November 2025 – Mister Monster's Workshop

Indecesive superheroics

I am happy to report that I am over my Warhammer 40,000 obsession for now. So instead I am geting obsessive about Aberrant instead. Hey, I got to get my OCD on somehow.

For those who don’t know, and that may be a not insignificant number of people, Aberrant is one of the lesser known White Wolf games from the 90s, one of the ones that weren’t World of Darkness or Exalted. It’s a superhero game where one person in a million has “erupted” into a “nova” who can subconsciously manipulate the quantum energies of the universe, which in practice means that they develop superpowers like flight and nigh-invulnerability and we’re going to pretend that it makes sense Because Quantum. Oh, and though no one knows it yet, all novas are slowly mutating into mad, godlike mutants called aberrants who humanity will fight in a horrible cataclysmic war, because it’s just not White Wolf if your soul isn’t being slowly devoured by something.

Otherwise, the big schtick of Aberrant is that it tries to be semi-realistic with the existence of superpowers. Most people don’t in fact put on colourful costumes and run around fighting crime – some do, but they’re mostly employed by the government or the UN, and far more novas are out there getting cushy corporate jobs, hiring themselves out as mercenaries in Third World proxy wars, or using their super-charisma to become world-famous celebrities.

It’s all kind of interesting in theory, but the execution is a little half-hearted. For one thing, it has that problem White Wolf games frequently had whereby it wasn’t exactly clear what you were meant to do. In a regular superhero game you stop bank robberies, but this game is all about avoiding that kind of cliches, and that just raises the question of what you’re meant to do instead. There are all sorts of things you could conceivably do, but since they’re all presented as completely optional, they’re not especially well-supported. Which is a little like writing D&D but just describing the monsters and magic in general terms while mentioning in the passing that some people go looking for treasures in old ruins, but you totally don’t have to be among those if you don’t want to. It leaves the whole thing with a great deal of assembling required.

It’s also got a major case of the White Wolf metaplot problem. Now, for most of these games, I don’t think the metaplot was ever as much of a problem as people made it out to be – it provided you with some texture and ambience, but the scope of the game would likely be about intrigue within a single city or region anyway, so it was easy enough to stay away from it. Not so with Aberrant. Here, the metaplot is in your face all the time, with the fundamental unimportance of single characters (yes, even the incredibly overpowered ones!) constantly stressed. Oh, this nova is really into Quebec secessionism? Yeah, that’s a ridiculous non-issue that doesn’t even matter now, so I am honestly perplexed as to how I’m supposed to care about it in a setting where physics have been turned on their head.

And to add to the problem, the metaplot is really kind of… well… bad. Like the rest of the game, it seems to not know what to do with itself. Like, it revolves around the shiny happy UN agency Project Utopia using novas to turn the world into a shiny happy paradise. But it has also managed (somehow! Don’t get me started on how stupid that plot hook is…) to sterilise 100% of all novas without anyone noticing. But it also wants to create a peaceful, enlightened one world government. But it also imprisons unruly novas and vivisects them. But it has also all but eliminated crime and pollution. But it also keeps isolated wars brewing to get novas killed off at a steady rate. But…

I am getting whiplash just from thinking about it. Like, I think it’s meant to be a case of a shiny happy facade hiding a terrible secret, but the facade is so shiny and happy and the secret is so terrible that it’s impossible to take either one seriously. It doesn’t give you that nice White Wolf feeling of a flawed ideal that it is possible to champion or oppose – it gives you the feeling that the pro-Project Utopia parts were written by a raving Project Utopia fanboy and the anti-Project Utopia parts were written by a foaming-at-the-mouth Project Utopia hater. The one thing that stays the same between them is that anyone who disagrees is clearly some sort of idiot or reprobate. That’s not shades of grey, it’s black and white constantly switching places!

To make it work, I think you’d need to actually bone down in Project Utopia’s methods and figure out how, realistically, they would be flawed. Crime has been eliminated? Okay, whose civil liberties were trampled to make that happen? A unified world government? Yeah, because stripping away the national sovereignty of poorer places surely won’t lead to them getting exploited even harder by the richer ones! You could make it into a study of why superhero morality (which was, after all, originally intended for small boys, no matter how much latter-day geeks tried to graft mature sensibilities onto it) simply doesn’t work in the real world, why we have tradeoffs and compromises, That’d be really interesting.

But no, instead we get one character screaming “what’s your sperm count?!” at another.

All of which means that this is a game that needs some tender loving care. Which is, as it happens, my stock in trade…

Where I Read: Daggerheart (part six)

When we last left our hero, he was blowing his top over the pointlessness of money-counting in a game where nothing has a definite value. This time, we’ll tackle the actual weapons and armour setting. Will it redeem what came before? Time will tell.

First, though, there’s a page on “player best practices,” essentially finger-wagging pointers to how you should approach the game as a player. Okay, let’s take a look.

