Superhero RPG that is not about wizards

[erik]

I expect Spider-Man would sate Galactus’ hunger with some individually wrapped pie pasteries.

[kzt]

Hero scales reasonably well from 150-200 point characters to 450 point characters. The issue that you get at the high end is that people whose characters went from 250pt characters to 400pt characters are usually built very different than people who built a 400 pt character or even a 350 pt character plus 50 xp.

There are concepts that just don't work at 250 that work fine at 350. The base attack people building a new 400 point character will often be a lot higher than a character improved with XP from much lower.

[Username17]

I just don't understand how you make a supers game that isn't even going to try to model the Avengers team from the movie.

There is absolutely no way that any supers game is ever going to model the Avengers team from the movie. That team has Hulk and Hawkeye on it. The only way you could have those characters be on the same team in a game is to somehow make the powers be completely irrelevant. Like, if you made the entire game revolve around social interactions around shared living space like that Robot Chicken series.

RPGs are different from movies or comic books, and one of the main ways they are different is that you have co-equal protagonists in an RPG. That's very rare in other mediums. Most ensemble protagonists you'd care to mention have primary, secondary, and tertiary protagonists. Bones is a "main character" in Star Trek, but we all know that Kirk and Spock are more important. In a role playing game Captain America and Thor have to be equals. They have to be, because it's a core conceit of the medium.

Spider-Man fights regular criminals with regular guns while the Hulk is a ten-foot tall kaiju. And yet, when Hulk and Spidey fight, Hulk's advantage doesn't seem any more significant than the big bruisers in Spidey's own rogues gallery, guys like Rhino. Hero vs. hero fights don't have the prerequisite that the hero always win in the end the way hero vs. villain fights do, so the Hulk does better against Spider-Man than the Rhino, but it's not nearly as one-sided as you'd expect given the vast difference between their standard adversaries.

All of this is wrong. It's just totally fucking irrelevant, because things in an RPG don't work that way. There are comics and movies and shit where things work like that, and ones where they don't. But in a cooperative storytelling game, things don't change power level depending on the needs of the plot. Hulk fights armies and Spiderman doesn't and in a head to head fight, Hulk turns Spiderman into a sticky paste.

Plot armor doesn't exist in an RPG because there is no plot.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

All of this is wrong. It's just totally fucking irrelevant, because things in an RPG don't work that way. There are comics and movies and shit where things work like that, and ones where they don't.

You should probably finish reading posts before you respond to them:

The source material is useless in figuring out how high the power needs to scale, because the source materials power scale is bonkers.

Like, the entire point of my post is that we can't use the source materials' power scale as a guideline because it doesn't work for RPGs at all, and we can justify any of the advancement schemes proposed by drawing on different interpretations of the same sources.

[deaddmwalking]

Frank (like many Denners) has a tendency to take a valid point straight into crazy land.

Clearly you want a game that can provide as broad support as possible for both 'low level concepts' and 'high level concepts'. Just as clearly, there is some point where you stop caring about the mechanics as levels below your floor and you stop caring about mechanics above your ceiling. In 3.x, normal mosquitoes literally pose no threat even though in 2018, they caused millions of real deaths. It's just not possible to use the same system to model mosquitoes, normal humans, all the way up to Superman. Or at least, probably not - if it is possible it's still not WORTH doing that way.

So once you accept you're going to set a floor and you're going to set a ceiling, and you're going to try to build a system that fits all the concepts in between, there are a few people that are going to be upset - they want the floor lower or the ceiling higher. It's true in 3.x (0-level characters/epic levels), and it'll be true in Superheroes. It's also not completely impossible to use the same system for Hawkeye and Thor, bearing in mind that Thor is going to destroy Hawkeye. Like, tiers are totally a thing you can do; when attacking a tier BELOW yours, you could add +TEXAS and when fighting someone ABOVE your tier, you could subtract -TEXAS from the rolls - as long as you're on the same tier as your peers/opponents, the system will work fine.

