The Basics
The book itself is available in both PDF and hardcopy forms. It is 164 pages and contains a solid table of contents and a thorough index, though the PDF is not bookmarked. The cover and contents are in full cover.
I have always found Spectrum Games’ offerings to be visually attractive, and this game is no exception. The full color artwork and layout makes for a pleasant read and the quality of the art is definitely a step up from other supers games available. The style of art skews very heavily towards “comic book realism,” rather than the animated or cartoonish style of offerings such as BASH and ICONS respectively.
The writing and editing of the text is serviceable, though a stronger editorial hand would have caught some of the grammatical issues contained throughout. The tone of the text is conversational, with attempts at humor that occasionally work. Personally, I prefer a more focused, “just the facts” approach to rulebooks, but I realize others prefer the opposite. Occasionally, the game purports to solve a genre problem that plagues other supers systems, as if solutions didn’t exist in other games, when usually it’s simply a matter of different ways of solving the same problem.
While it is hardly a deal breaker, I must say, I kind of hate the game’s name. It’s long, awkward, and a little silly. I understand it is a very old working name for a draft of the game, but I think something else might have been better.
The System
CCVF uses a heavily modified version of Spectrum Games’ also-excellent Cartoon Action Hour. Characters are composed of a series of Traits defined almost entirely by the player. These Traits are added to a d12 roll and compared to a Difficulty Level or an opposed roll by another character, utilizing his or her Traits. If the acting character succeeds, the opponent suffers a Setback Token, which may represent damage, psychological stress, boredom, or whatever else fits the story to describe how and/or why the opposition is unable or unwilling to keep fighting. The game focuses on creative narration of both actions and results, which allows (and perhaps even requires) a simpler core system to generate interesting results.
The philosophy behind this approach strongly resembles MWP’s Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. Both are excellent games, though I prefer CCVF for both its detachment from an established universe and for its increased detail in establishing real numerical differences between characters. The die rolling is also much faster and much easier to interpret. Setback Tokens are also ultimately a more elegant way of describing MHR’s three different kinds of Stress.
Introduction and Chapter 1: Character Design
The Introduction provides an overview of the system and lays out the design goal of emulating comic book stories rather than comic book “reality,” such as systems like Hero or Mutants and Masterminds do. The tone from the outset occasionally seems to not take the subject matter seriously, and examples throughout the book sometimes confirm this; I find this odd, as the system takes the genre very seriously and does it well.
Characters are designed with a number of points (100 for newbies, 150 for established heroes, or 200 for heavy hitters). These points are spent on Traits. Each character will generally have between five and twelve Traits.
There are no lists of powers or effects; instead, Traits can be defined however the player wishes, emphasizing whatever he or she wants to have the character do that can affect the game mechanically. Thus, Traits could be obvious superpowers like “Flight,” “”Super Strength,” or “Powered Armor,” or skills such as “Brilliant Scientist” or “World’s Greatest Detective.” They could be personality traits like “Determined” or “Bold.” They might even be odd character elements like “It’s Clobberin’ Time!” or “Boob Window.” This idea is very freeing and easily allows certain non-powered elements of a character to have a meaningful effect on the game. The process of naming Traits for new players can be tricky if they are accustomed to only buying “powers” in other systems; Traits should also include relevant skills and dispositions if the character is going to have useful options outside of combat.
Traits can normally only be used once in a scene before becoming less effective, thus requiring creative use of different Traits as a scene goes on. This also makes for interesting scenes and encourages creative thinking. Traits can be modified in various ways to allow them more uses per scene before becoming less useful, or even becoming more powerful when used more often (up to a point). These modifiers affect the cost of the Trait. One of the most common and important modifiers is Link, which allows multiple Traits to be combined for a single roll. For example, one could link Flight and Super Strength to do a flying move through attack or X-Ray Vision and Martial Arts to launch a strike intended to break bones at a weak point.
