45: Eye-Laser Man, Meat Mannequin, and Mascots for Some Reason

Tabletop Tim: Tabletop Tim here, reminding you all that actions have consequences, naming no named D&Daniel. Things will happen, bad things, if you steal from my haberdashery. Yes, that’s right. It was my haberdashery that he stole from, and that is why I’m like this. Anyway, thanks to our patrons Hedwig, Carlo, and A Socialist Hobgoblin. You’re in my good book…for now

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Paper: Hello, and welcome to The Probably Bad Podcast, a podcast which is definitely bad. I’m Pencil

Pencil: I’m Paper. Today’s probably bad rpg idea is

(dice rolling noise)

Pencil: A superhero game where you all play the love interests. The average session consists of being kidnapped, and rolling to struggle until the heroes show up

Paper: I think you need to go full silver-age coming, ‘cause the love interests in those got completely arbitrary powers every other issue. “Oh no, now Lois Lane’s a giant turtle”

Pencil: See this is the sort of thing I was thinking, or, you know, something’s happened to Iron Man

Paper: Mmm

Pencil: And then his girlfriend whose name I don’t remember, it’s a long time since I watched a Marvel film

Paper: Pepper Potts. I feel vaguely embarrassed I remember it off the top of my head

Pencil: That ridiculously-named woman, steals an Iron Man suit and goes to save the day, along with her book club

Paper: “That ridiculously-named woman” can be the name of the RPG

Pencil: (laughs)

Paper: The thing is, so most superhero girlfriends have held the superheroic mantle at least once. I know Pepper Potts has, I think Jane Foster, who’s Thor’s girlfriend, has? So, you know, you could just basically do the “oh no, the superheroes are down, it’s time for the love interests to get superpowers again.” They can just sit around and wait until it happens, and then they can go in and save the day

Pencil: See, I don’t know a lot about comic books, or that whole genre really these days, I feel like I should have picked a different idea, because what you’re saying is that this exists

Paper: Yes. What I’m saying is that, basically, if you’re in a superhero comic, you will get superpowers. That’s just going to happen at some point. And if you’re the main guy your powers will go away after a scene or an issue, but you’re gonna get powers eventually. I think the other alternative is you have your superhero world

Pencil: Mm-hmm

Paper: But you’re not focused on the whole “oh no, Dr Doom is trying to steal the ocean”, you’re focused on reporting and investigating and so forth. It’s a detective noir thing and it’s set in a superhero world, like Jessica Jones

Pencil: Are you suggesting some sort of detective comic?

Paper: (laughs) I am indeed suggesting a detective comic

Pencil: It’ll never catch on

Paper: Mmm. We’ll need a marvel to pull this off. But what it would be, would be you just be Lois Lane, you’d all be playing Lois Lane, and yeah, you’re just investigating all the superhero villains with reporting skills, as opposed to shooting lasers out of your eyes

Pencil: See I do like that. It’s like being the one guy at the press conference who’s asking Bruce Wayne “hey, when the bad guy arrived, you disappeared. Is there something you want to tell us? Did you know this was gonna happen?”

Paper: To be fair, if a bad guy appeared, I would probably disappear. If the Joker walked in, I would probably leave

Pencil: But he disappears every time. Does he know these things are gonna happen? Is this some sort of insurance scam?

Paper: Is Bruce Wayne the Joker?

Pencil: That’s the real question we need to investigate with this Mutants and Masterminds game

Paper: Yeah, you are trying to investigate whether Bruce Wayne is the Joker. Spills into my general desire for a working-class Batman. He doesn’t have infinite money, but what he does have is a wrench

Pencil: The thing is, I think a working-class Batman, so a working-class person whose parents are killed so he’s raised by a family friend, and then goes around beating people up, generally that’s  just referred to as a thug, is the problem

Paper: No, because he’s wearing a bat suit

Pencil: A weird thug

Producer Nick: Fathers for Justice

Pencil: That’s all most superheroes are

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: They’re just attractive or rich so people are like “aw yeah.” What I’m saying is I’m kind of on J Jonah Jameson’s side

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: You can’t just go around beating people up because you’re wearing a weird costume

Paper: You will get bonus content if you send us photos of Spiderman. They do have to be actual photos of actual Spiderman

Pencil: Mmm

Paper: Yeah, so if we discount…so yeah, glossing over the fact that Mod Paper is, in fact, J Jonah Jameson in disguise, as we all saw coming, I guess you’re tracking down Waynecorp and are like “ah, they sure are channelling a lot of money into bat-themed assault weapons, that seems odd”

Pencil: I quite like the idea of a game that’s almost…if you’re running a Mutants and Masterminds game, but you have a second game group

