I am a member of some forums where some
of us would get together on Saturday nights and play games sometimes.
More often than not the game we played was Cards Against Humanity.
The game is fun, but you can only cycle through the same cards so
many times before the charm begins to wear thin. Roleplaying games
and an interest in trying them had been brought up a couple of times,
but no one had a real go at running a game for the group as far as I
know.
I proposed a game and offered to run it
on the forums. There were a lot of interested players at first. I
prioritized some responses slightly over others. Not so much because
of any dislike on my part, but because I knew that we were going to
be taking over the Teamspeak server used by the Saturday gaming
group. I also placed more weight on suggestions from those that made the initial two setup sessions as well. Thankfully most of them were up for roleplaying in just about
any form as long as gore was not a main feature.
Seeing as how we all met via forums for the City of Heroes video game it was decided to use Paragon City from the video
game for the setting. Of all the participants I am the one the least
familiar with the setting, but the other players were helpful and
there are a lot of resources out there so I was able to brush up on
some of it. The in game date for the first session was 30 Aug 2012 as
the 31st was the date NCSoft announced the shutter of the game. We
wanted to bypass creating a reason why heroes and villains alike
would stand around holding torches for the next three months.
So some people who only kind of know me
were gracious enough to indulge me as I ran the Icons Superpowered
Roleplay RPG for the first time in a setting I know less than I thought I did. We considered a couple of other
rulesets for the game, but I already had some familiarity with Fate
which Icons is based on and it was a system suggested before I
started suggesting systems myself. I have limited experience with
newer d20 systems with most of that being Gamma World 7th edition if we leave out video games. I
feel Savage Worlds has scaling issues at higher power levels and was
hoping for some rules that could cover a variety of campaign levels
later on. We also had a couple of people new to roleplaying so I did
not want anything like Champions which might overwhelm them. I was
somewhat tempted to run Margaret Weis Production's Marvel Heroic
Roleplaying game (Cortex+), but it is currently out of print and the
non-licensed version has yet to be released. It also has an issue
where I think it works better with players already accustomed to more
story based RPGs so might be difficult to introduce to players
totally new to roleplaying.
We made use of a combination of Roll20
with Teamspeak. I have dabbled with various tools the last couple of
years, and Roll20 is my favourite virtual tabletop I have tried so
far. It is also the virtual tabletop I have spent the most time with
so my preference is biased. You can get more use out of some others
if you want to take the time to program some features or are running
a system where someone else has already done the work, but if you do
not want to program your own features, or are running a system that
is less likely to have the work done for you already, then Roll20
works like a dream.
After we had settled on a system and setting I
had two weeks to get things set up for our first actual play session
as we had character creation and such before the first session. I went a little
overboard creating cross-linking help files (over 200) so we could do
things like if a power showed up on a character sheet the player
could click it on there and it would bring up a box detailing the
power along with links in the power description to any game terms
that were used. This was really nice because I feel I gained a better
grasp of the rules through this process and I have found the Icons
rulebook to be hard to reference at times.
The two biggest issues we had with
Roll20 were the audio and connectivity. The first is solved by many
people by running the game with Google Chat which can be handled
through Roll20 instead of using the default third party audio
included with Roll20. We went with Teamspeak which I am grateful for.
I recorded the world and character creation sessions to help with my
notes. The quality was better than some podcasts I listen to where
they use microphones with costs in the triple digits and soundboards
where we by comparison were talking over the internet and I
personally use an eight dollar headset. No matter what else might
change, the choice to use Teamspeak is one I will not give up lightly
now.
The connectivity issue was a couple of
players would have trouble almost every session getting into the
game. Sometimes switching browsers helped, but normally it was a
matter of trying over and over until they got in. Others of us had no
issue with this except for two weekends where Roll20 were having
trouble on their server shards. It has me looking at other options
again, but chances are we will continue to use Roll20 as one of those
times they had server issues was the Saturday night of Halloween
weekend.
I guess a third issue might be that
there is no organization of reference materials and character sheets
outside of if they are archived or not. One of those help files I
made is essentially an unarchived table of contents so players can
sift through the archived files without having to pull them out.
There is a search feature, but it does not seem to actually search
the archived files. It would be nice if there was a folder system or
something for characters in particular. As far as I am aware this was
more a concern for the GM than the players as I could flag different
files visible only to certain players where they all show up to the
GM if they are not archived. It's a minor quibble compared to the
other two, but one that I think might get addressed in the future.
That is how the game started. This is another one of those blog posts that started as one post. I decided to break it up to make consumption a bit more manageable.
The Icons of Paragon City Series
Part One: The Origin of Icons of
Paragon City - This Post
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