But even then, there is going to be a place where you stop caring/modeling. If you support planet-eating baddies, you probably won't also care to keep going to galaxy-eating baddies...

[Username17]

Like, the entire point of my post is that we can't use the source materials' power scale as a guideline because it doesn't work for RPGs at all, and we can justify any of the advancement schemes proposed by drawing on different interpretations of the same sources.

I get the point you're trying to make, it's just wrong. You can use source material power declarations. It's just that due to the medium, those declarations become fixed in an RPG where in comics or movies those declarations are subject to revision at any time.

The translation to game numbers is one-way, and once something has made that transition it no longer has the property of vagueness that other mediums have. In Spiderman Homecoming, Peter Parker strains mightily to lift a bunch of rocks that are considerably less force than the boat he was holding together with mere discomfort earlier in the film. But in an RPG, Spiderman would have a strength value and the amount of lifting he could do would be pretty much fixed. Having established a strength sufficient to hold up half a ferry, lifting a concrete slab from the factory would be simply a known quantity of a task that the player could declare without further die rolls or justification.

I really want to rant about how Homecoming was a disappointing movie right now, but it's kind of off topic.

But it's not that power comparisons from source material don't mean anything when translating to RPGs. Quite the opposite. They have far greater meaning in RPGs because "the needs of the plot" do not allow future authors to ignore those power comparisons later on. Things get translated to numbers, and those numbers have persistent meaning.

Which of course is precisely why the approachable power scale is so limited. You can't have Hulk take a nuclear weapon to the face in one scene and then flinch from Daredevil's punch in another. Once you've established a toughness value for Hulk, he persistently has that toughness value. And that's why covering Huntress and Powergirl in the same system is so difficult and unsatisfying - because once a weapon is converted to game mechanics it isn't going to do different amounts of damage when pointed at Huntress or Powergirl - a weapon capable of making Powergirl care is going to turn Huntress into a grease spot.

Watchmen was a deconstruction of the genre, but the part where Dr. Manhattan casually vaporizes Rorschach is pretty much how things go in the medium of RPGs if you allow that kind of power disparity to exist.

In your mind, what are the top and bottom of the scale at which you would bother trying to handle superheroes?

In my mind, I think the target should be roughly the Young Justice cartoon show. Where characters have real and visible and impressive powers, but there's still room to be a martial artist detective with explosive arrows. That the bottom end of power would probably be Netflix Daredevil with the top end of the power scale being DCAU Blue Beetle or maybe a little less than that.

You keep track of hit points for individual thugs because player characters can and do use attacks that can fail to incapacitate normal thugs. You have access to super strength and super speed and stuff, but none of the super toughness goes high enough to "no longer caring what mooks do at all."

-Username17

[Dogbert]

But in a supers game, a guy with a gun is the equivalent of a goblin. We've seen numerous games where opposition starts at the level of goblins and ends at the level of dragons.

Except superheroes aren't dnd or animu. Superhero narratives aren't zero-to-hero. Even in superhero-related media (tv, movies) where they insist on starting with the trite origin story every time, the hero doesn't have "levels," their powers are fixed on a specific tier and stay there. You'll never see Barbara Gordon in fisticuffs with Parallax (barring Zero Hour comical interludes when all Hal does is snapping her back again).

All a superhero needs to care about is the threat range within their respective tier. The Spoiler cares about threats from "single mugger" to "gangster with a gimmick." Batman cares about threats from "super criminals" to "global conspiracy." Captain America cares about threats from "platoon of terrorists with years of combat experience under their belt" to "Red Skull is going to use the Cosmic Cube to make remake the world in Hydra's image." Doctor Strange cares about threats from "Doctor Doom is running for Sorcerer Supreme this year again" to "YOU'VEGOTTOBEFUCKINGKIDDINGME."

