PDA

View Full Version : How can Vin Diesel and Superman work as PCs in the same game?



DoomHat
2015-10-21, 02:21 AM
I've been fixated on the chasm between wizards and mundanes in a lot of game systems for a few weeks now, and it struck me after starting another thread in this forum touching on the subject, quite a few people tend to respond viscerally against the notion of making magic weaker or more difficult/taxing.

On the other side of the coin, when you give mundane characters more exciting options, those options frequently become either just as easily accessible to already powerful magical characters, or the options themselves become too paranormal for the tastes of players who wanted functional mundane characters in the first place.

I'm starting to realize that it might all boil down to a somewhat mutually exclusive matter of taste. Two equally valid power fantasies that tragically just don't really seem to mix well. See the following historical reenactment: [LINK (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FywMOuMqNuI)]

Batman is capable of doing all manner of nearly impossible to completely impossible feats, all of which make him really cool. Tragically, it's still really hard to justify his involvement in solving any problem that Superman is also working on. You could try to nerf Superman, but a lot of Superman fans won't take kindly to it. You could strain the limits of verisimilitude by letting Batman get away with way more blatantly and inexplicably superhuman feats "because he's Batman...", but that's becoming a pretty negative meme, probably for good reason.

I can respect wanting to play a character who is powerful simply be virtue of being powerful. But I personally also really enjoy the heroic Man of Action fantasy, being powerful by virtue of raw straining willpower, physicality, and to a lesser extent, serendipity.

How would you propose to marry the two play styles? Particularly in D&D?

BWR
2015-10-21, 02:42 AM
Which edition of D&D? And why does everyone need to be equally powerful?

Easiest answer: play the kind of games where power disparity isn't much of an issue. If you insist on playing games where power matters, the stronger parties are obviously going to outclass the weaker parties.


I can respect wanting to play a character who is powerful simply be virtue of being powerful. But I personally also really enjoy the heroic Man of Action fantasy, being powerful by virtue of raw straining willpower, physicality, and to a lesser extent, serendipity.
I think you're missing something here. A lot of really powerful characters are popular because they also have the Man of Action mindset. Goku, for one. Always striving to overcome obstacles, always challenging themselves, always powering through whatever stands in their way. The actual power level doesn't really matter, it's the personality the characters have and how the story is written. Likewise lots of characters can be ridiculously weak compared to Superman but still be strong in relation to other people with no effort on their part.

Khedrac
2015-10-21, 03:21 AM
Which edition of D&D? And why does everyone need to be equally powerful?

Easiest answer: play the kind of games where power disparity isn't much of an issue. If you insist on playing games where power matters, the stronger parties are obviously going to outclass the weaker parties.

I think you're missing something here. A lot of really powerful characters are popular because they also have the Man of Action mindset. Goku, for one. Always striving to overcome obstacles, always challenging themselves, always powering through whatever stands in their way. The actual power level doesn't really matter, it's the personality the characters have and how the story is written. Likewise lots of characters can be ridiculously weak compared to Superman but still be strong in relation to other people with no effort on their part.

Who says this is D&D? (Note the OP said "a lot of game systems".)
For me one example if Avalon Hill RuneQuest 3. In this system sorcerors are the problem. Starting sorcerors are almost completely useless - their spells hardly ever work unless they spend rounds boosting them before they try to cast, and they don't have the martial abilities of other characters (OK so they are not much worse than shamen).
At the other end of the game the priests are probably the weakest. Sorcerors however can do the adventure from a distance (e.g. 2000 miles) when virtually no one else can cast spells from more than 50meters and they can pretty much kill any other character at will.

Oddly, I have a friend who likes comics and superheroes but dislikes Superman (pretty much because there is nearly nothing he cannot do - and therefore all challenges are contrived).
To a certain extent Superman can be confounded by the opposition being political with nothing key written down.
I.e. moving the conflict out of an area where his abilities are so powerful - but that is much harder to do with over-powered spell-casters.
It is also an area where Dragonball falls down - Goku is always striving, but because he is always getting more powerful his opponents do too, so former allies either need big power-ups or become irrelevant, exactly the problem being raised. Dragonball eventually ends this by Goku accepting that he is too powerful for his world to be safe and he leaves - not much fun for the wizard player.

