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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jian" data-source="post: 9732954" data-attributes="member: 78087">Part of the problem is that the superhero genre is actually very, very broad and narratively variable, so what the rules of reality are depend heavily on the genre. A JLA game is quite different from an X-Men game which is very different from Invincible which is extremely different from Young Heroes in Love, despite superficial similarities.I’m in the camp that says point-buy power balancing is almost entirely a waste of time. Yes, your character can bench press the Moon, but how much can she affect the story with her biceps? That’s much more important. Will she flatten any NPC or PC 90% of the time? Can she deal with obstacles more easily than any other PC? Is the campaign more about relationships, personal growth, or the nature of heroism than who can beat whom in a big fight?One thing I think now is absolutely essential for superhero (emphasis on the hero) games is that there should be good fun mechanical support for actual heroics - saving people, rescuing people, natural disasters, saving the city. That should be absolutely front and centre in the system, more so than combat, in any superhero game, and not just sidelined to Chapter 11: Natural Disasters and the Grappling Rules. You honestly don’t see this a lot and I’ve usually made up my own rules most of the time. Icons isn’t bad and I’ve been quite inspired by the Danger Patrol (not superhero but an excellent system for escalating danger). (For instance: we’re currently running an X-Men game set in 1995, using MSH. In the last session, the PCs (directed by Destiny, who in this universe is a blind billionaire and the patron in the chair) had to deal with the appearance of “Magneto” (actual identity unrevealed) whom they knew would appear at a Sentinel publicity festival in San Francisco. The resulting battle between Magneto and the Sentinels would kill hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent bystanders since neither side would give any f*cks about collateral damage and friendly fire. The PCs therefore had to spend the first few rounds saving lives while diverting the battle away from the crowd before they could engage the bad guys meaningfully. There were a lot of big hero moments - catching thrown boats and buses, pulling kids out of the way of plasma blasts, the brick tanking a laser beam head-on to protect others despite not having enough invulnerability to do so - and they all needed good rules, which I mostly improvised.)</blockquote>

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