Murderous intent

[zen_hydra]

I can't help but completely dismiss the idea of running anything approaching a 4 Color campaign anymore. I just can't reconcile vigilantes and especially villains using massive, godlike powers that cause huge amounts of collateral damage and never intentionally killing anyone. Maybe I have become jaded by the real world over the years, but that kind of naivety just doesn't inspire me at all anymore. So I ask this.... Does the new version of DC cover more than street level heroes? Would it be a good resource to play a more Aberrant style game? I want the cold hard viciousness of the "real" world plus godlike powers.

[Talon]

I'd say that Dark Champions focuses on "realistic" issues as well as low-powered ones -- the forensics chapter comes to mind. So while it doesn't really delve into godlike powers, it does have the cold hard viciousness part covered.

[KA.]

I can't help but completely dismiss the idea of running anything approaching a 4 Color campaign anymore. I just can't reconcile vigilantes and especially villains using massive, godlike powers that cause huge amounts of collateral damage and never intentionally killing anyone. Maybe I have become jaded by the real world over the years, but that kind of naivety just doesn't inspire me at all anymore. So I ask this.... Does the new version of DC cover more than street level heroes? Would it be a good resource to play a more Aberrant style game? I want the cold hard viciousness of the "real" world plus godlike powers.

zen_hydra,
First, let me say that, while I am a four-color fan, I have no intention of trying to talk you into a four-color game. I think I can help because I think I have a grasp on what makes a campaign "four-color" so I should be able to make some suggestions about how not to.

1) If you want to have an "Iron Age" campaign that makes sense, you need to start with the background. I don't think we live in a four-color world, but there are still limits on criminal behavior. There are some "rules". This is not necessarily due to "virtue" but more due to practicality.
Most criminals could get access to some type of automatic weapon if they wanted to. They could also get access to explosives, poisons, etc.
So why don't they use them?
Even if people are relatively corrupt, they still want order!
The same police department that may turn a "nearsighted" eye toward things like gambling, prostitution, and other vice, would not feel the same if criminals started doing things like blowing up banks during the noon rush in order to rob them, or releasing nerve gas into a subway to kill one police informant.
When you do things like that, you recieve major attention, from every law enforcement official from the White House down. Criminals do not want to generate that kind of heat. It is not worth it. Because even if you think that there are not that many people on the side of "law", there are a lot of people on the side of "order".
That means that if you want to have Kill-o-Watt fry 300 people in a subway train, and not have everyone in the city out to find him, you are going to have to create a world that is extremely corrupt, uncaring, and inefficient.
Major law enforcement agencies are going to have to be very poorly run and very poorly funded and very corrupt to have this sort of thing not lead to the National Guard, UNTIL, or some other group show up to deal with things.
We may put up with a lot of stuff right now, but if the equivalent of 9/11 was happening on a weekly basis in major cities, things would be "cleaned up" in short order. You have to create a world that is so "wrong" that it can't be.

2) Lethality - No real problem.

a) One quick and easy way is to make 0 BODY = DEAD, either for normals, or for everyone.

b) Work out a way to account for "misses". Any time an attack misses, figure out what it does hit.
Just off the top of my head, a standard hex is 2m across. If you lay this out on your floor, you will see that it is a fairly large area, way bigger than a person. Since it is not too hard to figure out where an attack is headed when it misses, just figure that if it passes through a hex, there is a chance of hitting someone in that hex. Based on my very rough calculations, there are about 16 places for a person of average size to "be" in a hex. This is assuming that they are not crowding in like a concert, but just standing around.
Any occupied hex that an attack passes through, there is a 1 in 16 chance that the person in it will be hit. More people, more chances, 16 people, it is going to hit someone! So having a mega-fight at a rock concert is going to result in some casualties! Since normals are not going to be applying DCV, they just get hit. Based on a normal's PD, and the damage level of attacks, there should be plenty of bodies around after every fight.

What if an attack doesn't hit anyone? What it it hits a wall?

You could set up a house rule that any attack that hits a surface unable to stand up to it, creates "shrapnel".
You know the pieces of brick that fly around in cop shows when people miss with guns?
Imagine it with the equivalent of Rocket Launchers!