Paper: Mmm

Pencil: Who are investigating and trying to find out the secret identities of all these superheroes

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: ‘Cause the problem with doing it with stuff like Batman

Paper: Is everyone knows who Batman is

Pencil: Yeah. But if it’s made up superheroes

Paper: Hmm

Pencil: Then they’ve got secret identities that no-one outside of your game group knows

Paper: I like the idea of a murder mystery. So you go to a party with a bunch of presumably rich people

Pencil: Mm-hmm

Paper: And then one of them gets laser-eyed, and you need to determine which of them did it, and, by extension, which of these people is famous superhero Eye-Laser Man’s secret identity. Eye-Laser Man did not think very hard before coming up with a name

Pencil: See, I thought that Eye-Laser Man was going to be a villain, but you’re suggesting the person that got eye-lasered at the party, according to some logic, would deserve to be eye-lasered

Paper: I mean that would be the other thing, why has Eye-Laser Man turned evil? Has Eye-Laser Man turned evil? And also, who is Eye-Laser Man. And you have to get through all of this without getting eye-lasered

Pencil: Yeah, maybe Eye-Laser Man was a hero, and then eye-lasered this guy that everyone thought was great

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: And as you’re digging you find out that this guy actually wasn’t that great, and Eye-Laser Man is still a hero

Paper: You can have multiple twists and turns over “was Eye-Laser Man a good guy or has Eye-Laser Man snapped?” Did Eye-Laser Man tweet problematic things the day before the attack? We don’t know

Pencil: We don’t know ‘cause we don’t know who Eye-Laser Man is. We need to find out his secret identity so we can find his social media

Paper: Any one of these tweets could have been sent by Eye-Laser Man

Pencil: If we find Eye-Laser Man’s tumblr, we will know who he has called out

Paper: You are a group of detectives investigating Superman in order to cancel him

Pencil: You say detectives, I say very committed breadtubers

Paper: To be fair, I do like breadtube. But also “you’re very committed breadtubers and you need to check if Superman is problematic” is sure an idea

Pencil: Well like I said, you need to find Eye-Laser Man’s tumblr

Paper: Yeah, Eye-Laser Man

Pencil: So you can check what tags he follows, I guess

Paper: Yeah, Eye-Laser Man, who bears no resemblance to any existing superheroes…yeah, the alternative thing, going back to the original idea, rather than this murder mystery which has turned into a critique of twitter activism

Pencil: (laugh)

Paper: No, I want to play the murder mystery which has turned into a critique of twitter activism, because I would like to be cancelled too, apparently

Pencil: But the actual idea, where you play the love interests, who are presumably completely mundane and have been kidnapped

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: I also quite like as an origin story

Paper: Mmm

Pencil: Where you get kidnapped, you escape, and you go “ok, we need to train up and become super good at punching and kicking, so we can take down villains, because the superheroes aren’t always going to save us”

Paper: Ok, you’re kidnapped, but due to budget constraints you’re held in a gym

Pencil: (laughs)

Paper: And so you need to work out as much as possible before the villain returns

Pencil: So does this have a time limit on it? There’s a 10 Candles aspect to it

Paper: Yeah, each round you can either eat, rest to keep your morale up, or get hench, and you need to govern your time

Pencil: These are the three actions

Paper: Yeah. You can possibly put in more, but, yeah, you need to govern your time between those, because obviously you don’t want to burn out or starve to death

Pencil: Mm-hmm

Paper: But also you want to be really strong for when the supervillains arrive

Pencil: But you also need to be well-rested when the supervillains arrive

Paper: Yeah, otherwise you’d be tired

Pencil: If you just finished working out when the supervillains show up, you’re not gonna be very good at punching and kicking them

Paper: Mmm. Yeah, so day 1 you’re imprisoned in a gym, day 2 you’re imprisoned in a weapons training lab, and then day 3 you’re imprisoned in a room full of random radioactive material and you can try rubbing them on your face to see if they give you superpowers. Yeah I feel like if it’s just the gym…’cause if it’s just the gym, then you can have one action to work out the lower muscles, your legs, and another action to work out your upper body

Pencil: Roll for leg day

Paper: Yes, exactly

Pencil: (laughs)

Paper: And that way you can decide whether you want to focus on just kicks, or just punches, or whether you want a more balanced…

Pencil: Well, if each of you trains one limb, maybe you could hold yourselves together like some sort of human pyramid voltron

Paper: You are superhero love interests, you’ve been kidnapped, and your only solution is muscle voltron

Pencil: I mean, I would be afraid of muscle voltron

Paper: I guess, yeah, if I opened the door and there was just 6 people, each with an incredibly muscular limb, or an incredibly muscular torso in the middle, or an incredibly muscular head on top, and they just

Pencil: (laughs)

Paper: Started swinging each other. One of you is focusing on head muscle exercises

Pencil: So five of you are there exercising either your limbs or your core, and one person’s just there reading classic literature

Paper: No, I mean they’re lifting things with their eyebrows

Pencil: Tiny little dumbbells!

