Superhero RPG that is not about wizards

[phlapjackage]

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.

The reason I didn't post the first time, is that I kinda thought "I don't care if the Hulk could beat up Spiderman (well, I DO care, but you know...)." Whether or not a "high-power" character could beat up a "low-power" character (or how useful each character is with their powers etc) is not the issue and distracts from the real issue at hand - the question of whether a Supers game can (or should) be able to handle low- and high-power characters.

[shinimasu]

The reason I didn't post the first time, is that I kinda thought "I don't care if the Hulk could beat up Spiderman (well, I DO care, but you know...)." Whether or not a "high-power" character could beat up a "low-power" character (or how useful each character is with their powers etc) is not the issue and distracts from the real issue at hand - the question of whether a Supers game can (or should) be able to handle low- and high-power characters.

I think it can, but I don't think it can be the kind of rigid power level high crunch system that then Den tends to like. Or at least that Frank tends to like. Supers is a floaty genere. People die, people come back, planets explode, dimensions collapse, AUs spiral out into spinoffs of spinoffs. The hulk can paste spiderman in one comic and get effectively webbed up in another and fans don't really bat an eye at this because that's just how comic books do. It's how they've been written and will continue to be written for years to come. It's what makes those "who would win" debates ultimately end forever in nerd stalemates.

I think the supers genre is better suited to games like Bear World precisely because "whoops there's suddenly a bear where there was no bear before" is how these stories tend to go. You thought this was just a mugging? Surprise it's the Joker! You thought the Joker was working alone? Surprise it's Lex Luthor! Masks is hot garbage as a game system but I don't think it's a coincidence that it's also easily the most popular PbtA hack floating in the ether right now. And I think it generally had the right idea about ditching conventional HP in favor of measuring a hero's ability to take hits in terms of how much of a shit they can manage to give about the fight.

[Mask_De_H]

The reason I didn't post the first time, is that I kinda thought "I don't care if the Hulk could beat up Spiderman (well, I DO care, but you know...)." Whether or not a "high-power" character could beat up a "low-power" character (or how useful each character is with their powers etc) is not the issue and distracts from the real issue at hand - the question of whether a Supers game can (or should) be able to handle low- and high-power characters.

I think it can, but I don't think it can be the kind of rigid power level high crunch system that then Den tends to like. Or at least that Frank tends to like. Supers is a floaty genere. People die, people come back, planets explode, dimensions collapse, AUs spiral out into spinoffs of spinoffs. The hulk can paste spiderman in one comic and get effectively webbed up in another and fans don't really bat an eye at this because that's just how comic books do. It's how they've been written and will continue to be written for years to come. It's what makes those "who would win" debates ultimately end forever in nerd stalemates.

I think the supers genre is better suited to games like Bear World precisely because "whoops there's suddenly a bear where there was no bear before" is how these stories tend to go. You thought this was just a mugging? Surprise it's the Joker! You thought the Joker was working alone? Surprise it's Lex Luthor! Masks is hot garbage as a game system but I don't think it's a coincidence that it's also easily the most popular PbtA hack floating in the ether right now. And I think it generally had the right idea about ditching conventional HP in favor of measuring a hero's ability to take hits in terms of how much of a shit they can manage to give about the fight.

Masks is the Teen Titans/Young Justice with the serial numbers filed off one, yeah? If so, Tha actually plays into Frank's ultimate point; the power types don't matter if everyone is on the same mechanical scale. Masks has everybody pull the same weight because Bears and also because they're young heroes without the wildly divergent folk tellings of their abilities.

Peej and Huntress can't play nice in an RPG without narrative fiat because Peej gets more and better abilities. Hulk and Spidey can't play nice in a mechanistic RPG because Hulk and Spidey are swinging at different threats without narrative fiat. SRW has the ludonarrative gimmick of godmachines using the exact same numbers as some Zaku, and even then the godmachines get more play because they have better shit unless a pilot or gimmick is broken (Orguss in Z, Big O or any Super in D, Boss Borot with Level 99 pilots in @3) or you have to grind for a better unit (Nono before she becomes Buster Machine #7 in Z3).

The whole thing is all your dudes need to be in the same power band and do similar things, by hook or by crook. And in order to modulate how comics work, you either teaparty it (which I said last page) or you focus in a narrow power band (which Frank posited for Fantastic!).

[shinimasu]

Masks is ostensibly about teen supers and the mechanics try and reinforce that with the incredibly poorly implemented labels system, but the reason I say it models super heroes well is precisely because it doesn't care about who is technically stronger. My argument is that any game about supers that tries to care about who is technically stronger will ultimately fail, because the genre itself has never technically cared about who is stronger in any quantifiable sense of the word.

I mean maglag isn't wrong, kingpin in the new miles morales movie is basically the hulk in an expensive suit. In fact kingpin's overblown strength despite being a quote unquote "normal" human character is already the subject of nerd arguments on forums all over the place. The dude canonically at one point protected his valuables with a door so heavy that it didn't need a lock because only he could lift it.

So the fixed DC system works with this convention as opposed to putting a finite cap on the abilities of the heroes. You want to lift this car and chuck it at a dude? Sure get a seven+ and do the thing. Want to lift this building? 7+ do the thing. Want to fight a guy way outside your weight class? Sure go ahead and do the thing.

In Masks You can absolutely have Spiderman take on the hulk and win. Spidy can also get his ass handed to him. It comes down to how many sixes you roll since Masks is more forgiving with its bears than some of these games.

