SUPERHERO RPG GENERAL

Last thread went swimmingly

Today's topic: Which Supers RPG do you feel has the best damage system?

I'm quite partial to HERO's Stun/Body divide

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Just watched Civil War, I'm hype as fuck.

Pic not related

>Which Supers RPG do you feel has the best damage system?

It's a tricky thing to nail down. Most superheroes, even without powers that increase resistance, can withstand way more damage than they ought to. And it really is part of the genre than a fight can be knock-down, drag-out where the only hit that truly matters is the last one. But you don't want to get in the situation where hits do nothing at all.

>tfw we will never get Rightclops in a movie

I only ever played Mutants and Masterminds so I can't really tell.

If a friend asked me though, I would be willing to try another system.

Rightclops?

Cyclops was right.

About what, you ask?

EVERYTHING.

This guy gets it

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One of these days, I'll play a mimic character in a campaign and steal this concept from M&M's Meta-4 setting.

Because a generic "hero" that copies powers and abilities is great. Even though in the pic he's copying materials.

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I also always thought Daedalus from the Freedom City setting was a great concept. For those not familiar, Daedalus filled an "Iron Man" role in the Freedom League. He's got the Greek-themed battlesuit and is the genius son of the billionaire inventor who founded the Daedalus corp.

Except that part's a lie. He's actually the mythical inventor Daedalus, cursed with immortality by the gods after he lost his son Icarus.

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The fact that one of his villains is the equally immortal Minotaur, sent by Hades to harass Daedalus time and time again is also great. Especially because the Minotaur got bored with being unable to directly kill off Daedalus, and instead began to amass wealth and power and is now the secret head of a criminal organization.

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The fuck is this, Mr. Fantastic doing Daredevil cosplay?

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>Today's topic: Which Supers RPG do you feel has the best damage system?
I didn't play it much (two runs at the Jail Break scenario, the first act of Civil War, an original one-shot) but Marvel Heroic RPG's damage system had some interesting things.

Physical, Mental and Emotional stress tracks allowed you to reason and ridicule a villain into defeat, when punching them in the face didn't work out.

When stressed, your most relevant stress die is given as a bonus die to your opponent's pool.

You could also exploit you're own sustained damage, say exploit the emotional stress put on Peter Parker after Aunt May is shot, to increase your beat down pool to fuck up Fisk. (But after paying for the privilege, the damage would increase).

It also provides an interesting framework for SFX. Like the Hulk gets to add his own emotional stress die to his dice pools, reflecting the Madder Hulk Gets, THE STRONGER HULK GETS!

You could also pay a Plot Point to assign incoming stress to a different track. Say, someone tries to calmly reason the Hulk down from a fight, and TALK, TALK , TALK! PUNY RHETORIC JUST MAKE HULK MADDER!

Fate does a similar thing, with consequences, giving the person who inflicted them a free invoke, but other characters, even the recipient, can pay for the privilege to invoke them when it makes sense.

Setting sounds cool, what's it from?

pedos pls go

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weaver dice game is petty good

Ironically every single attempt to make him look like an irrational extremist just made him seem MORE correct because every single X-Men author within the last decade or so has been just complete shit at their job outside a few outliers.

They kept trying to make him "the bad guy" and since every other character was written like an irrational lunatic who refuses to come to terms with reality on accident Cyclops seems more and more right as time goes on.

The Freedomverse has some GREAT references from all over comics, including ones to really obscure characters (Mastermind is one) that often they change just enough to make it so that you can't easily make assumptions about them.

Also, making their old-school Batman "The Raven" is genius because then they work the shit out of the Poe angle which fits O'Neil's revamp of the character that everyone has been copying since he did it.

He's basically Wilson Fisk if Fisk was the original Minotaur.
I once had my players fight him, it was fucking awesome because the battle had 2 seperate "stages" that each time completely changed the way they had to approach him.

The X-Men at this point should really just be spun off into another damn universe.

The X-Men constantly go with the whole 'We want to just be part of the world' then throw a shit fit and refuse to work with anyone else when a non-mutant makes any decision that affects a mutant. Yet somehow the X-Men are not the bad guys here.

>The X-Men at this point should really just be spun off into another damn universe.
They ARE but for reasons that has nothing to do with improving quality of writing and everything to do with which company owns the movie franchise.

>The X-Men constantly go with the whole 'We want to just be part of the world'
Makes me wish Chris Claremont had never left and the 90's had never happened because before that the X-Men were an active part of the Marvel Universe and dealt often with characters from other comics.

