Superhero RPG that is not about wizards

[deaddmwalking]

Hulk must redmist Spiderman for real because conflicts in a cooperative storytelling game are resolved impartially.

This makes too many assumptions to even pretend to accuracy.

If we accept that The Hulk DID punch Spiderman, and Spiderman survived, clearly if we're aiming for genre emulation, the Hulk shouldn't destroy Spiderman with a punch.

Now, we can set our fantasy physics so that the Hulk WILL kill Spiderman if he hits, but also set it so that he cannot plausibly hit Spiderman if Spiderman is not already disabled; we can also set our fantasy physics so the Hulk CAN hit Spiderman and WON'T kill him.

I roughly know how many times Superman has died, but not Spiderman. For all this talk of 'bullets are a real threat', are they really?

Even if bullets are a threat to Spiderman, and the Hulk's fist ALSO poses a threat to Spiderman, that doesn't necessarily follow that they share a 1:1 correspondence. It all comes down to how you model those.

A bullet might be a 'save or suck' with an easy DC and the Hulk's fist might be a 'save or suck' with a difficult DC. A bullet might be low-damage and the Hulk's fist might be high damage - the relative value of each then becomes dependent on how many hit points Spiderman has. Or you could have some type of 'threat bidding' where mooks are willing to take a shot but they're not willing to risk their lives - to actually kill Spiderman they might need narrative weight and to raise the stakes high enough that life (and death) are on the line. In PvP, if the Hulk is willing to KILL Spiderman, it might be a coin-flip as to which one kills the other (but if no one raises the stakes, maybe death isn't even POSSIBLE).

For some values of attack value versus defense value, the Hulk WILL kill Spiderman. For a lot of other values, that's not only uncertain, it may be outright impossible.

For the sake of accuracy, you could offer a statement like: if the system allows a protagonist like the Hulk to kill an antagonist like Loki, it would follow that the Hulk could kill a protagonist that is weaker than Loki, potentially including Spiderman.

Even if this is true and the Hulk can kill Spiderman, it doesn't also imply that Spiderman MUST DIE if the Hulk lands a single blow.

[hyzmarca]

Hulk pulls his punches a lot. It's been pretty well established that even in his most mindless forms, Hulk isn't a murderer, that he goes out of his way to avoid killing people.

Spider-Man also rolls with punches directed at him and has combat-time precognition.

So Hulk is intentionally doing subdual damage and Spider-Man has damage mitigation from his Spider-Agility and Spider-Sense class abilities.

At the same time, one of Hulk's siginiture powers is that the madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets. Which means that he has an anger counter that goes up when his friends get hit and goes down when he sees puppies a it determines how hard he punches and when it hits 0 he turns back into Bruce Banner. Which means that you can work Hulk into a lower level game just by capping his anger meter and work him into higher level games just by giving it a higher floor.

[nockermensch]

In a cooperative storytelling game, Hulk and Spiderman are being written by different people, and they each desire a victory for the character they are writing about.

Hulk must redmist Spiderman for real because conflicts in a cooperative storytelling game are resolved impartially.

Frank is doing that thing where he writes something obvious and incontrovertible (A) and then ties it to his opinion (B) hoping you don't spot the trick. And it is a trick because there are other possible impartial rulesets that allow for the fair resolution of conflicts which don't end with a super strong character gibbing a less strong one.

Now, "Super Heroes" is a pretty wide genre, so if you're writing the Watchmen RPG again, then letting real world physics have their brutal consequences is a defensible and probably correct choice. But if you're going for the 4-color tropes, then the acceptable result for Hulk punching Spider-Man is for Spidey be thrown through a wall and fall unconscious on the other side after muttering a last quip.

Both systems can be impartial. But the 4-color system can output wound results for super fights that range from "no effect" to "knocked down for the scene". Even when the one doing the punch can punch planets. Death can still happen in the 4-color system, it's just that they shouldn't be normal outputs of the most common kind of fight scene you want to run, because a main character dying is supposed to be a major event and therefore rare.

