Megagame Designer Thoughts: The Real Heroes
In these articles we have a chat with designers after their games have run, to talk a bit about their experiences, thoughts, and any general pearls of wisdom they may wish to impart. This article is with a joint team – Jonathan Pickles, designer of Superhero megagame The Real Heroes, and Patrick Rose who adapted it for online play with OMEGA.
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Tell us a bit about yourselves – how did you get into megagames?
Jonathan Pickles: I met a guy in 1992 at a convention and he said there was a game running with half-price tickets… it turned out it was a megagame, and it went from there.
Patrick Rose: My first was Shot Heard Around the Universe, and of course a certain video as I’m one of the new people into megagames. We tried to sell people corn and ended up catering a wedding IN SPAAACE.
Jonathan enjoying a pint, most likely after a megagame. Credit: Jonathan Pickles
How do you think your most recent run of The Real Heroes went?
JP: I have no idea.
PR: Pickles was in a bunker for most of it, but I think it went well! The joy of The Real Heroes and the reason I wanted to port it online, was that it’s mechanically solid enough that it could run with a narrative layer on top of it, which is where interesting things can happen and you can really let megagames sing. Throw superheroes on top of this foundation, and people know they can do stupid things and start looking for an opportunity to explore that!
It was an easily accessible theme, so that also helped get players doing wizard wheezes. People said they had a good time, and whilst there were still some weaknesses, no game is without its flaws. Perhaps some overcomplicated rules could be looked at like the mass group combat.
Megagames need drive and enthusiasm from a designer – what excited you about creating The Real Heroes?
JP: This started out as quite a different game, but when I got enthusiastic it was with the mechanical stuff that went nicely. I like mechanics as a way to solve problems, especially creating my own mechanics and not borrowing them, and that was satisfying.
Plus creating superhero/villain characters is fun (Note: character creation by the player with game control was an element of this game), so creating a character with a highly responsive player is very rewarding as you get to bounce idea off each other.
Paddy running away from one of his megagame creations. Credit: Patrick Rose
Multiple runs – what’s changed in the game from its inception?
JP: The original game was rather different, which started out as an attempt to try and deal with the issues some conference games have. I came up with a list of things to address, and in fact failed to deal with any of the list, like conference or council games being out of touch with the rest of the game state, making sure senators were not completely overshadowed by superheroes, and guaranteeing threats in the game could be dealt with by mundane means as well as superheroes. Otherwise, the issue of whether we need superheroes is moot.
Half the game was thrown away and this version is the original superhero fighting crime and supervillains game, where I keep throwing away the complicated mechanics and slimming down the systems.
PR: We did make some changes based on the logistics of in-person versus digital play, to help tracking certain stats online for example.
What were the challenges involved in adapting an in-person game for online play?
PR: This involved both ease and difficulty. My megagame design experience involved my first game being cancelled because of Covid-19, but I ported it to run online as I thought it would work. This game ran 5-6 times in 18 months during The Time We Do Not Speak Of, so… because of this experience, I’d say I know how to port a game.
I gave a talk for the first MegaCon on how to port games from in-person to online formats, where I looked at how to take things happening in a game to a digital space.
So, for The Real Heroes we looked at how the maps work; we used Roll20, as it works for players using cards, and you can have multiple card decks. We also had to make sure there were places for people to speak – just think about the difficulties and differences in having a quiet conversation with someone in-person versus an online space, which required us to create multiple voice channels in a Discord so these private conversations could happen.
One complication was that the map game was semi-cooperative and needed players to be in the same space to liaise, but this could be difficult with several conversations all happening in the same digital space all at once. This is something we’re going to have to ponder on!
I run games that can work online, and my day job is as a software developer, and I spend time doing stuff for people so they can do their jobs. Trust players with telling them what to do, not making perfect systems. A piece of software might fall over, but humans don’t tend to fall apart in the same way.
JP: To add to that, for this run of The Real Heroes I had a character state for chases that only came up occasionally. It looked like it would be complicated to use, so why transfer it to a digital format when control can just adjudicate it as needed?
Corruption at a megagame? It’s unheard of! Credit: Patrick Rose
Players have a habit of doing unexpected things – from your last run of the game, did anyone do something you hadn’t considered, and how did that go?
PR: One of the villains went massively off-script, which was partially my fault for making him too strong. The way villains worked in this game was that they looked like a normal person, but they had secret actions which could be used “behind the scenes.” If this was timed correctly it should result in some kind of supervillain scheme coming to light on turn 7 or 8 near the end of the game, where they get to do a villainous monologue and there’s a last-minute scramble to stop them by the heroes.
This particular villain worked out a different way to perform, and this caused difficulties because the villains were having too much fun running away from how the game structure was originally planned!
