Punishment

I had another read through the Marvel Multiverse TTRPG last night. This time looking at character creation. Not as awkward as it first looked, you only need those big complex tables on pages 43-48 once per character. There’s a lot of flipping back and forth, but I find that in most games unless they’re really minimal.

I had a look at making the Punisher, not writing anything down just yet, just going through the book looking at choices and options. I thought Rank 5 for him would be best, as he’s a local area character and is often seen alongside Daredevil who is also rank 5. (Punisher should possibly be lower as he’s just a dude with guns, but that would limit choices).

Blaster, Special Training origin, Soldier profession, all those seem to fit, and give a good selection of traits that work well. Two bonus traits at this rank, there’s a lot that fit but I think Infamous and Loner are the best matches.

Now for powers; 5 powers from 2 sets.
Do This All Day from Martial Arts. to give him that relentless aspect where he just keeps going.
The rest of the powers from Firearms, because obviously.
Double Tap for close up damage and Stopping Power for a chance for extra shots. (Stopping power seems to make Sniping obsolete, Double Tap is one of the few gun skills that doesn’t involve shooting twice)
Snap Shooting for splitting the attack between two opponents, useful for cleaning up goons like the Hydra guys in the back of the book.
Suppressive Fire to get opponents to crack and duck for cover, good for situations where avoiding shooting them is preferable.

And that’s the choices done. I think those powers fit, but there are a couple that I’m sure Frank’s used in the comics that are locked to higher ranks. Covering Fire to protect a teammate is rank 10 and Kill Zone, which is effectively setting up overwatch over an area is rank 15. I could possibly build him at a higher level to get those , but that would put him among characters that are way out of his league (Unless this is the Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe version of Frank)

Not too bad, but not great either.

Next step is to properly build him by doing all the numbers and stuff and chuck a bunch of dice throwing him at a range of opponents.

Scaling issues have been covered in more depth than I could by people better at maths than me, so I probably won’t touch those too much. But yeah, they’re bad.

Not so Marvellous.

So I’ve picked up the playtest book for the upcoming Marvel Multiverse RPG and… I’m not impressed. There are quite a few posts and articles over the net detailing people’s thoughts on it and who am I to ignore a trend.

I’ve skimmed through the whole thing and just started reading it thoroughly. I’m up to the end of the combat chapter and these are a few of my thoughts so far.

Initiative: With similar ranked characters I can see a lot of them having similar initiative scores, add this to the distribution of the 3d6 roll and I can see a lot of ties needing to be broken. They do give a checklist of who goes first in this situation, but it still slows this part down.

Round length: Unless I missed it, there’s no definite answer of how long a round is. Getting a number of seconds here helps me visualise how much I can do if it’s not a standard action.

Holding/Reserving: I like that there’s a wait until nest turn option and a wait for a certain trigger option. However calling the wait for next turn “holding” could get mixed up in some groups, as many games (D&D for example) use holding to describe the waiting for a trigger option.

Unconsciousness: Can’t be fixed during combat? What? The choice of “do I rescue my friend, or do I finish the fight and hope they last?” has added some really great tense moments to games I’ve been in. Also, picking your buddy up seems like the heroic thing to do.

Guns: Shotguns “can attack up to adjacent average sized targets” I think they missed a number here. Also why do SMG’s take longer to reload? as far as I’m aware they’re not that much more complicated than other firearms.

Edge/Trouble: There’s going to be a lot of juvenile groups making edging jokes.

Some of these may be answered or solved as I read more, but these are my thoughts at the end of this chapter.

I’ll hopefully add more posts as I work my way through the book.