brigadon's page

DC Adventures uses an entirely points buy system. You pay for for stats, skill points, defences, powers and equipment. Even your base is on a points buy. I know your not really interested in playing DC Adventures yourself but I'd recommend seeing if the idea could be applied to your system.

The whole reason for a avoiding point buying systems still stands. lack of control, ability to 'self-gimp', lack of balance between characters and between npcs, GM difficulty, etc.

I would suggest you could use the something like cleric domains or sorcerous bloodlines to set the core powers of a class.

So with tanks 1 could be a fire tank useing game mechanics like fire shield and miss chances created with smoke to tank, while another may go for Tech and have built his very own iron man rip off suit with armor and deflection bonuses, a third may take stone with damage reduction as his primary defense.

If you go for this path i'd suggest 2 cleric like domains one primary and one secondary as it would allow for greater diveristy so our Fire Tank above my take stone as his secondary and play "Visuvious master of Magma", our Tech suited chap may go for healing as his secondary ability and become "Paladin" and our stone chap may chose Air as his secondary becoming "Trebuchet".

Heh, I might get in trouble with Cryptic, since that's pretty much exactly the system CoH used :P

I understand the damage per round part (it's like protection from arrows in that it gets used up as it stops damage) but I'm a little confused as to the 'floating' part. Are you saying this would be something you could spread out around the party?

No, but man, that would be a pretty cool ability for a protector, wouldn't it?

Instead of magic items, call them boons. Have them be "dispellable" by having their effects tied to reputation. For example: a favor from the mayor may manifest as a one shot effect that abstractly grants a temporary bonus, some kind of healing or back up in the form of uniform officers arriving at the scene to assist. Instead of wealth grant renown and have it work like gold. Boons have a renown value. Max renown is based on level. It isn't perfect, but it would work.

That sounds like a definitely workable solution for a tough situation.

AC is almost moot, but combat maneuvers and saving throws translate almost perfect. Have guns deal damage that is avoided by a reflex save and have super strength based attacks resisted by fortitude saves. The skies the limit.

i don't want it to devolve into nothing but saving throws, Though. that sounds an awful lot like M&M's solution. Once you do away with the core to-hit mechanic, you begin to ask yourself questions like "Why have hp?"

I am actually using a weird damage reduction model based on a damage-per-round mechanic instead of a damage-per-hit mechanic. There are both types of mechanics in the game, but damage-per-round reduction can be a LOT more powerful and let people feel super at an earlier level without massively unbalancing things or suffering from too much creep.

I mean, being able to bounce bullets is a great idea for a first level character to feel like a superhero, but to consistently bounce a 1d6 (pistol) attack, you'd need at least 5 points of physical damage reduction. that's a bit obscene for a first level character,and would not protect against rifles (d10) or a shotgun(d12) reasonably.

On the other hand, 2 points of damage reduction and say... 15 points of 'floating' per-round damage ablation wold be quite reasonable. They could definitely stop a round of almost any caliber they like, and even stop several small handguns at a time, but a couple of heavy rifles or armor-piercing rockets would be a SERIOUS threat They could even 'arrange' their damage reduction in concert with damage ablation if they feel like being strategic.
(Damage ablation is different from simply getting extra hit points or regeneration, as it doesn't return HP if you are not attacked.)

Witch Hunter: The Invisible World rules published by Paradigm Concepts.

Originally the concept was made for a variant of the D10 rules by white wolf studios, I adapted and altered it for d20 games.

I sorta fatfingered it, I meant to say 60HP, not 50.

It's a big feature of the game variant, so I am not going to excerpt it here, but the entire conversion is only about 150 or so pages, and I am already just about halfway through, so you are welcome to download the thing once it's in a more or less presentable form.

I guess i could rewrite the minion rules a bit for clarity and post them here as a PDF for download (If Paizo wants to host it) The actual concept is not copywritable, but i think I could copyright and expanded version of it and release it for free if people like the idea.

It's certainly made m,y life as a DM easier, as well as allowing 'epic' battles without epic paperwork :)

For the issue of magic items:

Why not just convert in superhero settings to just having all the item's effects be part of the hero? Naturally this beg the question of "so how do tech heroes work?", but I'm not good at that stuff. It just seems to me that "magic items = (at least some) superpowers" is the simplest way to keep cross-compatibility.

