Whats a good system for grittier capeshit stuff
Something in between The Boys (TV) and Invincible in terms of power level
Whats a good system for grittier capeshit stuff. Something in between The Boys (TV) and Invincible in terms of power level
Whats a good system for grittier capeshit stuff
Something in between The Boys (TV) and Invincible in terms of power level
Have you considered GURPS? It'll be whatever power level you want, and I quite enjoy the Powers book for making superpowers.
I've considered it, but it's a bit crunchy for my taste from what I've heard so I'm looking for alternatives.
I'll probably head there if I can't find anything else though, the level of versatility is pretty wild.
Oh sweet, a /supers/ thread, I've been waiting for one of these.
I've only ever ran Cyberpunk Red and D&D myself, but I may consider checking out GURPS for my own campaign. Besides Powers, are there any other books you'd reccomend for horror-inspired capeshit (ex. Blade, Hellboy '04, Constantine '05)?
I've never ran any horror inspired cape games, but I'd assume Horror would be useful. If I remember correctly Horror is more of a book for the GM than the player. The important thing with GURPS is that there's a ton of it, and you don't want to get too bogged down with more than you need. I'd recommend starting with as few books as possible to start. After you get more comfortable with the system Martial arts is great for melee and low tech combat rules, and either Gun Fu or Tactical Shooting depending on how cinematic you like to play for guns. Low tech, high tech, and ultra tech will be your equipment books for each time frame, though there's more than enough in the base book if you're not one to get super nitty gritty with your gear.
GURPS Supers, it expands from Powers.
GURPS horror books:
GURPS Magical Styles: Horror Magic
GURPS Creatures of the Night, Volume 1 through 5
GURPS Horror
GURPS Horror: The Madness Dossier
GURPS Monster Hunters
>Have you considered GURPS? It'll be whatever power level you want
disagree, it does super-durable type stuff very poorly
>GURPS
Seconded.
>>Have you considered GURPS? It'll be whatever power level you want
>disagree, it does super-durable type stuff very poorly
I think the opposite, at least at high levels. Supers expands Injury Tolerance, and a Cosmic modifier avoids death by a thousand cuts by rounding fractions down to zero. My problem is that only some parts of the system have exponential scaling like this, while others (including damage) are linear. It's most noticeable at the godlike level, where you can either have enough brute force to punch a mountain in half or the ability to mind control everyone on the planet simultaneously.
The nice thing about GURPS is the crunch level is up to you and your group. It took me a while to get this, coming in from a DnD 3e "RAW is king and all rules are in effect" mindset. The beauty of GURPS is that you can still asspull whatever you want, but rules are available for lots of stuff. Not required, just available to tables that find them fun or narratively interesting.
For example, radiation. There's a whole page dedicated to applying realistic effects based on the amount of rads someone was dosed with. Nothing wrong with ignoring them and saying "Omni-Man punched you through the nearby nuclear power plant. You're nauseated for three turns and take two points of burn damage from the radiation." Just asspull it, like you would in any system that didn't have rules for radiation in the first place. All GURPS rules are optional, but they're there if you want them. Knockback, penalties from wounds, buying and tracking ammo, encumbrance--all optional.
GURPS can even be run as a crunch-lite, narrative-focused system. In fact, Wildcard skills do a good job of emulating such systems by wrapping a bunch of stuff into a single "I do Hitman!-type shit" stat.
The core of GURPS is "take your stat, add bonuses, subtract penalties, and roll 3d6. If you're under your effective stat, you succeed." The rest is gravy.
As a big fan of GURPS, there's a lot of system mastery required to make a supers game work. It isn't an easy genre to build by yourself as a novice. If there was a Dungeon Fantasy genre line where 90% of the work is done already, but for superheroes, it'd be a much easier sell.
You can argue until the cows come home that GURPS is endlessly modular and you can simply "use what you need," but you really need someone else to help you understand how the system works and how to make it do what you want. That's why Dungeon Fantasy is so popular. It's a well-written supplement series with character options, monsters, adventures, and most importantly, an almost complete outline of the expected rules of play with everything built for those expected rules.
>you can still asspull whatever you want, but rules are available for lots of stuff. Not required, just available to tables that find them fun or narratively interesting
why are gurpsgays like this? literally every rpg works that way
fricking dnd explicitly works that way
I know its a meme but in actuality its true in this case.