Needless to say, Doctor Strange doesn't care for muggers, they're invisible to him (or rather, he may care, but they don't make for an interesting comic and marvel needs to make good on the money you're paying ComiXology, so they don't feature).

Now, Avengers only works on passive media because in tabletop that's just a huge trap. Sure, we all have had at the table the "myopic gamer with no memory" who insists on playing Hawkeye... and hopefully you'll remember how the same guy starts bitching right away the moment he realizes he has no reason to even be there because Hulk and Thor are carrying the whole battle and Iron-Man's player is busy pulling a fast one on the GM with Stark's wide-range agency while he can't even do his tiny schtick because he just ran out of arrows and no amount of muggle spy skills will help him out-do the BBEG with the Infinity Gauntlet.

As comical as it may seem to watch Myopic Gamer With No Memory trip over the same stone time and time again, it's cruel, and letting him do that to himself every time is a dick move. Let's not be dick GMs and just either split the game in tiers or just limit your game's scope.

[deaddmwalking]

I just don't understand how you make a supers game that isn't even going to try to model the Avengers team from the movie.

But in a supers game, a guy with a gun is the equivalent of a goblin. We've seen numerous games where opposition starts at the level of goblins and ends at the level of dragons.

As comical as it may seem to watch Myopic Gamer With No Memory trip over the same stone time and time again, it's cruel, and letting him do that to himself every time is a dick move. Let's not be dick GMs and just either split the game in tiers or just limit your game's scope.

From the original quote above that Frank responded to and you seem to be responding to, I took it differently than you appear to be. I took it to mean that the rules should support at minimum a range with Hawkeye on the bottom and Vision on the top.

Obviously it would be bad to make one player suck while one player gets to be awesome, but a party of Hawkeye/Blackwidow tier characters in one campaign and a tier of Ironman/Thor characters in another should work with the same rules-set, just like 3rd level D&D and 11th level D&D basically work on different tiers.

Now, if Captain Comics instead meant that he really wants to see people play the cast of Avengers in the same table top game (which would be dumb), he can clarify for himself, but that's really not the way I took it.

[Chamomile]

I get the point you're trying to make, it's just wrong.

You keep saying things like this, and then go on to agree strenuously with me. Like, here's your latest thesis statement:

You can use source material power declarations. It's just that due to the medium, those declarations become fixed in an RPG where in comics or movies those declarations are subject to revision at any time.

Apparently you think this is somehow a counterpoint. But, no, that is the thing that I was saying in the first place. Still. I don't know how many ways I can rephrase "the source material's power scale is completely inconsistent, so we can declare whatever power scale we want and there will be source material backing us up" before you stop thinking that...I honestly don't even know what position you're trying to ascribe to me, actually, because all you do is say "that's wrong!" and then go on to explain why I am right, without ever making any statement about my actual argument that might shed some light and what you think it is.

[Mask_De_H]

I get the point you're trying to make, it's just wrong.

You keep saying things like this, and then go on to agree strenuously with me. Like, here's your latest thesis statement:

You can use source material power declarations. It's just that due to the medium, those declarations become fixed in an RPG where in comics or movies those declarations are subject to revision at any time.

Apparently you think this is somehow a counterpoint. But, no, that is the thing that I was saying in the first place. Still. I don't know how many ways I can rephrase "the source material's power scale is completely inconsistent, so we can declare whatever power scale we want and there will be source material backing us up" before you stop thinking that...I honestly don't even know what position you're trying to ascribe to me, actually, because all you do is say "that's wrong!" and then go on to explain why I am right, without ever making any statement about my actual argument that might shed some light and what you think it is.

I'm assuming Frank assumes your position is "because the source material's power scale is completely inconsistent, we can declare any singular character can have any power scale we want." The thesis that comic power levels are bullshit is pretty obvious, so Frank's extrapolating more from you.

