Dream campaign

Are you the person who wrote that screencap? Just curious. I've seen it around a lot.

Secondly; you have to define what you mean by low magic. No casters? Weaker casters?

>reveals how shoddy the systems underneath actually are

I disagree. d20 + modifier vs AC or a DC is simple and effective for most people and campaigns. The rest comes down your dungeon master and how they let the party do things WITHOUT rolling, or how lenient they are in terms of skills or modifiers, etc. I should mention ahead of time I'm not referring to things like the specific numbers or uses of skills or classes, because I don't know 5e, just the basic dice rolling structure is fine and I don't understand why people get so upset with it.

Not sure what system but a campaign that is vaguely like the old show Quantum Leap mixed with fairy tales.
The premise is this:Your characters live in a dystopian future where all the fairy tales ended poorly. A mix of 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and a Brave New World.
A strange old man contacts your characters and meets them at an abandon shack in the bad side of town. Inside there is a basement with a sort of time machine; it doesn't send bodies back in time only souls. Your characters end up jumping into different people each time. The players always end up right at the moment something horrible happens and where/when everything went wrong. Example being say Robin Hood. The players arrive in the bodies of random peasants just in time to witness Robin Hood himself (along with a few of his Merry Men) being hung. The evil King John has somehow disposed of his brother as well... The conditions for completing this would be to Dethrone John and install someone trust worthy (preferably Richard but, if he is killed somehow it's still possible to make things right)

These aren't significant people - just random bystanders you're transferring your souls into so each fairy tale you'll be re-rolling class and stats but, for every tale you rewrite or correct you gain a permanent assignable bonus (IE a free +2 each time that stacks you may split or apply to any stat.)

Ideally you'd go through these in order of when the fairy tale was suppose to take place (IE the earliest would be in stoneage times and the latest might be near modern times (1950s or something like that)

Not the guy you're asking, but I share the sentiment so I'll weigh in.

The main problem with magic in DnD and games like it is that magic doesn't have a niche.

>But user, magic can do anything!"

And this is precisely the problem. When magic can do anything and everything, it just becomes a collection of "cheat codes" that some characters can access to bypass entire parts of the game, while characters without access to these cheat codes (such as martials) are stuck with far less in terms of agency and roleplaying options. They're almost playing a separate game entirely. They have to play a gme of "DM may I?" with a horribly underwhelming "skills system" where proficiency only makes them 10% better at something that someone with no training at all, while the characters with magic can just cheat past these parts of the game consistently and reliably if they build correctly. Even worse is the utter river of shit-spew counter-arguments that it's "balanced" because casters have spell slots that can run out. Yes, the character who can do everything some of the time and then become useless is balanced against the character who is mostly useless all of the time.

Magic needs to do a small handful of things that other classes can't do, but it needs to do JUST that. Not do a handful of things nobody else can do and also everything that everyone else can do, but better.

In before grognards with spreadsheets try to claim martials are better in combat, the most fucking boring part of a roleplaying experience. And even there, they may be "better" in terms of raw damage but still lack anywhere near the number of options and gameplay depth casters have.

Before that one troll is summoned, please know that I agree with you. But I feel the issue is more complicated.

For instance; in my homebrew game I changed and limited the classes to the most basic set; Fighter, Rogues, and Mages. The mages later had their name changed to "Sages"; because I made them a support class. Especially when using D&D as a base, you want the Rogue class to be THE puzzle solving, trap avoiding, monster sneaking past guy. The Fighter is the best at fighting of course, so then you should make the Wizardly class into a support unit. Healing, repairing shit quickly, giving off light or fire, protection from spells or undead; similar to what a cleric does. This is a perfectly serviceable situation.

However a LOT of people find a lot of appeal in a deep or interesting magic system, which is where the issue comes in. Having a magic system like in Ars Magica, where you can combine a verb + subject to create a spell effect, is EXTREMELY cool. You could "Create" plus "Fire" to make a fireball. You could "Change" plus "Animal" to turn your little rat familiar that lives in your pocket into a horse, so you can use it as a mount for a short time. Shit like this is classic fantasy and extremely cool, and people want stuff like this in their games. Powers they can actually control. Games without magic, or games with magic being purely in the form of magic items, become a "DM may I?" for everyone. But this magic is also extremely overpowered if only a few party members get it, which is why Ars Magica has EVERYONE make a Wizard and they rotate who is playing them and who is playing a non-magical supporting character.

