Marvel sentinel initiative11/10/2023 ![]() This gets a little weird if Wolverine is a go-first guy but has to “hold action” so he can be thrown by the big C it gets a lot weird if there’s all sorts of action happening between Colossus setting it up and Logan actually delivering the blow. Colossus sets up the assist, improving Wolverine’s subsequent attack. Colossus doesn’t necessarily strike me as the “oh yeah, he’s totally going to go first” guy in a bog standard initiative system, but you really want him to be going before Wolverine if they’re going to do the Fastball. With Marvel, one key example was the Fastball Special. How do you put together “intiative” such that it supports teamwork looking and feeling and working like teamwork? The action order system in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying is dead simple at its root, which makes sense, because it’s the dead simple concept that Lenny runs with: Action happens in the order that makes sense, and everyone gets their turn before a new round begins. Super simple, and a solid foundation, but the real traction for this implementation of it comes into the fore with how “the order that makes sense” is determined.įirst, a quick bit of background, here: the trick with an action order system like this is in the teamwork. So, there you have it, is how I ended up doing some design work on a game I did no design work on. ![]() Cam put some polish on it, the right specific system hooks and regulators and all, all light touches. What I pitched to Cam is pretty much what you see in the game. So I thought about how to blend that into the whole Marvel/Cortex Plus dynamic, and pitched an idea based on it, to Cam. It needed to feel fluid and comic-booky, but also it needed to respect character powers at least a little. That’s tricky as hell, but thankfully, I know Lenny Balsera, and I know how he runs games. And one of those times, Cam was butting his head against the call for there to be some kind of initiative system in the game, but really, really not wanting it to be the bog standard seen in most any game that has an initiative system. ![]() That doesn’t mean I didn’t try to nose into the process whenever I could, of course.Īside from a little bit of playtesting, I occasionally pulled Cam Banks, the head showrunner on this thing, into chats to talk about my impressions and thoughts about where the game design was going. See a bunch of Evil Hat or friends-of-the-Hat folks working on this game - seriously, look at the credits - meant it was going to be awesome, and I hope for the folks who have laid their hands on a digital copy (physical ones coming at the end of the month) it’s apparent how true that is. This is really the Marvel superhero game I always wanted it to be. After I got over my brief “left out in the cold” moment (understandable that I was, since I had Evil Hat to be running, etc), I got pretty excited. Due to the whole NDA thing and whatnot that happens around many licenses, I’d had no clear idea this was coming (though I did piece together it was Marvel just the night before), but it turned out that many of the folks I knew did… because they had been brought on board as part of the design or editorial team for the game. So, back at the GenCon where Margaret Weis Productions announced that they’d gotten the Marvel license, I had an odd sensation. It is licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. This work is based on Accidentally Designing Marvel’s Action Order System, written by Fred Hicks and describing a variation on a method originally devised by Leonard Balsera. The following attribution must be provided in your text, wherever you put your own copyright, in the same size as your copyright text: The content of this post is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Unported license. Other terms such as “popcorn initiative” have been floated, but are not preferred. The best “give credit where it’s due” name would be Balsera-Style Initiative. The best “neutral” name for it would be Elective Action Order. This initiative system has been given a number of different names since its introduction.
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