I just think that superman would look silly draped in cloaks, his head surrounded by ioun stones, covered with qual's feather tokens and sporting a pair of bracers of ogre power.

maybe I misunderstood the question. do you mean like the 'generic powers' we mentioned above?

Do not get DC Adventures: it's the Mutants & Masterminds system (3rd edition). You have stated you have already tried the previous iterations and did not like them for superheroes.

brigadon wrote:

I cannot really blame a lot of the systems for not suiting the genre well.

You mean not suiting your read of the genre. Because my read of the genre will never allow for the restrictions of class-and-level: I need a system that handle whatever weird stuff I can throw into whatever I'm doing. Superhero fiction is diverse, so I think both our interpretations exist, we just each focus on which one we like.

Actually i am sorta specifying 4 color comics. the superhero genre IS diverse if you count thinks like edge comics and dark horse, as well as sub-genre stuff like DC's 'post code' runs.

But 4 color, golden and silver age superhero comics were NOT diverse. They were covered by the comics code authority, and had very definite and unambiguous moral and fiction standards. 'Dark heroes', really strong anti-heroes, and truly heinous monstrous villains did not exist... gritty realism was set in it's own 'war story' and 'police story' genre, one which I am not trying to simulate. stuff like aberrant and wild cards, while certainly superhero enough, are far too dark and realistic to match the older style.

Frank Castle and even batman (The dark, Killer version) do not belong in the older genre. truly 'weird stuff' like vampires, corrupted souls, and even the savage were toned down enormously, and supervillains never just killed someone, they made sure to put them in an overly complex and easily escapable death trap, monologued about their plans for world domination, and then left to do more nefarious deeds while the heroes worked themselves free. Villains were never killed, they were sent to prison or the nuthouse.

Remember the ruckus that was caused by electra getting killed by bullseye? That was a huge scandal, the comics code authority freaked, it was too realistic by half. The whole 'cloak and dagger' comic book series was banned several times because of the drug and 'hints' of sexuality, and a lot of comic book companies, such as epic and dark horse, would never even think of trying to get code approval.

that's the era i am trying to simulate. The era where 'new' nazis wound up as almost everyone's enemy sooner or later, drug use was only mentioned as a crime in passing, sexual abuse was some bad guy beating up his girlfriend, an the 'dark hero' was truly tortured by his desire to do evil for good reasons instead of glorying in carnage 'for the greater good'

I truly believe that the silver/golden age superhero genre is distinctly different from the modern 'gritty' superhero genre... and while it has a lot less diversity, it also had a lot stronger vibrancy and boldness. The problem has been finding rulesets that embrace the different era without cluttering it up with all the modern, gritty stuff that the latter era requires.

Not that i don't appreciate the later style of superhero fiction (although i shed a tear and never bought another issue after marvel and DC both started 'mass retcons', and turned the X-Men into sociopathic serial killers.) but there are plenty of games that do a good job simulating that... Gurps and Champions are the ones that spring to mind as being the best fit. I am trying to create a set of spare parts for an older model.

One noteon the minion mechanic-

minions have a very big weakness. aoe attacks (and some weapons designed to take advantage of the minion mechanic) can put a major hurting on them. Then again, that's one of the things they pay for their strength. When tommies go 'over the top' the tendto get cut down by machine gun fire :/

If it wasn't for your request that it remain compatible with pathfinder I'd suggest that DC Adventures has a lot of the things you are looking for. That being said with all the work you've put into your rules I doubt your looking for a new system.

I am just getting tired ofputting time and money into something only to fin a critical flaw that ruins both my and the player's enjoyment of the game.

possibly DC might work, but my experience with the original DC heroes was just....bad, and after the DCUO debacle I am not quite ready to trust DC again or even give them a fair shot.

