Superhero RPG that is not about wizards

[Korwin]

There is also the Wearing the Cape RPG, which is FATE based.
(And for some reason I am only finding the german version on Amazon?)

Don't know if it's more to the taste of the OP.

[Ice9]

The VPP change was a fairly big one in 6E, yes. The pool is based on real cost now rather than active, which brings in more in line with Multipower.

While potentially exploitable, I think overall it's a change for the better - now a severely limited VPP like "Side Effect: Get Knocked The Fuck Out, No Roll (-2)" has the correct cost.

It does make non-combat VPPs quite cheap, but even a full strength one isn't that expensive if being used as a primary attack. 90 points (potentially a bit less) on a 400 point character is not an overwhelming amount.

And besides, Hero is not a system you can go RAW-wild with, some degree of judgment beyonds points is required if the group cares about balance. For example, you can make a character that sits in an extradimensional fortress while seeing anywhere on earth and sending legions of summons there if desired - for probably less than half the standard points.

[CaptainComics]

Just as players need to subjugate their desired tone to what the table consensus will accept, the "power band" of the characters needs to be pretty tight. You aren't going to have Phoenix and Jubilee in the same team of mutants.

I accept that in a tabletop game, you're not going to want Phoenix and Jubilee on the same team. However, you are going to have one table that want to play a team of Superman, Phoenix, Magneto, and Lobo, and another table that want to play Jubilee, Kitty Pride, Robin, and Cyborg. The game system should be able to model a fairly wide scale, even though in practice you won't have characters from both ends in the same team. The game should also, ideally, indicate that these characters are not the same value of points or level, and that mixing them is not advised.

So if your psychic class can manage a character who has telekinesis and can make short journey astral projections, you can do Quislet. It's just that your explanation of how that works is that your "body" is actually a non-baryonic spaceship from a micro dimension which is coincidentally the only object you can return to for any length of time and that when you are concentrating on telekinesis you are actually possessing some other object and moving it around and then return to your spaceship when you run out of time in the other object.

I know the game's just a sketch, so I don't expect you to have a hard answer for this, but does that mean that your game would have characters get powers from outside their class? A Psychic class could certainly cover Quislet's primary gimmick of possession, but if you tell me that '60s-era Marvel Girl and Quislet have the same stats I'm going to say that your game fails to distinguish between characters, not that you've found an elegant solution to the supers problem.

The issue is that while there are a number of very strong archetypes throughout the comics landscape, there are also enough freaks and weirdos that something is obviously missing when you try to boil it down to just the big 12 or 20 or however many archetypes. And cross-pollination is a big thing as well. Is Mr Fantastic a Plastic Guy who also has gadgets, or a Gadgeteer who also stretches? If the Vision is a Cape, where does his signature intangibility come from? The version of Sensor Girl that was a giant snake is a GIANT SNAKE with venom and such, and can also project illusions - what class is that? And what the heck is Sleepwalker?

[Pariah Dog]

F4ntastic was a stupid movie because it was basically Fox throwing a temper tantrum after having his X-Men crap movies repeatedly panned.

I thought it was shovelware to keep sitting on the rights to the F4 since they were being stubborn holdouts about the character rights they had unlike Sony who was willing to share spider-man when Marvel offered them a dump truck full of money.

All moot now since The Mouse just decided to buy them out.

[Username17]

I accept that in a tabletop game, you're not going to want Phoenix and Jubilee on the same team. However, you are going to have one table that want to play a team of Superman, Phoenix, Magneto, and Lobo, and another table that want to play Jubilee, Kitty Pride, Robin, and Cyborg. The game system should be able to model a fairly wide scale, even though in practice you won't have characters from both ends in the same team.

Why?

Serious question. Why would you think it was a design goal to model Phoenix and Jubilee in the same system? Even if you accept that they are in the same world, why should the game model them both as player characters?