I am quite partial to M&M's stacking toughness penalties.

I generally dislike the systems that have baked in lethal/nonlethal type damage for superheroes - you should be able to do the types with whatever you want, depending only on the decided mood of the game.

Iduno, X-Men vs Avengers Cyclops was pretty bad, IIRC.

The airport battle is now my benchmark for every combat I run.

The default setting of Mutants and Masterminds. Moreso 2nd ed, that had Freedom City's team (with Daedalus on it) as "main" team, while 3e moved to a new city.

Although I a little dislike the "hades is eeevil" angle.
I'd probably change it "Olympians had to loophole laws of death to get Daedalus, Minotaur escaped through them unintentionally" if I run a game.
Or at least "Daedalus fucked something up in death lands, Hades sent Taurus to collect him, but slipped his grasp on the situation"

Sounds badass. Some more detail please, what the stages were?

Oh, I'm playing one of these! He has like, 35 or 40 powers. So much fun to play!

Good fucking luck, amigo.

Pretty much worth the price of admission alone.

>Sounds badass. Some more detail please, what the stages were?

At first he fought extremely intelligently, basically like a super-strong and highly trained unarmed fighter and made full use of his minions and resources available at the time, trying to overwhelm the heroes through numbers and might. He talked and taunted and generally treated them dismissively, even expressing annoyance that he even HAD to fight.
About halfway through ruining all his goons he basically got fed up with their shit and lost his temper and said;
>"Okay. Kid gloves off. Let's see if I remember how to do this."

He then proceeded to rip off his ten thousand dollar suit in fury and tore a battle-axe off the wall and went full berserker nutshit on them and stopped treating them like an annoyance to be swatted and started treating them like something he was going to be killing RIGHT NOW and had become immediate priorities in his eyes.
While enraged and fighting them seriously he was legitimately a greater challenge all by himself then he was when backed up by his augmented super-goons.

Pretty boss.

In one memorable part of the second half of the fight he grabbed one of the heroes in his free left hand and uses him as a shield/bludgeoning tool (the hero struggling and battering his arm all while Taraus wielded him like a rag doll and choked the life out of him) while he wielded his axe in his right hand against the team's physically strongest member as he raged and shrugged off half of everything they threw at him.

I kept seeing that scene as a splash page in my head.

At the end as he throttled the super-bruiser on the team he told him;
>"By the way, I need to thank you. I'd forgotten just how cathartic it can be solving a problem with your hands."
I made sure that he sounded like he actually meant it too.

>I kept seeing that scene as a splash page in my head.
Yeah, that's a definite high-quality boss battle.

Gentlemen, how would run Las Vegas-based superhero game? How would capes affect the neon-lit city of sin?

PS 238 actually did an arc in Las Vegas. They helped a supervillian gone legit who owned a casino protect his casino from a heist. Its been a while but I remember it being a really comfy arc.

Huh, interesting. The comic didn't strike my fancy in the past, though now I may check it out just for this.

Hm how about them casinos with all the superpowers running around?

We can have some casinos going "if you can make it, you can take it" - as long as you're not caught blatantly, you can stealth however much you want... and of course the casino has supers employed to cheat for them.

Then we have "no super usage" casinos, lined with alllll sorts of detectors and nullifiers. They try their best to catch you.
Plus potentially special rules that delay paying out big jackpots until they run a background check.

We can have super-science tricked out gambling machines, which are openly rigged to make you lose and it challenges you to try to outcheat it.

Overall, the business has hit some problems, but is powering through by becoming as ruthless as possible (and before legislation catches up).

There would also be a stream of naive supers (especially villains) that got into some cash and decided that cheating at casinos would be easy way to multiply it. They either lose it or get it confiscated for violating the rules.
Thoughts? Additions?

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My Worlds in Peril group is reassembling itself from the ashes. That is, one of the 4 players really liked the game despite the other 3 torpedoing it. So I get a few more players and we'll be playing again in a month or so.

Kinda stoked, but now I've got to re-familiarize myself with the game and wonder how off the rails it will get.

Our group might be taking another run at Worlds in Peril soon as well. Nothing wrong with it the first time (aside from inconsistency of tone from GM) I just don't think we got it right, even though we're fairly familiar with PbtA games at this point.

Mutants&Masterminds is my go to for supers followed by Wild Talents if i want a more toned down or lethal game

>titty nova

That's a Star Knight. But yeah, they're basically Nova Corps/Green Lantern Corps.