Paper: Yeah, they’ve got tiny little dumbbells on their eyeballs and tongue

Pencil: World’s heaviest earrings, the exercise is to just stand up

Paper: Yeah, it’s a very well-stocked gym

Pencil: I mean if you’re there long enough, you’re going to start messing about

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: Improvise

Paper: So yeah, this almost feels like a bonus RPG system

Pencil: Would that be a patreon bonus RPG system?

Paper: A patreon bonus RPG system, which we are now offering to people who spend more that £20 on our patreon

Pencil: (laughs) Great plug

Paper: You too can become a muscle volton

Pencil: (laughs)

Paper: But yeah, you could have different supervillains who have…so one supervillain wears a metal helmet, so they’re resistant to punches, because you just punch the metal helmet, but they don’t have a lot of armour on their legs, so you can kick ‘em really easily

Pencil: I hate when I forgot to put on my anti-kick armour

Paper: Yeah, I mean, you know, supervillains dress weirdly

Pencil: It’s like that nightmare where you show up to school with no trousers on. “Aw I’ve shown up to the fight without my leg armour! So embarrassed”

Paper: Yeah. The most difficult villain is just a bundle of legs, so they can kick really easily and they’ve got nothing to punch

Pencil: I’m just imagining the Isle of Mann flag, but with armour

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: There’s a reference none of our non-UK listeners will have to look up

Paper: I hope you enjoy this learning experience we gave you

Pencil: So questions

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Paper: Yes. Our first post is from Andromeda Can’t Adult. “So I don’t remember where, but I saw a post about a character that’s a sentient hat piloting a mannequin. My sister and I want to try and make it work. So far, all my sister and I have come up with is a changeling with the spell telekinesis. Any other ideas?”

Pencil: I mean, I feel like the obvious answer is just an awakened hat

Paper: Yeah, with the ability to cast animate objects

Pencil: Yeah, but I feel like that is the coward’s way out

Paper: If you use magic jar, and use a hat for the jar, and then you can just possess the mannequin. This does require the mannequin has a soul but, you know, I feel this is a good way to inform your players that all mannequins in your setting are sentient. They can’t move, but they all are fully sentient

Pencil: This is creeping back into last episode

Paper: Time is a circle. Or I guess the other way you can do it is magically create a construct that is a mannequin, and then your mind is in a hat, and you telepathically send command words to it, which also means the mannequin might be able to do cool things like shoot acid clouds or make people bleed, or go out of control and go on a murderous rampage

Pencil: I mean, I’m assuming that this is D&D

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: So it would be kind of weird if the mannequin didn’t, at some point, gain magical powers

Paper: Yeah. What you need to do is, you make a mannequin, but you just make it out of magic items, which is, I think, a monster in D&D 3rd edition

Pencil: When you say make it out of magic items, I assume you’re not just talking sentient armour. Is this gonna be staffs for legs and things?

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: It’s got fingers, but they’re just 10 different wands of fireball

Paper: Yeah. Instead of a head, it’s got a potion of healing

Pencil: (laughs) So if it falls over, it spills, and it dies

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: Except that it’s got a hat that holds in the liquid. It’s a waterproof hat

Paper: It’s a symbiotic relationship

(crosstalk)

Paper: Sorry?

Pencil: A symbiotic relationship between a magical mannequin and a magical hat is sure something

Paper: The other idea I just came up with is, you’re a mimic, and you mimic yourself into a little hat, and the mannequin puts the hat on, and then you just mimic tentacles down to wrap around its arms and legs, and then you walk around like that

Pencil: Ok, like a mimic exoskeleton

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: I feel like that would be a lot more obvious to people, maybe, trying to see if you’re an actual person

Paper: I mean, it doesn’t specify that they’re hiding that they’re a sentient hat piloting a mannequin

Pencil: True. I guess it felt implies, but maybe that’s just my own prejudice

Paper: It’s the D&D world, there’s elves and goblins and trolls and stuff going around. A meat mannequin isn’t…arguably elves and dwarves and trolls are just meat mannequins, you know?

