"We Live In An Era Of Heroes"

[zakueins]

Wanted to bounce this idea off the list, to do some "reality checking".

The concept is-
1)A modern day superhero setting (post 9/11).
2)"Metahumans" are pretty new-there is NO metahuman known that has powers older than two years old. However...
3)The oldest of metahumans are at about a quarter to a third of the power level of Superman or such.
4)Every metahuman, without exception, has either gone villan or hero at a 10/1 (villan/hero) ratio, in one form or another.
5)The GM is going to prohibit player time travel, but there will be an NPC that's going to come from the future, and 9/12/2001 is the "hard limit barrier"-nobody can travel backwards in time past that point.
6)There are a few (not the "hundreds of hundreds" of aliens, but we don't see them in the game until much later.

Players will either be an "independent" team (the whole concept of superheroes is still a little raw, but players might change this for the better-or worse), or they'll be a government team, probably a Section team. (Think of Section teams as being like the Avengers but with a bigger budget, and sanction. ).

The deeper concept is below....(spoiler space for anybody in the SF Bay Area that wants to play in this game at some point)...
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Call it magic. Call it "semi-sapient focused quantum phenomina", call it what you will. But, when a group of Taliban soldiers blew the sealed doors of an ancient pagan temple in Afganistan off it's hinges, the resulting flash of energy destroyed the temple, the Taliban soliders, and caused NORAD to think that a nuclear weapon had gone off in Afganistan.

Of course, nerves were already high in NORAD-only twenty minutes earlier, the second plane had crashed in the World Trade Center. Future historians would claim that this was pure coincidence, merely the vagreties of fate seeming to end in a coherent plan.

Most people think historians were full of it.

The falling of those towers created something new-and powerful.

It created an age of heroes.

[McCoy]

Sounds interesting. Everyone who gets powers has a passion about using them? Sounds like there may be a psychic component, or that the power "chooses" proactive hosts.

Originally posted by zakueins
3)The oldest of metahumans are at about a quarter to a third of the power level of Superman or such.

Are we talking the pre-War Superman, more powerful than a locomotive, leaps tall buildings in a single bound; or the Silver Age Superman, moves planets with his ring finger?

[zakueins]

Everybody that gets powers does something with them. From the "with great power comes great responsability" to "hey, why should I rob a bank, when I can bloody well CARRY the bank away with me." And the tech level is advancing pretty nifty-somebody won the X-Prize (a civilian-produced rocket that can reach orbit) about a year ago, and IBM build a quantum processor unit for mainframe (and first-adopter home) users.

In terms of raw points, the most powerful metahumans in existance (about 20-30 so far), are pushing the 580-600 point level (from a 350 point base), but their power status is kind of fixed-what's happening now is more refinement than anything else.

I plan to use a modified XP system where you earn 12 XP (barring additional awards such as Worst Pun Of The Night and such) from 250-350, 10 XP from 350-450, 8 XP from 450-550, 6 XP from 550-650, and 4 XP from 650+. Villians, with few exception, get half (but start out at higher point totals). This represents my personal idea on superheroes that I've seen so far-they tend to get pretty powerful, pretty quickly and once they reach a kind of "archtype" role, they tend to refine it more than expand it.

Originally posted by McCoy
Sounds interesting. Everyone who gets powers has a passion about using them? Sounds like there may be a psychic component, or that the power "chooses" proactive hosts.



Are we talking the pre-War Superman, more powerful than a locomotive, leaps tall buildings in a single bound; or the Silver Age Superman, moves planets with his ring finger?

[Publius]

This sounds like a very cool seting concept, I may just lift it (in whole or part) for my next Champions Hero game (I am venturing into Steampunk as we speak). Very nice. Thanks for posting it!

The steep learning curve is interesting, I start out at 350-ish and generally hand out somewhere around 5 XP a session so that the players have enough to buy something neat and shiny at the end of the adventure but not enough to cause major shifts in their PCs between one adventure and another (like say, adding a point to their Speed), starting off "heavy" and trailing as the overall point values go up is a nice idea though.

Are the aliens connected to the emergence of superpowers OR are they attracted to the Earth suddenly by the emergence of the superpowers OR have they been here among us for many years and only recently discovered?

[zakueins]

Y'welcome-tell me how it works out and if there's anything else you'd want to do with it.

On the nature of aliens....think of the Event (First Advent) as if someone had dropped a rock in a pool of water-the ripples expand ever outward and people are starting to notice. These ripples happen every once in a while in Galactic civilization-just these ripples were massive tsunami waves in comparsion the the mildest of tides. Attention is being brought Earth's way, but it'll take a while.

Originally posted by Publius
This sounds like a very cool seting concept, I may just lift it (in whole or part) for my next Champions Hero game (I am venturing into Steampunk as we speak). Very nice. Thanks for posting it!

The steep learning curve is interesting, I start out at 350-ish and generally hand out somewhere around 5 XP a session so that the players have enough to buy something neat and shiny at the end of the adventure but not enough to cause major shifts in their PCs between one adventure and another (like say, adding a point to their Speed), starting off "heavy" and trailing as the overall point values go up is a nice idea though.