Let's consider two Quentin Tarantino movies: Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained. Now you could imagine characters from one movie appearing with little alteration in the other movie. And importantly, you'd expect a cooperative storytelling game capable of running through one of those narratives to be able to handle the other with little tweaking. But now let's consider a couple of other narratives set in similar times - Patton and Gettysburg. Inglorious takes place during World War II, but you wouldn't really expect a cooperative storytelling game concerned with making that story work to present a good strategic eye's view of the conquest of Sicily. Django takes place shortly before the Civil War, but you wouldn't expect a cooperative storytelling game concerned with making that narrative work to provide a good tactical eye's view of Grant's crushing of Confederate forces.

It is certainly possible to make a game that has both Mr. Freeze and Magneto in it, but it's by no means settled that doing that is a particularly good idea. Magneto probably wants to be in a game system that can easily tell you what the range modifiers are for using your powers on a target on the Moon versus a target that is "merely" in low Earth orbit. Because Magneto's powers do work on that scale. Victor Fries has powers that don't work on that scale, and would never work on that scale. And it's not at all obvious to me that Victor Fries would benefit from being in a game system that even concerned itself with such things.

Stories told with different scope and scale can and do make different demands on the game system. How important do you want individual mundane thugs to be? If you're doing things like Dare Devil, maybe you want to keep track of what kinds of combat maneuvers Thug #3 is using. If you're doing things like Super Girl, you probably don't give a rat's ass what normal gang members are doing in combat because the main characters can disable them with casual strength.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

There really isn't such a thing as $200m shovelware. Rushed? Sure. Ill-conceived? Definitely. But I think that's more of a function of the franchise and its relationship with other Marvel characters in general than I think it has to do with people not giving a fuck.

Basically, the Four haven't been one of Marvel's biggest sellers for a long time. A good chunk of their value is that they were at the leading edge when Marvel decided to emphasize shared continuity and centering things in New York rather than going with a fictional city like DC did with Metropolis or Gotham. You couldn't be a hardcore No Prize collecting weirdo without having at least a cursory knowledge of the shit the Four got up to in the '60s and '70s. But as has been noted, the MCU is a separate entity with its own legal entanglements. And as it turns out it's a lot easier to cut the Fantastic Four out of the Marvel Universe than it is to make interesting Fantastic Four stories without characters and concepts that also fall under the Avengers umbrella. That's a problem because while Fox had some claim to depicting overlapping characters they didn't necessarily have all the merchandising rights and Marvel apparently would rather cancel Fantastic Four as a stand alone title than continue giving Fox free advertising. I suspect that's why the Fantastic Four films remained so insular and were already just rehashing their origin story again; they had become a gateway drug to nowhere. They were an unmoored franchise and that's a genuinely tricky problem.

fuck posting via cell phones

[Username17]

Doctor Doom is a wizard who is also a super scientist as well as an Eastern European royal. He is personally cooler than any other Marvel villain. By a lot.

Why they keep making Fantastic 4 movies that pointedly refuse to just use Doctor Doom as Doctor Doom is fucking bizarre. He's not a computer hacker. He'snot some jerkoff CEO with metal skin powers. He's Doctor Fucking Doom. It's not fucking hard.

Finding an actor with enough gravitas to play Doctor Doom is hard. But writing him in as the villain just isn't. All you have to do is just not write up some jackass C-list villain to call Doctor Doom and just use the real thing.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Doctor Doom and to a lesser extent Galactus are the only two reasons you might care about telling a Fantastic Four story in the first place. And the only reason you'd even care then is because of how copyrights have been sliced up. Given free access to all of Marvel's IP, there's a strong argument for cutting the Fantastic Four, giving Doom a different rival, and making Galactus an X-Men villain.

[Whipstitch]

The problem there is they don't have the balls because on paper Doctor Doom sounds like a 10 year old kid's idea of what is cool and some people are dumb enough to see that as a problem. To paraphrase Jim Cornett they need fuck off and leave the fans to their enjoyment.