[jt]

If you want to handle wacky inconsistent power scales, you can peg everyone's powers relative to a scene power level. So the Hulk is always +4 Tough, which if we're fighting a military group means he doesn't notice bullets and is briefly slowed down by grenade launchers, but if we're fighting Unicron it means ignoring missiles and getting briefly slowed down by someone throwing an asteroid at him. Meanwhile Spiderman is only +1 Tough because that's not his primary shtick, and he's deeply inconvenienced by the guns and missiles, and would wake up in a pile of rubble next scene if he got hit by the grenade launcher or asteroids. All of this even though space missiles are probably actually stronger than a grenade launcher.

And this is probably more true to the material. The Hulk is always stronger than Spiderman if they appear in the same context, but if you go cherrypicking I expect you can find Spiderman lifting something the Hulk had trouble with in some other scene.

[CaptainComics]

From the original quote above that Frank responded to and you seem to be responding to, I took it differently than you appear to be. I took it to mean that the rules should support at minimum a range with Hawkeye on the bottom and Vision on the top.

Obviously it would be bad to make one player suck while one player gets to be awesome, but a party of Hawkeye/Blackwidow tier characters in one campaign and a tier of Ironman/Thor characters in another should work with the same rules-set, just like 3rd level D&D and 11th level D&D basically work on different tiers.

Now, if Captain Comics instead meant that he really wants to see people play the cast of Avengers in the same table top game (which would be dumb), he can clarify for himself, but that's really not the way I took it.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. The cast of the Avengers movie IS the range of viable characters in a functional supers game. They are NOT the PARTY of any particular game.

Somebody's favorite Avenger is Black Widow. They want to play a game where they can be Black Widow, and when they are invited to play a supers game, that is what they expect to be able to play. Likewise, somebody expects to play as Thor. If they're at the same table, one or the other of them should compromise so that the party can work, but to tell them that they need to find a different super hero game because one or the other is out of scope is going to confuse people, because they're both Avengers and they were in the same damn movie. But if you tell people that Black Widow is a level 7 Avenger and the Hulk is a level 12 Avenger, and we're sitting down to play a level 10 game, people will understand what you're talking about and pitch appropriate character concepts with a minimum of argument. And then they can all team up and fight the Hulk who's rampaging through the city, because an individual antagonist can be individually more powerful than any one party member and still have the party come out on top. The Hulk isn't a PC, but you can use the PC sheet to run him as an antagonist.

There is absolutely no way that any supers game is ever going to model the Avengers team from the movie.

See, here's what I don't understand. Every supers game I've ever played has claimed to model exactly that. None of them encourage you to run that PARTY, but they publish stats for Hawkeye and they publish stats for the Hulk and when you play the game with either character the game is exactly as playable. As far as I can tell, this has been done successfully numerous times.

So let me ask this - what is it about, say, the Champions approach (or whichever supers game you're most familiar with) that is sufficiently unsatisfying to you that you believe this to be impossible?

Superhero narratives aren't zero-to-hero. Even in superhero-related media (tv, movies) where they insist on starting with the trite origin story every time, the hero doesn't have "levels," their powers are fixed on a specific tier and stay there.

I agree, superhero narratives are not generally zero-to-hero. I'm not suggesting that Green Arrow needs to eventually digivolve into Green Lantern. I'm suggesting that Green Arrow is level 3 and Green Lantern is level 10.

Just because a system has levels doesn't mean that the player characters are expected to gain or lose those levels. I'm suggesting that the game identifies those levels or tiers and accurately places characters in them based on their level of power, and then when you start a campaign you decide how super you want to be and go from there.

[kzt]

See, here's what I don't understand. Every supers game I've ever played has claimed to model exactly that. None of them encourage you to run that PARTY, but they publish stats for Hawkeye and they publish stats for the Hulk and when you play the game with either character the game is exactly as playable. As far as I can tell, this has been done successfully numerous times.

