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Old 10-31-2023, 05:17 AM   #1
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
Default supers: nine options

I've been playing around lately with a concept for a possible future campaign, Demobbed, which would be about people with superhuman powers coming home from World War II. And part of this, as always, has been thinking about what rules system would suit this premise.

I have in mind a couple of departures from archetypal supers: On one hand, no characters whose powers make them comparable to national governments, or even strategic assets (so not like my GURPS Supers campaign Sovereignty, or Kieron Gillen's very dark graphic novel series Uber); characters would be streetlevel. On the other hand, no flashy costumes, no formal superheroic names (though supers might have nicknames), no secret identities—though there might be secrets. I'd be aiming for something less romantic than four color comics or even than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but less cynical than Watchmen or Uber.

Also, while the various characters could start out working together, they might initially not know each other, having all just been discharged from service. Think of Marvel's treatment of Daredevil, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage in the video series.

So at this point I've come up with multiple engines that might be used for this: Absolute Power, Champions, FUDGE, GURPS Supers, Mage: The Ascension, Mutants and Masterminds, Savage Worlds, Smallville, and Villains and Vigilantes (edition 2.1, not the recent new version).

* I'd be interested in what anyone thinks about the strengths and weaknesses of the various systems, overall, for the supers genre, and for the specific premise I'm looking at.

* If anyone thinks some other system, either specifically for supers or generic, ought to be in the list, please feel free to say so and point out what's good about it.

And yes, I wrote both GURPS Supers (the latest version) and the published FUDGE rules for supers. But I don't take it as a foregone conclusion that either of them is the best fit to this premise.
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Old 10-31-2023, 07:20 AM   #2
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Default Re: supers: nine options

I only have experience with Champions 3rd ed and V&V 2nd ed, but between those two I think I'd use Champions. Seems like it'd scale down from the ol' four-colors more easily. (YMMV, especially if you have the sourcebook for the 6th-ed Hero engine, because I don't know how flexible that is - I think it attempts to reconcile the old tabletop systems with Champions Online, which might affect this particular issue.)
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Old 10-31-2023, 07:52 AM   #3
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Default Re: supers: nine options

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I only have experience with Champions 3rd ed and V&V 2nd ed, but between those two I think I'd use Champions. Seems like it'd scale down from the ol' four-colors more easily. (YMMV, especially if you have the sourcebook for the 6th-ed Hero engine, because I don't know how flexible that is - I think it attempts to reconcile the old tabletop systems with Champions Online, which might affect this particular issue.)
You think? There doesn't seem to be much provision for scaling in V&V, but in the past, when I've tried to use it to emulate published supers, it's often seemed to me that the powers it presents are largely streetlevel already; it's more a question of scaling up if you want to do the higher-end powers.

What I have on my shelves for Champions is the fourth edition.
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Old 10-31-2023, 08:33 AM   #4
Anaraxes
 
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Default Re: supers: nine options

It's an interesting concept. By chance, I've been contemplating a Weird War II game with PCs that are low-level superhumans. But I hadn't yet considered what happens to them after the war.

Bill's an expert in GURPS, so there's nothing I could say there that he doesn't already know, and better.

MtA doesn't seem like a good fit to me. It's classic WoD wainscot powergamer material. But the goal here isn't characters with reality-bending magic that dominate the sheep-like mundanes. You could have weak mages, or even non-mages -- but then why bother with that system? The supers may well want their abilities to remain secret, but that's just an ordinary, practical secret, not the world-defining "true nature of reality", conspiracy-laden WoD series.

FUDGE I know only from its original free version, where it was basically a game system development kit rather than a game system. Lot of perfectly good suggestions (you should pick some attributes relevant to what happens in your game...) but not much of a time saver. The 4dF mechanic is iconic, but I didn't find it particularly special in practice; the game would have felt the same without the gimmicky dice. (A dF is just a d3-1, after all.) Plus, I've never been a fan of the systems that replace a continuum of numbers with names. They've trying to avoid the math and add color, but while I can easily remember that 5 is bigger than 3, it's much harder to try to remember whether Epic outranks Stupendous, even if I'm fairly sure those are both better than mere Heroic. Just make the attribute values go from 1 to 5, already. Boring, but I don't have to check the ranking chart in play, or count the number of steps between them so I know what Heroic + 2 is.

I'm unfamiliar with Absolute Power or Smallville, and V&V and M&M only by reputation.

So, on to the only two that I have used in a least a few games.