Pencil: Aren’t we all just meat mannequins

Paper: Yeah, and you can still talk because you can open up the hat in a little friendly mouth

Pencil: I feel like the post that this was inspired by must have been about Super Mario Galaxy

Paper: I have never played it, but all I know that it is canon that Mario is, in fact, just some random person being controlled by a hat

Pencil: Well thing is, I think in Super Mario Galaxy it seems to be that Mario and his hat are both sentient, and have similar goals

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: And also the hat can possess things

Paper: Hmm

Pencil: So maybe it’s Mario that’s the mimic, because he vanishes when the hat possesses something

Paper: Yeah. So what it is, is you go up and think “ok, the mannequin’s sticky, but the hat’s the mannequin, so I just avoid touching that”, then you grab the mannequin, but the mannequin’s sticky, and the mannequin reaches…pulls itself around you as the hat falls to the ground

Pencil: Mario is the exoskeleton

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: By the sentient hat

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: It clearly has the soul of some great and terrible sorcerer inside it

Paper: I mean, same. I think the other alternative is, if you do want to hide it…so you’re the mimic. You’re on top of the mannequin. Instead of wrapping around it you just send tentacles down through the mannequin, so it’s on the inside. So people look at it, go “ah, it’s just a mannequin wearing a hat”, and then the mannequin lunges at them, ‘cause they don’t think it has muscles

Pencil: Yeah, when I mentioned the hiding thing, I think I did forget about clothes as well

Paper: Yeah, you could also wear clothes. There’s a probably bad RPG idea: put on clothes

Pencil: (laughs)

Paper: Stop showing up to things as a mannequin. The other alternative is that you’re a wizard, you cast invisibility

Pencil: Mm-hmm

Paper: And you just stand behind the mannequin in such a way that your hat, which is still visible, looks like it’s on the mannequin’s head as (inaudible)

Pencil: Sorry, you tapered off there a little bit

Paper: You’re standing behind the mannequin invisibly, and you’ve just got the hat. You can still see the hat, because that’s invisible. No, sorry, that’s been magically made so it is visible, but you’re just grabbing its arms and legs and making it do a little dance. I feel the mannequin’s the best

Pencil: Is this a forced perspective thing, where they assume the hat’s on the mannequin

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: But no, it’s behind it, because where else would the hat be?

Paper: My assumption is, as a wizard, you’re probably good at magic tricks

Pencil: You’re invisible. Maybe your hat is also invisible, but you cast minor illusion of a hat on top of the mannequin

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: Just to make it make sense to people watching

Paper: You could, I feel you could do a lot of these with just illusions. Yeah maybe magically animate a mannequin is the easiest way, but I still prefer my mimic exoskeleton

Pencil: Just magically animating a mannequin doesn’t fulfil the sentient hat controlling it part

Paper: I mean, you could be a sentient hat. D&D’s a weird setting

Pencil: So you play an awakened hat, which has cast animate on a mannequin

Paper: Yes

Pencil: And just rides around on top like a horse

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: I can see that

Paper: I feel like what we need it all of these people in one party

Pencil: I would enjoy that very much

Paper: Yeah. I feel we’ve answered that question to a degree beyond what people wanted us to answer

Pencil: I was just wondering if you could create some sort of cursed magic item that’s almost like a phylactery

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: Where, when someone puts on the hat, the soul that’s within the hat can control it

Paper: Ok, so I just jumped to I’m a lich. I make my phylactery a hat. And then you put the hat on the mannequin, and it’s like “ha ha, isn’t that cute”, and then the hat mannequin just turns into a lich

Pencil: But it turns into almost like a clone of you, because you’ve both got your soul inside

Paper: Yeah. What it is, is you put on the hat, and then the lich is in your mind, but you’re still there, so you just have to form a relationship with this lich that shares your body sometimes

Pencil: Every time you want to do something, or don’t want to do something the lich wants you to do, you do have to make a wisdom save

Paper: I think if there’s multiple liches in the hat then it’s a democracy, and you all do a vote

Pencil: Ah, the fabled hat of lich party

Paper: (laugh) Yeah, I think on lich democracy

Pencil: Is this just a roundabout way of creating clones?

