Supers Thought Experiment - Does System Matter?

One aspect of the supers RPG market that I've been commenting on for a while is that there is a dearth of "focused" games, unlike the fantasy market. Fantasy gamers know that D&D is going to offer a very different experience than Runequest, which is in turn different from Warhammer, and that one shouldn't use D&D to capture the feel and tone of Warhammer, and vice versa. No comments on which is a mechanically superior system, as they are aiming for very different things.

In contrast, until recently the Supers market has been dominated by systems that claim to do all sorts of Supers equally well - they can handle Heroes for Hire and the Avengers, Dark Knight style Batman and the Justice League, Tom Strong and the Authority all with equal ease. In my experience, this is hogwash, and while I have played enough supers systems that I could say that I know for sure, I want to do a little experiment: taking a single character from a finished campaign and seeing how he looks in every major system I can. How do the mechanics of the system shape the character, what he can do and how he might be played. I am hopeful that some of the other supers gurus reading this - whswhs wrote GURPS Supers, Chadu wrote Truth and Justice, mnemex was a playtester for Marvel Diceless, Cambias wrote for Hero, and whoever else has a preferred system - might take their hand at translating the character to their preferred system, but if not I'll go it alone.

The character is Dr. Zachary Zevon, the Indestructible Man, the Smartest Man on Mars, from Dan Harvey's defunct Liberty League PBEM. Dr. Z is the leader and Reed Richards analogue of a team of adventurers and explorers who gained their powers over kinetic energy via a failed attempt to recreate the Philadelphia Experiment (the offshoot technology of which was what made Martian colonization after WWII possible - the game took place in New Philadelphia on Mars). His particular power is projecting invisible force fields, which he uses to give the world the false impression that he is personally invulnerable and superhumanly strong. His force fields are highly versatile, and he also has an array of personal inventions that he carries with him on missions.

 

 

 

( Here's how Dr. Z looked in V&V  )

As you can see, Dr. Z has 4 Powers, 3 of which are the less potent "skills" in V&V - out of a possible 7 + weakness. V&V offers a sizable range of power levels inside a single team, and a lot of variation in how those powers interact and what the player can do with them. His "inventions" are all an expenditure of the games "Inventing Points", which are one use resources that increase each level. His fame and fortune are just player decision with GM agreement, as the game doesn’t have mechanics for those. He is, in many ways, a pretty standard V&V player character when it comes to power level.

V&V can, in play, be either highly fluid or very rigid when it comes to how a hero’s powers work. Dan was a fluid GM, letting me use the force fields to mirror super-breath by pushing people away, heightened hearing by setting up large resonating membranes, explosive strength by sliding force fields into cracks and expanding them and a super-loud voice with an invisible megaphone. Few of these are listed in the power description, but the write up for Force Field gives the player a lot of leeway in the creation and manipulation of force field shapes. The mechanics of the V&V Defense system mean that Dr. Z was reliable invulnerable to physical assault, though it would tire him out if his field was repeatedly hit. Most of the threat came not from the amount of damage in the attack but the small chance that any one attack would score a "hit" and therefore do damage past his defenses.