Please don't mistake this as me saying the system is good. It's not, it's an absolute mess. But I think it has the overall right idea about how to model the genre. Power levels are bullshit, the points don't matter, and the fun comes from the cascading failure spirals that happen before that big glorious team up moment where somehow everyone manages to get their shit together long enough to beat the villain.

[Username17]

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

This is supposed to be some kind of gotcha or statement so xxxtreme that I go back and rethink my life or something, but you're almost right. Every superhero role playing game is automatically Watchmen. No exceptions.

That probably sounds pretty crazy to you because you haven't thought very hard about this issue, so I'll break it down. Watchmen is a deconstruction of the genre. A role playing game is a cooperative storytelling endeavor, which means that the story is constructed from elements brought in by multiple contributors. You have to deconstruct the genre in order to construct stories that way. The game has to be a deconstruction - has to be Watchmen - for the story to be a construction - to be anything at all.

Within a role playing game the individual characters are piloted by real people who have agency. When you have agency all things you have the power to do are things that you can do. That's what it means to have power and agency. If a character has the power to destroy New York, the character can destroy New York. Period. End of discussion. They have power, they have agency, that is a thing they can do. Whether they destroy New York or not becomes a question of choice, of desire. Not a question of can or cannot.

Supers is a floaty genere.

No. It really isn't.

The thing you're getting hung up on is that superheroes are folk characters that appear with different powers, motivations, backstories, costumes, and weaknesses in different stories. That's because those are different stories and the characters in them aren't the same characters. They are archetypes. Myths. Stock characters. And the basic parameters of the characters are not the same. Just as Punch and Judy are sometimes wise and sometimes foolish or the Sheriff of Nottingham is sometimes a master of the bow and sword and sometimes a drunken fuckup, Superman is sometimes a character who ducks when empty guns are thrown at his face and sometimes a character who literally bounces artillery shells off his eyeball. That's not because Greek Myths are "floaty" and it's somehow a quantum fluctuation whether Hercules can lift a mountain or is just like linebacker strong - it's because those are different stories that happen to use a stock character named Hercules.

Importantly, this means that while you can cherry pick a Spiderman and a Hulk that are roughly equivalent power - like maybe the Lou Ferrigno Hulk and the Danny Seagren Spiderman - this is also extremely and explosively not the point. If someone wants to play Hulk, they probably don't want to play the Lou Ferrigno Hulk. But if they do, that's fine. There are of course "brick" and "martial artist" characters of almost all power levels, and if you can settle on a power level that everyone wants to play at and you can find a ruleset that does a half decent job of portraying that power level, you've found your game.

The key issue is that whatever power level you're playing at is the power level you are actually playing at. You aren't playing some weird quantum state where you are playing both the George Reeves and Christopher Reeve Superman. You are playing one or the other. And whichever one you are playing, there will be appropriately powered other characters to be allies and enemies, as well as a scope of the game engine itself which is needed and desired. Things outside the scope don't matter, and giving up things within the scope that does matter for your game system to hypothetically be able to handle those things is literally paying something for nothing.

I mean, how are you handling the supervillains?

Green Arrow's villains aren't normally immune to punching or being shot with arrows. If there's a villain that Oliver needs to team up with other heroes to face off against, it's not because they are wildly out of his scope. His opponents aren't normally existing outside of time or the size of a planet or able to shatter Star City with a stomp.

There's plenty of room for an antagonist to be more powerful than one of the characters without being out of the scope for those characters to interact with. Similarly, there's plenty of room for antagonists that are weaker but still able to threaten the player characters - potentially in groups.

If your game is supposed to be about characters like The Shadow who are basically just really stealthy pulp heroes, you don't fucking need rules for lifting battleships and hitting people with them. And including rules for shit like that isn't free.

-Username17

[jt]

You can do some pretty floaty stuff with power levels even in a mechanically crunchy game with balanced parties, if you're willing to play with the units.

Arachnoman can shoot webs 10 Squares that can lift 1 Comic Ton, and can himself lift 4 CT. The Bulk can create shockwaves with a 2 Square radius and can lift 50 CT. Andrei Aramnau, who is an olympic weightlifter and not a superhero, can lift 200 kg.

In today's adventure, we're trying to prevent the nefarious Professor Platypus and his genetically enhanced animal-thug hybrids from robbing the bank (but it's a coverup for robbing the zoo). A Square is 4 meters - Arachnoman can shoot a web across a wide city street. A Comic Ton is 2000 kilograms. Arachnoman can lift a car with a web. The Bulk can lift a blue whale. Andrei is one tenth as strong as one of Arachnoman's webs.

In next week's adventure, we're going to fight a Sidereal Battleship; a proper alien invasion with space fighters and a space-aircraft-carrier the size of the moon. A Square is 10,000 kilometers - Arachnoman can shoot webs halfway to said moon. A Comic Ton is 2*10^14 KG. Arachnoman can lift most asteroids with a web, and The Bulk can lift a small moon like Phobos. Andrei's lifting capacity is still 200 kg, so Arachnoman's webs are 10^12 times stronger than him.

These numbers weren't just pulled out of the MC's ass, this happened because today's adventure was at power level 2 (to match the power level 3 Professor Platypus), next week's will be at power level 10 (to match the power level 11 Sidereal Battleship), and those are the weights and measures at those scales. The MC is breaking an important guideline by swinging the power level up that fast, but a couple sessions were cancelled and they wanted to get to the big fight before the end of winter break.

[Username17]

You can do some pretty floaty stuff with power levels even in a mechanically crunchy game with balanced parties, if you're willing to play with the units.

