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

[TiQuinn]

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.

But you’re okay not being Jimmy Olsen if it’s a superhero game. Or pre-super powered Peter Parker.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Fair enough, but I don't play games designed to narratively emulate that experience, just model the world those stories happen in.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But you’re okay not being Jimmy Olsen if it’s a superhero game. Or pre-super powered Peter Parker.

I could go either way. My concern with superhero games is the near-imposibility of nearly every player I've ever seen not to play people with super-powers as mechanically hard-core as possible, with no regard for narrative genre conventions. I can't have four-color without genre rules, and I want four-color.

But if you want to play normal people in a world with meta humans, that would be fun too.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

I suppose. But I'd still argue any problems found are with mismatches in expectation, not anything about the characters themselves. Its all about how even the playing field is expected to be.

(That said, there can be another problem that crops up, where the players expect to have a sense of challenge without a real one, or the GM expects the players to be big damn heroes while setting up the opposition so that's suicidal. I'm not convinced there's any good fix for those pathologies, though).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Fair enough, but I don't play games designed to narratively emulate that experience, just model the world those stories happen in.

The problem with that is, avowedly, the worlds those happen in is often "this one". That is to say, the chance of a result that looks even vaguely like those sort of experience just won't happen if you're entirely dependent on the dice and choices to produce them. They're too unforgiving.

The truth is, unless you want to accrue an awful lot of dead characters in a game where death is on the table, some manner of putting your thumb on the scale is necessary. D&D hit points are putting your thumb on the scale. SW Bennies are putting your thumb on the scale.

I think I understand your ethic here Micah, but in practice, it just isn't really doable; the only question you can ask is how much putting your thumb on the scale is acceptable. Otherwise you're expecting probability to let things work out in a way that is too unlikely to be even vaguely plausible to actually occur in play.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I could go either way. My concern with superhero games is the near-imposibility of nearly every player I've ever seen not to play people with super-powers as mechanically hard-core as possible, with no regard for narrative genre conventions. I can't have four-color without genre rules, and I want four-color.

But if you want to play normal people in a world with meta humans, that would be fun too.

It'd be hard to construct a campaign premise to make it work, depending on how far you're taking the word "normal".

 

[Wolfpack48]

But you’re okay not being Jimmy Olsen if it’s a superhero game. Or pre-super powered Peter Parker.

Sure those could work too if it was framed properly and everyone agreed. I mean there’s a whole show about Star Trek characters on the “Lower Decks.”

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure those could work too if it was framed properly and everyone agreed. I mean there’s a whole show about Star Trek characters on the “Lower Decks.”

There's some slight-of-hand going on there, though; though avowedly about people not as capable as the main heroes in most Star Trek shows, over time its abundantly clear that most of the four main "Lower Decks" characters are, in fact, very capable within their specialties (its sometimes hard to tell with Boimler); at worst they carry around a lot of comedy-leading psychological baggage those characters don't have.

So while they put on the front of being "normal people" they really, really aren't.

 

[TiQuinn]

Sure those could work too if it was framed properly and everyone agreed. I mean there’s a whole show about Star Trek characters on the “Lower Decks.”

Sure, but my point isn’t about what a table of consenting players wants to play. It’s about how we look at the genres differently in terms of power levels, or in D&D’s case, how older versions used to look at them, even though the stories that supposedly informed the game were filled with larger than life heroes.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure, but my point isn’t about what a table of consenting players wants to play. It’s about how we look at the genres differently in terms of power levels, or in D&D’s case, how older versions used to look at them, even though the stories that supposedly informed the game were filled with larger than life heroes.

Well, I'd argue most versions of D&D were perfectly willing to have larger than life heroes. They were just manifestly unwilling to start you there, for no obvious reason.