[phlapjackage]

Both systems can be impartial. But the 4-color system can output wound results for super fights that range from "no effect" to "knocked down for the scene". Even when the one doing the punch can punch planets.

The "world of cardboard" speech by Superman comes to mind here

[maglag]

Both systems can be impartial. But the 4-color system can output wound results for super fights that range from "no effect" to "knocked down for the scene". Even when the one doing the punch can punch planets.

The "world of cardboard" speech by Superman comes to mind here

Yeah, supes actually spends most of his time punching common thugs or just rescuing people from normal disasters life fires.

Clearly supes bought all his super strength by taking some heavy "will not kill" flaw that means he may be able to deal $texas damage but enemies are left at 1 HP instead of atomized.

[Chamomile]

But if you're going for the 4-color tropes, then the acceptable result for Hulk punching Spider-Man is for Spidey be thrown through a wall and fall unconscious on the other side after muttering a last quip.

I had kind of assumed that this what was meant by "redmist." Not literally dissolve into a bloody mist, but that one character is so much stronger than the other as to be able to defeat them in one blow, which presents a gameplay problem even if the form of that defeat is that Spidey ends up unconscious in a pile of rubble rather than splattered across it.

[Mask_De_H]

But if you're going for the 4-color tropes, then the acceptable result for Hulk punching Spider-Man is for Spidey be thrown through a wall and fall unconscious on the other side after muttering a last quip.

I had kind of assumed that this what was meant by "redmist." Not literally dissolve into a bloody mist, but that one character is so much stronger than the other as to be able to defeat them in one blow, which presents a gameplay problem even if the form of that defeat is that Spidey ends up unconscious in a pile of rubble rather than splattered across it.

Same. It's an off the RNG thing, not a "bang you're dead" thing. Unless you go full Munchausen narrative style, even a Hulk holding back most likely rolls so much higher than Thug #2 if Spidey has to sweat Thug #2, Hulk tagging and KOing Spidey is a numerical certainty. The only way around that is putting everything on the same RNG, but having DFA style Scale where you do more/better stuff after succeeding on a roll against someone of lower Scale than you.

[hogarth]

Reading this discussion of comic book "physics" is like listening to people argue about whether there is an anvil that is big enough to flatten Bugs Bunny like an accordion but small enough to merely raise a bump on Daffy Duck's head.

[Username17]

I had kind of assumed that this what was meant by "redmist." Not literally dissolve into a bloody mist, but that one character is so much stronger than the other as to be able to defeat them in one blow, which presents a gameplay problem even if the form of that defeat is that Spidey ends up unconscious in a pile of rubble rather than splattered across it.

Same. It's an off the RNG thing, not a "bang you're dead" thing. Unless you go full Munchausen narrative style, even a Hulk holding back most likely rolls so much higher than Thug #2 if Spidey has to sweat Thug #2, Hulk tagging and KOing Spidey is a numerical certainty. The only way around that is putting everything on the same RNG, but having DFA style Scale where you do more/better stuff after succeeding on a roll against someone of lower Scale than you.

Precisely.



It's entirely possible that your game system tops out with knocking people unconscious, and that being well off the RNG won't literally make the other character die in one hit. But they'll still be off the random number generator and combat won't be meaningful or fun.



Any system that attempts to model all the characters that have appeared in The Avengers will necessarily have so many "stronger than" statements between Hulk and Spiderman that you won't be able to fit both on the same Random Number Generator. And this is true no matter what RNG you use. There are a lot of characters that have appeared in the Avengers, including a significant number of X-Men characters because The Avengers is traditionally the title that Marvel used to move characters from the X-continuity to the Marvel Universe continuity and back again.

Now again and still, you could potentially use the same game system for Hulk and Spiderman, and simply accept that they won't meaningfully contribute to the same fights and keep them apart with some sort of tiers system or point cost thresholds or power levels or whatever the fuck. But the fact remains that retaining simulation elements relevant to Hulk actions has a cost for the game system that is undesirable to pay if you aren't going to use it because you are playing at Spider tier. And retaining simulation elements relevant to Spiderman actions has a cost for the game system that is undesirable to pay if you aren't going to use it because you're playing at Hulk tier.

