Superhuman Legacy – Review by ReviewAnon

By: ReviewAnon (name given by the readers)
Originally posted: 13.02.2016
--------------------------------------------

PREMISE
You are Thomas Cairn, and you have inherited your father's superhero mantle upon his demise. More specifically, you discovered that superpowers are primarily a factor of genetic lineage, and with his death, yours has been unlocked! You go forth with your newly found power to join the world of not-so-caped heroes and villains as you make your way in the world, juggle your social life, and try to discover who killed your father and bring them to justice.

Alt. Premise: Be really cool at everything and so amazing that everyone loves you because you do all the best things holy shit you are like the knees of an entire hive of fucking bees.

---

REVIEW pt1

Mechanics.
This quest has a lot of mechanics to it.

You've got the traditional "1d100, best of 3" approach, but with crit success and crit fails enabled. Except the crit success/fail range is 95-100 and 1-5 respectively, which for the math challenged means about a 1 in 20 chance to do either of them... Which begs the question of why they're not just using a 1d20 in the first place, but the QM evidently likes to add really big (10-20+) modifiers to rolls, so I guess there's that. You can also save a crit success for later, and then use it to "elevate" a result to one step higher. IE: A fail can become a success, a crit-fail can be 'just' a fail, etc.

Keep all this in mind, because you will be rolling so much in this quest. Dice get rolled, and then more dice get rolled, and if you've reached the end, and the jar is empty, and you think you're finally done, you may need to roll another die to determine if you can leave yet. The sheer amount of times dice get rolled in this quest, combined with its weird insistence on using a 1d100 only to have the same crit success/fail rate as a 1d20 leads to... A lot of things.

Then after you get done playing with dice, you have your points. You have Tech points which you accumulate every few threads, and you use these to research shiny new toys and gadgets! Then you have Plot points which you can use to buy traits/features that give you modifiers to certain things.

THEN after you get done playing with points, you have your suit. This suit has 5 spaces on it, presumably can be upgraded to have more, and you can slot inventions in each gear section of your suit (and swap them out later with other inventions), ensuring that you are as modular and adaptable as you can think ahead for.

Almost none of that last part matters in practice so far.

---

REVIEW pt2

Plot.
The plot of Superhuman Legacy is... Very disjointed. Often it doesn't even really seem to exist. You can stand and stare in both wonder and awe as you attempt to decode your purpose in life, only to get distracted by 'suddenly zombies!' or some such occurrence. If that's not bad enough, this single quest has so many timeskips in it that to fully explain the sheer density of them would require a timeskip in and of itself. I'll do my best to explain though, so pay attention-
[spoiler]TIME[/spoiler]
-And that's why I think Jules getting lost and ending up in the 1950s was actually due to the MC themselves being a free-floating existence in the chronological-
[spoiler]SKIP[/spoiler]
-And in conclusion, I hope you now understand how many timeskips you will be experiencing.

You start off tentatively hearing about a super villain named Menace, and this is the person who killed your father. You immediately learn everything there is to know about Menace:

1. Nobody knows what Menace looks like.
2. Nobody knows what Menace can do.
3. Nobody knows who Menace even is.
4. Nobody knows what Menace wants.

You eventually theorize that Menace's ability is to erase himself from people's memory (which doesn't explain cameras not working on him, but- gah, can't get distracted), which somewhat answers #2 even if I'm still half-heartedly waiting for the QM to reveal his power is something else. Not because there's any mystery there to solve, but because Menace himself seems to exist purely to be an inconvenient dick. He doesn't actually commit any crimes that we hear about or trace back to him (Maybe during a timeskip? I don't know) besides shanking our dad in the prologue, and we spend what? 3-5 years afterwards being too busy with SCIENCE to bother with-

I'm getting distracted again. Suffice to say, our primary 'villain' is a non-entity in both power, and the actual plot. He only shows up once later on, and he's a stupid dick then too.

---

REVIEW pt3

Writing.
In the beginning, it was one paragraph. Later it became two. On rare occasions, it is whispered you might even see three. This is the quest to follow if you really don't like reading, but also want to play a very text-based narrative game. While the good news is that updates are typically cranked out within 15-20m of each other (including voting windows!), don't expect to be immersed or engrossed in any manner of engaging prose or descriptions. A lot of it is flat, in some cases non-existent entirely, and other parts can range anywhere between confusing and straight up

There is a lot to talk about here, and the shorthand of it is just: Not everyone is good at writing. Even by "anonymous person on the internet doing a silly thing for shits and giggles" standards, sometimes you just... Have issues putting the imagery in your head to page.

The longhand of it is pretty extensive, and so I'll actually be breaking this up into smaller sections just to address the points individually and offer some examples.

---

REVIEW pt4

Writing - Character Development.
We'll start with what is arguably the QM's strongest point, and then go from there. Timeskips hurt this a lot, but they are so expansive I'm just going to dedicate an entire section to them later, instead lets look at the MC's personality.

