Attention all staff of Breathtaking Comics! This is your Editor in Chief, so listen up!

I’m finally going on that vacation you all keep begging me to take, the further the better you said. I intend to come back to a successful business, so I’m laying down a challenge to you all:

Create a freakin’ amazing comic book!

First and most important. There’s some things that we do not want to write about! Make a list of topics that you aren’t going to include in the book. Stick with the list. If you find a new thing to add to the list, add it and stick with it. Our business is our readers, and their comfort and safety - and yours - comes before anything else. I will personally fire anyone who breaks this rule. If you need some help, Melvin’s got you covered.

The TTRPG Safety Toolkit can be found online at https://ttrpgsafetytoolkit.com — Melvin

Next! You’re all fans of comics. Before planning your book, I want you to get together and talk about touchstones. What kinds of comics inspired you? What do you just absolutely hate? How about movie adaptions? What stirs your soul, pumps your blood, gets you excited as a comic reader? Do that! The point of talking about touchstones is to get you all writing along the same lines and in the same general direction. And don’t just talk about this - write it down! You’re going to want to refer back to it.

Finally, a really important detail. All of you are equally in charge. You all have authorial and editorial authority. Don’t speak over each other and show each other respect, but otherwise, no single person gets to dictate how things should go. Until I get back, anyway.

Pacing

Just in case anyone forgot how comic books work, let’s cover pacing!

An Issue is supposed to tell a story. Beginning, middle, end - or a cliffhanger. We gotta keep the kids coming back for more Issues, after all. Even when there’s a happy ending, always leave something tantalizing for next time. I’ve got specific guidelines on how to do that - keep reading.

I figure about a session of 2-4 hours should be enough to cook up an Issue. You’ll be doing that in one or more scenes, which I’ll talk about later.

Next, in case you artists had any outlandish ideas about layout, we use Pages and Panels here.

A Panel is one unit of action, like a character doing something or reacting to something. You can fit a few characters into a Panel, but try not to. A Page is a set of Panels. Depending on the kind of scene you’re trying to write, Pages might have fixed numbers of Panels or not. Some kinds of scenes also have rules about how many times a character can appear - keep reading, I’ll explain it all!

Characters

For this new book, you’re all going to create your own individual characters. Every character should be interesting enough to carry their own solo comic book, but my challenge is for you to throw these people together as a team! They should all know each other, be familiar with working with each other, all that stuff. I don’t care how dark and brooding you want to make your character, by the way - everyone needs a reason to stick with the team! No exceptions! You can write a character who might want to leave, you just have to give them a reason to stay.

If you need to keep track of your characters, Melvin’s got some kind of fancy document on the company network for you. Make a copy and get started.

Breathtaking Comics Character Keeper, click to make a copy — Melvin

Traits

Every character has 5 P’s. You can stop snickering now, if you want to make jokes suitable for 14-year-olds, put them in your comic book. Call them Traits if you have to. So here they are:

Position is who the character is on the team. Positions are things like “Team Leader” or “Scout” or something.

Past is the character’s backstory. Past is something like “Billionaire Industrialist” or “Janitor Bitten By Radioactive Pangolin”.

Personality is the dominant emotion for the character. For example, I’d be “Charming”. Anyone who laughs is fired.

Powers should be self-explanatory. But keep it snappy. I don’t need a laundry list of stuff you can do like “Lightning Claws” and “Freeze Vision”. Wrap it up in a few words!

Problems is kind of the negative version of Personality. It’s not that you’re vulnerable to magic space rocks or something, it’s that you’re a “Big Boy Scout” or “Wracked With Guilt” - something that can always come up in any issue of the book.

If you’re not feeling creative, relax. I’ve got a big list of standard traits I’ll be including later. You can grab some of those at random, fit them together, and see if it makes for a good character. If not, try different traits until something clicks.

Remember, I’m not paying you to be totally original all the time. I’m paying you to sell fun comic books! “It’s all good if I’m not sued,” I always say. So write about a knockoff version of your favorite character if it makes you happy. If you can write something totally original, congratulations. But the important thing is to write a character you have fun writing!