[erik]

Serious question. Why would you think it was a design goal to model Phoenix and Jubilee in the same system? Even if you accept that they are in the same world, why should the game model them both as player characters?

Same reason DnD does it. So you can have power fantasies and escalation of power. Mr Freeze could boost his powers to freeze cities and create mechs that are bigger threats than just ice themed bank robberies. I’d swear he has done so.

Jubilee or any mutant can continue to mutate and get more powers. I’d swear a version of her in the future could make dimensional portals in some mojo comic. Phoenix starts out as jean grey. Not super powerful and she gets some BS that makes her cosmic tier.

Edit: I think the big problem is having world destroying capable powers at all. It makes storytelling and gaming kinda difficult.

[Username17]

Sure, but soldiers in Inglorious Basterds could potentially contribute to the Battle of Centuripe at some point. It would potentially be a nice thing if the game were capable of zooming out to that sort of scale. But is it important? I would submit that it is not.

It would be kind of cool if you could have a system that could have Lex Luthor get the Antilife Equation and immediately be a match for Darkseid and just go full cosmic without choking. But it's more important to do whatever scale your system is intended to function at well than it is to function nearly as well at a scale it's not intended to function at.

D&D definitely should do kingdom conquest and army leadership better than it does. But it's less important than doing the adventuring and fighting small groups of goblins part well. The best edition is 3rd edition, and 3rd edition's kingdom management and army conflict rules are a war crime.

A superhero game that does either Robin versus Penguin's goons or Wonderwoman versus Kalibak well would be better than a superhero game that does both conflicts mediocrely. While every superhero game should have a range of supported power levels, there isn't any pressing need for that range to go all the way from Mystery Men to Cosmic Heroes. Things you consider and track for the near human levels are pointless diversions for the godlike characters and vice versa.

A Psychic class could certainly cover Quislet's primary gimmick of possession, but if you tell me that '60s-era Marvel Girl and Quislet have the same stats I'm going to say that your game fails to distinguish between characters, not that you've found an elegant solution to the supers problem.

The issue is that while there are a number of very strong archetypes throughout the comics landscape, there are also enough freaks and weirdos that something is obviously missing when you try to boil it down to just the big 12 or 20 or however many archetypes.

My thought with archetypes is that the 4e D&D concept of the "build" actually serves the Superhero genre very well. That 4e D&D tried to sell you on the idea that you could have a Starlock and a Feylock and they could have a few crucial differences but they were both Warlocks and could legally choose powers off the Warlock list - and that was a terrible fit for Dungeons & Dragons (at least the way it was implemented in 4th edition) - but that sounds pretty good for a Super Hero game.

So let's say you got Speedsters. And you have Kinetic Speedsters and Time Dilation Speedsters. Your iconics could be The Blur and Snap, respectively. The fact that The Blur is a Kinetic Speedster means various shit for how his defenses are set up, and gives him some basic powers and such. The fact that Snap is a Time Dilation Speedster means that he has different presets for those things. But they are both Speedsters, and they can both take the "Torrent of Blows" attack or the "Blink and You'll Miss It" defensive interrupt ability.

Similarly you're going to divide up the Psychics somehow. Penumbra and Wetnoise are going to be different Psychic "builds" and they are going to have different starting packages. But basic Psychic powers are going to be selectable by both.

Where that's going to be hard is with Controllers. Ice Princess is a Cold Controller and Mistletoe is a Plant Controller, and while certainly some powers are going to be agnostic as to what you are dropping on people - you might have "Crushing Bonds" that doesn't specify whether it's crushing you with ice or vines - I suspect a lot of powers are going to want to be highly geared towards one kind of Controller or another.

That being said, yes. There will always be examples of characters from comic books that don't fit your system for whatever reason. Maybe they have the wrong tone like Batmite, maybe they are practically from a different genre altogether like Blade, and maybe they just imply that super physics works in a way that it doesn't in your world like the various mutants with mutant power affecting powers. That's not necessarily a problem. Or rather, it's not an issue that you can solve or escape, so you shouldn't treat it as a problem.

