I didn't care for it, but I think the one with the stones just came out at the wrong time.  If they had released that as the wave of hippie story games rose, it probably would have sold better.

You're right about licensed games' sales in general.  If they use Star Wars or Lord of the Rings as a yardstick, they should end up with more realistic expectations.

Quote from: Almost_Useless on June 13, 2021, 10:59:00 AMIf they had released that as the wave of hippie story games rose, it probably would have sold better.

I think history will repeat itself as Marvel cranks out an RPG based on the all the buzz about D&D 5e but it looks like they'll release it a year after the whole 5e bubble bursts.

That being said, I don't think beating D&D should be used as a measure of this product's success. It seems more like a low effort attempt to create a product for the hobby games market just to fill that hole.

Quote from: amacris on June 12, 2021, 01:56:47 PM

QuoteWater controller rolls 1d20+their Water Control Rank vs. DC 10+ Fire's Power Rank. Done.

That level of simplicity only works if you hand wave anything of substance. E.g you assume the water controller has unlimited access to water, the building doesn't matter, and that you know what the fire's power rank is. Where did you get that information? What if the building is fire-resistant or flammable? What if there's not any water nearby? If you don't care about that stuff - if you just want Drama and Narrative -- you're welcome to make up those variables or ignore them. On the other hand, maybe you think "it would actually be awesome if superheroes could do what they really could do if superheroes are real". And then Ascendant has your back 100%.

Yet instead of accounting for these variables you replace the provided example with a far simpler Fire Controller. And who's to say that ability can be used to suppress fires anyway?

The issue here is not one of hand waving anything of substance, but deciding on the specifics and degree of abstraction. There are always more variables to consider in a simulation. and Logarithmic scales don't make a game more realistic, but more consistent.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan on June 13, 2021, 05:43:28 PM

Quote from: amacris on June 12, 2021, 01:56:47 PM

QuoteWater controller rolls 1d20+their Water Control Rank vs. DC 10+ Fire's Power Rank. Done.

That level of simplicity only works if you hand wave anything of substance. E.g you assume the water controller has unlimited access to water, the building doesn't matter, and that you know what the fire's power rank is. Where did you get that information? What if the building is fire-resistant or flammable? What if there's not any water nearby? If you don't care about that stuff - if you just want Drama and Narrative -- you're welcome to make up those variables or ignore them. On the other hand, maybe you think "it would actually be awesome if superheroes could do what they really could do if superheroes are real". And then Ascendant has your back 100%.

Yet instead of accounting for these variables you replace the provided example with a far simpler Fire Controller. And who's to say that ability can be used to suppress fires anyway?

The issue here is not one of hand waving anything of substance, but deciding on the specifics and degree of abstraction. There are always more variables to consider in a simulation. and Logarithmic scales don't make a game more realistic, but more consistent.

Well, as far as it goes, mechanics which enable people to transfer real-world experiences and knowledge into a game (when the world of the game follows the same expectations as the real world) do make a game more "realistic."  So a case can be made that amacris is correct.  As far as logarithmic mechanics allow players to accurately predict the outcomes of situations better than other mechanics, they do make the game more realistic.

I'd argue that doing calculus to run your supers game is not comic book accurate.  Hand-wavey is actually much more accurate.  I don't think any comic book writer or movie director Do calculations to decide for sure if Hulk can lift an object or how long it will take Superman to blow out a raging fire with his Superbreath.

Quote from: amacris on June 12, 2021, 01:56:47 PM

QuoteWater controller rolls 1d20+their Water Control Rank vs. DC 10+ Fire's Power Rank. Done.

That level of simplicity only works if you hand wave anything of substance. E.g you assume the water controller has unlimited access to water, the building doesn't matter, and that you know what the fire's power rank is. Where did you get that information? What if the building is fire-resistant or flammable? What if there's not any water nearby? If you don't care about that stuff - if you just want Drama and Narrative -- you're welcome to make up those variables or ignore them. On the other hand, maybe you think "it would actually be awesome if superheroes could do what they really could do if superheroes are real". And then Ascendant has your back 100%.

All those things matter in M&M though; they just don't need formulas and ultimately come down to the GM's call.

Tell me true, if it were an OSR game would you make the presumption that the situation couldn't be arbitrated based on those conditions listed even if there were no express formulas for calculating them? Or would you presume the GM is more than capable of deciding those those things on their own?

Access to water? GMs call if there's enough around. Default in a city with a fire department is "Yes" for me though since the whole point of the fire hydrants is to make sure the fire department has a enough water to fight fires with. If there's a shortage of water though, the GM can just throw a penalty on the check for there not being enough water to just outright drench the entire place.

