How important is it to you or your players for characters to feel "overpowered"?

[Wolfpack48]

To bring it back to superheroes though, it’s like saying “You’re not Superman…you’re Jimmy Olsen.”

Maybe more like Batman or Aquaman.

 

[nevin]

To bring it back to superheroes though, it’s like saying “You’re not Superman…you’re Jimmy Olsen.”

With things like Watchmen superhero Genre isnt really any diferent. Depends on the table.

 

[TiQuinn]

Maybe more like Batman or Aquaman.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Superhero games are the only ones where I'm fine with random death being off the table, because I feel genre conventions matter more there than in any other RPG.

There are others where unplanned death is off the table because its virtually nonexistent (i.e. never happens to a main character barring resolution of their plot path) in the sort of stories they're representing. Ensemble adventure TV shows (and there are games specifically designed to mimic those) for example. Some shows make a big deal about this not being true, but its not usually hard to pick out who's vulnerable and who's not fairly early in the run.

 

[Thomas Shey]

With things like Watchmen superhero Genre isnt really any diferent. Depends on the table.

Outliers in a genre are outliers. Watchmen and other deconstructions are clear what they are from the get-go.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Stories are not games. A story is to me one way a game could have happened. In a game I want the possibility of random death to be as real (within the logic of the setting and circumstances) as it could be in real life. You can't really do this in a superhero game without destroying the genre, so there I make an exception.

Its entirely possible to have a game set up so that random death will, in practice, destroy the campaign (yes, this has implications if a player has to leave, though sometimes something can be done if there's a little warning that'll be true).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I suppose it really comes down to whether the campaign is trying to produce that book protagonist feel. Playing The One Ring, Stormbringer or Lhankmar or Thieves World, the GM would need to decide whether the PCs are in Elric’s realm, or whether they’d are lesser or secondary personages in that universe.

Not all fictional settings are limited to one important set of characters at a time, though. A lot of it depends on how much the heroes are supposed to matter, as compared to being the only ones who matter. Epic adventure does tend to lead into the singular hero or heroes of the age, but as a contrast, shared-anthology series can share the light better by their nature (though I'm not sure how much those are still a thing).

 

[Thomas Shey]

To bring it back to superheroes though, it’s like saying “You’re not Superman…you’re Jimmy Olsen.”

I suspect its more like saying "You're not Superman, you're Spider-Man" in intent, though I still this require noting, in practice, what kind of opponents Superman normally actually goes up against. Superman is rarely overpowering by the likes of opponents he goes up against.

So I think it again is a case of expectation mismatch. Superheroes are actually a bad comparison, because they exist in universes that are full of powerful malign opponents, and their whole gig is dealing with them.

 

[TiQuinn]

I suspect its more like saying "You're not Superman, you're Spider-Man" in intent, though I still this require noting, in practice, what kind of opponents Superman normally actually goes up against. Superman is rarely overpowered by the likes of opponents he goes up against.

So I think it again is a case of expectation mismatch. Superheroes are actually a bad comparison, because they exist in universes that are full of powerful malign opponents, and their whole gig is dealing with them.

Well, my point is that whether it’s Superman or Spider-man, they’re both the heroes. Jimmy Olsen decidedly isn’t. And yet in the sword and sorcery genre where there’s concern around overpowered heroes, we still have Superman and Spider-man…they’re just named Conan and Elric.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But they are still defined by the conventions of the genres and D&D - at least the older editions - have always maintained that their inspiration were Leiber, Howard, Moorcock, etc.

To me, that's inspiration for how a game in that setting could be. I personally don't need or want the rules to push for that to happen.