Hooks

Oh yeah, there’s one other thing. Every Trait should have some downsides or complications - things that show our heroes are human - or alien - whatever! The point is, we want things to go wrong for our folks. So for each of the Traits you wrote, come up with about three things that can go wrong in a scene. These are called Hooks.

You might be tempted to write generic milquetoast Hooks like “the character messes up”. No - no no no! Heroes don’t simply fail. They’re inadequate, they’re under- or over-confident, they were sabotaged, they’re cursed, whatever. Something bad happened and we want the hero to learn from it, get stronger because of it, reach out to others to overcome it. Whenever you can, write Hooks that are about a struggle or a relationship. Hooks don’t have to be about something that the character did at all. Hooks can be how others react to the character. It’s not Mishmash’s fault that his body constantly transforms into weird scary shapes, but he still struggles with how people see him as a result.

By the way, it doesn’t have to be your character who triggers a Hook. Sergeant Stronghold has a Hook like “Someone faces discrimination or stereotyping”. He doesn’t have to do that himself for the Hook to trigger. It just has to happen while he’s on the scene. So any of your heroes can trigger another hero’s Hooks. You can even narrate some supporting character doing it.

What are Hooks good for? Glad I asked! Your Traits have dice attached to them. Those dice get worse and worse - we’re about to talk about that. When a Hook comes into play, though, the Trait die for that Hook goes up. Basically, your hero will succeed more often when their struggles come into the spotlight.

Trait Dice

You might be asking, “what’s the secret to your writing”? The answer is dice! You heard me. Dice have been keeping Vegas profitable for decades. No reason I can’t use them to make a buck as well.

People are famously superstitious about their dice, and no, you can’t use mine. Bring your own.

You’ll need a set of 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12-sided dice (“d4” through “d12”). Multiple dice per size may be helpful. — Melvin

Every Trait except Problems has its own die. Every scene, your Traits start with a d8.

Now listen up! This is the important part. Bigger dice don’t mean stronger or more powerful. The bigger the die, the bigger the spotlight on the trait!

“But boss, why roll dice at all? We’re writers, we can just figure out a story, right?” Wrong!

The kids have a term these days, “blorbo”. It’s a character you fall in love with. Hopefully, that’s the character you’re writing. If you don’t like your character, you think our readers will? Thing is, you love for your blorbo to either succeed all the time or to fail all the time. I don’t think there’s any middle ground. So the dice are there to keep you honest. Will your hero mess this up completely, or will they pull it off? Let’s find out! That’s the spirit behind rolling dice.

Make sense? Good. Because here’s the thing. The first time on a Page that you roll one of those Trait dice, it goes down a step! A d10 becomes a d8. A d8 becomes a d6. You stop at d4, because if you went any lower you’d just be flipping coins.

“But wait,” I hear you jokers asking. “What if we run outta dice?” Hooks are how you get Trait dice back. If a Hook for a particular Trait comes into play, you get to step that Trait’s die up. You can’t have a Trait over d10, though, so stop there.

Problems are special. They don’t have a die, so you get to step up any Trait you want, up to its maximum.

Why am I doing this funky dice stepping up and stepping down? In the Golden Age, we just had comic characters show up, see a problem, do their one gimmick, save the day, and sell Hostess Fruit Pies in the back of the book. That’s boring and pedestrian and if I could keep selling such simple comics, I wouldn’t have to pay you lot. What I mean is, characters are complex, multifaceted people. We can’t just see one side of them - we have to see them as complete people. Remember how I said dice represent spotlight? Keeping a spotlight on one Trait all day is boring. So the dice force you to move the spotlight around, between different Traits and different characters. And Hooks, because they’re critical make-or-break moments for a character, give some of that spotlight back. The more often a character loses, the more they deserve to get a big win.

Drives

When we read a scene full of tension and uncertainty, we hold our breath, waiting to see how it’ll turn out. That’s why I named us “Breathtaking Comics”. I want our readers to feel that. But at the same time, you can’t hold your breath too long - you have to exhale in relief too.

What is it we’re caring about? What fate is at stake? In a word, Drives.