If there's no water at all nearby then obviously they can't use water control. The entire point of it being water control (which in M&M would be "move object" with a "only water" limitation) is that it only works on water. What if a D&D character tried to light a fire underwater? Would you presume a roll is even needed there too?

The building matters and has stats, they're just not especially relevant to putting out a fire; just to how quickly its going to burn down. Its only two stats are basically size and toughness. A building with paper walls (toughness 0) is going to burn pretty quick... a building built of reinforced unobtanium (toughness 30+) isn't on fire in the first place, at worst its coated in accelerants that will burn off eventually leaving it unharmed.

The fire's rank? Again GM's call based on what's burning... just like they'd assign a difficulty to any task a PC attempts its a judgement call; there's various guidelines out there.

How does the player have this information? They don't any more than you'd expect a D&D PC to know the precise DC to detect the hidden door. Doesn't mean they can't roll though; The player doesn't need to know the fire's rank, its just determining what DC the Water controller needs to actually succeed.

If the building is flammable its probably got a very low toughness (see paper above) or if its resistant to everything but fire for some reason then the GM can give it vulnerability... which just means its toughness is lower against fire. It could also be given resistance or immunity to fire if far more resistant to that than other forms of damage... which means its toughness is higher versus fire or it doesn't need to make checks at all. If its very flammable, the GM is probably going to give the fire a higher rank that will determine how hard it is to put out...

All of that though ultimately comes down the very basic PC rolls 1d20+water control vs. a DC based on the fire's intensity/rank and the GM doesn't need in depth formulas for that because it ultimately comes down to the GM setting the stage as whether the want the Water Controller's efforts to be easy or hard, fluff or impossible.

Everything else is just flavor text used to justify the final DC the player is rolling against just like every other RPG ever.

Has any Marvel RPG come close to the original RPG?

Also, is this a Marvel comics RPG or a Marvel "cinematic universe" RPG?

Quote from: Spinachcat on June 13, 2021, 09:52:46 PM
Has any Marvel RPG come close to the original RPG?

Also, is this a Marvel comics RPG or a Marvel "cinematic universe" RPG?

Looks like at least artistically it's Marvel Comics, but while it's got fairly classic standbys with Storm, Wolverine, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel and Iron-Man, its also got Carol Danvers, Groot, Rocket and some dude I don't even recognize and a blank spot presum for your hero.

I'm guessing bait and switch and the actual signature characters included will be a wokapalooza of "diversity and inclusion."

Quote from: Jaeger on June 12, 2021, 04:56:05 PM

Quote from: hedgehobbit on June 11, 2021, 03:22:44 PM
It looks like this is being produced by Marvel Entertainment, who are Marvel Comics' parent company. Which is a good sign. Since Marvel Entertainment is also responsible for all Marvel related products (t-shirts, toys, etc) it makes more sense for them to be doing is although I would still like to know why they want to make an RPG. Is this a serious product? A throwaway product? Or just a marketing ploy?

I'm not so sure this is a good sign.

Seeing as how 'Marvel Entertainment' has presided over Marvel Comics march into comics irrelevance, and done nothing to change their course.

I'll wait until we have system info before I can have a real opinion about it as a game, but if they are basing the RPG on the current Comic universe and not the popular iconic characters, they are already making things harder for themselves than they need to.

I wonder what their expectations are as well. Because only D&D does D&D numbers...

They care very little about the comic book business and they don't really "preside" over it. ME mostly runs the licensing for Marvel IP. That's their focus. They've done very well with it.

QuoteTell me true, if it were an OSR game would you make the presumption that the situation couldn't be arbitrated based on those conditions listed even if there were no express formulas for calculating them? Or would you presume the GM is more than capable of deciding those those things on their own?

Hey now -- you began by telling me that my estimation of people's math skills was too high. Now you are telling me that my estimation of people's improvisation is too low. To answer your question, I presume people can do math, and I presume GMs want rules so they don't have to decide everything on their own.

I believe that the average player can do the math in Ascendant because *I have playtested it* for 2 years. It plays fast and easy and no one has problems.

I believe that many GMs do NOT like to have to improvise answers for complex situations. They don't want to "make it up". They want to get it right. I believe this because I run a thriving community of ACKS judges, and the most frequent questions I get as a game designer is to answer how to resolve complex situations in order to best simulate reality.

The history of every RPG system (and every wargame) is to trend towards more rules, because as the game is played more, people want to know how those situations get resolved. So to answer your question, when I design OSR games, I give the rules for the GM so he *doesn't have to* improvise the answers. That's why I designed ACKS, and not e.g. Dungeon World or OSE. And Ascendant and not ICONS.

QuoteAccess to water? GMs call if there's enough around. Default in a city with a fire department is "Yes" for me though since the whole point of the fire hydrants is to make sure the fire department has a enough water to fight fires with. If there's a shortage of water though, the GM can just throw a penalty on the check for there not being enough water to just outright drench the entire place.