--
Champions will scale down well. I've been in games using Hero (4e, I believe, so a long time ago) that included a straight-up supers game, a "powerful fantasy" setting where the characters were already major figures of that fantasy world, but then having to deal with Planescape-esque problems, and a "starting D&D" type fantasy game, which we later migrated to GURPS at about 100-150 points. The system worked about as well at any of those power levels.

There are things I didn't really care for about Hero System -- as it existed at that time, anyway. The integer division in the stat/skill mechanics (this /3, /4, 5) created a lot of breakpoints that meant there were really only about three meaningful values for each stat. The selection of abilities was heavily combat-focused, with relatively few things you could build on for social or "exploration" or narrative scenes, as well as a couple of abilities which were fairly broken unless you assumed that the only scenes that really mattered in the game were superhero slugfests (which is, of course, where the system came from). 6e may well have improved that area.

I did like the way Hero ability builds could scale down to make relatively modest spells at relatively modest costs. I generally struggle with making GURPS abilities that wind up cheap enough that you can have a variety of them, instead of a half-dozen or dozen "primary theme" abilities along the lines of a supers blaster instead of a lower-powered but flexible mage (in the neighborhood of GURPS Magic, say). Hero could make the minor cantrips and get something useful for a point or two, as well as the big attacks.

--

Savage Worlds doesn't really scale up well. I like the system, but it's happiest at the pulp hero kind of level. You're going to run out of polyhedra to upgrade to as you scale the numbers up. Of course, you can just turn those into pluses, as that's all moving up a die size really is. But the mechanics in general don't scale up tremendously well. I'm also uncomfortable with the exploding dice mechanic at scale. It's that system's version of the critical hit, but at supers level the effects will tend to scale into more of a random insta-kill mechanic, even when that's not the character's intent. It'll be harder to GM as the conflicts become more swingy and unpredictable.

But, the concept here is street-level supers, not far from SW's home territory, and I think the system will stretch that far. Justice League, probably not. The lesser Watchmen, yes. (Everyone says "Watchmen" as the touchstone for low powered supers, but let's face it -- Dr. Manhattan... But ignoring him and Ozymandias, then yes.) I think SW would work well at the scale of this setting.

You'll likely need to establish some acceptable stat ranges to avoid one-trick-pony builds breaking the system when they pile all their points into one thing. The system is pretty reliant on the benny economy driving the important rolls, so some player skill with those mechanics is required for them to earn their bennies and make good choices in spending them. It's not quite as easy for the "I'm just here for the story, tell me what to roll" playstyle as a plain skill-based system. But then, most games these days seem to have some sort of hero point mechanic, by whatever name.
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Old 10-31-2023, 08:42 AM   #5
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Default Re: supers: nine options

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Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
Savage Worlds doesn't really scale up well. I like the system, but it's happiest at the pulp hero kind of level. You're going to run out of polyhedra to upgrade to as you scale the numbers up. Of course, you can just turn those into pluses, as that's all moving up a die size really is. But the mechanics in general don't scale up tremendously well. I'm also uncomfortable with the exploding dice mechanic at scale. It's that system's version of the critical hit, but at supers level the effects will tend to scale into more of a random insta-kill mechanic, even when that's not the character's intent. It'll be harder to GM as the conflicts become more swingy and unpredictable.

But, the concept here is street-level supers, not far from SW's home territory, and I think the system will stretch that far. Justice League, probably not. The lesser Watchmen, yes. (Everyone says "Watchmen" as the touchstone for low powered supers, but let's face it -- Dr. Manhattan... But ignoring him and Ozymandias, then yes.) I think SW would work well at the scale of this setting.

You'll likely need to establish some acceptable stat ranges to avoid one-trick-pony builds breaking the system when they pile all their points into one thing. The system is pretty reliant on the benny economy driving the important rolls, so some player skill with those mechanics is required for them to earn their bennies and make good choices in spending them. It's not quite as easy for the "I'm just here for the story, tell me what to roll" playstyle as a plain skill-based system. But then, most games these days seem to have some sort of hero point mechanic, by whatever name.
I've got just the core book for SW. I looked at its chapter on powers, and one thing I couldn't find there was super strength, which seems to be THE iconic power (at least for male characters!), and was even more so back in the comics of the WWII era (not that I'm necessarily going to take them as models). Is there a way to do it that I'm overlooking?
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Old 10-31-2023, 10:17 AM   #6
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: supers: nine options

Of your list I have absolutely no experience with Absolute Power (indeed I've never heard of it). Pretty much the same for a Smallville supers game system though I saw most of the TV series episodes.

My actual experience with Champions is with 1st ed (before it was even "the Hero system") though I did run a 4e Fantasy Hero game and play in Space Hero game for a few sessions. I think I could still make a 1e character without a book to look at.

