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Thread: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
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2016-12-26, 11:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Looking for superhero ttrpgs
I've heard people on these forums bring up superhero rpgs a few times and it has peaked my interest. What games would fit into this genre and where would be a good place to start?
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2016-12-26, 11:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
There are quite a few options and I'm not about to list them all. The ones I have experience with are (in no particular order)
Mutants & Masterminds - The most recent of the list, easy to find and find support for.
A couple different versions of Marvel Superheroes (Still prefer the TSR original myself) Mostly out of print. Will take some scrounging to find.
DC Heroes - (my personal fav) Also out of print, but IMHO worth the time to find. (look for the 3rd ed)
Champions - A lot of math involved, but lots of options for character creation
GURPS Supers - Typical GURPS system with typical GURPS advantages and drawbacks."Sleeping late might not be a virtue, but it sure aint no vice. The old saw about the early bird and the worm just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
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2016-12-27, 12:42 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
Truth and Justice: A relatively 'light' game, more story-based than physics-based.
Aberrant: White Wolf does a superpower game!
Prowlers and Paragons: Fairly recent superhero game, is trying to be the next Champions. From my limited playing, it definitely has the 'huge buckets of d6s' part down.Imagine if all real-world conversations were like internet D&D conversations...
Protip: DnD is an incredibly social game played by some of the most socially inept people on the planet - Lev
I read this somewhere and I stick to it: "I would rather play a bad system with my friends than a great system with nobody". - Trevlac
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2016-12-27, 07:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
Wow, thanks for the quick responses and recommendations! Now I got a lot of reading and scrounging to do to check out all these systems.
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2016-12-27, 09:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
Masks: A New Generation
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2016-12-27, 10:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
I was in a play-by-post game here which used the Marvel Super Heroes advanced set. Classic Marvel Forever hosts pdfs. The thing I liked most about the design of that one was, while it was very heavy on charts and graphs, the Universal Table tried to pull things together. You have a rating in something, roll percentile dice, and compare your roll's number to the color on the chart to determine success. Having listened quite a bit to the X-Plain the X-Men podcast, it was also nice to see another source which was so very much of the 1980s; illustrations used in the Advanced Player's Book would have the Fantastic Four with She-Hulk on the team for example. Character generation in the game assumes you are either modelling a hero off of something seen in comics or you are fully randomizing it by rolling on tables, but in our game we had a Judge who set a point-buy system in place.
The X-Plain the X-Men podcast has also used the second Marvel RPG TSR put out: Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game. Instead of rolling dice, cards are drawn which have a color which matches one of the four attributes or is a Doom card. Players can play additional cards from their hand which have a value lower than their characters' Edge and drawn cards which match the color of the attribute used results in additional draws. Logan Bonner (who has worked on supplements to Marevel Heroic Roleplaying for Cortex Plus) has run two sessions using this system, but only the first one had a PDF of the module he ran based on the premise of, "What if there had been a sixth season of the X-Men animated series?"Last edited by KillingAScarab; 2016-12-27 at 10:18 PM.
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2016-12-29, 05:40 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
To explain a bit further. M&M 2nd and 3rd Editions are points based games, they look very similar to other d20 games since it they dereived from the OGL. You need a single D20 per player and you're set. Minor math, mostly addition, subtraction and multiplication. Quick note DC Adventures is M&M 3rd Edition with DC branding, they are the exact same game otherwise.
Champions is the superhero subset of the HERO RPG. It uses the bucket of d6s for most stuff, you can for example end up rolling 15d6 for damage. Character creation math is more complicated than M&M, but not excessively so. If you're comfortable with using fractions you're good to go.
GURPS is GURPS with extra stuff to make it more superheroish.
DC Heroes and the Marvel games I've never played.