So what's a good solution? I don't know. It's very hard to figure because it depends so much on what your group wants. Dungeons and Dragons, as well as video games, has created an expectation that people can play a Warrior dude and another player a Wizard dude and they should be of equal value, but they never are. That's our quest.

I'd agree, except I feel support should be the role of clerics, and mages should be "crowd control" forms of damage.

I know wizards already sorta are with things like Fireball and such. But this needs to be one of the ONLY things their class is good at. If you're a piece of blaster artillery, you shouldn't ALSO have mind control, and ALSO have shapeshifting, and ALSO have tons of defensive magic, and ALSO have the ability to see the future, and ALSO raise the dead, and ALSO teleport, and ALSO summon monsters to fight for you, and ALSO 9001 other things.

>I'd agree, except I feel support should be the role of clerics, and mages should be "crowd control" forms of damage.

You're already running into problems here though. Making Wizards the "crowd control" forms of damage is making them into better fighters, but usually better since they can disable foes or deal damage to many foes at once. There is literally nothing wrong with folding the Cleric and Wizard together; make the Wizard a supporting class.

>I know wizards already sorta are with things like Fireball and such. But this needs to be one of the ONLY things their class is good at. If you're a piece of blaster artillery, you shouldn't ALSO have mind control, and ALSO have shapeshifting, and ALSO have tons of defensive magic, and ALSO have the ability to see the future, and ALSO raise the dead, and ALSO teleport, and ALSO summon monsters to fight for you, and ALSO 9001 other things.

Yes, but even choosing one of those categories has potential to step on the non-magical classes toes, with exception to things like healing and protection spells. Combat spells and summoning are like being a fighter, but better. Transmutation, Divination, Enchantment, and Illusion all step on the roll of the party's Rogue or Bard usually. Powers like teleportation, flight, or powers that end monster encounters instantly are too powerful even if that's the only thing the character can do, as they ruin the entire game experience and primary structure for everyone.

In most games the classes that do crowd control do considerably less single-target damage than the classes that focus on doing high single-target DPS.

Play any MMO, the crowd-control classes are great when you're up against trash mobs, but garbage when you're up against the big boss of the dungeon (unless said boss summons trash mobs constantly).

Yes, that's a great idea in theory. But once again; that doesn't really give the magic user any really good niche. Doing a specific type of damage; being a class geared only towards combat and that's it kind of weakens the archetype and makes them too specific. It would work for a game focused entirely on a combat engine, but what about out of combat actions?

I think the biggest problem is that Martials and Casters in D&D is that they are operating on two entirely different tiers of power both mechanically and in setting/lore/fluff/universe but are presented as being roughly equivalent

It's like the martial is stuck being Black Knight and the caster gets to be Doctor Strange and even then the martial only gets to be Black Knight if the DM gives him a good magic sword

The only real solution to this problem is to either explicitly state that a group should all play one or the other with everybody being either martials or casters, or you move them closer together in terms of power, utility, depth and well just about everything else. Of course to do that you need to either remove a lot of magic from the magicians or give a lot of magic to the warrior in terms of blatantly superhuman/supernatural abilities, and when I say supernatural abilities I don't just mean leaping tall building or stopping a speeding lightning rail I mean superhuman levels of skill as well

This misses the point though. In DnD, or at least 5e, fighters are actually more POWERFUL than casters.

The cancer of casters comes instead from their sheer versatility and ability to bypass problems half a dozen ways before they even start. And then, even if the martials have skills that would be useful, the magical solution is usually better and more reliable in every aspect other than the spell-slot cost.

In combat the fighter still blows the wizard out of the water, but again, combat is the most piss boring part of actual roleplaying.

>I think the biggest problem is that Martials and Casters in D&D is that they are operating on two entirely different tiers of power both mechanically and in setting/lore/fluff/universe but are presented as being roughly equivalent

Most people agree with this reasoning.

>or give a lot of magic to the warrior in terms of blatantly superhuman/supernatural abilities, and when I say supernatural abilities I don't just mean leaping tall building or stopping a speeding lightning rail I mean superhuman levels of skill as well

I like this, you could incorperate elements from other fantasy works such as Fighters having literal supernatural charisma and being able to draw people to them. I am also somewhat enamored by the idea of giving Wizards all those crazy powers everyone loves, but no combat spells or abilities of their own at all, so if you need to actually show force or destroy a powerful foe the fighter is the only option. Even though I think at a high enough level of play the Wizard may still be a little bit better overall, I feel that some players may gravitate towards the weeaboo action fighter anyway just for the sheer badassness of the new and improved class.

