I want to run a one-on-one "epic fantasy superhero" game with a single PC and no companions...

I know you are, and that's whats sad.

GURPS can't run anything right. It's a generic system that does everything poorly, which is why it's a meme answer for everything. It's the Boku no Pico of Veeky Forums, except that it's a little crueler, because unlike Boku, where you figure out you've been tricked almost immediately, some people get as far as the middle of their first game before they realize just how awfully clunky and mechanically dissonant GURPS is.

Do explain.

I personally dislike GURPS, but I don't think it's a valueless system. I can kind of see why some people swear by it even if I don't see the point.

I get that it's a toolkit you can use to build your own RPG system aimed at whatever you're up for doing at that particular moment, and I can see why some people find it comfortable to always stick to the same base system and never have to learn something new. But personally, I'll always prefer a focused system designed around a strong core premise over a generic system. I don't mind learning new systems, and I'm very sensitive to mechanical tone and how the rules can make the system side of a game feel, and GURPS is one of the driest games in existence in that regard.

Mutants & Masterminds

Maybe Nobilis/Exalted/Godbound

Mutants & Masterminds 3e is a little too tactically stale, and Nobilis is not quite built for tactical combat.

Exalted 3e still has a long way to go for the types of supernatural powers mentioned in the opening post.

Godbound is an RPG I had downloaded and considered, but it does not meet the qualifications above. A Godbound character's ideal tactics against an army of mooks actually is simply "wade in and start spamming anti-lesser-foe attacks and Fray dice."

None of them meet the qualifications in the opening post.

Please respond.

Yes?

What system would you use?

I did say it'd need some work. You'd have to control the abilities the player and monsters have, but the rest of the system is largely there already.

Dude, to be honest wit you, there's no "tactically engaging" with a single-player campaign. Like, at all. The first thing you need for tactics is a way to do it badly and a way to do it nicely. A single character will default to his powers and spells and there will be no actual tactics from his side, he'll react to whatever comes in his way.

That said, high-level D&D 3.5 is actually a good answer. Pick a caster and possibly turn some spells in at-will supernatural effects, or give the character items/racial stats to have more health and spell slots. If what you want is a one-man army capable of taking an actual army, you really can't fuck that up.

Now, the enemies will be the ones doing tactical shit. They can walk in a spread out formation to reduce the effects of AoEs and bring various tricks to foil spells like an arrow shower for fly or a glitterdust grenade for invisibility, slowly draining away the player's resources as fights go on. Have different groups of mooks carry only a few of those tricks, and let the player have his powertrip fun.

>Dude, to be honest wit you, there's no "tactically engaging" with a single-player campaign. Like, at all.

Absolutely not. Legends of the Wulin is a game that decisively proves that one-on-one combat can have a plethora of interesting and meaningful tactical combat options. The issue is that while the game allows a lone player character to demolish mobs of mooks, it does not do so in a tactically interesting fashion.

>high-level D&D 3.5 is actually a good answer. Pick a caster and possibly turn some spells in at-will supernatural effects

This has the right power level, but not the right level of interesting tactics from the player's side.

Have it be a gestalt character then. A Caster/Melee that gets weaboo fighting alongside magic, while getting the best of each when considering health, BAB and saves. You want a crazy-high power level with new actions every round, so look up the Tome of Battle and pick your class. That book alone has enough melee tactics to put every other melee class to shame.

That way, you won't even need to alter health and spell-like abilities, as the usual spell slots will be more than enough for a melee/caster combo.

Anima. It has everything you want.

> not the right level of interesting tactics from the player's side.

Sounds like the GM isn't making interesting encounters for the player to think about.

Could you give an example of the tactical choices involved in a "sole hero, army of mooks" combat?

In Legends of the Wulin, two characters can square off in a plain white room, and it will still be a very interesting battle due to the way their abilities work.

The same goes for D&D 4e, except that instead of specializing in one-on-one dueling, the system's forte is group-on-group skirmishes.

Interesting encounter circumstances and terrain will help, of course, but they are not *necessary* for a tactically engaging battle.

It's nice that you know systems that give you a solution for one-on-one combat, but that doesn't fix your problem does it?

If the solution with other systems is "set up an interesting fight" then why don't you do that? It's incredibly easy to do when you only have one player and you know their abilities.

You do know that one-on-one combats have nothing to do with one-on-army fights, right? They're almost mutually exclusive.

A 1v1 fight needs both parties to be able to act on the same level and react to each other in an equal manner.
An army battle requires mooks to be utterly incapable of doing anything by themselves, and the only point of doing it is the extras you gain for swarming tactics and stuff. Those are mostly on the DM's part regardless of system.

What you need is a system that deals with powers and can handle great power dissonance. That's why 3.5 is the system for you. The possibility of also doing 1v1 is an extra you get by using the system. You have to accept there aren't any other good one-on-army systems just because that's a bad proposition that doesn't focus on group play and is based solely on powertrip dreams.

>3.5 is the system for you
When did Veeky Forums get so retarded?

When people started wanting systems for bad ideas and sonic-fighting-academy-level power trips. They're practically made for each other.

>If the solution with other systems is "set up an interesting fight" then why don't you do that?

Because it is possible that there is a certain obscure system somewhere that does handle "one hero vs. army" battles with as much out-of-the-box interesting tactical choices in the same way that Legends of the Wulin handles "one hero vs. another hero" quite well and D&D 4e is superb at "group vs. group."

I truly do not see what D&D 3.5 specifically has to do with anything you are proposing.

>You have to accept there aren't any other good one-on-army systems just because that's a bad proposition that doesn't focus on group play and is based solely on powertrip dreams.
One-on-one RPGs are no more invalid than traditional "one GM and a group of players" systems.

