ICON does what DC Heroes Already did, or ICONS/DC Heroes Conversion Guide

I’ve found Icons, one of the latest ttrpg supers game released with some decent popularity, to be completely backwards compatible with the old-as-dirt-old-school supers game DC Heroes. Currently the only copy of this great Mayfair game from the 80’s easily had is the retro-clone from Polaris called The Blood of Heroes. BoH is a complete set of rules which incorporate all the powers and mechanics through DC 3 edition. I like that it is also divorced from the DC Universe, emphasizing the best utility of the game is as your game system used in your own super’s hero universe. 

Icons should be noted lends itself to creating your unique superhero setting. It does this with its character creation process. World building and super villains are created the same time everyone is making up their random character. But I’ve used the Icons random character creation method generate BoH/DC Hero characters. The two systems are so compatible it fits like peanut butter and jelly.

Interesting, the game Icons bills itself as rather FATE-adjacent, with its inclusion of Aspects and the use of FUDGE dice, but really, it is just a recasting of Mayfair’s ground-breaking Exponential Game System! It also shows these “innovations” FATE’s story-telling system touts as a new way of playing ttrpg’s with a more player-focused set of rules is not. Early superhero games like TSR’s Marvel and Mayfair’s DC Heroes had these player-facing rules and mechanics consciously built into the fabric of these games. I’m obviously referring to the supers’ genre conceit of heroic flaws, disadvantages, drawbacks, complications, etc.   Every superhero role playing game at the dawn of the hobby included these character-driven world building and character-building elements. Really, a new game of Champions, or Villains & Vigilantes always started players and referee bouncing ideas off each other and coming up with their various enemies and power-origins. The act of character creation in any superhero game is automatically player-gm world building collaboration.

The next reveal this thought experiment of mine gave me is the relationship between the superhero genre and story-game intent. The juice of a superhero game is the soap-opera level drama players get involved with due to their alter-ego and the consequence of ultimate power. I mean SOAP-OPERA, afternoon television over the top back from the dead silly storytelling. And then you get to have a monster fight which wrecks cities!

This isn’t for everyone and running a supers’ game is a good challenge for Game Masters just on that point alone. It is a refreshing take from general murder-hoboing and the black and white moralities of the fantasy gaming realm. Supers’ games, like most games set in a contemporary setting, are NPC-heavy. A city street is a city street. It is the people who make the place fascinating, dramatic and filled with tension. The ordinary has to be made extraordinary without descending into camp. And this is what story games are really about. Spinning tales of interpersonal conflict in a very soap-opera way.

But back to the conversion method. Really, it is so simple I just went on the above rant to fill out the post.

Here is how the ICONS attributes translate to MEGS attributes:

Prowess = Influence

Coordination = Dexterity

Strength = Strength

Intellect = Intelligence

Awareness = Aura and Mind

Willpower = Will and Spirit

Stamina/2 = Body

Stamina is a derived stat in Icons and is a simple addition of two other attributes. When attributes are added together in BoH’s it is an increase in one point, not a straight addition. This is because the system is exponential, each number is twice the value of the number before it. 3 is twice as much as 2.

Now it is just a matter of plugging the Icons values into the appropriate BoH’s attributes.

Powers work the same way. A Flight of 10 in Icons is a 10 in Flight in BOH. Specialties are Skills. Qualities and Aspects are Drawbacks, Limitations, Advantages, and Bonuses from old-school BoH. Even resolution is identical. Both compare an Acting to an Opposing value and establish a degree of success. The spread of results, from terrible to nothing to exceptional success, is the same to.

Vehicles work the same way. You can take Icon stats and use them directly with BoH/DC Heroes rules, no modification!

I don’t have much interest in playing Icons. Blood of Heroes gives me a denser supers experience and the level of “crunch” and dramatic roleplay and pace of combat all come together perfectly for me with these rules. I don’t really much care for ICONS adventure material. I find the stuff terribly derivative framing of superhero cliches. Buuut, if you love your game of ICONS you have the whole DC Catalogue of heroes and villains all in ICONS numbers. Any of these old-school adventures can be dropped into your Icons campaign world with no mechanical prep required. The official Icons setting of Stark City and its sourcebook can be used with any DC Heroes/MEGS campaign you may have. Any of the Icons third party adventures and books can be used with your MEGS.

