Has anyone solved the brick problem?

[Rysith]

Originally Posted by Langy

Don't count points in a Supers campaign. It's probably the primary campaign style that's least invested in character point value, and using CP isn't particularly useful in that fashion anyways.

Since I'm in the process of running a 500(ish) point supers game, this is definitely the advice that I would give (and have run with). Like DF, niche protection is important to let everyone have a chance in the spotlight, but the actual points don't matter as long as everyone has a chance to shine. Similarly, the GM needs to exercise some control over what is appropriate and in-genre. As long as the /concepts/ are good and fit the campaign, the final point totals matter less than fitting the concepts well. Even DF at 250 points needs to enforce that at least a little bit, because a thief that took Innate Attack(3d(3) pi-, Low signature, RoF 3)[24] would be a) out of genre and b) seriously encroaching on the archer.

The brick in my campaign is a few hundred points higher than the other characters because after the first combat (where he was supposed to shine) we all agreed that he really hadn't, so he got some extra strength and survivability tacked on 'for free'. It hasn't impacted the fun for anyone else, so I don't see the issue with it.

[vitruvian]

Originally Posted by Gef

Sorry if I sounded snippy. I actually edited that last bit, evidently at the same time you were replying.

I think my biggest problem with Super Effort is this: Its percent value wipes out the discount from limitations. There's a big difference in price between ST+X and ST+X (Must Be Angry), but the difference between ST+Y (Super Effort) and ST+Y (Super Effort, Must Be Angry) is much smaller as a proportion. Once you go Cosmic, with any advantage, a -20% "half the time" limitation isn't worth the savings; you apply it for characterization or not at all. And that's a good argument for multiplicative modifiers, but they have their own problems. Ah well.



Does ST 100 (punch weaker than a ma deuce) suit your idea of a brick?

It's somebody with the strength of a hundred men, who can throw around cars and reliably mash a normal person into paste with a single blow that's not pulled, so it's at least a lower-level brick. If you go with Speed/Range table progression, getting up to the old OHOTMU values for lifting for sub-enraged Hulk characters, i.e., around 300 ST, costs another 150 points; if you go with linear progression from that point on, getting to 300 is another 200 x X points, where X is your flat cost per point of ST past a certain level (so, 100 pts under the old 3e Enhanced ST).

[vitruvian]

Originally Posted by Gef

Okay, for a brick who can punch through "anything" where anything is defined as the front armor of an Abrams, about 2k, if he had +2/d from Karate and +1/d from Claws or Strikers, and if he had Power Blow 25ish to reliably divide armor by 5, and Power Blow 35ish for reliable triple damage, he's need ST 200+.

That's 1900 points worth of ST, with max limitations 380 points! Which is cheaper I think than the Super Effort way, and without the FP cost. And bizarrely, he can only do this with his fist, not a club made of unobtainium.

Only cheaper than Super-Effort because of -80% in unspecified and probably crippling limitations, so not really a good way to make the comparison. Rather, we should be comparing the 1900 points to Super-Effort ST +12/+200 [480], and then looking at what happens to each when you apply limitations you might actually take.

Originally Posted by Gef

To stand up to 150 points of damage or so, with an armor divisor, he either needs godawful high DR, godawful high damage reduction, or Diffuse. The latter looks like the way to go, though he still needs DR sufficient against small arms, else he takes a point from each pellet of bird shot and dies from one blow, and he needs some Damage Reduction anyway for the linked explosion of an artillery shell. With maximum limitations, that's 60 points, though again, nothing but genre convention says he can't use his great strength to bear armor thicker than what any normal soldier could handle.

I think this side is less problematic... if you allow extended IT:DR, then it starts becoming quite cost effective pretty quickly.

On the other hand, if you allow either the Speed/Range progression cost for ST, or the 3e-inspired reduced cost going flat cost for ST, and these ST include HP, then you could pretty quickly get to the levels of Striking ST necessary to do the damage you want with a little Breaking Blow and Power Blow, and have soaking/toughness comparable to middling levels of IT:DR into the bargain.