So let me ask this - what is it about, say, the Champions approach (or whichever supers game you're most familiar with) that is sufficiently unsatisfying to you that you believe this to be impossible?

When Hawkeye is standing next to Hulk or Thor and someone drops something on them capable of injuring Thor or Hulk guess what happens? Hawkeye gets crushed like a bug under 5000 tons of concrete. Hulk takes minor damage and walks out.

The basic problem is that once you set the numbers that says that x amount of damage is required to hurt hulk, and x is 15 times the damage that kills a normal person like hawkeye dead then any attack that is directed at hulk will kill hawkeye dead if it hits him. Hence anyone who is capable of fighting hulk can erase hawkeye without any trouble. Anyone who can take an punch from hulk is immune to virtually anything that hawkeye can inflict on his best day. And if Hawkeye causes him any issues he can simple kill hawkeye.

[Chamomile]

I'm assuming Frank assumes your position is "because the source material's power scale is completely inconsistent, we can declare any singular character can have any power scale we want." The thesis that comic power levels are bullshit is pretty obvious, so Frank's extrapolating more from you.

If you Google for "who would win in a fight, [heroX] or [heroY]," the responses are not usually "whichever one you want, because the scale of their abilities is completely inconsistent." In fact, if you specifically Google the Spider-Man vs. Hulk example, you'll get people saying that Hulk would totally crush Spider-Man, even though that fight has actually happened twice and in neither case was Spidey completely flattened. In their first encounter, Spidey seemed to consider it an accomplishment that he'd staggered the Hulk, but he did it. He was batting in the same league, even though those half-dozen bank robbers with pistols and the entire platoon armed with grenade launchers are definitely not. I don't know if there's anyone in this thread who needs to be convinced of that, but they definitely exist at all, so when jt brought up whether we should do zero-to-hero or static tiers or what, I wanted to establish from the start that this is purely a question of what we want to do because the source material has nothing coherent to say on the subject.

[Korwin]

See, here's what I don't understand. Every supers game I've ever played has claimed to model exactly that. None of them encourage you to run that PARTY, but they publish stats for Hawkeye and they publish stats for the Hulk and when you play the game with either character the game is exactly as playable. As far as I can tell, this has been done successfully numerous times.

So let me ask this - what is it about, say, the Champions approach (or whichever supers game you're most familiar with) that is sufficiently unsatisfying to you that you believe this to be impossible?

When Hawkeye is standing next to Hulk or Thor and someone drops something on them capable of injuring Thor or Hulk guess what happens? Hawkeye gets crushed like a bug under 5000 tons of concrete. Hulk takes minor damage and walks out.

The basic problem is that once you set the numbers that says that x amount of damage is required to hurt hulk, and x is 15 times the damage that kills a normal person like hawkeye dead then any attack that is directed at hulk will kill hawkeye dead if it hits him. Hence anyone who is capable of fighting hulk can erase hawkeye without any trouble. Anyone who can take an punch from hulk is immune to virtually anything that hawkeye can inflict on his best day. And if Hawkeye causes him any issues he can simple kill hawkeye.

He said multiple times, he does not want them in the same Party, but in the same game.
So the Player is playing Hulk and in this Situation the NSC Hawkeye goes into meatpaste . End of Story.

[Dogbert]

If you want to handle wacky inconsistent power scales, you can peg everyone's powers relative to a scene power level.

If I remember right, that's how Marge Weiss' marvel heroes game worked... now, if only the game hadn't operated on Cortex or at least the scenarios had stuck with "Squirrel Girl to Spider-Man" levels, the game would have felt lots more satisfactory (or not, since just like the original Marvel Heroes game, it operated on the same "Marvel Diablo" model, but that's just my not-cup-of-tea, other people probably liked it better).

In any case, if you're into that and don't mind MTP (because there's no mechanics for powers altogether, it rather operates on HeroQuest logic where you just name a skill "POWERS" and every check is for "I solve problem X with POWERS"), then there may lie your answer.