Paper: Yeah. A roundabout and ineffective way, yes. Ok, so it’s a hat, and you put the hat on, and if you do, it becomes your phylactery. You’re now a lich. And anything else you put the hat on, you jump into that body. You don’t know this until something else puts the hat on

Pencil: You get home after a hard day’s work liching, put your hat on a hatstand

Paper: Now you are a hatstand

Pencil: Now you are a sentient hatstand

Paper: Yeah, you take the hat off and you immediately be the entire atmosphere

Pencil: Put it on the ground, become the world

Paper: This is a very powerful magical item

Pencil: It’s also incredibly inconvenient

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: And I feel like that balances it out

Paper: It can give you incredibly cosmic power, but at the cost of being really really annoying, like my magic sword that is incredibly powerful but won’t stop singing “Livin’ La Vida Loca”

Pencil: (laughs) That is a bop though

Paper: Yeah, so, yeah the hats. Yeah, so you are powerful lich with a sword singing “Livin’ La Vida Loca” and a hat that will possess hat stands. You’ve got your mimic, and you’ve got your invisible wizard, and you’ve got your animated mannequin, and now you’re ready to go fight heroes

Pencil: Perfect

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Pencil: So, our second question is anonymous. “You asked it on twitter, but how would your first and current characters get on?” I did answer this when I posted it, but basically they would get on great, because a little grandma gnome ranger, and a tiefling paladin who kind of is out of their depth, I feel like they’d just go on great adventures together

Paper: So my first character was a highly academic orc, who had just graduated orc university, and didn’t have much of a personality beyond that. My current character is a conspiracy theorist in a Hunter the…not a Hunter…Monster of the Week setting, who is continuously investigating monsters and runs a podcast, I am playing what I know, and, yeah, I don’t, I think they’d get on reasonably well, mostly would end up posting a lot of photos of “hey guys, I found an orc, believe in the supernatural, you fucks. There’s vampires everywhere”

Pencil: See, now I’m curious, because you’re also in a Monster of the Week game that I’m running

Paper: Oh yes, I am

Pencil: Now I’m curious how your Monster of the Week characters would get along

Paper: Ok, so my other Monster of the Week character is crimey mcburglarperson, who stole a magical artefact and wants to…and is trying to hid ethe fact they stole a magical artefact, ‘cause supernatural people would like their magical artefact back, but also magical artefact’s really neat. I feel like they wouldn’t get on, because my conspiracy theorist would be continually trying to ask questions about what the magical artefact is, and where it came from, and probably end up stabbed? Yeah, I think they’d get to fisticuffs

Pencil: (laughs)

Paper: And by fisticuffs, I mean shooting

Pencil: Yeah, I was gonna say, you say stabbed, but your character in my game is more guns than knives

Paper: Yeah. I feel like my character, given they are in the UK, possibly needs to stop shooting at things, but you know…

Pencil: I mean, you’ve shot very little so far

Paper: That is true, I need to work on this

Pencil: Although possibly not in this arc, because you are hunting a kelpie, and I’m not sure how that would go for you

Paper: For every new patron, I will shoot someone in Paper’s campaign. You won’t have any way of verifying this, but I will shoot a random NPC

Pencil: Is this what’s gonna happen when I bring back Nigel?

Paper: Yeah. Nigel is the NPC we’ve inexplicably decided we hated

Pencil: You’ve decided you hate him, but also slightly adopted him as a campaign mascot

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: Which, considering he showed up for about 10 minutes in one session

Paper: Look, the primary trait of mascots is that they’re horrifying, and everyone wants to punch them in the face

Pencil: I mean, I can’t argue with that

Paper: The whole point of a mascot is “hi, cheer for our sports team or the mascot will get you”

Pencil: I had always wondered what they were there for, I’m glad to have that clarified

Paper: Say you’re sat there, and they’re like “hey, do you like sport?” and you’re like “no, not really”, and then they release the mascot into the stands, and so you start cheering, because you don’t want the mascot to wear your skin

Pencil: I was always slightly creeped out by mascots as a child, maybe I was correct

Paper: Yeah. I have a very strong uncanny valley reflex, so

(loud car horn)

Paper: Hello person honking on our podcast

Pencil: Apologies for the fact I live on an A-road

Paper: Thank you for your contribution. But yes, anyway, my point is mascots are horrifying. I don’t know how I got to this point

Pencil: Maybe that means that we should end the episode

Paper: But I want to…but I want a two hour rant about mascots. So, the other thing I hate about mascots is the voices

Pencil: I’ve never met one with a voice. Anyway, yes

Paper: Only I can hear them

Pencil: We (laughs) we have a patreon, which is probablybadrpgideas, if you want access to a discord server where we play one-shots based on stuff from the podcast, and we do put that audio up on patreon for free, we’ve just started doing that. If you want bonus episodes, if you want homebrew, if you want weird short RPGs that Pencil and our editor Nick make, then go there and give us some money please. If you have an idea or a question, you can contact us on twitter at BadProbably, on tumblr at ProbablyBadRPGIdeas, or email probablybadpodcast @ gmail.com. That’s a lot of information. Thank you

Both: And remember to have a probably bad day