So that is really all there is to it. DC Heroes and ICONS are completely compatible games! It seems Steve Kenson has successfully traveled from writing a supers game on an old D&D chassis to writing a supers game on and old DC Heroes chassis and calling it some kind of original or different take on FATE, FUDGE and story-games is off the mark. The “neat” things ICONS claims in bullet points on the back of their book are old achievements by various old school games made a long, long time ago.

Multiple GMs

My first opportunity to roleplay in my own campaign world happened. Even Heroes Bleed had an alternate Game Master, one of the other players, this past Sunday and I was able to run an NPC Hero I created. Sitting on the other side was an incredible treat to see how the city smelt from the perspective of one. 

First "fact" of interest was campaign date. This adventure is occurring a month in the future from the current game action. This means the facts we established during the session are now future facts, events which will occur. My next thought of intrigue was how easy it was to become part of the player group. Makes sense, I've grown to know these characters right along side their players. Same with my PCs roleplay. I created the character and they have fought on the streets of Capitol City already. 

It also triggered some cool ideas for the current adventure I am running back in "real" world Capitol City circa May 2020. The entirety of the campaign's length is 7 days. A half a year of game play and we have advanced through seven days of activity. And what a busy seven days it has been! There is a record of history on each character which has so far appeared in the game, including the other Player Characters. This made for a deeper connection between my Player Character and the others. Ultra Rosa (my PC Hero) has formed opinions on her co-workers already and has had a chance to respond in kind. 

Last but not least, I got to "not know" what I was going to do because I was not in charge of pace. I could increase pace of action by having my PC do increasingly extreme actions in the game world right then. But overall, if the Referee says it is tomorrow, well, it is tomorrow gosh darn it! This type of control over pace is not something the players get to dictate as much as the Referee does. 

I have two more sessions (more or less) before this adventure will conclude and I am back in charge of the who, what, where of Capitol City and I intend to use Ultra-Rosa's guns before then. Before I have to release her back to the game world I want to see her light some shit up!

Long and short of it, I am sold on mixing up the game master work with the other players at the table. I don't know if any of the other Players wish to referee a game session, but I hope so. I think it is fostering greater and greater investment in the game world by everyone at the table.

Even Heroes Bleed Issue #5, part 1

 

I Sure Could Play some DnD

Yes, I am hard-charging through running a supers game, and it is the referee challenge I anticipated it will be. Specifically the real-world consequences of supers action in "real" world situations. It seems so effortlessly done in the comics and film because the creators have absolute control of the narrative. RPGs are not like that, on purpose, because the play is the thing and confounding one's expectations are the order of the day. For both referee and player. Responding quickly and creatively with the incredible events which supers creates is, for me, the lure of supers roleplay. 

And some days I look wistfully at my Elric! rulebook and the isolation sword and sorcery roleplay affords the busy Game Master. Fantasy is easier to run because Biden is president the action is always where the players are at. One part of the game world does not know what is happening in other parts. Except for the multi-dimensional beings pulling strings, I guess. In supers, or any other modern game, everything is connected to everything! That is harder to adjudicate. Same freedom applies to sci-fi roleplay. The sheer expanse of the natural universe is overwhelming and makes isolation of action easy to maintain. But a game set in your gritty urban city of millions, fuck, it gets weird just having the players take a car ride out of town. What does the rest of the world know of them? That is a big fucking question. A scary question. How is it well done? I still don't have good answers for this, besides looking at the current events of the day. That seems to be my current way out of not knowing what is the best, logical move of the game world to the characters actions. The real world is more weird, strange and frightening than fantasy supers world. I think I need to key on real life people and institutions which can be turned into supers caricatures. But caricatures seem lazy and abhorrent to my artistic  bent. I want something legitimate. But legitimate in an artistic sense in my terms means a lot. It means moving past tried and true and taking risks. 