Arachnoman can shoot webs 10 Squares that can lift 1 Comic Ton, and can himself lift 4 CT. The Bulk can create shockwaves with a 2 Square radius and can lift 50 CT. Andrei Aramnau, who is an olympic weightlifter and not a superhero, can lift 200 kg.

In today's adventure, we're trying to prevent the nefarious Professor Platypus and his genetically enhanced animal-thug hybrids from robbing the bank (but it's a coverup for robbing the zoo). A Square is 4 meters - Arachnoman can shoot a web across a wide city street. A Comic Ton is 2000 kilograms. Arachnoman can lift a car with a web. The Bulk can lift a blue whale. Andrei is one tenth as strong as one of Arachnoman's webs.

In next week's adventure, we're going to fight a Sidereal Battleship; a proper alien invasion with space fighters and a space-aircraft-carrier the size of the moon. A Square is 10,000 kilometers - Arachnoman can shoot webs halfway to said moon. A Comic Ton is 2*10^14 KG. Arachnoman can lift most asteroids with a web, and The Bulk can lift a small moon like Phobos. Andrei's lifting capacity is still 200 kg, so Arachnoman's webs are 10^12 times stronger than him.

While you can do things like that, there isn't really much reason to do so. Unless you have a weirdly obsessive desire to tell wildly different stories with wildly different characters without having to write new character sheets, you aren't getting anything out of that kind of shift.

And it isn't like doing that kind of shit, or even having the game be capable of doing that kind of shit is cost-free. In the last adventure, Arachnoman's blogger girlfriend Sarah Sanderson is apparently able to jump from San Francisco to Tokyo because the entire Pacific Ocean is only one square across? That seems like the kind of thing that might come up.

Making your game mechanics produce inconsistent results sacrifices the ability to have the game mechanics represent things consistently. And I'm not sure what you're even getting for that massive sacrifice. Basically you're just making the 4venger argument for using 4th edition D&D to tell Epic Stories. That seemed pretty bad at the time, and in retrospect it still seems pretty bad.

-Username17

[Dogbert]

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.

Indeed, in Marvel's power grid, his fighting ability is at the max of the scale, which makes him defacto invincible in combat except by characters with the same score and bigger fight penis (i.e Wolverine, Black Panther, etc).

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.

Ehm no, this is actually true and you don't have to dig that far. The thing is, while Hawkeye has some superhuman feats under his belt (like hitting the bullseye non-stop for three days straight without food or sleep), you don't need him in stories that actually warrant the Avengers' presence. Also, not only he depends on other characters to get the kind of arrows that don't make him feel small in the pants (mostly Pym), he -runs out of them- while neither Thor nor Ironman nor Hulk nor Vision run out of juice.

Furthermore, every other avenger makes him redundant:
-Super-shrinking > stealth
-Capt will always be a better fighter and his superhuman spatial intelligence means he'll out-trick shot him every time (and with a shield, no less).
-Divine lightning > arrows
-Stark has used cyberkinesis to make all world satellites microwave his secret ID out of the brains of every person in the planet, which enables him to undo pretty much any global conspiracy on the spot (so, > spy skills)

... and let's not even get started with Wanda... also, Squirrel Girl makes him cry tiny tears.

[maglag]

Within a role playing game the individual characters are piloted by real people who have agency. When you have agency all things you have the power to do are things that you can do. That's what it means to have power and agency. If a character has the power to destroy New York, the character can destroy New York. Period. End of discussion. They have power, they have agency, that is a thing they can do. Whether they destroy New York or not becomes a question of choice, of desire. Not a question of can or cannot.

Quite on the contrary, it becomes a question of cutscene power.

Like in SRW the RX-78GP02A's nuclear bazooka one-shots a whole army fleet with hundreds of ships/mechas spread all over the map like in the original series and the numerous adaptations, but when you fight it in-game suddenly said nuclear bazooka can't even fully cover the player's force of a dozen or so units and the player's units will probably be able to survive at least one shot from full health even if they're sidekick characters piloting mass-produced crap. Ditto for the SRW where you can get Gato to to join the players, he'll turn his nuclear bazooka to one-shot out some evil alien fleet in a cutscene then when you gain control of him said atomic bazooka is just another AoE attack with damage in the same scale as a large beam.

And SRW's been doing that for decades now, doing mashup of folk tales because why yes popular mecha series like Mazinger and Gundam and Getter and Macross have plenty of comics and series and movies by different authors where their powers and personalities are all over the place.

Because folk tales having super-feats that are done once and are never heard of again (like Tony Stark being able to rewrite minds in a global scale through microwaves) is just how they roll. If you blew up New York once, it means just that, you blew New York once and next story the same attack may struggle to take out some muggers.

[nockermensch]

In the last adventure, Arachnoman's blogger girlfriend Sarah Sanderson is apparently able to jump from San Francisco to Tokyo because the entire Pacific Ocean is only one square across? That seems like the kind of thing that might come up.

As Andrei's example shows, in jt's system normal people get their abilities defined in real world units. So Sarah jumps "2 meters". Once you are a super, your abilities get to be defined in units that scale according to the story being told, which frankly, is pretty spot on for genre emulation.

[deaddmwalking]

If your game is supposed to be about characters like The Shadow who are basically just really stealthy pulp heroes, you don't fucking need rules for lifting battleships and hitting people with them. And including rules for shit like that isn't free.

-Username17

If you're going to make a broad system that includes antagonists that are significantly weaker than your protagonists and significantly stronger than your protagonist, it's going to work if you change the power level of your protagonists - at least within a defined range. You might 'run out of room' for stronger antagonists if you play at the top of the scale, and you might have trouble modeling weaker mobs if you play at the bottom of the scale.

