One of my players thoughts on my first time running Worlds in Peril….

One of my players thoughts on my first time running Worlds in Peril….

I got to play Worlds in Peril, the superhero game using the Apocalypse World engine, with +Lonnie Spangler last night. We’d played a couple supers campaigns using Marvel Heroic Roleplaying before, and had been looking to test drive this system. In a nice touch, the game was set in the same continuity as our Heroic campaigns (three of the players were vets of those games, and two of us were even playing the same characters from the last go-round), so it really felt like a continuation.

Overall, I was pleased with how it turned out. Getting the character (I was playing Hank Pym as Ant Man) statted up was easy and painless, and the way the system handles powers is freeform enough that it easily facilitated the way that superheroes do new and inventive things with their powers that you so often see in comics but which is hard to pull off in some RPGs where game mechanical effects are more rigidly defined. That had been one of the things that I’d always liked about MHR over something like Mutants & Masterminds.

One thing I appreciated was speed. MHR’s dice pool mechanics are cool, insofar as the dice you choose to include in an action are a kind of storytelling. By choosing which distinctions to invoke (and whether they work for or against you), your establishing what narrative elements are important to the scene. The downside is that you build a LOT of those pools, and sometimes that process can be slow, especially in a larger game. Worlds in peril seemed to have a similar level of freedom and player agency, but the resolution of actions would likely happen more quickly.

The other thing I liked is bonds. By tracking the bonds that a character has with various NPCs, and being able to burn a bond in order to snag a bonus, it invokes a lot of the interpersonal drama that you see in comic books really well. After all, comics have always been basically daytime soap operas with more punching, a fact that the CW network appears to have noticed and been quite successful cashing in on.

The one thing I didn’t like as much was a slight death spiral effect that we ran into last night. Now, it seems that part of this was that we bungled a rule, and made things mechanically harder on ourselves than they were supposed to be. Another part was some of the most statistically improbable set of unlucky rolls I have ever seen at a table. In a system were we would have expected to have at least partial success on an action more often than not, we kept botching. And once we’d taken some complications, the penalties on later rolls made it harder to dig ourselves out of the hole.

MHR was sort of self-balancing in this respect. Someone who gets hit with a lot of crummy rolls tends to earn a lot of plot points, which tends to facilitate the big “hero comeback” that you see in comics ALL the time. Getting that last night seemed harder, but I’m not sure if that impression will be true if we play again.

I’m definitely looking forward to giving that system another test run.