Questions about Doug's World

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, I'm going to answer this in a metafictional way, and I hope that it makes some sense. What we've got is classic comic book rubber science. Every power in V&V can be found as a device, which means that yes, we've got blasters of all descriptions, particle weapons, ice guns, you name it. Much of it has been around for a generation or more. Not all of it is mass-produced, though -- isolated researchers/mutant geniuses/mad scientists/goofy gadgeteers frequently produce unique devices far above the local tech level. (I know I wrote a little bit about that somewhere in DW2.) Some of it can get reproduced, and goes into the world tech pool. Some of it just seems to work automagically, with no real explanation (at least in terms of current theory and practice). Such devices are subject to considerable research, both magical and mundane, to determine their operating principles. Sometimes such research is even successful. The DW version of the UN/Warriors have a warehouse chock full of toys taken off supervillains which have so-far proven resistant to analysis and replication. When he was at home, Doug sometimes puttered around there.
To answer your specific questions: Railguns, yes. They're current technology for us in the real world. Plasma cannons? Several varieties, depending how you generate your plasma. Lasers? Oh yeah. Very genre. Bomb tech? V&V has silly rules for bombs, so we don't use them, and no one in the campaign has given much thought to'em. Case in point: atomic bombs do 2d100 points of damage. Which means a normal can throw himself on a nuke and completely smother its explosion almost 1/4 of the time -- and surivive! If it were to come up as a story point in DW, I'd probably extrapolate something I felt was reasonable but it's never been explored in the game world.
Computers? God, do we have computers. Quantum computing is bleeding edge stuff in the real world, so I'd presume it's a bit more mature in Warriors' World, but it's another area that no one's really explored. Almost certainly some of those gadgeteer-produced computing gizmos incorporate quantum computing, though.
Beyond that, well, there's a lot that gets handwaving in the game, and which I really didn't lay out in detail for the world when I started DW. But if you mix the usual tech of a super world with a bit of real-world sensibility, you can get a bit of an idea of where we are. The main thing for me when writing is to give the sense of a world that is a strange mix of familiar and unfamiliar; wildly uneven tech levels across different fields is part of that.

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Skitz Warriors Alpha]

Bob Wrote:
> To answer your specific questions: Railguns, yes. They're
> current technology for us in the real world. Plasma
> cannons? Several varieties, depending how you generate
> your plasma. Lasers? Oh yeah. Very genre.
Don't forget limited power armor and paralysis ray guns, standard issue for the "Normal" Warriors guards.
> Bomb tech? V&V has silly rules for bombs, so we don't use
> them, and no one in the campaign has given much thought
> to'em. Case in point: atomic bombs do 2d100 points of
> damage. Which means a normal can throw himself on a nuke
> and completely smother its explosion almost 1/4 of the
> time -- and surivive!
While those /are/ the rules from V&V, I've never used them as written: nukes do realistic levels of damage when I run them...
> If it were to come up as a story point in DW, I'd probably
> extrapolate something I felt was reasonable but it's never
> been explored in the game world.
Not exactly. Arcanum once hijacked two Boomers (that's ICBM carrying submarines, not some sort of anime thingy) and held the world hostage for an improbable amount of money. As the Warriors came close to getting him, he launched the missiles and had they delivered the nukes, there would have been the expected consequences. (however, the nukes were off loaded from the missiles, Arcanum simply postponed the ransom into smaller chunks by loading the missiles with leaflets informing the world that he was now a nuclear power.)
The other time it came up, a cyborg character, who could detonate the nuclear power packs in his body, got bored with the game and childishly declared that he'd exit the game by detonating his nuke. The rest of the team stayed solidly in character and didn't suspect a thing. As GM, I decided that this was No Good(tm) and in game, the fabric of Space/Time opened, the Hand-of-the-GM envolped the cyborg, therre was a muffled "whump" and then the hand and the cyborg exited the scene.