So - how can we deal with this? I don't have a good answer, but there are some solutions that can work to a degree:
1) See if you can get the more skilled players playing the weaker "characters"
- this has the problem that less skille dplayers often don't want to play the more complex characters (which are usually potentially the most powerful) and they can be even less effective than with a simpler character. (RQ3 sorcerors were also the most complex character type to play).
2) Talk to the players. In my experience the better players are usually happy to play a more supportive roll and to use their characters to make the others shine. This method works well when it can be combined with (3).
3) In resource limiting games (like D&D) try to prevent the party from blowing all of their resources on the first two encounters and then retiring to reset. For D&D this seems to be the way most people suggest you play wizards - I think it would be boring for the characters if they spend 30 minutes of each day adventuring and then had to hide up until tomorrow.
- There quite a few ways to achieve this: time limit on mission (i.e. rescue before sacrifice), opponents up and leaving while party is resting up (you "win" but where's the treasure), monsters activey searching the party out while they rest (I did this one but the monsters in question really didn't want to find the party - they know they would lose).
etc.

There is no "one solution" but I think it a good area for positive discussion.

BWR
2015-10-21, 03:37 AM
Who says this is D&D? (Note the OP said "a lot of game systems".)
.

The OP specifically (but not exclusively) mentions D&D.

DoomHat
2015-10-21, 03:46 AM
The OP specifically (but not exclusively) mentions D&D.

But Khedrac also understood precisely what I was getting at.

Earthwalker
2015-10-21, 04:07 AM
I think systems and games can work when there is a difference in power. The thing is the problem with DnD isn't that the Wizard has all the power its he has all the versitility. A wizard can do everything and anything, becuase magica can do anything and everything.

Each character needs an area where they shine. If the game is all about the fisty cuffs and one character is an unstoppable pugulist and the others are a hacker and a doctor then the two none boxers are going to have unfun times.

Add in the need to find information, or some medical emergency and the puggulist is the one with nothing to do.

Eldan
2015-10-21, 04:52 AM
I think this is the reason why games have levels. To use the title characters: Vin Diesel doesn't adventure with Superman. He turns into Superman after levelling up 20 to 30 times. A level, in most games, is intended as a way to measure power. If the game was well written, characters of equal levels would ahve the same power.

Now, some concepts don't work too well at some levels. Like, "the mundane guy". In your typical fantasy game, he has a sword, a shield, heavy armour and he's pretty good at using all of them. Better than real life people, but not magically so. Can you put him in a party with a wizard? Yes, you can. But not the kind of godlike magical creature we see in high level games. The level equivalency has to reflect this.

"Mundane", as a concept, can not really stack up against "magical", because magical is open-ended and diverse. At least if we define "mundane" as "like the real world, just better". I'm of course not talking about stuff like "I'm so good at pickpocketing, I steal my life back from the Angel of Death when I die", because that's not really mundane anymore.

So, how woudl that work in a game? Assume we have a twenty level structure. Levels 1-5 are our low fantasy levels. Here, we have guys from, say, Jeff, the village watchman with a pike, to Conan. Our magical characters here follow the same sword and sorcery power levels (unless the are bad guys, of course.) To make this more or less equal, the wizard doesn't just throw around intercontinental fireballs or fly. The wizard is here to know what's going on and what the and their weaknesses are (scholar), to break magical barriers and curses (counterspells), perhaps they can offer healing, or alchemy, maybe they can bind some magical creatures that are encountered instead of killing them. But they don't fly, because flying means that half the classical obstacles in this level range are useless. Gandalf didn't fly the party over Caradras.

The midldle levels, say, 6-15, are where high fantasy happens. Here, wizards start throwing around spells, the way it happens in modern fantasy literature, but rarely in most (western) mythology. Wizards fly and throw lightning and summon daemons to do their bidding. Fighters, to keep up, get magical backgrounds too. They are now demigods, or have discovered their psychic talents, or they learn mystical martial arts.

