How many supers in your world?

[Powerhouse]

An exact number isn't need, just an idea of how many paranormals exist in your world. Just asking since I'm writing up a world right now. Who knows, I might win the lotto and self-publish.

 

Anyway, I decided personally to have the main team be the first supers of a new, modern generation and decided that two generations (Golden and Silver) had passed before but were either dead, retired, or "other" (storyline secret, sorry).

 

The reason is that this approach gives more freedom and lets the team have a much greater impact on the world: without needing insanely high point totals they are still the premier team (JLA or Avenge equivalent). I like it. It's intended to feel similar to he beginning of the Silver Age where there are a handful of solos and one or two teams, maybe three teams at most which are distinctive.

 

Has anyone else tried this approach? The Champions (and DC and Marvel) just seem too crowded for my taste. In your campaigns, are you characters one of many or are they it? What about the villains? Do you re-use the same ones or have a large number and make paranormals relatively common?

 

Thanks.

[Insaniac99]

uh, no exact numer, or howmany supers in the human population, but they are common enough that all but the most po-dunk towns have at least one, and almost all of teh TV shows have a supers or involve them, there are stores just for supers, magazines, schools, sports, all that sort of stuff.

 

the thing is that many are low powered supers, or they don't care abotu being a hero or being a villian, so just use their powers to help their normal lives, or for TV, the best pyrotechnics for the movies are supers same with stuntmen (though even better are the super actors, who really are doing their own stunts, and really do take a tank shell in their chest)

[Trebuchet]

Our PCs were the first public superheroes, although a few costumed crime fighters and other secretive types would probably technically count.

 

In any case, I envision about 1000 supers worldwide, 2/3 of them with actual powers. The remaining 1/3 are tech based and/or trained humans. Of the supers, 50% are 250 points or less. 25% are 300 points, 20% are 350 (including the PCs), and 5% are over 350 points. This last group includes megavillains and a few NPC high-end supers, mostly reworked imports of retired characters belonging to one of our GMs. Our PCs are the most powerful and respected superhero team in the world. Thus far we've probably encountered only about 60 other supers.

[KawangaKid]

They all died or retired

 

Well, I basically held that most of them are gone as of the end of the Millenium...

 

and this is the new batch.

["V"]

No exact count, but I can tell you with a great deal of conviction that there are many more Supers in my campaign world than I originally intended... might be something to do with getting Hero Designer...

[MoonHunter]

My Campaign...

 

There is approximately 50 public Meta level Super Heroes in North America, with 50 spread around Europe, Asia, and South America, 5 is Australia with one on living in the US.

 

There are 75 metal level Villians in North America and 100 or so in the rest of the world.

 

There are a little less than twice that many hero level metas (250-350 points) in the world who are not running around as heroes or villians. For an average population total 560 metas, given genesis and death/ destructs.

 

Now, paranormals... creatures and people with powers that are built on 75 base and 75-100 disads... These are our super athletes, psychics, magik users, androids, golems, dragons, werewolves, most vampires, ninjas, chi martial artists, and other paranormal gentes. That is in the 200,000 range North America and 1,000,000 more world wide, with a large concentration in the British Isles and HongKong. No true accurate rating is known.

 

This number exculdes those of the lost worlds, currently underhill, or living in Atlantis.

 

Giant Monsters... Population of 15 world wide. Two MegaHeroes and One Giant Robot make the world safe from big monsters.

[Yogzilla]

My campaign CURRENTLY has only a handful of super-powered beings -- the PCs (7 total), 6 NPCs that regularly interact with them, 3 NPCs that show up occasionally, and about 10 that are currently being used as adventure seeds.

 

However, this was after "The Event", which was one of these large annual-style adventures where the entire world is being engulfed by a white energy barrier *while* an alien invasion is taking place. Before The Event, the world had supers out the wazoo; last public count was 3000+

 

I freely admit that The Event was my way of paring down the number of supers; it was just too overwhelming. All too often, I would come up with adventures and then find myself thinking, "Why are the PCs getting involved? Such-n-such Team is much better situated to handle this." or "And these 7 supers are taking care of this because all other supers are...what? Busy? Out of town? Why aren't they showing up?"