The classic Drive is “bus full of civilians”. The villain threatens to blow up the bus! The bus is teetering over a bridge! A dozen frightened faces stare out the windows, imploring the heroes to help! That’s what Drives are - they drive the heroes to take action.

To write a good Drive, you gotta be passionate about something! You gotta care! You gotta be thinking, “this is a moment I want to see.” “I read this in some other inferior comic book.” “I saw this in a movie.” “I’ve always imagined a hero dealing with this.” If you don’t care about some detail in the scene, it’s not a Drive. It’s just a detail, and you can do whatever you want with it.

You keep track of the overall state of a Drive by giving it a color: Red or Green. Green means things are going okay. The bus is safe, the villain has been pushed back, the gizmo is unplugged, whatever. Red, though, let me tell you about Red. Red means the bus is about to fall. A kid is hanging out the open door. The villain has you backed into a corner. The gizmo is counting down and it’s in single digits. Hoo boy, how will our heroes get outta this one?

Drives start at Red unless something else says otherwise. If things were going well, nobody would need heroes.

Adding and Striking Drives

If a Drive isn’t working for the group, or it feels really definitively settled, you can strike that Drive. Mark it as handled. You can’t affect it with any more Tests. It stays however it was, Red or Green, for the rest of the scene.

You can always add a new Drive to the scene. If you do, it starts Red. Maybe it’s a new thing, or maybe one problem evolved into a new one. The hero’s boyfriend turns out to be a villain in disguise. The stolen dingus exploded so now there’s fire everywhere. This is great! Dynamic scenes are how we sell comics and keep our readers engaged. Never be afraid to change things up.

Tracking Drives

As Drives shift around between Red and Green, do your best to jot down the current status! “High-Tech Gizmo: currently held by the villain Nebulon”, for example. This way, when somebody comes round to their Panel and has no idea what to work on, they can look at the notes and say “oh yeah, I should take the Gizmo from Nebulon”.

Tests

Sometimes you write a Panel that’s just meant to be appreciated for its own sake. Characters talking about their feelings, some kind of lovely visual, blah blah blah. But when things are tense, you are gonna fill a Panel with action.

Here’s how. It’s called a Test. When it’s your Panel to fill, you figure out what the characters are doing - heroes and villains both. Who’s taking action, what action are they taking, who’s reacting to it, and how? You figure all that out and then you throw the Trait die that best fits what’s going on. If a hero is leading or supporting their team, for example, that’s Position. If they’re using their powers, that’s Powers, duh. You can narrate Problems, and should if you want to wind in a Hook, but come at this from one of the Traits your hero has. The trait has to make sense. If your Personality is Brooding and you try to use that to charm someone with your winning personality… it ain’t gonna work.

Once the dice hit the table, you look at what you got.

On a 1 or 2, you flip a Drive to Red. Things got worse for our heroes!
On a 3 or 4, flip one Drive to Red and one other to Green. That’s a mixed result, not the end of the world but not the best.
On a 5 or higher, flip a Drive to Green. On a 10 or higher, flip two Drives to Green! This is when things go really well.

If you’re trying to do something and you really have no applicable trait for it, roll a d4 or something. But really, this is supposed to be a story about your characters. Do something with their Traits!

Once you made your roll, pick the Drive or Drives you’re going to flip. Then, explain how that happened. Did the hero reach for the gadget and fumble it? Did the ambulance get pulled out of the pit at the last moment? Did the villain knock the hero across the sky with a powerful punch? Give us some punchy prose! Sizzle it!

Never be afraid to throw in some corny dialogue or earnest pleading or whatever’s appropriate to the book you’re writing. Let’s hear our characters’ thoughts or something. If nothing happens in a Panel, you made a mistake, go and rewrite it. If you don’t have any better ideas, do some exposition at least, for god’s sake.

If by some miracle every Drive is Red when it comes time to flip a Drive to Red, guess what. Add a new Drive - and flip it to Red. Come up with a new complication that emerges from this horror show of a scene. You don’t get any similar grace with Green, by the way. If everything’s going perfectly, that’s its own reward.

Also, don’t forget! If this is your first roll on the Page, step down the Trait die, and stop stepping at d4.