The very high levels, 16-20, are when the really epic stuff starts going on. Here, wizards do ludicrous things. So fighters must do equally ludicrous things. Here, we meet our Cu Chulainns and Hindu gods.


So yeah. My answer to high Vin Diesel adventures with Superman is that he doesn't. Superman adventures with Raistlin or Elminster. Vin Diesel adventures with an adventuring magic scholar (I can't think of an example right now.) Batman can go adventure with, say, Harry Dresden, and Jeff, the village watchman can adventure with Rincewind.

SimonMoon6
2015-10-21, 07:46 AM
Two different threats at the same time.

This may not work in a D&D game, but it works in other games where you have characters of widely varying power levels.

I first considered this when reading a classic JLA/JSA storyline in which one of the JSA members was the Spectre (a godlike being... if you think Superman is powerful, you haven't see anything yet) and the other members were mostly "ordinary humans with a minor gimmick". So, what did the writers do to challenge everybody appropriately? Well, there was a threat that was causing the two versions of Earth to collide with each other, so the Spectre had to go deal with that. At the same time, there were other bad guys doing things that needed to be stopped, so the rest of the group could go handle that.

In an actual RPG where one hero outpowered the rest, I did something similar. I had Aquaman's foe Ocean Master show up as a threat for most of the party... and there was also a ridiculously powerful giant squid monster that only the one ridiculous hero could possibly hope to deal with.

Now, this doesn't always work, because players are notoriously bad at planning their actions. The one awesome hero might take out the wimpy threats first, allowing the powerful threat the chance to kill all the wimpy heroes... and that's okay in a D&D game because everybody always comes back to life because there are never any consequences to making bad decisions. But in other games, this is more likely to work.

Comet
2015-10-21, 08:18 AM
Superman can fly and lift and laser things.

I don't think he can fix cars or know street racing etiquette. So he calls Dominic Toretto.
I also don't think Superman is willing to stab a makeshift shiv into somebody's neck or skulk around in the shadows while people around him are dying horribly. So he calls Riddick.

Of course you can't beat superman if you're just flying and lifting and lasering things.

ICN
2015-10-21, 09:51 AM
Two different threats at the same time.

At that point, the parties involved are almost playing different games though. It can work occasionally, but in my opinion lacks sustainability.

DoomHat
2015-10-21, 11:32 AM
Superman can fly and lift and laser things.

I don't think he can fix cars or know street racing etiquette. So he calls Dominic Toretto.
I also don't think Superman is willing to stab a makeshift shiv into somebody's neck or skulk around in the shadows while people around him are dying horribly. So he calls Riddick.

Of course you can't beat superman if you're just flying and lifting and lasering things.

Superman often can fix cars because he also frequently has super intellect and or being a farm boy from Kansis, has worked on motor vehicles (trackers and so forth) in the past. Why does Superman need to know street racing etiquette? He can see through walls and hear conversations from miles away in the depths of buildings if he concentrates, so he can get basically whatever information he needs.

If there's a situation where Superman's light-speed movement and mega strength aren't enough to keep dozens of people from dyeing around him, there's not much Riddick is going to be able to contribute to that scale of disaster.

There's virtually nothing a mere mortal can do that Superman can't do better in an infinitesimal faction of the time, because Superman can do a HELL of a lot more then "fly and lift and laser things".

Madeiner
2015-10-21, 11:32 AM
Probably irrelevant to the topic of RPGs, but there is an online game called Eve online where there is some sort of parallel balance.
It is a space game, and to make it short, there are many classes of ships.
To fight a big battleship, you need a big battleship. Because if you try to use a big battleship to fight a small frigate, then the guns cannot track a fast and small target. Also, the small frigate can hit, but not really damage, the big battleship, but it can fight on equal terms vs another frigate.
A solution is to for frigates to fight other frigates, and for battleships to fight other battleships.
Sometimes, a frigate's role against a battleship is to keep it from escaping so that the friendly battleship can actually fight it.
Both classes are useful, and both are meant to face a specific threat, but are powerless against a threat intended for the other class.

I don't know how a fantasy RPG could approach this kind of balance, but it sure would be interesting.