 

Eventually, it came down to my realization that I had (subconsciously) decided to stop fleshing out the world and just concentrate on the PCs. But this felt too unreal, if you will. So I opted to "reboot" and create a more manageable number of supers.

 

But it sounds like some of you out there are doing well with multitudes of supers. If I may ask, how are you accomplishing this? How are you making a supers world work, yet still giving the PCs their due time in the sun??

 

-Yogzilla

[Dino]

I equate the number of Superpowered beings in a given campaign to movie stars. There are probably only a few thousand in the world, but they get a lot of attention from the media. They also tend to gravitate to big citys, so people in those areas are more likely to run into them on a day to day basis.

[cjudisch]

For Campaigns that simulate universes akin to the "mainstream" comic continuities (DC, Marvel), I find that a ratio of one Superhuman (of whatever persuasion) per one-million Normal Human works really well.

 

I generally add the caveat that Superhumans tend to gravitate towards the "First World" of industrialized/Post-Industrial nations and areas where personal liberty is held in high esteem (otherwise, China has a VAST number of superhumans that dwarfs the rest of the world's superhuman population).

[Storn]

More every week.

 

I dunno, I'm personally responsible for about 20 PLAYER CHARACTERS and probably about 100 powered NPCs (and quite a few more non-powered ones...but running spy campaigns will result in that) in Neil's RDU campaign.

 

Last time I checked, Neil's database had about 600? 750? Neil? A lot. Many are published characters. And these are characters who've actually seen use at the table in a 17 year old campaign. Recent extraordinary events will result in a whole new level of P-norms.

 

And then send in the clones. My longest running PC has at least 38 clone on ice at the moment... thanks to Malachite... but they are under UNTIL protection. They aren't viable, they die if let lose. But someone, sometime is going to solve that problem.... Thanksgiving is going to need a MUCH bigger table. Another long running PC also has the roughly the same number of clones. Luckily, my PC has a lot of room, being one of the leaders of the Mars Terraforming Operation.

[Kristopher]

As many as I need to run the game and tell my stories. I don't really start out with a set idea. I guess that would be several thousand, at least, though.

[RDU Neil]

Adding to what Storn said, I've always operated on the 1/million ranking someone mentioned above. That puts 6,000 true metahumans on the planet.

 

This does NOT include guys with high tech equipment, magic users, or martial arts adepts, etc. Equipment or training that can put someone at the power level of a Delta level metahuman or higher does not make them count as one of the six thousand.

 

So there are a LOT of paranormals in my world... though some may have sub-Delta powersets which means they aren't really combat effective, but as Storn says, more are growing every day, as tech and such actually begin to create more transformed humans.

 

Heck, this is also not covering magical creatures like dragons or unicorns, which have returned in parts of the world.

 

Over all, the paranormal factor of my world is going exponetially off the charts... and this is a major theme to the campaign. What will happen to the world? Will there be any place for normals? What happens when metahumans begin running countries and making policy?

 

Oh yeah... and then there is "the Key" A young woman whose power set is to "activate" latent metahumans. If the normal activation hovers around 1 in a million, she can bypass this and then... who knows how many we might have.

[Vondy]

There are ~1000 known/active metahumans in the Freedom Patrol Universe. About 50% of these are in North America.

 

I have no idea how many unknown/inactive metahumans there are. I never bothered to give it much thought. Its my nebulously infinite reserve.

[Enforcer84]

4257973.4 as of tuesday.

[lemming]

Currently written up,

oh about 100 not counting paranormal agent types. (damn, pesky vampires)

 

Actual Superhumans running around, probably 5 - 10K depending on what qualifications you use.

 

The PCs are in the top 5% area. Too bad they keep running into the top 1%.