Have you done any research into how other d20 class-and-level superhero systems do things? I'm just saying you may want to seek them out and take a peek at least to maybe learn from their mistakes.

yep, lots.

marvel superheroes, marvel diceless, champions(several versions), silver age sentinels, villains and vigilantes, gurps, fudge, aberrant, aberrant d20, and mutants and masterminds first and second edition plus a horde of other games like BESM, teenage mutant ninja turtles, witch hunter, witchcraft, call of cthulhu, all the versions of D&D, iron/jadeclaw, palladium, rolemaster, skyrealms of jorune, the indiana jones roleplaying game, paranoia, ghostbusters, all versions of star wars, star trek, Aeon, vampire, wod, warhammer, traveller, hackmaster, and probably dozens of others are sitting on my shelves :)

I cannot really blame a lot of the systems for not suiting the genre well. on the surface, superheroes LOOKS like modern fantasy or something that requires a touch of realism, and it's very hard to put that aside and dig into the comic books that the genre rests upon until you find out that the modern world is really just handwaved away in favor of high fantasy.

and if they hadn't made the mistakes, i would have :)

Okay had some time, bullet points help with designe objectives.

You definitely did, Thank you very much

The problems you note of the current offerings is one of the "Tool Box". Anime/(aka Big Eyes Small Mouth) also suffers from it. A tool box game is not really there for the players, it is there for the GM to cover any and all sub-genres. It is often required of the GM to enforce a narrower focus then the game can cover. You want the limiters in place out of the gate, which is good if you have a focus design objective in mind.

Nailed it in one :)

Have you ever tried the MMO City of Heroes/Villains? There are "class" setups in that game which may work conceptually for what you want to do.

Yah, played it extensively. It's close to what I want, but so far no MMO that I have played translated well into a Tabletop (Shudder) (everquest)

Objectives (in no particular order 
1. low lethality 
2. works in PRD ecosphere
3. defined class roles
4. clear Black/White morality
5. controlled power curve

Good way of organizing the concepts. Thank you. Not sure what PR means.

First your suggestion HP stops at 0 (disabled). Interesting addition doesn't feel overly realistic but this is comic book logic.

Second, Anime d20 like BESM has a rule for voluntarily reduced damage. Any attack you can choose to drop the damage to as low as 1 for a "cheek" cut. This requirers the players to guess (or perhaps use a perception check) how much damage is enough to put mooks down without killing them.

Third, increase the number and usefulness of Non-Lethal damage options. This is an underutilized damage type.

All three options could be used together or in any combination.

option one is what I am using. Option 3 is a great idea, and I will incorporate it. Option 2 I am...avoiding. It adds complexity that I don't feel is justified by the return... Although I am considering it as an option for dealing with 'nameless' baddies, i probably won't implement it.

2. I'll see if I can link the "page 42". This one is all about sticking to the expected outcomes. Equipment is an issue, the christmas tree of stat buff items. There are two options here. Either incorporate them, and that's not hard as every hero eventually gets new costume thingimes during a run. Or design without them and try to come up with a CR reduction scale. I would be really hesitant about building them into the classes because that hinders the back and forth between standard fantasy and comic play. Out of all design choices keeping booster items in some form is the simplest by far.

Another way is to not build them into the classes but add them to the generic level table. That way if you drag and drop classes across the fantasy/comic line all you have to do is add or remove those bonuses. A rogue brought into comic suddenly matches power-wise. A "Bruiser" taken to fantasy losses those and must find/buy items to regain them, or is just given the items on arrival.

That is a very, very important question/point. I mean, equipment DOES give the munchkin's something to do,right? Don't want to exclude them completely.

I would like to kill the weapon/armor dynamic, but you are right about this affecting the balance... perhaps the 'stat boost' and other specialty items might be worth keeping in an altered form. however, since this is a more modern setting, a lot of magic items would be devalued anyway... what good is a murlynd's spoon when there's a macdonald's on every block that serves food just as tasteless and less nutritious?

But adding them as a generic level table would certainly be likely to work. I didn't WANT to have a generic level table, and it's extra work.. but if it's solely as a balance mechanic, it would likely work well. that's a good idea.

3. How many classes? What roles? Personally I don't like your idea of using prestige/advanced classes to fill out things. It's the same that got 3.5 in trouble.

I am actually stealing a mechanic from Champions online for this. Each class has a primary/secondary attribute, and there is generally a class for each combination. people have their 'favorite' character attributes for secondary effects... for many it's strength or dex, for the combat bonuses, for some it's intelligence for the skillpoints, for some it's charisma because they want to look and be 'hot', and for some it's con because of the sheer value of hit points in the game.

