Reposting this from Reddit, now that I finally have a forum account. (Thanks Craig McRoberts, Community Overlord!)
So, after having run the game for a group of players across a couple months, I have some thoughts I'd like to get off my chest. And not just because I know the devs come here sometimes and I'm pretty sure this is going into the Core Rulebook as a starter adventure.
I'm going to look at each of the six adventures, and talk about not just my group's experiences with them, but some problems I ran into that I hope might get ironed out before the final release. I'll also mention changes I made to these issues and why I felt they were necessary. Most of them aren't extensive, hopefully, but they'll potentially serve to make for a better starting package.
That said, I had a few overall thoughts before I begin. First, my group had variable numbers of players at times. I'm not sure the adventure is fully balanced for different numbers of heroes. I would sometimes have each player control two heroes at once, in the event that we only had two players, rather than run some of these scenarios with only two characters. Also, I worry that a few challenges were too easy or too difficult for different numbers of heroes, but more on those situations as they come.
Also, I allowed them to change which hero they played from adventure to adventure, and just keep their hero point bonuses between adventures. I don't know if this'd have an enormous effect, but I mention it for completeness's sake. And the hero-point gathering system seems almost superfluous, with not a single adventure going by with the heroes gathering less than five, and usually more. I'd almost just award five hero points at the end of each session.
Anyway, that's overall. So...
Issue #1: Freedom Five #801
I really like the way this issue works from a design perspective. It does a good job of easing a completely-green player into the game, first with some low-stress, easy combat, complete with an escape hatch in the form of the RevoCorp field hospital if they're nervous, then with a second battle that, while still fairly easy, helps them get their heads around the way the Overcome mechanic works, and the way the Scene Tracker and Environments work.
None of the obstacles they face are overwhelming, though, at least not with a team of three, and including optional objectives like saving the Argent Adept and freeing the hostages to make things easier helps get them in the mindset of playing the game like a superhero.
For what it's supposed to do, it's a great little starting adventure, and my group also had fun with the opening, which encouraged them to get creative with the hero's powers and abilities, and to come up with ways to use them to help people.
The one major change I made here was having the Argent Adept contact the heroes with his powers, rather than use the headset the text indicates he has. I did this because it solves many problems later on, where, say, the heroes are looking all over Insula Primalis for Tempest.
Issue #2: Freedom Five #802
...We did have a lot of fun with this one, and I loved the ideas, but it did have more problems than the last one.
First, the story is really fun here, especially the idea of walking the Void. The twists and the weird, alien landscape were fun there, and the players enjoyed them. Also, it introduces several mechanics, just like the last adventure, at a slow, measured pace, that's well-designed for getting players to pay attention: collateral damage twists to make them feel bad about letting people get hurt, Environment dice for the Void, the unfortunately-underutilized mechanic of Montage scenes, etc. And this is a point where I feel I was actually given enough tools to put together a halfway-decent roleplaying scene, unlike many later Issues, with a good overview of the Visionary's mindset and reactions to many obvious questions.
That said... I ran into some problems. First, and this might just be a consequence of that night's team (Tachyon, Legacy, the Wraith, and Unity), the Illusory Demons were just too easy. Between lots of multi-target attacks and boosts, the heroes didn't have much trouble at all clearing all the demons out before the scene tracker had gone further than barely dipping into yellow, with minimal twists. And since the scene has relatively few total overcomes compared to, say, the final battle from last Issue, the collateral damage twists went mostly-unexplored. If I were to tweak it, I'd probably either reduce their numbers but make them lieutenants, or have them not only increase in die size at set points but replenish their numbers.
In contrast, I almost feel the next fight is particularly harsh, especially for a smaller hero team. The Dark Heroes respawn too quickly, and with no cap on their numbers, there's almost no point attacking them unless they're close to the VoidHeart and a hero has a multi-target attack. I put some of the blame for this on my group, which was very slow to catch on to the idea of getting rid of its defensive Orbs before trying to smash it, as well as the Unity/Wraith player having trouble grokking the latter and continually trying to make robots that only got smashed with the former but... well I can only imagine how bad it would've been with just the two of them. I would probably put some sort of limit on the number of Dark Heroes in play, beyond just "no copies."
Finally, two minor story points. First, the Void sliver that the heroes are, theoretically, supposed to pick up and take into a later adventure. I like the idea, but my group were hearty and seasoned RPG vets who do not go lightly into "touchy-feely" mode with chunks of destroyed crystal malevolence. I'd probably give some exposition to either the Visionary or the Argent Adept about it not being inherently malevolent at its core, and some part of it maybe being salvageable, or I don't see a party taking it without a bit of DM prodding. (Which I provided.)
Second, I foresaw that my seasoned and cynical group of vets would not for one second want to sent their characters on a side-quest trip around the world to gather the Prime Wardens for the Visionary when she could just do it herself, so I put a lot of stress on how drained her stamina was, and had her have a vision of the future, which she used to justify sending them instead. I felt this kept to the spirit of what the scene was trying to do, while avoiding a few pitfalls.