Computers? God, do we have computers. Quantum computing is bleeding edge stuff in the real world, so I'd presume it's a bit more mature in Warriors' World, but it's another area that no one's really explored. Almost certainly some of those gadgeteer-produced computing gizmos incorporate quantum computing, though.
Beyond that, well, there's a lot that gets handwaving in the game, and which I really didn't lay out in detail for the world when I started DW. But if you mix the usual tech of a super world with a bit of real-world sensibility, you can get a bit of an idea of where we are. The main thing for me when writing is to give the sense of a world that is a strange mix of familiar and unfamiliar; wildly uneven tech levels across different fields is part of that.

[Bob Schroeck]

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Arcanum once hijacked two Boomers (that's ICBM carrying submarines, not some sort of anime thingy) and held the world hostage for an improbable amount of money

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Right, I had forgotten that, as it's borderline before my time.

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cyborg character, who could detonate the nuclear power packs in his body, got bored with the game and childishly declared that he'd exit the game by detonating his nuke

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Geeze, I'd forgotten that, too, and I was there for that one. Gotta love those Beta team members, always up to some wacky stunt. Lach (spelling? I don't think in 17 years I've ever seen his name written down) certainly had a low threshold of boredom in those days; he seems a little better now.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Trodamus]

You know, reading this makes a guy who's trying to make his own superhero world (for collaborative progressive writing purposes) feel like he's just handed in a half-page of handwritten scrawl to your twenty-page discourse.
My friend and I have a few pretty cool, unique ideas here and there, but it's no where near the level of detail shown here. Damn. A few points raised here are a tad too logical for me to ignore, such as the banning of metahumans in the military. I suddenly realize that no one would be willing to fight a war where Super Bomber Man could concievably fly over their heads, shirk off bullets, and blow them to smitherines....
Certainly, an inspriation to do more with a handful of ideas...

[drakensis]

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A few points raised here are a tad too logical for me to ignore, such as the banning of metahumans in the military. I suddenly realize that no one would be willing to fight a war where Super Bomber Man could concievably fly over their heads, shirk off bullets, and blow them to smitherines....

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Not necessarily. If you get chance, look at the concept of Godlike, a RPG where 'Talents' are drafted into various armed forces (it's set in WWII). There are a lot of possibilities for world building, so use the one syou want. I find the Champions book from Hero Games to be very useful for world building purposes because it's presented as a series of questions with a discussion of possile answers and their likely consequences.
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[Trodamus]

Aye, and upon discussing the notion with a friend of mine, I almost found it increasingly illogical, or at least, in the framework of the world we've etched out. Of course, logic has never played too large a role in any sort of comic-book-spandex-clad-superhero continuity.
I think I might browse a few of the tomes you've mentioned, you know, as a purely professional interest

[zojojojo]

The other thing not to overlook is that (correct me if I'm wrong, Bob/Skitz/other) a) Bob does this kind of thing professionally, b) it's based on an existing world, so it's not created whole cloth, and c) they've had quite a few years to develop it... I rather doubt the original GM sat down and wrote a monograph of the V&V World as Seen In Warriors Alpha...

I'd say, start with a base system and add your ideas to modify it to your needs... and as time goes on, you'll find wrinkles and iron them out. Don't expect it to spring forth fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus...

-Z, Post-reader at Medium
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If architects built buildings the way programmers write programms, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

[Bob Schroeck]

