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NichG
2017-11-08, 11:10 PM
Out of the various campaigns I've run and systems I've designed, I've never done a superhero game. So I've been sitting and trying to think of what actually constitutes the superhero genre. At the broad level, I sort of get the idea - recurring rivalries, protect-vs-control types of stakes (the thing at risk is more often those around the superhero than the hero themselves), the importance of a feeling of 'home' in establishing reasons why a varied cast of characters would risk their lives to defend something bigger than themselves. Similarly, at the broad level of character archetypes I get the idea of having more narrow thematic powers, having growth be more about becoming better at using those thematic abilities in new ways than necessarily branching out into totally new, unrelated abilities (or powering up by getting loot), etc.

But when it comes down to what the actual motions should feel like, I'm kind of hitting a wall. For example, in a fight, I don't generally get the impression of wearing away at bags of hitpoints but neither do I get the impression that superhero fights tend to follow a death spiral type of model. It seems more like a kind of situation where things have very little momentum - a hero can be almost dead and in a very disadvantaged situation, and then when they figure out the gimmick that goes and wins the fight they pop back up to full strength or even above that (almost an inverse-death-spiral). Similarly, when it comes to things outside of fights, I don't have a good mental model for how things could play out any deeper than at the sort of trivial 'if your power does that, you can do that' sense.

I feel like maybe the best mechanical analogy I have in my mind is something like the card game gin rummy, where both sides are basically waiting for an opening that lets them take the win, and progress is constructed somewhat internally, but has to be externalized (at the risk of, once you've done that, its information your opponent has about how close you are to the win). So something like, 'I'm going to hold on to my secret move because when the other guy gets his second wind and becomes immune to everything I've done so far in this fight, if I don't have that I'm done for'. I also feel like there might be a strong rock-paper-scissors type of dynamic, where positioning and limited range combined with the point that there's usually an objective that the heroes are defending (rather than the 'kill all the enemies' objective) means that ploys like drawing someone away or provoking someone to leave their position are very meaningful.

But when I come up with systems for that, if I imagine using it for out-of-combat things it ends up making for a very abrupt in-combat/out-of-combat dichotomy. Worse than the 'roll initiative' call in D&D, I think.

So, for a superhero game, what do you think conflict should feel like? What do you think out-of-combat interactions should feel like? What makes up the basic building blocks of 'doing the superhero thing'?

Drakeburn
2017-11-09, 01:45 AM
How the fights should feel like really depends on what tone you want your superhero game to be. Is it silly and lighthearted, or dark and gritty?

Let me say this: Try not to anticipate everything the player characters are going to do, but rather focus on the goals of the villains. Things like acquiring power, becoming immortal, avenging the death of a loved one, and finding a way back home, just to name a few.
Villains usually don't want to stay and fight the superhero (unless the villain has a personal vendetta against the hero and defeating/killing the hero is the villain's plan). So they would have minions keep the hero busy, cause a "what will it be, catching me or saving the innocent people" situation, or have some other way of getting away.

NichG
2017-11-09, 02:37 AM
I'm more worried about getting the right feel, since I'm intending to also write the mechanics from scratch and the wrong kind of mechanics can change the logic of the genre. For example, in D&D running away from an enemy is all or nothing. If your move-speed is lower, running is basically suicide. If your move-speed is higher, if your enemy tries to pursue then necessarily they also can't attack as you flee. The full attack/etc aspects of the game also encourage standing in one place and slugging it out (and for many characters, they are harshly penalized if they don't do exactly that).

So in D&D it's pretty hard to run chase scenes that are actually interesting without a lot of prep ahead of time to ensure lots of environmental participation along the escape routes. It's also hard to e.g. maneuver the fight to a convenient location - once the melee meet, its more or less a clinch and the location of the fight is fairly static.

For a superhero game, I think I'd want a lot of moving engagements - rather than saying 'you have to be adjacent to attack this person' I'd say instead something like 'as long as you are within a certain distance, you can dart in and attack, then return to your previous position for free'. Similarly, its a fairly common trope that strength-based superheroes fling their enemies around quite a bit with their attacks, so the system design shouldn't punish you for doing that (e.g. in D&D you've potentially just bought yourself an AoO when re-approaching, as well as not being able to full attack).