[Username17]

See, here's what I don't understand. Every supers game I've ever played has claimed to model exactly that. None of them encourage you to run that PARTY, but they publish stats for Hawkeye and they publish stats for the Hulk and when you play the game with either character the game is exactly as playable. As far as I can tell, this has been done successfully numerous times.

This hasn't really been done successfully ever. In Champions, "Human Strength" is anyone who can lift 100kg, and you don't do meaningfully more damage until you can lift twice or four times that. The fact that Hawkeye is a "pretty strong guy" is completely hidden by the strength scale. In champions, attacks have "knockback" where they track how many two meter hexes a character is thrown after being struck - clearly a fucking irrelevant question to ask anytime Hawkeye shoots an arrow or from any attack that would reasonably be directed at Hawkeye. On the other hand, these questions are of vital importance to Hulk and enemies capable of fighting Hulk.

Champions delivers on Hulk Fights pretty well. It can tell you what happens when Hulk picks up a car and throws it thirty meters to smash into a dude and it can tell you what happens when Hulk punches an opponent through a wall. Those are important points of the simulation for Hulk smashing. But they are not meaningful questions for Hawkeye and Hawkeye related adventures. For Hawkeye I'd rather have a semi-decent Stealth system (completely absent from Champions) or a combat system that meaningfully differentiates between arrows and bullets (which Champions does not) or a scale of strength where Hawkeye can be meaningfully stronger than Mockingbird (something Champions does not deliver on at all).

A player who wanted to play Hawkeye would be better served playing 4th edition Shadowrun or 1st edition Feng Shui than Champions. You can use the Champions points system to create a facsimile of Hawkeye because it's a universal system that can produce some kind of representation of anything. But it doesn't do it particularly well.

You can use pretty much any game system to run pretty much any set of characters. And in the 1980s, people thought that this was a profound point and you should try to make a system flexible enough to do everything. And we were wrong. GURPS and Champions deliver on being able to assign point costs to theoretically anything, but they do not deliver on being a particularly satisfying game for many characters and genres. Spy HERO is actually pretty terrible and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

-Username17

[LR]

Is this something that could be covered by troupe play?

If you're making a X-Mansion or MHA Classroom of characters, then it seems like there are going to be characters like Storm or Magneto who are Hulk-level threats, characters like Gambit or Beast who can throw down with Spider-Man without leaving the city in ruins, and characters like Mystique or Shadowcat who might as well be noncombatants in Supers fights but are incredibly good at infiltration mission when normal humans are involved. The disparity of the World's Finest scenario doesn't need to be a problem if Batman and Superman are played by the same person.

Of course, that would mean you'd either need separate systems for those levels of play, or you'd just abstract combat out entirely at the low 'basically human' end and scale from 'can lift and throw a car' to 'can lift and throw an oil tanker'.

[Username17]

Is this something that could be covered by troupe play?

Not really, no.

There's several issues with scope and scale, and while they are related, they are not the same. So the most obvious issue is one of apprpriate challenges. You have a meteor hurtling towards the Earth and you have an armed robber trying to take some college student's purse at knife point. Those are both problems, but your typical masked avenger can't do shit about the first one and your typical demi-god isn't taxed or strained by the latter.

There are lots of answers to appropriate challenges. You can have high threat areas and low threat areas where Gotham has gut toting criminals and Metropolis has Intergang armed with super weapons from Apokalips. You can have superhero dispatch offices that send demigods to fight kaiju and masked avengers to fight extortion rackets. Or you could just handwave the issue away and say that Superman is on a mission in space any time anyone asks why he doesn't solve whatever problem is vexing Nightwing at the moment.

But the much bigger issue is one of appropriate mechanics. Shadowrun is a shit system for dealing with anyone who has the strength of twenty men. Champions is a shit system for dealing with conflicts between people who have normal human strength. A demi-god wants to be in a rule system where there is a robust subsystem for picking up and throwing cars. A masked avenger wants to be in a system where the strength difference between a dedicated reporter and a big chinned street thug is significant.

