A supers-system for me? ... Grim Tales?

[ledded]

Like I've posted elsewhere, I'm a fan of BnV for the reasons you listed above.

It fits onto d20 Modern seamlessly, it's easy to scale up/down (and has suggestions for doing so in the book) and you can mix in other d20 Modern-ish stuff fairly easily.

It does have sort of an unfinished feel, mainly because (IMO) of the brevity of work that it is. It's pretty much a nice chuck of rules/powers for supers, with some suggestions and a few new (and fun) rules variants. I love the 'knockback' rule, for instance, and have thought about instituting a very similar rule in other games I run for explosions or extremely hard impacts. But for 6 bucks, it's a bargain IMO. Our group has had a ton of fun with it.

 

[Vigilance]

80 pages is brevity?

Thanks for the praise though man

Chuck

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

It seems to be pretty nice. I statted up a character with it earlier today. It was fast, for me, as I used a Excel cha-gen to make the base character, then layered the B&V stuff on top, adjusting as I added super powers. At 5th level the character was pretty heroic, but not insane.

I'd like to look at M&M but either it's insanely popular or they have total crap for distro as I've been to half a dozen different retail places as of today and nary a copy between them. I HAVE B&V ... and I have all kinds of monsters I can toss at them.

I downloaded a copy of Four Color To Fantasy ... mmm ... didn't work as well for my style as B&V because it seems to depend on that new core class. I'll run through it again, might have missed an easy way to layer those hero points onto existing base classes.

I'll lay one of my BIG prejudices out, though, as to any system.

The biggest thing that makes Mutants and Masterminds attractive to me? Somebody has created a nice, fully-loaded character generator in Excel for M&M. What would take 30-45 minutes of point-counting and adjusting and jinking around takes 10 minutes with a Cha-Gen. When I need to make a bunch of NPCs and enemies or when I need to gen some characters, that sort of thing saves me SO much time.

One reason I love d20Modern is I have a really nice Character generator in Excel for it. So much saved time. I love it. So B&V works pretty well for me in that I can stat up at least the first three levels in 5-10 minutes. The other stuff takes longer, but not as long as it would if I were using a system I didn't have any sort of tool for.

That's just me, tho.

--fje

 

[Vigilance]

At some point we will add Blood and Vigilance to our Modern generator, which has Darwin's World added and Blood and Relics soon to come online in time for the PDF's release.

So it might take awhile but this WILL get even easier eventually.

CHuck

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Excellent.

I love generators and time saving tools.

You make me happy, Chuck.

--fje

 

[Krieg]

Have you taken a look at D20 Adventure! yet?

It seems designed specifically for the type of campaign you are wanting to run, and if nothing else it can always be raided for ideas.

 

[ledded]

80 pages is brevity?

Thanks for the praise though man

Chuck

No, not taken by itself, really only compared to something like M&M, where you can spend a pile of cash and get a stack of books and supplements.

But to me, I've never really felt it was brief, more aptly *concise*. It had exactly what I was looking for when I needed it, and took very little time to get my group up to speed on it. Which makes in an exceptional value, I dont have to pay for a bunch of stuff I didnt need.

Plus the author hangs around the boards a lot and tends to promptly answer pretty much any question you put to him, which is a bonus in my book.

I do look forward to ya'll getting BnV up on the Modern Generator Chuck, I've liked what I've seen so far.

Heap, I'm a lot like you too. I have a very good excel generator for Modern that I love, and I messed around with it enough to be able to help me more quickly generate BnV guys. That's a *huge* plus to me as a player, and darn near a necessity for when I GM.

I havent heard much about D20 Adventure! Krieg, I'll have to keep my eye open for that.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Well, if I weren't a complete clutz with Excel, I'd prolly do the same thing.

I asked the author of the Excel generator how to edit things, and he told me ... I was going to put some Dark*Matter creatures in there so I could easily put classes on them.

Thought I had it down pat, seemed like he made it pretty easy ... tried to get it to work and the whole thing went crazy. Sure I needed to replace a search function somewhere to get the dropdowns to read new cells ... but I never could figure it out.

I've been enjoying myself statting up characters in BnV to see how they work. So far my favorite was: "The Magnificent Marsupial", a Sugar Glider-themed super theif, because my wife loves Sugar Gliders. Have to work him in somewhere.

I'll prolly crack open the sheet again, see if I can finangle anything in. It's called "Modern Heroes" if anybody else is interested in a NICE little gen for Modern.

And Ledded, if you have something that works for BnV, think I could schmooze a copy from ya'?

I, too, haven't seen D20 Adventure! yet. Then again, I usually live in chronically non-gamer areas of the country, so... we had a single comic-book store two hours away from where we are in Alabama. I was there the other day looking for M&M. They ripped out 60% of the stock of comics, graphic novels, and RPGs to clear most of the floor space in the store for permanent game tables and they apparently now make most of their money hosting CCG tournaments and selling action figures. GAH!

When I get a chance to physically pick up and examine Adventure, I'll, well, do so.

--fje

--fje

 

[Olive]

So far M&M is the "biggest" name in d20 Supers, that I can see. From what I read, though, it doesn't seem to do "low power" very well. IronMan, SpiderMan, Superman ... sure, but Hellboy, Rorchach?

But Watchmen isn't a supers book really... and from what I know about hellboy, that isn' either. It's heroic supernatural stuff, or even scratch the heroic bit.

So Grim Tales would probably be fine, but so would d20M.

I mean what supers stuff do you need?

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Well, Abe Sapien is telepathic, at least in the movie (haven't read too many Hellboy comics with him in there yet). He's also Icthus Sapiens, and can breathe underwater.

Liz Sherman is powerfully pyrokinetic.

Roger the Homunculus is, essentially, Frankenstein's monster.

And Hellboy has super-healing, super-strength, an indestructible Red Right Hand, and the ability to speak with the dead.

Which, really, are all monsters and magic you can pull pretty much out of the hat in d20M anyway, yes. And you're very much right that Watchmen was a masked hero book and not a super-hero book. 'Cept for Dr. Manhattan, and he was a plot element.

Thing is, the guys have asked for a SUPERHERO game. So I don't really want to just say: "Cool, we'll play d20 Modern at 7th level."

I'm still finangling how I want to run things. Who knows, I may end up running a full-tilt Four-Color style game. I'm just not sure I'd be good at that kind of thing. I've always been more of a Lovecraft/Noir/X-Files sort of GM, even in my D&D games.

--fje