I'm looking to run a game set in the worm verse written by wildbow on his Web series.  I plan on using something light like Worlds in peril,  OR fate as well as borrowing from fate and including players in worldbuilding process.

I plan to set the game 2 years before the events of the serial and some contenders for the city are, Jacksonville, Seattle, Milwaukee, or D.C.

So any interest or suggestiind?

I'm vaguely interested.  While I'm normally not a fan of Fate, it does fit the source material pretty well.

Have something like this going in my real life monthly group. We've tried it in FATE, Cortex, and M&M 3rd. All of them worked or, it just depends on the crunch level you want.

I would app for this.

I had forgotten about mutants and masterminds.

Another thing I thought of was with my face to face group we generated powers by defining our trigger event and then rolling a bunch of random elements,  like strength, fire, super senses.


And then the others took your trigger and random rolls and came up with a power that fit the trigger and incorporated elements of what you had rolled

M&M would probably work, too, though the power levels seem to vary dramatically between people.

For powers, I've heard Worm's powers described as the "answer" to a "question" which is the trigger event, and that's a pretty apt description.  Second generation triggers (and all shard buds) are kind of like revising your answer after you get feedback on the first one.  That makes truly random powers kind of weird, in context, though some shards seem to have quirks that don't otherwise fit their theme (or combine two powers in odd ways - the whole "Alexandria package" concept is a weird one, when you think about it - though you could argue that one is due to the collective unconscious and the ideal of Superman influencing expectations).

More interesting, because the shards desire conflict so heavily, they seem to give people powers that don't necessarily help them.  Or, at least, they give them the kinds of powers that will lead them to using them to create conflict.  This seems to be a lot of what drives the high villain percentage.

I actually think the A+ answer would be to start the game as a regular person with a few character flaws, play out the trigger event, and then come up with a rational powerset based off the person and the event.  Random... just feels like it lacks something.

They always say the powers are related to the trigger but the connection is cannonically tenuous and even only presented as a 'kinda sorta' thing in the material.

Taylor's power did literally nothing to get her out of the situation. Mental power and physical power has a very odd application too. 'I'm stuck in a room about to get raped' is clearly mental trauma but I get the ability to turn into a ball of light?

I had considered putting together some charts representing the Cauldron vial rating system. But that still comes down to being random or at least GM generated.

My real life group had a card deck that we used we got 3 cards and had to make a coherent power out of them, but they were SUPER generic, I think I got Defensive Item, Escape Artist, and Mutable Form. My pitches to the group varied from a Mechadendrite using tinker (Tinker Garotte), Basically a Genie, and A guy who could have his arms and legs fly off who used a set of armor to establish a new identity.

Fate lends itself to having characters of fairly wildly varying power levels (which is wierd) Our guy that could make paintings come to life ended up way too strong because of how versatile that is (so he could create advantage after advantage).

M&M basically can't do anything but be balanced. All your stuff has a ceiling, so it doesn't matter if you would pulp anything you hit, since you just won't hit it. It doesn't matter if you are immune to physical harm, since your Will is required to be weaker. Some exceptions may apply, but it does work pretty well.

Either way I like FATE plenty well, warts and all.

It kind of depends on how you define the "situation".  The locker was a specific event, but it isn't the only thing driving the trigger.  If you look at the situation, as a whole, she got a power that gives her control.  While the locker was the tipping point, a case can be made that her trigger was more about lacking control over her life and being powerless to change things around her.  To a degree, it's a Rorschach test where you make the answer fit the situation so it's not really worth arguing the point.

There are lots of examples of powers that don't actually help solve the problem of the event (Vista being an obvious one), but they do seem to be related to the event in some way and make a certain kind of (alien) logic.

Right but if it's going to be alien logic that you are trying to fit a solution to then you are basically just picking. If I go in wanting fire powers then I'm just going to have my guy be in a burning building. I'm not restricting myself, I'm driving my character to a solution.

You COULD randomly pick a tragedy and then Rorschach test the power off of it. That might be a cool method.

It still means that if I really want to be a thing I'll be that thing. But the devil is always in the details. Flying brick with wings and spatially enhanced muscles versus one with applied tactile telekinesis, both are the same powers (in an M&M sense but one is clearly physical and the other is clearly not (maybe).

The doctor saying that there aren't any healing powers comes to mind for some reason.

Well, Wildbow did offer his own guidelines on how you would go about creating Worm characters for roleplaying:

https://docs.google.com/docume...mTGyzCziYhCwozo/edit
https://docs.google.com/docume...2kOZkjwltkP1Ong/edit

He also commented at some point that picking your own powerset goes against the spirit of what Worm's like, since the whole point is that you have no control over the power you get, as the shards want to see what people are capable of once the power is given them. That's why he suggests that other people pick your trigger and how it manifests, according to the psychology of the character you created.

Of course, there is always the Cauldron option for people who want to pick their own powers - it's what it is there for. Which might explain the Alexandria packages as being something people bought because of, you know, Alexandria herself.


The point was that a power that just heals and nothing else creates no conflict, that's why powers which heal are either regeneration (which is mainly useful if you fight) or powers that could be used offensively, but aren't being due to the user willingly limiting themselves. Since the goal is to stress-test powers against each other, they need to be useable to create conflict in some fashion.

