Welcome again to another installment of "Causing A Scene-ario", the article that spices up your hum drum game!

Click Full Story below to see what Caused a Scene-ario!

The 'Nado is gone, and the Sharks are cleared! I hope anyone who used that scenario had a good time with it.

Anyone who wants to know how the Sharknado was made, send me a message, I'll be glad to provide you with what I used to make it. It's not hard, and I think all 4 that I made weren't that expensive.

So, I have a local player who has taken to scenario design who's made some interesting games based on TV shows. It's great to see players designing new ways to play. While reading them, I've thought of potential problems that could come up. So I wanted to do TheFreak's Guide to Scenario Building.

The first thing is to have fun! That's why we're playing this game right? You should want and try to make it so that all players in the tournament or your at home session have fun. Sure one person's fun can mean another person's grueling torture, but hopefully you can do your best to mitigate that.

My second suggestion is that if you're not a competitive or experienced player, it helps to think like one or let someone try to "break" your scenario before rolling it out to your venue. Because those competitive/experienced players will break it, and break it hard. They will look for and find any kind of loophole in wording you didn't cover. And that just makes for a bad experience for everyone. Use the right terminology like Attacks vs Actions or Can vs May. If you don't, someone WILL ask you "Hey can I do this with that?" and you'll need an answer. It's best if you have solid rules wordings and definitions to explain your answer.

The bigger you make your scenario, the more likely players are to forget aspects. Consider what we already have to keep track of. Who has a possessor. Did I link the dial. What am I getting from a resource/trait. What can this vehicle do. Inspiration Effects. If you add on "and you get these three powers, plus can do this and this...Phew. My head is already spinning. Don't even throw Zombie Super Skrull or Engineer in there!!

It can also cause issues with a tournament setting. If you have too much going on, players might not get to actually play the game. That 4000 points, nothing over 100 points scenario may sound like a blast, but for a tournament setting, I'd wager very little action will happen.

Keep collections and the players in mind. It's been my experience that players don't want to go crazy looking through everything they have to see if a figure has specific keywords. When you get too restrictive, you also alienate that new player without many figures. If someone doesn't use HCRealms, they may not realize that un-carded figures even have Keywords! I know players who've seen a limited build requirement and decided not to bother playing that day. Players seeing more and more tournaments they don't want to play in is a quick way to start losing players!

Keep these things in mind, and you and your players will have a lot of fun! I'll leave with this scenario, one that locally is a big hit:


Much like "Who's Line is it Anyway" the points don't matter. You can scale it up or down as you see fit. I suggest no special objects, resources, vehicles or team bases. Those pieces just cause issues usually. But it's up to you. If you use special objects, I'd say they need to come out of the point totals. So if you use a 50, a 100, a 150, a 200, a 250 and a 300 points figures, you don't have room for Special Objects. So replace the 50 with a 40 and throw out the Crimson Gem of Cyttorak on the field for example.

One variation that's also fun is having two figures out at the same time. Watch for players using the lowest available option, to try and game other players out of getting many points. It's a real Grayson move, but I've seen it done just "because it'd be funny". This is also a pretty easy scenario to build for, as most players usually have at least ONE figure that can fit into each category.

That's it for this installment! Now get out there and Cause a Scene-ario!

This is nice and simple, I had a variation on the Marvel vs Capcom theme, where characters tag in/out, upon the change and for a double power action, they could use the ability.

I've used MvC to describe ID Cards actually!

How do you lose in here? Just one character has to be KO'ed or every figure must die? XDDD

Oh, yeah that should be noted... hahah. Characters that leave the field aren't healed. So when they come back on the field, they are on the click they were.

This is a really great primer, and I've run in to a few of these issues. Great read!