The core issue is J. Jonah Jameson and Mary Jane Watson. I get the impression that J. Jonah Jameson is physically stronger than Mary Jane Watson. A system that retains the granularity to have that fact be at all meaningful is going to have an enormous difficulty representing Hulk strength. I mean, you can easily represent the strength difference between those characters in a Shadowrun or Dungeons & Dragons strength scale, but can you fucking imagine trying to represent Hulk in either of those systems? The game system would just choke on its dick and die.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

You probably can't represent the Hulk's strength because his strength is probably unquantifiable, but if his strength capped out at lifting the HMS Hood over his head, then his 3.5e D&D strength would be 112. A lot, but give him some huge rage penalties to hit and don't let him use too many feats that are good for attacking (No BAB maybe?), and he's not necessarily more dangerous than other level 12 characters. Edit: Well, he's also basically invulnerable etc, so okay, the whole set of his powers is too good for a level 12 character. But being super-Strong doesn't by itself need to be too much.

Meanwhile, in 5e D&D, his strength would be 3485440.

[Emerald]

You probably can't represent the Hulk's strength because his strength is probably unquantifiable, but if his strength capped out at lifting the HMS Hood over his head, then his 3.5e D&D strength would be 112. A lot, but give him some huge rage penalties to hit and don't let him use too many feats that are good for attacking (No BAB maybe?), and he's not necessarily more dangerous than other level 12 characters.

The War Hulk PrC in Miniatures Handbook does the +0 BAB thing, actually, and is basically "Hulk Lite: the PrC." It gives no BAB progression but gives +20 Str over 10 levels, lets you effectively turn melee attacks into AoEs by applying the same attack to multiple squares, and has a "No Time to Think" feature that treats the character as having 0 ranks in all Int/Wis/Cha skills except Intimidate. Give that character Power Attack + Combat Expertise and always take the maximum attack penalty on both regardless of whether it makes sense--working out to -5 PA and -5 CE with his +5 BAB, exactly canceling the +10 attack from the Str increase--and you basically achieve the desired effect.

You can come closer to approximating the Hulk with a Goliath Barbarian 5/War Hulk 10/Berserk 1/Frenzied Berserker 4, if your DM is permissive about Mountain Rage (Goliath Barbarian ACF, turns you Large when you rage) meeting War Hulk's "Size: Large" prerequisite and lets you turn the class features "on" and "off" when you enter and exit rage. The character is normally Medium and doesn't have any of the War Hulk features since he doesn't meet the size prerequisite...then he goes into rage+frenzy+battle fury, becomes Large and impossible to kill via damage, and gets all the missing class features including the ridiculous Str increase (topping out around 74: 18 base + 4 racial + 5 level + 5 inherent + 6 enhancement + 20 War Hulk + 4 Rage + 6 Frenzy + 6 Battle Fury plus whatever miscellaneous stuff you can throw on). The custom item of disguise self for green skin and purple shorts while raging is optional.

(Yeah, yeah, no one plays at 20th level, I know, but we're going for maximum ridiculous Str here.)

[Fwib]

I played an epic character using War Hulk once - using a palette-swapped Abomination as a character picture - campaign was fun while it lasted, I thought. Sadly, D&D is dead in our gaming group

In other news, Festive Greetings!

[Iduno]

Frank saying that you shouldn't sacrifice mechanical function to support games you're not playing is true, but it isn't PROVEN that you can't use the same rules for low-powered supers versus high-powered supers. D&D already does something similar with low-level characters compared to high-level characters.

That's a terrible example. D&D already does horseshit at both high and low-levels, and does those things only because we need goblins and dragons in the same setting because.

