Community College Hero: Trial by Fire
by Eric Moser
Published Dec. 2015 - 168,000 or 176,000 words (The store descriptions can’t agree!)
Community College Hero combines two of the most popular Choicescript genres—the school setting and the superhero genre. You play a young freshman college student who joins a community college’s new hero training program in Nebraska. In CCH’s world, thanks to Cold War shield technology, babies and kids got bombarded with neutron particles and developed real super powers as they got older. Except not your character! Moser has made the bold choice to make you the only ‘normal’ student in the hero program.
It almost seems cruel at first, because you get a list of powers to pick from, then get a description of how said powers failed to show up. Instead, you get to pick what type of ‘badass normal’ you want to be, as they define it in the comic genre. You can be a stealthy detective-type, an acrobat, a sharpshooter, or a soldier-type.
You even get to pick what hero archetype you want to be, whether it’s a brooder like Batman, a charmer, a jokester like Spider-Man with quips for every opportunity, or just a traditionalist who upholds the ideals of being a hero and presents themselves that way.
My character was ‘Ghost Gal’, a brooding detective type, wearing an all-black trench coat, a hood with a domino mask, and who was big on stealth and thinking (or Shh and Hmm as the game calls them). A ‘The Shadow’ or ‘Batman’ type of hero.
PROS:
World building. Stories in the superhero genre can quickly feel silly if authors aren’t careful with the implications and ramifications. Moser neatly handles this in multiple ways—first, powers have only been around about 20-30 years, growing out of alternate history Cold War technology that went awry. So there hasn’t been time for massive divergence between our modern world and that of Community College Heroes.
Second, the story acknowledges actual changes brought about in the world, including a big focus on the legal practicalities of superheroes running around blowing things up in fights against criminals and super villains. Even the legality of running up to a street thug while wearing a mask and hurting them by attacking them. One of your college classes is “Law and Liability” and you even have a “Insurance Claims Filed Against You” stat!
Third, there is pretty realistic corporate and political squabbling over superheroes and powers. People protesting superheroes in their town for attracting villains or just running up insurance premiums, cities competing for lucrative hero technologies, the privatization of superhero training and the competition that arises, and the pure destruction high-power level villains can inflict on cities and the trauma and statutes that result.
Moser does a great job of tying it all together into what feels like a cohesive lived-in setting.
Characters. This is perhaps where Community College Hero shines the most. On joining the school in Nebraska, you are presented with 15-16 major characters and probably at least that many minor characters. Many at first seem one-note, but quickly start accumulating depth as you interact with them.
Just a small example of the fellow students on offer: A punk girl slacker who emits smoke from her fingertips and goes by the moniker ‘Dirty Girl’, both for her powers and because, hey, she just likes making people uncomfortable. A nerdy boy who wears a suit of armor that makes him look like a turtle but calls himself the ‘Combat Wombat’, and is entirely too confident in the abilities of his armor and overlooks the many downsides it causes in his everyday interactions. A young optimistic girl named ‘Origami’ who can turn her body into paper and fold herself into all sorts of shapes and gets way more utility out of that than you’d initially imagine. Even an ‘older college student’ archetype named ‘Crook’ who has nearly a decade on the other students and can create portals from one location to another, but he’s really fond of his knives.
There is also a lot more interaction with the teachers and administrators here than in something like the Keeper series. Each has a strong personality, agendas, teaching methods, and interactions that can totally affect your grade. There are secrets to discover with each of them and a teacher who reminded me strongly of Gilderoy Lockhart from Harry Potter except with an even darker sleazier angle since all the students are in college.
Grades matter. A lot of games in the “school” genre have grades, but they usually don’t matter too much outside of maybe parental approval or if you want to achieve certain academic awards at the end of the game.
In Community College Hero your grade point average directly ties in with how strong your character is—do well in a class and you may increase your stats. Maintain a 3.0 GPA and you get awarded more powerful gadgets and gear that can unlock new options in situations and fights.
