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.