[Dogbert]

You probably can't represent the Hulk's strength because his strength is probably unquantifiable

Both Hulk and Superman possess Strength of Plot: They're as strong as the story in turn needs them to be, period. Sometimes you'll see Hulk getting bitch slapped by Tony Stark, and some other times you'll see him lifting Thor's Hammer for totally unworthy deeds, something which, without being "the chosen one", would require a strength approximate to the Chandrasekhar Limit (other Asgardians can't lift it, and they have cracked neighbouring planets just with the shockwaves they send when trading blows).

So, you don't need to care for Hulk's actual strength limit, just the top strength they'll use in the story you plan to tell or adventure you're going to run (saying this story/adventure even -warrants- the Hulk's presence, that is).

[Username17]

Both Hulk and Superman possess Strength of Plot: They're as strong as the story in turn needs them to be, period.

This is very importantly not true.

The first thing that might make it look like it's true is that in most comics that aren't Dragon Ball, characters don't tell you numerically how strong they are - they perform feats of strength that show you how strong they are. This is a question of medium, and completely not transferable to RPGs. In a cooperative stroytelling game, characters do in fact tell you how strong they are before they can perform feats of strength because that is how cooperative storytelling is adjudicated.

The second thing that might make it look like it's true is that Hulk and Superman are folk characters who have appeared in a lot of different stories told by different people using different parameters. The Hulk played by Lou Ferrigno is much less strong than the Hulk played by Mark Ruffalo. Hulk is a folk character, and appears with different strengths and weaknesses in different retellings. Similarly, characters in Robin Hood have really different traits and abilities in different tellings. Is the Sheriff of Nottingham the second best archer in Nottingham or a buffoon fit only as an object of fun? Is Robin the Early of Loxley or a charismatic Yeoman farmer? And so on and so forth. This again doesn't much apply to an RPG, because within any particular cooperative storytelling game the traits of a character will be defined before you declare actions and roll dice and won't be likely to change before you declare actions and roll dice again.

It isn't that Robin Hood has an indeterminate social class. It's that there are different stories that use a character named Robin Hood and in some of them that character is a well-off commoner and in others that character is a low ranking lord. But in any particular story, he's one or the other. And a roleplaying game is a particular story told by a group of people who agree on how the story goes, not a collection of stories told by different people who don't agree.

-Username17

[maglag]

You know, having been playing some super smash brothers and super robot wars recently, what I figure out is that most players don't really give a single fuck about power discrepancies if it means they can have everybody fighting at the same time.

Like Samus wearing uber power armor and Kirby's an eldritch deity with canonically infinite power, but fire emblem lords that die to street bandits or the villager or even just a dog are allowed to fight them head on. Some characters can fly at will on their original games, others can't jump at all, but they all get 1-6 extra jumps in-game and everybody has a good time.

Votoms stand side to side with all sorts of reality-breaking super robots, just with votoms being dodgier and more precise while the supers are tankier and deal more damage with worst acuraccy, even if in the original show the super had some uber targeting system and could move at the speed of sound/light. Even among real robot shows there's supposed to be quite a lot of power discrepancy like gundams only operate in the earth sphere while macross operates in a galactic scale and valkyries should be able to just run circles around even the faster gundams besides having stuff like rifles loaded with miniature black-hole bullets, but in-game they have pretty similar stats.

And yes, SSB technically isn't a rpg, but SRW is, characters all have levels and numbered stats and skills and whatnot.

So if your super-hero rpg ends up with spider man able to punch-out the Hulk with a bit of luck, most people would actually approve. Because that's what they want from a mashup rpg, to bring anybody they want to the table and stand side to side with the other players, original power levels be damned.

[nockermensch]

A superhero RPG worth its salt has to have Spiderman vs Hulk conflicts resolved like this:

* Hulk knocks down Spiderman in one punch, but Spiderman's high dodge means Hulk has a terrible chance of hitting.

* Spiderman can't outpunch Hulk, period, but there should be other ways to end the fight: Or he talks to Hulk until he calms down, or he tricks Hulk to get stuck by collapsing buildings, or whatever. In game terms, Spiderman could be attacking a mental defense hopping to add enough hits to inflict a condition like charmed or paralysed.