Note that these are the primary DEFAULT attributes, and do not include super abilities.
Speeder- relies on light, rapid attacks, or heavy-hitting attacks based on movement. dexterity and movement-based defense. (DEX,WIS)
*Brick- Heavy,incredibly hard hitting attacks that are slow, with incredible defenses mostly in the form of damage resistance. Lots of special atacks.(CHA, CON)
Psychic- very stealthy, light attacks and controls that can ignore most defenses, fairly good team utility and social monkey(CHA/WIS)
Gadgeteer- The ultimate in utility moderate attacks and defenses, but can build stuff to hit weaknesses. great with improvised weapons.(INT/STR)
Sorcerer- weird utility and some pets. can have good defenses and attacks but takes time. good skills(CHA/INT)
*Popgun- massive ranged attacks, range is primary defense. reasonably good skills.(DEX/CON)
Scrapper- most dangerous melee attacker... medium defenses, lots of special attacks.(STR/DEX)
Tankmage- heavy defenses and ranged attacks, not much utility(INT/CON)
*Protector- extremely good team buffing and utility, as well as excellent defense but light attack(WIS/CON)
Elomancer- utility paired with good ranged attacks, some pets, little defense(DEX/INT)
Summoner- unparalleled master of pets. modest attacks and utility.(CHA/DEX)
*Detective- excellent skills, very similar to rogue but with a different critical mechanic. (INT/WIS)
*Challenger- extremely strong leadership skills, good overall abilities but doesn't shine anyplace but on TV. lots of flashy attacks(STR/CHA)
Shapeshifter-shifts shapes a lot. good at emergency solutions and moderate melee(STR/CON)
Naturist-controls plants, animals, or other objects of the natural world (WIS/CON)
Mystic- Ego melee monkey, has interesting shields and good defenses, as well as psychic-type attacks that are melee and heavier damage.(STR/WIS)

* Core classes. The rest are hybrids.

5. Everyone eventually outgrows the street thug. Average hoodlums are no challenge or really any danger to the Batman. It can't be help, that's the nature of a leveling game mechanic. That's why people made E6 and E8, or even E10 for 3.5 and now Pathfinder to cap play at a particular level. That way Batman can't single handedly take on a whole armored division with just a batarang. The upside in Pathfinder, if you want to slow your game down use the slow track. I will remind that 5th level is generally consider World Class in the context of a "real world". Very few NPCs make it past 1st let alone 2nd over their lives. 6th level would be where "experienced/established" super hero begins. Actually in Pathfinder that may be closer to 5th level.

Actually, I have stolen a mechanic from witch hunter and have been using it successfully in pathfinder for some time. called the 'minion rule'.

Basically you set up a group of minions, and decide what their 'total' ECL is. You base their damage, number of attacks, and total hitpoints on this statistic, instead of on individual attributes. What this does is it simplifies book keeping, as each time you do enough hit points to the 'comglomerate' to equal one of it's components, you weaken the whole. this allows you to build 'groups' that are a challenge to a hero of nearly any level, without overpowering the individuals of the group or changing the 'feel' of the world.

the 'minion group' subtype can be applied at nearly every encounter level, and can make heroes truly fear a group of bad guys with crossbows... bring the unreality of higher levelled heroes back into line with the feel of the campaign.

Remember, though, that minion groups are always SIMPLE monsters. They usually may only have none or one special ability or spell, or else minion groups can rapidly grow out of control. They tend to have a LOT more hit points and be more dangerous in melee and missile combat than a standard ECL creature, but in repayment they are quickly weakened as member are picked off and lack access to high-level ability that a lot of larger ECL creatures have access to.

You basically take a single monster type... say, a human archer level 1, and start adding minions.
for each additional member of the group you add hit points, and an extra +1 to-hit and damage for each hit die of the creatures. if the creature composing the group has multiple attacks, each of these attacks benefit from the bonus.

so a group of 10 human gunners (warriors) would, in general, start off with +2 to hit,and 1d8 damage. he would have about 6 hp. (CR 1/2)

the group of 10 minions would get +11 to-hit, do 1d8+9 damage, and have a total of 50 hp. their combined CR would be 5 (cr 1/2 x 10) Their ac is determined by their armor (unmodified) so with leather they would generally have an AC of 13
They are cannon fodder, of course, but provide a valuable and viable threat, enough to dissuade some would-be conqueror. larger groups are correspondingly much more dangerous, although the size of the actual group should be kept low enough that the components could reasonably cooperate... in fact, many armies are defined, literally, by their ability to keep large groups of people coordinated!
attacks are only able to hurt people within range, but any extra damage beyond that necessary to end one creature moves on to the next, so long as the next is within range of the square where the original single-target attack occurred or (In the case of ranged attacks) is in front of or behind the target. So a warrior wading into a fight could likely attack, and disable, up to 8 people if he is completely surrounded. of course, If he is surrounded he will be considered flanked by the group.

