Killer Shrike

Hero does have a bias towards the defender, but there are a lot of ways to adjust the system to any desired level of danger. I've mentioned it before on these forums, but I wrote up some coverage of what I called "Lethality Options" a long time ago and they are still relevant.
 
http://www.killershrike.com/FantasyHERO/HighFantasyHERO/shrikeLethalityOptions.aspx

Hero does have a bias towards the defender, but there are a lot of ways to adjust the system to any desired level of danger. I've mentioned it before on these forums, but I wrote up some coverage of what I called "Lethality Options" a long time ago and they are still relevant.
 
http://www.killershrike.com/FantasyHERO/HighFantasyHERO/shrikeLethalityOptions.aspx

The Hero System definitely offers more options than most game systems for dialing things up or down to suit a desired outcome, and in the hands of a skilled GM who knows what they want for the campaign they are running that level of control can afford a "better" result than if using a system that does not offer such tunability.
 
However, while I've had a lot of success over the years using the Hero System for a wide variety of genres at a similarly wide variety of power levels and grittiness, I'm also not blind to the cost of the game in my time as the GM or the learning curve for the average player. 
 
The question often isn't "does the Hero System do this better?"...to which the answer often is "yes" or at least "maybe". Instead the question more typically is "does this other system do it well enough and are there people who will agree to play it with me?". 
 
If time and players were abundant, I would likely still be using the Hero System for everything. But as they aren't, often times I'm looking for the game system I can wring the most amount of fun out of with the least amount of effort. Sad but true. 
 
 

The Hero System definitely offers more options than most game systems for dialing things up or down to suit a desired outcome, and in the hands of a skilled GM who knows what they want for the campaign they are running that level of control can afford a "better" result than if using a system that does not offer such tunability.
 
However, while I've had a lot of success over the years using the Hero System for a wide variety of genres at a similarly wide variety of power levels and grittiness, I'm also not blind to the cost of the game in my time as the GM or the learning curve for the average player. 
 
The question often isn't "does the Hero System do this better?"...to which the answer often is "yes" or at least "maybe". Instead the question more typically is "does this other system do it well enough and are there people who will agree to play it with me?". 
 
If time and players were abundant, I would likely still be using the Hero System for everything. But as they aren't, often times I'm looking for the game system I can wring the most amount of fun out of with the least amount of effort. Sad but true. 
 
 

Lets talk about the statement "Unlike you, I would rather War game out resolutions than have it resolved with a couple of die rolls, and a description. "
 
So...in all the wargames I've played, and also the style of rpg with a heavy focus on wargame elements (tactical maps and minis, highly detailed combat resolution, etc), dice rolls were involved (or cards that served a similar randomizing purpose). The "description" of outcomes in those games was present...but they were generally mostly asserted by rules text rather than by one or more of the players. 
 
___
 
Once a player has initiated an action that requires dice based resolution in a game system, whether there is one roll, or an arbitrarily extended series of dice rolls by one or more players (including the GM) is basically irrelevant. In the end there will be an outcome; the number of dice rolls and the complexity necessary to resolve each dice roll to get to that outcome doesn't improve the finality of that outcome.
 
In other words, if a system requires a series of back and forth contested rolls, each of which may have various modifiers, to arrive at a final outcome and the nature of that outcome is put to words by a chunk of rules text, that is not intrinsically a better system than one that boils all the circumstantial considerations of success or failure down to a single dice roll where the nature of the outcome is interpreted by one or more of the players (including the GM). 
 
You may of course prefer one style over the other, but in the end they differ mostly in means, not in motive.

It had, and there was plenty of tension between the Chainmail-era grognards and the new generation of roleplayers.  Gygax Himself complained about it in Dragon #102 (1985):
 


 
One of the things that really set Hero apart was the invention of a mechanic for roleplaying--Disadvantages, particularly psych lims.  Though it may have been based in four-color Comics Code inflexible superhero values, it was the first concrete mechanic that forced the character to behave differently than its player would.  And even today few games have such a mechanic.  D&D5 doesn't.  Pathfinder doesn't.  Shadowrun doesn't. 
 

The Hero System definitely offers more options than most game systems for dialing things up or down to suit a desired outcome, and in the hands of a skilled GM who knows what they want for the campaign they are running that level of control can afford a "better" result than if using a system that does not offer such tunability.
 
However, while I've had a lot of success over the years using the Hero System for a wide variety of genres at a similarly wide variety of power levels and grittiness, I'm also not blind to the cost of the game in my time as the GM or the learning curve for the average player. 
 