You're right, Zojo. a) I am a professional writer, both game and other. I even have a membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to prove it! b) and c) Warriors' World is a V&V campaign which has been running more or less continuously (it's been on a bit of a hiatus for the last couple of years) since the early 1980s and so has a lot of history behind it.
It's the product of, geeze, I'd say at least six different GMs minimum, probably more when you factor in the branch campaigns; the current group has none of the original players left in it -- the last one drifted out of the group a few years back. The original GM, I am told by Kat and Joe, was a fellow by the name of Joel Steiglitz, who can still be found on the Net in various roleplaying forums. (I've never contacted him, as I never knew him, and I doubt he even knows that GURPS IST is based on one of his own campaign worlds.) When he created the campaign, he certainly didn't have the world-spanning setting we have now in mind -- the Warriors started as a little local team. It wasn't until a little while before I joined the game, circa 1985 or 1986, that the Warriors were contracted by the UN as their super-police when that august body grew concerned about the escalation of nuclear weapons and metahuman militaries, and sought to re-stabilize the world situation. By that time Joel and many of the other original players were gone, and a second generation had taken over the campaign and started leaving their mark on it; the only original player left was a fellow by the name of Frank Lazar, who stayed with the game all the way until the middle 1990s.
The campaign branched, with Alpha (London) remaining with the core group at Rutgers, and Beta (Tokyo) being (mostly) played at Stevens Institute in Hoboken; Delta (Sinai Peninsula) had a very brief incarnation around 1987, and there are even some notes in the big GM notebook for a Gamma branch, but no one seems to remember actually playing it, or even much about it. (Historical note: The inaugural adventure for Delta turned into my contribution to GURPS Supers Adventures, if anyone cares.)
Anyway, GMship for the branch games was more or less steady, but Alpha rotated through the members as first classes and later work allowed, and each of us have added a little bit of new material to the world. What we have now would certainly be unrecognizable to Joel and whoever else played in its earliest incarnations, although Kat and Helen's characters (and maybe Joe's) might well be recognizable to them. I doubt Joel could have envisioned where things would go when he first started the game twenty or so years ago...

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Ace Dreamer]

Did the "Omega" team appear at any point? It is the sort of thing that might have tempted a few GMs. [grin]
I think Marvel did this to "Alpha Flight" some while ago.
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind

[Skitz Warriors Alpha]

> Did the "Omega" team appear at any point? It is the sort of
> thing that might have tempted a few GMs. [grin]
Sort of. The issue that lead to the ban on National Super Teams involved a sort of Omega team from the far future (though the warriors had ceased to exist by that point). In that alternate future, there was a war that blossemed into WWIII and while the Warriors worked hard to avert this war, they were largely neutralized by the various National Super Teams. The war was, of course, not decisive, and when peace had settled, brought on by the massive destruction and world wide famine, the seeds for the next war already sewn. WWIV finally wiped out tradional humanity entirely. Only a handfull of supers remained on the largely poisoned and ruined earth. They arragned to send an emmisary back in time to a point where it was thought that something could be done to stop this chain of events.
The result: a ban on national super teams and a econdary creation of a super team tasked with perfoming the legitimate jobs of those banned teams, that reported directly to the security council. Heroes Amalgamated for National Defence; the HAND of the UN found themselves in competition with the Warriors for a time. They were hamstung by forced international integration, the usual political infighting by the members of the sucurity council, and the widespread flaunting of the national super team ban.
During the period where Arcanum had hijacked two nuclear submarines, the fact that the day was saved, not by the HAND of the UN, but by Warriors Beta, a relatively new group, and the United States Supers Team (which had simply gone into the black rather than dissolve), both of whom comperted themselves very well, the US supers fighting alongside the freed Soviet submariners shaped much of the debate that National super teams were not necessarilly a bad idea, which deflated most if not all support for the bans and the HAND. The Bans were lifted shorthly thereafter, though, like most beuracracies, the idea has stuck around and resurfaced from time to time.
Obviously in Doug's world, the Bans were never lifted, nor were they in the IST world.
However, not all is bad for our timetraveling super: the end time for WWIII has come and gone and we're still here, so he must have done something right.

Skitz

[Bob Schroeck]

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Obviously in Doug's world, the Bans were never lifted, nor were they in the IST world.