If you're happy with everything being a GM's call, then my games are "over-designed" for your purposes. It's the equivalent of offering Dwarf Fortress to someone who just wants to play Bard's Tale.

The people who buy my games love that they can pick up a book by me and find the answer to questions that come up in their games and know the answer will be *right* from the point of simulation and verisimilitude. In ACKS, you can pick up the books and find out "how long would it take a siege engineer to build a catapult?" "how many 1st level henchmen can I hire in a city of 4,000?" "how much does it cost to buy a baby wyvern and how long will it take to grow to maturity?" All those answers are in the books. Sure, a GM *could* make them up on the fly, but I've done the work for you. 

For good or ill, I am an exceptionally meticulous designer and world-builder.  When I built Capital of the Borderlands (for ACKS), I went through the entire city of Pompeii to map every type of building down to the whorehouses. Then I made an Excel spreadsheet of the number and size of each type of building, and then used that to guide the building of the city of Cyfaraun. It took probably 40 hours of research just to do that. You may never care that the number of whorehouses in Cyfaraun is the correct amount for the population of an ancient ersatz Roman city, but I care, and people who buy my games care a lot. It's "real".

So, turning back to this. I would never, ever, run a scenario involving fire-fighting as a major event where I hadn't thought all this through. And I like games that afford me *rules* for that. I don't like games that expect the GM to just make it up. Your mileage varies, and that's fine. My games aren't going to appeal to you.

QuoteThe building matters and has stats, they're just not especially relevant to putting out a fire; just to how quickly its going to burn down.

That's fine... if you don't care about reality. But in reality, that's incorrect. The flammability of a building absolutely determines how hard it is to put out a fire. Buildings are categorized by fire departments based on material used and contents contained within, which is used as a variable in the official firefighting guides. I know this because I researched it and modeled it. The mechanics of Ascendant are such that if you model an actual fire engine using an actual fire hydrant's flow rate, against various buildings of known size, material, etc., the fires get put out in the time the fire-fighting manuals say they would.

I'm guessing you don't care, and that's fine. I do care. And this level of coherence is awesome if you care about it.

QuoteIts only two stats are basically size and toughness. A building with paper walls (toughness 0) is going to burn pretty quick... a building built of reinforced unobtanium (toughness 30+) isn't on fire in the first place, at worst its coated in accelerants that will burn off eventually leaving it unharmed.
The fire's rank? Again GM's call based on what's burning... just like they'd assign a difficulty to any task a PC attempts its a judgement call; there's various guidelines out there.

Pause for a sec. Imagine if people ran D&D5E the way you're talking about running a fire-fighting scenario. "How hard is it to hit the dragon?" "That's just a judgment call for the GM." "What's the intensity of a fireball?" "That's just a judgment call for the GM." And so on. But that doesn't happen! Why? It certainly could.

I have a heuristic: You can tell what a game is about based on how many pages of rules it devotes to the topic. A typical RPG is about combat, and you can tell, because it has a huge combat chapter. A typical RPG has almost no real rules for anything else, because all it's about is combat. In my opinion "that's a judgment call for the GM" means "we don't think this is important". Anything a game thinks is important, it provides rules for. Cyberpunk, humanity loss, head shots, shock saves. Call of Cthulhu, sanity checks. Etc. 

One of the things Ascendant is "about" is saving the day. So it takes saving the day, like fighting fires, or stopping earthquakes, as seriously as D&D 5E takes combat. It has 50 pages of rules for dealing with emergencies ranging from fighting fires to stopping floods to diverting asteroids to defusing bombs to settling hostage crises. We've done entire sessions of Ascendant that are just superheroes doing emergency response - massive earthquake strikes Haiti, with fires, collapsed buildings, etc. And it plays with as much detail and mechanical support as D&D5E can give to a combat, for instance.

So to my ears, your answers are just different ways of saying "I don't think saving the day is worth having rules for". And that's fine. But one of my design goals was to have rules for saving the day. Rules as robust as combat rules.

QuoteAll of that though ultimately comes down the very basic PC rolls 1d20+water control vs. a DC based on the fire's intensity/rank and the GM doesn't need in depth formulas for that because it ultimately comes down to the GM setting the stage as whether the want the Water Controller's efforts to be easy or hard, fluff or impossible.

Ah-hah! Now we come to the crux of it. This is where I part ways with you philsophically. I don't run games based on "whether I want the [player's] efforts to be easy or hard, fluff or impossible." Never, ever. I don't take that into consideration at all. The world is what the world is. It doesn't change for the players. What happens is what would happen given how the world is. (I hate to bring up the awful Forge/GNS theory, but it provides a useful heuristic here. You sound like you are a "gamist". I'm a simulationist.)

