NerdNYC is running a little mini-convention in early September, and I agreed to run a four-hour session of With Great Power... I was thinking of using pre-gens based on "real" superheroes, to (a) facilitate audience investment and (b) save time on char-gen. But I've never used pre-gens before (or run a game at a con).

Questions:

1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using pre-gens? I feel that with supers games, audience investment is absolutely key, and while it's possible to achieve this with "new" characters, it usually takes longer than 4 hours playing with strangers. But I've never played this way before and I'm not sure how it would work.

2. I'm going to have 3-5 players. How many pre-gens should I create?

3. How detailed should pre-gens be? Right now I'm thinking that for certain characters, there'd be a lot of detail for someone who wants "the real deal," and for others (i.e., those characters I don't know very well) there'd be a lot of blank spaces for customization, and players could pick and choose based on how much freedom they would like.

4. For With Great Power... specifically, should I establish the Struggle beforehand? Or should we do that at the table? On the one hand, I think having the Struggle beforehand would allow me to prepare a little bit more, and select some pre-gens that I know fit into the themes. On the other hand, I think establishing the thematic conflict and creating a roster of characters might be domineering and un-fun for the players.

5. (This is just for fluff.) So, if you had to pick Marvel or DC characters for pre-gens, who would be on your shortlist?

I do a fair number of convention-based one-shots, and I always have pre-generated characters. For Gen Con I brought a complete TSOY adventure and all the PCs written up, with the exception of four abilities (one Expert and three Competent) that I asked players to add, to round out their dude to their liking.

I try to point the pre-gens strongly at one another, which is tricky if there is a flexible number of participants. In a 4-6 player session, I'll have six PCs, four of which are pointed at each other and two of which are pointed at each other as well as mildly at one of the other four. If I have less than five, the four core dudes get handed out first.

People will be happier to take a pre-made character and leap directly into the action than spend precious game time crafting their own unique flower of awesome, in my experience. Just make every one fun to play and part of the relationship map.

Scott, wow, that's helpful! Thanks! I really like your approach of pre-defining the Strife aspect and leaving everything else loose. It certainly takes the load off the GM to improvise something.

Hi, James! Thanks for running WGP... at RECESS.

Posted By: James_Nostack1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using pre-gens?

When Kat and I run con scenarios, we each prep 5 heroes with 4 aspects a piece. We also prep 2-3 villains that might menace these heroes. At the table, we have the players choose their Strife, and then craft the Plan and draft which villain or villains will actually be in play. BTW, we craft the Plan publicly in front of everyone, particularly to guage the interest of the players in the direction of the Plan. When I put forward an idea, I can easily see whether the players are thrilled at the idea of stopping it, or just thinking they'd put that issue of the comic back on the shelf. If it's the latter, then I change the Plan until I get a reaction like the former.

Scott's idea above of having pre-gen Strifes, Villains and Plans, and allowing the rest of the Aspects to be created at the table sounds really cool. I might have to try that at my next con.

2. I'm going to have 3-5 players. How many pre-gens should I create?

Kat and I usually make 5 characters for a scenario. Often, 2 of them will have strong ties to each other, and the other 3 will have strong ties with each other, so with 2 players, you hand out subgroup A, with 3 players, you use subgroup B, and with 4 players, you leave out one of subgroup B. OF course, there's also no big problem with just laying out all the characters, giving a very brief intro (3-5 sentences) to them, and letting the players choose. Most players can innately sense connections between characters and choose accordingly.

By "strong ties" between characters, I usually mean something like having each other as a Relationship Aspect, or perhaps sharing the same Relationship Aspect, or having a common orign or motivation.

3. How detailed should pre-gens be?

See above

4. ForWith Great Power...specifically, should I establish the Struggle beforehand? Or should we do that at the table?

I always establish it beforehand. There's so little time at a convention, and the Struggle tends to be such a head-scratcher, that it's really not worth the trouble. So much stuff gets layered on top of the Struggle that players often forget about it. When I eventually revise the game, I'm not sure if I'm going to make it as central as I have. It hasn't proven itself to be so vital to my own post-publication play. But that's a topic for a different thread.

5. (This is just for fluff.) So, if you had to pick Marvel or DC characters for pre-gens, who would be on your shortlist?