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2017-01-13, 01:31 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
There are tons, but they do tend to break down into two families: the ones based on Champions (the great granddaddy) and the ones that aren't. (for the nonce, I'm going to ignore games that are out of print or unavailable)
Champions and its derivatives - GURPS/Supers, Mayfair's DC Heroes/Blood of Heroes, M&M 2nd and 3rd edition, Godlike/Wild Talents, Savage Worlds with the Superhero Toolkit - these are all pretty straightforward zero-to-hero, physics simulation engine RPGs with an effects-based point-buy powers creation system and a logarithmic scale. The dice mechanic and base lethality changes, but they're all pretty similar in execution. Some are explicitly hex wargames like Champions, others are more abstract, but they all tend to focus on combat effectiveness to the exclusion of everything else.
Everything Else: There's the stuff based on D&D (Villains & Vigilantes, Heroes Unlimited), the old stuff (TSR's Marvel Superheroes), the new stuff (ICONS, which is TSR's Marvel plus a bit of Fate mechanics, and BASH, which is about as rules-lite as you can get) and a crap ton of indie games that are probably technically available but good luck tracking them down (Capes, World vs. Hero, Truth & Justice, several Powered by the Apocalypse games). There are games that cover very specific superhero niches, like Mutant City Blues and Cold Steel Wardens, but they aren't as generic and often don't work at all outside their niche.
In my experience, the only TTRPG that actually feels like a four-colour superhero comic book was MWP's Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, which was erased from history by Disney so you'll have a beggar of a time finding a print copy. It's well worth it if you find one at a con, though.
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2017-01-13, 11:06 AM (ISO 8601)
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2017-01-13, 11:20 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
On those indie games - if you're good with PDFs, they tend to be much easier to get ahold of (if only because sticking a .pdf file on DriveThruRPG or RPGNow is a bit easier than running a print run and shipping it).
Back to the system side, there's a few significant options that have been missed. Namely:
Wild Talents - An ORE superhero game developed by a third party company. The rules are a bit janky, but it's generally a decent game.
Godlike - The more official ORE superhero game, about relatively low powered superheroes in WWII. It's dark, it's gloomy, and the system side can be stripped out of the setting pretty easily and used to cover a lot of more conventional games.
The big selling point for both of them is that the underlying One Roll Engine (ORE) is a really solid piece of design.I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums.
I'm not joking one bit. I would buy the hell out of that. -- ChubbyRain
Current Design Project: Legacy, a game of masters and apprentices for two players and a GM.
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2017-01-13, 11:25 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
The core rules for sure. I own the book because it came out before M&M 3E rule book. The setting books, and the double volume big book for characters? Priceless beyond measure for somebody looking for a way to build a power or character based on an existing DC character. It also has dozens of on PL characters, including a bunch at PL10 you can literally pull from the book and start playing.
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2017-01-13, 06:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
of the out of print (but still sometimes findable) games, Marvel Heroic falls down on character creation. It's pretty good if you want to adapt an existing character from the comics, but it doesn't have much guidance for inventing your own original character (Like a lot of Margaret Weis games, it assumes you're going to play in an existing fictional world rather than create your own.) Smallville does better in this regard, and has the distinction of being the only supers game I know that really works if you mix supers and normal humans in the same group.
Villains and Vigilantes was one of the earliest super RPGs, and it's loosely based on OD&D. The game system has little to recommend it (although I had a blast playing it back in the early 80s), but the supplements are still a gold mine of ideas for characters and capers.
Blood of Heroes is just DC Heroes without the trademarked characters. This was another one of my favorites, in part because of how fast the fights play out. Also, creating NPCs is super quick. Once I had a concept, I could generate their stats literally as quickly as I could write them down. (PCs take longer, though, because you have to add up points.)
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2017-01-13, 10:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
The 1980s Marvel game might be worth looking at: fairly straightforward system, a karma mechanic used to enforce 'comics-code morality' (albeit not very consistently), and a ton of powers and characters already written up.
It's been out of print for ages, but there's a clone of it called 'FASERIP' (after the stats). And it's free.Imagine if all real-world conversations were like internet D&D conversations...
Protip: DnD is an incredibly social game played by some of the most socially inept people on the planet - Lev
I read this somewhere and I stick to it: "I would rather play a bad system with my friends than a great system with nobody". - Trevlac
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2017-01-14, 02:08 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
Oh, not this canard again.
