From: uc-chan@mcl.ucsb.edu (Christina Callihan)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc
Subject: Re: Media in Roleplaying Games
Date: 24 Jul 92 19:40:16 GMT

In <1992Jul22.051857.25425@mks.com> rod@mks.com (Rod Currie) writes:


>	I am just curious about how other GMs treat the media in
>their campaigns, especially in Superhero games.   The superhero
>genre is a breeding ground for media interaction, since it deals
>with larger than life characters with a knack for getting involved
>with events that are sure to make the evening news.  Does anyone
>have any media-related tales from their campaigns?  Let's hear
>about them.

Heh.  The first serious CHAMPIONS campaign I played in involved the
media in a big way...mainly because they were usually on our case 
about something or other.  Whenever our super-team (the Bay Area 
Guardians) inflicted a little property damage or lost a bust due to
"excessive force" (well geez, the city wouldn't supply us with 
restraints up to the job....), the media was there, gleefully recording
every detail.  They had a field day with our team:  Our membership
included one petite, blonde, hyper-strong refugee from an experiment
to create a Scandinavian super-team who ate several times her weight in
food (or whatever) daily, a young man in a power suit whose move-through
attacks usually damaged the surroundings more than his target, an alien
colony intelligence, a former gladiator from another dimension who got
sort of welded together with a demon, and an ameboid creature who
congealed from the illicit waste dump of a secret government research
facilites (thank the Is for Multiforms....).  And then there was
Kirilian, my character, a now-superpowered former UNTIL agent who 
became team leader by virtue of the fact that he was the only one with
a traceable background.  Some honor, huh?  ;^)  Suffice to say he went
through about a case of aspirin per week, and I wouldn't be surprised
if he was nursing ulcers.

Yep, the press just adored us; our GM went so far as to now and then
give us a list of the month's headlines that we had inspired, from the
serious (The Guardians:  Dream Team or Taxpayer's Nightmare?) to the
ridiculous (I Had Demonstone's Love Child!).  This isn't to say that our
press was _all_ bad:  We got loads of kudos for the rescue and repair
work we did after the big San Francisco earthquake, and more of the same
for rescuing the entire kidnapped city council (though there were some
wags who thought we'd have done better to leave them where they were).
By and large, though, we had pretty hard luck with the press, culminating 
in a major circus outside Guardians Mansion when the U.S. government 
found out that Plasmorph (the ameboid) was actually the accidental product 
of one of their research installations.  They decided to declare Plas
national property, and we wound up with a horde of reporters mingling with
an even larger horde of representatives from dozens of government agencies,
everyone from the Department of Defense to Housing and Urban Development.
And they were _all_ claiming first right to take possession of Plasmorph,
for use in their own department.

The moral of all this?  GM's, if you think your PCs are getting a tad too
cocky with their world-beating abilities, just assign them a reporter or
two whose only "beat" is the characters.  Within a few sessions, they'll
start wondering why they ever got into the superhero business in the
first place.  ;^)


____________________________________________________________________________
If You Know What |     Christina M. Callihan     |  Doing STRANGE THINGS
 You're Doing,   |  AKA C-chan, Bwee, Chrystal-  |  in the name of Art,
   It's Not      |   Elf & Who Knows What Else   |  and STRANGER THINGS
   Research!     |       (I sure don't)          |    in the name of
 => => => => =>  |     uc-chan@mcl.ucsb.edu      |       CHOCOLATE
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(The opinions in this post are not endorsed by the University of California
at Santa Barbara....THANK GOODNESS!!!!!!!!!  ;^}  )