Help me understand Milestones and XP

[Duck Call Lass]

Okay, I like the idea of "unlockables."

But to get to them, I need to use the XP subsystem, which means I need to use Milestones.

As you may have noticed in my writeups, I haven't included Milestones even though I probably should. It's because I have a hard time both with thinking them up and with getting my mind around them.

To me, it kind of feels like personal Milestones -- especially those written by the Event creator -- are just a way of saying "here's how you have to roleplay your character." And with Events basically being (so far as we've seen) "play your way through an existing comic book with prewritten canon Marvel characters," it feels like the Milestones exacerbate that lack of individual player control.

Yeah, I know you can ignore your personal Milestones (or just go for the ones in the Event), but that seems like it defeats the point of Milestones.

I realize that experienced players can write their own Milestones, but especially for introductory games that will be beyond many players' abilities.

So for me, Milestones seem more like millstones around the players' necks, forcing them to play to one particular person's (the Watcher's and/or whoever created the stats) vision in order to get the necessary XP to unlock valuable effects.

I'm considering just playing the game without Milestones and without XP -- giving up the unlockables, even -- because of the bad taste that Milestones leave in my mouth.

Mind you, I haven't had a chance to play a real session of MHR yet, so I may be entirely wrong about Milestones and XP. If so, I'd like it if someone could explain the magic behind them -- or maybe let me know if it works to just leave them out.

Thanks!

[BaronVonStevie]

The solution is to create new milestones and new events. I used to have this problem back in high school when we all wanted to play Star Wars (the old West End one). We kind of got bored because Han and Luke and the rest did everything important. It was getting ridiculous. Comic books are, thankfully, already ridiculous. There are an infinite number of stories you can tell. Don't worry about what's going on in Avengers or whatever. Just do your own thing.

[MPOSullivan]

Play a session. Play a couple. In my experience Milestones work, and work well. The reason they do is that they reward the player with XP for doing two things:

1. Playing the character they chose. When a player picks a character to play, it's because they want to roleplay that character. A person picks Iron Man because they want to swirl the occasional glass of scotch around and talk smack about the villains inferior tech. You pick Cap because you want to yell out "Avenger Assemble!"

Hell, let's talk Legion. Would you want to play Brainiac 5 and not deal with creating crazy new experiments and being snarky to your teammates? Would you play Cos without taking the weight of the world on your shoulders? Or Garth without flying off the handle at any given opportunity?

Milestones are designed in a way that they will give players rewards for doing the things they would be doing anyway. They let players focus on those things, and help Watchers refocus the game on the important things, the characters, when gameplay starts to wander.

2. Interaction with the environment. Many of the Milestones encourage the players to interact with the world around them. Spider-man gets to meet new villains and build a history with them while earning XP along the way. Beast rescues injured mutants. By following Milestones, and Watchers offering opportunities to pursue them, players get to become more involved in the story on a personal level. The story becomes a tale about their choices, and the XPs serve to highlight those choices.

Now, the secret engine of Milestones is that they are always driven by choice. Players get to chose which Milestones they want to use from the ones on their character sheets and the Event milestones. The ten point XP hit at the end of each Milestone is always a decision. It's "You decide to side with the government, or you stand with your teammates." It's a statement from a player. It's him saying "This is what I want my story to be about!"

And when a player gets his 10 XP hit they get to write up a brand new Milestone.

Milestones aren't millstones. If used properly, they're a flag waving in the air.

[Spatula]

To me, it kind of feels like personal Milestones -- especially those written by the Event creator -- are just a way of saying "here's how you have to roleplay your character."

There's a few things going on here.

First off, saying "you get a small benefit for doing X," isn't the same as "you must do X." Players are always free to not bother with the roleplaying if that's what suits them. What milestones do is offer small rewards for the players to engage with the story.

Secondly, you get to choose which milestones to use in play from the character and the event. So you pick the ones that you're interested in roleplaying.

Thirdly, you get to choose or create your own character. So you select or make the character you're interested in roleplaying.

If you (the general you) don't want to play Wolverine, why decide to play that datafile? If you didn't want to play up his berserker nature, why choose the "...And What I Do Isn't Very Nice" milestone? And even if you are playing Wolverine under duress and don't like his milestones (or the event milestones), what are you losing out on by ignoring them and playing the character as a pacifist hippie?

The milestones are a way to encourage players to engage with and contribute to the story. Unlockables are story rewards. If the player doesn't want to participate in the story beyond the surface, then unlockables probably aren't all that interesting to the player. So the player's inability to buy them won't matter much.