In Spiderman Homecoming, Spidey couldn't lift a battleship. But if that scene were part of a game, you absolutely would need rules for whether he could or not - trying to stitch the ferry back together with webbing was the result of him not being able to simply pick up half the ship in each hand and jump to land.

And if he can't lift a battleship, but he can lift a tank, you're going to want to have rules for what happens when he uses it as an improvised weapon. Those same rules should apply to similar situations (cars/trashcans) and potentially battleships.

[Chamomile]

That kind of system is definitely spot-on for emulating the genre as it actually is. However, I would put it to you that the preponderance of arguments about who would win in a fight, [heroX] or [heroY] serve as strong proof that this is a result of being a decades-long serial with far too much material for even very dedicated storytellers to stay on top of, plus several periods where the storytellers were crazy, lazy, or both, and not a result of this being how people actually want comics to go. If you look up debates on Spidey vs. Hulk, you will very frequently find people insisting that the Hulk has a decisive, and often overwhelming, advantage in that fight. It's not impossible that this is one of those times where the audience for media doesn't know what they want, but I'm pretty sure that what people actually want out of their super heroes game is Spider-Man being significantly less combat capable than the Hulk.

EDIT: Oh, also, as the guy who first brought up the Spidey vs. Hulk comparison, I don't know where Spider-Man "struggling with muggers" became a thing that people started quoting, but what I actually said is that Spidey frequently reacts to a pair of muggers with ARs the same way the Hulk frequently reacts to an entire platoon of fully trained soldiers with LMGs and grenade launchers: As trash mobs, threats that are very unlikely to actually win but pressing enough as to not be completely ignored. I said that pretty explicitly when I brought it up, so I don't know why that has somehow transformed into Spider-Man being in serious danger of losing a fight to them.

[CaptainComics]

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.

Ehm no, this is actually true and you don't have to dig that far. The thing is, while Hawkeye has some superhuman feats under his belt (like hitting the bullseye non-stop for three days straight without food or sleep), you don't need him in stories that actually warrant the Avengers' presence. Also, not only he depends on other characters to get the kind of arrows that don't make him feel small in the pants (mostly Pym), he -runs out of them- while neither Thor nor Ironman nor Hulk nor Vision run out of juice.

This is wrong and weird from a number of directions. First of all, no, Hawkeye does not rely on anyone else for his arrows. He builds them himself. Once in a while he'll collaborate with someone else on the team for something special, like the Pym Particle based "storm of arrows" arrow, but generally speaking his weapons are his own.

Second, if a story warrants the Avengers' presence, and Hawkeye is currently serving on the Avengers, that is all the justificaton you need for him to show up in an Avengers story. When a writer works on the Avengers book, they choose a set of characters they want to tell stories about, and then they tell stories about them. Generally speaking, an Avengers story with Clint Barton in it will have something for Clint Barton to do in that story, unless the writer is not very good. Furthermore, if you look at the stuff he's actually done in countless Avengers comics, Hawkeye literally does as well in fights as anyone else, and gets spotlight time comparable with the others.

Third, Hawkeye runs out of arrows as often and for the same reasons as Spider-Man runs out of web fluid. It is a means to increase the dramatic tension in the story by removing one of the character's advantages. It doesn't happen every story, and it doesn't happen for no reason. Furthermore, three out of the four examples you cited that don't "run out of juice" actually did run out of juice quite often for a long stretch of their careers. When Thor had a human identity, he could be forced back into that identity by separating him from his hammer for long enough. Likewise, the Hulk tends to change back into Banner at inopportune times. Finally, Iron Man would literally have to go plug his chestplate into a wall socket and sit there in the dark for a couple of hours after every battle. Each of these limitations came up about as often as Hawkeye having limited ammunition, if not more so.

Furthermore, every other avenger makes him redundant:
-Super-shrinking > stealth
-Capt will always be a better fighter and his superhuman spatial intelligence means he'll out-trick shot him every time (and with a shield, no less).
-Divine lightning > arrows
-Stark has used cyberkinesis to make all world satellites microwave his secret ID out of the brains of every person in the planet, which enables him to undo pretty much any global conspiracy on the spot (so, > spy skills)

... and let's not even get started with Wanda... also, Squirrel Girl makes him cry tiny tears.

This sounds very much like your primary familiarity with the character is from comics and other media published post-2000. That's understandable and I'm not surprised that you have this impression based on that. However, be aware that Hawkeye pre-Avengers Disassembled is portrayed so differently in skill set, general competence, and personality as to be essentially a completely different character. As such, I will address your points with respect to the character as he was portrayed in the past.

To begin with, you can pick any two Avengers and show how one of them would be much better than another at some arbitrary task. I could just as easily point out how Hawkeye is much sneakier than the Hulk and able to fit through doorways Giant-Man can't.

Super-shrinking > stealth

While Hawkeye has been known to sneak around when necessary, I don't why the man in the bright purple suit who tends to enter a scene shouting insults is thought of as a primarily stealthy character. Hawkeye is not a spy. That's something they made up for the movie and one of the cartoons to simplify the exposition for his history with Black Widow and his frequent issues with the law and his reputation. So this is largely an irrelevant observation.

Capt will always be a better fighter and his superhuman spatial intelligence means he'll out-trick shot him every time (and with a shield, no less).

So Cap can take out the Radioactive Man with his lead-foil shield, right? And boil off Hydro-Man with his super-heated shield? And dissolve the Crimson Dynamo's armor with his hyper-oxdizer shield? Oh wait, that's right, Cap doesn't do any of that stuff, but Hawkeye's whole deal is to have arrows with weird weapons built into them, making him a completely different archetype.