Oldschool D&D got this more right since when Fighters reached a high enough level they got a fort for free and could attract 50+ men to serve under them. Magicians by contrast got a wizard tower and like 3 lesser mage apprentices.

Yes but I also said supernatural levels of skill as well like a Rogue so sneaky that if he's out of sight for even a moment he becomes virtually/actually invisible or a guy whose Athletics skill is so great he can run on air and gets to make a check to gain flight for a round

I don't think anyone is agreeing with you, but you don't think that at a certain point that reaches asymmetrical balance?

Say if a fighter gets strong then versus a same-power level wizard there is basically no way for the wizard to kill the fighter. The fighter will always defeat anything the wizard could throw at him, and naturally if they got into a fight the wizard would easily lose. Even moreso that the Wizard doesn't get shit like dimension door or save or suck spells at all, just has to rely entirely on illusions, enchantments, magical traps, and transformation spells.

I feel that at a certain point of this people might be happy enough with the balance. If the wizard is so useless in combat that only a fighter can protect them, but the wizard has great utility that can bypass other obstacles that it would work out. I'm not saying this is how it works already, but how it COULD work theoretically.

Still kind of doesn't work because the skillsets of a fighter isn't in the same usefulness of the skillset of a Rogue or Wizard. Unless you count the whole leadership thing and make all the Kings fighters, then it might work a bit better.

Stop derailing the thread.

My dream campaign would be a monster/evil campaign where the players neither try to act like dumb murderhobos or like "we're misunderstood special snowflakes!" either.

>I feel that some players may gravitate towards the weeaboo action fighter anyway just for the sheer badassness of the new and improved class
I feel this is an inevitability

As much as Veeky Forums like to bitch about weebshit and talk shit about how videogames ruined roleplay the culture has changed and a lot of people getting into roleplaying now grew up on anime and videogames that portrayed martial warriors as incredibly skilled and powerful individuals with amazing abilities

But when they go to try D&D the quintessential rpg they find not the type of fantasy they are used to but a system bogged down by decades of adhering to a style that is no longer in fashion, various flavors of magic man and mundane warrior/rogue/whatever but players these days, at least in my experience, don't want that they want magic man and magic warrior I mean shit look at this webm this shit is from a fucking movie about King Arthur a guy in the top 5 of people you think of when you think western fantasy and he's tossing guys around and firing off some sort of wind blade thing

Whether in 6th, 7th or 8th D&D will eventually have to give baseline martial a greater range of shit to do and part of that will involve embracing some shit Veeky Forums will consider weeb

>As much as Veeky Forums like to bitch about weebshit and talk shit about how videogames ruined roleplay the culture has changed and a lot of people getting into roleplaying now grew up on anime and videogames that portrayed martial warriors as incredibly skilled and powerful individuals with amazing abilities
>involve embracing some shit Veeky Forums will consider weeb

And that's a good thing. I used the term "weeabo fighting magic" as a shorthand, not as an insult. In a high fantasy world that's what martials SHOULD be doing. If you're going to restrict fighters to near human levels of fighting ability and physical strength, then wizards should be greatly limited in terms of their magical powers.

Did you have to fight off wolves on your way to school?

No, I had to wade through the giant masses of snow while trying not to freeze to death instead.
Though in all seriousness, somewhere in countryside people have to keep firearms in order to fend off wild animals. The person I know had to hide from the pack of wolves on the top of a street light once. He was trying to catch a bus late at night after visiting his relatives deep in the countryside.

Then what would they act like? Or,w hat is left for them to act like?

A Bionicle campaign.
But this childhood feeling is too abstract to properly make something concrete out of it, if you know what I mean.
Sure, I can just use the wiki for all the info I ever need, but it just needs this specific feeling of awe and mystery, that I'm afraid I'm not able to elicit in others, since it is so closely related to my subjective experience.
Don't want to ruin it for myself.

I feel this same was about a good Mass Effect scifi campaign. The setting itself is interesting as fuck, but all my friends know about it "LOL, WORST ENDING IN VIDEOGAME HISTORY!"

How do you even climb streetlights?

Somewhat like that, I suppose? youtube.com/watch?v=ZtXjHtEd3bo
In general, human body is capable of doing impressive feats under the influence of fear.