Comet
2015-10-21, 11:43 AM
Superman often can fix cars because he also frequently has super intellect and or being a farm boy from Kansis, has worked on motor vehicles (trackers and so forth) in the past. Why does Superman need to know street racing etiquette? He can see through walls and hear conversations from miles away in the depths of buildings if he concentrates, so he can get basically whatever information he needs.

If there's a situation where Superman's light-speed movement and mega strength aren't enough to keep dozens of people from dyeing around him, there's not much Riddick is going to be able to contribute to that scale of disaster.

There's virtually nothing a mere mortal can do that Superman can't do better in an infinitesimal faction of the time, because Superman can do a HELL of a lot more then "fly and lift and laser things".

True, Superman is pretty great at everything, isn't he?

In that case, there's just no way that another character can feel useful in a task-oriented way. Superman can do it, so let him.

Instead, Vin Diesel could be useful because Superman isn't willing to do certain things. Sure, Superman could kill that villain instead of sending him to a poorly secured prison but he won't. So Riddick kills him. Or Superman might be too proud to get into a car race on the streets of whatever mean city so Toretto has to do it instead to teach us a valuable lesson of how great cars are when you use them right.

If Superman is able and willing to do everything then he does everything. If he's not, then someone else gets to do it instead.

Amphetryon
2015-10-21, 12:00 PM
I suppose you could limit Vin Diesel to Superman's power level if it were necessary to the story. :smallbiggrin:

Knaight
2015-10-21, 12:06 PM
The problem with characters who are majorly different in power only really comes up when the game is centered around getting things done to which the power difference is directly relevant. If a game is centered around other things, it's not really the case.

To use a superhero example, the game Smallvile is a character drama around the personal lives of those in it. Some of these characters are explicitly superheroes, but in the context of a character drama around personal lives that doesn't cause any spotlight balance issues relative to normal people. In the context of accomplishing the sets of tasks associated with adventure stories, it absolutely does.

Honest Tiefling
2015-10-21, 12:27 PM
Ever see Avatar? Sokka was a mundane human travelling next to the freaking Avatar. However, if you don't allow Supes to have super intellect (probably by the virtue that while he can read fast, doesn't mean he's super smart and able to process or learn it any faster then anyone else). A mundane guy is the ideas guy and the one who studies things. Strange alien plant grabbing onto people's faces? Yeah, let's...Not just start punching those. Impervious to cold? It will also hurt the person it is attached to! Gosh, we might need some serum to counteract the poison and mind control!

I think at this point I'm basically suggesting Batman. Go be Batman.

Demidos
2015-10-21, 12:38 PM
Give the mundanes STORYPOWER (Trademarked)

How is Vin Diesel a match for superman? He isn't....but he knows someone who can accomplish the same thing.

Car broken? -- Walk into a random auto shop, know a guy to fix a car.
Hostage situation? -- You helped out the guy who made the plans for the building a few weeks ago. Or you are so trained you can spot that one of the armed assailants has forgotten to reload.
Pitched battle? -- You

Basically give the mundanes a limited resource like Hero Points, that refresh daily, to allow them to be AWESOME, a limited number of times per day. They gain a bonus equal to their level + relevant stat to a roll. Because they're just that good, that they can travel with someone like superman...and still contribute.

Arbane
2015-10-21, 01:07 PM
And why does everyone need to be equally powerful?

They don't necessarily need to be equally powerful, but they do need equal ability to contribute to the story, or the game becomes "the adventures of Omnipotent Man and His Bumbling Sidekicks." Most people don't like being the bumbling sidekicks.

Anyway, ways to deal with this:

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG gave the White Hats (PCs with no special powers) additional Hero Points - good for luck rolls, avoiding injury, etc.

The Dresden Files RPG uses a similar approach: The more magic and powers you have, the less Fate Points (luck points) you CAN have - and if your Fate Point capacity goes to zero, you become an NPC. (You have to deliberately over-reach yourself for that to happen, usually.)

Unknown Armies makes being insanely obsessed with something a requisite to be a magician. And sanity does have advantages. (Also, magic in that game is a LOT less omnipotent than D&D magic, usually.)

