Gandy Games

Trope: Never Fight Yourself

I just wanted to comment briefly on something I saw last night that touches on a supers trope. It’s not really relevant to Iconography, per se, which is why I’ve labeled the post differently.

There comes a time in many stories when a character must fight themselves. Sometimes it’s a clone, sometimes it’s a robot duplicate, sometimes it’s an illusory form of the negative side of your personality. Whatever it is, it’s hard to fight, because it’s you. It knows all your moves, it knows how you think, it knows what you’re going to do.

This is much more interesting when this happens to a team. Same reasons, same problems. The answer to the team problem, at least, is this:

Never fight yourself.

In most team stories, the characters are trounced within an inch of their lives by their direct dopplegangers, before our heroes realize they need to switch up and face off against someone else’s evil twin. Suddenly, the team turns the tide and victory is theirs. (It can even be a bit frightening, insofar as it demonstrates how effective their powers and abilities are against the weaknesses of their teammates, but that’s another trope for another time.)

What instigated this post was the Leverage season 1 finale, wherein the team didn’t find themselves up against their dopplegangers, but their individual problems couldn’t be solved with their own specialty. Instead, each one needed to think like another member of their team, in order to prevail. It was a nice twist on an old trope.

I promise I’m working on a new post about Iconography, but life has been busy the last few weeks. More soon.

Iconography: Happy Birthday, Fred!

Back in January of this year, I realized Fred Hicks’ birthday was fast approaching, and I wanted to give him a nice gift.

Fred and I go way back. Apparently, this is not as well-understood as I’d thought, so here’s the short version: We gamed together in high school, where he got me hooked on Champions and later GURPS Supers. Those made me interested in comics, which I think is somewhat the reverse of the norm. More on that later.

So I wanted to give him a nice gift. Buying things for friends is all well and good, but I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to get him, and I didn’t want to just buy something off his Amazon wishlist. Also, Fred is a new dad, so I wanted to give him something he would enjoy personally, rather than something that underlined his dadhood or was really just a gift for his daughter.

I gave him a game. “Happy birthday, Fred! I would like to run a game for you,” started my email.

After some mulling, Fred got back to me with a few things:

1) He’d been reading the Invincible comic. I’d read some, a few years back, enough to have a frame of reference.

2) This made him itch for a supers game. We played our fair share of supers games back in high school, but it’s been a good long while since he and I sat down for some cape-and-tight action.

3) His focal point for Invincible was how it handled relationships, so we wanted a supers game about relationships, not just heroism and combat.

I had a few ideas of my own, which I’ll go into in a later post, but those ideas gelled into a pitch:

Iconography: The biography of icons. You are the world’s greatest heroes, and this is your story.

The conceit is that sessions would be bookended by the characters being interviewed by their biographer, possibly with some mechanics around that.

Next time, adding my own influences to the mix, and considering what makes superheroes super.

Reboot!

Hi, I’m Matthew D. Gandy, and this is one of my sites.

I’m rebooting Gandy Games in light of my new site, semioticity.com. Since the new site covers language and meaning, sometimes in the context of gaming, I wanted a place for my own personal thoughts on design and play.

This site will focus on the games I’m playing or running and those I’m working on, either for myself or others.

More soon!