Tests are how we develop the Drives in a scene. The Drive itself is still there, but the circumstances can change. If the Drive is “reporter girlfriend endangered”, she could be endangered by a lot of things. The building on fire, the villain takes an interest in her, another hero’s powers go out of control, yadda yadda.

Scenes

So here’s how I sum up writing scenes: your goal is to write Panels where (a) heroes take actions to push Drives into Green and (b) you narrate stuff that invokes Hooks, so heroes can get their Trait dice back.

That’s it, that’s scenes!

Check out my notes on “Example Issue Templates” for more ideas how to structure the scenes in your Issue. If you’re just starting a new book, I strongly recommend you start with a Crisis Scene to introduce your characters and kick off some plots.

Crisis Scenes

A Crisis Scene is a big fight. Hero against villain. Hero against natural disaster. Everything’s tense, anything could happen, all that great stuff!

Assembling a Crisis

Everybody should come up with about three starting points for Drives. Think about the plots of a comic book and condense them down to a short phrase. “A villain is committing a crime”. “A high-tech invention is being stolen”. “Civilians are in danger”. “A giant monster is rampaging”. “A high-rise building is on fire”. You know, like those phrases we splash on the covers?

Each hero should have one starting point that’s a personal or team issue. “My reporter love interest is in danger”. “My hero wants to impress a teammate”. The human side, you know?

Ideally you’re drawing from the touchstones you all talked about early on. If you don’t remember those, go back and check your notes.

The group takes these moments, and builds them into a coherent narrative. You arrange the moments into a list of sentences. You connect those sentences together with words and phrases like “because of that, this” or “this, therefore that”. If you can’t make a direct connection, it’s “meanwhile, this”. You use parts of one moment to explain another moment - if a gizmo’s being stolen, and there’s a villain, it’s probably the villain stealing it. Boom.

Your goal is to have between 6 and 12 total Drives. Too few and the scene will be boring. Too many and people can’t keep track of everything.

Pick three Drives to start the scene Green. This is the stuff that’s going well - for now. Every other Drive will start the scene Red. This is a Crisis, not a picnic.

Figure out how dangerous the Crisis should be, and assign a number of Panels per Page. An easy combat against jobber villains can be allowed eight Panels per Page. A really dire, world-ending crisis might only give the heroes four Panels. Most fights, though, have a Panel count of six per Page.

You gotta put some names and motives on all this, too! Who, What, When, Where, How, Why. Try to answer a couple of these for your Drives - Who for villains or monsters, Why for crimes, and so on. Every villain or monster needs a name, and every villain needs a motivation.

Here’s a really important thing about plot points and Drives. With the exception of your safety policies, nobody gets to veto your idea about a plot point. If they don’t like it, that’s their right, but if you do like it, it goes in. You have to be able to create a story you’d enjoy reading.

Playing a Crisis

Once the crisis is assembled, start writing! Page one, Panel one. Pick a hero to tackle a problem, and go!

Crisis Scenes have some strict rules about Pages and Panels.

First: every hero character can make a Test in only one Panel per Page. Every hero gets their own Panel to do this. You can place hero Panels in any order you like, but keep track. No hero should be dominating the Panels on a given Page.

If the number of heroes doesn’t match the number of Panels, somebody’s gonna go multiple times. If you have more heroes than Panels for some reason, some heroes might not appear on a page at all. The ironclad rule, though, is that a hero doesn’t get a second Panel until everyone else has gotten their first, and so on. Share the spotlight.

Second: every Panel should ideally have a Test of some kind. Crisis scenes are supposed to move fast, they’re supposed to be tense, we’re supposed to be on the edge of our seats!

Third: you have a grace period. For the first three Pages, at the end of each Page, you flip one Green Drive to Red. Every Page after that, at the end of the Page, you strike a Drive.

Why? Explain why! The villain’s plot comes to fruition. The fire spreads. Chaos on the scene. Miami Ninja! The point of this rule is to put pressure on the scene. Better get your Drives in order, folks, because you know the ax is going to fall on one of them.