So that's the kind of thing I'm worried about. I want to make sure that the design choices support the genre, particularly in terms of how the stakes of an interaction and the abilities of the actors involved are communicated by the system. For example, three different types of combats that I've seen in various systems:

- Swingy: When you're vulnerable, its extremely hard to predict if you will drop or not, so whenever you go into range to interact you are making measured gambles
- Grindy: Winning or losing is more about maintaining a consistent rate of overperformance compared to the enemies. No single interaction makes or breaks the fight, but over many repeated interactions a winner/loser emerges.
- Lethal-but-predictable: There's lots of information and a smaller degree of dependence on chance, so you can tell for example 'if I get within this range, I'm certain to die'. But avoiding those 'ifs' is generally fairly easy. So losing is because you were maneuvered into a position where you couldn't avoid the certain-deathblow.

I feel like lethal-but-predictable is closest to the genre, but at the same time actual superhero media tends to have a sort of trump-card structure, where rather than maneuvering an enemy into deathblow range its keeping the deathblow hidden until they stumble into that range. But that almost has to be a protagonist-only power or characters will be dying/dropping constantly, which doesn't feel like it fits the genre.

RazorChain
2017-11-09, 03:46 AM
Capturing the feel of supers can be hard as supers can be portrayed differently. Stormwatch became vastly different when Warren Ellis started to write it and changed it to Authority.


The easiest supers game I have run is a low powered vigilante game, a Batmanesque game. Where the team wasn't leveling buildings or saving the earth but just protecting a single city.


For high powered supers just think soap opera in spandex with fisticuffs

Rynjin
2017-11-09, 03:53 AM
My preferred tone and lethality for supers is "Saturday Evening Cartoon". Eg. Young Justice. Villains are dangerous but important people really only die when it's plot relevant not just as a matter of chance.

Mutants and Masterminds is a good system for this in general, and your idea of moving action and chase scenes being viable, not having to anticipate all the PCs moves, etc. The game gives GMs a lot more Rule 0 leeway on a session-to-session but lets players have their own GM approved scene edits and whatnot so things can be very dynamic.

It's very hard to die in M&M so it's usually relegated to "I want my hero to go out in a cool scene" scenarios for dramatic effect than "Well, the bad guy crit me real hard and now I'm dead".

NichG
2017-11-09, 04:22 AM
Hmm... At the high end, I could imagine a character's 'hitpoints' actually being more about Fame/Infamy and collateral damage, where there's always an option to trade personal risk off for collateral in either direction, but always raising the stakes when you do so.

So e.g. Mr. Death who has a death ray that basically just kills stuff shoots one of the PCs and hits. That PC can 'nope, you missed!' but since Mr. Death succeeded, that shot is going to hit someone or something - just not the PC. And then the news is going to run a photo of that character dodging out of the way of the beam and letting it hit, say, a tree that was planted at the day of the city's founding two centuries ago - tomorrow's headlines: "Cowardly capes allow arborial accident!". Choosing to make the tradeoff raises the stakes, meaning the next shot dodged in the same fashion would hit an innocent bystander.

Or correspondingly, the PC may choose that the stakes are high enough that they will take it on the chin, so when Mr. Death turns his death ray on, say, a schoolbus full of kids, the character jumps in the way, saving the kids while taking the consequences of the attack (in this case, death). I could also see a third stake in order to stretch things out a bit, which is that rather than dying, some kind of dramatic change happens as the character loses something of personal importance (which could be extended out over many scenes - e.g. Mr. Death kills the character, but then they are raised by a necromancer by the light of a full moon; or Mr. Death apparently kills the character, but actually it was their identical twin brother all along; or ...) or just be something like 'the character is so awesome that even when they're killed, they don't die... but they now have a dead spot on their arm that is slowly growing)

Anymage
2017-11-09, 04:30 AM
I'd be tempted to nick two big things from FATE.

First, a wound point track, but wounds have specific descriptions and only hinder you if they're specifically called out. A solid hit might do anything from bruise your ribs to break your legs, but you only suffer a penalty if the enemy chooses to hit that same spot again, scamper back so they're hard to reach, or whatever. Supers are usually only hampered by specific injuries, and then only when it's narratively relevant.

Second, some form of metagame currency. Ideally, one that can be charged up by getting into trouble. You'll want some way to mimic the usual narrative arc where the hero gets into scrapes with lieutenants, but can pull something big out of his bag of tricks when the climax rolls around. That comes from cashing out a big bag of narrative chips.

