The Early Years: Can We Lift It? Probably Not!

So this week I decided to take a break from being curmudgeonly about AI to sift through the giant stack of my old papers that my folks sent me a while back; but this time, near the top of the pile, I found something that wasn’t an old bad drawing or me asking rude questions. Instead, it was a mysterious list of weights.

Now, I imagine most readers will look at this list and be wondering, “Who cares how much a mansion weighs?”, while others will be wondering, “What is a Brownstone Six Flat?”, while still others will be wondering, “A larger tree than what?” But there’s probably also a certain subset of readers who will be saying to themselves, “This is obviously some sort of reference for a superhero role-playing game.”* Because if there’s one thing that might happen in a superhero RPG, it’s picking up a bank vault door and throwing it at somebody, and in order to know if a character can do that, you need to know how much such an item weighs. In theory.

Sure enough, in the immediate vicinity of this sheet, I started finding other superhero RPG related stuff, much of which is so old it is written out in longhand on paper. Imagine! For instance, I found the character sheet for this villain, Malefarr, an obviously boss-level baddie who may be familiar to anybody from my college who used to write on the old Story Board on the VAX, or whatever that system was that the school was running.

I also found a number of sheets for various villains and player characters, also done in longhand, many of which for some reason had small attached character head shots (which I guarantee you I did not draw myself**), as if they were sending in applications for modeling agencies. I mean, who wouldn’t want to put the very attractive Amazing Man and his mullet on the cover of their magazine?

Referring back to the weight chart that kicked this all off, one will note that Amazing Man can pick up a house, a tank, or a DC-9, but not a blue whale or a larger*** tree. In any case if he throws something at you it’s probably going to hurt.

Although they’re not labeled, I’m pretty sure, based on the structure, that these character sheets are for the old “Villains & Vigilantes” RPG, AKA “V&V”****. Here’s an example of a proper V&V character sheet, for a well-known character from Marvel comics:

If I remember correctly one of the central conceits of V&V was that your character was, in his or her secret identity, supposed to be you; i.e., it had the scores for intelligence, willpower, charisma, etc., that your gamemaster (GM) thought you should have, plus whatever your enhanced abilities were. If the potential this concept presents for generating arguments and hard feelings is obvious to you, congratulations! You’re apparently more astute than the makers of this game. Needless to say, we always ignored that part of the rules.

I mean, we play ourselves enough in real life as it is.

* Right? Anyone saying that to themselves out there? Bueller … ?
** Because Jim Can’t Draw.
*** Larger than what?
**** See what they did there?