Supers: Character balance

[smurf]

The gm has to make sure the players understand character first.

Also be prepared to ban certain powers, that is they do not exist. There is no astral plane, etc.

I did mine with certain categories: bio, chi or psi and some where cybernetic. So no body of fire setting sprinklers off, or of stone crushing the floor beneath themselves, or ice/water and weird jets.

And if you allow teleportation and the players wants to do the horror stuff really ramp up the points for it... or argue not because the nuclear bonds between molecules are strong.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by the_matrix_walker

On the other end of the spectrum, the last Supers game I played in was an 800 point game. My hero was a 400 point super-spy before he got powers... His meta abilities were far less extensive than the others, but his high attributes and extensive skill list made him a fantastic leader, and every bit as effective in a fight.

My last supers campaign had a 1600-point base, actually, but I haven't tried to analyze what traits the characters had before their origins. It doesn't help that one of them was a dragon, one was an angel, and one was an immortal ancient Greek woman who gained her powers as a gift from Ares 2500 years ago.

Bill Stoddard

[Libertine]

Originally Posted by Refplace

This seems to get overlooked a lot on these threads.
However it i not only a part of Comics but many good games to spotlight a little used skill or power or make situations where your specialty comes up.
But despite the title of the thread I do not think that is waht the Op was asking for. His post semed to b about how to make a cahrecter.

My answer.
I just build a personality or type then build from there. It is all based on what I want to play at the time and what I think works best for that campaign.

I never felt like I had to spotlight certain players based on their ability. I found that if you make a well thought out adventure, those situations come up organically.

[Libertine]

Originally Posted by davidtmoore

Per David Johnston.

If your character is a wimpy nobody prior to being bitten by a radioactive tadpole, like maybe a high-school student or a hospital janitor, then you go as little as fifty or a hundred.

If your character is an average-to-competent kinda guy even before being bathed in Epsilon radiation, pretty capable in a squeeze, like a cop or a seasoned criminal, then 150 or maybe 200.

If your character is a serious mofo bad ass special-ops-meets-post-doctorate before being kidnapped by genies and shooled in their ways, then 200-500 is plausible.

He could be a failed, pathetic crony thug, or maybe the paperboy for 0 pts if you want
Things to get crazy. Than you have 1000 points in powers. You can use a modifier for attributes providing a 10% discount in superattributes, than an additional 30% if the attributes are in emergencies only, than 2 fp to round attributes down to half price.

A geek who can spend FP and amp up his attributes like crazy.

[naloth]

I used to do a fair bit of character building for fun as well as run a number of super hero games... My general experience is that at 100-250 points, you have super normals with a nice gift. They aren't quite "x-men" caliber, but they have tricks normals don't have access to. You can start building well rounded "x-men" type characters at 250-1000 points. You can build characters like the Fantastic Four for 1,000-1200 with the Thing and most of the Avengers as well. Spidey is generally 1500+ and if you get into the world rocking characters (Thor, Hulk) you're in the 2k - 3k range at least.

[Libertine]

Originally Posted by naloth

I used to do a fair bit of character building for fun as well as run a number of super hero games... My general experience is that at 100-250 points, you have super normals with a nice gift. They aren't quite "x-men" caliber,

This could also be good for child supers with exceptional gifts. Just give the characters a St that defaults at 6 & maybe 4 actual skills and off the chain powers.

[NineDaysDead]

From the thread: Is it possible to build an essentially realistic character for a 500 poinsupers game?

Originally Posted by Kromm

Consider a former SEAL or other special operator who left the service, exploited his training and service record to start up a PMC (however governments feel about that, real-life people do it . . . look up Erik Dean Prince or Al Clark), and made it big thanks to bodyguard contracts in wealthy places like Saudi Arabia. Now he's a rich man with serious military training and a career arc that means he may well have kept up his skills or even added to them – many PMCs take on civilian security contracts and de facto criminal investigations, both of which require tactics and technologies not generally used by special operators. If the GM is serious about making this work, ask about adding Legal Immunity [5, 10, or 15] to all this to represent having all the licenses to maintain training facilities and an armory, and the connections to obtain EUCs for military weapons. This won't grant true immunity, but can represent a tangle of red tape so dense that nobody can easily cut through it to get him in trouble; the GM is within his rights to charge as much as he thinks that's worth, anywhere from 5 to 15 points.

After that, how you spend the last 110 to 120 points depends a bit on your definition of "realistic." Gunslinger [25] isn't a super-power, and with the extended treatment in Gun Fu it's a great investment for a hero like this. With all those points, you could also afford Trained by a Master [30]. Something that lets you hang with bulletproof men who shoot nukes from their hands would be nice, too . . . guns are great for offense, and you'll have those, but for defense I'd look at Unusual Background (Invention) on p. B477 and spend 5-50 points for next-gen body armor. Even less unrealistic is Luck [15, 30, or 60]; this is clearly someone who has had lucky breaks to get where he is, and Luck could simultaneously justify and be justified by that stuff. Actually, you could afford most or all of the above.

Then build a motivation. It's easy to use "patriotism" or "avenging my men" for an ex-soldier, or "charity" or "giving back" for a rich guy, but there are more interesting options. Perhaps this PMC owner got rich off blood diamonds and developed regrets, and is a tortured soul trying to make amends for selling out. Or maybe sinister truths were revealed to him while he held a security clearance, now he sees things happening in the world that tell him his country is doing evil without letting Joe Taxpayer know, and he vows to stop it. A character like this can have a lot of interesting disadvantages!

[bluetyson]

Originally Posted by DangerousThing

My favorite supers character was a fifteen year old sidekick. Of course, by the present day he had been fifteen about 90 years. The character came to me in a dream one day and I wrote it down.

At the beginning, during prohibition, he was a bit better than the average kid, even though he was small for his age and rarely got respect. He developed in a few years as his power kicked in into a legendary martial artist, but still was a sidekick.

But as posters above have said, he learned a lot of side skills. He never worried about material possessions, and travelled about the world doing good deeds and 17 year old girls.

Unfortunately the system we used was a free-form narrative system so I've never tried to create him in GURPS.

Karate Kid Eternity? :)

That one shouldn't take too long for you to write up?