San Angelo's Newest Heroes

Tell us how you are using our gaming tools and how your sessions are going.

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RPMiller
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San Angelo's Newest Heroes

Post by RPMiller »

I started teaching my daughter and son (13 and 12 yrs old) how to RP using the Hero System this past weekend. My son is very intrigued by MapTool and every time I play in Snikle's SW game he wants to watch the action unfold so I figured I would run the game using MapTool on my LAN. I happen to have a couple laptops so I set up the server on mine and gave the kids my wife's to share (as an aside, this will change during the next session as they fought over wanting to operate MT. I'll setup another laptop next time for each of them).

I used the city blocks map freebie from FUM and after resizing in PS and doing a little stamp work with the cars and objects on top of the buildings and grabbed a couple figures from RPGMapShare and a couple supers tokens that I created we were ready to go.

We played both Saturday and Sunday, but Saturday's session wasn't done in MT so I'll just talk about Sunday's session.

I setup the map and placed the various bad guys around the warehouse and gave them circular vision of 100'. I did this because I hadn't learned the work around of giving them an additional small circular vision to fix the "wedge vision" bug. I then gave the same vision to each of their tokens. I set up the topology so that each building was blocking and the structures on the roofs was blocking. That allowed tokens to "hide" until the heroes arrived on the rooftops should they decide to do so. I also set the topology back from the edge of the building and drew diagonals at the corners this was to allow the bad guys to "lean over the edge" and thus become visible when they fired on the heroes below.

Comment: In Hero vision is line of sight, but the farther something is the more penalties there are to actually see details and such. I have no idea how you could implement something like that in MT. My initial thought involves using the future feature of multiple token images. That way I could have a token with a "blurred" image and a "sharper" image. If they make their Perception roll I change the token to the sharper image.

My son's character started off in the east and my daughter in the south west corner.

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They quickly spotted the "questionable" characters near the warehouse and moved in to investigate. Golden Arrow (son's character) used his swing line and moved to the top of a nearby building. This building was shorter than the warehouse so he couldn't see the figures on top of the warehouse yet and the figures below disappeared as now the building was blocking his view. He moved to the edge and once again spotted the bad guys on the street and another lurking below that he hadn't seen earlier.

Meanwhile Sound Surfer (daughter's character) flew to the corner of a nearby building and discovered the bad guy my son had already spotted.

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Comment: This would have been a great time for individual vision for each character especially later on. My kids still did a great job of not letting the player knowledge influence the character's actions.

She then proceeded to blast the lock on the back of the large unmarked van in front of the warehouse, but that brought one of the nearby bad guys to investigate and she had to quickly back peddle and talk her way out of the fact that she just broke the latch on the back of the van.

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Golden Arrow then decided that he would stay on the roof tops and swung up to the roof of the warehouse where he was surprised to encounter a bad guy waiting up there with a large blaster! He tried to convince the guy that we was a super villain sent to help out, but unfortunately the radio the guy had disproved that lie and Golden Arrow shot him with an ice arrow and encased him in ice.

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Comment: I initially thought this would have been another great use for a multi-image token as well, but now that I've thought about it, I could have just drawn over the top of the token with an "icy type texture". I'll have to look for those.

Sound Surfer, after telling the bad guy that had questioned her that she was leaving, flew up and over the building where she discovered Golden Arrow and the bad guy as well as another bad guy that was targeting Golden Arrow! (The warehouse actually had a split level roof and I had added topology to the split to allow for the same effect as the other roofs. This worked really well.)
Last edited by RPMiller on Wed Sep 12, 2007 12:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
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brad
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Post by brad »

Great story RPMiller! I am looking forward to the updates and screen shots. I hope when my kids get older they fun with role-playing as well.

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Post by RPMiller »

Thanks. They have been around role-playing pretty much their whole lives, and about a year ago I introduced them to D&D and ran a few sessions just to see how they would do and give them a chance to flex their imagination muscles a bit. I think that going forward I'm going to try to keep this campaign going with them and see how things unfold and maybe introduce them to a few other systems in the process.

Now I just have to figure out how to get them to get their friends in on the action. :twisted:
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trevor
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Post by trevor »

Thanks for the post RPMiller, that's a fun read ! Screeeeeenies !

I can also host 15-20 meg video files if you happen to make any :)
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Post by RPMiller »

I recreated the events of the game and posted the pics above.

Continued...

Golden Arrow realizing that he had to do something, used his swing line to catapult himself to the higher roof and behind the gunman. He then fired his flame arrow and sent the bad guy flying from the high roof down to the lower level...

