RPG Elements

I have toyed a bit with a card-based RPG-idea. It was mainly based on d20 3E system reference document.

The idea was that the battle-stuff you could 'do', was compiled in a deck of cards and a pile of action-point counters. Every time, you got extra feats, cards and or AP-counters were added. (Later the idea was to incorporate skills too.)

So, fighting was done by playing cards (or card-combo's if you spent action-points).
No more dice to roll.

Spending much action-points would deliver more fatal blows or allow for feats to be used, but AP-regeneration was not fast enough to be able to deliver massive blow after massive blow...

It was never seriously develloped, but sometimes, I think that this RPG-card-idea may see implementation in a game...

Cheese!

Hey Wolf,

Great idea! I'm a huge fan of super RPGs, having run Champions for many years starting in high school.

I don't want to discourage your effort, but I suggest you put off the particulars of "how powers will work" for a bit and ask some larger questions. The answers will help you sort out the rest of your system.

Without further ado, here are the questions:

1) What is the range of power levels in your game?
In Marvel and DC style universes, you have everyone from "heightened normals" like Captain America to gods like Thor -- often fighting side by side! If you envision this kind of world, you will probably need to reflect stats on a logarithmic scale in order to keep numbers manageable.

Champions did this with a simple rule: powers and stats are all point based. The score for an "average" human is 10, and every +5 points doubles the stats' effectiveness (and -5 halves it). So, if a "normal" can bench press 100 kg at strenght 10, Captain America can bench press 400 kilos at 20 strength and so on.

Where it got tricky was in "damage dice": damage was computed using stat / 5. So the Hulk with 60 strength rolled 12 dice for damage while Cap only got 4, whereas the Hulk could life 256 times more than Cap!

The linear scale for damage vs the logarithmic scale for lifting meshed well with comic book fiction where Cap could still inflict small amounts of pain on someone with whom the Hulk could go toe-to-toe. Nevertheless, it's a bit weird at first glance.

2) How fast do you want your combat to be, and how much comic flavor do you want it to have?

Champions had a very detailed combat system: your Endurance stat controlled how often and how fully you could exercise your powers. Your Speed stat controlled how often you moved in a 12-second round. You had seperate stats for "unconsciousness hit points" and "death hit points". There were fully realized miniatures rules for movement. I could go on. Needless to say, combat moved fairly slowly unless you had a very experienced GM. On the flip side, combat had fantastic comic book flavor -- often because really powerful characters were rolling 12, 13, or 14 dice on a single damage check (impressive characters = impressive rolls).

Still, it's not for everyone.

If you're using dice pools based on attribute values and you have a large range of power levels, be prepared to 1) do some fancy math or 2) learn to love big die rolls, because someone will inevitably dump all his points into a single stat or attack.

This is not to say you can't achieve comic flavor without large die rolls and complex systems. However, you'll need to ask yourself what constitutes the kind of flavor you want and create mechanics that supports it.

There are other questions, but these two probably have the most impact. Superhero power levels require mathematics that scale well across wide ranges.

Good luck!

Kreitler

Here are some comic-book-esque mechanics to match your needs:

Limit actions using Endurance. Maybe heroes buy an END stat along with strength, agility, etc. Each hero gets that many chips. To activate a power, he must expend chips equal to its value (1-5). At the end of a round, players retrieve a certain number of chips (could be fixed or equal to the value of another stat, like "recovery", to borrow from Champions).

Actions per round = speed. A round represents a fixed time -- like 10 seconds. High speed characters act more often in these 10 seconds than those with lower speed. When every player has acted his "speed" times, the round ends and players recover endurance. You'll need a simple movement chart to distribute players' actions across the round. Assuming speeds range from 1 to 5:

Acts on 1_2_3_4_5
Speed 5: *_*_*_*_*
Speed 4: *_*___*_*
Speed 3: *___*___*
Speed 2: __*___*__
Speed 1: ____*____

Don't worry about this favoring speedsters. Sure, they *could* act every round, but if they run out of endurance, they can't do much.

What constitutes an action? Use of any power or stat for offense. Defensive powers (like turning on a force field) shouldn't count as an action -- though maybe you could bring down their cost if you took that as a limitation on the power. Also, you could consider letting someone abort his next action in exchange for activating a defense during a phase when he normally wouldn't act (e.g., Hydroman wants to erect his water bubble shield to block an attack on phase 3, but he's speed 2. He aborts his phase 4 move in exchange for the defensive act).

A lot of this is borrowed or modified from Champions because it just worked so well. Your 5-point system should ensure a very different feel to the game, though.

K.

Maybe you shouldn't be worried about this yet. but one thing that is always nice to remember is non-linear powers (meaning tings like being psychic, instead of just super-strength). I think it would add a lot of character to the game and choices (though it would also be considerably harder to balance...)

Not sure if I can be of any real help, but here is my two cents anyway. I'm a huge fan of the Marvel FASERIP system. Of course in that system the power was often, but not always (Rogue being just one example), tied to a particular common stat. Energy emission powers need not be tied to anything, but could have a stat all of their own.

I'm working on a Japanese super hero & giant monster RPG myself using a d100 system. Not just because the zocchihedron is funky kewl, but because as heroes and monster get more powerful or grow, the stats will multiply by 10s or 100s.