It's true in most of the cases people ask about. That GURPS is a meme suggestion is a meme itself.
I'm not going to pretend it's a 5e alternative, but I quite like it for more crunchy and gritty games. I personally find the core mechanic quite elegant, and there's splatbooks and rules enough to cover everything I could want or need for most types of games.
The ORE supers books (Wild Talents/Godlike/Better Angels) do a pretty good job emulating the absolutely schizoid powerscaling of an Image comic. System math takes some getting used to though.
Sounds great I'll check it out
I'll keep the system math advice in mind
This. Once I got my head around power creation I found Wild Talents pretty great, and Godlike is prwtty much an earlier edition of Wild Talents with a WWII setting.They do gritty super heroes really well but can also do bullshit crazy. You have to be able to say no as a GM though or powers will be all over the place.
Came here to suggest ORE.
Genesys can be anything you want it to be, sans the crunch of GURPS.
Savage Worlds
Genesys
Aberrant
Heroes Unlimited covers everything from human vigilantes with guns and gadgets up to hypersonic Demi-Gods that can rip tanks in half. Characters never reach the same level as ones in M&M or Marvel systems, so you don't get the same power scaling problems. You get completely different ones since HU characters are completely front-loaded, so their relative strength is pretty much set at character creation.
HU also handles super abilities, technology, magic, psychic powers and chi using different systems. So a guy with a flamethrower, the human torch and a pyromancer all play differently.
Just be ready for 80s style skill system and random table frickery since even the revised version is as archaic as they come.
Aberrant
Also the Savage Worlds systems are pretty good for street level supers stuff they just don't really work once you get to the four colors level (kinda equivalent to planetwide superheros) because you have enough power to completely break the turn system
Wushu.
I like that Wushu has grown in reputation around these parts. It deserves it.
The media credits under every piece of "art" is totally cringe and makes it look amateur as frick. Why do that? Don't use that shit then. I don't even care that the drawings look dumb, I just don't want to see the gay credits under them. Damn bro. Draw some squiggly lines. Draw some stick figures. Don't vomit all over your book crediting Hector Alizondo (Wikimedia Commons) and Manuel Ortega Garcia Marquez (GIMP Paint Studio). Frick dude.
Hero system.
You need a system that represents stun damage and endurance.
Ascendant if you can get past the nuclear levels of autism that game has.
weaverdice
Anyone saying GURPS has not actually ran a supers game with it.
It breaks at high power levels.
It's broken even on typical fantasy levels, particularly when it comes to damage vs DR.
TSR Marvel and the homebrew clone, FASERIP.
Masks is interesting, but too specialised.
Has anyone tried the older systems, like Villains & Vigilantes, or Mutants & Masterminds?
D20 worked pretty well for my old campaigns, but we were doing some kind of rules-light homebrew.
Mutants And Masterminds combat alternates between the worst slog imaginable and death spiral due to stun mechanics is the big issue.
"getting hurt makes you worse at fighting" isn't a negative, plenty of other systems have penalties for trying to fight while leaking your guts all over the floor, people use "MUH DEATH SPIRAL" as a complaint for every system that isn't D&D style hit points where you fight at 100% effectiveness until the exact moment you drop dead which is moronic.
if you don't want to get stunned stop eating shit, or take a healing power and remove your damage conditions. if you're playing a hero who's not bulletproof, has no healing factor, and no magic healing abilities, stop facetanking nuclear bombs if you don't want to get staggered.
Well first off the implication that dodge and toughness aren't going to be maxed out on literally every mnm character is just plain wrong, same for damage/accuracy, it's what the system is built around to a frustratingly limiting degree especially in 3rd edition.
The other issue is that wound penalties in most games accumulate while in mutants and masterminds they CAN be cleared by healing factor or hero points which turns combat into, yes, just slapping each other with pool noodles until one side runs out of gas and fricking dies exalted-style. Unless of course it's a high-tougness villain in which case you just sit there stunlocking them until someone gets a high enough roll and the bulletproof guy just can't do shit because he's out of metacurrency and too heavily penalized to make his recovery saves and it just becomes a tedious slog unless someone specifically specced in a switchable max-damage power to finish people. Makes for a very good power rangers/super sentai game though.