What I'll never understand is the people who played those games and didn't get anything more out of it than Halo+Tiddies
I think it's the same issue MtG lore has, where it's really cool when it's just these little snippets, but the bigger picture simply can't live up to what they promise

I always wanted to run a campaign based on the not-ottoman empire being rivals with a not-golden horde. The magic system is based on a combination of alchemy vs. animism with a renaissance level to the technology of the world in general. I just need to get some confidence as a dm and find a system besides D&D or pathfinder that will actually let me run it .

wtf is this from

>PC's fighting a war against an evil, demon controlled empire that's invading
>War is going poorly since the Devil himself is on the battlefields and assisting the Empire
>One of the good nation leaders sends the Party to find three pieces of the Lost Orb of MacGuffinatorix in order to have enough power to beat the Empire
>Party successfully gathers two peices, but the third is a wild goose chase, and the faction leader that sent them on the quest already had the third piece
>By the time they realize what's been going on, that faction leader has completed his ritual and ascended to godhood using the orb
>turns out he was a relative of the Emperor, and staged a coup in the Empire against the demon worshipers, the leadership of which had already been decimated by the Party during the campaign
>Many of the other faction leaders from the good nation have been hanged, and the war is seemingly at an end
>Players offered a choice: either join the new evil god (who actually quite likes them), and be offered wealth, political positions, and magical demi-god powers, or fight him using a clever plan, defeating the Empire and the man who murdered their favorite NPCs, but with unpredictable political consequences

It's too complicated, and far too "rail-road-y" for my taste. It definitely feels more like "my story" than my players', which I hate, but I love the double cross and the choice at the end. Besides, my group seems to be more interested in getting crits than story or roleplaying, so I keep my narratives more on the simple side.

God this is so relatable
You have already evoked this deep sense of nostalgic wondrous longing in me

Why did you do this to me

Man, The Giver was a pretty good book.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, I believe.

Sorta running it now, but I'm tired of high-flying crazy super deep lore campaigns and boring high-fantasy settings. I really want to run a simple campaign. A wandering band of mercenaries, joining military endeavors here and there, also clearing out bands of monsters and bandits. And occasionally hunting a big monster, with basically no more motivation than "go get gold, keep doing jobs," that aren't necessarily part of a linear story. Mixing a lower-fantasy gritty feel with some fairytale would be what I'm looking to do. which is basically, now that I think about it, is ACKS along with Lairs and Encounters.

We had a "steal eachother's idea" thread a while back, and most all the campaigns therein I'd run.
included
>Dwarf fortress adventure campaign
>Spooky paranormal boat patrol
>Dystopian City Militia campaign
>Prohibition Era X-Com Campaign
>Antarctic Penguin-people campaign
>Fallout Game set in Florida Everglades
>Straight-Archetypical Zombie survival campaign

If anyone would like copypasta of any of those, I can provide them (some are shorter than others)

A human centric renaissance type game.
My players can barely play something that is even a bit down to earth, let alone a normal human.
Its always a dragonborn bard/barbarian that wants to be a Viking type, when that culture doesn't exist, or a gnome baker/summoner

Not that user, but something like the Industrious Rogue story maybe?

>Prohibition Era X-Com Campaign

How would you even shoot down the UFOs?

Cannons, or alternatively, improvised explosions.
I think it would have to do more with grey-man distilleries

If the people you play with aren't willing to learn something that isn't D&D, they're not worth playing with anyway.

So kinda like Monsters on Maple Street, but real? I can dig it

My ideal campaign...
Well, the world is old, so fucking old.
There are grand nations that exist, the humans have long since genocided any non humans, leaving much of those conquered kingdoms to rot. Magic, while not rare persay, is not fast or without risk. There are 5 kinds of magic. Ritualism, lots of magic circles, insence, study and runes, sorcerers, fonts of arcane power formed by either fusion of a spirit to a human or some other mishap, whose wild magic is both destructive and unstable. Alchemists are kind of the scientists of the world, learning and processing the supernatural components of the world. Divine magic is uncommon, sparsely used, and gamechanging. Casting divine spells is less an incantation, and more a prayer, that if answered will completely change the encounter. Then we have shamanism. This is essentially a smaller and more manageable form of divine magic, in which you do favors and recieve favors from spirits of all sorts.
The Warriors of this realm are wide and varied (read as talk to me about playing a martial, ill get you a few fun abilites that you can use creatively.)

Fuck yes, user. This is basically my dream game, but everyone wants to do gay shit like live out the life of xXXDarkElf420XXx in minute detail.
Why cant we just go kill a dragon and steal its gold without it being a grand moral dilemma for all involved!?