I think that one was qualified as a breaker, as the circumstances were such that the threat was both physical, mental, and undefined, since the cape in question wasn't the only possible target. So, it makes sense according to the guidelines.

Also, keep in mind that the power also depends on the shard; if you're dealing with a shard that does primarily energy manipulation with a strong focus on light & plasma, some type of manifestations might be harder to achieve that others.

Anyay, I don't think I know much about the systems named here, but I like the Worm setting enough that I'd be willing to learn a new system if the game was worth it; the only games onlie for Worm I found so far are chats, and for me that just doesn't work - while PbP is much better for my needs.
This message was last edited by the user at 15:36, Fri 10 Feb 2017.

Wildbow did a fine job writing a story, a statement like that makes it a little dubious that he'd make a good game designer.  Certainly, having a character that picks their own powers is out of sync with the spirit of Worm, but that doesn't necessarily mean that allowing the player to pick them is out of sync.  That's especially true for PBP where the "player=character" thing that you see so often in face to face games is greatly reduced.  Powers definitely shouldn't be what a character wants them to be, but rather what the character is "broken in the right way" to abuse to create conflict.

As I said, the A+ answer is to create a normal person, then play out a trigger event (my assumption is that since this is imposed by the GM, that it's inherently "random" in that sense), and then pick powers that could fit if you squint a bit (the less obvious the connection, the better) - preferably playing on that character's flaws.  For instance, I'd actually find the fire powers more interesting if they were attached to a guy with serious anger issues rather than someone that'd been in a fire, for instance.

If it were random, I'd suggest allowing quite a few rolls and then picking from a thusly constrained set of options rather than pure randomness.  It'll make it easier to have the powers make at least some sense (I can't think of many canonical characters that have truly random abilities - they usually seem to synergize with each other or make some sort of sense or are the sort of "universal" addon powers that fit with anything).


Heh, you made me look stuff up.  The doctor actually said that Cauldron can't give out healing powers, not that they don't exist.  Healing is always a side effect of another power rather than the power itself (and that randomness is what keeps them from coming in vial form).  Within a game like M&M, you could certainly take a "healing" power, you'd just define its SFX as being part of another, larger power idea.

Wow, truly grateful that you posted this. Yes I read it but I'm ignoring it for the time being. It puts forth some ideas that work pretty well around a table but might be hard in our usual format.


Pretty sure the point was that the shards don't know or care about human anatomy, until they activate. There is no way for the concept of 'healing' to occur in a being like the worms. Panacea and her dad had functionally the same shard (or she had a bud off his whatever, it's close enough) It gave wildly different but thematically the same powers to them. So if the doctor literally had the vial for Panacea's shard she couldn't reasonably say that it contained healing powers. If she had the vial for acid powers she could say PROBABLY not that one, but it could still manifest as a method for healing in the right circumstances.


I don't disagree that it could make sense in universe, Mover power for escape, offensive power for protection. But that still means if I had something in mind I can set up the circumstances so that any random inputs can give the same outputs. I don't really see that as a bad thing. People playing the characters they want is good, they just need to be interesting, and that's what having to contrive things gives you.

Taylor's power is a weird one because it gave her control but the shard was too alien to know how she would react to that. Like, imagine if at that moment taylor was sent to a magic room with a genie that was the shard.
Taylor: I want to be in control!
Shard: OK, this will be fine.
Taylor: Oh, god not that!
Shard: What I literally gave you absolute control over 99% of the living beings on the planet?!

lol, I'm pretty good at remembering things I read, sort of why I play these games. D&D 3.5 probably give Worm a run for it's money on word count.

I don't necessarily disagree, and seeing as, after the guidelines on how getting powers works, the links I gave also contain something approximating a rule system, you can check and judge for yourself, really.

As I said, I don't know about the systems which have been named, but the way to grant power outlined in those links goes "people provide a number of trigger events and the personality of their own character; GM put all provided trigger events together and randomly rolls one for the player; players other than the one which is triggering use the trigger event and the character's personality to come up with a power that fits that combination by brainstorming". I think that's a good way to generate worm characters in general - and I agree that "total randomness" really doesn't fit at all.

The only reason I offered the author's opinion is because it seemed relevant to the discussion at hand: even if you (or I) disagree with it, the matter at hand here is startng a game in the Wormverse, so knowing what the author thinks such a game should entail can't really hurt any, and adds to the discussion.

I would like to express interist. If my prefferance matters, I like Fate Core for the systwm and Milwaukee for the city. MKE is near where I live, and being situated between Chicago and the Madison Quarantine Zone would be interesting.

Sadly I've had some bad experiences with systems powered by the apocalypse. There are some design elements that are curiously implemented (Bonds) and the system creates to many "yes, but..."'s that makws it feel that you are not accomplishing anything at all.

Mutants & Masterminds would be a great choice if you want crunch, as would the old TSR Marvel FASERIP system. But they would need to be monitored for meeping to the tone and powerlevel of the setting.

So I see there's definitely interest so we should probably move discussion over to the game thread

link to another game