Issue #3: Tome of the Bizarre #86
We ended up doing this one first, since my group wanted to meet the new character first.
The bit about the portal being in a casino in Vegas was a bit... odd, especially given the fact that the last issue said the Visionary had sent them to the Tomb of Anubis. I made up a story element that there are "many roads down to the Underworld," and that they all lead through the Tomb. Otherwise, I wasn't sure I could get them to blithely jump into a weird warp portal.
Beyond that, though, this adventure does a good job of exploring the idea of using the system for a traditional D&D-style dungeon crawl, and my group had a blast with it. The enemies were a constant nuisance without being too easy or too overwhelming, and a new player trying the Wraith ended up using her Principle of the Detective very creatively, so much so that I felt I had to give him a few bonuses, like figuring out the scarab swarm was actually just nanobots and turning them into minions or deducing some facts about the robots that the group failed to notice back in Issue #1.
Also, they used a lot of their hero point bonuses to generate overwhelming successes. Without a lot of guidelines I remember from the rules for those, compared to twists (and I freely admit I might've just missed them), I usually elected to let them disable Major Twists.
Finally, they enjoyed meeting Anewbis, and figuring out the mystery. I am glad the book gave me plenty of material to use for the roleplaying encounter with him too.
It wasn't my favorite tie-in in concept, but it probably worked the best in execution.
Issue #4: Prime Wardens #67
...No one played Absolute Zero here, so no one got to make the incredibly-obvious Batman and Robin joke...
Anyway, I will admit that at least some of the problems I encountered here were of my own making. I came up with a concept (which I thought was clever at the time) where I'd assembled a list of different locales on the island, some of which, like Baron Blade's base, were discovered from other locations, and one of which, the ruins of the Citadel of the Sun, was a fun red herring, that the players could visit during their turn, with each player being able to visit one new location if they wished, or, if they had a power that let them "move anywhere in the scene," to explore two. I even had the Wraith and Tachyon in the party that time, so it's not like there weren't plenty of options! Unfortunately, rather than actually do that, they mostly sat in one place trying to fight off all the dinosaurs without in any way exploring the island until Tempest was almost out for the count.
Because I blame myself for this, I let one of Unity's bots spend a Defend action each turn keeping the scene tracker from going down, following the example of the tree in Issue #1.
I also did this to let them explore the ruins of Baron Blade's base next to the missile launcher, though, since it's actually pretty important to the plot but isn't described in the tie-in and doesn't fit what's supposed to be the narrative of all these adventures being connected. So I let them look the place over and roll Overcomes to figure out it was something designed to trap and contain spirits. They also used it as a convenient place to shelter Tempest while he recovered and exposited to them.
From there... the Arataki encounter. I've said it before and I'll say it again: this one's just badly-designed, top to bottom. The first and foremost point is that I just do not feel it gave me any of the tools I needed as a GM to run the character, the way it did for Anewbis. I don't know, for instance, the ways in which she is different in personality from the original Haka, which she apparently is, or her relationships to the Freedom Five-equivalents in her home reality. I don't even know why she's on Insula Primalis! (My table answer was that she fought in the OblivAeon crisis, and came there because her old nemesis, Citizen Storm, had a base there like Dawn did.)
Plus, the environment is just not a good secondary threat in such a scenario. When I ran it, one dinosaur, a dimetrodon, showed up, and before it had time to attack anyone, the heroes had already rolled three Overcomes and gotten Haka over to their side. She barely marked one "patience" box before they'd turned it around.
If I were to re-write the scene, I'd instead ditch the scene tracker mechanic altogether, have the heroes shelter in either the strange base or the ruins of the Citadel of the Sun, and have Haka suddenly leap from an unexpected place, pin Tempest, and give the heroes three rounds to convince her to release him, with any "twists" causing the effect under the "patience" boxes, representing her listening, but also getting tired of all this jawing, and her turning into a villain and having to be fought on a failure. I recognize that having villain write-ups wasn't something you guys wanted to do, it looks like, but...
That said, I did have some fun with it, where Unity tried to describe the concept of alternate universes with Star Trek, and Haka pointed out that this wasn't her first rodeo, and that villains often try to convince dimensionally-displaced heroes that they're the good guys and point them at the other heroes in those kinds of plots too. I like the concept, I just wish it was put together better.
Finally, the big finale with the plants. I like that one unironically, though I stopped putting in dinosaurs for that fight because it was getting late and also I didn't think they'd want to tangle with the plants anyway. It was a good time, and I even got to use Overcomes for the villains as the tree tried to grab the VoidHeart Shard from Unity. No complaints there, it worked as intended, though, again, that was after I'd prodded them to grab the shard earlier.
Issue #5: Justice Comics #740
My absolute favorite conceptually, and not just because Fanatic and Proletariat are two of my favorite characters.
I bungled several points here. I will own that. I drew up a map of the facility based on a misread of the building description, as a visual aid representing their progress. And I accidentally started introducing the twists from the table before they'd gotten down the elevator into the second scene, which upon re-reading it I don't think I was supposed to do.
