Remarks: Villains & Vigilantes

Here’s a bit of trivia: the name of my posse, The Damage Patrol, comes from a one-shot Villains & Vigilantes game I ran back in the early 1990s. It was the name the players came up with for their oddball super-team, which included a giant ninja and a killer clown. We never played that game again, but we kept the name for ourselves and, eventually, our show.

Ah, V&V. I will always have soft spots in my heart and my head for this game. Randomly-rolled super powers is up there with Classic Traveller‘s dying during character generation for pointless old school FAIL, but something I heartily embrace as part of my gaming heritage. Roll with it and move on. I’ve even used the V&V random powers tables for other games, to come up with villains and NPCs and sometimes to even help players stuck for a character concept. It’s an inspiration tool; if you take THIS power and THAT power and cram them together? Sometimes it leads to something incredible, interesting, and unique. Sometimes I just shake my head and allow the player to reroll.

This new edition isn’t drastically different from how I remember the original 1979 version, except it has  all new Jeff Dee artwork and a few minor tweaks.

You play yourself, having somehow gained superpowers. There are five attributes: Strength, Endurance, Agility, Intelligence and Charisma, rated 3 to 18. You don’t roll or point-build them; the gamemaster assigns them, based on where he thinks you rank. Potentially awkward, but you can easily house rule around it. Hmmm, what could we do to randomly generate numbers between 3 and 18? As I stated above, powers are randomly rolled. Roll 1d6+2 to determine how many powers you get. What I like about this is that you can randomly roll a completely lame character with 8 crappy powers, but you could just as easily roll Superman. If you roll a power more than once, you can reroll or pump it up. You do get to pick which table you roll on, so you can at least guide the types (Powers, Devices, Magic/Psionic Items, Skills, and Magic/Psionics) of powers.

To give you an idea, here’s a set of randomly rolled powers. Rolling 1d6+4 I got 4 powers. I stayed on the Powers table for the first three rolls: Illusions, Emotion Control, and Light Control. Those all work thematically for me; light and emotions are bi-products of projecting illusions. Since these all seemed like mental powers anyway, I rolled my last power on the Magic/Psionics table and got Telekinesis. Yeah, I could play this character.

You also have to roll a weakness. I rolled Prejudice, which according to the rules means that other heroes and society in general don’t accept that you’re a good guy. Hmm, given that the character manipulates emotions and tricks people with illusions, I can see that. I’d work with the gamemaster on a good back story. A trickster. Bwahahah.

After powers, you figure out other old school stuff like the base damage you do, carry capacity, hit points, and so on. The whole system is old school; roll a d20 against a target number to hit, increase in levels to increase your to hit bonus and saves, etc. Your powers never really change, but your skill at using them does. You level up based on Experience Points you gain from beating bad guys.

One major deviation from the familiar norm is Charisma Points. Based on your deeds, the gamemaster can give you Charisma Point for doing good deeds and becoming beloved of the people, or screwing up and having the citizens turn on you. Charisma Points aren’t your Charisma, directly; the guide a roll the player makes to see if the character’s Charisma increases or decreases.There are both Hit Points and Power Points, the latter working kind of like Fatigue, so the character can get knocked out rather than getting killed. Fits the genre.

About half the book is devoted to gamemaster stuff: designing adventures, creating NPCs and villains, dealing with law enforcement and other ramifications of superheroics. Not having my vintage copy of V&V handy, I don’t know how much, if any, of this section was re-written or updated. It’s pretty good stuff, basic and simple yet just enough. It’s got a very Silver Age mentality to it, in that the assumption is that the good guys are Good and will cooperate with the police. You really don’t need a lot of worldbuilding advice when things are as black and white as the world of Adam West’s Batman.

I’m glad V&V is available again, and I hope it finds an audience. Its mere existence makes me happy in a nostalgic way, and re-reading it to discover that it’s a very playable, albeit very old school, game makes me even happier.