I feel that most disappointment from magic comes from the encounter bypassing variety: Fly, teleport, scrying, remote sensing, lie detecting, All of which need very specific countermeasures to nullify, as if nobody else in the party didn't matter.

I liked the WFRPG (1st ed.) approach where even low level D&D type magic is exceedingly rare and, likely to get witch hunters and the various cultists gunning for the PCs.

...

Basically toaru majutsu no index universe but with OC donut steels and acquirable powers. Feeling of the setting be more like Persona with travelling but the plotline would be more serious than solving a weekend villain influence.

And I'd like to play two of them, one by a balanced weeb and one by a balanced superhero movie fan. Just to see their direction visions for the concept, I love to see new ideas.

I want to start up a West Marches style of campaign though i am a little intimidated about creating dungeons and the over all world map.

i want players to create their own map by using land marks they remember passing but at the same time I want a proper world map showing the exact locations of things. That way if they place anything on their map in the wrong spot, they might end up searching for a while if they decide to go back.

any advice?

Just put together a few dungeons at the start; it's likely players won't go past the first dungeon until they've well looted it. 3 dungeons is more than good to start.

Giving a vague world map is always good for players, and letting them draw upon it is a good idea as well.
I wouldn't focus too much on the mapping aspect outside the dungeon, simply because of how annoying it can be with constant builds onto the world map.

A campaign about a bunch of varagians/latin knights/mercenaries involved in the conflicts of the early komnenos restoration.

Story focused, low scale (with the events happening in the background), conflicts being rare but dangerous, etc.
Using Burning Wheel (or GURPS maybe).

I don't know, which is part of the problem. I want to make a game or setting with a specific theme and run it with some sandbox elements, but it's so hard to decide on a game, world, magic system, setting, etc. etc.

>The setting itself is interesting as fuck

What would possibly make you say this? The races are generic. The factions are boring. The characters range from good to hilariously awful. The dialogue includes "But the Priiiiiize." and "My face is tired." And yes, dat ending.

Thanks my dude, I already have a few good dungeon ideas in mind

I have this thing where if there's large parts of a universe I don't like (large enough that I can't simply ignore it), I can't bring myself to run it now matter how much I like the rest. I'm also really fucking sick of grimdark when it seems to be all anyone's who isn't Paizo or WotC is making anymore. So, I've had a couple scifi not!settings bouncing around my head for awhile now
>My Eclipse Phase
Basically transhumanist black ops garbage men. Humanity has spread out across the galaxy (although they haven't encountered any other intelligent life), loosely governed by the not!Federation. Space being vast and government recordkeeping only being so good, this has produced a certain amount of refuse, some of it dangerous- rogue military AI's, bioweapons experiments gone wrong that were simply abandoned, isolationist cults disrupting shipping. The PCs are elite soldiers who slot themselves into other bodies (which is common but not quite EP common) to quietly take care of these problems (quietly, because the existence of some of this stuff would make people uncomfortable and make the government look weak and inept). Your bosses would prefer you do it peacefully, but no one's going to chew you out over it unless you fuck up really bad.

(1/2)

>My Shadowrun
Not so much cyberpunk as sort of a proto-biopunk/eco-future thing. Possibly some alt-history as well to make the timeline work. Government became more and more decentralized over the course of the 21st century, and nation-level governments atrophied to the point of really only existing on paper. Large cities are now effectively city-states, ruling over nearby smaller cities and suburban fiefdoms in a quasi-feudal manner, with the area between urban zones being lawless and nearly empty. Urbanization and rural decay got REALLY bad as the century went on, largely due to the development of lab-grown meat and produce and GMO bacteria generated plastics, along with the complete switchover to renewable energy. "Montana is basically Mongolia" was how the fa/tg/uy I'm "borrowing" a lot of this from put it. Life in urban zones isn't dystopian per se, the standard of living is even higher than it is in the developed world now and on paper we've never had it so good. It's just incredibly dull and sterile. No danger, little suffering, but no adventure. 95% of life takes place in front of a screen. Your average person works a menial white collar job from home in a cloud based "office," having their groceries delivered by drone, getting all their human interaction via social media. They can spend days or even weeks without seeing another human being face to face unless they choose to. The players are people who've rejected that life and choose to live as mercenaries, working for municipal governments (outright bloodshed between urban zones is almost unheard of, but espionage, sabotage, scheming, and politicking is constant) and organized crime rings (which grow like weeds in the rural areas, inevitably making inroads into the cities as well). Also there's magic, occult conspiracies, lots of kooky cults, anarcho-primitivist and anti-magic terrorists, and a bunch of other weird shit I think is neat.