I'm a Marvel man, myself (as if you couldn't tell). One thing we've done in a number of our con scenarios is to do "Inspired by..." set-ups. I have a scenario called "Mutant Academy" that is very much like the X-men, but all the characters are original. I have the straight-arrow team leader, and the tough rebel, and the optimistic good girl, and the spy for the Bad Guys, but they're my own characters. When I intro the game to the players, I make a big tongue-in-cheek deal of saying how these are completely my own ideas, 100% original and stolen from nobody, certainly not The Uncanny X-men. It serves to break the ice of playing with new people a little bit, lets players know that I love this superhero stuff and love making new things out of it even more, and frees them from any bounds of "keeping canon," which is always death to a game like WGP.

E-mail me at my gmail account: stalwartIP and I'll send you the characters so you can see what I mean.

One last thing. Pay the $10 and use Heromachine to make pictures of your characters. Comics are a visual medium, after all.

Hi Michael, thanks for the reply! If you and Kat are going to be in Brooklyn on 9/6, I'll make room for you in the game.

we each prep 5 heroes with 4 aspects a piece. We also prep 2-3 villains that might menace these heroes. At the table, we have the players choose their Strife, and then craft the Plan and draft which villain or villains will actually be in play.

That's more or less how I planned to do it.

we craft the Plan publicly in front of everyone, particularly to guage the interest of the players in the direction of the Plan.

Interesting: I wasn't thinking of full disclosure, as WGP is one of the few indie games that explicitly directs the GM to withhold information from the players. I'll have to mull that over: I can see doing it in public can increase the dramatic irony, I'm just worried about not providing enough excitement. I'm concerned a little bit about the "Czege Principle," which I think is a bit more relevant to WGP than other games.

My idea was to devise the Plan while the players were figuring out ways their aspects can suffer. But I suppose if I get blocked, or can't think of anything good, I can always enlist them to help brainstorm, since it would be in public anyway. This also might sidestep the problem I've noticed where players usually guess the plan way in advance, and sometimes pretend like they don't know it.

OF course, there's also no big problem with just laying out all the characters, giving a very brief intro (3-5 sentences) to them, and letting the players choose. Most players can innately sense connections between characters and choose accordingly.

This is what I was thinking of doing, but I like that "sub-group A / sub-group B" approach too. Hmm!

One thing we've done in a number of our con scenarios is to do "Inspired by..." set-ups. I have a scenario called "Mutant Academy" that is very much like the X-men, but all the characters are original...

This is what I've done in the past, but this time I'm almost certainly going to use "established" characters for three reasons.

(1) When I get bored, I sometimes "stat" published superheroes for various RPG's, and I want to get a return on that investment;
(2) I've never seen a WGP... actual play report using published characters, and I'm curious to know how it would work;
(3) 99% of RPG's place an emphasis on home-grown characters, and I'm curious to see what happens when gamers have a "spec."

We'll see what happens.

[Cheerfully derivative characters] serves to break the ice of playing with new people a little bit, lets players know that I love this superhero stuff and love making new things out of it even more, and frees them from any bounds of "keeping canon," which is always death to a game like WGP.

Yeah, I've got two plans for the canon problems:
(1) Leaving a couple aspects blank, or offering a choice. I have no idea what the Flash's motivation is, for example, so that's open to the player to define. Or: for a while in the 1990's, Superman was some blue guy who had electricity powers, so Superman's player could choose whether he prefers Classic or Lame-Nineties version.

(2) DC, and to a lesser extent Marvel, have this whole "parallel realities" stuff going on. I plan to say our game is a parallel universe, and so n00bies who don't know continuity don't have to fret about it, whereas comics nerds can get all worked up over whether Nick Fury is white or black.

Posted By: James_NostackInteresting: I wasn't thinking of full disclosure, asWGPis one of the few indie games that explicitly directs the GM to withhold information from the players. I'll have to mull that over: I can see doing it in public can increase the dramatic irony, I'm just worried about not providing enough excitement. I'm concerned a little bit about the "Czege Principle," which I think is a bit more relevant toWGPthan other games.

In play, I haven't found this to be a problem. In fact, making the Plan publicly increases the excitement at the table, as I can taunt the players with the terrible things that will befall them if they lose. Just as knowing both the Stakes and CounterStakes of an enrichment or conflict scene beforehand makes the choices within that scene more meaningful, having the Plan as public knowledge acts as a sort of CounterStakes for the entire story.

One note about soliciting player input, is I try to use it as a suggestion for a general direction for the villain's Plan. Then, I try to put that little extra twist that really makes the players quirm. Lame example:
Player: "Maybe if the villain transforms my motivation it will become 'I smash anyone who questions me.' I become a thug."
GM: "How about it becomes 'I hunt down my wife, for all the times she questioned me in the past.'"
Player: "Oooh. You're evil."

Definitely let me know how the game goes.