They're a genius. They just understand everything, it's almost literally part of their super power... They're also mildly psychotic. And by mildly I mean at one point they beat a man with a wrench so badly that both his arms broke and one of them needed to be amputated. They have to roll routinely to just stave off being so genius they cross over into Mad Science territory and have actual breakdowns. It's humorous to note at one point that the MC observes how most people with super powers have a specific way they walk or carry themselves, describing it as something 'similar to a peacock strutting and vying for attention', and literally become something just like this as the quest goes.

The MC's personality is conveyed pretty consistently in this manner, and to the QM's credit, they do manage to write the occasional bouts of madness in such a way that it usually does not feel like some stupid edgy thing tacked on top of a character, but an actual aspect that they regularly deal with.

The praise then promptly stops, because the character doesn't really develop any. Their personality is almost entirely locked in stone from thread 1 and they don't do much more than pay lip service to anything afterwards until around thread 18. Sure there are moments where it's like "and then I felt feelings about something", but it's rarely actually addressed IC, and even rarer does it change anything the MC does.

The same can be said for most of the rest of the cast, with a couple specific exceptions (Monica and Harry, Thomas after thread 20) which is tied to a traumatic event that fucks them up pretty hard. They don't develop so much as get hit by an emotional bus.

---

REVIEW pt5

Writing - Combat
Despite being a quest about superheroes and villains, you get into remarkably few fights. Of these few fights, at least two (three if you count two zombies as a fight) of them are against punching bag minions, and three of them are against the exact same guy. While the selection isn't something to note, the fact that the combat is consistently very... At times it can be confusing, to the point that you kinda wonder what's going on really. Other times it's just blatant power fantasy. Nearly NONE of the fights really feel dangerous or engaging in any way.

One good thing that can be said is that the QM's update speed makes it flow quickly. I will go on record saying that the 'suspense and immersion' of a fight may be strained reading through archives, when you know the thread goes on, as opposed to experiencing it live and getting the stream of rapid updates on the struggle.

At one point you are punching a shadow dog while screaming latin at it. You preface this by cursing excitedly at it in full caps for not being able to pierce your anti-psychic head accessory, and this is immediately followed by a reference to how you've matured and gained experience during your time as a hero. This is all a single sequence, in a single thread, and it's easily one of the worst moments I experienced.

This seems to improve remarkably once our second protagonist enters the scene, and I'm not sure if it's because the QM got better at writing combat in an easily followable and interesting manner, or if they were just really bad at describing gadgets and CQC.

[spoiler]Close quarters combat is difficult to really articulate at times, so this is understandable.[/spoiler]

---

REVIEW pt6

Writing - Dialogue, Thoughts, and Emotions
Dialogue is consistently okay when emotions are calm, and then proceeds to either get cheesier (as positive emotions rise) or cringier (as negative emotions rise). As earlier mentioned, fights can range from ludicrous screaming, to having overly hammy mental rhetoric running that is a little painful to read.

Emotions in this quest are completely indestructible, until they're not. What this means is that there isn't much variance in how characters display themselves; Either they are fine, or they have completely lost their shit and are swearing revenge or crying. It feels like emotions are typically used for shock value, rather than just as a common extension of how a character might feel about something, and this is even further obfuscated by very little body language being exhibited by any of the characters.

Beyond that, dialogue doesn't carry the weight of a personality or character behind it. There is very little in this quest which springs to mind as a memorable quote or dialogue, and I find that a little disappointing. Characters can stay undeveloped in some stories, and if your story just isn't about fighting then that's entirely your decision, but if the dialogue - The very soul and voice of your characters - falls flat, then it's just a line of words to be read off paper.

---

PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt1

Too much time is skipped. There's just no way around this for me, and it really started to bother me as I looked into it. One of the earliest timeskips occurs right after you had just become a superhero, right at the cusp where we know nothing about the city, the world at large, any villains, or anything at all! There is so much... Space here. So much room that could be filled. So much opportunity for us as players to control Thomas and watch him grow into being a hero.

Instead, we immediately skip all of it. It's vaguely referenced later that during that time period, we became friends with other superheroes and managed to beat an entire mafia. Are you kidding me? This is at least an Arc's worth of adventure. The Mafia could be used to set up for other things, we could have used this time to actually grow to get to know the other characters, we could have - and SHOULD have - used this time to actually build an attachment to our character as we were there with them as they grew. We did none of these things, and like a chilling omen of what was to come, we just picked back up as 'an experienced crime fighting hero with connections'.

Maybe it was just me, but instantly I've lost my connection to this character. It was a second's worth of reading to me, but they went away for a year and came back different. I found it difficult to have empathy and concern for other heroes because they were never developed or even given an opportunity to be cared about. We skip time over a variety of things, and the more it happens, the less I felt a connection or investment with Thomas at all.

---

PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt2

Investment in a story is huge. It amplifies things. It makes it so that when a character cries, you feel bad. When they're happy, you're happy. When they're mad, you're mad. It makes it so when Thomas is forlorn over how "for the first time since I put on this super suit and gained all my experience, I realized how strong I had become. And how much I still lacked", I actually give a damn. As it stands, I just don't, because I wasn't there for any of it!