We never want to stop a player having fun, so we ended up re-directing these things a little bit.
JP: The villain was basically trying to get to the end game state, but using slightly different tools – this was effectively a cooperative boardgame with a hidden traitor mechanic, with minor uses of powers in ways that weren’t expected.
A superhero game can lend itself to players making ethically questionable decisions (vigilantism is the most obvious example), how do you think they should be handled from a design and mechanical perspective?
JP: This was supposed to be the whole point of the original game, with questions around vigilantism and especially whether they caused more harm than they prevented. One character destroyed another player’s home in the first turn! It’s not especially morally “grey” in this setting a lot of the time, because some players were definitely criminals – it’s hard to show there’s a grey area with definite lawful and criminal characters (plus players, who are mostly agents of chaos).
PR: In a cyberpunk game I wrote, the government sold some public land to corporations, and the question here was “will it end up becoming a dystopia?”, and we’re 50/50 with it being a corporate hellscape or not from games run so far.
The thing about megagames should be that they ask these ethical questions in a way that has some meaning, but this is still supposed to be a fun day out! We’re not going to be able to successfully resolve a whole bunch of philosophical questions.
On the other hand, this can be quite light with gameplay and funny moments – but also with dark humour in resolving crimes. When writing a game, I’ll ask myself “How do I make sure this is funny even if it’s horrific?”
JP: Well for this, The Boys is my reference point!
We all have lists of games we’d like to make, and some of these end up actually bearing sweet megagame-flavoured fruit – what are you working on for your next game design?
JP: Trains! Railway Mania, all about the foundation of railways in a fictionalised 1830s England – it’s easier to capture the elements you want to highlight in a made-up location that feels familiar. The idea has been with me for three decades, but inspirate struck after visiting an Isambard Kingdom Brunel exhibition whilst in Bristol for a run of Sugar and Sedition. I have something to playtest now, it’s half engineering and half financial shenanigans! There’s plenty of scope for doing dodgy things and creative play.
PR: I’m in a daze and have no idea! Running Hot ran online a lot, so I'd like to do an in-person run at least once, but then it’ll be put to bed for a while. Maybe pick up a new design in next year? Maybe do some mentoring? I want to help people get going as I’m a rare person who has two different games under their belt, so I want to try and help others.
The Staten Island Roll20 board that helped to run the game. Credit: Patrick Rose
If resources and time were no object, what would be your dream megagame to design?
PR: An “end of the world” game, where everyone has to bring about their preferred apocalypse. There would be a time travel element to it, but everyone I’ve spoken to about it has said “don’t do it, it’s a terrible idea”, but I think this is a solvable challenge for a game. I don’t think anyone’s done a game like that.
JP: I have.
PR: *Expletive removed*
JP: It was all about the end of the world and called The Hell Game, the players were all angels and devils fighting over humanity at the end of the last millennium, perhaps a bit more specific, but still like your idea with people aiming for their preferred apocalypse.
PR: You didn’t have four maps with time travel!
JP: No, but we had turns that were centuries long. Another game I want to do is when the world has ended in 2012 with teams being the different religious pantheons fighting over the remains.
PR: It sounded like a challenge which is why I want to do a game with time travel. It looks like a fun problem to solve, and needs as many fun and silly ways to destroy the world as possible. I tend to think of a Patrick Rose megagame as asking “how do I bend these rules and cause a problem for myself?” because that’s what I find fun.
JP: Time travel aside, my dream game would be about the history of Britain from 400 – 1000 AD, going from Roman province to Viking Britain. It would need a lot of turns and wouldn’t be practical for a normal game. A game of this length may be difficult because there’s a lack of single characters – perhaps players could represent a dynasty? Perhaps it would be viable as a convention game, with players doing 4-hour slots, and then the next game inherits the last game’s setup!
For anyone looking at designing a megagame, what is your one top tip for them? (From you guys we get one each!)
PR: You need to constantly ask yourself “what is this player doing?” because roles need something engaging to do. If you don’t know, as the designer, what a role should be doing, how will the player be able to engage with it? You don’t realise this is not fun until you go into a game with a dead role.
JP: PLAYTEST!
But that’s because I like mechanics probably. Playtest and simplify, cut out stuff you don’t need from your design, and you’ll see what gets used or what works so each time you can make it better.
Thanks to both Paddy and Pickles for letting us interview you and talking game adaptations to the online domain, as well as time travel and even portrayals of ethics in games! The Real Heroes ran with OMEGA but you can reach Paddy at Pennine Megagames and Pickles… well, ask Paddy (or look on some of the UK megagame Facebook groups).
If you’d like to chat to Rob about a game you have run recently, get in touch now.