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The thing about the Bans, John (and we've had this discussion before), is that not all of us in the group actually remember them being lifted! We have no doubt that that's what happened in the wake of that adventure, but we kept going (in and out of game context) for a long time as though they were in place. The matter of the French Superteam, for example, was an adventure we played out only a few years ago -- it was one of the last sessions before we went on hiatus -- and whoever the GM was for that (Helen? Kat? Who was before Joe and me, not counting the Mont-St.-Michel adventure Peggy and Helen ran? I can't recall) certainly thought that they were still active, as that was the whole point of the "illegal" national team -- to flout the Bans.
The DW version of Warriors' World certainly does have the Bans still intact and enforced, but that's more a consequence of my not remembering anything about them being lifted than an intentional "design decision". Of course, the DWWW varies from the campaign world in a lot of other details, so what's one more?
And the IST world is another beast entirely, being at best a strange reflection of Warriors' World. The last common point of history between the two is the arrival of the Seeders hundreds of thousands of years BC, and even then, we have the campaign version of the Seeders (symbiotic intelligent viruses) and the IST version of the Seeders (Precursor-level eco-engineers who create intelligent races as a hobby or an obsession). The Edicts of 1987 are much the same as the Bans, but how they got there and what they did afterwards was quite different from WW in the same timespan.

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However, not all is bad for our timetraveling super: the end time for WWIII has come and gone and we're still here, so he must have done something right.

---

Of course, as a result, he's stuck in a world nothing like the one he's familiar with. Not that it isn't unpleasant, but he doesn't really have an anchor here and he's been drifting a bit trying to find a place and purpose now that he's achieved his goal. (Thus sayeth the GM, since you raised the issue about him being a part of that metahuman political action group at the last session I ran.)
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Skitz Warriors Alpha]

Bob Wrote:
> The thing about the Bans, John (and we've had this
> discussion before), is that not all of us in the group actually
> remember them being lifted! We have no doubt that that's
> what happened in the wake of that adventure, but we kept
> going (in and out of game context) for a long time as
> though they were in place.
Which is why my ret-con of sating that the idea, while once abandoned, continues to resurface and be flirted with. AFAIK, pretty much every nation keeps their own super team. I certanly keep the US super team as available for adventures. Meanwhile the HAND is IIRC, basically defunct.
> The matter of the French Superteam, for example, was an
> adventure we played out only a few years ago -- it was
> one of the last sessions before we went on hiatus -- and
> whoever the GM was for that (Helen? Kat? Who was before
> Joe and me, not counting the Mont-St.-Michel adventure
> Peggy and Helen ran? I can't recall) certainly thought that
> they were still active, as that was the whole point of
> the "illegal" national team -- to flout the Bans.
Sure that wasn't Frank? The political situation took a rather drastic turn during the Frank years (the UN was working to regin in the Warriors during a lot of this). I could see a revival of the Bans happening during this time, and frankly, the political wrangling is the sort of thing most of find to be quite a bore, so it's not unreasonable to say that wew missed it. I know that likely the Warriors were *far* more concerned with what exactly happened with Arcanum and the Nukes than the HAND, who we considered to be something of a bad joke. And Panther, Helens character, who might have remembered the most of the issue was mostly concerned with the fact that she was terrified that Arcanum was out to get her personally for ripping his larynx out.

Skitz

[Bob Schroeck]

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Which is why my ret-con of sating that the idea, while once abandoned, continues to resurface and be flirted with.

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Ah, okay, I see now.

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AFAIK, pretty much every nation keeps their own super team.

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We ought to at least generate capsule descriptions of the major teams, then, and stash'em in the GM's book, just for quick reference...

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Meanwhile the HAND is IIRC, basically defunct.

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Well, yes, that I remembered. Why else do you think I had what's-his-name hanging out with that new politically-active group?

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Sure that wasn't Frank?

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Could've been. It certainly has the right feel for his tenure.

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And Panther, Helens character, who might have remembered the most of the issue was mostly concerned with the fact that she was terrified that Arcanum was out to get her personally for ripping his larynx out.