I can't really explain it. But I know when it happens in game. I've delivered something on message and unexpected and dare I say cool in the game when players react in that awesome way: "Whoa!" Nothing better to my GM ears then the collective "Holy fuck" exclamation from the players at the table. If you can get any of the players in your virtual game table to stand up and start pacing and rubbing their forehead you are doing something right! 

I can recall two occasions I achieved this monumental feat. Both were fantasy games. The first time was during my play test of USR Sword & Sorcery in 2012. The players had completed their charge, escort a young prince through a dangerous city and equally dangerous mountains to a remote keep. They were escorted out of the main hall after the royal head requested they be paid for their faithful and successful service. At the gate the sergeant told the players to get the fuck out. Commoners are not getting paid, petty corruption of the simplest sort. The sergeant pocketed the purse of gold and the PCs were left outside in the cold with nothing to show for their efforts. They got pissed! It was pitch-perfect as far as any genre conceit could be and the players were not expecting this turn of events. It prompted the most awesome thing in any roleplaying game; the PCs began to bicker. As game referee this is where you get to sit back and watch the game being played completely in the hands of the PCs. I love that!

Oh, this reminds me of the third time I achieved this kind of gaming awesomeness. It was plain old DnD and it was a mexican stand-off between a vampire lord, frenzied fairy bitch, and the PCs in an enchanted and rotten tree crawling with bugs and corrupted sap dripping on their heads. The BBEG was dealing, making intriguing offers which aligned with the party's interests. When I say mexican standoff I mean it was twitchy fingers on the gun belts and the first side to blink wholesale carnage would get unleashed. There was no guarantee on who would come out on top in this confrontation. This is all theater of the mind, but I could feel the Paladin's arm shoot out in front of the frothing Cleric when he stated "He has made no move against us!" A Paladin! Asking the Cleric to step off and deal! That shit is gold. My relief was palatable, to me, when I set down the initiative die I had been rubbing briskly in my hands. 

The second time was completely unplanned. It was one of those times when you spontaneously react to the unexpected in the best possible ways. The Cleric was going down at the hands of the evil lich-lord's undead minions. It was curtains, even though the group had slain the lich-lord by a bold move of the Assassin. The Cleric proposed, in his moment of great victory and grim death, his last plea to his "god" in a very specific and  appropriate way. Highly dramatic. "Sacrifice # experience points," I responded. This shit isn't necessarily original, but timing is everything and this adjudication fell hard and hot if the collective "whooooa" around the table is to be believed.

I have yet to achieve this with my supers game. Any suggestions?

Cut through the Crack House Supers Tool

 Superheroes are going to end up in a crack house. They are just going to. For any number of reasons. The Superheroes in the current "house" game of the Vanishing Tower Press, Even Heroes Bleed, they eventually end up in a crack house. 

Question is, how not to make it boring? I am starting simple with a short list of denizens to be found in said crack house. I also map out a crack house, but you can procedurally generate your rooms as the session plays out. My list of important deniziens in the crack house looks like this;

OG,     Original Gangster, violence.

WH    Whore, helpful and smart.

A       Addict, random reaction.

S        Soldier, violence

M       Meat, the McGuffin.

Room descriptions are a must for a crack house, there are so many rich details accessible to everyone's imagination a GM who lays it on thick is going to start off the encounter as tense as you are going to get it. Here is the split-tabIe I put together; 

1. Wet Drywall        Only Support                       Wracking Cough

2. Urine                   Unstable stairs up/down    Creaking and snapping wood

3. Gasoline             Open Window                     Hysterical Laughter

4. Rotten Carpet     Stuck Door                           Low Whispering

5. Cat Litter             Table set with a meal          Cry for help

6. Burnt Electrical    Mean Dog                            A challenge  

Okay, I worked and expanded these lists a little bit and made your single result button to click below. Click on the link and get a quick description of squalor!

 

You Find in the Crack House