subplotkudzu | Always wanted to

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supers games

Always wanted to

As I noodle around on my supers setting building construction kit I have a question for my hordes of fans [Listens, daffy duck-like, for crickets]. Is there any super-hero concept that you've always wanted to play but either have had the opportunity or haven't found a system that could handle it?

In my case two spring to mind (there used to be more, but I did get to play my super smart guy and my super-strong cowboy ideas in now defunct PBEMs).

The first is an Adam Strange style SF adventurer: a two fisted science hero with a jet-pack, ray guns and other gadgets who, while a member of the super team on contemporary earth, is actually the defender of a different planet, time or timeline. The system would have to be able to handle someone who was basically a skilled, smart normal person with flight, a good dodge and a modest energy blast - a little tricky in some systems but more a matter of lacking opportunity rather than systemic problems.

The second is someone who has a separate energy body, similar to Negative Man, Raven's Soul Self or, ideally, Antibody from the New Universe book DP7. This is much harder to work mechanically - Cambias once recommended doing it as an Ally, or perhaps it's duplication where one of the duplicates has all the powers, or something of the sort. It's a really neat idea, but finding a system that could handle it is the problem.

This latter is one of the reasons why I'm building the supers setting construction kit: the hope of being able to simply define the characters potency, versatility, and scarcity and have it be in the world as its own distinct power - if the scarcity is high enough (or even if it's not with an oddball power like this one) my PC might be the only person with it, but it would be a quickly defined part of the world.

Finally, as a villain I still love the idea of a mummy whose internal organs were eaten away by vermin that now occupy his body cavities. He would be able to have his eyes turn into snakes, vomit up spiders, breathe out termites and so on for a variety of nasty effects. Icky, yes, but it just sticks with me,

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Body Horror Hotep.

Seriously, the others sound like neat concepts, but I agree they're tricky to represent in games rather than fiction.

Cambias is correct: 4th ed GURPS CHARACTERS expands Ally to the point where both Antibody and Vermin Hotep are easily done. You modify Allies with Constantly, Summonable, and Minion, with Costs Fatigue, Size of Group, and Sympathy to taste. Although, POWERS does say that swarms of smaller creatures are often better done as Afflictions with mobile areas, so Vermin Hotep may want to go both ways.

Um, the Ally suggestion wasn't attached to Hotep (who woudl actually be called the the Pharoah Tut-Uncommon), just the energy form guy.

In any event I find the Ally an incredibly clunky solution:
It's still an NPC even with the Minion advantage, which means that I'd send it off to do things and it's under the GMs control, which is not ideal from a player perspective and doesn't capture either the Soul Self or Negative Man concepts.(1). I, as a player, want to be in control of both bodies simoultaniously - even if I as a player have the two bodies argue with one another (as Antibody did in DP7).

If I do make the Ally Summonable it runs from adventure to adventure, and with a 15- chance I have a 5% chance of being hosed in any adventure. If I instead make him Constant then it's always around but perhaps invisible (Invisibility, only works when not taking any action and directly next to PC, -60%), which would be much cheaper and would save the time of concentrating to summon it, as it would already be there. No, it's not ideal, but there it is.

The point cost issues of how Ally scales means that even if I did work all that out it would be realtively easy to have the ally be phenominally powerful. For 500 point hereos I can make my main body a 290 point adventerous human and my Ally (costing in at 210 points [35 point base, +50% minion, x4 for Constant])would have 2000 points - the cost of the Archetype template. Gives being Superman's Pal a whole new meaning.

Of course, I'd need it to have 2000 points because all of the examples can take enourmous damage or even be destroyed and the hero can create new ones - Raven and Negative Man have the shards of the energy forms fly back into them to reform, while Antibody generates a new body (and at times he has swarms of the suckers). Which means kludging around a lot of regeneration and hard to kill to capture the effect.

Easily done? No. Conceievably mechancially possible if you're willing to pull together a large number of rules? Sure. But I could do it much more smoothly in Champions with Duplication, which in 5E has specifically rules for handling just this scenario - I-the-player control both duplicates, the duplicate can be more powerful but won't be multiple times more powerful, and so on. I'm not a big fan of the HERO system, but I have to admit that the designers have gone to great lengths to capture a lot of existing powers.