(This all assumes that you want your supers to follow the general superhero narrative structure. Then again, if supers play "realistically" instead of sticking to script, the lethality would ratchet up crazy high. Not to mention what super geniuses untethered from a need to look like our world would wind up doing to theirs.)

NichG
2017-11-09, 04:35 AM
I'd be tempted to nick two big things from FATE.

First, a wound point track, but wounds have specific descriptions and only hinder you if they're specifically called out. A solid hit might do anything from bruise your ribs to break your legs, but you only suffer a penalty if the enemy chooses to hit that same spot again, scamper back so they're hard to reach, or whatever. Supers are usually only hampered by specific injuries, and then only when it's narratively relevant.

Second, some form of metagame currency. Ideally, one that can be charged up by getting into trouble. You'll want some way to mimic the usual narrative arc where the hero gets into scrapes with lieutenants, but can pull something big out of his bag of tricks when the climax rolls around. That comes from cashing out a big bag of narrative chips.

(This all assumes that you want your supers to follow the general superhero narrative structure. Then again, if supers play "realistically" instead of sticking to script, the lethality would ratchet up crazy high. Not to mention what super geniuses untethered from a need to look like our world would wind up doing to theirs.)

If its any help, I'm targeting something like Worm, but softened enough that the players don't have to be genius strategists and tacticians just to manage to survive.

Rynjin
2017-11-09, 06:06 PM
I might suggest using Savage Worlds in that case. PCs have a certain amount of plot armor in he form of Bennies which you can use to reroll dice and soak damage, but once those are gone damage can easily cause death and permanent injury.

TeChameleon
2017-11-10, 06:18 PM
Hmm... if you're targetting the general 'feel' of Worm... assuming you're thinking the feel for the time period when it was more traditional Capes vs. Black Masks (insofar as Worm was ever traditional), rather than the later cosmic-shenanigan dimension-hopping-and-warping... then a fame/infamy stat for hitpoints might actually be ideal; it would keep the combat flowing fast, and taking a hit might mean the difference between 'recovering in hospital for saving schoolbus of children while candlelight vigils are held outside' and 'booed and showered with rotten vegetables every time they show their face', but they're free to act while Captain Heroic is in the hospital.

A mechanic where a sufficiently heroic character's endorsement could boost a more dubious character's 'fame' to allow them more public access, or a morally dubious character doing something heinous enough to drag down Captain Heroic with them, could make for some interesting dynamics, but, well, I'm just spitballing here.

But heroes in Worm really did seem to live or die by their publicity, with what they were able to accomplish (exceptions being Taylor and cohorts, and Dragon to a lesser extent) being heavily dependent on them being in good standing with the public, or else they lost (to one degree or another) their logistical support, their transportation, their intel networks...

Cealocanth
2017-11-11, 11:21 AM
I might suggest using Savage Worlds in that case. PCs have a certain amount of plot armor in he form of Bennies which you can use to reroll dice and soak damage, but once those are gone damage can easily cause death and permanent injury.

If you're going with Savage Worlds, I do not recommend the use of the Super Powers Companion for this feel. The SPC puts players in the same category as minor gods. When a character is good a something, the chances of them failing that thing is actually lower in some cases than the chances of rolling 10 consecutive natural 1s in a row on 20 sided dice. When they're bad at something, the enemies they're fighting are so good at that thing that that thing will most certianly be what kills them. SPC plays like Pokemon in many ways. Use the thing the character is weak against.

I would also not recommend the default system the game has for superpowers. These characters have one power mechanically (think one "spell" from D&D) that they actually have to spend skill points to use, and a ridiculous amount of them to use them right. These characters are so ridiculously underpowered compared to many classic supers that they fall more into the category of the weaker characters from Heroes, rather than the classic four-color heroes of Marvel and DC.

So yeah, if you're using Savage Worlds, make your own powers system.

Aran nu tasar
2017-11-11, 12:06 PM
If you're willing to go PbtA, Masks is a great superhero game that would handle a Worm-style game pretty well. It's about teen heroes struggling to find their place in the world, rather than being a more generic supers game. Definitely some good stuff that you can steal for your own game. There's also Worlds in Peril, which is a more generic supers game, but I haven't read through it so I don't know how helpful it would be.