The first one is to embrace danger. Do not make the boring, safe choice, make the interesting but risky one. Eh, I don’t know about this. To some extent, it makes sense to emphasise that if you didn’t want to have an exciting life, you should have become a cobbler like your mom wanted you to instead. But the way this is phrased gives me less of a sense of “you’ve got to be in it to win it” than one of “stop thinking sensibly and walk into the obvious trap already!” I feel like that’s unreasonable – players should do what their characters would do, yes, but their characters can be assumed to want to survive, so you can’t let it break the game if they act prudently and with forethought.

The second one is “use your resources,” meaning to look at your character sheet, see what points you’ve got laying around, and actually spend them. Mmm, okay. I’m on the fence about this one. On the one hand, I kind of like meta-currencies and subsystems – they’re fun to work out how to make the most of. But on the other hand, I also know that there are a lot of people who absolutely can’t even with those things, who just want to make decisions based on the fictional situation and not bother with a bunch of fiddly mechanics. I also note that this is very much in keeping with the first practice – this is very much a game where you’re not supposed to immerse yourself, where you’re supposed to remember at all time that you’re telling a story. Which is… fine, certainly there is plenty of pitfalls on the opposite end of the spectrum, but it still feels symptomatic of how afraid this game is of actual emotional intensity. I am starting to conclude that “epic” means something very different to the designers than it does to me.

Third one, appropriately enough, to tell the story. Most of that I have no issue with – it’s about things like detailing aspects of the game world so that the GM doesn’t have to, and letting them know if there is something in particular you want your character to get a chance to do. But then it goes back to lecturing about how you should make tactically suboptimal choices if that makes for a better story, and, uhm… Thing is, any story is about people trying to accomplish something, whether that’s saving the world or finding some treasure, and they’ll absolutely be trying to make the choices that brings them closer to that goal. They won’t always succeed, but then, players won’t always be tactically brilliant either, so it evens out. In fact, all this hectoring about “think of the story, you philistine, the story!” just feels to me like a fundamental insecurity about your own mechanics, because good mechanics create the incentives for telling a certain type of story.

The last practice is to discover your character over time. I… actually have no problem with that at all. Huh.

Levelling up! Levelling up happens when the GM says it does, but preferably no more commonly than once every third sessions or so, and it happens to every character at the same time. Level translates into tier, with level 1 being tier 1, levels 2-4 being tier 2, levels 5-7 being tier 3 and levels 8-10 being tier 4. Every time you advance a tier, you increase your proficiency (which determines how many dice of damage you roll), and you get a new Experience. You can also only raise each core attribute once per tier, so a new tier means that you can get your minmaxing on some more.

In addition, you can choose a two of a number of other mechanical options to improve, like extra hit points, extra damage, more Stress, higher Evasion… All pretty basic stuff, but it seems to be intended to let you build your character in roughly the direction you want to. You also get the option to multiclass, in which case you get the foundation card of one of the new class’ subclasses and access to one of its domains.

When levelling up (not just when switching tiers), you also increase your damage threshold by one and you get to pick a new domain card at your current level or lower. You may also, if you like, switch out one of your existing domain cards for another one of equal level or lower. Okay, nice touch, makes it harder to get stuck with suboptimal builds.

Inventory! You can only use weapons and armour that you have equipped, and you can only carry two weapons (and no armour) in addition to what you have equipped. You can switch weapons in mid-fight by taking Stress. Weapons can be “primary” and “secondary” which seems to be mostly about which one you hold in your dominant hand – a shield is a “secondary” weapon, for instance. You can attack with either weapon if you have two equipped, and some secondary weapons also give extra perks.

You can also throw weapons, in which case you make a regular attack with them using Finesse, and do damage upon hit. After that you can’t attack with that weapon again until you reclaim it. Uhm, duh? That should go without saying – I recall something about “rulings, not rules” quite early on, and I’m pretty sure that most GMs can figure out that you can’t hit people with a sword that you just flung away…

There are some notes on what different stats of a weapons means, nothing terribly surprising there. The only thing I’d note is that there’s a distinction between physical and magical damage, and some enemies may be resistant or immune to one or the other.

Armour – okay, let’s see if we can get some clarity here. Armour comes with a base score, which determines how many armour boxes you get in it, and two base thresholds, which determine whether a hit inflicts 1, 2, or 3 hit points on you upon taking damage. When you’re hit, you can also mark an armour box to reduce that amount by one. Okay, that’s… a little finicky, but I guess it’s straightforward enough.

If you’re wearing no armour at all, your damage thresholds are correspondingly low – anything that inflicts as much damage as your level takes away 2 hit points and anything that inflicts as much damage as twice your level takes away 3. And of course you have no armour boxes at all.