The question often isn't "does the Hero System do this better?"...to which the answer often is "yes" or at least "maybe". Instead the question more typically is "does this other system do it well enough and are there people who will agree to play it with me?". 
 
If time and players were abundant, I would likely still be using the Hero System for everything. But as they aren't, often times I'm looking for the game system I can wring the most amount of fun out of with the least amount of effort. Sad but true. 
 
 

The Hero System definitely offers more options than most game systems for dialing things up or down to suit a desired outcome, and in the hands of a skilled GM who knows what they want for the campaign they are running that level of control can afford a "better" result than if using a system that does not offer such tunability.
 
However, while I've had a lot of success over the years using the Hero System for a wide variety of genres at a similarly wide variety of power levels and grittiness, I'm also not blind to the cost of the game in my time as the GM or the learning curve for the average player. 
 
The question often isn't "does the Hero System do this better?"...to which the answer often is "yes" or at least "maybe". Instead the question more typically is "does this other system do it well enough and are there people who will agree to play it with me?". 
 
If time and players were abundant, I would likely still be using the Hero System for everything. But as they aren't, often times I'm looking for the game system I can wring the most amount of fun out of with the least amount of effort. Sad but true. 
 
 

"Many books" is "a library".

The Hero System definitely offers more options than most game systems for dialing things up or down to suit a desired outcome, and in the hands of a skilled GM who knows what they want for the campaign they are running that level of control can afford a "better" result than if using a system that does not offer such tunability.
 
However, while I've had a lot of success over the years using the Hero System for a wide variety of genres at a similarly wide variety of power levels and grittiness, I'm also not blind to the cost of the game in my time as the GM or the learning curve for the average player. 
 
The question often isn't "does the Hero System do this better?"...to which the answer often is "yes" or at least "maybe". Instead the question more typically is "does this other system do it well enough and are there people who will agree to play it with me?". 
 
If time and players were abundant, I would likely still be using the Hero System for everything. But as they aren't, often times I'm looking for the game system I can wring the most amount of fun out of with the least amount of effort. Sad but true. 
 
 

Certainly, but even Shrike's hard SF campaign probably occurs at a higher tech level than the Orbiter.  At least some of STS-51L's crew survived the initial breakup and might have lived if the ejection seats had been left in.  A recent Soyuz mission to the ISS became a successful demonstration of launch abort systems, and SpaceX's Dragon capsule has undergone successful launch abort tests.  It's hard to believe that even a near-future SF campaign couldn't have even better technobabble ways to avoid a TPK scenario. 
 
But it sounds as though the real issue is not TPK but disruptions to the flow of the prepared campaign, which is entirely understandable.
 
What is thread supposed to be about again?

Trivial, but as close to hard sci-fi as we have:  135 Space Shuttle missions.  2 TPKs.  Zero other casualties.  Of the TPKs, those on board could have effected repairs and saved the day zero of two times.  So yeah, the casualty fraction is more "binary" than was the case for early transoceanic adventures.

For me, there are many problems with space combat in the context of a roleplaying game. I don't really care to break them all down, so I'll focus here on my main issue with it. 
 
If a RPG involves ships (or analogs) and player characters move around through some kind of medium that is hostile to organic life while in them, either it is on the table for the player characters to die horribly as the logical consequence of something going wrong with the ship they are on...whether that be malfunction or enemy attack or whatever, or it is not on the table at all for the player characters to die in that way.
 
Now to be clear, it might asymmetrically be TOTALLY ACCEPTABLE for non-player characters to die horribly due to a ship mishap. That's a non-issue. The crux of the question hinges on player characters dying due to a ship mishap.
 
If it is not on the table for the players to die in that way, then any supposedly dangerous situation that happens while they are on a ship is not really a danger. In a RPG trying to emulate a fictional work such as Star Trek or Farscape or Legends of Tomorrow or Firefly, it is tacitly understood by the players that any apparent danger to the player characters or their ship itself while in space is just a pretense for an episodic adventure...the threat of danger and whatever needs to be done to avoid it is just a mcguffin or a call to action. But if that is not the focus of the gaming session, emulating a ship malfunction episode or similar genre trope, then events of that nature just seem like a time waster to me. 
 
If it IS on the table for players to die horribly due to ship mishap then the next question follows: is it on the table for ALL of the player characters to die horribly due to the same ship mishap? I.e...is it possible for the ship they are all on to explode (etc), killing them all at the same time? 
 