For example:
A Brick Wall has 5 DEF and 3 BODY.
Megablaster shoots his 12 d6 Megabeam at The Skulker.
The Skulker skulks out of the way and the attack misses, but it hits the brick wall near the crowd of onlookers.
We will assume the 12d6 attack did a standard 12 BODY.
12 BODY from the attack - 5 DEF of the wall, leaves 7, which means that the hit on the wall creates the equivalent of a 7d6 Explosion. If you happen to be right next to the wall, and you are a Normal, you now probably need an ambulance, or at least some First Aid.
And if the attack was bigger, or the DEF was lower, you could be hurting bad. You remember those stories about a tornado driving a straw through a tree? How would you like to be the tree?
A little piece of wood, brick, plaster, etc. Could be lethal if driven with "super force".
(Note: this rule does not really "fit" with current system design. I am not presenting it as "reasonable", or proposing it be added to the system. I am just providing a simple tool for increasing lethality in your campaign.)

c) Pay more attention to "environmental effects" like shooting near power lines, gas mains, train tracks, etc. Any of these can have major consequences.
Also, do not ignore the relevance of simple traffic. Distracted, startled motorists can easily run up on sidewalks, or through crosswalks.
Also, never assume that people will be able to "get out of the way" when a mega-fight breaks out. In a modern city with realistic traffic, things would grind to a halt instantly, leaving people trapped inside their all-too-flamable cars.

KA.

[Just Joe]

I like most of what KA has to say, but would like to add one point by way of agreement and one by way of disagreement.

The former is that in addition to the reasons KA gives why most criminals don't casually murder, there is the fact that most do not have it in their hearts. Sure, there are plenty of exceptions, but by and large, most criminals don't want to kill people. Even many of those who do kill do so only once in a blind rage, perhaps drunk or otherwise intoxicated. Even murder in cold blood can be done reluctantly, because the murderer feels he has no choice. None of this is intended to excuse murder in any way; it's just meant to point out that even very bad people tend not to want to kill people, even if they think they can get away with it.

On the other hand (and in disagreement with KA), I don't think a world with superpowers would have to be terribly corrupt or inefficient for there to be some very nasty murderous supervillains who are not quickly caught. I'd say that all you need is for the superpowers to be powerful enough that normals can do little against supers. From there, you just have to imagine the effects of power on ordinary human nature. Power corrupts, but you don't need all that much corruption. Imagine a world with some very nasty villains, a number of less nasty ones, some greedy non-heroes or marginal heroes who spend most of their time seeking publicity and endorsement contracts, some heroes who are too proud or too suspicious to cooperate well with others, a few rare "heroes" who are secretly corrupt or become so, and a few genuine full-blown heroes. I don't think I've relied on an excessively pessimistic view of human nature, but I do think I've painted a world where the results of high-powered superpowers could be pretty ugly . . .

[sinanju]

On the other hand (and in disagreement with KA), I don't think a world with superpowers would have to be terribly corrupt or inefficient for there to be some very nasty murderous supervillains who are not quickly caught. I'd say that all you need is for the superpowers to be powerful enough that normals can do little against supers. From there, you just have to imagine the effects of power on ordinary human nature. Power corrupts, but you don't need all that much corruption. Imagine a world with some very nasty villains, a number of less nasty ones, some greedy non-heroes or marginal heroes who spend most of their time seeking publicity and endorsement contracts, some heroes who are too proud or too suspicious to cooperate well with others, a few rare "heroes" who are secretly corrupt or become so, and a few genuine full-blown heroes.

You don't even need greedy/marginal heroes. Let's say you've got half a dozen serious superheroes in NYC. That's half a dozen people out of--what, eight or nine million? Unless they're either a) super-detectives or well-connected to the police, or b) superfast, they're no more likely to be present at the murderous supervillain's next rampage than anyone else. Cops sometimes stop killers in the act, but that's the exception rather than the rule--and there are a lot more cops than there are likely to be superheroes in any given city.

A supervillain who doesn't taunt the heroes with clues to his next caper, and who does his damage and then vanishes, can pretty much count on not encountering a superhero most of the time. And anybody else is just meat for his grinder. The only way he's likely to be stopped is if the large number of local, state and federal cops investigating him figure out who he is or where he's likely to be at some particular time, AND they can arrange for superheroic types to be there to beat/capture him. (And if merely mortal bad guys can stay uncaught for years--sometimes decades--someone with superhuman powers and a secret identity should be able to do at least as well if he's smart.)

[KA.]