MHR doesn't have a "character creation system" because it doesn't need one. Write down whatever stats you want. The system is self-balancing in play (if you think a character with all D10s and D12s is more powerful in play than a character with all D8s, you don't understand how the system works).
Smallville does better in this regard, and has the distinction of being the only supers game I know that really works if you mix supers and normal humans in the same group.
Villains and Vigilantes was one of the earliest super RPGs [...] the supplements are still a gold mine of ideas for characters and capers.
Blood of Heroes is just DC Heroes without the trademarked characters.
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2017-01-14, 02:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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2017-01-14, 02:17 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
There's The Phoenix Project, an add an to d20 Modern that's a fan project and therefore free. It's all mechanical; what if you have Str 80, or could run thousands of feet per round, but it's an interesting take on a scaled up D&D without the imbalance spells brought (they only exist as an optional power).
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2017-01-14, 02:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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2017-01-14, 02:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
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2017-01-14, 02:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
I will second this recommendation. It's awesome for telling stories in its specific niche: teenage superheroes trying to find their place in the world. The setting, Halcyon City, is vibrant and really helps you understand the tone and feel of the game. Moreover, the PbtA system is great for low-prep, high-improv games with lots of player buy-in.
"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."
-Carl Sagan
Spoiler: Games I'm Playing InDevigor's "Points of Light: Ancient Empires" as Eleazar Garodya
SteelMirror's The Quest for the Fancy Fungus as Duryss
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2017-01-14, 03:39 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
Mutants and Masterminds 3e is not just a great superhero systems, but (in my opinion) one of the finest RPGs out there, period. It offers staggering flexibility without relying on either giant lists of pre-made abilities (as, say, GURPS or D&D does) or vague self-defined categories (as, say, Fate does). It plays very quickly and robustly, and captures its genre better than any other game I've seen. It's also very setting-neutral; as long as you're looking to run cartoon-style action*, you can plug-and-play any setting you want, even things like fantasy or sci-fi.
*It plays exactly like, oh, an episode of Justice League Unlimited or Young JusticeHill Giant Games
I make indie gaming books for you!Spoiler
STaRS: A non-narrativeist, generic rules-light system.
Grod's Guide to Greatness, 2e: A big book of player options for 5e.
Grod's Grimoire of the Grotesque: An even bigger book of variant and expanded rules for 5e.
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2017-01-14, 07:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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2017-01-14, 07:47 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
There's a superhero setting for Toon: The Cartoon Roleplaying Game (in part of the "Tooniversal Tour Guide" supplement IIRC)
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2017-01-14, 09:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
Soultaker: A magic sword (Strength-Based Damage, Incurable) that stores the souls of those you kill with it (largely fluff), letting you commune with them (Enhanced Intelligence, Limited/Quirk: only for knowledge possessed by the souls in the blade, with an Alternate Effect of Mind Reading, Reduced Duration, Linked to the sword's damage effect.), and possibly summon them to your service (Summon Ghost, with the power tweaked to your taste).
Deadman: A ghost (no Stamina, Permanent-duration Concealment 10 (all senses) and Intangibility 4) who can possess people that do not remember the possession (Affliction (fascinated and dazed, compelled and vulnerable, controlled and mentally transformed) with the Feedback flaw; possibly Immunity (Physical effects), double or triple limited: only while possessing subject, and cannot take actions yourself; the Mental Power Profile suggests a flat Extra 1: Merge with subject, which seems too cheap, but I guess also means that you're not doing anything, so...), using their skills (mind control, duh) while retaining your own (buy selected skills and advantages as Enhanced Trait, Also affects others, limited to possessed subjects).
While wearing the white lantern ring, he could fly (Flight), survive in hostile environments (Immunity 10: Life support), teleport (Teleport, Extended; Movement (Dimension Travel)), heal people (Healing, Persistent, Restorative, probably Resurrection), conceal his presence (Concealment 10 (all senses)), shoot power blasts (Ranged Damage/Ranged Area Damage/etc), make constructs (Create), and so on and so forth; all or most with the Uncontrollable flaw. Or better yet, stat the ring out as a separate entity (possibly purchased with the Sidekick advantage) with a bunch of absent Abilities (probably Strength, Stamina, Dexterity, Agility, Fighting, and Presence), with the powers Brand could control gaining the Affects Others modifier.
