Weekly Games: M&M

Well, last night was the (eventual) continuation of my "weekly" Mutants & Masterminds game. It got put off last week thanks to a last-minute change of plans on my part, involving my wife and I, both our cars, and my mother-in-law.

Thankfully the two weeks have given me the opportunity to think a little about the current plotline.

It was originally planned to be a brief side-step from the core campaign plot involving the sinister Zodiac Group, but, as ever, the GM took an idea and ran with it. This now has the potential to turn into a full-blown adventure, rather than a brief aside. Not that I intend to be at all bothered, though if my players complain, I'll have to take steps.

Last night was a wonderful talky session, no action at all, but a few conflict resolution rolls were needed (mostly Notice Checks) to see if things would be easy or hard.

As a recap, the teaching and support staff of Claremont Academy (in fact, every adult working there who is over the age of 20) have vanished! The pupils have called in outside help, because they want to keep things quiet and out of the press ( and that's because they don't really want it publicly known that they're all super-powered). So, they got in touch with the PCs who have gone over to see what they can learn.

From the OOC comments made, my plans are working quite well. There are a couple of suspicious characters at the school, and so far everyone is managing to treat the information they've been given the right way. Heck, they even managed to make one of the suspects cry. (I would say "like a girl", but she is a girl, so that would be a little pointless.)

The session was characterised by a few things I love about the online gameplay: Clear and concise communication between players, the ability of the GM to pass secret information to specific players, and a very clear demarcation between IC info and OOC info.

Problems that occured were pretty minimal, from my end - there was a small hiccough when I misread my map of the Academy's layout and described the wrong building as the PCs destination, and I misread the intent of one of the players who arrived after everyone else and mildly messed it up - neither of those were insurmountable issues, and neither actually caused any problems for anyone.

The party is starting to settle down into their personalities and roles, and it's a lot of fun to see certain people acting brashly, others being reconciliatory, others taking the lead - that sort of thing only comes to the fore in "talky" sessions, and it's truly wonderful to see.

I'm looking forward to this plotline (short or long), for a number of reasons - firstly is that it's my first attempt at a significant plot-twist in my M&M game (significant isn't the same thing as important). Secondly, I'm hoping to instill a sense of achievement - I can't say with what, because it will give away a major plot point. Thirdly because one part of it actually falls under the "moral ambiguity" issue, and I'm curious as to how the players choose to deal with that.

More on that as the plot develops.

That's it from me, for now - more coming after Wednesday (I hope), when I've had my D&D game.