Originally Posted by Gef

Well, I said I wanted to start with a comic book premise and extrapolate logically. Maybe a world where a brick is less like the hulk or the thing and more like the punisher of steroids is what that gets me.

And come to think of it, I'd buy punching through the side of a tank as a grab-n-smash. Trained by a Master that you need for Power Blow also doubles control points. With a grab, then smash, over 2 turns you inflict triple damage. So that definitely brings the minimum ST to pull this stunt pretty close to my point budget without a houserule. I never much like the mechanic for power blow, but it has the advantage of being canon.

Breaking Blow and Power Blow (allowed by Perks rather than TBAM) could easily be interpreted as Hulk or Thing-like brick behavior just as much as super-strong martial arts per se.

[Culture20]

Some things to keep in mind about Super Strength: It doesn't give you Super hit points, so keep that in mind when making your brick. If you have a brick with Super Strength level 14 and normal strength 10, he'll normally have strength 24, with 24 hit points. Give him a lot of DR, and he can still be quickly squished if someone hits for just 48 points of damage over his DR. always add some IT:DR to a brick.

I pulled back out my Super Strength spreadsheet and fed in the +100% suggestion from above. Don't know why I bothered; it's just 1/2 the former amount. But the "100%" being smaller does give more leverage to the limitations mentioned.

Something to be careful with Supers though is over-specialization from the players. Spider-Man can easily be a 1600point character with all his powers and whiz-bang science know-how. But RAW 1600 points of only Super Strength can buy you a character stronger than Galactus: Basic Lift of 10000000000 tons, damage dice of 1000001, and 2-hands+critical lift of 120000000000 tons. I put a hard-cap on Super Strength levels.

[vitruvian]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

Speaking from experience here:

The issue may be player expectations not matching the point budget. Some people think, "oh my brick has to be the Hulk, able to take on a tank without breaking a sweat," and fail to realize that Hulk is not a low-powered character. 500 points in a supers campaign is still fairly low-powered; we're talking the average X-Man or one of Cap's Kooky Quartet (second line-up of Avengers).

For 500 points, your bricks aren't going to be anywhere near the Hulk, Thor (bench-pressing 100-200 tons), or even Ben Grimm or Colossus (bench-pressing 50-80 tons). Your 500 point bricks are going to be closer to Beast, bench-pressing one ton in his classic blue-furred state when he was on the Avengers and Defenders rosters in the '70s to mid-'80s, or possibly Scorpion, who could bench about 15 tons. These guys are not going to be demolishing tanks, though APCs and IFVs (such as the Bradley) might be vulnerable due to their tissue paper armor. Both Beast and Scorpion have an issue, though, where they're not just bricks; both are also incredible agile, which also eats up points.

A dedicated brick on that point value would probably be Rage (Eldon Daryl Halliday, of the '90s Avengers and New Warriors rosters). I believe he was tested to bench-press around 20 tons (ST 160, or ST 10 + Super ST +11/+150, not counting the ST from his prodigious mass), and able to shrug off assault weapons with ease (DR 30, or DR 15 + IT:DR /5), though I don't think he ever went up against LAW rockets or high armor-divisor energy weapons.

In my own super-hero games, I allow a flexible point value: 150 points for the character before powers, and between 350 and 850 points for powers unless the character is a dedicated brick, in which case I add yet another 500 points to the budget (1,500 points total, 1,350 points for the brick power set). It seems to work, and helps match player expectations (once I explain the concepts of Super ST and IT:Damage Reduction to them).

Except the OP's issue is not with general power or point level... Gef is saying specifically for the same point budget that players can't build an effective brick, they can purchase other abilities that in his eyes make them world-beaters with much greater effectiveness. Even you are allowing for this with that extra 500 points to the budget for bricks, but I can kind of see why Gef would not be comfortable essentially doubling the budget for one sort of character as opposed to alternatively reducing (halving?) the cost for the particular abilities that seem to be problematic.

[vitruvian]

Originally Posted by Langy

That's basically just Lifting ST + HP + (ST-based innate attack). Not really a big cost savings.

Besides, it's not like improvised weapons for swinging and throwing aren't perfectly in genre... just ones you always carry, except for special exceptions like Mjolnir.