It's all very well to say that Wonderwoman is on a mission in space and can't solve your problems at the moment, but that still doesn't answer the question of why we'd want to sacrifice mechanical resolution for important events in the tier we are playing in to get better mechanical coverage of Wonderwoman's super strength. She's not even fucking here, she's on a mission in space! Why are we seriously suggesting making sacrifices to the mechanical ability to simulate the actions of characters who are relevant to the story in order to better handle the actions of characters who are not? That's a totally insane thing to do.

-Username17

[Hicks]

So the thing in Ars Magica Troup play is that your super powerful wizard, who could wave their hands and pull a fortress up out of the ground or set everybody on fire with their mind, can still be skewered with a pointy stick, not to mention made to be a wizardry pincushion for a fullsilade of arrows. Because at the end of the day, your wizard is like a dude who *could* do magic *if* their turn comes up, but in an ambush of like 10ish bandits iterative probability means it is more likely that the bandit will go first and skewer your magic dude, because your magic dude is still *just a dude*. And a troupe of Companions with a squad of Grogs is more likely to have someone who takes their turn earlier than the wizard, just by the natural distribution of interative rolls for initiative, who can charge into the ambush and be a more immidieate and present threat so as to spoil them focusing down your wizard dude.

None of that works if your wizard dude doesn't care about kenetic damage less than a tank round or is so super fast that they *always go first*.

The Hawkeye by definition does not get abilities as good as The Hulk. They aren't stronger, faster, tougher, or.... anything on Hulk's level. But the crazy thing is for all the people saying BMX bandit *could and should* be in a party with Angel Summoners that we *already* have extensive playtesting of playing Hawkeye in a party of Hulk, Dr. Strange, and Flash: being a 3.0 and 3.5 Monk in a party with druids, clerics, and wizards. And being on the short end of that sucks .

[echoVanguard]

You can't have Hulk take a nuclear weapon to the face in one scene and then flinch from Daredevil's punch in another.

Daredevil feinted first.

echo

[deaddmwalking]

But the crazy thing is for all the people saying BMX bandit *could and should* be in a party with Angel Summoners that we *already* have extensive playtesting of playing Hawkeye in a party of Hulk, Dr. Strange, and Flash: being a 3.0 and 3.5 Monk in a party with druids, clerics, and wizards. And being on the short end of that sucks .

Nobody HERE is saying that.

Clearly, there is a floor for powers you care about and clearly there is a ceiling for powers you care about - it's now arguing where those are. 'Guy with a gun' is super-relevant in a lot of superhero stories. Even 'smart guy with no physical abilities OR A GUN' can be important, and that's in SUPERMAN comics. Like, obviously they'd matter more in Daredevil comics (and therefore games designed around that power level).

Frank saying that you shouldn't sacrifice mechanical function to support games you're not playing is true, but it isn't PROVEN that you can't use the same rules for low-powered supers versus high-powered supers. D&D already does something similar with low-level characters compared to high-level characters.

Point-based systems tend to be abusable - if you spend your points entirely on attacks you may be able to wreck level-appropriate enemies if you go first, but you won't survive if you don't. If you spend your points on defense, you aren't threatened by level-appropriate enemies, but you also don't have a way of OVERCOMING them. Ensuring you spend your points appropriately within a relatively narrow band is effectively what 3.x levels do - you get a bunch of level-appropriate abilities and you get to pick some flavor options that are appropriate. 3.x isn't perfect - monks are lame and wizards have ultimate power, but assuming your supers interact as 'near equal' at those levels should work.