Divine lightning > arrows

Again, Hawkeye's weapons are much more than mere "arrows". His payloads are versatile and effective in a wide range of situations.

Stark has used cyberkinesis to make all world satellites microwave his secret ID out of the brains of every person in the planet, which enables him to undo pretty much any global conspiracy on the spot (so, > spy skills)

So you're going to use a bullshit plot device used to undo a series of poor decisions made by writers that explicitly only returns a comic to its previous status quo before the new writing team takes over as, like, an actual power that you expect Iron Man to actually use as a thing he can do? Fuck that. And again, Hawkeye is not a spy, so this is irrelevant. And since Hawkeye actually debuted as an Iron Man ANTAGONIST, it's been made clear over the decades that Clint can actually give Stark a run for his money in most scenarios.

Wanda

Scarlet Witch used to be the weakest Avenger. She's fluctuated in power and effectiveness over the years, usually ending up in the middle of the pack power-wise. The thing where she's this all-powerful reality manipulator is, again, largely a result of Avengers Disassembled.

Squirrel Girl makes him cry tiny tears.

Squirrel Girl isn't a real character. Squirrel Girl is a symptom of the modern comics decay. If you actually think that Squirrel Girl can get anywhere at all without writer pity, you just aren't paying attention to the stories that you're reading. Given that you can actually hunt actual squirrels quite effectively with an actual bow and arrow, I'm pretty sure my money's on the world's greatest archer.

[Trill]

also, Squirrel Girl makes him cry tiny tears.

"Man, this character is weak. If you throw him into a black hole he dies!"
Who cares that he loses to Squirrel Girl? Dr. Doom and Galactus also lost to her. Because she's a joke character with the two traits "Controls Squirrels" and "Beats anyone"

[Username17]

And if he can't lift a battleship, but he can lift a tank, you're going to want to have rules for what happens when he uses it as an improvised weapon. Those same rules should apply to similar situations (cars/trashcans) and potentially battleships.

This is like, super dumb. The idea that a game that can satisfyingly simulate characters who are strong can automatically satisfyingly simulate characters who are stronger than that is just obviously wrong. Just for starters, the random number generator has a beginning and an end. There are things that are too small to produce reasonable inputs and outputs and there are things that are too big to produce reasonable inputs and outputs. That's just fucking obvious.

But even without considering the numbers aspect, there's the size aspect. Hitting someone with a folding chair is different from hitting someone with a car. Hitting someone with a car is different from hitting someone with a bus. Hitting someone with a bus is different from hitting someone with a battleship. Those things are different. They are importantly and obviously different. What does it mean in your game to be attacked with an object that is larger than your character? What does it mean in your game to be attacked with an object that is larger than the area defined for your character's location? What does it mean in your game to be attacked with an object that is larger than your character's movement speed for a turn?

Defining these things has a cost. A cost in text and a cost in rules burden. And if they aren't going to come up, you don't want to pay that cost when designing your game. If the "strong" characters in your game can't smack people with objects large enough to have characters moving around and fighting on top of them, you don't need to have rules that govern what happens when a character picks up terrain that other characters are moving and fighting on to use as a melee weapon. In fact, including a rule to cover such a situation would be a totally insane thing to do unless characters are in fact strong enough to pick up and swing buildings and ships.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

If you're calling it a supers game, you're going to have to cover being hit with a car or a bus because that is a thing that people without superpowers can do. If you get a divide by zero error with the attacks that unarmed, untrained, non-powered individuals are likely to make, your rules missed the boat even if it isn't a literal battleship.

Comic book physics let you treat a battleship or a 747 as an object that can be supported by two hands. That's bad physics, but it is genre appropriate.

As far as whether you treat a bus or a battleship differently, that's up to you. I think a reasonable argument can be made that no matter how big a building is, there's some limit to how much of it can fall on you. I'd be killed if I was hit by a bus or someone dropped a battleship on me, but I could see a superhero crashing through the hull like a torpedo.

I agree with your larger point that it's important to decide on a scale that your system supports. Every actual example is so limiting that nobody will want to play that game even if they're all making Suicide Squad powered characters.

You know that one of the things D&D does well is provide a range of monsters from small peasants with spears to universal-extinction-level foes.

No matter how far you think the players will go up the threat ladder, you need to go higher. Otherwise you can't tell the story where the heroes team up with the villain against a greater danger. It's like you don't care about genre emulation at all which is weird since that's the point.

You don't have to define what happens if a hero tries to use a super massive galactic black hole as a weapon, but that doesn't let you off the hook through real world arsenals - if for no other reason than the player agency you brought up before - supers can go fuxking get them, so you have to include them.

[Dogbert]

First of all, no, Hawkeye does not rely on anyone else for his arrows.

I said, he depends on others for the arrows that don't make him feel small in the pants. No one cares for his flashbang arrow or his net arrow when the Kree Empire comes a-knockin'.

Furthermore, if you look at the stuff he's actually done in countless Avengers comics, Hawkeye literally does as well in fights as anyone else, and gets spotlight time comparable with the others.

Only because comics are a passive media and writers put all those "oh if only a muggle was here to..." things specifically so Hawkeye justifies his existence, a conceit that doesn't work in tabletop as the Rogue and traps have proved for decades (the thief is in the party because only he can disarm traps, and the game needs to have traps so the thief has something to do).

When Thor had a human identity, he could be forced back into that identity by separating him from his hammer for long enough.

