[Torg] Jumping in Torg

[Benjamin Grant]

Authenticity is the first job of a GM.  If a GM fails at this, nothing else matters.

 

1)      To me, Torg is the playground of people who play more flexibly than effect-based gaming – as witnessed by its consistency and universality.

2)      A superhero genre is not a license to dump authenticity.  That’s what the Heroes TV show thought, and that’s why it has fallen so short of its potential.

3)      The material at the flash wiki link I provided clearly demonstrates that the Flash’s powers include momentum, not just speed.

4)      I have been playing rpg’s for 3 decades, so I believe I know them quite well too.  Nevertheless, what they have or have not done is probably more a factor of streamlining for playability.  In either case, I have demonstrated utterly that in reality, speed is critical to determining distance covered.

5)      Even if the Flash doesn’t build ramps, and even if his vertical jumping remains unchanged, his jump distance increases even without a ramp.  Consider – I, in real life, can jump and spend one second in the air.  Assuming that when the Flash’s feet leave the group he doesn’t slow way down due to authenticity, then 1 second – average human jumping hang time – is enough for him to travel truly legendary distance horizontally, even if he never gets more than 2 or 3 feet off of the ground.  The point being that even a weak human jump such as even I can do, as out of shape as I am, is more than even hang time to go very far when moving at the speeds that the Flash does.  And of course, the Flash is free to build ramps.

 

This is kind of the over point, some GMs – perhaps like you – want the player to pay extra points to be permitted to use a clever new trick.  Other GM’s – like me – want to reward the player’s ingenuity, assuming that the character already has the ability to accomplish the building of a ramp in the blink of an eye and has the materials.

 

Bottom line is if the player figures out a way to leverage his existing powers in a way that makes sense, I will not deny him the ability to do so simply because he hasn’t paid the points.  In my games the points, such as they are, buy *abilities* NOT *effects*.

 

Just like in Torg, where a 13 Intelligence is an *ability* that can be leveraged in countless ways, not a bundle of pre-determined effects outside of which one is not permitted to stray.

 

Which is why I love Torg. J

 

-Benn Grant

eFix Computer Consulting

 <mailto:benn at 4eFix.com> benn at 4eFix.com

603.283.6601

 

From: torg-bounces at justintimeadventures.com [mailto:torg-bounces at justintimeadventures.com] On Behalf Of Phil Dack
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 5:17 AM
To: torg at justintimeadventures.com
Subject: RE: [Torg] Jumping in Torg

 


--- On Thu, 11/12/08, Benjamin Grant <benn at 4efix.com> wrote:
From: Benjamin Grant <benn at 4efix.com>
> I am not a fan of an approach that only suits people who want to play 
> Batman and tells people who want to play the Flash that they are 
> out of luck.

If you'd said your issue was with games that require you to think of every possible effect in advance, or bog you down with detail, those are valid concerns. An effect-based game does not explicitly prohibit playing any particular character, even game-breakers such as Flash.

To return to the original jumping argument, however, I'll go back and summarise the reason I disagree with your approach. But your mileage clear varies:

1. To me, Torg is more effects-based than powers-based, so when you buy super-running all you do is the ability to run (specific game effect) faster. You benefit from any direct game correlations, such as collision damage, but do not benefit from other correlations that may exist in the real world but do not currently exist in the game. That's a judgement call, and yours differs. There's no right or wrong here.

2. I think bringing real world physics into a superhero game is just plain nuts. There is no way for any bipedal creature to accelerate itself speeds of 7,500 mph and survive without significant protection (eg a spaceship). Given this is the case, why should it follow that the laws of physics that says "great speed = great leaping ability" follow, when the laws that say "great speed = great friction", "great speed = great mass", "great speed = great energy requirement" clearly don't apply.

3. I don't know the canon particularly well, but I'm familiar with Flash and followed the recent reinvention of the JLA for several years, and he's never leapt in all the books I read IIRC. Equally, I'm not aware of Quicksilver being known for jumping about the place either. I always feel that superheroics as a game is highly genre-driven, and there's little in the genre that I know that suggests either of them should be able to leap great distances.

4. I know superhero rpgs very well, and I don't know of a single game that associates running speed with leaping. Many of these games do a good job of recreating the genre, and in all my years of reading, playing and contributing to forums, I've never previously come across the suggestion that leaping should be linked to speed. Not proof that it shouldn't, but it's circumstantial evidence in support of point 3.

And finally, a new point!

5. Superheroics is all about power stunts, as Travis or Smooge mentioned. I could definitely foresee a power stunt where a speedster ran up a ramp and leaped huge distances for a specific purpose. The difference here is that in the realms of a power stunt a superhero can achieve things that they would never otherwise be able to achieve (cheesy examples: think Batman producing a kryptonite arrow; superman flying backwards around the Earth to reverse time; Beast coming up with a way for Storm to conduct lightning through Wolverine's adamantine to turn him into a human electro-magnet). If Flash starts regularly building ramps using his superspeed, then it sounds to me like he's investing in a limited version of the Superjump power, and should buy it accordingly rather than trying to get it as a freebie.

Now all of that is simply how I would rule in my game. But I am a fearful GM who loves effect-based powers because of the awesome control they allow me to exert over my puny players. Or something like that.

Phil

 

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