How ell it will work depends somewhat on what you think is a "street level" game. Particularly important is the Speed stat. Our heroes back in the day basically worked well in the 5 to 7 range. In non-supers games later when everyone had Spd 4 that didn't work very well. Everyone was very boringly similar.

I have little experience with Fudge but it never seemed very interesting to me. Changing the name of "that thing i do" stat but rolling the same dice from game to game never seemed to suit me.

There have been some very high powered characters in some Gurps campaigns I've run and a few of those were in the Supers "style" even if the overall game wasn't. I find the real attraction to using Gurps for this sort of thing is the level of detail that's possible. Ideally you'd everybody to be at the roughly the same level of detail. It usually doesn't work when some characters have spent 5 to 15 pts in a dozen places when another person has spent 100 pts on Offence, 100 pts on Defense and 50 pts on Movement.....and stopped.

II know you've used M;TA on non-Mage games before and i have little experience with it but I will say that from an unexperienced with the system player's viewpoint it seems both quite complex and only tangentially relevant to your campaign theme.

I've read the Mutants & Masterminds 1e book when it came out but all I can say is that it's probably functional at a basic level.

I can say nothing about Savage worlds except that I have disliked it in every form I have come across it in (including the Deadlands 1e that we translated into Gurps Deadlands). Particularly revealing to me was that I disliked Savage Worlds:Rifts even compared with the original Palladium version. It was somewhat more regular than the original but far more complicated. In particular I t believe that the core dice mechanic with it's small single die "flat curve" range is a thing to be discarded rather than to be preserved and elaborated upon.

That leaves V&V and I've mostly made characters for that one. The random generation method might actually work for what you want. It seldom throws up characters who are particularly powerful (and does so only in response to unusual luck) but for your set up of "You got these powers and then you joined the military and used them for whatever they would do and never put on a flashy costume" it might work. the actual dice mechanics might not be so good.
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Old 10-31-2023, 10:20 AM   #7
Anthony
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Default Re: supers: nine options

I don't know all the options, so I'll only comment on the ones I know

Champions: The Hero system can scale down reasonably, but this campaign feels like it wants to be somewhat grim and gritty, which isn't particularly a strength of Champions. If I were running it, I'd probably highly restrict resistant defenses. It's very much not rules-light, though that may not be an issue for you.

Fudge: my very limited experience with Fudge is that it's more a framework for a game system than an actual system, so it seems like a lot of work unless you're using a plugin someone has already written, and the quality of the game will vary heavily depending on what rules you come up with.

GURPS Supers I would expect to be fine with this sort of campaign, most of the problems I have with it come when I'm trying to make it cinematic. Like Champions, it's not rules light.

MtA has the problem that it's assuming Paradox as a big issue, and that doesn't sound like an element this game concept would want. I'm not sure how it plays if you just ignore Paradox.

Mutants and Masterminds has a scaling issue if you want to do street level, though if you update the Ranks and Measures table (currently set to double every rank) to something like a decibel system (x10 per 10 ranks, or roughly x2 per 3 ranks) it would probably be fine.

In other game systems, I'm currently in a Supers game involving the Masks RPG, but I don't think it's suited to what you're trying to do.
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Old 10-31-2023, 10:43 AM   #8
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In other game systems, I'm currently in a Supers game involving the Masks RPG, but I don't think it's suited to what you're trying to do.
Is Masks the Powered by the Apocalypse game about teenage superheroes? I've bought that and read it, but I've concluded that it isn't at all what I would call a roleplaying game; it has a really short list of narrative moves for each character, as if it were reducing relationships and dialogue to game mechanics, and that's very much the other direction from what I want.
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Old 10-31-2023, 10:49 AM   #9
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: supers: nine options

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; it has a really short list of narrative moves for each character, as if it were reducing relationships and dialogue to game mechanics,
I was in a one shot for a Sentinels of the Multiverse thing that worked that way even though it was supposed to be a "true" RPG rather than the card/board game (I'm not sure which, it may have been both) that spawned it.
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Old 10-31-2023, 10:51 AM   #10
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Default Re: supers: nine options

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Is Masks the Powered by the Apocalypse game about teenage superheroes? I've bought that and read it, but I've concluded that it isn't at all what I would call a roleplaying game; it has a really short list of narrative moves for each character, as if it were reducing relationships and dialogue to game mechanics, and that's very much the other direction from what I want.
There's a reason I said I didn't think it was suited to what you wanted to do. I wouldn't agree that it isn't an RPG, but it certainly is a PbtA game, and that means it has a very different attitude towards actions and causation than a typical RPG.
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