Still, it's not an easy power to capture in the best of senses - even DC heroes, hope of 2 of the 3 examples - didn't have a good way to do it.

(1) Of course, I could do that if I instead took it as a Puppet, but then I wouldn't be in control of my own body and would have this funky body shifting ability from Possession that I would have to limit so that it was just between me and my puppet, but then my body couldn't be independly active from the puppet. I suppose I'd have to take it as a 0 IQ Ally with a weakness to my Mind Control, which is turn only works on my Ally, but with that I'd have to constantly work out commands to transmit via Telesend....

If the entities truly share a mental identity but can function separately, POWERS p.44 says to combine Duplication with Alternate Form and the Projected Form modifier (Powers p.75).

I can't say that I've followed Raven's Soul Self to any extent, but of the various takes on Negative Man (including Negative Woman) I don't recall too many occasions when the host body is good for much while the energy form is zooming around, so simultaneous awarness didn't seem a concern. Meanwhile, you put most emphasis on Antibody, who empahtcially was mentally separate from his little pals most of the time; even when he was inside one of them, the others had minds of their own.

Meanwhile, some finer rules points:

A Summonable, Constant Ally doesn't *have* to be there 24/7; it is available to you gamewise, but you can choose to dismiss it, and call it back as needed, just like you can turn your wearable AI on and off as you like, or send it off through the net and call it back.

"kludging around a lot of regeneration and hard to kill to capture the effect" is not necessary in 4/e, you can just buy Unkillable at your desired level.

We're still jumping through way more hoops than I want to - at my age I just havne't the time to use a hammer to pound in a screw, and that's what we're doing with GURPS. Saying that it's easy as long as you look in a second supplemental book and buy two combined powers with a separate modifier, with an extra 100% addition to the x4 cost, is not a selling point for me. (I will freely admit that I fully forgot that Immortality had to be looked up under Unkillable.)

And the Rebis form of the Negative spirit - present for Grant Morrison's high water mark on the Doom Patrol book - alsways had the physical body active when the negative spirit was about, just as Raven's soul self and the energy duplicates that Antibody made. Simoultanious awareness is key for the character concept.

In any event this is far afield from the original point of my post.
1) I am building a new system from the ground up
2) I am curious what character concepts people have always wanted to play but haven't yet, to make sure I could cover those.
2a) here are some of my character concepts.

Letting me know that I could build the things in point 2a in a different system is somewhat purpose defeating for point 1.

Saying that it's easy as long as you look in a second supplemental book and buy two combined powers with a separate modifier, with an extra 100% addition to the x4 cost, is not a selling point for me.

* POWERS is the single supplement necessary.
* Projected Form is a -50% Limitation, there is no +100% or x4 multiple involved.
* Duplication, Alternate Form, and Projected Form is two powers and a modifier; how is this more complex than Champs 5/e using one power (Duplication) and two modifiers (make the Duplicate more powerful, and making the Duplicate have a different form)

In any event this is far afield from the original point of my post.

Letting me know that I could build the things in point 2a in a different system is somewhat purpose defeating for point 1.

How far afield is it to show that the stated motivation for the point is partially mistaken? Reading what's already been written in a supplement that directly addresses your subject is much, much easier than hammering in screws.

Unless your new system is going to be narratively based somehow? This is a fairly easy power to infer from what's drawn and written on a page of the comics, but here we are, two veteran super gamers who've been present at the creation of much or all of a current effect-based RPG, and we still have trouble articulating exactly what abilities and disabilities are involved.

Duplication is the the main HERO rulebook, with the example neatly set up as sidebar. The power I want is one that lets me have 2 bodies at once, one with special powers. By logic, having two bodies at once has Duplication as its base. So I look up duplication and lo and behold there's an explination of the very power I want, with straightforward rules on how to do it. It's a more complex system than I like in a lot of ways, but it's right there.

In your original post, you identified "4th ed GURPS CHARACTERS expands Ally to the point where both Antibody and Vermin Hotep are easily done". So I dutifully looked up Ally and discovered that it was nothing of the sort, and the rules in the CHARACTERS book explictly outlawed using it for what I want since it is absolutely an NPC under the GMs control. So I look up Duplication - trying to apply the same logic - and find that it doesn't do anything close to what I want either.