[dbsousa]

I heard a great piece on NPR a while back that used certain factors to determine how many gold medals a country would win at the Olympics. I want to use roughly the same criteria to determine the distribution of Supers in my world.

 

I suspect that the number of living Supers in my world is 5% of the living olympic atheletes (100,000) and distributed around the world in the same ratios as gold medals...

[Enforcer84]

I'm looking at somewhere between 5-7.5K combat worthy, maked marvel types. This doesn't count the Batman/Punisher caliber Martial artist, superagents, or Powered Armor types. It does count cyborgs and Mystical martial arts masters...

 

 

I have a pipe dream of just drawing thousands of generic superbeings and eventually using them to create every super on my game world. I have 2. Its going to be a long time....

[Doug McCrae]

Powerhouse, I'm working on a new superhero campaign and I decided to take the exact same approach as you. There's a Golden->Iron Age back story, but most of these heroes have died or retired or disappeared or some such, leaving the PCs free to be the World's Greatest Superheroes. I'm planning a globetrotting worldsaving campaign kind of like a mixture of the Fantastic Four and the Authority with a bit of Planetary's 'secret history' thrown in.

 

The great thing about this is the legacy these heroes have left. The secret bases, the power-artefacts, the children or others (perhaps PCs) inspired by their legendary deeds and wishing to follow in their foot-steps. The statues.

 

The world at present will have very few heroes. One or two local teams, a few independents. These will have clear territory marked out to avoid stepping on the PCs toes and will be of a significantly lower power level anyway.

 

There will also be a few hidden civilisations, a la Atlantis or Gorilla City. Well they used to be hidden. Some will have become public knowledge between 1938 and the present.

 

Although they potentially do exist there will not be much emphasis on vampires, werewolves, chi experts or psychics, given that this is a superhero game.

 

MoonHunter, I really liked your '15 giant monsters'. There will be giant monsters from two periods (1960 odds and the mid-70s) in my universe.

[Blue]

I'm thinking somewhere around 600 to 1000 currently existing supers worldwide. (That's a ratio of about 1 in every 10m people).

 

This does not include Dark Champions types or agents.

 

It's still more villains than they will encounter during the life of my campaign, so the number works fine.

[Killer Shrike]

Originally posted by Enforcer84

4257973.4 as of tuesday.

Whats the birth vs death rate looking like? I want some metrics on this, stat!

[Killer Shrike]

Originally posted by dbsousa

I heard a great piece on NPR a while back that used certain factors to determine how many gold medals a country would win at the Olympics. I want to use roughly the same criteria to determine the distribution of Supers in my world.

 

I suspect that the number of living Supers in my world is 5% of the living olympic atheletes (100,000) and distributed around the world in the same ratios as gold medals...

Discounting Winter Olympics right? Otherwise you wind up with a lot of Canadians, Swedes, and Russians

[Killer Shrike]

In my current Champions Universe campaign, I run it pretty much as printed, allowing for characters of my own creation added in, and some characters I dont care for not necessarily excluded, but highly unlikely to ever come up.

 

The campaign previous to that was a Cyberpunkish campaign, wherein the PCs were 5 "metahumans" forced to catalyze by a typically dirty cyberpunk megacorp. Mutants, called metahumans, were starting to occur but there were only a handful known to exist world wide; around 2 to 3 hundred at the absolute outside, including the majority of metahumans with very minor and/or non-adventuring power sets. Most hid thier powers to avoid corporate entanglements. Those with combat effective abilities that were of a mind to were mostly runners/mercs, either freelance or with a company.

 

The PCs had all been exposed to brainwashing and personality molding and were effective amnesiacs. The PCs were freed by way of a complex series of events stemming from the back story and basically boiling down to a rival megacorp becoming suspicious as to what was going on and sending in a team to find out.