NichG
2017-11-11, 09:38 PM
Currently I'm thinking of a kind of action bidding system halfway between Risus and the dice system from the computer game Curious Expedition.

The idea would be that in a given scene, you describe things you're going to be trying to do throughout the scene: stay hidden, don't fall in the lava, etc. Roughly these things separate into attack, defense, positioning, and support. You secretly assign points to each category based on relative emphasis (maybe assign dice pools).

Then you take mechanical actions by declaring extended goals from these categories - don't be spotted, don't fall in the lava, restrain that villain, etc.

Unopposed goals just work, but opposed ones become contests where you can reveal your bid die by die to try to one-up the opposing side, but doing so commits those dice to the task. Powers might enable otherwise impossible actions, add to pools, let you see other people's pools or freeze their bids, let you reclaim or shuffle dice around, etc. Stunting could pull dice out of nowhere to turn around a failed bid. Other things could be put at risk to try to win a desperate bid (collateral damage/fame for example).

Setting-wise, all heroes have the potential for improved physical/mental attributes, but you only get one 'power' though it tends to become more broadly interpreted as you advance it (which you do by erasing words from the description). For example, a starting character 'controls the movement of flame by touch' and could advance to 'controls flame by touch' and then 'controls (energy) by touch' towards finally just 'controls'. Still working on how to construct valid power descriptions this way and how to assign costs to the word removal/alterations. At a fine level below word removal, you can construct any number of 'moves' that fit within your sentence, and optionally invest XP in them to make them better than your general actions - that's where particular funky mechanics might come in, but I haven't systematized how that works yet.

Mutazoia
2017-11-14, 07:19 AM
The tone of the game really depends on what genre of super hero you are trying to emulate. A Batman style game, is going to feel and play a lot differently from one based on the old Underdog cartoon. And even then, one Batman genre can be vastly different from another (Early age Detective comics, when "Batman" was just a cop that wore a cape vs the recent Bat-Fleck for example)


Currently I'm thinking of a kind of action bidding system halfway between Risus and the dice system from the computer game Curious Expedition.

The idea would be that in a given scene, you describe things you're going to be trying to do throughout the scene: stay hidden, don't fall in the lava, etc. Roughly these things separate into attack, defense, positioning, and support. You secretly assign points to each category based on relative emphasis (maybe assign dice pools).

Then you take mechanical actions by declaring extended goals from these categories - don't be spotted, don't fall in the lava, restrain that villain, etc.

Unopposed goals just work, but opposed ones become contests where you can reveal your bid die by die to try to one-up the opposing side, but doing so commits those dice to the task. Powers might enable otherwise impossible actions, add to pools, let you see other people's pools or freeze their bids, let you reclaim or shuffle dice around, etc. Stunting could pull dice out of nowhere to turn around a failed bid. Other things could be put at risk to try to win a desperate bid (collateral damage/fame for example).

And your combat sessions are going to take FOREVER to resolve. One of the biggest complaints I hear about various systems is the crunchiness/clunkiness of the combat rounds...how a fight that takes 2 minutes in game time, takes 2 hours in real time. If you handle combat the way you are suggesting, you are just throwing fuel on that fire.


Setting-wise, all heroes have the potential for improved physical/mental attributes, but you only get one 'power' though it tends to become more broadly interpreted as you advance it (which you do by erasing words from the description). For example, a starting character 'controls the movement of flame by touch' and could advance to 'controls flame by touch' and then 'controls (energy) by touch' towards finally just 'controls'. Still working on how to construct valid power descriptions this way and how to assign costs to the word removal/alterations. At a fine level below word removal, you can construct any number of 'moves' that fit within your sentence, and optionally invest XP in them to make them better than your general actions - that's where particular funky mechanics might come in, but I haven't systematized how that works yet.

Hmmm....

At lower levels I can see this working. The problem comes when you get to the higher levels, and everybody eventually becomes Dr. Manhattan. In the long run, I would think that it is probably best to stick with a clearly defined power, that just ramps up in power as you feed it XP. Let the players spend "points" or what have you, to trick out their powers with other affects/effects. So your "Controls the movement of flame by touch" would just be flame manipulation, range: touch. Basically, a standard method of handling a power/ability.

Honestly, there are enough super hero systems out there, that you really don't need to re-invent the wheel. Just pick one that has the feel you like. Personally, my two favorites are DC Heroes and TSR's old Marvel Superheroes (FASERIP).