JustJoe and Sinanju,

Sounds like I didn't really make myself clear. I am not just talking about the response of Superheroes, or even Law Enforcement. Think about the kind of "freelance profiling" that went on after 9/11. People were looking suspiciously at anyone who wore a turban, including Sikhs from India.
Now imagine that 9/11 was not the work of some shadowy terrorist organization.
Imagine if Osama Bin Laden just flew right up to the Towers and used his own superpowers to destroy them.
In full view of everyone, including cameras.
And then continued to hang around New York?
Just about every human in the city would be grabbing their cell phone the second he showed his face. He would barely land somewhere before every Superhero, Law Enforcement Officer, and even some patriotic Villains would be on their way to kick his butt.

If you want to have a world where someone can do that kind of damage without that kind of response, things have to be really messed up!

At least in my opinion,

KA.

[KA.]

Wow, "Murderous Intent" is one thing, thread killing is another.
Sorry, zen_hydra, if I killed this one.
Please accept this bump, in hopes that someone new will take a look and decide to contribute.

KA.

[RDU Neil]

A supervillain who doesn't taunt the heroes with clues to his next caper, and who does his damage and then vanishes, can pretty much count on not encountering a superhero most of the time. And anybody else is just meat for his grinder. The only way he's likely to be stopped is if the large number of local, state and federal cops investigating him figure out who he is or where he's likely to be at some particular time, AND they can arrange for superheroic types to be there to beat/capture him. (And if merely mortal bad guys can stay uncaught for years--sometimes decades--someone with superhuman powers and a secret identity should be able to do at least as well if he's smart.)

This is the big issue here, IMO. To me, for a game to have any kind of verisimilitude, I have to have a semi-logical reason why the heroes are able to respond to the badguys in TIME to stop them.

What has happened in my games is that often, this is not the case. Many adventures/storylines, involve heroes slowly becoming aware of badguys doing their thing, then investigating, making contacts, organizing authorities or other people with resources... tracking down the villains, putting pressure on THEIR resources, driving them into the open, THEN taking them down in a fight.

None of this is hyper realistic... nor is any of this hyper-corrupt-world... it is just more believable.

To this point, heroes/protagonists in my campaign are much more proactive. They don't sit around waiting for the batphone to ring... they are out, hitting the streets, working behind the scenes, even getting into politics and law... as would any normal person committed to security, law enforcement and social change.

Bad guys... thugs or supervillains... also work in a believable fashion. Some are dumb, and pull dumb crimes, and get their butts handed to them... go to prison and never get out. Others are smart, and go many years without getting caught... and often these are the ones that don't go overboard. They don't slaught a theater full of people... even if they could... because the kind of heat that would bring is insane... and likely they wouldn't survive being tracked down. The truly psychotic might get away with mass murder for a while, but they also end up with their head disintigrated in the end.

Yes... if a game grows to the point where there are dozens of supremely powerful metahumans... each with abilities that dwarfs normal humans ability to handle it, and likely can beat most other medium and low powered metas... then what you get is "the new feudal system" where these 36 have parcelled out the world... create their own countries and spheres of influence, build powerbases (political and social and real) and try not to piss off the others, who are the only ones who might be able to beat them.

As someone above said... it may not be law or justice or "the greater good" that will motivate truly powerful paranormals... but "order" and their own best interest in maintaining some new social order, would still be paramount. Those utterly corrupt, total maniacal evil that no one seems to really do anything about worlds (extreme Iron Age) are just as ridiculous as the soft and happy, gee-whiz, no one ever dies worlds (extreme Four Color) stuff.

You can make a hard edge super world... but making every villain a psycho mass killer and every hero a psycho revenge killer just isn't necessary... and doesn't work (IMO) any better than "Super Friends, we need your help!" kind of games, either.

[Zed-F]

A key point to remember about how law enforcement works is that the principle virtue required is patience. Any criminal will make mistakes. How likely that criminal is to be caught largely depends on the frequency and magnitude of the mistakes they make. Dumb criminals will make large mistakes on a regular basis and get caught easily. Smart criminals who continue to be active will continue to make small mistakes and get caught eventually if someone competent is looking (i.e. we're not dealing with widespread corruption.) The smartest criminals are those who commit only one crime, do it capably, and then vanish permanently. Those are the kinds of cases that sit in the unsolved bin forever.

[gewing]

and again, I will point out that the government would HAVE to have techniques, weapons, and Tactics for dealing with at least SOME of the supervillains.

I like a lot of the posts people have put up. In a world where every 3rd person seems to have a cellphone glued to their ear, Police would be notified of many events almost instantly.

I do have problems personally with some of the power levels that people like to play at.

