Generation Gap: Marvel Superheroes

Back in 1984, the Big Two in comics realized that their lunch was getting eaten by a bunch of upstarts-- who didn't even make comics! Roleplaying games were booming and neither DC nor Marvel had released a system to make supers. Now, no one else on the market could even breathe an idea like Arachnid Boy or Super-Bones McClawHand without a swift cease and desist, so the established characters were off-limits to the gaming world until the comic publishers got their stuff together and made these licensed games.

The one on the docket today, Advanced Marvel Super Heroes, is the 1986 follow-up which actually featured character creation, as prior to this book, the only thing you could use was pre-published characters with Marvel-official power scales. Oh, how we take for granted now the trading card industry making it easy to know who was stronger, faster, or more powerful with their beams. (Not eye beams, as those are probably trademarked.) Anywho, Marvel Super Heroes!

My Dark Tower

Some years ago, I wrote a game called Nexus, using a modified d6 system I wrote whole cloth. This game had a multiverse setting, similar in intent to most other Universal systems (probably more similar to Palladium than GURPS, but you get the idea) in that the idea was that player characters from different worlds could portal across to other planes of existence and go on adventures there, sometimes running into some universal ideas that tie the multiverse together, like common religions, identical people on vastly different worlds with new backgrounds and names, etc.

I've run that game with a couple different sets of rules, from my original to FATE to a brief flirtation with Savage Worlds. Now, I think this idea works well enough that I would run it in nearly any ruleset and port over the setting, but part of the goal was to bring it across with identical ideas, not just differences among flavors.

This eventually led to a project I've begun to consider my magnum opus in gaming...

Generation Gap: Savage Worlds

My buddy Theron over at "These Dice Look Funny" pointed out that Savage Worlds (one of my Top Two systems) had created a random generation attachment during their toolkit phase a couple years back, and rolled up a halfing for himself. In taking a look at it,  I feel like the Savage approach to random generation might just be my favorite way of doing things. Let's take a look, shall we?

Introductions All Around

I'm Jamie, and I'll be your host here at The Revenge. I'm a longterm gamer, a theatre professional (currently in grad school), and I'm finding that the way I like to talk about things isn't supported, necessarily, by Facebook and other social networking.

This blog will consist of reviews of gaming products or hobby material, updates of material I'm working on, be it props, gaming info or miniatures, and my thoughts on the Nerd World as a whole. We've recently found out that wizards and video games are mainstream cool, and I think it's taking some time for us to adjust to that. With that in mind, let's kick this thing off!

Generation Gap: TMNT & Other Strangeness

The difficulty in generating characters if that for every Moronkainen, you can end up with a character that ends up being either unremarkable or perhaps terribly overpowered. Most game writers (particular among them the author of nearly all Palladium products, Kevin Simbieda) defend this as reflecting real life, and that any true gamer would be able to make any character effective. This is true, and I feel the dark and dangerous pull of this argument the longer I build characters for this project (to date, at least half a dozen, and some of them are not just games I would play, but characters I actually wouldn't mind having!).

One such character follows: Bertolli the Teenage Mutant Ninja... Cat

Generation Gap: Original Dungeons and Dragons

This series of articles will strive to catalog one of my love/hate relationship with a prime aspects of RPGs: random character generation. Those of you who have known me for a long time know that I get like a down-on-his-luck gambling addict in Atlantic City whenever there's a random chart I can roll on. I can't help but find out what would happen if I roll on it. Daddy needs a new pair of shoes!

To that end, the notes marked 'Generation Gap' will feature a different system, reviewed almost exclusively on their character generation. To help you understand this experiment, I accept the first roll, whenever possible. If I am allowed to make any of my own decisions, I make them from a purely mechanical perspective, and will explain each choice as we go. At the end, I will try to collect this information into one coherent character, if I can.

I owe it to black book D&D to start this nightmare, though I will admit that a different, more sinister game inspired this odyssey. We'll get to that.

Let's start: Generation Gap, Dungeons & Dragons