Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying their holidays. A couple quick questions for those who may be around, and for the others when they return:

Do we need clarification on any game/house rules before we enter the PvP scene in a couple(ish) weeks? I've tried (as ever) to keep as close to the official game rules as is feasible over the last ~9 months, but I know there have been a few fuzzy things here and there. It'd be great to have any lingering questions or confusion resolved before the punches start flying.

I've made a small list of my own questions to ask on the Cortex/MHR Discord channel (great resource, since, y'know, the lead game designer himself is on it) and would be happy to take any player questions there as well. I'll post the responses here once I have them.

For that matter, does everyone have access to a copy of the MHR game book? (Oddly enough, I've only now just thought to ask.)

In reply to The Watcher (msg # 278):

Yeah, it'd be worth knowing what all you're doing differently.

One of the best and worst things about the Cortex/MHR rules is their malleability. We can fashion the technical aspects to what we want or what works best, but they can also be difficult to track and depend on when we want to do something. I don't know if we need a detailed accounting of all the possible rules variations, but maybe a note for the major ones or the parts that are different that come up most frequently. On the other hand, this group hasn't seemed so sensitive to any rules issues and that's seemed to work well so far. If it's all about the story then the rules are secondary, up to interpretation and whatever serves the Scene the best. If there's a concern though, maybe there could be a rules post or thread for variations and clarifications.

In reply to Daredevil (msg # 280):

You know, I ran this game for a year and a half thinking when when you rolled a 1 on a die, you added the whole die to the Doom Pool. The end of every mission was just a slog, and nobody noticed until the game was almost over.

Yes, I'm asking more in an attempt to anticipate anything that could possibly come up. I've yet to have any major quibbles from players with the rules, which probably says more about all of their willingness to be flexible than it does my being consistent. ;)

I'll create a PvP FAQ thread and announce it here when it's up.

Only recently did I come upon the rule for adding the whole die that rolled the 1 to the Doom Pool, instead of stepping up from a d6. I've considered it for my own game but it hasn't been time yet to have an action scene that can be run as a test. There are a few concessions to add in there, but it could work. I'd be curious to see how it was run in the another game. Do you have more details about how it ran in that game? How was the end a slog?

The PvP thread is great! A good start. It's a suitable place for optional rules as well as a refresher on some of the finer points. In a game that prides itself on its modularity and spontaneity, consistency can be a challenge. Thinking you're setting a precedent on any swerve of the rules can be nerve-racking. But it helps to have good, flexible, and forgiving players who are more concerned about the story and doing cool stuff together than picking apart the rules.

Thanks DD-- and for any who didn't see it yet, the PvP Guide is up. I intend to match players up myself in the coming weeks via PM (so as to provide some kind of structure to this thing as opposed to a total free-for-all). Stats will likely be the biggest determinant of who matches up with who, and players will be encouraged to get into the drama and have fun with it.

Basically, I was starting with hefty Doom Pools anyway-- it was an eXiles game-- and I'm not good at spending Doom to control the pacing and mix things up. (I'm old school, used to doing this manually.) End result, I was running honking big Doom Pools by the end of a Mission and anything I rolled the full pool against would simply fail-- so I started holding the dice back, which felt like fudging.

It occurs to me I should have been holding dice back all along anyway, so I had dice to spend to modify the roll.

I like to think I'm a good GM-- I am a damned good GM-- but I'm just not good with this system yet.

Hey, can I make a request? We all know the the argument is going to turn into a fight, because we want it to... but can we actually have the argument first? It's the part I'm looking forward to most.

@Mayhem Yes, I encourage it. :)

It'd be fun to hear a player's recap, but I could also throw it on Tigra if needed. (Who I just remembered is also a police officer somehow.)

FYI, I'm in the process of trying to change my RPoL user name to SacMan and apparently need to notify any games I'm in. We'll see if it goes through.