If the answer is NO then there is some kind of plot protection in place to prevent the TPK and probable end of the campaign. If there is plot protection in place, then only threats that might kill off one or two player characters at a time are possible. Since a sensibly equipped enemy vessel attacking the PC's ship could logically blow up their ship and kill them all, if its not allowed for all the PC's to die at once due to ship mishap it strongly limits the usability of enemy vessels capable of blowing them up. At any rate, great care and hoop-jumping must be taken either by the rules or the GM or both to avoid the TPK. This can be played around by being clever with particulars...maybe the PC's have clones, or are all on separate ships, or some kind of elaboration on ship design that somehow prevents one shot kills, or some other gyration. But any such sidestepping puts you back more or less at the same place as not allowing players to die in this way at all, from a story perspective.
 
If the answer is YES, it is on the table for a mishap in space to potentially kill off all  the player characters at once, then the player characters are basically flying around in a deathtrap. And if it does come to pass that a dice roll is failed (or an enemy's dice roll succeeds) and all of the player characters die and their ongoing story comes to an abrupt halt due to a randomized outcome, how will the players take it? Personally, I would feel distinctly unsatisfied if that were the way a space game I were running or playing in ended.
 
 
 
So, for me, generally speaking ships in a space game are best used primarily as plot justification for transit between point A and point B, as a mobile HQ, and as a built in rallying point / shared motivation for player character who comprise the crew of or live on a ship together. Space battles in which the dice land as they may and anything up to and including TPK is possible are very risky affairs unless I just don't care if the campaign comes to a screeching halt...in which case why am I showing up to play in or run that campaign in the first place?
 
That's the core of my issue particularly with hard sci fi space games...beyond the tedium of trying to simulate such a complex undertaking as space travel (much less space combat) and the dangers of floating in a pocket of technology through a hard vacuum, at the end of the day if the game system being used is fully simulating the innumerable ways my character's existence can come to an abrupt end using semi-random resolutions, it is simply a matter of time before a bad roll or chain reaction of some kind snuffs my character, or baring that forces the session to change from whatever it was going to be about to the process of trying to head off an inevitable doom due to lack of oxygen or radiation poisoning or space induced psychosis, etc. 

Pretty much.  The difference between abstraction/crunchiness in RPGs vs wargames has mainly to do with focus.  In my experience wargames tend to have detailed rules for unit movement, casualties, and morale, and few to no rules for the psychological motivations behind the principals.  Conversely (good) RPGs have some mechanics for personalities and noncombat activities like persuasion and lockpicking, and rarely tend to cover unit-scale action well.  And even RPGs vary widely in focus between very-small-unit wargaming and quasi-improv storytelling.
 
That said, everyone is striving for the right balance between crunch and abstraction.  You don't want to get bogged down in minutiae, but at the same time you want a framework around available choices when it's your turn.  The latter can be really paralyzing--at a recent D&D 5E session (I feel dirty for having to type that) the party returned to town and the GM hit us with "You're in town, what do you do?"  And all the players froze in confusion and indecision. 

I am more a high fantasy RPG fan than a superhero fan for a clutch of reasons, some of which fall into "generational", some of which fall into "experience".
 
As Killer Shrike alluded to near the top of the thread, I got into RPGs just about at inception, June 1975, and I was 19, and fully into the Tolkien fantasy world (won a trivia contest once under embarrassing circumstances).  It took very little time to start thinking about world building (which includes general fantastic cosmology), which still holds a great appeal for me.  Plot arc matters to me.  I still am very fond of worlds with a time abyss in their backstory; that adds an underpinning of structure to the world which I enjoy.
 
(I was also big into hexgrid wargames, Avalon Hill starting in 1967, and SPI starting 1971; this is kind of irrelevant for this thread, but that's in the mill also at some level.  It goes a ways towards explaining why my favorite D&D version is 4th.)
 
I had been a comics reader younger, but got out of that right at the end of the Silver Age.  Superhero stories are MUCH darker now, much more complex.  I'm not saying that's bad; I'm saying that most source material of the last 35 years is qualitatively different from how I still think of ... remember, really ... superhero stories.  At core, I still can't accept even the possibility of a deep backstory for superhero worlds; I think of them as cheesy grafts on top of real Earth (because that is certainly the case back in the Silver Age, and I don't see much difference now, other than a lengthy and largely gratuitous dragging through the gutters of the red-light district).
 