[chaosnet]

I posted about the XP part of this a few days ago with the fact that "if i can make my character the way i want and it is consistent in my mind's eye, why do i need to power him up by spending xps (unless it was my intent to make a novice hero)?"

The Milestones simply give a direction for your character and that direction can be ignored at any time. What I've done is to give each villain and other story elements several Unlockables, which allow the heroes some ability to shape the storyline (i.e. 5xp to unlock the villain Glide's connection to "Mysterious Rich Woman", 10xp to unlock the location of Glides tech stash, 15xp to unlock "Glide Redeemed", etc). This way it either becomes important for heroes to play up their Milestones (which they designed for roleplaying their characters) so that it can fuel XP generation to get unlockables.

For example, my villainess White Siren has the Seductress distinction with a 5 xp unlockable of "We had a 1 night stand before", 10 xp unlockable of "we were good together when it lasted" and 15 xp unlockable of "I STILL LOVE YOU!".

Of course the above can be done without Milestones, but they along with Distinctions show pretty much the personality of that character.

just my 2c

[MidnightBlue]

I can definitely see your points in the original post, Duck Call Lass.

I personally don't think you NEED Milestones and XP to roleplay in this game.

I like the mechanic and the options, I really do, but I could see where they just won't work for some people.

It shouldn't be too hard to chop off the Milestone/XP portion of the rules if you don't want them. You could even base unlocking Unlockables on roleplay plus Effect dice. Maybe treat the Unlockable as if it had its own Stress bar that you need to reduce to gain access...or an Asset that needs to be stepped up. This is off the top of my head and could need some rethinking to smooth it out.

Where Milestones really work for me is when I am making my own Milestones with my own character goals in mind.

Does my character want to create a super team...maybe becoming its leader? Write a milestone for it and I've got my goal ready to roleplay.

Does my character want to play out a love story? (Hey...I'm a hopeless romantic, sue me.) I can write that desire directly into my character...maybe even what happens when/if it goes bad.

Since any good Watcher is going to try to incorporate my milestones into the story, in a sense I can help dictate the path of my own character's story.

THAT is where I think the real magic is.

Like I've seen some mention, I'm not really interested in playing through someone else's story. I think it's cool that milestones for established characters can give you that option, the option just isn't for me.

I hope you find a way to make the mechanics work for your game.

[vitruvian]

There's also nothing wrong with letting the player completely rewrite both character Milestones before the beginning of the Event or game, allowing the player to define how they want to play the character (or at least what kinds of choices they want to make) for the next story arc. Somebody wants to play Armor Wars conflicted over the use of his tech Tony rather than Demon in a Bottle Tony? Or even Need My Chestplate to Live and can't have a girlfriend Tony, or Brain Tumor Ultimate Tony? No problem. Let it be player-directed.

As for XP 'improvements', you could restrict it to Unlockables and things that seem plausible to roll back in the next Event or story arc, as opposed to increasing something from Enhanced to Superhuman to Godlike or whatever... but in a way, that would be restricting player involvement in its own way.

[chaosnet]

Unfortunately most players are married to the idea that they NEED to gain experience in order to improve their characters. As a result most players are going to go for bumping up power traits and speciaties as well as adding SFX and different specialties. The players and the Watcher just need to be on the same page and it is pretty obvious when using an established Marvel character, but when using player created characters it may be a bit ambiguous about HOW MUCH the character should progress.

I have a guy named Mocker who is a street level vigilante that likes to quip (loves to deal Emotional Stress) before he goes in for the KO blow. He's a normal guy thats pretty quick that swinglines around and has a staff. None of this is inherently 'super' but as he completes and closes out Milestones he accumulates (example) (Some Number) xps. Now he is looking for a way to spend these xps since they will make him better. Bumps up his D6 Martial Arts to D8, Bumps his D8 Refelexes to D10 (now he's 'super'), bumps his Staff from D8 to D10. Oh and he takes D8 Durability (Metal Mesh Suit) and says that when he gets more xps he'll bump it up to D10 (is he armored at this point?).

Now the Street Level vigilante has become a super...

[GabrielK]

Okay, I like the idea of "unlockables."

But to get to them, I need to use the XP subsystem, which means I need to use Milestones.

If you want to have unlockables accessed with XP, there's no reason you HAVE to use Milestones at all. Just say that everybody gets a fixed amount of XP per session. Maybe something like 1-3 depending on whatever criteria you specify and you're good to go.