Let's Talk About Supers RPGs (Especially Ones Good For Cons)

[Reynard]

An oldie but a goodie is Brave New World, if you can find it. It's all low level supers, and essentially it's Savage Worlds for a system.

I LOVE Brave New World in that 90s way. My favorite thing about it was it was the first game I remember where you chose to do cool stuff (stunts? tricks?) AFTER you rolled, rather than the old school punitive mechanics for trying cool stuff. It is pretty dated now and I always have hoped there would be a reboot.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Did you play 2E? Its chargen was much more robust.

Played more of it than 3e (ran two campaigns of it, played in three more); can't say I saw any of the changes in 3e impacting that materially. Some equivelent of all the power modifers were still there, and the Complication system hadn't changed materially. It had gone over to the "use modifiers rather than attributes", but since I saw everyone hit the even numbers anyway, that didn't mean much. I'm really hard pressed to think of anything in 2e (at least in the character generation" I'd call "more robust". Closest I can get is that they had all the separate things that got rolled into Afflictions, but that didn't stop anyone from doing anything with Affliction they'd done with the earlier versions; they just had to go tot he trouble of customizing it (you can question whether some Affliction builds were particularly useful, but that was true about their predecessors, too).

 

[Reynard]

Can you provide some examples? Like I said, I came in for 3e, and while it wasn't HERO it gave a lot of options I thought, especially once you got more books in the line.

I don't have my books in front of me, but what games like Champions and M&M 2E did was make Powers as broad as possible and then pile on modifiers so you could actively build any power you wanted. 3E reduced the number and complexity of modifiers for ease of use, which has its value, but in doing so constrained some creativity.

 

[Reynard]

Played more of it than 3e (ran two campaigns of it, played in three more); can't say I saw any of the changes in 3e impacting that materially. Some equivelent of all the power modifers were still there, and the Complication system hadn't changed materially. It had gone over to the "use modifiers rather than attributes", but since I saw everyone hit the even numbers anyway, that didn't mean much. I'm really hard pressed to think of anything in 2e (at least in the character generation" I'd call "more robust". Closest I can get is that they had all the separate things that got rolled into Afflictions, but that didn't stop anyone from doing anything with Affliction they'd done with the earlier versions; they just had to go tot he trouble of customizing it (you can question whether some Affliction builds were particularly useful, but that was true about their predecessors, too).

I don't know what to tell you. We played A LOT of both and 2E was less versatile in character creation.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't know what to tell you. We played A LOT of both and 2E was less versatile in character creation.

I assume you meant 3e here, but I'll have to go right back about that. Never saw a character I could build in 2e that I couldn't build in 2e to the same level of detail. There just wasn't that much change between 2e and 3e (unlike 1e and 2e). There were a few individual changes that could be visible (Multifire's structure as compared to 2e Autofire, or the decision to ignore the distinction between lethal and non-lethal damage going forward) but most things you couldn't distinguish in 3e weren't such that you could in 2e either (usually because the core mechanic had no way of handling them).

 

[Reynard]

I assume you meant 3e here, but I'll have to go right back about that. Never saw a character I could build in 2e that I couldn't build in 2e to the same level of detail. There just wasn't that much change between 2e and 3e (unlike 1e and 2e). There were a few individual changes that could be visible (Multifire's structure as compared to 2e Autofire, or the decision to ignore the distinction between lethal and non-lethal damage going forward) but most things you couldn't distinguish in 3e weren't such that you could in 2e either (usually because the core mechanic had no way of handling them).

Out of curiosity, were you using Ultimate Power?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Out of curiosity, were you using Ultimate Power?

Yes. I considered Power Profiles a functional replacement for it. In the few cases something didn't port over, it was usually something that had been a bad idea before, at least as expressed.

To be fair, I'll admit I never went through 3e with quite the degree of depth I did 2e (because I only GMed something using it for a short period), but the campaign I played in was primarily occupied by ex-Hero players and others who would have been pretty vocal if they struggled getting the result they wanted.

(Mind you, I ended up by the end of that campaign deciding M&M wasn't an adequate system for me, but most of that had been a very long time coming and had to do with some things I thought were intended to be meaningful decisions in combat that I concluded were illusory after years of play and GMing, and the only thing that made that worse in 3e was the loose and easy handling of GM fiat).