NichG
2017-11-14, 07:51 AM
The tone of the game really depends on what genre of super hero you are trying to emulate. A Batman style game, is going to feel and play a lot differently from one based on the old Underdog cartoon. And even then, one Batman genre can be vastly different from another (Early age Detective comics, when "Batman" was just a cop that wore a cape vs the recent Bat-Fleck for example)

And your combat sessions are going to take FOREVER to resolve. One of the biggest complaints I hear about various systems is the crunchiness/clunkiness of the combat rounds...how a fight that takes 2 minutes in game time, takes 2 hours in real time. If you handle combat the way you are suggesting, you are just throwing fuel on that fire.

I don't imagine a fight involving more than say three failed bids per character. Once you've won 'don't get hit by Ace', Ace can't land a hit on you - that stake has been settled. He might delay you or kill a civilian or something, but that's it. Once you fail 'avoid Ace's attack' he can hit with impunity. So there wouldn't be a hitpoint grind. That back-and-forth bidding replaces it.

Even if you want to start a new bid, the dice you've already spent in that category don't come back. So fights should naturally have a certain timescale to them. Of course, this needs some testing.

I guess the danger is a stalemate where neither side can win and neither side can retreat.



Hmmm....

At lower levels I can see this working. The problem comes when you get to the higher levels, and everybody eventually becomes Dr. Manhattan. In the long run, I would think that it is probably best to stick with a clearly defined power, that just ramps up in power as you feed it XP. Let the players spend "points" or what have you, to trick out their powers with other affects/effects. So your "Controls the movement of flame by touch" would just be flame manipulation, range: touch. Basically, a standard method of handling a power/ability.

I'm fine with everyone eventually becoming Dr. Manhattan. Worm had it's Khepri, and that kind of thing is something I would intentionally like to hint would be possible for the PCs if that's where the game goes.

If anything, that's the power level I'm actually more comfortable running at.

Jay R
2017-11-14, 12:57 PM
The essential fact you need to internalize is that "the superhero genre" is not one genre, but a great many. Deadpool, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Wolverine, Captain Planet, and the Super Friends are very different in tone and structure. Don't put Adam West into a Ben Affleck story, or vice versa.

Read comic books. Determine which kind of comics you enjoy and believe in. Then read more of those until you see the structure and understand the story approach.

My latest superhero game was explicitly Silver Age. It started in 1961. In an early episode, they heard about a space ship landing outside of town. When they arrived, they found a super-strong orange creature, and a fight started. Soon the were attacked with flame, with long tentacles with human-looking hands, etc.

It took about an hour for the PCs to realize that they were fighting humans who had just had an unsuccessful rocket trip, and had been transformed by cosmic radiation. They had blundered into the original of the Fantastic Four.

But here's a brief approach I use: Open with a fight. It should be easy, and showcase their abilities. [The most frustrating situation while playing a superhero is to not be able to use your powers. If your PC has super-strength, then detective work is fine, but at some point, a boulder should need to be lifted, or some such.] The opening fight should also foreshadow the main plot, or provide a clue, or something. Then develop some details, some detective work, whatever, leading to the big showdown.

A lot of comics have followed that formula.

Mutazoia
2017-11-15, 03:54 AM
I don't imagine a fight involving more than say three failed bids per character. Once you've won 'don't get hit by Ace', Ace can't land a hit on you - that stake has been settled. He might delay you or kill a civilian or something, but that's it. Once you fail 'avoid Ace's attack' he can hit with impunity. So there wouldn't be a hitpoint grind. That back-and-forth bidding replaces it.

Even if you want to start a new bid, the dice you've already spent in that category don't come back. So fights should naturally have a certain timescale to them. Of course, this needs some testing.

I guess the danger is a stalemate where neither side can win and neither side can retreat.

If you really want to streamline things, try doing things they way the Amber Diceless RPG does: He who has the highest stat always wins. Unless the other guy get's help, or cheats.

For example:

The main character in the Amber novels (that the game is based off of) is Corwin. In game terms, Corwin has the highest Constitution score....high enough to re-grow his eyes after they were burned out of his head by white hot pokers, in just a couple of years.

His brother, Benetict, in game terms, has the highest Warfare stat. There isn't a weapon he is not a complete master of, or a tactic or strategy that he can't counter in his sleep.