-Username17

[kzt]

Serious question. Why would you think it was a design goal to model Phoenix and Jubilee in the same system? Even if you accept that they are in the same world, why should the game model them both as player characters?

Same reason DnD does it. So you can have power fantasies and escalation of power. Mr Freeze could boost his powers to freeze cities and create mechs that are bigger threats than just ice themed bank robberies. I’d swear he has done so.

No. What happens in an RPG is that the fight opens with an attack that can injure Phoenix a little and converts Jubilee to dogfood.

It's like playing D&D with a party consisting of 5th level thief, a 3rd level paladin and three 18th level wizards.

[erik]

Serious question. Why would you think it was a design goal to model Phoenix and Jubilee in the same system? Even if you accept that they are in the same world, why should the game model them both as player characters?

Same reason DnD does it. So you can have power fantasies and escalation of power. Mr Freeze could boost his powers to freeze cities and create mechs that are bigger threats than just ice themed bank robberies. I’d swear he has done so.

No. What happens in an RPG is that the fight opens with an attack that can injure Phoenix a little and converts Jubilee to dogfood.

It's like playing D&D with a party consisting of 5th level thief, a 3rd level paladin and three 18th level wizards.

Same system <> Same party.




Edit: I'll concede to Frank's notion that they are pretty different games at different tiers and it's better to do one well than both blah.

[maglag]

Serious question. Why would you think it was a design goal to model Phoenix and Jubilee in the same system? Even if you accept that they are in the same world, why should the game model them both as player characters?

Same reason DnD does it. So you can have power fantasies and escalation of power. Mr Freeze could boost his powers to freeze cities and create mechs that are bigger threats than just ice themed bank robberies. I’d swear he has done so.

No. What happens in an RPG is that the fight opens with an attack that can injure Phoenix a little and converts Jubilee to dogfood.

It's like playing D&D with a party consisting of 5th level thief, a 3rd level paladin and three 18th level wizards.

An heavy machine gun will turn a normal human in dogfood, but that doesn't stop there being countless heroes in settings with heavy machine guns that somehow survive just fine without being bullet proof. The gritty cop/basic martial artist will survive that hail of bullets just fine despite being made of soft flesh.

Heck, in any world war II story by definition there's a bunch of high-grade explosives that will reduce you below dog food level, but what was the last time you saw a story go "and then the protagonist took an artillery shell to the face and died"? What happens is always "and then the protagonist took cover from the artillery shell at the last moment and survived".

And Bats/Jubilee make such miraculous dodges all the time, them being limited to normal speed be damned.

[deaddmwalking]

I think in any RPG, you need to address 'plot armor' - if PCs feel that they're being saved because the GM is bending the rules in their favor, their choices cease to have meaning - they're going to survive because the story calls for it. If the only way to survive is plot armor, that should be a mechanic that the PCs know about and can use directly.

[CaptainComics]

Why?

Serious question. Why would you think it was a design goal to model Phoenix and Jubilee in the same system? Even if you accept that they are in the same world, why should the game model them both as player characters?
...
It is certainly possible to make a game that has both Mr. Freeze and Magneto in it, but it's by no means settled that doing that is a particularly good idea.

There are several reasons I'd think it was an obvious design goal.

First of all, Phoenix and Jubilee are obviously on far sides of any power spectrum you care to name, but fundamentally they're both physically normal human women with an ability to manipulate and project various forms of energy. Jubilee being a level 1 X-Man and Phoenix being a level 20 X-Man is literally the point of having levels and classes. You could argue that we're looking at condensing our levels to between 5 and 15 or whatever, but there is going to be a low end and there is going to be a high end and if neither of those are significantly far from Spider-Man then you don't really have levels at all.