And the possibilities should be tuned so that in the end, both heroes have about the same chance or winning. It's just that Hulk needs one hit, while Spidey needs like three or four.

[Chamomile]

Being taken out by a single lucky/unlucky roll is really unsatisfying.

[Username17]

A superhero RPG worth its salt has to have Spiderman vs Hulk conflicts resolved like this:

* Hulk knocks down Spiderman in one punch, but Spiderman's high dodge means Hulk has a terrible chance of hitting.

* Spiderman can't outpunch Hulk, period, but there should be other ways to end the fight: Or he talks to Hulk until he calms down, or he tricks Hulk to get stuck by collapsing buildings, or whatever. In game terms, Spiderman could be attacking a mental defense hopping to add enough hits to inflict a condition like charmed or paralysed.

And the possibilities should be tuned so that in the end, both heroes have about the same chance or winning. It's just that Hulk needs one hit, while Spidey needs like three or four.

Fuck off. If I'm playing a character who is the power level of The Fucking Hulk, I don't want the MC to tell me that I have a roughly equal chance of losing to some guy who routine struggles with muggers while wearing pajamas with lines drawn on them for a costume.

This is the whole problem with World's Finest type shit in RPGs. Yes, when people sign up to read a comic about Powergirl and Huntress teaming up, they want to see both characters do stuff and pull their weight. But when a player gets to play Powergirl, they want to actually have and use those powers. They don't want to be hit with a nerfbat and forced to carry the idiot ball so that other characters get to shine in places their character could hog the spotlight.

Yeah, when we read World's Finest comics, we're all onboard with pretending that Powergirl doesn't have super speed and X-Ray Vision and could solve the entire mystery in like twenty seconds. But in an RPG Powergirl is played by an actual person who is going to raise her fucking hand and point out that she can in fact solve th mystery in twenty seconds. And if you rob her of her agency to do that, you are being an asshole and ruiningthe player'sr night.

-Username17

[nockermensch]

This just in: Every superhero comic is automatically Watchmen to Frank.

[Omegonthesane]

You can't both say that comic book mediums have flexible power levels for different story purposes and say that the only acceptable RPG conversion of comic book mediums is one that pegs a specific combination of power levels that excludes crossover stories you don't like.

The whole length of character creation should really be more than enough time to get everyone on the same page re: power levels. Which is the only point in time where your mewling about how Power Girl ought to be able to ruin the Huntress crossover is relevant, because it was decided one way or another long before that happens whether Power Girl in fact has super speed and X-ray vision in this campaign.

Even accepting the idea that the Hulk will roflstomp Spider-Man in a strictly physical contest, it's very strange that you think the Hulk's power level should entail that he has absolutely no weak spots for Spider-Man to exploit in the medium that brought us Kryptonite. Regardless of the fine details of the telling Hulk's emotional state and lack of cunning are absolutely intended to be his weak spots where someone could punch above their weight class against him. ((ETA2 wrong genre example: at the design stage it would be reasonable to think of a level 10 Radiant Servant of Pelor having a 50/50 chance of soloing a level 12 Vampire Necromancer if one were of the opinion that such a specialised character was appropriate))

ETA: or some campaign specific contrivance where while the Hulk's victory condition entails defeating Spider-Man, the reverse is not true and Spidey only needs to maneuver the board so he can collect the MacGuffin and escape without ending his turn in Hulk's charge range.

[CaptainComics]

Fuck off. If I'm playing a character who is the power level of The Fucking Hulk, I don't want the MC to tell me that I have a roughly equal chance of losing to some guy who routine struggles with muggers while wearing pajamas with lines drawn on them for a costume.

See, this is what keeps confusing me. Again, it's not controversial to state that a game has a range of power levels that it can support, and that characters that are weaker or stronger than that range are respectively too short or too tall to ride. But the examples that Frank is using to express this seem to imply that no published comic book ever can be modeled in a "functional" supers game, and that's just crazy.