With a little dash of Power Rangers

Man, a teen Star Knights team would be hilarious.

You know, since they never actually explained if Star Knights take the armor on and off like normal I always had them Guyver into their suits which just exploded out of pocket dimensions.

I always assumed they were constructs, so having them "sentai" into their outfits is fine.

Or even "magical girl transform!"

What's the difference between "Guyvering" and "Power Rangering" or "Sailor Mooning"?

About 2 to minutes of stock footage.

>What's the difference between "Guyvering" and "Power Rangering" or "Sailor Mooning"?

Special Effects, of course.

And tone.

Has anyone played Prowlers and Paragons? I'm curious what people think of it since it seems a bit more "balanced" then Mutants and Masterminds.

Guyver: fleshy tendrils and stuff
Power Ranger: flashy lights and you get into tights with a helmet
Sailor Mooning: flashy lights and you get into a frilly dress

Kamen Ridering can be like guyvering or like rangering with more defined armor pieces over the tights.

Ultramanning: like rangering, but your helmet has a dorky sculpted face and you're huge

Nope. Post PDF? What makes it more balanced?

Speed was the difference I was describing.
Most transformation scenes take a while, while Guyver's is fairly perfunctory and has a lot less...spinning involved.

Which game lets me do The Mask-style cartoon physics bullshit?

Ah, well yeah, that's padding with stock footage for you.

I've found a quickstart
lsgrpg.com/uploads/ProwlersParagonsQuickstartIssuev1.1.pdf
16 mb is too big for straight to Veeky Forums I think

All of 'em? You could do it mechanically in M&M, if you wanted. A flight power restricted to walking speed with the flaw that you can't look down, for example.

But I find that cartoon physics is better left up to GM fiat.

>P&P is a narration-driven system. The rules in this game are not effects driven. For the most part, they don’t tell you what happens. Instead, they tell you who gets to describe what happens. And that’s what it’s all about in P&P: describing what happens. Both the players and the gamemaster (GM) take turns narrating events in the game world. This makes P&P feel more like an exercise in collaborative storytelling than a typical roleplaying game. However, P&P isn’t totally freeform and open-ended either. There are rules that help determine what characters can do and how they compare to one another, especially in combat! This prevents the game from devolving into a never-ending debate about what is and isn’t reasonable.

>P&P is rules light. It’s chock full of gross oversimplifications and blatant inaccuracies that mimic comic book tropes rather than real-world facts. This also makes P&P a simple game with a streamlined set of rules. Once you know what you’re doing, you should be able to play without ever opening the book.

Ok that sounds like the only similarity with M&M is they use alliterative titles. You need better comparisons.

That's reality warping. That shit is really hard to nail down. Doubly so since the Bighead's only real weakness is that the host has to deal with the bullshit it caused.

M&M 2e had a gang of low-tier supervillains who were spawned by another super and their shtick was cartoon physics. Although I don't remember which book.

The Toon Gang from M&M.
In theory they were a crime syndicate, but all they did was weird Animanics shit that caused a ton of problems because the world didn't operation the same set of physics.

Unfortunately since neither did they, killing them or arresting them was nearly impossible.

Yeah, but which book?

Pretty sure the Toon Gang was detailed under the "organized crime" section of Freedom City.

I've always gone the Green Lantern route where they create the costume out of energy but i have had a Guyver-eqsue character in my previous campaign

What said.
I went with the Guyver route because it IS described as a full-on suit of armor so having it just be energy seemed to not fit.

>it IS described as a full-on suit of armor so having it just be energy seemed to not fit.

True I suppose I went that route due to the similarities with the Lantern Corps

Man, WHY Claremont left was total bullshit.

Basically, he got hooked up with Jim Lee as an artist. Lee's art had an insane impact on sales, so Lee started making some requests, like turning Psylocke from a British supermodel who wore armor to a ninja. Claremont agreed, begrudgingly, because keeping your artist happy was a good idea. Lee kept coming up with other things and one thing lead to another until Marvel went "You know what? Jim Lee should have some plotting responsibilities. Make it happen, Claremont."

In essence, Marvel basically demoted Claremont to dialogue and Jim Lee to plotting, throwing all of Claremont's years-long plotlines away in favor of whatever Lee felt like doing at the time.

Claremont basically went "This isn't fair" and Marvel told him "If you don't like it, there's the door. He's the one who sells."