Hm... all three are modern-day games. I wonder if there's a reason for that?

In a comic-book, you can have Hawkeye and Thor on the same team and make it work. Most GMs aren't Joss Whedon, and most dice and players aren't that cooperative, unfortunately. So, we need a better solution.

Flickerdart
2015-10-21, 01:16 PM
Ever see Avatar? Sokka was a mundane human travelling next to the freaking Avatar.
Sokka also voiced dissatisfaction with not having magic kung-fu, and was generally the butt-monkey of the show. There were other non-benders who were capable of being a serious threat to benders, but Sokka was rarely one of them.

But really, the problem here isn't "magic is awesome and if you don't have it then you suck" but rather three things:

The range of encounters a character can contribute to: Not every encounter is combat. Not every non-combat encounter is the same. The party might need to sneak somewhere undetected, or make a long journey, or convince someone to help them, or build something, or destroy something.

Capabilities within an encounter: This is the only part of the issue that deals with power; the others are issues of versatility. The difficulty of making an encounter is proportional to the gap between the party member most qualified to resolve it, and the party member least qualified. This is never an issue in movies and comics because Batman's feelings aren't hurt when he gets less screen time than Superman, and the power of all characters involved can be changed when necessary. But a PC that can't even land a hit on the important enemies will feel frustrated, and a PC that effortlessly wrecks them will be bored.

Off-the-rails agency: A supernatural being (such as a wizard) has access to supernatural means of affecting the world. Rather than reacting to things that are happening (stopping those things, or defending them from the people that want to stop them) such a being can be proactive to a much greater extent than Vin Diesel. Batman actually does fairly well here, because his superpowers are money and knowledge, but "I hire a hundred guys to build me a castle" doesn't feel as good as "I use my super strength and super speed to build a castle".

If you, for some strange reason, want to run magic and mundane together, consider the following:
Pick a system where no option is hyper-versatile: Superman can punch and Vin Diesel can punch. Superman can't become invisible or heal, and neither can Vin Diesel. As long as the party is more or less prepared for the same sort of problems, there will be no situation that thrusts a PC out of the spotlight. You can also try a roles-based approach, where Vin Diesel sneaks around and then Superman flies in with the key piece of intel you need to save the day, but when half the party is sitting around and waiting for the other half to have their moment, that half of the party is wasting their time.

Pick a system where no option is hyper-powerful: If the answer to "could these people plausibly be challenged but not overwhelmed by the same enemy" is "no" then it's not a good choice. The answer here is a system that encourages horizontal growth instead of vertical growth, like M&M - no matter what power source you use, you can only be so good at doing any one thing, and better characters are ones that do more things. You can also just instill this in your players' minds - the game works better when you all agree on where to draw the line.

Pick a system where no character lacks agency: Not having magic doesn't mean you can't bind fiends or build castles or go places - you just need a mundane solution for it. There are loads of stories of heroes getting aid from evil beings and then reneging on their side of the bargain, or getting from one place to another by means of a preposterous plan, and paying people to do work for you is a tried and true means of getting things done. How to do things might vary from world to world, so it's up to the DM to help the players know what their PCs would.

To summarize:
The system: Should provide problem-solving tools for every situation to every character.
The players: Should make sure that they don't become so good at solving one particular problem that everyone else is useless.
The DM: Should allow and help PCs to act on a strategic, not only tactical, level, regardless of the power sources they have at their disposal.

Gettles
2015-10-21, 01:56 PM
They don't necessarily need to be equally powerful, but they do need equal ability to contribute to the story, or the game becomes "the adventures of Omnipotent Man and His Bumbling Sidekicks." Most people don't like being the bumbling sidekicks.

Anyway, ways to deal with this:

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG gave the White Hats (PCs with no special powers) additional Hero Points - good for luck rolls, avoiding injury, etc.

The Dresden Files RPG uses a similar approach: The more magic and powers you have, the less Fate Points (luck points) you CAN have - and if your Fate Point capacity goes to zero, you become an NPC. (You have to deliberately over-reach yourself for that to happen, usually.)