Filling Crisis Panels

When it’s your turn to fill in the details of a Panel, remember these tips:

Think what the big emotion that should spill out of the Panel. Anger, shock, disgust, surprise… What are people supposed to feel here?
Narrate for the hero(es) in the panel! Bold actions, declarations with fingers pointed, clenched fists, steely glares, whatever!
Narrate for the villain(s) in the panel! Evil monologues, dastardly deeds, sneaky tricks, surprise reversals, and so on. If your villain has a bio, look at the notes about what they’ll do
Add glimpses of anyone and anyone else on the scene. Civilians screaming in fear. The sound of metal groaning as a bridge is halfway to collapse. The rising whine of a deadly machine about to activate.

Maybe you just have no idea what to do with a panel. That’s okay! Grab a random Drive and come up with a way to push on it. If you can’t think of a way at first, pick a trait and roll the dice. Sometimes, we just need a little push to get the idea engine going.

Completing the Crisis

You can wind down the Crisis when about half the total Drives have been struck. The group can always decide a scene is over.

Ideally, when the scene ends, about half to two-thirds of the Drives will be Green, and the rest will be Red.

Your Green Drives are your triumphs. This is what your heroes managed to do.

Your Red Drives set up your future plot points, but also the heroes’ regrets and failures. A Red Drive isn’t necessarily permanent - in fact, we want some Drives to be Red, so we can wind them in next Issue.

Challenge Scenes

A Challenge Scene is when the hero is furiously inventing a cure to some condition, or when a hero’s on a date and their buddies are following to see how it goes, or there’s some negotiation with the alien ambassadors. There’s one thing going on, you want to know how it ends, and it might get complicated.

Assembling a Challenge

Come up with one Drive as a group that talks about the big picture. “Cure Research”, “Hero’s Date”, “Diplomatic Negotiations”, whatever.

Everybody should write one extra Drive. Want to complicate the situation? Think there’s an extra step that is needed to do the deed? Maybe the cure research needs some rare specimen. The alien ambassadors want to have pizza. Could be anything. The point of these extra Drives is to give every hero a thing to do.

Playing a Challenge

Challenges play out on one Page. How tense is the situation? How urgent? The more urgent, the fewer Panels you have to work with. A really dire situation takes four Panels to resolve, a moderate challenge should be six, and a more easy-going challenge (like the date) can be done in eight Panels.

One hero makes a Test per Panel. No hero can make a second Test until everyone has made their first Test.

Filling Challenge Panels

When it’s your turn to fill in the details of a Panel, remember these tips:

You’re making progress on something. So make progress! Don’t just have characters sit there drinking coffee.
Zoom in on little details that tells us something about the larger situation. If there’s a time crunch, tell us about the clock ticking away.
Remember those emotions! Curiosity, fear, anticipation, joy, surprise, whatever!

Remember that every player should have added a Drive to a Challenge. Use your Panel to push on that Drive, or shore up a Drive that someone else biffed if you think it’s more important.

Completing the Challenge

The Challenge is over on the last Panel. Look at the Drives and see how you did!

Open Scenes

An Open Scene has no rules. It’s freeform writing, character development, fun moments, breathers from serious action, whatever.

Assembling an Open Scene

Open Scenes don’t start with any Drives. You just talk about what you want to do, and then you do it.

Playing an Open Scene

There’s no strict rules about Pages and Panels here. Just tell your story how you want to.

You can add Drives to Open Scenes if you want, and make Tests to shift those Drives around. Again, up to you. In Open scenes, the group can also declare a Drive has been flipped without needing a Test.

Filling Open Panels

When it’s your turn to fill in the details of a Panel, remember these tips:

Keep the emotions front and center. The scene is all about personal lives and interactions that matter.
Don’t just narrate speech - include facial expressions and body language. Do our heroes hesitate, or look away, or stammer? Do they clench their fists, destress by flexing their fingers, pace nervously?
Add some flair from the scene. People walking by, day or night time, weather, and so on.

Sometimes you just want to give the scene a moment to breathe. That’s great!. Just fill a Panel with something. This can include ads or signs for in-universe restaurants, corporations, or politicians. It could include animals, or shots of the sky. It could just be faces looking at each other, expressing a feeling.