Oh-ho, you say, but by CHARACTERS you really meant POWERS, and by "Constant, Summonable Ally" you really meant "Duplication + Alternate Form + Projected Form". All becomes clear now. If I had but known that you had meant I had to pick up a second (or in this case third, since I already have CAMPAIGNS) book to further explain how your original original statement was entirely wrong and that CHARACTERS, which promises on the cover to have everything I need indeed doesn't, it would obviously be the perfect system for what I want. No reason for me to ever think of using a different system when this one handles things so cleanly that even long time players will give 100% incorrect advice with full conviction.

In short, my view is not partially mistaken - the power is a difficult one to model. The systems that are out there don't do it well, in part because it has so many ways of being handled. The reason why we're having problems is that the effects based RPG we've both worked on it one that has fundamental difficulties in modeling the power. Which is not uncommon.

And - this is important - even if there was a system out there that had a power specifically written to do this, exactly as I liked, it is totally immaterial to my question: WHAT CHARACTER CONCEPTS WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY THAT YOU HAVE NOT HAD A CHANCE TO DO SO? You will note that my Adam Strange-esque character would not be hard to model in almost any system, but that isn't a reason for me to not noodle around on my own game ideas. My original post has one question mark in it. That's where I'm looking for input. I'm not going to drop all work on my enjoyable system noodling because you're convinced that there's a way to build the power in your preferred system.

Hold on, Rogers-Man, don't use your Disintegration Gas attack! He's only a misguided sidekick. It's Doc GURPS you should be fighting!

(removes tongue from cheek, returns to work)

Wish I could give reputation points for that.

It's the thought that counts. Thanks!

Who, hold on there, let's get hostile. Or dog style, or whatever.

I changed my suggested solution because you refined your description of the concept you wanted to play. Antibody, the example you gave with which I am most familiar, does not fully share consciousness and volition with his Antibodies. You, as a player, would like to play out the actions of the Antibodies, of course, rather than sit back and wait while the NPC Antibodies do stuff, and that is understandable. However, that shared identification is not a power that the character has in the context of his fictional world, but rather is a metagame issue, similar to people having multiple PCs.

WHAT CHARACTER CONCEPTS WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY THAT YOU HAVE NOT HAD A CHANCE TO DO SO?

You said part of not having a chance was because you couldn't make a build that suited you. Since you displayed some mistaken assumptions about how GURPS currently worked and I've spent spent hundreds of hours researching the subject, I thought you'd have a second chance to make a better build with the correct information.

I wouldn't dream of talking you my neighbor out of building your own custom lawnmower, but if I as a factory-trained mower repair man saw that your old mower wasn't quite as broken as you complained it was, I'd feel obliged to let you know in case you preferred to cut the grass just so sooner rather than later.

Here is the question: what type of character do you want to play that you have not yet had a chance to, either due to a lack of time or a system problem? The list of characters that I put forward as examples are irrelevant to that response, because no matter how much you think the system you are evangalizing for handles the problem, that's not what I'm trying to discuss. No amount of explanation will make me decide that I have/could have/will have played the character in GURPS because I both haven't had time and, no matter how much you want to sell it, I don't think it captures it well.

You. Wished for Characters. That's it. Comprende?

I'm sorry, but I don't see how it is my fault for getting off topic when 25% of the original post is about system issues.

I have to agree.

Because at 7:14 AM yesterday I told you that this was moving far afield from the original post and not the topic of discussion. Up until that point, no harm, no foul - I was willing to indulge the tangent for a bit, and then tried to steer it back on line. Eight hours later and you're still trying to argue with me that despite my telling you that wasn't what I was interested in discussing that it really was what I was interested in discussing.

This isn't an unmoderated message board, it's my blog. If I ask you to drop something but don't ask you to leave, it's because I'm interested in your statements on the primary topic but, as host here, I want you to drop something. It's really that simple.

I must say, the mummy sounds like a better supervillain concept than a hero.

Concept I've always wanted to try out: a hero who is obviously the "comedy relief sidekick" for the team (e.g. Rick Jones or "Snapper" Carr) -- except that his sidekick persona is a carefully-crafted mask for his true nature as a badass good-mastermind supergenius. As if Wendy or Marvin was really Batman in disguise. (Interestingly, I've noticed that superteams seem to have gradually abandoned the collective comic sidekick idea.)

Cambias

Well, I did say the Mummy would be a villain....