And when Thor had a human identity I was four years old and watched that on re-runs from the 60s' cartoons because we already were in the Bronze Age of comics by then and no one cares how things were in the silver age anymore. Don't move the goalpost to the silver age. Players don't care for the silver age, they don't sign up to my games to chase Lex Luthor for stealing forty cakes, nor they go around calling bystanders "citizen" (except for one, and the time he did I threatened with turning the whole game into Champions Online/Space Ace idiocy). Also, no one cares if back in the Silver Age Hawkeye was a circus man with a bone to pick because that origin story sounds stupid today, everyone likes Ultimates' Hawkeye better.

Superman is no longer vulnerable to green-rocks-of-lazy-writing, Thor no longer has a "secret identity," and Clint Barton was always a SHIELD agent... many retcons are for the better.

Trust me you're talking with the biggest advocate of genre emulation in this forum, but even I know genre emulation has its limits. All the examples you describe in your post are due to author fiat which works in passive media, but GM fiat is the enemy of player agency, and people play superhero games to be larger-than-life. You can ask the wizard at a dnd game to sandbag it because chances are the wizard is by far the one with most agency at the table, but you can't ask everyone at the table of a M&M game to sandbag it so the table's Myopic Gamer With No Memory who keeps playing Hawkeye doesn't feel small in the pants, because chances are they're the only wimp.

P.S: Squirrel Girl rocks, get over it.

P.P.S: I actually don't hate Marge Weis' Marvel Heroes game, and it works exactly the way you want, as long as you don't mind MTP.

[Username17]

If you're calling it a supers game, you're going to have to cover being hit with a car or a bus because that is a thing that people without superpowers can do. If you get a divide by zero error with the attacks that unarmed, untrained, non-powered individuals are likely to make, your rules missed the boat even if it isn't a literal battleship.

Driving a bus into someone and picking up and throwing a bus at someone aren't remotely similar things and it isn't at all weird for a game system to handle one well and the other poorly. Making both work is a non-trivial problem, and acting like you can automatically solve one because you resolved the other is completely ridiculous.

This is more of your bullshit "If you can dodge a brick, you can dodge a ball." Things which aren't the same aren't the same. The fact that your system handles one thing well doesn't mean that you can just add or subtract numbers and handle a bigger or smaller thing well. 3e D&D works pretty well for characters that are one meter or two meters tall, but it doesn't work very well for characters that are thirty meters tall. Things being bigger opens and closes doors of possibility, and that's things your game physics needs to address.

And that's over and above the raw reality that random number generators have beginnings and ends. GURPS doesn't work for real big or real small stuff whether it figures out a way for the point costs to go there or not - the random number generator only has 16 numbers on it!

A modern game should probably have rules for car crashs whether it's about people with super powers or not. But being able to handle cars crashing doesn't magically make your game able to handle cars being swung around as clubs without choking on its dick. Again and still, your claim that handling one things in the rules allows you to effortlessly handle different things with the same rules is trivially refuted. That isn't true because it just obviously isn't true. Role playing game systems are generally longer than a single paragraph, because you can't magically and efortlessly expand a rule for one situation into all other situations. Anyone who says otherwise is deeply confused or blatantly dishonest.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

Driving a bus into someone and picking up and throwing a bus at someone aren't remotely similar things and it isn't at all weird for a game system to handle one well and the other poorly.

Being hit with a bus (because it was driven into you) and being hit with a bus (because someone swung it as a club) are very similar things. Either way, you're being hit with a bus. Resolving the damage outputs for one should correspond relatively closely to the outputs for the other. They may not be exactly the same (in 3.x terms the person swinging a bus as a club would add their strength modifier - the bus itself would either be treated as having a STR modifier or given just a base damage - especially if it was a falling object).

Picking UP a bus is different than driving a bus, but picking up a bus is not substantially different than picking up a car (other than the strength required).

Even if we're not talking Hulk Strength, we've got examples of Spiderman holding up a bus, holding up part of a building, and tossing a tank.

I'm not claiming that a rule can be expanded effortlessly. I am claiming that rules generally cover a range. In D&D, wielding a weapon works for a normal human who is weak through a normal human who is strong through a normal human with the strength of a giant through a giant. In a supers game, you will need to cover picking up objects that will include things that people without super strength can wield and cars, tanks, buses and trains, and if the expected power-levels of your game put battleships off the table it should be clear HOW. If you determine that Superman and the Hulk can't do it individually, you still need to cover whether they can together.

If you're making a game, you need to support the reasonable range of expected actions. My claim remains that while I agree with your larger point that there is some limit to where power levels are too low to support and too high to support. Even if you generally set the power-level low, Super Strength is a staple of the genre, so you're going to have to have robust rules that cover lifting and throwing unusual objects. If you can throw a car it's going to come up as to whether you can throw a tank; even if you can't throw a tank it'll matter if you can pick it up.

Bringing up the limited nature of the RNG is a little strange. In a Supers Game, it's not weird that some people are off the RNG in respect to others in one dimension. Individuals that have super strength need to be able to do things that people that don't have super strength can't. If they couldn't, we wouldn't call it 'super'.

I will commit to believing 'if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball'. I found it utterly convincing when I heard Patches O'Houlihan make the claim. Thrown objects actually behave very similarly; two objects with similar weight, similar cross-shapes as related to air resistance and volume will have similar trajectories and speeds. If you can dodge a bullet, you can dodge an arrow. That's what having a character ability means in a supers game.

[Username17]

Being hit with a bus (because it was driven into you) and being hit with a bus (because someone swung it as a club) are very similar things.

You keep saying shit like this. It's bad, and you should feel bad. Like honestly I feel like I should just respond with an image macro because the thing you just said is so extremely stupid and wrong.