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Footnote for all our listeners out there in radioland -- Panther is Helen's Beta character, a quasiferal half-human half-cat (not a shifter like Kat, but a hybrid). She noted that the loyal supers that Arcanum's Servant Factor virus created were commanded by voice, in fact specifically programmed to respond only to Arcanum's voice.
So in the middle of one combat, she had a moment of opportunity and deliberately ripped out his throat.
He didn't die, but the damage permanently altered his voice -- he had to get a mechanical voicebox as a replacement. And probably had to re-infect all his servants with a variation on his original virus which would reprogram them to his new voice.
Until he personally left the planet, Panther was in constant fear of a reprisal of some sort.

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Skitz Warriors Alpha]

Bob Wrote:
> Not that it isn't unpleasant,
Hmm, by my count that's a triple negative on "pleasant".
Did you really mean that Mr. Professional Author, Sir?

Skitz

[Skitz Warriors Alpha]

Bob Wrote:
> Footnote for all our listeners out there in radioland --
> Panther is Helen's Beta character, a quasiferal half-human
> half-cat (not a shifter like Kat, but a hybrid). She noted
> that the loyal supers that Arcanum's Servant Factor virus
> created were commanded by voice, in fact specifically
> programmed to respond only to Arcanum's voice.
Although I think that Panther was unaware of that detail, she was ostensibly just looking to take out the leader ASAP (this _also_ was during the incident where Arcanum had hijacked the Nuke subs) due to the gravity of the situation, but I think that she might have been applying a bit of player knowledge, being the creator of Arcanum up to that point.
> So in the middle of one combat, she had a moment of
> opportunity and deliberately ripped out his throat.
*BAMF* in, claw past hasty defences, and sink teeth into throat: take a bite and *BAMF* gone. (The Beta team had been dealing with a mage who was creating gates into this world for shared realities, and as a result of one of those encounters, she gained a few powers from a famous comic book character...)
> He didn't die, but the damage permanently altered his
> voice -- he had to get a mechanical voicebox as a
> replacement. And probably had to re-infect all his servants
> with a variation on his original virus which would reprogram
> them to his new voice.
In meantime, he doubtless had to rely on the skills of his few loyal servants to keep the rest in line.
> Until he personally left the planet, Panther was in constant
> fear of a reprisal of some sort.
Panther, who already had finely honed Jungle sense to alert her of danger, also got a number of other precognitive senses that drastically heightened her ability to sense danger: I doubt she's super comfortable even with Arcanum off-planet.

Skitz

[Bob Schroeck]

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Did you really mean that Mr. Professional Author, Sir?

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Why, yes, yes I did. It's not like it's a structure, as convoluted as it gets, that's never been used before...
(Yeah, I know you were just ragging on me. I still get defensive on the topic.)

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Bob Schroeck]

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but I think that she might have been applying a bit of player knowledge, being the creator of Arcanum up to that point.

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Gee, ya think? Helen's a good enough player that she can separate player and character knowledge; but still, you've got to wonder in cases like this...

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(The Beta team had been dealing with a mage who was creating gates into this world for shared realities, and as a result of one of those encounters, she gained a few powers from a famous comic book character...)

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This was, for those who have been keeping score, the same incident which spawned "Anakin" into one of the subcampaigns, and created the hero "Toon", about whom I think I've spoken here, among other weirdities.

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In meantime, he doubtless had to rely on the skills of his few loyal servants to keep the rest in line.

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Seems reasonable, yes.

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Panther, who already had finely honed Jungle sense to alert her of danger, also got a number of other precognitive senses that drastically heightened her ability to sense danger: I doubt she's super comfortable even with Arcanum off-planet.

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Again, for the readers, we used to joke that Panther's danger sense would go off, and she'd say something like, "We're going to get attacked! Two weeks from Thursday!"


-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.