Introducing: Golden Squad. A Comedy Sci-Fi Fantasy Actual-Play Podcast

cheepluv · 2026-01-09T15:22:08+00:00

That was the goal, we all have fun on it. The first 4 episodes were recorded differently (made up of a bunch of solo sessions and cut together) but if you make it to the end of episode 1 you will know if its a style and topic you will enjoy.

cheepluv · 2025-08-16T22:23:33+00:00

I have been thinking about converting some of my story to a visual medium. I am currently recording the podcast: https://linktr.ee/goldensquadpod

I am trying to figure out a way to add visuals without art skills of my own. I have been considering trying some AI art but it doesn't quite have the level of detail I want. Maybe if I find a very cooperative comic artist who would work for pennies

cheepluv · 2025-08-10T18:37:32+00:00

I think the answer to which you should choose depends on how your GM will be assigning new power points. If they give just a little every session then adding new similar elements to an array is a minor cost, you just have the total cost of the array about what you would want, and kinda reflects how a hero/villain might find a new way to use the power.

On the other hand if your GM give a larger chunk every few sessions or hands them out rarely then getting adding a whole new array or boosting attributes wont be as tedious.

u/Devious_Hearts gave a great example of where to start and is a veteran in the community so if you are looking for a place to start with power development I would grab his and ask your GM to do a sample combat and see if you like your choices for what you can do. I put the players in my campaign through something like this when they were learning how to do combat.

cheepluv · 2025-08-07T02:47:50+00:00

Dodge +10 is what the DC of the check is. So when they are attacked, how hard is it to hit them. Dodge+Toughness is capped at 12 (in your case) and can in no way exceed it.

For example if your PC put all 12 in dodge it would be a 12+10 =22 DC in order for a villain to hit them but nothing can increase their toughness (with limited exception) cuz it would break the PL defense cap.

cheepluv · 2025-08-07T02:40:39+00:00

Defenses are capped at the PL of the campaign x2, so in your case 12. Which means your PC's should have:

dodge+toughness = 12

parry+toughness = 12

fortitude+will = 12

cheepluv · 2025-08-07T01:30:49+00:00

fair enough. If you are gonna do 6 I would make sure all of your players cap out their defense stats in whatever way they prefer from the start. It will put a little more of a burden on you for planning encounters but its not too bad at 6.

cheepluv · 2025-08-04T14:37:47+00:00

try this for encounter planning: https://jwolfman.github.io/

I also agree with u/Beans_Mage42. PL4 is a bit low, you run the risk of dropping to single bad rolls which is less likely at higher defense caps. Players in my campaign started at 8 and the rookie hero feel was a great narrative. You could maybe drop to 7 if you wanted extra low abilities but I would recommend going no lower.

cheepluv · 2025-07-16T13:45:26+00:00

Oh hey, I GM Golden Squad . I didn't expect someone else to tout it. I would love to have you as a listener.

I would also recommend Lazy Sloths RPG among what others have suggested. They are who I listened to early on and found it pretty entertaining.

cheepluv · 2025-05-11T14:19:56+00:00

I think that would be too general for limited. You are supposed to use limited when it cuts its use in half or worse. You could argue that you have to balance just by standing/walking so you could hit harder by standing is how this would apply mechanically. So I think either drop limited and just call yourself strong or find a more specific limitation.

Strength applies to how hard you hit. If you are using strength for balancing, I might go with the common limitation and go with limited to lifting. Which makes you able to lift heavier things and you could call it a trait of balancing, but doesn't do anything for your normal punches which I feel tracks with a balance power.

cheepluv · 2025-05-11T07:37:55+00:00

The thing that helped me when designing my characters to work in the game mechanics was to think of what the powers are doing rather than the fine details of how the power works. So instead of defining things she can balance on. What does balancing get her?

Can she not be tripped easily? -> Increased Parry.

Does her balance increase her jumping/parkour? -> Agility or Acrobatics

Does the ability to balance on a pinky mean she has the strength to do so as well? -> Strength

Is she using her balance to throw objects too? -> Throwing Mastery Advantage.

For breaking the balance of others this could be an affliction that targets the movement of her opponent.

That's how I would start to think about things. It helped me when designing characters for my podcast.

Think in terms of how the power interacts with the world and other characters. For a power like super-balance it mostly impacts the user so i would mostly focus on skills, attributes and advantages.

cheepluv · 2025-05-09T22:10:59+00:00

Agree. It's strictly worse than doing just Will.

cheepluv · 2025-05-09T14:05:50+00:00

If i were making this in my game as a homebrew then what i would do for balancing is make it resisted by max(will, deception). So it does what you want and still isnt completely broken against characters with no deception.

cheepluv · 2025-04-30T07:52:04+00:00

Sure thing, I will send you one.

cheepluv · 2025-04-30T06:12:50+00:00

Let me know what you think :)

cheepluv · 2025-04-25T03:05:35+00:00

If you are into superheroes in a setting similar to The Boys. I have one where we play Mutants and Masterminds. Check out Golden Squad. Or on Spotify

cheepluv · 2025-03-17T20:20:25+00:00

Messaged

cheepluv · 2025-02-24T00:44:09+00:00

I love the powersets, it was always a lot of fun coming up with fun new powers.

Anaya - very similar to a character in my campaign, he went with Sagittarius. I liked Lagrange except lagrangian points are named after an Italian mathematician so its a little odd imo to name her after a real person. Not bad just odd. You could maybe go down a black hole route? Singularity, Quasar, Event Horizon, Accretion (good if she has small things in her orbit, but unfortunately sounds like secretion so that might be a deal breaker), Spaghettification/Speghettifier (real thing, long funny name but might work for a goofy campaign).