 

Once on the outside the PCs were basically on thier own and to fend for themselves started taking contracts as a runner team. Thier opponents were overwhelmingly cyborgs of one type or another, with only 1 genetically engineered bad ass, and 1 other metahuman paid specifically to take them out by a Yakuza clan that the PCs angered (and backed up by enough cyber ninjas to make the PCs very very lucky to have survived -- although one died in that particular engagement and was replaced by a cyborg). Eventually the original megacorp tracked them down and sent 4 of its indoctrinated metahumans after the PC's, who wisely ran after an initial bout of resistance proved to be relatively futile.

 

The campaign ground to a halt shortly thereafter because the PCs had managed to make such a mess out of things, and had gained so many enemies in the process, that they begged me to stop the campaign because they didnt think they could get out of it. Champions Universe had just come out, or maybe it was CKC, so I said ok and started up the current CU campaign.

 

It was a gritty campaign, hard boiled and unmerciful. It was definitely an interesting dynamic to have the PCs with powers (started at 250, ended around 275) against cyborgs and guns.

[Publius]

In my world, roughly 1 in 1000 people are classified as "parahumans" and have the ability to use Neotech, which are devices that can perform "super" type stuff - flight belts, powered armor etc. This way, not every bad guy has to be a costumed supervillain, and in fact the players have mostly fought against parahumans. At the same time, the vast majority of the society has to get along with regular guns and cannot use the neotech gizmos (which is why there are no mass produced flying cars or similar super-gadgets). Of the parahuman population, a small percentage have manifested powers on their own, usually during periods of high stress and/or otherwise deadly accidents (hit by lightning, radiation etc.); these are known as Elites and run roughly 1 in 100,000 in major metropolitan areas (where they tend to gravitate)and 1 in 500,000/1 in 1,000,000 elsewhere. Not all of these Elites are real 'superheroes' however. There are more possible Elites, but the vast majority are unmanifested, and thus are born, live and die as any other parahuman (i.e. normal except that they can use paratech)

 

There are some tests for parahuman abilities (known as the P-K Value test), but they have to be administered individually and are costly. This is why there are more parahumans and elites among the wealthy (they can afford the testing) and in some governments (which perform the testing randomly on relatively large numbers of people to get more parahumans). There are techniques to raise the P-K values, but these often end in some kind of mutation or otherwise awful effect. A lot of the supervillains were parahumans who underwent these sorts of experiments and have turned into monsters.

 

Comments?

[JmOz]

Counting Psi's and Phenobs about 1,000,000, Most (about 900,000) are extremly week, maybe TK Str 5.

 

My game world has four types of supers:

 

Phenobs: These people are of extrodinary talents, MOST power armored characters, Skilled Normals, and mages fit in here (Note anyone can do magic, just with out being a phenob you will be lucky to get off a very minor spell such as a D&D Cantrip or a minor curse that gives the guy a d6 of unluck), they can have attributes up to 1.5 times NCM

 

PSI's: Most Psi's are also Phenobs, but these people naturaly develop powers, these powers will always have a psionic F/X (Telepathy, telekinesis, etc...)

 

Adaptors: These people do something weird, if they are put in a situation where there body should die they develop powers, usually based on the situation (a Adaptor who is struck with lightning may develop Lightning powers). Note that this does not make them immortal or anything of the kind, just there body at times react to stimuli oddly

 

Other: A catch all for Aliens, people given powers by a mystic spell, etc...

 

PSI's can detect each other

 

I do want to give the adaptors a limitation they have to follow as well, I'm thinking of mabe a small DF...

 

A word on Super Teck, anyone can use it, but usualy only Phenobs can create it (While others can build it if given plans), it is also quite expensive

[Thirdbase]

Roughly 9000 with about 30% of them generated in the US. This includes non paranormal supers like Batman, Ironman, and Dr. Strange. I based the numbers on a number of factors including: Population, GNP, Power Production, and Nuclear factors, (accidents, tests, power generation, arms). I can determine things like down to state or even city inside the US, but my formula gives surprising results. Like Texas generating the most Supers in the US. But over 100 countries generate under 10 and this is about 300 supers.