We just constantly get exponentially more money through timeskips because we have a robobutler investing for us. That's cool and all, but what does this mean to me? I have more imaginary money? The worth of imaginary money hinges solely on how much the player feels they earned it. By thread 20+ or so, we're nominally the richest people on earth and it means absolutely nothing to me.

Speaking of things that mean nothing to me, what is Menace, even? We're so preoccupied doing SCIENCE and skipping time after dad died that we never even looked back into him in any meaningful manner. Almost all of that time is taken up by us inventing new things and then getting richer, so we can invent new things and then get richer again. The next time we see Menace is when he comes out of nowhere to kill [spoiler]our waifu[/spoiler] after we [/spoiler]died[/spoiler]. Why? We never bothered him. Why did he even know our secret identity? Why was this guy just stalking us while we became rich science nerds so he could spring into action after THAT happened of all things so he could do THAT to her? What is even the point?

[spoiler]By the time you wake up, he's a decrepit old man anyway. What was he even trying to accomplish being a dick this entire time? Wasn't this supposed to be our big villain?[/spoiler]

---

PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt3

Speaking of when we [spoiler]died[/spoiler], I'm not even really upset about it. As previously mentioned, due to all the timeskips it was difficult to really have any investment there, and as the QM pointed out, the players got so much ridiculous stuff out of their avalanche of crit successes. If anything, I feel this entire quest was made objectively worse by the way the dice in it work. With all of the rolling going on, and the expanded crit ranges on the 1d100 (may as well be a 1d20), you're practically begging for crit this, crit that. As a result, this quest had almost nothing but godly rolls and results, and the players just got more and more stuff forever.

Naturally, this means that when a fail finally rolled around and they get punished in equal measure, there would be fallout. No amount of 'reward' will help the sting when you're hurt later, so it was painful to see coming. The question then just becomes... What is an 'equal' measure? Early on we just accidentally crack infinite energy forever. We sell this for lots of cash, etc., but we did it by rolling an 86 while tinkering with designs that had for all intents and purposes seemed pretty safe and relatively harmless. It's only later  we learn, in an OOC post as an aside, that the roll table was:

86-100: Succeed! Free energy!
16-85: Horrible explosion that scars us forever and maybe cripples us!
1-15: The entire city is eradicated and we die.

Holy. Shit. I feel like if I'm tinkering with something that's gonna have a roll table like that, I really want some kind of hint. This was later referenced as a laughing matter several times, which is another bit of humor completely lost to the wind because... The threat meant nothing to any of us. We only found out later. If we had blown up the city, it'd have been an ignorant mistake. This isn't a threat we willingly knew about and decided to test fate against.

This is also how we [spoiler]died[/spoiler] eventually.

---

CLOSING
If the people playing this are having fun, I'm happy for them. If the QM is enjoying themselves, that's all that matters. I personally would not recommend this quest to anyone after having read through it. It's a hot mess that sort of starts to get better after the mini 'reboot' that is [spoiler]dying and coming back to life through science bullshit[/spoiler], but even that doesn't fix all the previously mentioned problems, and it definitely doesn't fix that atrocious dice system and roll spam.

I learned very quickly DMing my first tabletop game that while I thought really notable crit fails and successes on a 1d20 was a ton of fun, it wasn't for my players, and it was detracting from both the game and the story. While this isn't a tabletop game by any means, I feel the knowledge learned there can and does carry over in this case.

And if Complete Character Death is on the rolling agenda, we REALLY need to know this ahead of time! Especially when the character's express super power is being a bloody genius.

Probably what annoys me the most is that I know the QM could improve and do better, but the very system they set up will be actively fighting them the entire time. The QM even mentions at one point that they wish they could show the MC isn't wearing plot armor, but the crit successes keep getting in the way... Well, when they finally can show it, it's a crit fail. Speaking purely from a 'writing and story quality' standpoint, I don't know if this is even salvageable anymore. So much has gone wrong from the ground up that I'm not sure if it would even be worth the effort to try and salvage a workable environment for self-improvement from this quest, or if it would be better to just write it off as lessons learned and try something new and fresh.

---

ADVICE

If they decide to stick with it, my advice is just: Don't skip times you can use to develop your characters. If it seems boring to you at first, stop and think about it. There's a lot of opportunity there for you. I feel like you were really excited going into this quest, but ended up writing yourself into a corner and maybe got frustrated when you realized that you weren't managing to nail the opportunities you thought you'd hit.

None of us expect suddenly breathtaking writing or prose, and I know from having read the archives that you do have players who really enjoy what you're doing, but don't be afraid to take a step back and look at what's around you. What can you do away with that's not really helping you? What do you think you can improve on with what you've got available? Make little changes, try experiments with your writing.

Finally though, if you're having fun and none of this really bothers you, and your players are having fun with you, then don't let this discourage you. Ultimately, that's all that matters.