Traits are rated from one to theoretically whatever (I don’t think I’ve seen one higher than 20 anywhere). Traits from one to four are considered a normal human range, five to eight is considered superhuman, and nine or higher is considered cosmic. These distinctions serve a purpose for a couple rules in the game, but otherwise, they should be very broadly interpreted. Most mundane supers with skills and gadgets will still likely have some Traits higher than four, and the descriptive level of “cosmic” seems far too low, a fact echoed in many example characters.
Because all combat effects are encompassed in Setback Tokens, certain fairly common superpowers are a little harder to create in CCVF. Mind Control is one example: there is no effect to actually control someone else, so how to build an egoist? The author provides a lengthy sidebar about some such powers, with some very interesting results, but I would have loved to see more. As I have fooled with the system, I can see the potential for some very interesting effects, but I’d like to see more examples from the designer or other experts with the system.
Characters also start with Editorial Control, which is simply CCVF’s version of Hero Points, which allow a player to affect die rolls or narrative details. The author provides some fun ways to use EC; I find CCVF to be better than M&M in this regard, and as good as (though much different) than BASH. Characters also have Complications, which work as they do in M&M to earn a character more EC, and Factoids, which include any detail the player wants to add to his or her character. Factoids function as low-level Traits, enabling a character to act in certain ways that wouldn’t require a die roll. A character may have the Factoid “Trained Pilot” in order to fly the team’s jet, but he wouldn’t be as good as the character with “Hotshot Pilot” as a Trait.
The chapter ends with a number of templates with all the math done, just waiting for Trait names to be plugged in. I wasn’t aware of how useful these were until I tried using them. Also included are 24 example characters. Some of these are fairly standard archetypes, though I would have preferred more generic types than found here. Some of the characters skew too much to the comical, which I am not a fan of. A note should be made of the nine female examples: six of them contain Traits or Factoids about their sexual practices or appearance and/or have artwork that exemplifies the negative stereotypes of women in comics. This may be an issue for some readers. On the plus side, some of the characters demonstrate interesting ways to build powers; in particular, I found Slavedriver very interesting. He has a few low level Traits, but after taking a few Setback Tokens, he gains access to a number of much more powerful Traits.
Chapter 2: The System
This chapter develops the core mechanic at greater length. It provides information on combat sequencing and how Action Scenes, Contested Scenes, and Extended Scenes come together to form an Issue. The rules for Initiative are the same as those found in MHR, which is very good. Rules are included for other combat options, such as attacking multiple opponents at once or being attacked by multiple opponents. These rules are obviously useful for when the hero faces a number of faceless mooks with energy rifles. Unfortunately, there are no example mooks with energy rifles in the book; no “minions” of any kind (other than a rat swarm as an example). Minions are created like any other character, albeit with fewer points and lower Trait values. As such, an example would be helpful to see, lest one make one too strong or too pathetically weak. So, three supplement ideas: how to do certain kinds of powers, traditional character archetypes, and minion examples.
Outside of combat, rolls are still made with Traits against a static difficulty rather than against another character’s Traits. Here is a significant failure of the system: outside of combat, one uses the same Traits that they might use in combat. Thus, it is important that characters have Traits that are more than just combat powers and abilities. But what if a character doesn’t have any relevant Traits? How does one roll? The rules imply that one is restricted to the creative use of Traits, which seems like an excessively limited approach to “skill checks.” There is an optional rule later in the book that allows one to make a roll with a Trait value of zero when nothing else applies; it would seem that such a rule must be required rather than optional.
This also leads me to what I consider to be the other critical failure of the rules: little concrete guidance on setting static difficulty numbers for tasks. At least some broad chart should have been included as a basis for people who have never played the game and thus cannot accurately judge the effect of Linked Traits on a roll. The example provided in the rules assigns the task Traits, potentially linked to other Traits, in a manner similar to what one might find in the Leverage RPG. But the difference there is that most obstacles in Leverage can be assigned a simple d6 or d8. The potential Traits one could imagine a concrete wall to have (e.g., “Exterior Wall,” “Main Support Wall,” “Excellent Construction,” etc.) make for an interesting engagement with the Trait system, but way too much work at the table in play. A simple rule like, “Breaking Walls: difficulty 9-12” would have been a big help.