Second of all, your opposition is going to sometimes be Mr. Freeze and sometimes be Magneto. It might be that you're fighting Mr. Freeze and three other elemental or seasonal themed villains, whereas you're fighting Magneto on his own, but there should obviously be strong and weak individual supers. And if the bad guys scale like that, the heroes should too.

Third of all, some people want to play the Teen Titans, and some people want to play the Justice League. And they're both looking to play "superheroes", and I think both groups can be serviced without undue difficulty.

Fourth and finally, every game needs to be able to model a normal guy with a handgun. Everyone, from Robin to Superman, takes out a guy with a handgun at some point in their careers. That's the low end, and it's a very low end, and the only question is how high do you want your system to go. So I'm not going to complain if your system can't handle a PC with Galactus level powers, but you cannot make a supers game where Jubilee isn't a playable character. Because she's the guy with a gun only the gun is her hands. And I am going to complain if your game can't make a passable attempt at some version of Superman, because somebody wants to play Superman, and if the other players are Wonder Woman and Green Lantern nobody has to be small in the pants. So that just IS what a supers game is for.

A superhero game that does either Robin versus Penguin's goons or Wonderwoman versus Kalibak well would be better than a superhero game that does both conflicts mediocrely.

But what's actually different about these two battles, other than the collateral damage? Wonder Woman and Kalibak punch each other until one of them falls down. Robin and the goons punch each other until one side falls down. What's so hard about making these the same system?

Against Robin, the Penguin's goons are a threat, and some pickpockets are mooks. Against Batman, the Penguin is (maybe) a threat, and his goons are mooks. Against Spider-Man, Venom is a threat, and the Penguin is a mook. Against Wonder Woman, Kalibak is a threat, and Venom is a mook. It's just a sliding scale. It's exactly what D&D levels are supposed to do. If you're making a supers game based on any edition of D&D and you don't have enough levels to handle this - what are you even doing?

[phlapjackage]

Jubilee or any mutant can continue to mutate and get more powers. I’d swear a version of her in the future could make dimensional portals in some mojo comic.

I just read a wiki on Jubilee, she totally continually gets more powerful/powers

The strength of the blasts varied in degrees of power and intensity, and can range from...to a powerful detonation capable of smashing objects and destroying property...to...a precision burst inside a human brain, simulating the effects of a massive stroke...Emma Frost described Jubilee as having the untapped ability to detonate matter at a subatomic level, which in theory is the equivalent of a nuclear fusion bomb...Emma stated that Jubilee had unlimited potential and was one of the most powerful mutants she had ever encountered.

AND she later became a freakin' vampire with all the awesome vampire powers...

[erik]

This is the one I was recalling...

https://comicvine.gamespot.com/abscissa/4005-15691/

And let us not forget that Jubilee was a master martial artist who could kick ninja ass easily as a teenager. While wearing a stupid yellow trenchcoat.

[Username17]

Third of all, some people want to play the Teen Titans, and some people want to play the Justice League. And they're both looking to play "superheroes", and I think both groups can be serviced without undue difficulty.

But that's the part where you're wrong. Scaling an RPG is difficult. If your combat system wants to track 5 foot squares or 2 meter hexes it's going to have a hard time tracking the footwork in a 16 foot boxing ring, and it's going to have a hard time with space ships engaging each other. Whatever scale you operate on, it's genuinely difficult to operate on a larger or smaller scale.

And that goes for every facet of scaling. A game that cares about division-level military engagements on the Eastern Front is going to have a hard time resolving the adventures of a band of a half dozen partisans and vice versa. A game concerned with how many tons a character can lift is going to have a hard time resolving the difference in strength between two human strength people and vice versa. A game that cares about closing distances in fencing is going to have a hard time resolving horizon engagements with laser blasts and vice versa. Even simple numbers have limits to how they canbe pushed, because there are a finite number of numbers on the Random Number Generator. A d20 only has twenty numbers on it. 3d6 has only sixteen.

Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition is a pretty great game up until about level 9 or so, but it's basically unplayable at level 16. And fixing it at those levels is not easy. Scaling is hard. It's like Nintendo Hard, hard. You only even attempt to do it for parts of the scale that you expect to use.

Fourth and finally, every game needs to be able to model a normal guy with a handgun. Everyone, from Robin to Superman, takes out a guy with a handgun at some point in their careers. That's the low end, and it's a very low end, and the only question is how high do you want your system to go. So I'm not going to complain if your system can't handle a PC with Galactus level powers, but you cannot make a supers game where Jubilee isn't a playable character. Because she's the guy with a gun only the gun is her hands. And I am going to complain if your game can't make a passable attempt at some version of Superman, because somebody wants to play Superman, and if the other players are Wonder Woman and Green Lantern nobody has to be small in the pants. So that just IS what a supers game is for.

The point is that a "normal guy with a gun" isn't the same thing in different games.

Consider some games that actually have normal guys with normal guns like Shadowrun or Vampire, versus Feng Shui or Flames of War. In a game like Shadowrun or Vampire, a normal guy with a gun is supposed to be plausible antagonist, and so we track their level of gun skill and they take injuries and stuff. In Feng Shui or Flames of War, there are just a number of normal dudes with guns who are categorized vaguely by quality and attacks either remove them or they do not. Depending on the scale of the game, basic questions like "Does the basic guy with a gun have hit points?" are questions that need to be asked and answered. And the answers will not be the same for different games concerned with different things.

You can make the World's Finest comic book, where you have Batman and Superman side by side (or Huntress and Powergirl, if that's your thing). But firstly it requires you to use a pretty low power version of Superman who is closer to Max Fleischer cartoons than to the levels where he's going back in time by flying around the world backwards. But secondly, even then it requires a lot of narrative shortcuts that you could not rely upon in a cooperative storytelling game. No one has ever made a game that handles both Huntress and Powergirl particularly well, and I am going to go out on a limb and say that the reason for that is because it is in fact extremely difficult to do.

-Username17

[kzt]

You can make the World's Finest comic book, where you have Batman and Superman side by side (or Huntress and Powergirl, if that's your thing). But firstly it requires you to use a pretty low power version of Superman who is closer to Max Fleischer cartoons than to the levels where he's going back in time by flying around the world backwards. But secondly, even then it requires a lot of narrative shortcuts that you could not rely upon in a cooperative storytelling game. No one has ever made a game that handles both Huntress and Powergirl particularly well, and I am going to go out on a limb and say that the reason for that is because it is in fact extremely difficult to do.

Any attack that can make superman pay attention will produce a greasy smear where batman was. This is a huge issue in a game vs a scripted comic book. Superman can trivially obliterate anyone who is a worthy batman foe, while batman can't even bruise anyone who can go toe-to-toe with superman. You can come up with workarounds, but are you really going to have everyone in kryponite battle armor shooting kyptonite bullets? All the bad guys special effect is 'magic'?

At that point what you've done is reduce superman to a batman level character.

Producing a game that can handle a group of batman level characters and a group of superman level characters is viable as long as it's either a or b, not both at once. Doing both at the same time seems really, really hard.

[jt]

Assuming you magically solved all the design problems and made a game that can scale from Hawkeye to Superman, what would you do with it?
[*]Start as a street-level super and work your way up. This is the most D&D-like but it's not really how most of the supporting fiction works.
[*]Play games at one power level, knowing that the system will support whatever power level that is. This seems like a waste, since solving the scaling problems probably is harder than designing three entirely separate systems then choosing from them.
[*]Troupe play. Everyone has a stable of characters at different power levels and you try to weave a tale about their crossing paths. This is maybe the most true to how comics work, but has anyone done a good troupe play game? On the plus side you probably don't need to solve the scaling as well for this, since the default assumption is that Superman can solve any street-level problem (no need for mechanics, he just wins) but he's busy.

