Some Assembly Required (an Avengers PBP game)

Some Assembly Required is an Avengers PBP game set on Marvel Universe Earth-2015 and run using TSR's Marvel Super-Heroes RPG (FASERIP). The original pitch by Bellerophon is:

I want to do a game about the Avengers as an organization - during the course of the game, players might play three or four different heroes. This rotating cast of characters allows for a diverse array of stories and settings - you can have the stories where the Avengers go into space, and the stories where they go into the sewers. To compound this idea of the team being more than any single person, maybe there's some focus on the workings of the Avengers - staff meetings around the table, votes on new members, courts martial - the general everyday life around the Mansion/Compound/Hydro-Base/Tower (Wow they've had a lot of HQs...).

That's not to say that superheroics will take a back seat - far from it. The Avengers have an incredibly diverse rogues gallery to draw upon, in re-interpretations of old stories and new ones as well.

Now, my thought is to set the game in a new, parallel universe, called 617 or 618 or something like that, that is practically quite close to the mainstream continuity (Cap is Steve Rogers, Wasp and Ant-Man helped form the original team) but is different enough that we won't be slaves to the continuity, while still having that baseline level of familiarity with the iconic characters (Not that any real knowledge of the books is required. Your characterization of, say, Dane Whitman might be totally new). One thing I do want to stick to, despite the AU nature of all of this, is having players play pre-existing characters (or new interpretations of them); there's a certain cachet in being able to instantly know something about the other characters on the team, rather than having to deal with original characters and fit them into the narrative, especially in a game with a large ensemble cast.

Recruitment Thread

IC Thread

OOC Thread

Gamemasters

Bellerophon

Cast

Bullwinkle J. Moose as Spider-Man (inactive)

Bunch as Moon Knight

Captain Astounding as Dr. Druid

drreamscape as Wasp

Fred as Thor

Ziven of Nine as Ms. Marvel

Timeline

Mystical movers, mundane shakers and innocent bystanders.

Story Arcs

Ancient sites, alien vistas and exotic planes.

House Rules

Body Armor

A common criticism of this system is that the Body Armor power, granting damage reduction essentially, is a bit too powerful, and outright prevents certain characters from being useful. As a compromise, I propose that attacks with Red results ignore Body Armor, representing finding a critical weak point in its structure. Additionally, attacks with Yellow results ignore Half of the Body Armor score. If this proves a bit too much, we can revise it, but I think it will, overall, allow for more fun battles.

Karma

Traditionally, Karma serves the double-purpose of being both an in-game resource and an advancement resource, which leads to somewhat crappy situations where the characters that need Karma least are the ones using it for advancement. I propose that there be two separate pools of Karma - one normal pool for use in-game, and one of "spent" Karma which then becomes available to be used for advancement. This encourages heroes to be heroic, and I think fits the genre better than hoarding Karma.