Completing the Challenge

Open Scenes happen at their own pace, and they are done when you say they’re done.

Post-Scene and Post-Issue

Moving From Scene to Scene

So you’ve wrapped a scene. Great. Now what?

Whatever just happened hopefully suggests the next scene!

Callbacks

At the end of every scene, each of you gets to lay claim to one Red and one Green Drive, from all the Drives that happened in the scene. You can only have one Red and one Green for yourself - no more. Drives aren’t shared, either - only one person gets to lay claim to them.

This might mean that not everyone gets a Callback from every Scene. That’s how it is sometimes. Figure out amongst yourselves who can lay claim to what.

In future Issues, you get to make a Callback to these Red or Green Drives. “Never again,” your hero might say about a Red Drive they failed to uphold. “I’m inspired,” your hero might think, about a Green Drive that succeeded against the odds. Whatever the situation, using the callback lets you make a Test with a d12. Scratch off the Callback once it’s used - we don’t like locking readers out with heavy continuity, after all.

You can’t invoke Callbacks from one Issue that you collected in the same Issue. Our readers aren’t that forgetful.

Letters to the Editor

At the end of the whole Issue, you’d normally get letters from the readers. As we’re pitching a book here, we don’t have readers yet. So write them yourselves.

Each of you should describe good and bad things about the Issue. Stuff you liked, stuff you want to see more of, stuff that didn’t work, whatever. Reward good action, and be constructive in your criticism.

Character Tuning

You can use what you experienced during the Issue, along with any feedback from Letters to the Editor, to tune the character you wrote. You can change any or all of their Traits, reassign the Trait dice, rewrite Hooks, and so on. Anything you were able to do when creating the character is fair game.

What, you think major comic characters haven’t just switched power sets between Issues? Happens all the time. Go wild.

Conclusion

Folks, Breathtaking Comics isn’t about poring over lists of specific super-powers, or debating who would win, the guy with the gadgets or the physical god. You can do those things if you want to, though, because that’s really what we’re about here - being fans of superhero comic books. We’re all here to be fans.

Spectacular ficiton can be a way for us to talk about real problems. They tackled racism on “Star Trek”. “Superman” helped take down the Ku Klux Klan! Unbelievable but true. I’m perfectly happy to keep selling books where people just punch each other in the face. But as long as the kids are reading our books, it doesn’t hurt to aim higher. That’s why only one of my five Traits is about superpowers. The rest matters. Who we are as people matters, god dammit.

So tell your stories the way you want them to be told. Remember that there should be a beating human heart at the center of them, though. That’s why it’s better that some Drives in a Crisis don’t go well for the heroes, for example. The days where everything goes our way are few and far between. We should always want to do better, try harder, go bigger. Just because a Drive was struck while Red this time doesn’t mean it can’t be tried later. Our heroes will get there eventually. So will we, if we follow their example.

Advice and Questions

A lot of this is gonna be “can we…?” and me saying “yes you can!” What am I, your mother?

But some people like having their permissions explicitly spelled out. So here we go!

Do we have to use Crisis scenes for every battle?

Absolutely not. Crisis scenes impose a particular feel on the scene, sure, but nothing stops you from using Challenge or Open scenes instead.

Do Challenge scenes have to be for hard-hitting urgent situations?

You can do a Challenge where two teammates are on a date and the others are spying on them, if you want. The different scene types are really about how the scene should feel, not the activities inside the scene. You can have a Crisis without a single villain - maybe heroes are doing nothing but rescue work, helping save civilians.

Are we really limited to 4-6-8 Panels per Page in Challenge and Crisis scenes?

You can do 5 or 7 Panels if you really want, sure. The more Panels you have on a Page, the easier it’ll be to flip Drives to Green. So the specific numbers aren’t too critical.

Can we write a solo comic book with this?

Sure!

You have one hero, they just appear on every Panel on a Page. They’re the one rolling tests and having hooks invoked and all that, but it doesn’t matter if there’s one hero or ten when it comes down to it - the pacing of Drives in a scene is about number of Tests made, and that’s per Panel, not per hero.