Even a level 20 fighter would not scoff in the face of 50 crossbowmen when their combined CL is 25, they do 1d8+49 damage, have +51 to-hit, 250 hit points, and he can only kill between 3-5 of them a round! even if he were a killing machine, the group would be very likely to do enough damage to wear him down before he was even halfway through destroying them.

In general, melee squads are not composed of more than 10 individuals unless they have weapons with reach.

In addition,for each 'member' of a group you dispatch, their total attack and damage are weakened... so if you have an aoe that blows away half of them, they may no longer be a real threat.

In addition to the minion group template, you might want to bear in mind that a modern world would likely have higher levels, in general, than a medieval fantasy society, due to the easy dissemination of information vital to levelling up and the prevalence of education. a level5 fighter, for instance, might have spent a dozen years travelling to get the sort of information neccessary to his class level, while a modern version could get the sort of information he needed simply by cruising wikipedia or library or spending 25 bucks on a hardcover from amazon.com. Of course, physical training would still be necessary, but with the ready availability of information and training in the modern society, the amount of daily time allotted to training could potentially be MUCH higher.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if your average, experienced 'beat cop' was a level 5 detective, and your homicide detectives were level 6-9's. 'supercop' types could be level 15-20, and even your country lynch mob could easily be composed of level 4 rednecks. your nasty gangbangers would likely be around level 2-3, but in groups could prove quite dangerous, especially if some thoughtless disciplinarian thought that having a Dojo next to the corner market would teach the kids some responsibility. a group of ex-marine mercenary 'thugs' could easily be level 5-6 warriors, and when outfitted with automatic machine guns and modern body armor could be a threat indeed.

Very quick, have you looked at Anime d20, not as a whole mind but to mine for spesific mechanics to pluck.

Nope. hadn't checked it out, but I will look. I do want to avoid having TOO many inconsistencies from vanilla pathfinder, though.

I am very very concerned about making sure everything is balanced, and Paizo has done a pretty good job of doing so. I have a lot of experience with 'minor' alterations adding up to big balance issues. (I thought it would be easy just to not use the attack of opportunity rules.)

Interesting first post. Welcome to the boards.

Your concept is intriguing. You have several of the same problems with conventional supers game I have noticed. I do enjoy the oppurtunity to create different powers sets and character types but eventually the struggle to match power levels between characters brings a sameness to the abilities.

I would guess that characters do not start the first level?

Thanks.

Umm... i was trying to make sure that starting at first level WAS an option. another one of the problems I was trying to address.... most superhero games assume that you have been a hero for some time. I was hoping to create something that would allow you to go through... say... the origin of the character, if you like. perhaps first level could be 'Okay, you just are finding out what your superpowers are'

obviously characters DO need to advance somehow, but in the beginning of the character their major abilities are already pretty much set in stone. Occasionally the character performs way outside of their abilities for cinematic purposes (did you know superman could erase lois lane's memory?) but they don't remain 'standard' abilities... That will be covered by stunt points.

In general though, a standard character should be just as viable at level 1 as he or she is later. Not as tough, obviously, and not having as many cool tweaks, but certainly as playable.

And the sameness to abilities hopefully won't exist. I mean, sure... glass cannons that choose the fire path will be fairly similar to other fire-path glass cannons, just like most melee rangers are fairly similar in ways, but within the framework there should be a nice broad spectrum of customizations and feats (and drawbacks!) to make sure Firestar and the Human Torch aren't identical.