There’s a note that you can reflavour armour as you like – a wizard might wear heavy armour, for instance, but it’ll actually be a variety of protective rings and amulets, and the reason why he can’t move around as fast in it is that he’s always preoccupied with maintaining the magic. Fair enough.

Weapons are listed in tiers. I’m not sure if there is any rules significance to those, or if they’re just guidelines for when the GM should leave some of them around? Either way, there is a variety of magical ones of every tier, but at least on the lower tiers the magical ones mostly differ in what stat you use to attack with them, though there are some exceptions like the Returning Blade, that returns to your hand if you throw it. Higher up, among a ton of weapons that are just the lower-tier ones with “Improved” or “Advanced” in front of the name, there are also things like the Ego Blade, which can only be used by characters with a Presence stat of 0 or lower. Heh.

Blackpowder weapons are a thing, they require you to mark Stress to reload them after every shot.

Then there is a section on combat wheelchairs – nope, nope, not touching that with a ten-foot pole – and after that it goes into secondary weapons. A lot of it is simple stuff like shields (add to armour score) and short blades (add to damage of the primary weapon), but there are also some standouts like whips (can be used to force every enemy to back away from you) and grapplers (which can be used to pull enemies close).

Armour, finally, is pretty much what we just described – they have a static threshold and a depletable number of boxes, and the heavier ones give you penalties to evasion. Higher-tier armour seems to mostly be magical and have some special widgets associated with it, though I’d kind of wish it described how it works. Like, Rosewild Armour lets you mark an armour box instead of spending Hope, so does that mean that Rosewild Armour… steels your resolve in some way? That might be nice and flavourful if it was actually commented on. You know, like it would be in a game that was actually all about the story, man, where you weren’t supposed to care about those boring mechanical bits.

I mean, this is really what it comes down to, and why I am growing to hate this game with a considerable passion. It’s not mechanics-focused or narrative-focused, it’s got mechanics and narrative forcibly kept apart to keep the one from inconveniencing the other in any way. It’s not a single game, it’s two different games that you’re meant to play at the same time! Insofar as there is a mission statement here, it seems to be the exact opposite to the sort of down-in-the-dirt, zero-narrative, let-the-dice-tell-the-story dungeon-crawler that crusty grognards tend to espouse.

And in fact, I think that might, in a final analysis, be what the writers mean with “epic.” They don’t mean “sweeping and mythic with high stakes,” which is what I naively assumed back in part one. They just mean “absolutely not in any way gritty or realistic.” And while I don’t always want my games gritty and realistic, any game – or any other form of expression, really – that defines itself solely as being “not that, ew!” is pretty much doomed to suck.

Grimdark puttering

No major progress on anything important this week – I’ve been two steps away from a nervous breakdown most of the time. Still, puttering around on this and that has, surprisingly, gotten me most of the way through outlining Rank 5 of the Dark Heresy port. And that’s kind of neat, because Rank 5 is honestly where the game actually starts to happen. That’s when you get to play around with power swords and big-boy psychic powers and cybernetic implants that lets you levitate.

The entire first half of the game is you working your way up from “Imperial Guard draftee” or “underhive scum” to actually becoming one of the people the setting tends to really focus on. Which makes senes in theory – zero to hero is a thing for a reason, right? The problem is that it cuts you off from most of the source material – not all of it, by any means, there is the occasional piece of media that follows the people way down on the ground, but still, the pickings there are a bit slim. And I think the game designers did realise that, since they went on to release special rules for playing as an Inquisitor (even if they mostly amounted to, “just start by spending a gazillion points of XP”) and all the other games in the line were about being some kind of badass.

I don’t know. I guess I’m not that much of a fan of zero-to-hero in general. It can be cool if you’re playing a really long campaign, but most campaigns don’t last for years of real life – whatever level you start on, you’re probably not going to be moving that far from it, so I think it makes sense to put at least a decent amount of cool stuff on it.

I’m kind of looking forward to starting to adapt the other games in the series, because there I’ll find out if the system I’ve worked out can be adjusted to higher power levels and plenty of authority. That’s honestly what I enjoy running more – not games where the players are all-powerful or anything, but games where they have juuuuust enough power to get to make demoralising hard decisions. Being powerless means freedom from responsibility, and as my players could tell you (usually with a lot of long-suffering sighs), I do so love to inflict responsibility on them.

In other news, today’s Mummy: the Resurrection session went well. It was the thirtieth one in the campaign, proving that sometimes they really do go on for a long time (so it’s kind of a shame that this is a system where character progression is a lot more plot-dependent and thus the players still aren’t that far from where they started out). It’s odd, it’s a pretty obscure and unloved game running on a glorified set of house rules, but somehow it just clicked. I kind of feel like I should change to a different campaign soon, because Lord knows there are plenty of other games I want to try, but at the same time, it seems a shame to stop when it’s going so well. Oh well, we’ll see.