Unknown Armies makes being insanely obsessed with something a requisite to be a magician. And sanity does have advantages. (Also, magic in that game is a LOT less omnipotent than D&D magic, usually.)

Hm... all three are modern-day games. I wonder if there's a reason for that?

In a comic-book, you can have Hawkeye and Thor on the same team and make it work. Most GMs aren't Joss Whedon, and most dice and players aren't that cooperative, unfortunately. So, we need a better solution.

In a work of fiction every character does whatever the author wants and for the less powerful characters the odds will always favor them when they need to for them to contribute. In a game the DM puts out a scenario, than hopes the Superman character doesn't think up a solution that trivializes the problem that the DM hadn't thought of, than when Vin attempts to do something he has to roll dice to find out if he has a chance and if his random number ends up low he doesn't do **** for the encounter.

Also, as a side the traditional D&D idea of balance doesn't work because it implies that the Wizard is the hero at all times and everyone else is just their servants(the Wizard kills the monster, the Fighter is the Wizard's bodyguard, the Rouge handles tasks to trivial to waste a spell on) which I don't think is really a healthy group dynamic.

Khedrac
2015-10-21, 02:15 PM
There's also the Ars Magica approach. I have never played it, but as I understand it Ars Magica mages make D&D wizards look very under-powered...
So each player has one mage and a number of underlings. In any adventure only one or two players will bring the mage, the rest will send their henchmen. For the next adventure it swaps round.
This way each player gets to play the superman character some of the time, but the basic mundanes the rest of the time.

Lvl 2 Expert
2015-10-21, 02:39 PM
I think this is the reason why games have levels. To use the title characters: Vin Diesel doesn't adventure with Superman. He turns into Superman after levelling up 20 to 30 times.

Plus one on that. If you're trying to run a high powered game and a player basically refuses to use the resources available because he wants to be John McClane than just make really sure that this player understands that he will be bored because his character can't contribute. A really good GM can juggle Captain America fighting some goons inside a building while also running a giant super battle outside for the rest of the party, but in general it's more fun for everyone if the players do their best to be similar in power.

If a system doesn't support balance as well as it could, see if the players and DM can do their part to keep the chasm as small as possible. In D&D an often heard option is to encourage the magical folks to focus less on direct damage and more on buffing spells and other ways to make the martials more effective. Another way to balance things out is to put time limits on adventures to prevent the 15 minute adventuring day syndrome. If you're not in Castle Darkdungeon within 4 days Mister Evil will kill your puppy! This means magic and other replenishing resources will have to be managed more carefully.

SimonMoon6
2015-10-21, 02:39 PM
There's another approach that sometimes shows up in comics:

Everybody loses their powers. Superman without powers? Well, he's still a reasonably strong, fit, healthy guy with some small amount of training in combat. But that's it. Batman without powers? Not changed at all (well except in those comics where the writer wants to make Batman useless too).

In D&D games, this shows up in the form of anti-magic fields and fighting creatures (constructs mostly) with infinite spell resistance. I recall having to go through one module that had permanent anti-magic fields all over the place.

I also refer to this as "World's Finest syndrome," where often in an issue of World's Finest (a formerly ongoing comic in which Superman teams up with Batman; the modern version has a much less creative title), the only real purpose for Batman is to handle things when kryptonite shows up. Batman can move the kryptonite away, allowing Superman to do his thing.

Many early issues of Justice League of America would start the story with "And here's why Superman can't do anything" (which might be kryptonite, magic, etc), so the rest of the Justice League has to save the day instead.

I don't *recommend* that sort of thing to happen regularly in an RPG; it's okay in a story because Superman won't complain that his character never gets to do anything.

Morty
2015-10-21, 04:00 PM
I'm going to second what other people said. It's not an issue of power sources, it's an issue of power levels. D&D's problem is that certain power sources are strictly superior to others, but the game pretends they aren't. It's really not as complicated or fundamentally hard to reconcile as it's made out to be. You just need to pick an approach and stick with it. Decide what "magic" even means, whether "mundane" can stop applying to characters who don't use magic, what you want the power relations to be. D&D has historically tried to have its cake and eat it, too. It's also had a very bad handle on the power it gives to PCs. So we have a mess that's very hard to discuss properly and constructively.