Come on, give me something harder.Last edited by Grod_The_Giant; 2017-01-14 at 09:09 PM.
Hill Giant Games
I make indie gaming books for you!Spoiler
STaRS: A non-narrativeist, generic rules-light system.
Grod's Guide to Greatness, 2e: A big book of player options for 5e.
Grod's Grimoire of the Grotesque: An even bigger book of variant and expanded rules for 5e.
Giants and Graveyards: My collected 3.5 class fixes and more.
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2017-01-14, 09:52 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
So your thesis is that the ability to reliably command the knowledge of specific dead people is...a couple of points? That's also very much not what the Intelligence stat does.
and possibly summon them to your service (Summon Ghost, with the power tweaked to your taste).
This is the problem with pretty much all the Champions derivatives - their effects-based point buy system can't handle anything that isn't materialistic. The notable exception is Mayfair's DC Heroes, simply because the DC Universe has always had a huge mystical component so they wrote in specific rules for it.
Deadman: A ghost (no Stamina
Permanent-duration Concealment 10 (all senses) and Intangibility 4)
Like all Champions derivatives, M&M can't do absolutes (it was an explicit stated design pattern for Champions, and the other games have aped it without ever addressing the genre problems it creates).
Come on, give me something harder.
Look, you can handwave away the problem (I've seen writeups for Katana that reduce everything Soultaker can do down to a couple of quirks, which is just a tacit admission the system can't handle it) or you can make up completely new rules for it, like how to handle Deadman possessing a mouse or a bird without Shrinking, or how to interact with dead people. But at that point, it isn't the system that's modelling the character.
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2017-01-14, 10:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
Okay, first question: are you coming at this from 2e or 3e? A few of your responses make me wonder.
Yes and yes. What's the practical upshoot of "can draw on the knowledge of dead people?" Enhanced Knowledge skills. The easiest way to represent that is boosted Intelligence, which adds to all of your Expertise stats. If you want to get fancier, you could go Variable 1 (Skills and Advantages).
You explicitly can't summon specific people. (You also can't trap the souls of dead people, because M&M has no concept of souls or the afterlife).
This is the problem with pretty much all the Champions derivatives - their effects-based point buy system can't handle anything that isn't materialistic. The notable exception is Mayfair's DC Heroes, simply because the DC Universe has always had a huge mystical component so they wrote in specific rules for it.
That's...not actually a thing you can do in M&M.
Here comes Hydra, with a high-tech phase-shift blaster (Damage, Range, Affects Insubstantial). Or perhaps a SATAN-field generator (Nullify insubstantial, Area). Except those don't work on Deadman. Ever.
Like all Champions derivatives, M&M can't do absolutes (it was an explicit stated design pattern for Champions, and the other games have aped it without ever addressing the genre problems it creates).
Okay. Mjolnir.Last edited by Grod_The_Giant; 2017-01-14 at 10:20 PM.
Hill Giant Games
I make indie gaming books for you!Spoiler
STaRS: A non-narrativeist, generic rules-light system.
Grod's Guide to Greatness, 2e: A big book of player options for 5e.
Grod's Grimoire of the Grotesque: An even bigger book of variant and expanded rules for 5e.
Giants and Graveyards: My collected 3.5 class fixes and more.
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2017-01-14, 10:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
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2017-01-16, 01:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
It's a good thing this system was designed for use by human beings with functioning brains who can paper over the unavoidable gaps in a game-system with their own minds rather than a computer, then.
Semi-seriously, there's probably a corollary to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem that guarantees there's always a few things that can't be modeled, no matter how hard you try to make a rules system all-encompassing. Trying to is doomed to failure and just results in 500-page rulebooks.Last edited by Arbane; 2017-01-16 at 01:17 PM.