[Dogbert]

A superhero game that does either Robin versus Penguin's goons or Wonderwoman versus Kalibak well would be better than a superhero game that does both conflicts mediocrely.

I certainly won't argue with this, I just wish superhero RPG contenders were actually honest regarding their true scope. 3 out of every 4 sell themselves as "the definitive game for ALL superheroes" when all you have to do is skim through the first three pages to see the author lying through their teeth.

And yeah, scaling is pretty hard. I remember how after reading whatever the name of FATE's super-zero game (the one that is not ICONS) I entertained for a whole three minutes the thought of how I'd go about writing a superhero game in FATE... but then I'd thought "Fuck it, I'd need to work on at least four different Difficulty Tables for different scales of talents/powers and then we go back to SDC vs MDC crap and there's no way I'm going back there."

[CaptainComics]

Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition is a pretty great game up until about level 9 or so, but it's basically unplayable at level 16.

OK, this is a pretty noncontroversial statement, but that does still give you 9 full levels to play with. In your mind, what are the top and bottom of the scale at which you would bother trying to handle superheroes? When you sketched up Fantastic, what did you think the hero team would look like?

The point is that a "normal guy with a gun" isn't the same thing in different games.

But in a supers game, a guy with a gun is the equivalent of a goblin. We've seen numerous games where opposition starts at the level of goblins and ends at the level of dragons. This, again, seems to be easier than you're making it out to be.

But firstly it requires you to use a pretty low power version of Superman who is closer to Max Fleischer cartoons than to the levels where he's going back in time by flying around the world backwards.

Maybe this is where we're not connecting. My default when I think of Superman is the post-Crisis, John Byrne's MAN OF STEEL version, where he's quite powerful but not able to travel through time on a whim or drag planets around on a giant chain. So to a certain extent, I agree that there are limits to what a PC should be capable of, and there's a point where the scale needs to stop that is considerably lower than Silver Age Superman. I just don't understand how you make a supers game that isn't even going to try to model the Avengers team from the movie.

No one has ever made a game that handles both Huntress and Powergirl particularly well, and I am going to go out on a limb and say that the reason for that is because it is in fact extremely difficult to do.

This discussion has been pretty nebulous about what the targets are. I'd say that the 2nd and 3rd editions of Mutants & Masterminds handle both of those characters "particularly well." Both of those systems have issues, but I don't think any of them stem from an overreach on the intended power scale. I'm not very familiar with Champions, but it seems to be able to handle high- and low-point characters without shattering into a million pieces. Silver Age Sentinels had a kind of terrible combat system, but it didn't work any worse if you were using Caliburn or the American Sentinel.

In your opinion, what would it look like for a game system to handle even one of those characters "particularly well"? Pick whichever character you prefer.

Assuming you magically solved all the design problems and made a game that can scale from Hawkeye to Superman, what would you do with it?

• Start as a street-level super and work your way up. This is the most D&D-like but it's not really how most of the supporting fiction works.
  Play games at one power level, knowing that the system will support whatever power level that is. This seems like a waste, since solving the scaling problems probably is harder than designing three entirely separate systems then choosing from them.
  Troupe play. Everyone has a stable of characters at different power levels and you try to weave a tale about their crossing paths. This is maybe the most true to how comics work, but has anyone done a good troupe play game? On the plus side you probably don't need to solve the scaling as well for this, since the default assumption is that Superman can solve any street-level problem (no need for mechanics, he just wins) but he's busy.

I use M&M for the second option. Whenever I get enough people together with interest in a supers campaign, the first question is always "How super do you want to be?" I've participated in games ranging from a high-school full of sidekick-level proto-X-Men to the new incarnation of the Justice League analog in the campaign setting. In those games the heroes battled against crime lords and intergalactic armadas alike. It pretty much worked the whole time, and it was useful to have a go-to system for superheroes with which I was familiar that could handle pretty much whatever level of super the groups would want.