Yes, tems have lost the collective comic sidekick, but I feel that's a big loss. I'm curious how you'd manage the supergenius aspect? would it be hidden from the other players as well? or just their characters? the former would likely limit your freedom of movement in game.

except that his sidekick persona is a carefully-crafted mask for his true nature as a badass good-mastermind supergenius.

I did have a player ask to do something similar to this in a very successful Champs game I ran back in the day. His secret ID was the team's butler/chauffeur, while his super-athletic, mildly psychic ninja Hero ID would appear to work with the team during a case. The team was supported by a consortium of insurance companies with a public base of operations, and one of his bits was offering tea to gatecrashing heavies and bouncing them before they could distract the occupants.

Is there any super-hero concept that you've always wanted to play but either have had the opportunity or haven't found a system that could handle it?

Well, pretty much all of them, as I rarely get to be a player as opposed to a GM, and we haven't really played a straight-up Supers game since my college days.

I'm more or less resigned to the conclusion that to do Supers properly (i.e. in genre) I'm going to have to steer clear of the traditional effects-based systems and anything that has anything more than the most simple and hand-waving of points-build systems.

I love speedsters - I've never seen a good implementation in RPGs. I love telekinetics, but I want more than Strength at a distance and force fields/bolts. I love teleporters, and time travellers, and the can of worms there would fill a TARDIS.

Please keep up the work on the construction kit, though. I really like the ideas of potency, versatility, and scarcity and want to see where you go with it.

One of my goals is to get super-speed to work. There's no reason why it shouldn't, after all, as long as the player doesn't walk in with the attitude of "I have super speed and am therefore unstoppable!" The same is true for a lot of powers, though.

One other note on this - there seems to be a false dichotemy between an "Effects Based" powers game and a "Narrative based" powers game. What I want is a "Cause Based" game. V&V was designed that way - you have Flame Powers, and Flame Powers let you do Flamey things - and as a result it's always made more sense to me than trying to cost out what how useful invisibility is vs energy blast to figure out what the character can do.

Now that I've thought of it that way I think it would have to be a cornerstone of the construction kit.

I'm not convinced that 'Narrative based' and 'Cause based' are that different, assuming that one restricts oneself to describing things that are a) in genre for a particular power and b) match the group's consensus on what a given power can and cannot do.

'Cause based' really suggests consensus-driven descriptions and mechanics, or a strong central vision that everyone buys into.

I dunno. See, V&V has Cause Based powers in that you had the power and wrote down, in clear mechanics, what it could be used for. Effects couldn't be added if they didn't fit the cause - no "and I have a 10d6 energy blast because I need to have a 10d6 energy blast". That's a strong part of what I'm aiming for, and it isn't tied to the needs of the narrative as much as it is the logic of the character

For the other aspect, one reason to get everyone at the table involved in the strong central vision. If you develop a power with a clearly written central premise/cause and then buy it with a lot of versatility everyone knows what that means in play because the outlines of versatility and potency were defined by the group as the campaign was hammered out.

Okay, I understand that V&V required that you wrote down the mechanics for any power effect or sub-power as needed, but that there was a certain amount of leeway and fudging allowed (I seem to recall Animal Powers and Mutant Power being particularly prone to this). To me it seemed like a negotiated agreement of 'what this power can do', and that sounds hippy-gamer style to me.

It's not explicitly Narrative in the sense that it doesn't have to play to the narrative requirements, but it is very much in the broader sense (in the hobby) of Narrative as player-empowerment.

I strongly agree that Cause-based can be a rewarding and sensible approach to gaming super-powers, always accepting that it can lead to proliferation problems if let run unchecked.

I think I'm going to pull this out into a fresh post today - it's worthy of longer discussion....

Okay, wished for characters: I've done several femmes fatale, but never have gone quite to the extreme of the Aeon Flux cartoon, particularly the ones where she runs through a factory with twin Uzis blazing, and mows down catwalks full of minions to either side. Somehow, it matters to my enjoyment exactly how this is done: working out the level of Guns skill and advantages required to reliably put each bullet into the vitals of each successive target is more enticing than something like being a high level Fighter and getting to attack N times against sub-HD creatures that die form minimum damage, and still less fullfiling is a HKAT or FENG SHUI-esque thing where plowing through endless numbers of minions is taken for granted.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Always wanted to

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