You continuing to post this idiotic line of thought is basically this. You're acting stupid and also being an asshole.

Now I work in surgery. I deal with injuries all the time. I stick various sharp implements into people almost every day. In a real-world sense, injuries caused by the same object delivered in different ways aren't particularly similar. On a physics standpoint, there's a real big difference between the same object traveling at the same speed and bouncing versus pushing through versus crushing the target. There's a huge difference between impacts with the same overall force that are simply distributed over different areas. The number of wrists I've pushed back together because someone fell from standing and simply impacted their hand at a bad angle is pretty significant.

But fully aside from the fact that from the standpoint of anyone who actually knows anything at all about this subject, your premise is retarded, there's the entire issue that there's absolutely no reason for any of that to be remotely true in game mechanics. Melee attacks probably don't use the same resolution system as traffic collisions. I seriously can't think of a single role playing game where sword strikes and car crashes use the same resolution, and there's no particular reason to think that any game system would be improved by making that be the case.

In an actual game system, swinging a bus as a club is a melee attack that raises many questions. Among them being:

• What does it mean for a melee weapon to be physically larger than the area occupied by two or more characters involved in the combat?
• What does it mean for a "melee weapon" to be longer than point blank range of a "ranged weapon"?
• What does it mean for a melee weapon to be used in an attack that would be big enough to destroy it were it to be the target rather than the weapon?

None of those questions are relevant when some hero is hitting fools with a hammer or a tonfa. But if weapons get big enough, those questions come up. And if your game scales up to the power levels where people can use weapons like that, they will want to know how your system answers those questions.

But of course, if your game does answer those kinds of questions, but people aren't strong enough to do shit like that, you've just wasted a lot of paper. Capiche?

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

Being hit with a bus (because it was driven into you) and being hit with a bus (because someone swung it as a club) are very similar things.

You keep saying shit like this. It's bad, and you should feel bad. Like honestly I feel like I should just respond with an image macro because the thing you just said is so extremely stupid and wrong.

You continuing to post this idiotic line of thought is basically this. You're acting stupid and also being an asshole.

Now I work in surgery. I deal with injuries all the time. I stick various sharp implements into people almost every day. In a real-world sense, injuries caused by the same object delivered in different ways aren't particularly similar. On a physics standpoint, there's a real big difference between the same object traveling at the same speed and bouncing versus pushing through versus crushing the target. There's a huge difference between impacts with the same overall force that are simply distributed over different areas. The number of wrists I've pushed back together because someone fell from standing and simply impacted their hand at a bad angle is pretty significant.

I see what you're doing here. It's bullshit and you know it's bullshit. Yes, stabbing someone with a knife is going to result in a different wound than slashing someone with that same knife. In the real world sometimes people sprain their wrists falling down from standing and sometimes people survive falls from airplanes with no broken bones. Your claim that there are 'big differences' is easily dismissed by your own claim that games shouldn't deal with the things that don't matter. Since superheroes don't sprain wrists falling down from standing, that's not going to be modeled. But there are going to be ways for supers to get hurt, and getting punched with the force of a freight train or having a freight train dropped on their head are both likely to come up - EVEN ON THE LOW POWER END.

Writing rules for abilities that will never be used is pointless. But you haven't provided an example of a rule that is BEYOND what you'd expect in a supers game. Further, you haven't provided any support for your claim that supporting a range of superhero power levels within the same game is somehow undesirable. Other people besides myself have pointed out that a range of powers is not only desired, but REQUIRED. Villains will sometimes have more power than the team of heroes.

I agree that you have to answer questions about weapons that are thrown objects larger than a person. Those come up in comics ALL THE TIME. And if you don't expect the people running your game to be masters of calculating physics on the fly, you're going to have to provide examples of what you don't THINK players will do, but might happen anyway. There's a big difference between impossible and improbable - and with superheroes you cover a lot of potential ground. Like, even if your game doesn't support Hulk powered characters (who apparently is on record supporting a 150 billion ton mountain by himself), you'd have to be on the extremely low-end to not have to deal with the question of a battleship (60k tons) or a train engine (200 tons) or a tank (68 tons) or a car (3 tons).

You know and I know that a big part of a role playing game is making expectations clear. If a PC has an ability, the PLAYER needs to know what they can do. If they're playing a super-strong character, they need to know what that Strength means. If Magneto is launching the Golden Gate Bridge at them, they reasonably need to know if they can catch it - depending on the comic source that may or may not be reasonable. And if you're going to say Magneto CAN'T launch the Golden Gate bridge at people, it's reasonable to ask how much more powerful he would need to be before he COULD. It'd be REALLY GREAT if the same rules you played with broadly supported that higher level play so you didn't need to learn a new system. It's okay if you're off the RNG relative to mere mortals and low-end supers, as long as you're on the RNG relative to the opposition you're facing RIGHT NOW.

That's one of those issues that was solved in the 70s and you know it.

[DrPraetor]

A game of "capes" or "pulp" could very well depend on realistic physics - in which case, if you were strong enough to pick up a bus, you'd rip off the bumper instead; and if you did somehow pick it up, you'd crunch into the sidewalk from concentrating the weight.

Now, that isn't what most people would expect for this genre, which generally has cartoon physics in which you can pick up an aircraft carrier if you're strong enough (instead of just punching a hole in the hull.)

That isn't a *given*, while I'll grant you it's expected. But, once you've decided that your game of supers *doesn't* have realistic physics, the pretty-obvious answer is:
[*] If you are a tough hero, you can shrug off being hit by a moving train because that demonstrates how tough you are.
[*] The same tough hero is going to be shaken if a strong hero hits the tough hero with a train, because that demonstrates how strong the strong hero is.