This creates some real drama to academics that usually isn’t present in these types of settings. In many games like this, the option to slack-off, talk during class, or skip studying is really just a personality check as to what type of character you want to be or what type of friends you want to hang out with.
Here, it’s much more ruthless and feels like a real choice. Do you flirt with that cute classmate or take notes? If you take notes, you actually get real info committed to your Academic menu in the Stats you can refer to during tests. If didn’t study the info? Well, welcome back to real world academics where you get to stare at multiple choice questions on an exam and optimistically pick the ones that sound like they could be right.
You have two rounds of testing—Mid-Terms and Finals. Each determine whether you get upgrades or not. The game even builds tension by updating where you are academically. “You got a C. It’s going to be hard to maintain a 3.0 GPA unless you get A’s in your other classes.”
Because of this, what starts as determination to just do your honest best can waver as you go on and discover your character’s personal best isn’t adequate to get the grades you want. Then you get new pressures. How badly do you want those upgrades and new gear? Will you cheat? Will you pander and suck-up to teachers? Will you sabotage fellow students for your success? Or will you do even worse things?
One of the hardest choices I had in the game was facing an exam in my last class for Mid-Terms, knowing I had no way of passing, and knowing I needed a ‘B’ or an ‘A’ to hit the 3.0 GPA required for upgrades. But I had other options. Horrible, terrible options. Ultimately, I took a deep breath and did the bad thing, got the grade I wanted, and felt awful about it afterward.
SPOILERS: One teacher gives you the option to perform sexual favors in exchange for better grades, which to the game’s credit, is presented as just as unseemly as it is. You can even report them to the dean for this behavior, or use it to get the grades you want. Or maybe you’re just genuinely attracted to the teacher.
It wasn’t the last time the game asked me to make a hard choice to get the grades I wanted, but I had the backbone to do the right thing the next time, even if the game basically smiled in response and said, “Okay. No prize for you.”
More Choicescript games set in a school setting should make grades matter as much as they do in CCH.
You feel like a rookie hero. The game neatly manages to balance giving the player the feeling your actions matter and also continuously reminding you that you are indeed, a (beginning) badass normal in a world of people who are immensely more powerful than you are.
You can and do regularly get the stuffing beat out of you, making each victory feel all the better.
When you finally go against a real villain the tension is off the charts, because you are ultimately a really talented normal teenager (basically a Robin) standing against someone who fights people x10 stronger than you and the game will punish you if you dare ignore the fact.
CONS:
Limited gadget use. You have quite a few options when it comes to the gadgets your character can have or acquire, and while each has it’s uses, these are limited to one or two uses in the entire game. They DO make a big difference in the scenes where they can be used, so you never regret getting them, but when you get to the end of the game and you’ve only used your specialized gear (basically, your powers) a small number of times it does feel like a missed opportunity.
However, I’m sympathetic to Moser here. This is the same issue every author who writes a Choicescript game that gives a player a selection of powers or abilities runs into—the sheer number of branching or parallel scenes you have to write can quickly become exponential in scope while trying to accommodate all the variety on offer.
Still, this is an instance where limiting the scope of options and giving more frequent use of those available might have been a better way to go.
Relationship stats are ambiguous. The relationships for the various characters are represented with just single digit numbers. There is no indication of what the scale or scope of the measurement is either. So you end up with some characters a 4 or a 5, maybe someone you really like a 14, maybe a friend at an 8, and just no idea whether some one might like you or be ambivalent from the stats themselves.
Thankfully, the writing and story does a great job of conveying character relationships to you as the reader, but the relationship stat screen is basically useless as it is.
Final Verdict:
(8/10)
Final verdict, I would recommend Community College Hero: Trial by Fire. It’s a superhero Choicescript game, so it’s got that going for it, but more importantly it does the school setting really well by actually making grades matter.
I immediately started reading the sequel right after, so expect that next!
. I’m getting much better at figuring out why some tropes/writing/design choices “click” while others don’t.
vibes 
Same for me, too!