| brigadon |
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.