I think a lot of it also is backwash from my early experiences with both genres.  The guys I played fantasy RPGs early on were similarly motivated by the deep backstory, so we all played in genre and in story pretty faithfully.  By contrast, the guys who introduced me to superhero games had a very different outlook: they were shameless power gamers and butt kickers, and plot and backstory were wasted on them (and if they encountered any, they'd pretty wantonly waste it, leaving the corpse in a convenient dumpster).  Who got the best alpha strike on the boss villain, who cleaned the most clocks, etc., was pretty much the point. This reinforced my prejudice that supers RPGs are just a palookavillain of the week club, with all the plot arc, character depth, and backstory of I Love Lucy.
 
I've dabbled in sci-fi gaming, but for that I am such a hopeless simulationist that I haven't yet devised a game-world where there much for a player to do.  Haven't figured out how to make ship (and fleet) combat work (within my overly picky tastes in obeying real physics) on a human timescale.  Urban fantasy doesn't do a lot for me either, for a complex of reasons I haven't tried working out, and I have never liked horror ... whether film, novel, or game (invariably I just get mad).

D&D as the first rpg set the trend, and had first mover advantage plus hit on the zeitgeist of its times.
 
In the 60's, early 70's Tolkein's books entered the public domain in the US on accident due to a bizarre clause in the US copyright laws regarding import of books from other countries. Ace published a bunch of royalty free copies at a reduced cost compared to other books of the time. The themes of the books in regards to "back to nature" / anti-technology and an overall anti-war sentiment meshed well with the counterculture movement of the day (what we think of as hippies these days), and the idea that the "pipeweed" hobbits made and smoked was marijuana found favor with the same group as well (Tolkein himself stated it was just a kind of tobacco). Consequently, Tolkein-isms and similar derivatives became a cultural phenomenon of the era, and you end up with wizards painted on the sides of panel vans and rock ballads such as The Battle of Evermore and so on. It resonated with a lot of people who did not conform to the mainstream norms of their day, particularly creatives. In the downstream ripple of that, we get D&D and other vaguely Tolkein-esque content including some early video games made mostly at colleges by young techies who were hip to the youth culture of their day. 
 
Superheroes on the other hand had their original heyday in the 1940's and then again later in the 80's. For a very long time, they were seen as being strictly for kids. This began to change in the 80's and 90's, and of course the last decade has been insanely big for superheroes. 
 
Unfortunately, most people only know DC and Marvel characters from the movies and TV shows, and for whatever reason both Marvel and DC have never really been able to get their act together when it comes to RPG's and videogames. There's been a lot of good rpgs published. I myself enjoyed Marvel FASERIP from TSR in the 80's, Marvel SAGA (the card one, which was actually pretty fun if you gave it a chance), and Marvel Cortex+ (which was a GREAT game). But either they don't catch on, or they are not supported and die off, or the license lapses. 
 
I think that perhaps part of the problem with getting more people hooked on superhero rpgs is that fantasy stories are mostly literary; you read them and imagine them in your minds eye. They attract readers who are good at imagining things in their minds eye. This is the very same skill one needs to get into and enjoy roleplaying games. Superhero stories are mostly comic books / graphic novels or now movies and tv shows; you experience these stories mostly by looking at pictures or cinematic representations. You don't have to imagine anything in your mind's eye...what is happening has been drawn or acted out for you to look at. It is a visual medium, and it draws people who appreciate a visual medium and want to be SHOWN what it is vs imagine it for themselves. There is some overlap; some people enjoy both traditional textbased books and graphical books, but a lot of comic book fans are not big readers in the general sense.
 
 

Premise: either you adapt the source material to the existing game system and accept that some resolutions will play out differently using that system than they would in the source material, OR you adapt the existing game system to match the source material and accept that some resolutions will play out differently than they normally would when using the unmodified version of the game system in the interests of matching the source material.
 
It sounds like you want to do the later, adapt the game system to match the source material.
 
When I do projects like this, adapting ideas to a game system or vice versa, I first make a bullet point list of certain ideas that I want to cover to capture the "feel" I'm going for. Too few and its not worth bothering with, too many and maybe I'm overreaching or need to refine my scope a bit. Then I go down the list and for each bullet point I jot down how I think the existing system naturally handles that idea or could be bent to do so, if relevant. Any remaining bullet points that resist easy solution I then group into two categories...a) those that directly contradict or "go against the grain" of the game system in question and b) those that simply fall into a gap in the game system's coverage or are outside the scope of what the game system attempts to deal with.
 