I know of the why as well.
Amusingly Lee himself as well as half of the guys who ever worked on X-Men comic's at Marvel bails himself a few years later, which has a large degree of irony there.

I cannot for the life of me pick a system to run, help

Mutants & Masterminds 3e if you want one of the best d20 games out there.

Do you want quick and easy, something with some numbers, narrative, or crunchy and versatile, but difficult at times?

>one of the best d20 games
>want the best piece of shit on the pile?

MnMfags pls go

I want a middle ground of crunch vs narrative, with a lot of versatility. While I don't mind players punching their way through problems on occasion, I don't want it to be the only way they can solve problems.

A must is that combat be fast and intuitive.

I don't mind something like HERO where the play is (supposedly) easy after the character creation, because I can make their characters.

Aww, look at this adorable little asshole with his opinions but no answers of his own.

I'd rate HERO high on the crunch, but I will say that there's a lot of versatility there and you can do a lot with narrative there. GURPS is less crunchy than HERO, but also less geared towards superheroes.

M&M, as mentioned, is a decent balance. It's simple enough that it can trip people up, but fairly versatile and it was also the official DC RPG engine. It's lighter on the crunch than narrative, I'd say.

Palladium's Heroes Unlimited can be an interesting run, but... It's Palladium. You might find yourself frustrated easily, especially since everything in character generation is random, right down to your origin and the powers you get. It's pretty easy for your party to end up with someone who's a joke character on the same team as someone who can shred through any obstacle in your path.

>you can do a lot with narrative there

What do you mean here?

I want to get into HERO, but I can't seem to quite get my head around it.

I've also heard good things about DC Heroes, but the way everything is measured on one scale just seems fucky

Even though it's crunchy as fuck, you have a lot of freedom and wiggle room, is what I mean.

The one scale fuckery is easily the worst part of that system.

>I've also heard good things about DC Heroes, but the way everything is measured on one scale just seems fucky

DC Heroes is just the M&M system.
You might be thinking of Marvel.

>Today's topic: Which Supers RPG do you feel has the best damage system?
In MHRP I once emotionally attacked a hero until they flipped out, punched a dude and fled to mope in seclusion as one does.

I don't know if that's good or bad but it led to some bronze age grade melodrama.

So, now that Masks is just getting a final trim before going off to be printed, who's excited?

For those who don't know...

kickstarter.com/projects/1277034820/masks-a-new-generation

>You play fourth-generation heroes, teenagers to twenty-somethings. Operating off the Apocalypse system.

>Heroic archetypes based on classic comics archetypes, including Brute, Nova, Protege, Legacy, Joined, and Loner.

>Five Labels: Freak, Superior, Danger, Savior, Mundane. Labels are constantly-shifting attributes that describe how you see yourself and react to others around you. High Danger and Low Mundane, for example, means you fight against villains better but have trouble dealing with normal people.

>Characters can have Influence over each other, meaning that their reactions to your character can change your stats.

No, he means the DC Heroes based off of CHAMPIONS

Oh, my mistake.

I ran MHRP for like half a year, I loved the shit out of it even though you need to be okay as a GM handwaving things when players get clever comic book grade ideas that the rules don't strictly account for.

How does character creation in that game even work?

Also, how do they do their dice pool? Is it roll for successes, roll and keep, straight add, what?

You don't character create, you pick from one of their absurdly long lists of established heroes. Which I know is weird by Veeky Forums standards, but the game is more like you and the players are teaming with the GM to be the write team of an ongoing comic.

The GM is the line editor, the players are joint writers/artists, and the game is whatever new team book you're trying to shill.

You can make characters in it but you have to work back from concept and construct them to match it rather than use set rules

I had problems with that and MHRP too since my players ALL read comics and thus are prone to the sort of thing.
That was when I switched to M&M, was a bit more flexible for our needs.

>Also, how do they do their dice pool? Is it roll for successes, roll and keep, straight add, what?

You pick one die from several spots on your sheet. Like if you're alone/with a buddy/with a team you get a die based on if your character is better at that role. Then a power die from each power set for the action you're trying to do. Some heroes have one set, some have two. The ones who have one set tend to have some SFX that let them double up on dice though in certain situations. Then of course an obligatory skill, like combat training or tech skill (which explicitly you can use to aim your fancy guns with) or even science or mystic shit depending on what you're doing. You pick two dice for your total roll, and one die for your effect die. The total is based on showing face value, effect die is based on the die shape.