(The unwieldy "sacmarvelrpg" was chosen to give my old IRL players something easy to remember when they searched me to join my game... which, y'know, never actually happened...)

Not sure we're going to have much of a fight if everyone agrees on using the spell.

Far as I'm concerned, it's the better option: I don't want Carnage to suffer, I don't want him to be punished, I just want him gone. Trapped in Hell is way, way better for my purposes than merely rotting in Hell.

I picked my RPOL user name well before I thought I'd be on the site so much. If I knew I was going to do so much on here for so long I'd have given more thought to my name. I've just gotten used to it (as I have with various other sites I've given a dumb name to, including the site where I met my wife).

I'd be interested in that recap (why I initiated it). In game terms it would explain how we're all privy to everything that's been going on, even the stuff we weren't present for. It could also be interesting to see how anyone interprets the events that happened to them. It doesn't have to be long -- i.e., "Then Moon Knight explains what happened in his former base" -- but it could offer some great color to get the story through someone else's filter.

I'm sometimes blown away by everyones' posts and how true they are to the characters. The current discussion in the game has been a real treat to read for your Watcher.

Given the current near-consensus among the players on what to do with Kasady, maybe the PvP scene could come later. I'm not counting it out, but wouldn't want to foist it on everyone when they seem to be on the same page. (Though I wonder what Domino thinks of the group's plan?)

I'll leave it open a while longer to any additional discussion (and maybe some bonus XP for a player who gives a really good recap of events), and then we'll see where the villains ended up.

Last week was exhausting. Planning to have a new game post up later today.

It's been a big month, these last weeks.
Sorry for my abstinence:  but Domino is somewhat distracted at the moment anyway.  She'd not the talkative type.

Apologies for the slow pace recently. Work has had me burned out, but I hope the abundance of new posts today makes up for it.

With these new posts, I've done my best to set the stage for the climax of this adventure of ours. Normally I try to hold myself to no more than ~3 Watcher posts in a row (to keep things from turning into a puppet show) but in this case there was a lot to resolve. I may have forgotten just how many characters showed up in this story over the last ~10 months! I hope everyone enjoys the callbacks to some earlier things in the campaign, as well as maybe clearing up some loose ends. There's still a good 2-3 months left in this thing, and we might yet swing that PvP scene discussed earlier if everything falls into place.

I still need to stat up "King Carnage," as I'm calling him, but he'll be in the Watcher Datafiles thread soon. Assume the Predator healed any of his lingering stress/trauma, as Tigra did for the players.

Thanks all for your continued participation, and see you in the finale!

Ugh. Sorry about my irritation with the dice roller.

I feel ya. I let Venom talk himself a big game and his dice chuckle behind his back.

This message was deleted by the player at 08:41, Tue 26 Jan 2021.

I've been assuming that Mayhem was the version from the early '90s:

She even has the Cloak & Dagger connection. But now I realize you're the symbiote version:

I know the latter a lot less (which is considerable since I barely know the former), but that's a much better use for the name. I've been waiting to figure that out. (Thanks, Google!)

No need to revise, but I wasn't trying to make Carnage shoot himself in the face... I was just trying to do that trick myself, and I didn't want to create spikes out of my own precious body mass while I still had three perfectly good ones sticking through my torso.

In reply to Mayhem (msg # 300):

@Mayhem Ah yes, I just re-read it. I seem to have misunderstood-- appreciate your pointing it out.

Re: the latest game developments, does anyone need Watcher assistance? We have 5 players with actions still on the table, so just checking everyones' status.

I'll cop to it, I've let quite some time go by without any updates here. I've joined another game on RPoL that's a lot of fun, and was invited to join a D&D 5e campaign with Tigra and a few co-workers over Zoom recently. So diving into those games has taken up some of my bandwidth that would otherwise be spent on Marvel Mania. But I haven't forgotten about our adventure here, especially now that we're in the climax. I'm issuing a last call for any dice actions from the remaining players in the Status Tracker, and I'll plan on having a new post up over the weekend.