I don't think I WANT my character to be able to level a country with a wave of his hand. Maybe a city block if he pushed, or boosted himself up, or something. The Watchmen didn't do anything for me really. I started reading the COllection recently, never bothered to finish.

[sinanju]

This is the big issue here, IMO. To me, for a game to have any kind of verisimilitude, I have to have a semi-logical reason why the heroes are able to respond to the badguys in TIME to stop them.

What has happened in my games is that often, this is not the case. Many adventures/storylines, involve heroes slowly becoming aware of badguys doing their thing, then investigating, making contacts, organizing authorities or other people with resources... tracking down the villains, putting pressure on THEIR resources, driving them into the open, THEN taking them down in a fight.

Yep. That's why (in the GM style thread) I noted that my approach to plotting a game is to decide who the bad guys are, what they want, what resources they have, and what they'll do both a) in the absence of interference by the PCs and b) if the PCs DO interfere. Will they go to ground? Try to scare/bribe the PCs into leaving them alone? Throw a false trail? Try to kill the PCs? Once I've worked out these things, I know how the PCs can find them--so when the PCs start investigating, even if they take an unexpected approach, I know what they'll find (and can throw a clue in their path if they're clearly stumped).

My games also tend to have superpowered characters, but not costumed superheroes and villains for just this reason. Superheroes can "patrol" a city til the cows come home, but the odds of them actually stumbling across a crime in progress are considerably worse than those of the cops who are both far more numerous and have dispatchers (and a 911 call center for crime reports) to guide them. It just doesn't work for me.

[megaplayboy]

well, I'm currently in a campaign where a villain blew up an entire police station so his captured henchmen wouldn't rat him out.
this is after they kidnapped a school bus full of kindergartners, just to get the villain's "twin" (a PC, of whom the villain is the evil clone) in a position where he could be killed. Well, we managed to find and rescue the kids, and to have enough PCs around to stave off our teammate's destruction and capture the henchmen(though the villain escaped).
Our reward? see above.
This is after we captured a bunch of missing kids genetically altered and cruelly experimented upon by the huge multinational corp run by the evil bastard--then the corporate lawyers showed up and "proved" that those weren't the missing kids, but just "altered rhesus monkeys" who somehow escaped their labs.

Now we are basically at war with this guy and his company, trying to gather enough evidence to bust all of them. My fear is the GM will overestimate our frustration tolerance threshold, and it will come as a complete shock to him when, after he shuts down our best efforts and lets this guy commit another atrocity without consequence, we just kill the SOB, his evil clone girlfriend and his evil parents, too. "and your little dog, too!"

[gewing]

Sounds like your Ref. is a little out of control...

That takes Dystopia to a sick level, imo.

OTOH, there are reasons I don't play villains. the Tactics are effective...

well, I'm currently in a campaign where a villain blew up an entire police station so his captured henchmen wouldn't rat him out.
this is after they kidnapped a school bus full of kindergartners, just to get the villain's "twin" (a PC, of whom the villain is the evil clone) in a position where he could be killed. Well, we managed to find and rescue the kids, and to have enough PCs around to stave off our teammate's destruction and capture the henchmen(though the villain escaped).
Our reward? see above.
This is after we captured a bunch of missing kids genetically altered and cruelly experimented upon by the huge multinational corp run by the evil bastard--then the corporate lawyers showed up and "proved" that those weren't the missing kids, but just "altered rhesus monkeys" who somehow escaped their labs.

Now we are basically at war with this guy and his company, trying to gather enough evidence to bust all of them. My fear is the GM will overestimate our frustration tolerance threshold, and it will come as a complete shock to him when, after he shuts down our best efforts and lets this guy commit another atrocity without consequence, we just kill the SOB, his evil clone girlfriend and his evil parents, too. "and your little dog, too!"

[RDU Neil]

Now we are basically at war with this guy and his company, trying to gather enough evidence to bust all of them. My fear is the GM will overestimate our frustration tolerance threshold, and it will come as a complete shock to him when, after he shuts down our best efforts and lets this guy commit another atrocity without consequence, we just kill the SOB, his evil clone girlfriend and his evil parents, too. "and your little dog, too!"

Tell the GM now. Don't wait until the players revolt in frustration. Tell him what you suspect is going to happen... give him (her?) some feedback on the unrealistic distopia he is creating... explain to him that if the world seems to do nothing but support psycho killers and let them get away... then he is asking the players to sit back and just be frustrated over and over. If he's at all mature, he'll understand... if not... well, I wouldn't play in his game.

Good luck.