BWR
2015-10-21, 04:22 PM
There's also the Ars Magica approach. I have never played it, but as I understand it Ars Magica mages make D&D wizards look very under-powered...
So each player has one mage and a number of underlings. In any adventure only one or two players will bring the mage, the rest will send their henchmen. For the next adventure it swaps round.
This way each player gets to play the superman character some of the time, but the basic mundanes the rest of the time.

Magi are not more powerful than a high-level D&D mage, at least in any D&D edition up to and including PF - can't speak for 4e or 5e but what little I think I know about 4e indicates AM magi are more powerful while 5e is probably back to D&D winning. AM has some advantages like potentially infinte spells, but has problems like botches, warping and Twilight which can royally mess your day (try pissing off Poseidon while out on the sea; remember what happened to the last guy who did that?).

The bit about how troupe play works is correct.

Thinker
2015-10-21, 06:37 PM
Give super-powered people mechanical in-game power. Give mundanes plot power, i.e. more options for something like action points. Now the mundane warrior can say, "the enemy's sword breaks as our blades clash" and the mundane thief locked away in a prison cell can say, "I pull my spare lockpick out of my sash." You can increase the power of these changes, the mundane mariner says, "a friendly ship appears on the horizon as we clash with the pirates."

Jay R
2015-10-21, 07:03 PM
Batman is capable of doing all manner of nearly impossible to completely impossible feats, all of which make him really cool. Tragically, it's still really hard to justify his involvement in solving any problem that Superman is also working on. You could try to nerf Superman, but a lot of Superman fans won't take kindly to it. You could strain the limits of verisimilitude by letting Batman get away with way more blatantly and inexplicably superhuman feats "because he's Batman...", but that's becoming a pretty negative meme, probably for good reason.

Form the 1940s to the 1970s, World's Finest comic book ran stories of Batman and Superman together, without nerfing Superman, and without making Batman superhuman.

There were several tools:
1. They leaned on Superman's weaknesses, and Batman had to save him from Kryptonite.
2. They leaned on Batman's strengths, and had situations requiring a bat-computer, a Bat-lab, or even just the world's greatest detective.
3. They required important feats in two places at once, and Superman repaired the dam while Batman fought the bad guys.


I can respect wanting to play a character who is powerful simply be virtue of being powerful. But I personally also really enjoy the heroic Man of Action fantasy, being powerful by virtue of raw straining willpower, physicality, and to a lesser extent, serendipity.

How would you propose to marry the two play styles? Particularly in D&D?

They same way World's Finest did.

1. Lean on the magic-user's weaknesses. Have more encounters per day, so that the limit of available spells becomes a factor. Also include more area-effect hit point drains, like avalanches, floods, etc.
2. Lean on the fighters' strengths, and provide encounters with lots of lower-level creatures that can be beaten with swords without using the (now carefully hoarded) spells.
3. Require both sets of skills at the same time. The evil wizards spells must be countered while his minions are attacking in melee, all while the rogue has snuck over and is trying to deactivate the trap.

A bad writer can write a bad story in which Batman has no function. Similarly, a poor DM can write scenarios in which the wizard alone has value.

The solution in both cases is very simple: don't.

Knaight
2015-10-21, 10:43 PM
There's also the Ars Magica approach. I have never played it, but as I understand it Ars Magica mages make D&D wizards look very under-powered...
So each player has one mage and a number of underlings. In any adventure only one or two players will bring the mage, the rest will send their henchmen. For the next adventure it swaps round.
This way each player gets to play the superman character some of the time, but the basic mundanes the rest of the time.

That's not really how troupe play plays out. The wizards are absolutely more powerful than everyone else, but there's plenty of things that others are likely to be better suited for, and Ars Magica doesn't hit high level D&D levels of magical power at any point. On top of that, Ars Magica also deliberately focuses away from the model where the game is about a group getting stuff done, and the point of the weakest characters (there's 3 groups, the mages, the major nonmages, then a shared pool of bit characters) is to add the scenes not about that sort of thing at all.