A style that we’ve settled on for running Marvel games that I’ve found works great in a lot of situations and works without any extra rules or rulings is what I call Perpetual Action.

The standard style of play the book offers (which there is nothing wrong with; please take this as an extra toll in the toolbelt and not a critique of what currently exists!) is an alternation of action scenes and transition scenes.  When you have material prepped and in front of you, I think this works pretty well.  You have roughly formed containers of scenes and elements and dividing lines you can pour everything into.  It also works great for longer sessions.

My sessions tend to be 1-2 hours in length and run almost entirely improv (I will design datafiles that we need and I do use pull lists), so I am looking for maximum impact with minimal scaffolding.  What I do is  remove transition scenes as a separate constructs and make the entire session one big action scene.  When we start the game, we take a few moments to position everyone in the action, and then I give someone the initiative, and we hold the initiative order the rest of the game.  Players may start out at different areas and that’s fine. We run these separate scenes (some of which are embedded transition scenes) and go from the next scene to the next, like in a real comic. We move from panel to panel in essence, and keep a high paced game. Because of how Marvel treats conflict, you can run many different scenes in parallel without any major cognitive shift.

In our games, it’s become commonplace to have Kitty Pryde try to convince Captain America to join the pro-SHRA forces while Falcon chases Nightcrawler while  Iron Man and Spider-man interrupt a firefight between the Punisher and Colombian cartel enforcers. It’s high pace, high stakes, all-at-once gameplay that we really enjoy.

The first trick to this style is to focus on action.  It’s not that fun letting one character take a 20 minute turn while everyone else has to wait.  I want each player to state what he’s doing, “step into” the scene for any roleplaying, and then take some action.  Now when I say action, I don’t mean just punching someone in the face.  Action can mean talking, researching, flying a plane.  What we need is characters always doing something at the end of their actions.  Even dialogue should be action-oriented.  Even if the action automatically happens, you want to always be pushing the story forward.

The next tip I’d give:  Keep the individual character scenes short and snappy!  You don’t want to rush player, but it’s your main job as a Watcher in this style to keep the pace going and make sure that people aren’t waiting too long, especially when characters are spread out.  My guideline is I steer each scene into a critical moment and then  move to the next player from there. A character goes searching underground for a bomb that’s set to go off.  You have him roll against the doom pool to see if he can find it, and then when he does, you tell him:

“You finally find the bomb, but you don’t like what you’ve found with it…So, who goes next?”

handing over each player’s turn on a cliffhanger (where sensible or possible) is a great technique for building up snappy units of action that helps keep your game running.

Have you experimented with a style like this for your Marvel games? How did it work out?

I posted my pull list technique earlier in the week. Brian has his variation of the technique on his site, which you should also check out.  Here is the template I use in a google doc for my Marvel players.  It gives examples of what I’m looking for and then gives some space for players to share their scenes at the end.  I thought this would help explain pull lists a little better.  If you want to see an example pull list I’ve shared out our Marvel Mondays pull list so you can see it in use.

Anyway, enjoy the template preamble!

Pull Lists

So, here’s how the pull list works.  You give me a few (let’s say three per person) potential scenes/situations you’d like to see in our Marvel game. I will use these some of these scenes (probably not all) in running the Marvel game, and I will use some that I think are appropriate. As Watcher, I get to determine the exact content of the scene.

The best way to do this is to state something specific with no specific resolution, That gives us a start, and gives me room to work.

This is pretty good:

Mr. Fantastic gets into a fistfight with Dr. Doom.

it gets some evocative imagery going between two specific entities, but it doesn’t force a place or a time, and doesn’t try to say what happens.  What happens is the reason why we play the game, so don’t tell me that.

If you fail to use specific people that is great too, as it makes it easier for me to fit in.

The scale can be huge (“Galactus comes to eat the Earth….again”) but probably I’ll only use 1 of something like that, so keep that in mind.

Also, most important: Don’t worry about story!  Your scenes don’t have to fit into any given context.  The making of story is what we’re going to do at the table, not beforehand.  No plots! Situations only, please.

A plot looks like:

Dr Doom takes over New York, and the heroes must stop him.

A situation looks like:

Dr Doom invades New York

There’s no progression (“this happens, then that, then this”), only a starting incident which demands a response of some type (“This is happening!”)