Are the aliens connected to the emergence of superpowers OR are they attracted to the Earth suddenly by the emergence of the superpowers OR have they been here among us for many years and only recently discovered?

[Deacon Blues]

I used the Battle of Detroit as the CU-equivalent of 9/11 in my campaign, moving it forward a few years and setting it in the campaign city that I intended to convert to Millennium City. I think that's a bit less ... tacky, for lack of a better word ... than using a real-world holocaust as plot fuel.

But that's just my taste, of course. For your PCs, the game may be lent an extra touch of gravity by using historical tragedies. It just doesn't work that way for me, though. For those who feel the same way I do, there's already an in-game option.

[zarglif69]

hey, nice concept, having the setting revolve around 9/11. So good, I coulda thought of that myself. Why are people always thinking of things before me?

[Trebuchet]

We average 2-3 XP per adventure. I'd noticed previously that with 350 point characters 3 XP is less than 1%, and as the characters' XP total rises the percentage gained with each XP decreases proportionally. So major changes become increasingly more difficult as the character gains XP. That's generally a good thing IMHO.

[zakueins]

Yea, but I like giving players enough points at higher levels to either buy a new power in four to six game sessions, or to take some risks with skills (a guy in powered armor learning a martial art, for example).

And, I like charaters with skills. I'm not a big fan of "Grog Smash Villian" pure combat critters.

Originally posted by Trebuchet
We average 2-3 XP per adventure. I'd noticed previously that with 350 point characters 3 XP is less than 1%, and as the characters' XP total rises the percentage gained with each XP decreases proportionally. So major changes become increasingly more difficult as the character gains XP. That's generally a good thing IMHO.

[ChuckB]

Not sure if I'd base it off 9-11. Still too recent for a lot of people and (not sure how you'd do this) you might want to make sure none of your players were personally affected by it.

[zakueins]

I'd be careful-I'm working on the posters for the local gaming stores to invite players.

Originally posted by ChuckB
Not sure if I'd base it off 9-11. Still too recent for a lot of people and (not sure how you'd do this) you might want to make sure none of your players were personally affected by it.

[Trebuchet]

Originally posted by zakueins
Yea, but I like giving players enough points at higher levels to either buy a new power in four to six game sessions, or to take some risks with skills (a guy in powered armor learning a martial art, for example).

And, I like charaters with skills. I'm not a big fan of "Grog Smash Villian" pure combat critters.

Sure, but giving 2-3 XP per adventure/play session still adds up fairly fast. Even if (like our group) you only play once a month, that's basically 24-30 XP a year. That's enough to do some nice skill or characteristic improvements , several new MP slots, or a whole new EC power. Or in the case of a martial artist, several new maneuvers.

Our group is fairly skill-intensive; my martial artist Zl'f has Riding (Horses), Animal Handler (Equines), Downhill (Combat) Skiing and Chess as hobbies and Bureaucratics, Computer Programming and PS: Executive Assistant as Secret ID-enhancing job-related skills. She's also picked up 3 points of Norwegian (she lives in Norway). Other team members have non-combat skills as well; for example our team brick/scientist is an expert piano player. Our mentalist speaks 7 or 8 languages.

[Fur Face]

I met a new player last week, and he brought up an interesting question. He told me he was looking at the reals given in FRed, and he thought there was a typo in the XP awards recommendations. He said "it kind of doesn't make sense. If you are playing in a Fantasy Hero campaign, and each player is built on 25/25, you get 3 experience points (XPs). If you are playing a game that is 200/150, you still get 3 XPs. That doesn't make any sense."

I didn't disagree with him, because I believe the same thing. I suppose it all comes down to character progression. If everyone is happy at 3 XPs a session, then it doesn't matter.

[zakueins]

Yea, but remember that it levels off pretty rapidly, as well. Building Champions! PCs myself, I can fairly say that we all wish we had about 100 pts more when we were building our characters.

It's a style difference, too-I personally think that comic book heroes tend to "power up" pretty quickly, then reach a point where it's refinement. You can disagree-that's why there's chocolate and vanilla ice cream. If 2-3 XP a session works, feel free to use it. If XP based upon current points is your cup of tea, cool.

Originally posted by Trebuchet
Sure, but giving 2-3 XP per adventure/play session still adds up fairly fast. Even if (like our group) you only play once a month, that's basically 24-30 XP a year. That's enough to do some nice skill or characteristic improvements , several new MP slots, or a whole new EC power. Or in the case of a martial artist, several new maneuvers.

Our group is fairly skill-intensive; my martial artist Zl'f has Riding (Horses), Animal Handler (Equines), Downhill (Combat) Skiing and Chess as hobbies and Bureaucratics, Computer Programming and PS: Executive Assistant as Secret ID-enhancing job-related skills. She's also picked up 3 points of Norwegian (she lives in Norway). Other team members have non-combat skills as well; for example our team brick/scientist is an expert piano player. Our mentalist speaks 7 or 8 languages.