I figure that game masters wanting to make 'accomplished' heroes would start them out at level 5 or something.

and i really want to avoid that 'arbitrary levelling' junk that mutants and masterminds first edition tried to leverage into the game... The mechanic might make sense, but it was NOT a way to make players happy. People like to feel like their advancement is at their own pace..so I am currently working on a much better 'story rewards' experience system.

Of course, heroes will always fight hordes of henchmen and monsters :)

Okay, I am in the process of creating a web-published (ie. free) full modification of Pathfinder for superhero genre games... andI was hoping to get some ideas and feedback from experienced gamers or even staffers on things such as balance and other ideas:

Warning, this is a VERY long post :)I tend to overexplain stuff, so if it doesn't interest you you might want to give this post a miss.

First off... I am very experienced as both a GM and a player, with over 30 years of experience (Yes,I played Chainmail) So I have discovered a lot of things and learned a lot of hard lessons about what does and does not work. Some of my opinions may be biased or others might disagree with them, so bear in mind that they are simply opinions.

One of the biggest problems I have always had with superhero games is that they have always seemed to follow in the footsteps of CHAMPIONS. Even contemporaries, such as villains and vigilantes, have always seemed to hold the same simple rule: 'Thou shalt not constrain thy player's creativity'.
While this is an indeed admirable goal, it makes most games of the genre a total nightmare for a GM to run... incredible amounts of time must be spent making sure that major enemies are a challenge for a party that might contain both superman and spider-man... two characters that are clearly NOT on scale with each other.
Often I have seen villains carefully crafted to challenge the party (with enormous amounts of time devoted to all aspects of the creation) be either walked all over by players or requiring ridiculous amounts of GM intervention simply to keep the party alive... sometimes the same villain!
in addition, most of the games have truly ridiculous scaling in place to make players feel that they have 'advanced'... of course,players have to feel rewarded, but do you really want a player to go from a glass cannon to a tank-mage in a single gaming session?

There's also been the scaling issue from a top-down perspective... once a character has been playing a while, they are soon godlike beings that can only be challenged by anew world-threatening disaster, week after week... even if they started out as a 'punisher' sort of hero!

The third problem with these systems has been from a character design perspective... There's always a 'right way' and a 'wrong way' to build a character. Most of these systems will allow an inexperienced or 'roleplayer' character to dramatically gimp their character in the interests of 'coolness, and also allows munchkins (we are legion) to wangle their way eventually into a character that can vastly outclass all of their teammates and the enemies... leading to player (and GM!) dissatisfaction.

So i spent the last several years writing and rewriting alternative systems... cartoon heroes is up to version XI, with up to 560 pages on some of the versions.

That's where pathfinder comes in.
Mostly d20 systems absolutely stink for making a 'modern day' setting... modern day is both truly modern and somewhat more 'realistic' science fiction. Other games, such as gurps, and even the hero system and oddball genres like Vampire and 'dark future' games do a much better job of capturing grittiness and the modern-day shades of grey than d30 games do... d20 games were designed for, and do their job best as, true fantasy genre. Gurps does NOT capture the fantasy genre all that well, and even vampire dark ages feels a lot more like modern day people in a fantasy setting... a film noir version of alice in wonderland.

But four-color comics are NOT 'modern day'. they very seldom truly have shades of grey, and those shades of grey are often the center of a story... the exception that proves the rule. D20 systems, however, are precisely adapted to that bright, "This is your role", black-and-white fantasy that comes closer to the reality of superheroes than any 'modernish' genre can approach.

Four color comics do NOT worry about whether or not that bullet just went through your left eye socket, what the actual difficulty of hitting a car speeding perpendicular to your path of travel is, or even the exact rate at which you regain energy eating, resting, and fighting. The characters get fatigued when the story calls for it, energy blasts knock superheroes that are NOT bulletproof through buildings without killing them or putting them in traction (unless the story calls for it), and you are much more likely to see a brick wading into a horde of bad guys than calling for an air strike.

Frankly, the lethality of games like pathfinder is VERY low... a simple house rule not permitting damage 'blowthrough'past 0 hitpoints on PC's and named villains suddenly sets 'death' into a realm where you have to CHOOSE to kill, by coup de grace... where maiming is not the order of the day, it is exceptional... and where things seem bigger and bolder. You can haymaker a group of agents and they all go flying backwards, and you don't have to deal with the wrenching moral issue of whether or not you have just broken some of their spines,cursing them to spend the rest of their livesin a wheelchair, or perhaps 'accidentally' killed one or two of them with your car-throwing strength.