>One-on-one RPGs are no more invalid than traditional "one GM and a group of players" systems.
I lost.

Don't be a prick, dude. They are a fine way to play a game.

They're not.

>example from Anima
Well every type of character has some kind of resource they use to power their abilities. So a high level mage is going to have a lot of Zeon (mana) with which to cast many spells, but the amount is ultimately finite. It's probably better to cast cheap, high damage spells in most situations, but better to drop a big, high cost area of effect spell on top of an army. In either case the resource has to be managed at the level of the reserve pool and in terms of ability upkeep.

In addition to abilities, characters also have better attack and defense values than mooks, so they can block a string of attacks without any problem, byt at a certain point numbers become dangerous because you take stacking penalties, so then they have to think about taking a hit in order to preserve their ability to block a more dangerous attack or something.

In general Anima offers a great deal of choice in combat and character design.

Are too.

Nuh-uh!

>So a high level mage is going to have a lot of Zeon (mana) with which to cast many spells, but the amount is ultimately finite.

I am fairly leery of "single point pool" resource management system. D&D 3.5's psionics, while certainly better-designed than its Vancian casting, still promoted a paradigm of spamming a couple of a character's best combat powers.

D&D 4e's power point-using psionicists likewise fell into a pattern of spamming one or two of their best powers.

Even Legends of the Wulin still suffers from this with some of its builds, most notably Boundless Prosperity Manual builds and Heaven's Lightning builds.

What does Anima do to actively promote mixing things up with such point pools?

Yeah huh

I would suggest the Hero system, its phases system and Endurance management makes for tactical combat, it's mechanically similar to GURPS but scaled for power levels, it's subtractive DEF values and the way defenses are weighted vs attacks point wise means the character should be able to be set up to be fairly safe from dying.
Downsides are character creation is involved, but if you only have to do one character then that should be less of a problem. You will also have to do some basic multiplication and (gasp) division, but mostly in character creation, but since you're only running one character, you might be able to just handwave the points and give them what you think is appropriate.

The resource pools are not the place to stop spamming the "best" power, to prevent that you have to make all the powers useful in different situations.

Not sure what you mean. Different abilities rely on different resources, Zeon for magic, ki for techniques, psychic points and fatigue for psychic powers, and then there's the implicit resource of the action economy and stacking penalties surrounding regular attack and defense values.

If you want 1 guy to face down an army without having it all over in one spell or slogging through thousands of combat turns, and have it be possible in a number of different ways, Anima is the system for that.

Because unless you go balls-deep buying Magic Accumulation multiples, your Zeon takes ages to regenerate, so spamming your best shit leaves you with nothing.

Say, for example, I have a Final MA of 15 (started with 5, bought a couple of multiples), and I want to cast Inorganic Modification to turn a box into a barrel. That's 60 Zeon, more if the box has more than 20 Presence. With my MA of 15, I need to accumulate Zeon for 4 turns (8 if I'm bound, gagged, or performing any other actions other than accumulating or casting.) before I can cast the spell. It will cost me 3 points per turn to maintain said transformation.

It will also take me 4 days to recover all the Zeon I spent on that spell, if I'm not maintaining it. Maintaining it for a whole day would be impractical, given that a turn is 3 seconds, so a day is 28800 turns, which would give a daily maintenance cost of 86400 Z/dy.

For comparison, a level 1 wizard starts with 100 Zen before they spend any DP to buy more.

What are some examples of the Hero system making the types of encounters mentioning in the opening post tactically interesting?

What usually happens in these games is that you can construct your build in such a way that one or two of your powers become extremely effective and cost-effective, and from there, you simply spam them with your points.

This sounds a little cumbersome. Does any given character have access to all of these pools simultaneously?

An MA of 15 is just... why are you even a mage at that point? A level 1 Wizard should have 40-60 MA, hell even a Warlock should have 20 at the absolute minimum.

>simultaneous access
Yes, though a character will usually only focus on 1 type of supernatural ability.

>Does any given character have access to all of these pools simultaneously?
They can, given that all your class does is set the DP cost of buying your various abilities and the proportions you can allocate your DP in (W% to skills, X% to combat, Y% to magic, Z% to psionics).

Magic and Combat cover two ability blocks each (Spells and Summoning, and Martial Combat and Ki Stuff respectively).

However, going for any more than two blocks of abilities tends to leave your character useless at all of them, because you don't have enough DP anywhere to actually be good at anything.

I just pulled the MA number out of the core book's MA example.

Godbound, it's D&D exalted

Already been shot down.

How about LotW, and add a method to stat out groups as if they were a hero?

This could certainly work. I do wonder how any given external style's laughs and fears would have to be modified with this in mind, however.

This may be a stupid idea but...

Savage Worlds?

What does this have to offer for the type of game described in the opening post?

I remember some external styles laughing at "groups of enemies" or "numbers advantage", but I'm not sure now.

Then again, that would not make interesting combat.

Anima isn't a great example regardless because the math doesn't work. Ki doesn't have enough points, psi gishes are crazy good, mages are super overpowered. That and the lethality level is so high that you can't get hit once or you die.

i was going to recommend gurps, but on second thoughts if you're going to be having the hero face a LOT of enemies at one time, it's probably not the best
i imagine there's ways to do it well in gurps, but by default it's just that much better for one-on-one combat and the like - fighting multiple enemies alone tends to be suicide unless you have a massive advantage over them to begin with.
it definitely supports the crunch you want, and it'll be really easy to design the kind of character you want for this, but it'll ultimately let you down at one-on-many combats.

why don't you actually read it instead of buying into the MUH FLAVORLESS memes
i can understand not liking it - everybody's got their preferences on system, but don't blow smoke up our asses by pretending that it's an absolute shit system that doesn't work