Wednesday, June 23

ICONS - First play impressions

So, yesterday I got a chance to play Icons! for the first time, since our regular gaming was interrupted. The group was all experienced players, but we were all new to Icons! (to be expected, really..) Two of us had played in fate-like games before and had some idea about the principles behind it.

Character Creation

Characters in Icons! are built randomly. First you roll the dice for your origin. This origin doesn't affect that much, except that it gives you some bonuses during character generation. It is, however, nice to have a starting point when visualizing your character.

The next step is rolling for abilities. You roll 2d6 and look the correct ability score up in a table. This led to a minor inconvenience, since there was three players, and only one PDF of the game. All the players had to tell me their rolls and I gave them the actual ability score. Not a major hassle, but it would have been faster with a straight up roll.

After that, it was time for rolling up powers. Once again, it was based on tables, and it was quick and easy. If I can be picky for a second, there is one thing that I would have wanted. Some powers offer the choice of adding bonus powers at the cost of one of your power slots. The only place to see if a power offers that choice is in the power description. It would have been a bit smoother if there was a symbol next to the power entry in the tables if it offered bonus powers.

The results so far from our group was interesting. One guy turned into a high-tech ninja with an invisibility-suit and gloves that secreted a poison. the other a slightly powerful telekinetic and the third guy became Magnetic Guy, with a low level of telepathy to boost.

The part of character generation that was hardest (at least it seemed so to me) was the aspects part. It seemed to help a lot if you got a power set that gave you a good mental image of your character. If that was the case, filling in a Quality or two, and a couple of Challenges seemed quite easy. One of the guys, however, had a hard time coming up with a single good concept for his character, and it was a bit harder for him to come up with something good on the fly.

It was also a bit hard to explain the concept of determination points and how to use them. However, when we actually started to play, I got the impression that the idea caught up fairly quick.

I didn't check the time for how long character generation was, but I guess that it took 45 minutes, including some side-chatter and me explaining the rules etc. When at home, alone with the book, rolling up a character is a 5-10 minute affair at the most.

Play time

So, that was character generation, now it's time for some actual play. The adventure I was running was the one included in the pre-order package (Dr Zodiac). I will try to keep it spoiler free, but there might be some parts of it that you might want to avoid if you are a player.

Initially, we had a tendency to get stuck with details (of both the rules and where the characters were in combat etc), but as the game progressed we got more and more into the mood of playing it fast and loose.

In the first encounter, I also got the opportunity to demonstrate how an aspect works. One of the players had a quality that he was japanese, and that he wanted to uphold the japanese code of honor. Now, the first battle in the adventure is in a museum, and I said that the room next to the scene of the battle actually was a priceless japanese exhibition, with samurai armor etc. I then offered the player a determination point and told him that "The blast of the enemy hit a pillar, so that it's starting to fall down on a valuable antique armor". Either he could accept the Determination point and leave the combat for 1 round to save the armor, or he could pay me a point to keep on fighting.

He of course accepted the point and threw himself under the pillar, trying to save the valuables. The more the game progressed, the more the players got how to use determination, even though it became even more fast-and-loose than written in the rules in some places.

The one thing that they missed out on was the possibility to activate a challenge themselves to get a point of determination. This would have been handy in the final battle (at least), since the Big Bad was a bit to powerful for the group as such.

A major part of the adventure was combat, with some other obstacles thrown in. In itself, combat was fairly quick, and with a combination of tagging/compelling and creative descriptions, I felt that the combats for the most part was exciting and the environment was used to create interesting situations. I think, however, that with a GM or players that are low on their creative juices, combat can quickly degenerate into a series of simple rolls that would be quite dull and boring.

(One could argue that that is true for all RPG's, but the way I see it, more crunchy games have more varying options built into the system. In the case of more rules-light games, the players have to come up with the options on the fly)

Another thing that at first was a point of hesitation, was how to use powers. I don't think that any of the players was used to playing superhero games at first, and they were a bit uncertain about how much freedom they had. That changed after a while, and the magnetic controller was soon pushing big boats around, and the telekinetic guy used his powers to affect the environment in creative ways. As earlier, that part of the game was also done in a fast and loose style. If it sounded cool, it worked. It seemed like the game worked heaps better that way.

The dice mechanic supported this feeling. The span of a roll is from -5 to +5, and this is actually a larger span than the span of the abilities (11 steps vs. 10 steps). In practice, that means that even the worst fighter ever could get a lucky hit on the best fighter ever. If that is a good or bad thing is a matter of taste, but I think it's worth pointing out. For us, that meant that the results were all over the place, and in a way I must admit that it made it hard to get a feel for if a character was a good or bad fighter (for instance). That feels like a small contradiction, since there is supposed to be a big difference between each level of an ability.

Another interesting little tidbit is that the players make all the rolls. If they attack, they do the attack-roll against the defence of the enemy, and if they are attacked, they make a defence roll against a static attack-value. While that idea worked well in practice (I don't think the players did mind all the rolling), some things could have been clarified in the rules. For instance, if hit by an attack with a knockback potential, the character that is hit by the attack is told to make a strength check vs. the damage. However, the rules also say that only the players should make rolls, so what do you do if an NPC is hit by a knockback attack? In my case, I let the players do a roll + damage, and compare that to the strength of the NPC (the mathematical result is exactly the same)

So, what is the final verdict? The game was fun and captured the feel very well. It's not without it's flaws, but it's simple and robust enough that you can improvise your way out of most situations.

Timewise, we completed the adventure including character generation in about 4 hrs, and even though it was a new game, there was a minimum of checking up rules.

Don't treat aspects as an insignificant side-system. I'd say that they are actually the core of the game and the characters, together with the powers. They fuel your determination, which in turn lets you do stunts, increase your rolls etc.

I don't know how enjoyable longer campaigns with this game is, but for shorter one-offs when the regular game is interrupted, I'd say that this game is a perfect candidate.

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