If you put Corwin and Benedict in a ring and have them fight it out, Benedict will cut Corwin to ribbons, long before Corwin's constitution will let him wear Benedict out.

In the novel(s), the two get into a fight. Fortunately for Corwin, he is aware of something in the environment that Benedict hasn't encountered yet. Namely, a patch of "grass" that entangles anything that steps on in. During the fight, Corwin jumps backwards, as if trying to put some distance between him and Benedict...and jumps over that patch, placing it between them. Benedict, not knowing about the patch, advances right on top of it. When the grass starts entangling him, Benedict is distracted just long enough for Corwin to jump behind him and pommel smack him unconscious.

Even though Benedict's Warfare score was higher than Corwin's, Corwin still won, because he "cheated"

Doing things this way will allow your players to flex their creative muscle a bit, and keep IRL combat time down.



I'm fine with everyone eventually becoming Dr. Manhattan. Worm had it's Khepri, and that kind of thing is something I would intentionally like to hint would be possible for the PCs if that's where the game goes.

If anything, that's the power level I'm actually more comfortable running at.

The other problem becomes "What about poor Batman?"

It's all fun and games when everybody has a super power, but what happens if a player really wants to play a batman style hero? He doesn't have a power that he can just erase a word from to power it up...his Martial Arts simply becomes "Arts" and now you have Dr. Manhattan fighting crime with Bob Ross ...

NichG
2017-11-15, 04:57 AM
But here's a brief approach I use: Open with a fight. It should be easy, and showcase their abilities. [The most frustrating situation while playing a superhero is to not be able to use your powers. If your PC has super-strength, then detective work is fine, but at some point, a boulder should need to be lifted, or some such.] The opening fight should also foreshadow the main plot, or provide a clue, or something. Then develop some details, some detective work, whatever, leading to the big showdown.

A lot of comics have followed that formula.

I think this is good advice, for other kinds of campaigns too.

From the system design side of it, I suppose the thing to do is to make sure that its not hard to form an impression of what a character should be able to do during character generation, so that you don't have an opening fight where everyone is standing around saying 'wait, how does grappling work again?'


If you really want to streamline things, try doing things they way the Amber Diceless RPG does: He who has the highest stat always wins. Unless the other guy get's help, or cheats.

Yeah, I'm loosely familiar with it by reputation and discussion at least. At least based on the way I've sketched out the bidding, if you were playing in the small-pool limit the game becomes more and more like this. If everyone has a pool of zero, all interactions basically become 'check if its physically possible, compare your associated stat, higher wins (ties go to the aggressor)'.

The tricky thing is formalizing what kinds of advantage can be gained from e.g. 'cheating'. It needs to be transparent enough that players can reason about it in advance and make plans. Especially with very open-ended abilities, this one promises to be a bit tricky. However, since the theme of the system has to do with limits and breaking them, it would make sense that every powerset has to come with a selection from a set of built-in flaws which can be bought off as the game progresses.

There's also the issue with Amber that keeping your abilities secret is the primary strategy element, and that seems to go a bit against the idea of flashy caped crusaders. With the bidding pools, it'd be like an Amber character with two free ranks that they can move around every scene, but which only get to go towards a specific action.



The other problem becomes "What about poor Batman?"

It's all fun and games when everybody has a super power, but what happens if a player really wants to play a batman style hero? He doesn't have a power that he can just erase a word from to power it up...his Martial Arts simply becomes "Arts" and now you have Dr. Manhattan fighting crime with Bob Ross ...

Well, for example, I could stat Batman in this system as being: "Planning for contigencies by using gadgets on known targets". Shark-repellent Batman would be what happens when you delete "on known targets" - now the character is always prepared for any contingency that does actually come up even if they could not possibly have known. Deleting "by using gadgets" gives you Batman at the head of the Justice League who can treat the powers of everyone working with him as things that can be brought into play freely to resolve issues - though 'summon help' would by no means be the only way that power could be brought into play, just keeping with the Batman theme. At that point it could just as well be 'I knew he would miss and shoot that building, so I bought it yesterday and had the staff clear everyone out'.

And when you delete 'for contingencies', you have a potentially incredibly potent character depending on how they interpret Planning. Worm has a bunch of these, but the high end of it with the Contessa's 'know what I would need to do to obtain X outcome' definitely reaches the same kind of power level as Dr. Manhattan even if its not as viscerally flashy.