Where the hero count matters is when Trait dice step down. That’s why you only step down dice once per Page.

Can our characters get hurt?

Can and should. Heroes being injured can be a reason a Drive goes to Red, for example. If you roll well, you get a second wind and return to the battle. Happens all the time!

You can optionally create a “Heroes Hurt” kind of Drive to keep track of injury as its own thing. If you rally, it goes Green. If you get beat up, it goes Red. Don’t do that unless this is a major part of the scene, and if you can see it going both ways.

How do we pull off a daring million-to-one rescue?

You have a couple of options.

The first is to just cheat. Take a Drive out of play, and just say “we did the thing because it was that awesome”. This is absolutely legitimate. If everyone except the dice think an action should succeed, the dice don’t get a say. You do.

The second is to play within the rules. You want a Drive to end the scene in good shape? Roll Trait dice until that Drive flips to Green. If you have a Callback, roll that. It’s especially great if that Callback invokes the object of the rescue. Once the Drive goes Green, strike it. If you had to sacrifice some other Drives along the way, or introduce new Drives to flip to Red, well that’s the price you paid for victory, isn’t it.

What’s the math on Drives and dice and stuff anyhow?

You can think of dice in terms of how many net green drives it’ll buy you. On a 1-2 it’s -1, on 3-4 it’s net zero, on 5+ it’s +1, on 10+ it’s 12. So the average of the outcomes, as far as I know, looks like this:

d4:  -1 -1 0 0                 = -0.5
d6:  -1 -1 0 0 1 1             = +0
d8:  -1 -1 0 0 1 1 1 1         = 0.25
d10: -1 -1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 2     = 0.5
d12: -1 -1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 = 0.75

In a Crisis, the goal is a healthy mix of Red and Green Drives by pages 5 to 8 or so. You’re gonna lose 3 Drives during Pages 1-3, offset by the three Green Drives I gave you up front. With six panels and d8 starting Traits, you’re going to average a gain of 1.5 Drives. If you neglect your Hooks and just rotate through traits, you can keep this rate up for four Pages.

People starting out will dip into d6 Traits pretty fast, because they aren’t using Hooks. Starting Crisis scenes also don’t have Callbacks, which are frankly magical once you start racking them up. So early fight scenes will probably feel tense.

As you get used to using Hooks to keep your dice in the d8-d10 range, and you use your Callbacks properly (which is to say as much as possible), you’ll be nailing more and more Green Drives. But of course, dice are random for a reason. Just because you know the long-term average roll doesn’t mean you’ll get anything near it.

Examples

Example Character: Sergeant Stronghold

Sergeant Stronghold, aka Craig Costigan, is one of our flagship characters. Here’s my notes on his Traits.

On the team, his Position is Tactician. He’s barking orders, taking point, running interference, all that stuff he got from his war experience. Oh yeah, that’s his Past, by the way: 20th Century War Veteran. Powers? Obviously his Elixir-Enhanced Physique. He drank the witch’s brew, it made him strong, blah blah blah.

But what’s the biggest appeal? What keeps people reading the Stronghold books are his Personality - American Dreamer - and his Problems - Disillusioned Doughboy. Craig’s experienced the worst parts of America, and he keeps fighting for the best parts.

Sergeant Stronghold’s Problems trait is “Disillusioned Doughboy”. He’s been around since at least the First World War and faced hate for his heritage. So let’s write some Hooks to support that trait, and I’ll let you figure out hooks for his other Traits.

Someone faces discrimination or stereotyping
Someone is let down by a cause they fought for
An institution breaks its promises

This doesn’t mean that Stronghold himself has to deal with discrimination - but if anyone in the scene does, that brings his Hook into play. If Stronghold is on the scene, we want to talk about questions of patriotism, war service, honor, and all that. Hooks help establish and safeguard the themes of the book. They keep the story from veering off into weird territory.

Example Crisis Scene

I listed some example plots earlier. “A villain is committing a crime”. “A high-tech invention is being stolen”. “Civilians are in danger”. “A giant monster is rampaging”. “A high-rise building is on fire”. I’m going to turn this into a single Crisis scene.