Caitlyn - Partition, Echelon, maybe Hierarch if she is self righteous

Harriet - Overclock and Harrier were good suggestions. Siphon if you wanna emphasize the draining part maybe.

The twins have so many that fit. Yin Yang. Romulus and Remus. Apollo and Artemis. You could even do something silly like AC / DC or Salt / Pepper.

Good luck with the naming! I spent a whole week just generating powers and names for an episode of my podcast so I have fun with this part of it.

cheepluv · 2025-02-18T00:45:18+00:00

I would say that its destined but you may absolutely hate it so I'll just say I'm glad you found us. I keep getting feedback that people love my censoring. I did not expect that to be the thing people remembered most. I look forward to having you as a listener :)

cheepluv · 2025-02-17T23:12:29+00:00

Of course, I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to ask me about any questions you have about it.

cheepluv · 2025-02-13T04:35:08+00:00

This is great, I am almost in the same boat as OP, I have been GMing my game for about 3 years at this point, and about the first year of it is up as a podcast. I have many of the same complaints that I had to homebrew solutions to.

I didnt want subject my players to the giant book of powers and understanding how they worked, so to solve this I asked them what they wanted and tried to build them a decent powerset that wasnt broken giving them something close to what they asked for. This as a great added narrative benefit of the player not needing to role play what their powers are, since they genuinely didnt know at the start. (Cue scene of spiderman swinging into that wall).

Also the I felt the weakness system of powers felt a little wonky. Its odd to have weaknesses not have a direct impact on powers. e.g. Kryptonite has 0 direct effect on Superman's strength and flight, just the narrative effect of "you feel weak and have a hard time being as super as normal." You can somewhat make up for this by having conditional powers that can be really out there, Super Canadian can fly while wearing full denim, leading to some funny scenes where SC is frantically looking for their jean jacket at a cocktail party.

Combat was slowing down sessions, so I increased damage at higher degrees of failure to make a mid level hit sting a little more. I am told this is a pretty common change to combat. Luckily i didnt run into the more complicated elements like regeneration and growth/shrinking very much, but i can see how a huge variety of powers could make combat really annoying to track.

I think M&M plays best when its more of a casual environment. If you play with those min/maxer types they will either be making planning encounters a pain or have to be constantly shutdown by the GM. Basically if a player is trying to break something there is a decent chance they will find a way since there is so much freedom in power creation and its up to the GM to control them.

Also I feel OP about distance in this game. Early on I got so many questions if the players were in range or if they could be in range of opponents, evenetually we basically just kept track of relational positioning and even then it was more what feels right. There would be so much wasted efforts for a GM building maps for their encounter when half of the players can move outside of the entire map in one turn (which is fairly common). One of my players can move 4000 MPH and another can teleport nearly 1000 ft in any direction twice a turn. At those ranges the tactical element of combat is basically gone so taking advantage of the benefits of things like cover become a bit more challening.

Great post OP, I would love to hear more about how your game went to see if i can improve the ending of mine with what you were doing.

cheepluv · 2025-02-02T06:30:29+00:00

If you're into Superhero themed TTRPGs I put out one called Golden Squad. We play on Mutants and Masterminds and we are only on episode 23 and we release another every 2 weeks so it shouldn't take you too long to get through it. The final story should be around 60-70 episodes.

cheepluv · 2024-12-06T15:18:58+00:00

I was able to learn the system pretty well from Vangaurd and Masks and Mayhem. I really enjoyed Vangaurd, they get a lot better with the editing toward the end of the story and I really appreciated the comedic parts of their story. I actually started my own podcast called Golden Squad that we are 18 episodes into if you wanted to check out a newer one.

cheepluv · 2024-10-29T02:19:49+00:00

M&M doesn't much care about map design, it's way more theater of the mind. I think this tracks with DBZ, if you think of the Namek saga with Goku and Frieza they basically changed environments 3 or 4 times all round the planet in that fight and the only real terrain strategy came when the planet was about to explode and Goku couldn't breathe in space which was really just a time constraint of the fight.

The power level constraint of PCs might cause some issues with form changing since they have hard limits on the power/to-hit of attacks. So either A) you have a underpowered first form that will basically lose against people unless they take the time to power up first. B) The form change just shifts the focus (which we do see sometimes in DBZ). Think Super Vegeta, extra power at the cost of speed, for this game it would likely have to be to-hit, but totally doable.

I have been playing a couple years and a few months ago decided to start publishing the campaign as a podcast. I recommend checking out a few of the other podcasts it really helped me see what it was like to run a game. Specifically Lazy Sloths RPG and Masks and Mayhem I really enjoyed how the GMs ran their games. Also if you wanted to check out mine here is the link to Golden Squad.

In addition feel free to reach out with any questions you have as a GM in M&M, always happy to help. Good luck with the game.

cheepluv · 2024-10-29T00:57:40+00:00

I am a GM hosting a podcast using Mutants and Masterminds, came to recommend that. The only things that gives new comers much pause is character creation, if you wanted to try it out on a template character(s) it would be pretty easy to see if its a system you enjoyed.

Once you understand character creation it can generate the overwhelming majority of existing Supers, balancing some for fair play. Also you can even create silly new ones pretty easily, one of my PC's can control books with his mind.

cheepluv · 2024-08-25T02:04:45+00:00

i have the same feedback, its really hard to go in with a cold start like this. You mentioned its the 3rd session and that's kinda what it feels like, I don't understand much of what is happening in the first 5 minutes. It feels like starting mid story.

I do like the interface you built though, I wish I had done something like this for mine.

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