Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Conversation With The Guy Who Wrote Marvel Heroic--Cam Banks

This is part one of a conversation we'll probably see more of soon...

Cam Banks:
Hey Zak what's up? You can put me in your game designer circles or whatever. I'm that Margaret Weis Productions lead designer/director/developer guy, etc.


Zak S:
Yes sir Cam I recognize your name from the new Marvel game

C:
Yup, that's the one.

Z:
It's an interesting design--i'd love to talk to you about it some time longform at some point. Maybe an interview/conversation for the blog or something.
C:
Sure thing. I have noticed there's a real cross section of the hobby interested in it. Probably because it's Marvel, but people hear one thing or another and take a peek and try it out and like it. Or hate it, that's happened!

Z:
Well it's very much itself in an interesting way. Like I think the fact that it's Marvel really makes it easy to compare to the other Marvel designs and see how different it is. Like if you look at Mayfair DC and Green Ronin DC Adventures you'd be hard pressed to completely put your finger on the exact philosophical differences whereas you run the same character in MSH or FASERIP you are defitinitely going to see an explicit point of view shift. This game is about this and not that in a very clear way.

C:
That's correct. It is what it is. It's a comic book RPG. I don't answer the question of how fast, specifically, this one guy is or how many tons this other guy can lift, because comics don't really do that. It's not a physics engine. And I think in some ways this is what people have freaked out about. They expected something more traditional.

Z:
Do you wanna do the conversation right here? We could just go back and forth at whatever speed and then I could edit it, show you, get the OK and then post it.

C:
I would, but my youngest is doing his best "I will stay up past midnight because I can't sleep and you're still awake" impression. I've been alternating between laptop and any of my usual list of things to get a six year old to sleep. 



Z:
Well whenever you wanna, let me know. We can talk on and off for a few days if necessary. Faster than email. Good luck with the 6 year old. Avengers: The Crossing might put him to sleep.

C:
No joke. And yeah, this works. Think of a list of Qs if you have any.

....

Z
1. It's more you're pretending to write a comic book (or a part of it) than you're pretending to be in the place of the superhero isn't it?

C
1. Yeah. I describe MHR as a comic book RPG not a supers RPG. I think the difference is the whole avatar element and lack of a "physics engine." Most supers games allow you to create your toon and play him in the world the GM creates using super hero physics. MHR goes to the whole "you are the writer/artists of your characters" and seeks to get that specific comic book narrative going, often in lieu of being an avatar in an environment.

Z
2. Do you think it makes a sort of roleplay-as-in-kinda-acting-centric design more accessible to have everybody in the game working with characters where they kinda know how they're supposed to act rather than PCs made from the ground up? I mean, that way everyone at the table has an entry point for the character's personalities.

C
2. I think what's core to the play experience is knowing enough about your hero that you can engage all the cogs and wheels. The datafile gives you a lot of that, but you also have to bring a bit to the table. You need to imagine how the hero does things, how they respond to challenges, their quirks, that sort of thing. You can get that from an original hero, you just have to establish it for yourself and the table first. It's easier to work from concept than, say, choose some cool powers and try to come up with everything ephemeral later.

Z
3. This is the most interesting thing to me: the math. In an older design like FASERIP, the ideal (and designs don't necessarily meet this ideal) is, I think, you just say what you want to do (trying to think of something that would work in the situation in the genre you're playing) and then the system and/or GM kinda provides the math to do it and you just roll and it works or it doesn't. In this system it seems like you have two stages in combat: first, you have to think about the math almost abstractly (I want 2 dice here and 3 there and I want to split this die here so that this happens) then you come up with a dice pool, then you describe that pool in in-world terms and roll. This surprised me because it was, in a way, very tactical but in a math sense rather than a diegetic thinking sense. The game kinda has a split-personality that way. You aren't thinking like Spider-Man as much as thinking like a poker player and collect resources to use and then you're like someone given a challenge like "You have to get Spider Man out of the elevator shaft in 3 panels and 40 words, go"

C
3. Because you have to choose your dice from different parts of your datafile, you're already starting to think about intent and narrative even before you roll the dice. Which Distinction you go for, which power traits, what special effects, whether to hit a Limit's trigger, etc is all a little gamey, yeah, but it comes from the fiction. It's absolutely not just "one of these and one of those" unless you ignore the labels and texts and context. Which I suppose you could do, but we find that descriptive tactical combat is easy to do when you've got to think about where those dice come from and where they're going.

Z
4. I've heard someone say they like that mathy/cardgamey part of it because they can use it to get their wargamer friends to role-play because their math is telling them to...

C
4. There's a side of the game that does open it up for war gamey people, yes. I think it scratches a lot of issues. I know it scratches mine. I guess I can't help designing the stuff I know I'd like to have going on. I like dice tricks AND I like freeform improv stuff AND I like constraints. All of that is part of the system.

Z
Thanks! I want to ask some more questions in a sec but this stuff is so meaty I'm gonna post what we have so far...



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Some bonus reference bits:



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