That said, the group still had some fun with a largely-non-combat scenario featuring problem solving, though at least one is kind of a "punch stuff" player who would've preferred more fighting. I don't think that's on you, it's just that this wasn't his favorite kind of game.
And, mechanically, it all works. The stuff there was for them to do was clear, readable, intuitive to me, and fun to run and solve.
That said... I feel like this one really bungled a lot of the storytelling. First and foremost: Fanatic. Even more than Arataki, this story needed a list of helpful suggestions for how to characterize Helena, for what sorts of approaches to the classic "talking down the hero going too far" scene were likely to work on her, and which ones were more likely to send her into a frenzy. Furthermore, the notes suggest they're supposed to send her off to "fall back," but the players instead tried to get her to help them shut down the reactor and make things right, which I personally found a lot more reasonable. (At the table, I had her Boost them like the Argent Adept did in Issue #1, and since it was a team of Tachyon, the Wraith, and Unity, I had Fanatic be the one who dealt the finishing blow to the OblivAeon shard with her big super attack.)
Also, Proletariat. The ending paragraphs seem to imply the heroes just leave him there in an unconscious heap after helping him pull himself back together, but my players didn't want to do that, once they'd realized he'd just showed up to help. As a result, I decided, on the spot, to make a big storyline alteration (helped by the fact that I really liked it) and, after Helena prayed to heal him a bit, he shared what he'd seen (though he cautioned them that Baron Blade, filthy capitalist that he was, had sold many inventions over the years, and it could've just been a Blade bot) and eventually agreed to go off to Megalopolis to help with the big final battle, before driving off with his pickup truck. If this is inappropriate (and don't think I didn't notice a recent issue of the Letters Page mentioning a "villain team" called "Perestroika") well... I don't see why they'd just leave him there in a heap once the reactor's no longer gonna blow either.
Also, the story stressed repeatedly how Proletariat is too exhausted to help even once he's been pulled together, but he has a villain write-up, while Fanatic who's explicitly in a fighting mood and attacks the heroes several times in twists, does not. What's up with that?
Issue #6: Freedom Five #803
I have to say, ran this one right out of the book, and had a blast. So did the rest of the group. The starting battle at the tree was fun, with them clearly excited to see all the heros they'd run into during the rest of the campaign there kicking butt, it didn't take them too long to get underwater, and from there they managed to infiltrate Baron Blade's base stealthily while dispatching various obstacles. (They also refused to kill the last laser shark once they'd reduced it to a d4 and had a robot Hindering it each turn, then had the teremity to complain they never got to see the robo-squid. I swear... in the future, I would probably introduce a new threat at that point, but at the time I was worried about repeating the Insula Primalis debacle with my "mechanical innovation.")
Then, they fought through the base as intended, encountering various threats along the way, and had fun bantering with Baron Blade as they disabled the reactor, then his suit, then him. I also had fun running my first villain, though as before I must express some concerns about how to scale him up or down for various numbers of players. And after they'd beaten him, in a fun fight that had one of the Blade Battalion rather than a player plugging a leak, then watching helplessly as his buddies and boss got beat, That One Player jokingly asked if they had to take him in alive (which I thought was excessive since this latest scheme was actually rather civilian-casualty-averse), I had the Prime Wardens show up to lift the base out of the sea so they could say goodbye. We all enjoyed the "montage" at the end.
That said... I did run into exactly one problem with that final battle: several points describe players as being able to "callback" rather than Overcome to pass challenges or degrade the threats presented in the base. I wasn't sure how this worked, and could find nothing in the rules. Maybe invoking the Collection, but that's a one-time thing, and the Collection isn't the list of issues.
At the table, we ran it as "each player may check off the relevant issue without spending an action," but I also heard defensible arguments for other methods. If I'm supposed to present them something that has them invoke that on their own, I'm not sure how to do that short of giving it away by telling them what reminds them of what, since they don't know what they sense without my telling them.
Some description of what callbacks are and how they're supposed to work would do this final adventure a body of good, since they were the one major mechanic I struggled with as a GM rather than as a player.
Conclusion
On the whole, I really enjoyed all six issues, and they made up a fun introductory campaign. From a design intention perspective, they do a good job of introducing the system, showing off different kinds of adventures using the same ruleset, and then pulling it all together for a big final battle.
But, I think a lot more work is needed in the field of providing the GM with storytelling resources, particularly for the "social boss fights" with Fanatic and Arataki (though I also feel the latter really needs the whole set-up for the boss fight re-engineered) and the "Callback" mechanic needs to be both nailed down in the rules and described to the GM. I, for instance, am not sure how I'm supposed to prompt a player who played Issue #2 that the psychic conduit on the reactor reminds them of that adventure without just telling them that it reminds them of that adventure, and then what's the difference between a callback and just giving them the bonus? Also, a few minor story nitpicks here and there, but nothing major.
At the end of the day, though, it was fun to run for them, and they told me afterwards it was fun to play.
I'll probably do a sister-post to this going over the ups and downs of the rest of the product in due time. Hope this is helpful to both other players and, potentially, the dev team.