Quote from: Glazer;423873There is one fairly serious omission in the Icon's rules, which I became aware of a couple of days ago while preparing to run a campaign using the system. One thing I do is to 'dry-run' new rules solo, so I get a feel for them and how they play – it also helps spot rules issues!

What my dry run quickly showed up is that there are no rules explaining how villains use determination, or even if they are allowed to. All the example villains have qualities, but have no determination points to tag them with. In addition, because only the players roll the dice, it's not clear how villains get any benefit out of tagging one of their qualities.

A trawl round the internet found a thread on rpgnet where the author implies that villains can spend determination, and that if they do so the points are given to the players. However, there is no explanation about how this works exactly, how many points of determination the villain has, or what effect tagging a villain's quality has in the game.

Hopefully the Villainomicon supplement (which should be out soon), will include official rules covering this issue or, even better, Adamant will publish errata explaining what should be done.

Until then, as a house rule, I've decided to give villains determination in the same manner as heroes (ie 6 – powers). Villains in a team with get a 'villain team pool' just as heroes do. I'll let the villains use their determination in the same manner as a hero, except that a 'determined effort' will apply a -2 modifier to a hero's reaction test per point spent. I won't be giving the points spent by villains to the heroes (if I did the points heroes spent would need to be given to the villain, which means they will never run out). However I will give the villain a determination point if the heroes compel one of the villain's challenges.

The intended effect is as you said...villain spends Determination, hero gets the point.

How many points do villains have by default? As many as you want to spend...because the heroes will get to use them right back.

Like with much of the book, you have to take the effects of the actions and reverse them. If a villain would normally add a +2 to the attack, then it would either be a +2 to the hero's difficulty to defend, or a -2 to their role, however you wish to play it.

Quote from: Spinachcat;423661How?

I want to hear more about this.  I like Fudge, but Fate and its Aspect play completely lost me.   Tagging Aspects feels like clicking icons to me.

1. 10-point range for ability scores. Both ICONS and Marvel FASERIP have this. This makes conversion dead simple btw- an ability score or power rating of Remarkable in FASERIP translates to a 6 in the ICONS scale.

2. The ability scores themselves: ICONS has Prowess, Coordination, Strength, Intellect, Awareness and Willpower.

Marvel has Fighting, Agility, Strength, Reason, Intuition and Psyche.

3. Random character generation.

4. One-roll resolution for quick and easy play.

Those are the biggies right off the top of my head.

I've never played FATE/Fudge, so I have no idea how much of their feel translates over.

As an old time FASERIP fan who has every book for that system, ICONS feels very, very similar to me and seems designed for easy translation between systems.

Quote from: Tommy Brownell;423874The intended effect is as you said...villain spends Determination, hero gets the point.

How many points do villains have by default? As many as you want to spend...because the heroes will get to use them right back.

Like with much of the book, you have to take the effects of the actions and reverse them. If a villain would normally add a +2 to the attack, then it would either be a +2 to the hero's difficulty to defend, or a -2 to their role, however you wish to play it.

I have a couple of issues with this solution (apart from the fact it's not described in the rulebook ).

First of all it breaks the 'determination point economy'; either there is little reason for the villain to spend points as the hero can 'spend them right back' to counter the effect, or the villain will always spend determination points to get the desired result and the heroes will always have lots of points to spend in their own turn. I hope that makes sense - I know it does to me!

More importantly, determined effort doesn't work as a flat modifier. You say what effect you want, then spend determination points to achieve it, after the dice are rolled. So, what happens if a villain tags a quality when attacking a hero and says "I want you to massively fail to block my attack" and the hero tags a quality to succeed? Say the hero rolls a 'fail', but not a massive one - who spends determination points? In what order? Can the hero use the determination points the villain spends to undo the effect they had?

Quote from: Vigilance;4238771. 10-point range for ability scores. Both ICONS and Marvel FASERIP have this. This makes conversion dead simple btw- an ability score or power rating of Remarkable in FASERIP translates to a 6 in the ICONS scale.

2. The ability scores themselves: ICONS has Prowess, Coordination, Strength, Intellect, Awareness and Willpower.

Marvel has Fighting, Agility, Strength, Reason, Intuition and Psyche.

That is very cool - I must search out my old MSH stuff straight away and try converting over some of the heroes and villains

Yes, that determination points for villains thing seems a bit off.  I missed that in my reading of the book.

I would probably just give important villains a set amount of determination points, and the villain spending it would NOT go to the player except perhaps if the villain specifically used the point to compel a player's challenge or something.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Vigilance;423877As an old time FASERIP fan who has every book for that system, ICONS feels very, very similar to me and seems designed for easy translation between systems.

Very interesting!

As a FASERIP fan, is Icons your new supers game?  What are the pro/con of Icons vs. the Marvel RPG?

Quote from: Spinachcat;424044Very interesting!

As a FASERIP fan, is Icons your new supers game?  What are the pro/con of Icons vs. the Marvel RPG?

It is.

For me the main pros are its simplicity. I love fast resolution supers games, and ICONS is even more streamlined than FASERIP.

It's also dead simple to make a character, and using the character folio to create characters makes the prep time just about nil.

The folio also randomly generates characters with a push of a button. That's not normally my thing, but I recently used it for an adventure where a mysterious chemical was randomly mutating citizens, and I used all random characters for the adventure.

Hey guys.

The stupid stupid art.




I'm the stupid stupid artist.



I've gotten better at the stupid art thing, though.

Thanks for the thorough review, though -- Villainomicon is much better in the art regard.

Also, if you're interested in Kirby-esque art, my new ICONS Hero Pack is going to be retro-themed for the art style. It's gonna be Kirby-Crackle Goodness for ICONS!

Example:





I figure I'd necro the thread to give you some ICONS stuff to look at. The 3rd Hero Pack should be finished sometime in July, if all the slots, etc. are filled.

Dan (Alienmastermind)

Yeah, you took a bit of a beating about the art in this thread, Alienmastermind, but for my part it was certainly nothing personal.

Well, it's as harsh as some of the criticism for it have been. It's why Villainomicon and the rest of the stuff I've done looks FAR better, in my opinion.

Well, I assume that its not that you're a crappy artist, but that you were doing it in that style.  The question is whether that was your choice, or whether it was what you were ordered to do?

RPGPundit

It's what was asked of me, yeah. But I happened to like it while doing it. My goal was to stretch that style more into the Teen Titans / Young Justice look. (Which is what Villainomicon is bordering on in spots. )

Dan

Having seen most of Dan's ICONS work among various lines, he's got some stuff that's really rough, unfortunately, but some stuff that's frickin' great...(and makes me want to kick anyone who might have put a "muzzle" on him in some of the earlier work).

Dan is awesome. He's responsible for these two gems...

Now see, that style would have been far better for ICONS, in my opinion, assuming he can do it with more than just cheesecake.

RPGPundit