>Are there any campaign concepts you always wanted to try but never had a chance to?

Holy fuck

Thundarr the Barbarian is basically every Appendix N style game I have ever played in. It's super simple to emulate with something like Dungeon Crawl Classics.

One campaign I'd read about that I was super interested in is a very frontier town feel, where the players are basically on the far borders of a nation that is in conflict, and though they do venture out to do some missions here and there, they primarily stay at "home base" and build it up into a little frontier town from a small outpost.

The party is illegal aliens.
The Men in Black kind of illegal aliens.
Everyone has a weirdass goal, like collecting dinosaur bones to pay off their gambling debts, liberating as many of their cockroach bretheren as they can, eating pineal glands to fuel the next stage of their life style, etc.
Avoid attention, commentate earth culture, blither about absurd alien shenanigans, adamantly refuse to become less horrible sapients.
The more you fuck up, the greater the opposition, ramping up from incompetent mall cops and large dogs to swat teams, dudes in tanks, and (If you fuck up badly enough) Agent K missing his lunch break.

Everyone writes up a character history with multiple points of divergence.
The party is chosen by a bullshit wizard to save dimensions or time or something.
Every time they die, the wizard pulls a different them out of their possible lives and into the fight.

So like
>Knight dude fell into despair and made a deal with a demon for power
>Black Knight dies, wizard goes back and gets the knight that fell into despair and ended up a demon hunter instead
>Demon hunter dies, wizard goes back and gets the knight that kept his faith and became a paladin
>Paladin dies, wizard goes back and gets the knight that got tossed out of knight training and became a layabout twat noble rogue
>Etc. etc.

It's not so much the system as it is the players
Scheduling and varying tastes are the bane of a GM's existence

That's quite disappointing; I find that to happen with online games most. They tend to be quite a bitch when it comes to attendance and scheduling.

I wanted to do a semi-meta campaign with my party. The game I ran was a series of one-shots that often connected to one another, think URealms if you've ever seen it. The plan was that I would let my players pick one character they've played before and bring them back, but I'd also let them pick any character from another campaign that they had played, even a PC they'd created in a vidya game if they really wanted.

The idea is that they'd wake up together in a complex with a necromancer I was building to be the big bad of this story arc. As they fought through the dungeon, they'd come to find out they they weren't flesh and blood, but arcane spirits that infest books and diaries and become the main characters from them, called Believers(which I also stole), and that the necromancer was building a force from them and killing the ones that wouldn't co-operate. The last fight would of been against three copies of the dude, who they'd find was also abusing Believers to clone himself for more power.

It was a concept I had in mind that kickstarted my GM'ing in the first place. I thought it would be interesting to inject those characters into the world if they survived, especially if they brought back PC's from one of the previous one-shots. They'd have a clone running around, or a new version of them if they had died at some point. I thought the campaign would be a bit janky if I didn't get the story just right, since I wanted to balance the metaness of old characters pulled in from anywhere with the lore. Really though, it never took place since the party fell apart.

As a foreverGM I have a lot of ideas that I'd like to run someday but probably never will.
My favorite is the generational supers game. Start with a brief, golden-age style setting (Nazis in WW2), then update the characters for a cosmic level 80es style setting, and finish with street level descendants a la young Justice.
I'm never going to get my players to stat one superhero, let alone three.

never once have I had this experience

All cyberpunk amnesiac party where everyone runs a character sheet I made for GURPS in advance, but since they're amnesiacs the abilities don't get filled in until they discover them.

The secret is that they're all varying degrees of robot; one is android (100% robot) who his creator made with intent to find out how an extremely life like robot would react to finding out it wasn't human. Another is a mercenary who had his nervous system replaced to increase his reaction speed but got hooked on a program that is copy protected and deletes itself on use that mimics a massive endorphin release (the character is under the assumption that the program also makes him addicted to it but it turns out he became addicted from pleasure alone). The third is the opposite, a cyborg with only his brain remaining; originally he was a Raiden expy, but I turned him from a child soldier in africa to a mass produced clone army from Taiwan. The last is seemingly 100% human, and should be considering he's the leader of a terrorist group trying to ban the cyborg procedure, but he secretly has a robotic heart due to a birth defect (I think I stole this from Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd century, but I can't remember for sure).