QuoteEverything else is just flavor text used to justify the final DC the player is rolling against just like every other RPG ever.

See above. I couldn't disagree with you more philosophically. There's all the difference in the world between a DC that is realistically grounded in the physics of the world, and just making shit up -- if, like me, you care about simulation. If you don't care, and it's all fluff to you, then Ascendant's not the game for you. 

Please note I'm not trying to claim your philosophy is wrong. It's just not mine, so you and I aren't going to see eye to eye. Thanks for the discussion.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan on June 13, 2021, 05:43:28 PM

Quote from: amacris on June 12, 2021, 01:56:47 PM

QuoteWater controller rolls 1d20+their Water Control Rank vs. DC 10+ Fire's Power Rank. Done.

That level of simplicity only works if you hand wave anything of substance. E.g you assume the water controller has unlimited access to water, the building doesn't matter, and that you know what the fire's power rank is. Where did you get that information? What if the building is fire-resistant or flammable? What if there's not any water nearby? If you don't care about that stuff - if you just want Drama and Narrative -- you're welcome to make up those variables or ignore them. On the other hand, maybe you think "it would actually be awesome if superheroes could do what they really could do if superheroes are real". And then Ascendant has your back 100%.

Yet instead of accounting for these variables you replace the provided example with a far simpler Fire Controller. And who's to say that ability can be used to suppress fires anyway?

The issue here is not one of hand waving anything of substance, but deciding on the specifics and degree of abstraction. There are always more variables to consider in a simulation. and Logarithmic scales don't make a game more realistic, but more consistent.

Realism requires consistency. I agree it's not sufficient, but it's necessary. Chris and I are definitely disagreeing on hand waving. He explicitly took the position that everything I've mentioned is just fluff that masks the real question of whether the GM wants it to be hard or easy for the player. I disagree. I agree with Eirik, who said "mechanics which enable people to transfer real-world experiences and knowledge into a game (when the world of the game follows the same expectations as the real world) do make a game more "realistic."

Quote from: Spinachcat on June 13, 2021, 09:52:46 PM
Has any Marvel RPG come close to the original RPG?

Also, is this a Marvel comics RPG or a Marvel "cinematic universe" RPG?

It's Marvel Comics, not the Cinematic Universe.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2021, 10:17:18 PM

Quote from: Spinachcat on June 13, 2021, 09:52:46 PM
Has any Marvel RPG come close to the original RPG?

Also, is this a Marvel comics RPG or a Marvel "cinematic universe" RPG?

the actual signature characters included will be a wokapalooza of "diversity and inclusion."

No doubt about it. Miles Morales instead of Peter Parker, etc.

Quote from: Batjon on June 13, 2021, 06:58:35 PM
I'd argue that doing calculus to run your supers game is not comic book accurate.  Hand-wavey is actually much more accurate.  I don't think any comic book writer or movie director Do calculations to decide for sure if Hulk can lift an object or how long it will take Superman to blow out a raging fire with his Superbreath.

Well, it's hard to argue with that. We live in a world where multibillion dollar movie franchises get created with less effort put into canon and continuity than your average RPG Site DM puts into his home campaign for his buddies. They didn't even bother to figure out the plot line for the SW sequels before making them. So, yah, I doubt they have any idea what Hulk can do.

But there is a large community of nerds who, like me, hate that. The sort of people who create wikis to compare the power of characters, or read Star Trek Technical Manuals, etc. That's my tribe.

Quote from: amacris on June 14, 2021, 04:20:30 AM
Pause for a sec. Imagine if people ran D&D5E the way you're talking about running a fire-fighting scenario. "How hard is it to hit the dragon?" "That's just a judgment call for the GM." "What's the intensity of a fireball?" "That's just a judgment call for the GM." And so on. But that doesn't happen! Why? It certainly could.

I have a heuristic: You can tell what a game is about based on how many pages of rules it devotes to the topic. A typical RPG is about combat, and you can tell, because it has a huge combat chapter. A typical RPG has almost no real rules for anything else, because all it's about is combat. In my opinion "that's a judgment call for the GM" means "we don't think this is important". Anything a game thinks is important, it provides rules for. Cyberpunk, humanity loss, head shots, shock saves. Call of Cthulhu, sanity checks. Etc. 

This is a great explanation for why the D&D5e skill system is so under-designed compared to the combat rules. Unlike the combat numbers, much of the skill system does fall to "That's a judgement call for the GM" and that's really unsatisfying to myself and several of my players.

Quick question about Ascendant: With the scaling you're using (each point bing a doubling), how do you represent someone being stronger but not twice as strong? Is there room for fine tuning the differences between the fighting skills of Batman, Nightwing, and Deathstroke or the strength of Black Adam vs. Shazam?