What makes a successful superhero game?

[Thomas Shey]

I’m basing my assessment partially off of actual write ups of published DC, Marvel, and other companies’ superheroes in gaming magazines. I remember Teen Titans, the X-Men and Justice Machine all getting the treatment.

Villains like Dr. Doom & Magneto were over 1000point builds. I’m assuming Supes & Bats would be written with no fewer points than either of those.

And even giving Bats a bunch of skills (& talents) at pretty generous skill levels, you’d still run out of known skills (IOW, ones demonstrated in the comics) before you’d reach Supes’ point totals. And while he’s got a base with a supercomputer & some nifty vehicles, he doesn’t have a network of them like Doom or other arch villains.

And wealth has a pretty generous points to benefit ratio.

But modeling Batman’s insanely resourceful analysis of threats- and what he’d need to combat them- is an absolute build point sinkhole. It’s conceptually open-ended and amorphous; as powerful as you’d care to model it.

This is all a fair argument; a lot of it will depend on what you think he needs in the way of Talents (if any) and how much you tie up in the Batcave and a couple of the vehicles (if you're basing the Batplane on the DCAU version its pretty punchy).

(I'm betting that Magneto build was inefficient as heck, though; he's one of those characters who can get a lot of value out of a multipower or a VPP without going nuts).

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

This is all a fair argument; a lot of it will depend on what you think he needs in the way of Talents (if any) and how much you tie up in the Batcave and a couple of the vehicles (if you're basing the Batplane on the DCAU version its pretty punchy).

(I'm betting that Magneto build was inefficient as heck, though; he's one of those characters who can get a lot of value out of a multipower or a VPP without going nuts).

If memory serves, the Magneto writeup may have been before the VPP was added to the game, so yes, inefficient compared to how a skilled player would model him in the later editions.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah I think that actually was kind of true of lot of 1980s and 1990s, if you really looked at the math, many choices in combat were just either:

A) Objectively a bad idea - i.e. simply does less damage than normal or is an obviously bad trade-off mechanically (like a big penalty to hit in a game where hitting is hard, for a small damage bonus).

or

B) Very nearly meaningless in practice (usually trade-offs that sounded like a big deal but almost no difference).

or the particularly hilarious

C) Obviously the best option, no comparison, and in certain combat situations people will just take it repeatedly, over and over

Yup; in M&M, you also ran into some of the ways some offensive abilities interacted with Hero Points and GM Fiat. In practice after running two and playing in three fairly lengthy M&M campaigns, it became abundantly clear the best thing to do most of the time was just hammer away with damage, maybe with some Power Attack thrown in. A lot of other things looked good on paper but actually just ended up being a waste of time most of the time.

I remember C-type situations coming up in Rifts a lot. Indeed one should-have-been-titanic duel in Rifts rapidly became very boring because the player realized if he just picked "simultaneous strike" (or something like that), because their PC had slightly more MD than than the antagonist (or regened it or something, I forget), they'd mathematically definitely win, there was basically no way for them not to apart from really bad damage rolls (which was incredibly unlikely, and indeed, didn't happen). So we had like to sit there whilst essentially just rolled the same attack over and over. The DM initially tried some stuff, then realized his best chance was also spamming the same attack and just hoping he got slightly better damage rolls! (He didn't succeed).

Yeah, similar sort of problem. Steve Kenson was and is a good designer, but I just don't think some of the ways revealed preference in how things tended to play out were things he could see or showed up so visibly even across multiple editions that he realized quite the implications of them. Like I said it took multiple campaigns for me to do so (and probably telling, only really did so when it became obvious as a player in a campaign I otherwise enjoyed).

 

[Thomas Shey]

If memory serves, the Magneto writeup may have been before the VPP was added to the game, so yes, inefficient compared to how a skilled player would model him in the later editions.

There's always been a tendency with NPC writeups to just write down whatever and ignore perfectly functional build constructs that any actual player trying for the effect would do. Anytime I ever saw a Hero (or even M&M far as that goes) character with multiple full cost offensive powers on them, I knew someone just couldn't be arsed.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

There's always been a tendency with NPC writeups to just write down whatever and ignore perfectly functional build constructs that any actual player trying for the effect would do. Anytime I ever saw a Hero (or even M&M far as that goes) character with multiple full cost offensive powers on them, I knew someone just couldn't be arsed.

I remember a long-ago thread on maybe Shadowland.org or something (so like, probably 1997 or something) where people had to try and make HERO versions of major comics characters on a strict budget actually showed off some really cool build ideas as a result of the inverse of this.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I always looked at HERO NPC write-ups as “one person’s” version of a character, to be mined for ideas; rarely used as-is. Because- let’s be honest- in a system like HERO, you can model individual powers in dozens of ways. The main limiting factors are your imagination and the GM’s points cap.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I always looked at HERO NPC write-ups as “one person’s” version of a character, to be mined for ideas; rarely used as-is. Because- let’s be honest- in a system like HERO, you can model individual powers in dozens of ways. The main limiting factors are your imagination and the GM’s points cap.

Yeah, as I referenced earlier, you saw a lot of this with representing speedsters; the simple, stupid and over-expensive way to do some of it was to throw a bunch of Speed at them, but as Ruin Explorer refenced above, that didn't actually represent the way you saw them work in most of the source material, so there were a lot of other ways to go about them, and you'd see a great degree of variation.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Yeah, as I referenced earlier, you saw a lot of this with representing speedsters; the simple, stupid and over-expensive way to do some of it was to throw a bunch of Speed at them, but as Ruin Explorer refenced above, that didn't actually represent the way you saw them work in most of the source material, so there were a lot of other ways to go about them, and you'd see a great degree of variation.

Simply throwing big points into SPEED would be a pretty good way to model certain speedsters. You know, the ones who might be able to run as fast as a race car, but not much beyond that. They’ll be pretty good at taking down mundane opponents, and confounding other supers would still be part of their shtick. They’d probably have other, non-speed tricks up their sleeves, though. (I always liked adding conventional weapons or martial arts to PCs like this.)

But the SUPER super speedsters? The faster the speedster, the more you need to delve into things like Autofore and/or AoE attacks, heat attacks (via friction or molecular agitation), running on vertical or liquid surfaces, sonic boom stunts, multiple locations/images, high defense bonuses (probably based on perception) and so on.