These are inter-related questions of game-balance and narrative space for the various superpowers, which have no bearing on the underlying physics, and don't remotely imply that moving trains (natural hazards) and wielded trains (improvised weapons) would ever use the same rules. Furthermore, they describe a game of supers in which being a "normal human" is a special effect in which everyone is supposed to pretend to be worried, even though when the strong hero hits you with a bus, you show up with soot on you and your arm in a sling going "ow ow ow" while in a realistic physics engine you'd be a stone dead. That can be a genre-appropriate conceit - I forget his name, but there's a guy in Dragonball who is supposed to be just a regular guy with Kung Fu and he's no match for Goku but he regularly holds his own for a while against people who can punch planets into powder, because although he's a "Normal Human", he did not write "normal characteristic maxima" on his Champions character sheet, he has like 20 points of defense or whatever it takes to not die.

Going back to Frank's original point, Champions works great for Dragonball but it works absolutely awful for the Shadow; and the version of the Shadow who you'd play in Champions is as strong and tough as a high-power-level Spiderman because otherwise he just dies. Since playing a more source-appropriate Shadow is also something you might want to do, there is also room in the design space for a game of pulp heroes which would work more like Shadowrun, and which would do a bad job of emulating Dragonball.

Since the source-faithful Shadow and the source-faithful Goku are not playable in the same game, there is no incentive to generate a game that runs both of them well at once, and in fact it's quite difficult to do so.

[Josh_Kablack]

Lemme go back a few pages, because Frank is also being obtuse about Champions Strength scale. Not wrong, just not quite clear on how things work:

Champions delivers on Hulk Fights pretty well. It can tell you what happens when Hulk picks up a car and throws it thirty meters to smash into a dude and it can tell you what happens when Hulk punches an opponent through a wall. Those are important points of the simulation for Hulk smashing. But they are not meaningful questions for Hawkeye and Hawkeye related adventures......or a scale of strength where Hawkeye can be meaningfully stronger than Mockingbird (something Champions does not deliver on at all).

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.

Mary Jane Watson has an 8 Strength -- she's not particularly strong
J Jonah Jameson has a 13 Strength -- he's a bit stronger than average
Hawkeye has a 23 Strength -- he uses a bow with a draw weight above that of the real-world Guiness record.
Spider-Man has a 30-40 Strength -- he can lift a bus, but it's a notable feat for him.
Hulk has at least a 60 Strength -- this depends on the version of the character, but even the weakest versions of the Hulk throw cars casually and flips tanks over. The top-level versions of the Hulk actually cause problems with the Champions scale - but that's a different post.

The problem with Champions' strength scale at the low end is not what Frank thinks it is. At the low end, normal human strength scales from 1-20, with each 5 points offering 2 damage breakpoints. Fucking D&D has used a 3-18 normal human strength scale for my entire life, and since the year 2000 D&D strength has had a damage breakpoint for every 2 points of Strength. It's absurd to claim that a 3-18 system where every 2 points matter works where a 1-20 system where every 2.5 points matters fails based solely because it doesn't have numeric granularity.

Where Champions Strength scale falls on the low end is that Strength is that it is trivial for normal human characters to pick up extra damage in ways that are just not available in D&D. And I mean the sort of normal humans who are supporting cast for secret identities in comics, I'm not talking about superheroes with the special effect of "Normal Human" written on their character sheet

In D&D when JJJ (Strength 13) picks up a baseball bat he goes from dealing 1d3+1 nonlethal to dealing 1d6+1 (no-longer-nonlethal) damage and the only ways he is upping that during a fight are magic and critical hits. Compared to MJ's (Strength 8) 1d3-1 barehanded nonlethal and 1d6-1 regular with a bat. When you run the averages, JJJ's 5 points of strength are letting him deal something close to double damage compared to MJ.

In Champions JJJ goes from dealing 2.5 d6 normal damage with his fists to dealing 6.5 d6 normal damage with a baseball bat and if he can manage to land a haymaker with a bat that becomes a whopping 10.5 d6. Here, Mary Jane dealing 1.5 d6 with her fists becomes 5.5 d6 with a bat, and 9.5 d6 using the bat for a haymaker.

When common weapons add +4d6 and there are basic combat maneuvers to add another +4d6 , then a 1d6 difference in base damage is of much lower significance than a +1/-1 damage on a single small die roll.

Which is to say, you could fairly trivially design a system with the desired low-end granularity that still handled superstrength characters hurling cars through brick wall by removing or limiting a bunch of the damage addition options from Champions.

[Dogbert]

Expanding a bit on my last post... yes, Hawkeye's arrows don't have to be useless. As long as he as an offense power (by whatever other name), it must work in combat, perhaps just as well as anyone else's. Same goes for his spy skills... but while his resources work, there's only so much you can do with propelled pointy objects (there's a reason why "healing arrow" was a running gag back in City of Heroes) while the other heroes can teleport armies and control satellites or flat out say "lulz no."

Even in Marge Weiss' MTP Marvel Heroes game, you can only BS the Editor so much, eventually they'll just say "Sorry, no amount of superglue arrows is gonna stop the fight between Snyder's Superman and Zod, or keep the building from collapsing."

[erik]

Even in Marge Weiss' MTP Marvel Heroes game, you can only BS the Editor so much, eventually they'll just say "Sorry, no amount of superglue arrows is gonna stop the fight between Snyder's Superman and Zod, or keep the building from collapsing."

You choose the one example where a special arrow actually could be the right kryptonite for the situation?