this means is that the rules support an average skill with 0 to the roll. So unless the GM decides otherwise it's 2d6 for every roll. If you want the stats for a Cop then you just eyeball it and decide how good a Cop you want, and that's it, on with the show.
The really juicy part of the chapter is the section on scenario design which harks back to the enthusiastic tone of the early chapters. The section headings say it all with things like, Two Page Spread, the Splash Page and Villain Jazz. There's sound advice here that is well worth a read even if you are an old hand at gaming. If nothing else you would want to pay attention to the fact that the rules generate story hooks through gameplay in a total of 16 areas, so there's no excuse for not having a session ready for the following week.
Finally there are example characters and they really show off the scope of the system. I liked every single one of them and could see exactly how they would fit into play. What's cool is that they are linked to the spot art throughout the rest of the book, a cute touch. I like flicking back through the book to see who Reflex was.
The setting
Actually you get three. They are fleshed out examples of the aforementioned campaign styles and there's something to recommend in every one. The only issue is which to pick. It's the True20 syndrome where each setting would have felt better in it's own supplement that you could choose to pick up or ignore. Would you ever get to play the other two? No matter what you do the chances are that you won't get to use some of this stuff, which is a real shame. That said, I applaud the fact that this book gives you everything you need to play, and then some more. You won't feel cheated.
I'll skim the settings because I don't want to give too much away. The first, Second String Supers riffs off the animated serial tropes and has your players defending the city while the A-listers are on the other side of the galaxy dealing with a Cosmic level threat. This is the most mainstream Marvel/DC stuff and none the worse for that. You get a super brief gazetteer of a generic city, a handful of decent antagonists and a well structured plot point that will give you about a dozen good quality scenarios that form a well designed mini campaign. If this had been released separately, I'd have spent good money on it.
The second world is Supercorps. It's cinematic stuff with a similar structure to Second String Supers but this time your heroes work for the man and collect a salary. It's set '20 minutes into the future' and has less of the fantastic elements and more of an LA Law with capes vibe. I loved it mostly due to the humour in it being so beautifully subtle. Again, I'd pay good money for a more fully realised supplement.
Lastly, Fanfare for the Amplified Man. 7 pages of grim and gritty. It's Heroes, there you go. Impossible to say what would happen in your version of this because it's so player driven. I'm impressed that T&J feels it can handle all these stetting, I think it pulls it off with aplomb too.
The rest
I’ve got to mention the appendices. If you’re anything like me you judge a game on it’s character sheet. This one is spot on. But there’s so much more goodness in the back, there’s a bibliography which covers comics, movies and games. It’s comprehensive and extraordinarily generous . In itself it gives a great overview of the medium and almost inspired me to pick up titles I would have otherwise overlooked. Add to that a complete set of charts, worksheets and random inspiration tables and you suddenly realise you already own what other companies would have made you pay for in the first supplement.