Isn't that how Champions is generally played? First session, everyone decides on the gentleman's agreements of how many power points you get, what an appropriate attack and defense value looks like, etc?

I suppose if someone made a "really good" game about low-power teenage heroes, and someone else made a "really good" game about world-shaking cosmic heroes, that could suit the situation better. But I don't know what "really good" would even mean in either of those contexts while requiring that both concepts be mutually exclusive, so we're kind of talking about a Platonic ideal as though it can be meaningfully compared with real published games.

Producing a game that can handle a group of batman level characters and a group of superman level characters is viable as long as it's either a or b, not both at once. Doing both at the same time seems really, really hard.

Well, yeah, I'm not suggesting that a game must deliver a fun experience when the party consists of one level 1 guy and three level 12 guys. But I think it's obviously POSSIBLE for one game to have a fun experience for a PARTY of level 1 guys and a PARTY of level 12 guys without the game necessarily being a piece of crap. Or even strictly worse than one game designed for levels 1-3 and another game designed for levels 10-12.

[Iduno]

[*]Play games at one power level, knowing that the system will support whatever power level that is. This seems like a waste, since solving the scaling problems probably is harder than designing three entirely separate systems then choosing from them.

Didn't Paranoia make 2-3 different books for different levels of play? I know they had the book anyone used, an ultraviolet book (high-end play), and maybe somewhere in the middle. I have no idea how that worked out, but as an idea, it sounds reasonable. At least more reasonable than expecting a group to play with the same characters from levels 1-20 (or local equivalent).

[Chamomile]

Super heroes are as powerful as the plot needs them to be. If there was a Spider-Man vs. Galactus comic, an ordinarily street level super hero would find some way to contend with a cosmic level threat, and then go right back to treating a pair of bank robbers with assault rifles as a significant threat deserving of his full attention (if only for the ten seconds it takes to get them webbed up) in the next book.

It seems like Spider-Man is weaker than the Hulk because Spider-Man treats a handful of guys with guns as a threat (not an equal adversary or anything, but still dangerous) while the Hulk fights entire platoons if not battalions of better equipped, better trained soldiers, often with company-level support like bombers or artillery. Spider-Man fights regular criminals with regular guns while the Hulk is a ten-foot tall kaiju. And yet, when Hulk and Spidey fight, Hulk's advantage doesn't seem any more significant than the big bruisers in Spidey's own rogues gallery, guys like Rhino. Hero vs. hero fights don't have the prerequisite that the hero always win in the end the way hero vs. villain fights do, so the Hulk does better against Spider-Man than the Rhino, but it's not nearly as one-sided as you'd expect given the vast difference between their standard adversaries.

And, of course, Batman and Superman are both on the Justice League and somehow manage to make equal contributions even though Batman can't fly at all.

The source material is useless in figuring out how high the power needs to scale, because the source materials power scale is bonkers. There's an argument for zero-to-hero, because most long-running heroes do eventually accrue enough stories over the course of their career to have distinguishable arcs from when they're new, to when they're in their prime, to when they're tired and worn down with the job. Actual comics tend to ping-pong back and forth from one point in that arc to another rather than having an actual progression through it, but the source material is there if you want to say that Batman starts out fighting the Falcones' regular goons and ends up fighting Brainiac with the Justice League. You could also use the interpretation whereby Spider-Man really is significantly weaker than the Hulk, not just at certain points in his career but all the time, and just ignore the fact that the Hulk seems to have an awful lot of trouble defeating him if they're supposed to be on such a radically different level of power to one another. Or you could say that Spider-Man and the Hulk are of comparable power to one another, and that whether it's five-ish goons with sidearms or two hundred soldiers with M4s and grenade launchers, they all use the same "gun-toting henchmen" stat block, which is some kind of swarm enemy. That last one sounds super lame to me, personally, but it'd be perfectly in keeping with the source material.

So the question isn't "how do super hero power scales work," it's "what kind of advancement do we want the game to have?"