Chapter 3: Villains
This chapter describes how to create and use villains in CCVF. Rather than having individual Editorial Control, the Editor (GM) has a pool of points for all the villains to use, as well as special (often more powerful) ways to use them. This allows a solo villain more options when facing a team of heroes and allows a solo hero a chance against a team of villains. Again, the options are clever and fun. Furthermore, while all Player Characters can take four Setback Tokens before being out of a fight, villains may have less (perhaps as few as one for mooks and low-tier villains).
Chapter 4: Options
This chapter includes a number of optional rules. Among them are rules for having characters of different point totals acting on the same team. The process is similar to the one in BASH, where the lower point character gets more Editorial Control for the Issue. Interestingly, however, one doesn’t need this rule necessarily, because a 200-point Hawkeye will actually be able to compete with a 200-point Thor. Hawkeye’s Traits will be lower, but he will likely have more of them and be able to Link them to compete with the Big Boys. In a system like M&M, characters of the same PL may have roughly the same points, but without a strong GM hand, there is no guarantee that they will contribute equally in combat (the problem is even worse in Hero). The default rules of CCVF cover this problem very well.
The game, like the trend for many newer supers games, has no default experience point rules. I understand this, but it’s always a hard sell for my traditional players and, recently reading a number of Marvel comics from the early 60s, I am not at all convinced by the argument that comic book heroes don’t advance in power and skill. But as a compromise, the author suggests allowing players to re-write their Traits more or less whenever they want when there is a story reason to do so. Given the flexible nature of Traits, this would seem to work pretty well.
The chapter also includes a section of LARPing supers. I have a hard time imagining what such a horrific idea would look like, but the rules are there if you want them.
Chapter 5: Example of Play
CCVF provides a detailed example of play: 26 pages long! Rather than being just a combat example, it is an example of an entire evening’s play, with dialogue that actually makes me think it is closer to a transcript of an actual session than a manufactured example. Unfortunately for me, one of the two PC stars of the story is a hero who happens to be an insane swashbuckler, whose loony antics were more tiresome than humorous to me, and one of the villains is a mime assassin. Yup, a villainous superpowered mime. Characters I personally would not use. Furthermore, the start of the Issue has the crazy hero acting crazier than usual under the effects of a villain’s influence. So: a crazy character influenced to act crazier. It doesn’t work for me.
However, as an example of the rules in action, this chapter works very well. The style of writing has the players mostly just naming the Traits they want to use and then letting the Editor narrate the action after the die rolls, but I think I’d want the players to work a little harder at justifying some of the combinations they came up with. In the PC heroes’ investigation, the importance of viable non-combat Traits comes to the fore.
Chapter 6: Issues
The final chapter gives some guidelines for designing adventures, as well as two example adventures using several characters from the book. Decent material all around, but nothing that struck me as unusually excellent. The book ends with a Glossary and an Appendix.
Conclusion
CCVF is an excellent new addition to the available options in supers role-playing, in large part because it offers something new, while also incorporating rules that resemble some of the best ideas in several other good games. The core system is flexible and encourages creative narration while still grounding gameplay in thoughtful tactical choices and meaningful character design. While fans of point-based, effects-based systems may be put off, those who find games like MHR and ICONS not crunchy enough may find something to love here. I highly recommend checking it out.
Style: Excellent production values and nice art, though with a writing style that was not always as precise as I would have liked. Score: 4.25 out of 5.
Substance: An innovative system with tremendous flexibility that successfully bridges the gap between substantive mechanics and narrative fluidity, marred by a couple of important rules areas that need better explanation and development. Score: 4.5 out of 5.