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(Buildup for what happened - The previous night I had them stop a mugging by some street thugs and they learned just how powerful they were when one of Golden Arrows flame arrows nearly killed one of the thugs. So this session he decided to pull all his punches, however I mentioned to him that these guys were wearing some sort of body armor. Apparently my son took that to mean full plate or something and unleashed a full powered flame arrow...)

...where the sounds of breaking bones could be heard by both the heroes! :shock:

I explained that while they were wearing body armor it wasn't heavy body armor and against a full force attack offered little resistance.

This is where we ended.

I think topology was the biggest complaint I had for this session. I would have liked to have some sort of elevation be represented easily on the map, but we made do. Another interesting facet came up. The water tower that Sound Surfer was hiding behind was actually raised up. She wanted to look under the tower. At first I wasn't sure how to do that, but then realized that I could simply delete the topology and then readd it when she stood up again. One thing I didn't try was "cutting" topology with the the tool set to remove. Is that possible?
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Post by Greyloch »

That's pretty cool. Sounds like a fun time was had by all. I've always liked supers games, though I rarely got the chance to play in the pnp versions (hmm, maybe that's why City of Heroes/Villains held my attention longer than other MMOs).

I actually did own Dark Champions at one point, but never managed to convince my friends to play it (they viewed Hero as some sort of threat to their sacred GURPS system, and refused to play it).

Anyways, nice writeup and pics, it's cool to see what people are able to do with the tools at hand here.
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trevor
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Post by trevor »

Love the pics, really adds to the story :)

Elevation and line of sight is a really tricky problem (as has been discussed in great depth in other threads)
RPMiller wrote:One thing I didn't try was "cutting" topology with the the tool set to remove. Is that possible?
I'm not quite following, could you elaborate ?
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Post by snikle »

Great write-up, my kids are itching to play too. My oldest is 12 and she is always interested in what I am doing, though my 7 yr old is very interested in the games I play.

On the 'cutting topology', if I get your meaning, that is how I remove topology on doors. I create a small line for the door, then when the characters open it, I simply remove the topology by cutting/erasing it with the tool set to remove.
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Post by RPMiller »

trevor wrote:
RPMiller wrote:One thing I didn't try was "cutting" topology with the the tool set to remove. Is that possible?
I'm not quite following, could you elaborate ?
If I have a topology that is a rectangle and then I switch to the eraser tool and "cut" into the square, will it turn it into a polygon like this example:

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Post by RPMiller »

snikle wrote:Great write-up, my kids are itching to play too. My oldest is 12 and she is always interested in what I am doing, though my 7 yr old is very interested in the games I play.
If you are concerned about the complexity or "maturity" of a particular genre or system, you may want to take a really good luck at Faery's Tale by Firefly Games. The name and cover makes most people think this is just a game for little girls, but I assure you it can be as dark and/or mature or combat centric or really whatever you want it to be. I was on the playtest group and I've played it a few times and there are some writeups on the web from adults that have played it as well. The system is incredibly simple, and it is highly narrative which I think you prefer.
On the 'cutting topology', if I get your meaning, that is how I remove topology on doors. I create a small line for the door, then when the characters open it, I simply remove the topology by cutting/erasing it with the tool set to remove.
I think you get my meaning. This is cool, I will definitely check that out. I may have to experiment with it to see how I want to use it.
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Post by trevor »

RPMiller wrote: If I have a topology that is a rectangle and then I switch to the eraser tool and "cut" into the square, will it turn it into a polygon
Yes
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Post by RPMiller »

SWEET!
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trevor
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Post by trevor »

trevor wrote:
RPMiller wrote: If I have a topology that is a rectangle and then I switch to the eraser tool and "cut" into the square, will it turn it into a polygon
Yes
Essentially the vbl is just a set of polygons. As you add and subtract the vbl, it updates the polygons appropriately.
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Post by snikle »

RPMiller wrote:If you are concerned about the complexity or "maturity" of a particular genre or system, you may want to take a really good luck at Faery's Tale by Firefly Games.
I have it, really good system too, actually bought it for the express reason of showing it to them, just been so darn busy lately. I think I would probably use it to show the younger one, but my older one is doing algebra in school now (!) so I think she could could handle, and she is pretty imaginative as well.
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Post by RPMiller »

Trevor, I just remembered another question I had as I was creating those screen shots above. When you draw on the token layer it always goes under the tokens. Is there a way to get it to go over the tokens?

The purpose I would have is if a super entangles another character, it would be cool to quickly draw a covering of that entangle over the character. I'm assuming this would make it impossible to select the token underneath which is exactly what I would want. It would really convey the sense of frustration to the player when they couldn't move their character because it was entangled in an ice casing or other type of trap.

Then when they break free a simple swipe with the eraser would free them.
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