Campaign Analysis: Game Play

         My overall view of the game was to design a world which had enough stuff going on that it would "run itself". Rather than coming up with adventures for the players, I would simply drop them in and say "do whatever you want". Because of the depth of creation, whatever they did would presumably lead to results which were interesting to play out.

         When the campaign rolled around, I decided to choose an initial to push the PC's together and get them introduced. This was certainly a dramatic nod -- the campaign was before I had a good concept of party planning, otherwise I might have let the players determine for themselves what held them together and how they started off.

         Frankly, I had no idea what interested them -- I had been designing this stuff not as plot hooks per se, but rather as ongoing action and conflict between the NPC's. My premise was such that there was lots of interesting stuff going on, primarily because there were 70+ NPC's with similar powers as the PC's who were also poking about, with their own projects, goals, etc.

         It was not a perfectly realistic campaign. There was a bunch of hand-waving explanation of how superpowers worked (a bit like FTL in a sci-fi game). Aside from the powers and the whole backstory to them, I had two main differences from the real world:

• Traumatic damage in people was less likely to lead to death. This was an integrated part of the world, done primarily because I needed both PC and NPC paranormals to be a bit more survivable or they would be killed off too much (remember my "what if" included their power/influence). Now, in truth, I could have found a better in-game explanation, but I went with this because it matched the default HERO system which I was using.
• All the paranormals were given silly names, like Mobius. This was primarily just a mnemonic for the players. I found in the last game that none of the players could remember who Jerry Kaehler was, but with the mnemonic it was much easier. They remembered not only the power but also other aspects of his character.