Imagine if all real-world conversations were like internet D&D conversations...
Protip: DnD is an incredibly social game played by some of the most socially inept people on the planet - Lev
I read this somewhere and I stick to it: "I would rather play a bad system with my friends than a great system with nobody". - Trevlac
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2017-01-16, 05:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
I can make them tell me anything they know. That's more than just skills or abstract knowledge, it includes secrets, passcodes, conversations they've had with other people, places they've been. You're essentially giving free retrocognition with the power.
Variable 1 (Skills and Advantages) (Limited, only for things this dead guy knows) lets me know everything this dead guy knows, can I just remove the Limit and know everything everyone knows for 2 points? That seems like a pretty cheap mind reading power.
Funny, I don't see anything about that in the rules.
He's a ghost. If you've got some sort of fancy ghost-busting technology, it should affect a ghost. If you want more than that, pay for more Immunities. Or not, because "can't be harmed at all" is bad for the game.
[...]with another Feature that others can't pick up the hammer. Don't need many points for that, since "can't easily use other people's gear" is sort of the default assumption.
Riiiiiight.
The core M&M book is 236 pages, and the 36 Power Profiles constitute an additional 180 pages, so...well, 400+ pages anyway.
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2017-01-16, 05:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
Post-cognition isn't htat expensiuve.
Variable 1 (Skills and Advantages) (Limited, only for things this dead guy knows) lets me know everything this dead guy knows, can I just remove the Limit and know everything everyone knows for 2 points? That seems like a pretty cheap mind reading power.
Summon (Variable Type, Controlled) lets me summon anyone I want and have them completely under my control? Because Summon (Variable Type (any member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Controlled) seems....overpowered.
My point is that the RAW doesn't distinguish between technological Insubstantiality and supernatural Insubstantiality, but the genre absolutely does. (Deadman is not affected by technological gimcrackery, ever, because that's not how that works in the DC Universe) So now we have to add Immunity to technological Affects Insubstantial Powers to his sheet, too. See how the corner cases keep piling up?
So the ability to immobilize opponents - up to and including gods that can shatter planets - by laying the hammer on their chest, a trick Thor uses quite a lot, is now a one point Feature. Like speaking with the dead and commanding all their knowledge is a one point Feature.
Riiiiiight.
The core M&M book is 236 pages, and the 36 Power Profiles constitute an additional 180 pages, so...well, 400+ pages anyway.Last edited by Beleriphon; 2017-01-17 at 09:21 AM.
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2017-01-17, 08:38 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Looking for superhero ttrpgs
Okay, fair; Senses 4 (Postcognition) with the same limit works better.
Variable 1 (Skills and Advantages) (Limited, only for things this dead guy knows) lets me know everything this dead guy knows, can I just remove the Limit and know everything everyone knows for 2 points? That seems like a pretty cheap mind reading power.
Summon (Variable Type, Controlled) lets me summon anyone I want and have them completely under my control? Because Summon (Variable Type (any member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Controlled) seems....overpowered.
My point is that the RAW doesn't distinguish between technological Insubstantiality and supernatural Insubstantiality, but the genre absolutely does. (Deadman is not affected by technological gimcrackery, ever, because that's not how that works in the DC Universe) So now we have to add Immunity to technological Affects Insubstantial Powers to his sheet, too. See how the corner cases keep piling up?
So the ability to immobilize opponents - up to and including gods that can shatter planets - by laying the hammer on their chest, a trick Thor uses quite a lot, is now a one point Feature. Like speaking with the dead and commanding all their knowledge is a one point Feature.
The core M&M book is 236 pages, and the 36 Power Profiles constitute an additional 180 pages, so...well, 400+ pages anyway.Hill Giant Games
I make indie gaming books for you!Spoiler
STaRS: A non-narrativeist, generic rules-light system.
Grod's Guide to Greatness, 2e: A big book of player options for 5e.
Grod's Grimoire of the Grotesque: An even bigger book of variant and expanded rules for 5e.
Giants and Graveyards: My collected 3.5 class fixes and more.