Spider-Man absolutely does not "struggle with muggers." Not even in Amazing Fantasy #15, his origin story, does he "struggle with muggers." He takes apart rooms full of muggers literally to blow off steam. Spider-Man is a fairly high level character. He's not the top, but he's experienced, he has a good mix of effective attacks and defenses, and his abilities complement one another in a way that makes him perform at a higher level than any of his individual powers would imply he could. He can absolutely tangle with the Hulk. He just can't beat him in an arm wrestling contest.

Likewise, the assertions that Hawkeye is a weakling who can't be on an Avengers team with the Vision without throwing verisimilitude out the window is a matter of opinion and writing style. It doesn't help that he's be written as a useless sad sack for the last 20 years or so, but taking the character as generally used before Avengers Disassembled, Hawkeye could absolutely function on any Avengers team you could put together and more than pull his weight. He's literally a D&D wizard - he's a glass cannon whose ranged attacks are level-appropriate for any level you care to name because his arrows can be anything from "pointy stick" to "contains a payload that can dissolve Iron Man's armor."

Everyone is going to have a different canonical picture in their head on where an individual character's power level should be in the rankings based on the comics and other media they are familiar with featuring that character. Likewise, there are characters like Daredevil, whose power is he's a blind guy who's not really blind, and Phoenix, who's a cosmic space god, who are going to be so far apart on anybody's spectrum that you can confidently say that if the supported power levels of the game don't include them nothing of value is lost. But I put forth once more that a supers game that cannot write up stats for any given Avengers team and at least end up with a rough approximation of all of the characters is a game that is too narrowly focused to be considered a successful supers game.

I mean, how are you handling the supervillains? You can't fight the Mutant Liberation Front every time - sometimes you fight Magneto, or Doctor Doom, or the Juggernaut. And if you can have a villain who's strong enough to fight an entire team of heroes, then you can hand those stats to a player and have them play that guy. So even if your PCs aren't using the whole scale, the GM sure will. So again, the game just has to be that flexible or it doesn't do superheroes.

[hogarth]

We had the "Batman vs. Hulk" comic when I was a kid. It was pretty goofy, but kind of fun.

https://13thdimension.com/the-len-wein- ... -the-hulk/

[phlapjackage]

Spider-Man absolutely does not "struggle with muggers." Not even in Amazing Fantasy #15, his origin story, does he "struggle with muggers." He takes apart rooms full of muggers literally to blow off steam. Spider-Man is a fairly high level character. He's not the top, but he's experienced, he has a good mix of effective attacks and defenses, and his abilities complement one another in a way that makes him perform at a higher level than any of his individual powers would imply he could. He can absolutely tangle with the Hulk. He just can't beat him in an arm wrestling contest.

I wrote a whole long post with this same point earlier today and then decided not to post it...spiderman, with his combination strength/speed/reflexes/intelligence/danger sense/webbing, would be someone I would absolutely bet on to actually be able to take the Hulk.

[maglag]

Spider-Man absolutely does not "struggle with muggers." Not even in Amazing Fantasy #15, his origin story, does he "struggle with muggers." He takes apart rooms full of muggers literally to blow off steam. Spider-Man is a fairly high level character. He's not the top, but he's experienced, he has a good mix of effective attacks and defenses, and his abilities complement one another in a way that makes him perform at a higher level than any of his individual powers would imply he could. He can absolutely tangle with the Hulk. He just can't beat him in an arm wrestling contest.

I wrote a whole long post with this same point earlier today and then decided not to post it...spiderman, with his combination strength/speed/reflexes/intelligence/danger sense/webbing, would be someone I would absolutely bet on to actually be able to take the Hulk.

Funny thing is, today went to see the new spider man animated movie and there newbie spider-man just casually pass by armies worth of goons with laser guns.

Meanwhile the final boss may as well be the Hulk, creating shockwaves by punching the ground, casually throwing cars as ranged weapons, bulldozing through solid metal walls like they were paper and easily overpowering spider-man in any direct contest of raw strength... Yet newbie spider-man wins through his combination of "strength/speed/reflexes/intelligence/danger sense/webbing". And that was with newbie spider-man already being worn out by fighting a bunch of other named villains.