Or if we went the other route and wanted to stat out 'Martial Arts' as the power (e.g. we're making Iron Fist) then we would need to think a bit carefully about how to actually write the initial description. Something like "Physically skilled in fighting using martial arts" becomes "Physically skilled in fighting", "Physically skilled", and eventually just "Skilled". Or if you really want to preserve the martial arts theme in particular, "Manipulates Qi to empower their body" -> "Manipulates Qi to empower" (when he learns the healing trick) -> "Manipulates Qi" -> "Qi". At the end of that, the character would essentially be able to do stuff like become a force ghost or possess someone or scan the area using Feng Shui or basically anything which is thematically consistent with using Qi (or they could drop Qi and just become 'Manipulates').

Mutazoia
2017-11-15, 05:13 AM
There's also the issue with Amber that keeping your abilities secret is the primary strategy element, and that seems to go a bit against the idea of flashy caped crusaders. With the bidding pools, it'd be like an Amber character with two free ranks that they can move around every scene, but which only get to go towards a specific action.

Only during the initial bid phase, where you bid to be the first rank in each stat, are things kept secret, so nobody know's who is going to be the best at Warfare, for example. But once the bidding is over, everybody knows who is the best at what.


Well, for example, I could stat Batman in this system as being: "Planning for contigencies by using gadgets on known targets". Shark-repellent Batman would be what happens when you delete "on known targets" - now the character is always prepared for any contingency that does actually come up even if they could not possibly have known. Deleting "by using gadgets" gives you Batman at the head of the Justice League who can treat the powers of everyone working with him as things that can be brought into play freely to resolve issues - though 'summon help' would by no means be the only way that power could be brought into play, just keeping with the Batman theme. At that point it could just as well be 'I knew he would miss and shoot that building, so I bought it yesterday and had the staff clear everyone out'.

And when you delete 'for contingencies', you have a potentially incredibly potent character depending on how they interpret Planning. Worm has a bunch of these, but the high end of it with the Contessa's 'know what I would need to do to obtain X outcome' definitely reaches the same kind of power level as Dr. Manhattan even if its not as viscerally flashy.

Or if we went the other route and wanted to stat out 'Martial Arts' as the power (e.g. we're making Iron Fist) then we would need to think a bit carefully about how to actually write the initial description. Something like "Physically skilled in fighting using martial arts" becomes "Physically skilled in fighting", "Physically skilled", and eventually just "Skilled". Or if you really want to preserve the martial arts theme in particular, "Manipulates Qi to empower their body" -> "Manipulates Qi to empower" (when he learns the healing trick) -> "Manipulates Qi" -> "Qi". At the end of that, the character would essentially be able to do stuff like become a force ghost or possess someone or scan the area using Feng Shui or basically anything which is thematically consistent with using Qi (or they could drop Qi and just become 'Manipulates').

But, in the end, wouldn't that just end up with EVERYBODY having a power that was just some form of "controls", and everybody is pretty much the same character in different spandex?

NichG
2017-11-15, 05:29 AM
Only during the initial bid phase, where you bid to be the first rank in each stat, are things kept secret, so nobody know's who is going to be the best at Warfare, for example. But once the bidding is over, everybody knows who is the best at what.

Yes, what I'm saying is that the bidding system I'm proposing for my system essentially ends up redoing an element of that initial bid phase on a per-scene basis, so you don't have this kind of crash-out when the GM knows what your stats actually are and has to always try to not metagame it.

Rather than 'is he higher rank in X than me?' its 'is he going to end up being higher rank in X than me this scene?'.


But, in the end, wouldn't that just end up with EVERYBODY having a power that was just some form of "controls", and everybody is pretty much the same character in different spandex?

Probably the way to plan out characters/parties is to actually start with that last word, and then narrow down, rather than start with the narrow and broaden. So yes, you could have 'Controls fire' and 'Controls lightning' both end up being 'Controls', but its also legit for them to be 'Fire' and 'Lightning'. After all, 'Controls' doesn't imply 'Becomes' or 'Creates' or 'Understands' or 'Goes' or anything like that. I think there's actually plenty of diversity at the highest level, but maybe being explicit about where characters are going is important to make sure you don't just get an accidental party of identical powersets.

If it ends on a noun rather than a verb, there's also going to be a lot more diversity. 'Qi' and 'Fire' are very different characters.