@Almalthia@ShieldsOfWarConsidering this is a school setting thought I'd share something from one of my source books that is about a Hero school
“REMEMBER, CLASS — TEST TOMORROW” Rowan and her staff of instructors use the Testing Room (page 58) for more than everyday training exercises — they also use it to give exams to their students. The “exam scenarios” are designed to test what the students have learned over the course of their studies. Ravenswood uses some as exams for particular courses year after year (with slight changes, of course, to improve the scenario, better test a particular class’s strengths and weaknesses, and prevent cheating). These scenarios have gained a reputation among the students, both current and former, and have become a sort of rite of initiation — no superpowered teen is considered a “true” Ravenswood student until he’s been through Freshman Orientation, and no Ravenswood student is considered a “true” Ravenswood graduate until he’s had his butt kicked in the Damocles Scenario. The students have nicknamed the scenarios, and hand down these nicknames from class to class. Throughout the remainder of this chapter, you’ll find Remember, Class — Test Tomorrow text boxes that describe the exams in broad terms. A GM can use these as plot seeds for quick one-night game sessions and the like.
Freshman Orientation: Rowan always gives the same lecture to incoming students, and she holds the lecture in the Testing Room. (Of course, the new students are [mostly] unaware of the Testing Room’s true purpose at that point.) The lecture is especially boring — she drones on... and on... and on... about the responsibilities of a superhero, the difficulties of being a masked crime fighter, and the importance of studying hard until the students have difficulty keeping their eyes open. Then comes the attack. It usually involves Dr. Destroyer, Mechanon, or some other infamous and supremely powerful supervillain bursting through the wall and threatening to kill everyone in the room. Rowan gives the students enough time to react before commanding PLATO to stop the scenario. The purpose of Freshman Orientation is to allow Rowan to get a handle on the new students’ instincts — when faced with the situation, do they freeze, jump immediately to the attack, stop to reason out the situation, or chose some other course of action?
The MCPD Blues: The MCPD Blues is a series of exams for the course sequence Superheroes, Law Enforcement, and the Law. Th e class teaches students about the justice system, law enforcement, and how best to guarantee a guilty verdict. In these scenarios the students are stripped of their superpowers and “roleplay” police officers on duty in Millennium City. They take the roles of uniformed officers, detectives, and in the fourth year sequence attorneys trying the case. They must stop supervillain crime, practice crowd control during superpowered battles, and do detective work into supervillainous activity without recourse to their powers. The main goal of the exams is to provide the students with a better understanding of what it’s like to be a member of traditional law enforcement.
We Come In Peace: The final exam for the lecture series Other Species Cultures, We Come In Peace involves the students being thrown into a tense situation involving an alien species they know nothing about. The situation ranges from being caught at the outbreak of intergalactic war, to a planet’s star just hours from going supernova, to being revered as gods by a primitive species being wiped out by a plague. Most students hate this scenario mainly because there’s never a right or wrong answer; instead a lengthy “debriefing” session follows the scenario’s conclusion and each student is required to justify the decisions the group made.
Help, Mr. Wizard!: This series of exams is for Secret History I and II. The students are placed in the past and future and tested on their understanding of the times and cultures. Environments range from the Valdorian Age (a time of flashing swords and dark sorcery) and the Atlantean Age (a golden era of high magic) to World War II, when American superheroes fought Nazi superpowered ubermensch, to the far future when even the lowliest citizen possesses technology that would make him a superhero in the modern day. Doctors Hildreth and Post program the scenarios, and their memories of those places and times are something less than consistent — a situation only made worse because of the many alternate dimensions they visited while lost in time.
Game Night: Like cadets at a military academy, the students study famous past battles between superheroes and villains — Mechanon’s first appearance, the Class of ’92’s infiltration of Dr. Destroyer’s base, the “Martian” invasion of 1938, and so on. Game Night is a series of pop quizzes where Rowan programs one of these battles into the Testing Room, and the students take the role of the superheroes. Rowan doesn’t give the students any advanced warning about what they’ll face, but if the students have been paying attention, they should quickly recognize the scenario for what it is and what they must do. If they haven’t, the scenario usually ends badly for them. And on one or two famous occasions, the students have done better than the original superheroes (at least, in the minds of the students).
Superhero Cribs: In Superhero Operation Centers, an extracurricular series of seminars for upperclassmen, the participants work together (or more often fight it out) to build a superhero base and then staff it, selecting the staff from a group of pregenerated “applicants.” Once the students have made their choices, the Testing Room then produces a hologram of the base, and over the course of the semester, the students must deal with crises that arise because of their decisions. These include housing refugees who lost their homes during a titanic supervillain crisis, to dealing with interpersonal conflict between staff members, to an AI gone rogue (PLATO’s favorite crisis, since he gets to roleplay the part of the rogue AI). The final test is a supervillain assault on the base.
My Enemy, My Self: Like Game Night, Rowan uses this scenario as a pop quiz. It involves the students fighting doubles of themselves — but not just exact doubles. Rowan always has in mind ways and directions for a student to develop his powers, and as an object lesson, she programs the Testing Room to give the doubles these potential powers. That way the student can see — and oftentimes, feel — first-hand what Rowan has described to him. The students hate it — in their minds, it’s like Rowan’s telling them, “I told you so” — and nothing makes a student happier than easily defeating his double. To him, it’s proof he’s doing just fine with his powers.
Pimp My Super-Ride: A second extracurricular lecture series, similar to Superhero Operation Centers, is Superhero Transportation. This is only an eight-week series, and it involves creating a super vehicle and testing it in battle and other hostile conditions. It starts with ground-based vehicles and then moves on to watercraft , atmospheric flight, and finally starships. Two weeks are dedicated to each type of vehicle — one week for initial design and testing, the second week to improve the initial design and test it again. Students learn not only how to design a vehicle (roughly speaking — it’s not advanced engineering), but how to pilot/drive various types of vehicles and deal with a variety of environments.With only two weeks devoted to each type of vehicle, the survey is short,and PLATO provides considerable assistance with much of the actual driving or piloting, so most students don’t have time to master all the ins and outs of handling the various types of vehicles, but a few students do gain considerable skill. In game terms, Pimp My Super-Ride doesn’t automatically give a student Combat Driving, Combat Piloting, Mechanics, and the various TFs — the seminars just give him a general knowledge about how the vehicles work and how to operate them — but after completing the course, a player can chose to purchase those Skills for his PC if he wishes. Although Superhero Cribs has a reputation for being a bit dull — mostly because of the scenarios dealing with what are essentially interoffice politics — few students pass up a chance to take Pimp My Super-Ride. Driver’s Education is a prerequisite for this lecture series.
The Damocles Scenario: The final exam a student takes is the Damocles Scenario. No graduate will say anything about the scenario except that it’s impossible to win. The scenario is entirely voluntary, although peer pressure is high to participate and most students are intensely curious about Damocles after four years of hearing about it. The Damocles Scenario can not only be humbling, but emotional traumatic, and Rowan has been known to forbid some students from participating. Rumor has it that only Night Marshall II (Class of ’94; see page 49) has won the scenario. Whenever a student mentions this, however, Rowan shakes her head and rolls her eyes.