As far as how you solve the problem, there are a number of ways you could approach it. You could use some type of ranking or allocation of points across 'attack/defense/utility/sensory/speed'. Someone like Spiderman could be relatively balanced across those while Hulk dumped everything but attack/defense. Whether that WORKS for a party may depend on the game - having the Hulk outshine Batman when the fisticuffs start isn't necessarily a problem if Batman can pull solutions out of his Bat-Belt outside of combat. If it IS, there can be some type of agreement as far as how those rank and/or how you allocate points. And of course, you can have tiers or ranks that mean you can use the same game for higher level supers but when they go against lower-level supers, they just destroy them.

It's also worth noting that because this is a game, you CAN give out plot-armor. Fate points/Action points/Mulligans/Miraculous Survivals can actually be written into the rules and used by players at appropriate times. If you're Bruce Banner and a comet is going to strike the Earth, whether it is Hawkeye or a random civilian, there's the whole 'throwing my body over them to protect them', and it doesn't really matter if that's an ability the bystander triggered or the super activated. Outside of really dumb recent Superman movies, saving bystanders is kinda important...

[nockermensch]

The hole on Frank's logic is to treat every RPG as a physics simulation game. He can't imagine Hulk and Spiderman fighting "in a RPG" because when you assign a Strength value to Hulk and this strength is tied to physics based damage (where things have hit points, for example), then it must follow that Hulk redmists Spiderman if he lands a punch for real.

But if you decide you want to simulate the narrative conventions of a genre, then you'll find out that Hulk has actually the same narrative weight as Spiderman, or Jubilee or whoever else has been drafted to that ensemble team.

Such a game shouldn't worry about how many tons Hulk can lift and throw, but have extensive rules about the need to develop plots that cater to everybody on the team, to keep the spotlight moving between the players, and the such.

[deaddmwalking]

To be fair, a certain amount of 'the game' is a consensus about what is and is not possible. If the Hulk throws a 200 ton (400,000 pound) railroad engine 1/2 a mile in one scene, it wouldn't make sense that he can't pick up a 4 ton heavy pickup truck and throw it just as far the next scene.

It is important to be able to define what a character can do.

Now, it is OKAY to define the Hulk's fists as crushing anything of 'normal human' into a fine mist of atoms without simultaneously defining it as doing the same to Spiderman (or even Hawkeye) - if either happened in a comic or a movie, I'd expect them both to survive - even if the way it happened was amazingly contrived. As long as that 'makes sense' based on how the game has defined Hawkeye and his abilities, it doesn't matter that there are some people that don't die the moment the Hulk touches.

It ends up being like Worf - he's strong by definition, so even though he loses every fight, it establishes that the opponent is EVEN STRONGER. So the Hulk does need to be consistent in his ability to throw heavy objects, but there doesn't even need to APPEAR to be consistency in which enemies are obliterated and which ones survive a direct punch - clearly if you survive you have SOME SPECIAL POWER that makes it possible.

[Username17]

The hole on Frank's logic is to treat every RPG as a physics simulation game. He can't imagine Hulk and Spiderman fighting "in a RPG" because when you assign a Strength value to Hulk and this strength is tied to physics based damage (where things have hit points, for example), then it must follow that Hulk redmists Spiderman if he lands a punch for real.

Hulk must redmist Spiderman for real because conflicts in a cooperative storytelling game are resolved impartially. Hulk won't redmist Spiderman in a comic with a single author or a movie with a single author because the author wants both characters to continue existing. In a cooperative storytelling game, Hulk and Spiderman are being written by different people, and they each desire a victory for the character they are writing about.

Hulk has objective powers and when other people are subjected to an impartial adjudicator with regards to Hulk punching them it does not go well for them. The RPG needs impartial adjudications, and because of that, Hulk is going to redmist Spiderman. It's simply how things work in the medium.

Note: you can have computer "role playing games" where there actually aren't multiple contributing authors in a meaningful way. And in those you can go ahead and have "genre conventions" or some shit kick the simulation to the curb. But in a cooperative storytelling game, that is not an option.

-Username17