>Unless of course it's a high-tougness villain in which case you just sit there stunlocking them until someone gets a high enough roll and the bulletproof guy just can't do shit because he's out of metacurrency and too heavily penalized to make his recovery saves and it just becomes a tedious slog unless someone specifically specced in a switchable max-damage power to finish people.
this is a straight up skill issue on your players' part. you can target defenses besides Toughness with a 0 or 1 point per rank power extra, if the entire party has built themselves as nothing but dudes with guns and swords who exclusively target toughness alone then of course they're going to run into issues, the same way a D&D party of five monks is going to run into issues against enemies who aren't weak to being punched.
Even IF your party is nothing but wolverine and deadpool types who cannot possible conceive of doing anything but Toughness damage, you can still use a Hero Point to power stunt an alternate resistance effect for a scene, so your Deadpool can pull out a gun that fries people's brains instead of shooting bullets and has Alternate Resistance: Will, or Wolverine can start vibrating his claws to disrupt molecular bonds and turn it into a High-Frequency Blade metal gear style, and make it Alternate Resistance: Parry.
If you have a dearth of both creativity AND character building yeah, you'll struggle against a brick wall, but that applies to virtually any RPG system. An all-physical damage D&D party will struggle against an enemy resistant to physical damage too.
Damage is also like the single least interesting way to resolve combats in Mutants and Masterminds, you can remove characters from fights with Afflictions and Complications just as easily (and as a GM you have access to every single affliction at-will, with no power point budgets to worry about), and healing skills and healing factors do nothing to prevent your Wolverine from getting mind controlled
Anon you can say skill issue all you want but the hard facts of the matter are that MnM's core mechanics are extremely swingy and reliant on hero points as a bandaid. Even your 'solutions' come down to 'spend more hero points' and GM fiat on either side of the table.
Didn't Bill Willingham write a couple modules for Mutants & Masterminds? I remember reading that he re-used the characters in Elementals...
M&M isn't really good for gritty stuff. You can do it, the GM guide has the advice about it, but it's not default assumption and the result is kinda meh. It's more for comic/cartoon style supers even if you use the darker stories.
>Something in between The Boys (TV) and Invincible in terms of power level
mutants and masterminds works fine for this, just use the rules for lethal damage and be edgy when describing how minions get pasted
Aberrant. It was literally designed to exemplify the conflict of existentialism and the responsibility of super powers.
Also uses the storyteller system, which is basically what is required when you're dealing with supe-level powers for humans. Numbers stop being a necessity when you have a man who can throw a tank into orbit.
Ascendant
Anyone played Champions? I've only seen the adverts.
What if Superman was a Total Dick like my Stepdad? 2E
is Worm a good setting, its the only thing I know about supes and capes, I never watch those two shows OP mention but I read alot of worm fanfiction
its a setting not a system. Would work fine as a setting I think
Depends on what you want and what kind of game you want to run. The background of Worm is basically sidereal style precognition combat between some absolutely bullshit precogs that mog almost everyone else. So the game needs to be either small enough in scale that those precogs don't give a shit about it or you need to account for the fact that multiple parties may want to mindrape, murder or screw over the PCs in other ways.
he reads worm fanfiction so in that case worm is a setting about isekai protagonists with cringy cyoa powersets
which actually makes the exalted comparison even more fitting
Appendix N for cape horror:
Hellboy
Mr. Monster
Hack/Slash
The Nocturnals
Zenith
GenXorcist
All Superheroes Must Die (2011)
The New Mutants (2020)
The Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy (1964)
Santo vs. the vampire Women (1962)
The Wraith (1986)
Earth vs. the Spider (TV Movie 2001)
I played the shit out of Wild Talents and beware: as it states clearly in the book itself, it doesn't have any resemblance of balance. You will have to balance out the party and opposition. That said is fun and relatively easy, and very fast in play... When I started running it the party went through what I thought would be 4 sessions worth of stuff in a single evening.
Prowlers and Paragons. Any power level from street to cosmic, and it already comes with specific gritty variant rules.
Well? Which system did you decide to use?
Echoing Wild Talents. The system is specifically designed for maximum lethality - Hard Dice and Wiggle Dice are “frick you it works” mechanics. An Omni-Man character (flight, strength, resilience, combat speciality) isn’t all that expensive points-wise, if I remember correctly.
You can create powers that exclusively target an opponent’s brain stem every single time you take an action, if you really wanted to.
Isn't there a DC comics rpg?