Okay, anyway, that's enough of the conception behind what I am trying to do...Now I want to get into the nitty gritty.

The first thing is...classes. they are the primary reason I chose Pathfinder. that and the ease of the skill system, which is a LOT more forgiving than 'vanilla' d20.

Most D20 hero-style games have tried consciously or otherwise, 'follow in the footsteps' of more free-form games. they present a few general-purpose classes, and then allow people to 'narrow them down' for their individual playstyle. While this allows fantastic creativity on the part of the players, once again GM's are railroaded into trying to accomplish all goals with players that steadfastly try to go every which way. I am not proposing trying to limit the player's freedoms, instead I am trying to take a more 'top down' approach... no matter what the players may pull, they are all still going to generally remain close to the same power levels.

so, instead of narrow selection of 'character archetypes' to which players can add until they get close to their concept over the levels, I proposing a much BROADER base of classes... Sort of like pathfinder fantasy already is... where classes are defined by their role, rather than being a starting point.

each role will have it's distinct class, just like pathfinder's cleric, rogue, wizard, and fighter, but there will also be a large number of 'hybrid' classes,the paladin, ranger, bard, druids, and others that define a more niche playstyle.

powers will be locked to the classes, with variations. just like the rogue can choose which tricks as they level up, or rangers can define their path, classes will have built-in options that allow them to perform as their player desires... without the complicated pitfalls that utterly 'freeform' characters and powers can create.

As another facet of the whole top-down approach, prestige classes will be common and strongly encouraged... as a way to specialize your character into a number of comic-book style tropes. but, like original D&D, these tropes will be defined by the genre instead of defined by the player. You are highly unlikely to find a superhero that can make things explode with his eyes, while at the same time killing everything he touches and being immune to basically everything, because superheroes are truly defined by their weaknesses more than by their strengths... how boring would superman be if he wasn't harmed by kryptonite?

Instead, I intend that the players will find it extremely easy to simulate existing superheroes, or stuff that matches the genre thematically. I am not trying to LIMIT creativity... simply guide it in a direction that makes it more likely to balance natively rather than being a constant struggle for the GM to simply keep up with what players are wanting.

After all... if people really want to play without any structure, balance, or ability to maintain consistency, they'd all be playing FUDGE (Not to bust on fudge, I play it all the time, but it takes a very special set of people to play a game with almost no rules)

Okay, now on to the framework:

The first part is, I want it to be consistent with the pathfinder universe. meaning, in general, that a regularly-equipped pathfinder wizard or rogue would mesh neatly into a 'superhero' party without more than minor modifications and without feeling under or over powered at any level. Admittedly, because 'gear' is much less of an issue for superheroes than for pathfinder characters, that means that the classes would, in general, be slightly more powerful than their standard equivalents.... but, basically, if i had a level 10 party, i would prefer an ECL 10 monster from one of the standard books to be nearly the same sort of challenge for them as it would be a standard pathfinder party.
This will make balancing encounters MUCH easier, since there are numerous resources out there for creating meaningful enemies of an appropriate ECL. In a clinch I could just grab a giant construct out of the monster books and send it rampaging through Tokyo as a huge alien robot for the players to stop... and many creatures, such as dinosaurs, demons, and even undead, can slide neatly right into the superhero genre without modification.

The second part is about the only real 'base rules change',namely with dropping the lethality. essentially, all damage stops at 0 hit points. you can,of course, coup de grace, but that must be a conscious decision... and for plot reasons people can be killed. Murderous characters and villains find it quite easy to blast apart innocent bystanders, but in general, that should only be left as an exercise for the most evil of characters.

There are several other modifications, such as completely replacing the classes and the races (Referred to as 'power origins')as well as downscaling the importance of magic items (Which is already handled well by pathfinder's 'enhancement type' limitations... super strength is considered a 'superpower'[magical] enhancement, so bracers that improve your strength are not likely to be useful to a character that's already super-strong... but a character that casts lightning bolts might indeed find a set of power armor useful)and what remains is clearly easily handled by super-science and modern technology.

that, in general, is the basic idea behind the system... any comments or suggestions would be strongly appreciated.