A giant monster is rampaging
Because of the giant monster, a building is collapsing
Civilians are in danger because of the collapsing building
Because a hero’s love interest reporter is near the building, they are endangered
Meanwhile, a villain is committing a crime
The villain is stealing a high-tech invention
A hero wants to impress a teammate by solving these problems

Now you turn these into Drives. Combine moments when they feel like they’ll overlap too much. For example, if the building collapses, the civilians are really in trouble. But maybe the building collapse causes a bunch of collateral damage if it happens? Who knows. So we turn this into:

Giant Monster Rampage
Civilians In Danger
Hero’s Reporter Girlfriend
Villain Committing Crime
The Gizmo
Hero Impressing Teammate

We choose “Hero’s Reporter Girlfriend”, “The Gizmo”, and “Hero Impressing Teammate” to start Green.

We start at Page One, Panel One. A hero sees civilians in danger. Naturally they’re going to rush in and save those people first. Which hero? Who cares. I’ll roll a d8 for their trait. They get a 5, which lets them move a Trait to Green. Obviously that’s “Civilians in Danger”. That d8 now goes down to a d6.

Next Panel, next hero. They’re going to attack the monster. They roll a d8 Trait and get 2. They decide the Giant Monster Rampage isn’t going well, and it breathes fire over downtown. That Drive goes Red. That d8 also drops to a d6.

Third panel, third hero. They want to rescue the teammate from the barbecue, roll a d8, and get a three. Giant Monster Rampage goes Green because they’re distracting the beast, but we’ll say the fire and chaos presents an obstacle for the civilian rescue. Sure enough, that d8 drops to a d6. Doesn’t matter whether you succeed or fail, the Trait die always steps down.

Say one of these heroes had a traumatic experience with fire, and now seeing the creature’s fiery breath sets that off. If that was a Hook, this would let them bump up a trait die. If the Hook about fire came from Problems, it’s any trait die. If it was from any other Trait (like Past), it could only bump up the die for that trait.

If there were three heroes, it’s now end of Page, so pick a Drive to go Red. For our example we’ll say the Villain is getting away with it, because nobody interfered with them.

The Drive notes should look like this:

Giant Monster Rampage (GREEN) - being distracted by Hero #3
Civilians In Danger (RED) - monster’s fiery breath cut off escape route
Hero’s Reporter Girlfriend (GREEN) - no change
Villain Committing Crime (RED) - villain is acting unopposed
The Gizmo (GREEN) - no change
Hero Impressing Teammate (GREEN) - no change

Rinse and repeat, until about half the total Drives are struck.

Example Issue Templates

We’re writing the first Issue of a brand-new book

Open with a Crisis scene.

Everyone loves a big fight. Plus, it’s a good way to introduce the characters, feel them out for yourself, get used to writing Drives, and so forth and so on. It has the most structure, which means it’ll corral newbies through the process. You’ll get a feel for Drives.

Because you won’t have Callbacks to start with, your characters will fail more often. This means you’ll get more Red Drives. Good! Heroes fail up front, then rally and win later.

Once you finish that first Crisis, you should have plenty of Red Drives racked up. The bad guy got away. The dingus is lost. The reporter love interest broke up with you. Is your hero gonna take any of that sitting down? No!

Figure out which of those Red Drives should be followed up on. Spin up a new Scene to take action. Maybe the heroes pursue the villain in an action-packed chase! Or maybe there’s a quieter scene, where the heroes help civilians and put out fires and stuff. But that’s the magic of Drives, especially Red Drives: they give you a direction to go next.

We want to introduce a new hero or spotlight an existing one

Great, fantastic. We love special issues.

Open with a Challenge Scene featuring that character doing their special thing. We’ll see how other characters interact with our spotlight hero by the way they contribute to this scene. Develop new scenes from the way the Drives turned out.

Try to wrap up the Issue with a Crisis scene, or some kind of kinetic action-packed Challenge where we see the hero face some notable opposition. This could be their rival, a special villain, or something else that sets up their long-term struggle. To give our hero an edge during this scene (or any other scenes where you think it’s relevant), start their Traits at d10 instead of d8.