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by Gef

Hmm, this gets me to about the same cost for kiloton lift, with the drawback that ST 40 or so is dirt cheap. But it's much cleaner, so it may be worth living with the drawback. Hmm, maybe 10/lvl for 10 levels, 5/lvl for 21-30, 2/lvl for 31-40.

I don't like that idea. Part of the point of this repricing is to make it simpler and cheaper to buy. Elephant-level ST might be "dirt cheap", but so long as you enforce some sort of ability cap on non-brick supers that shouldn't mean much.

Is ST 30 really worth more than DX 11 in a scifi series with ultratech armaments or a supers game? I don't think so.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Kenneth Latrans

...
Is ST 30 really worth more than DX 11 in a scifi series with ultratech armaments or a supers game? I don't think so.

In a Sci Fi setting, it sure as heck is useful. Hit points, and ability to carry all that cool ultra tech equipment is very useful. Numerous Star Trek episodes have characters needing to punch and wrestle at times they don't have all their awesome tech, so even striking strength gets used.

You're thinking of Space Opera Jedi-land where Strength is useless.

[vitruvian]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

In a Sci Fi setting, it sure as heck is useful. Hit points, and ability to carry all that cool ultra tech equipment is very useful. Numerous Star Trek episodes have characters needing to punch and wrestle at times they don't have all their awesome tech, so even striking strength gets used.

You're thinking of Space Opera Jedi-land where Strength is useless.

Yeah, I don't think reducing the cost of ST in the 'normal' range up to 20 is needed. Neither is ST from 21-30 all that useless. Above that, as long as 10 levels of Striking ST for each extra die of Thrust damage doesn't come out a lot cheaper than a die of Innate Attack, I've got no problem with a considerably lower cost, since there isn't much special equipment that requires ST above 30 to tote around. So, it becomes a matter of deciding on the cleanest, easiest to remember progression.

The Tbone Rules Nugget idea of using the Speed/Range table progression is nice and neat for the values it covers, but definitely has some strange costs for the in between values, and goes on above ST 200-300 to make ST a lot cheaper than other options - a feature if you want to have Silver Age Kryptonians that can shove planets around, but not sure it's necessary for most campaigns, even four color ones.

Adapting the old Enhanced ST rule seems pretty workable, maybe along the reverse of the Armor Divisor progression... so instead of going 1, 2, 5, 10, go 10 (up to ST 20), 5 (up to ST 30), 2 (up to ST ?), 1 (above ST ?) points per level of ST. With Striking ST remaining at half cost, that keeps it to a minimum of 5 points per added die of Thrust.

[Otaku]

Originally Posted by vitruvian

Except the OP's issue is not with general power or point level... Gef is saying specifically for the same point budget that players can't build an effective brick, they can purchase other abilities that in his eyes make them world-beaters with much greater effectiveness. Even you are allowing for this with that extra 500 points to the budget for bricks, but I can kind of see why Gef would not be comfortable essentially doubling the budget for one sort of character as opposed to alternatively reducing (halving?) the cost for the particular abilities that seem to be problematic.

Well, no one answered me before, and I'm not trying to uselessly go round and round, but I thought we were largely having this discussion about Gef's setting (that he has a couple of threads about) and that his mutants actually did have some "distinction" in commonality between different kinds of powers. So while it might be a bit late now, if this was a "new thing" an Unusual Background Cost makes at least a little sense. Well, I seem to think so; it wouldn't be the first time I was wrong.

The other point I'd want to come back to is expectations, coupled with a little bit of the dangerous "Are you sure you're doing it right?" I mean when I see comments like this

Originally Posted by Kenneth Latrans

Is ST 30 really worth more than DX 11 in a scifi series with ultratech armaments or a supers game? I don't think so.

something is wrong. I mean, the setting might be fine; it could be a really stylized setting where yeah, having 20 levels above the average ST is no better than being a single level above the average DX, but technology offsets likely all Attributes and figured quantities to one degree or another, as well as certain Advantages and Disadvantages. Two levels of ST may not work out to be as useful as one level of DX in a lot of settings, but for 20 levels something is likely wrong.

Unless I am simply very, very wrong. Again. >.>