Those bullet points that fall into a rules gap are usually simple to solve by just bolting on some custom mechanics. Those that directly go against the nature of the game system are trickier; too many of them and its a clear indicator that the game system is the wrong choice for the source material, one or two and maybe it can be worked around or possibly I might just decide to live without the problematic ideas the bullet points represent and drop them from the adaptation or tweak to a more solvable analogue. However, I might decide to hack the game system to work differently to allow for the ideas represented by the problematic bullet points.
 
 
Moving into this specific project...I played street fighter style fighter games a long time ago in the 80's and through the mid 90's, but they were never my favorite. I preferred the Tekken / Virtua Fighter / Soul Edge / Soul Caliber style of 3D fighter much more, and stopped playing that sort of game entirely sometime after the PS2 era because I stopped buying consoles and going to arcades.
 
 
With that preamble and disclaimer out of the way, if I were to make a punch list of bullet points that I would want to capture in an arcade fighter RPG it might look something like this:
 
combos power meter of some kind; possibly tied to combo must follow block abilities every fighter should have at least one finisher move and / or signature ability   
 
 
If I were going to do this using the Hero System, I would consider...what feature of the Hero System lends itself particularly well to doing this as opposed to using some other game system? And are there any official or fan-based resources available for the Hero System that already cover what I'm looking to do?
 
The answer to these two questions is...custom Martial Maneuvers and Powers, and in 6e*, the Hero System Martial Arts (HSMA6e) book. In addition to offering a plethora of existing martial arts "styles"...aka packages of maneuvers and related abilities...it also offers a bunch of examples of made up styles and guidance to make your own made up styles (perfect for wackier street fighters), and of course Chapter 2 starts off with a subsystem to build custom maneuvers allowing unusual styles and signature moves to be easily defined.
 
*In earlier editions of the game, Ninja Hero, Ultimate Martial Artist, etc offered basically the same content. 
 
If you want something beyond maneuver based martial arts, it also offers copious guidance and write ups for abilities using the Powers rules. It also has deep rules coverage assessing how existing rules can be applied or reinterpreted from the perspective of a martial arts focused game, and extending the rules to cover certain concepts such as combos (which this book refers to more generally as "sequence attacks"). It also has a one-column write up on "video game martial arts" in the "martial arts subgenre" section.
 
So, personally, I would sit down with HSMA6e and write out 8-10 characters modeling street fighter type archetypes, or just direct conversions of existing IP characters from my favorite fighter game using the resources available in HSMA6e, and see where that got me. Do the characters match my expectations? If I run a few simulated fights using them am I able to capture the feel I'm looking for?
 
I kind of already know from past experience that all my bullet points except for one would be easily covered using the content in HSMA6e...but a power meter sort of build up mechanic as found in some fighter games would be a gap in coverage...HSMA6e has write ups for a "power up" or "rage meter" effect that fills a END reserve that can then be used to fuel certain abilities which is pretty close to the idea and would work for some characters, but doesn't quite do it for me as a general mechanic...however I wrote up a custom "Threshold" framework many years ago (http://www.killershrike.com/GeneralHero/ThresholdFramework.aspx) to model abilities tied to a build-up or meter type mechanic and I would use that to cover the "power meter of some kind" bullet point.
 
So...in summary...I would strongly recommend you check out HSMA6e first and model some characters and just note any gaps or things you feel are missing before starting to tweak / rules patch / homebrew. I'm pretty sure you'll find that nearly everything you want has already been covered in HSMA6e.
 


 

Premise: either you adapt the source material to the existing game system and accept that some resolutions will play out differently using that system than they would in the source material, OR you adapt the existing game system to match the source material and accept that some resolutions will play out differently than they normally would when using the unmodified version of the game system in the interests of matching the source material.
 
It sounds like you want to do the later, adapt the game system to match the source material.
 
When I do projects like this, adapting ideas to a game system or vice versa, I first make a bullet point list of certain ideas that I want to cover to capture the "feel" I'm going for. Too few and its not worth bothering with, too many and maybe I'm overreaching or need to refine my scope a bit. Then I go down the list and for each bullet point I jot down how I think the existing system naturally handles that idea or could be bent to do so, if relevant. Any remaining bullet points that resist easy solution I then group into two categories...a) those that directly contradict or "go against the grain" of the game system in question and b) those that simply fall into a gap in the game system's coverage or are outside the scope of what the game system attempts to deal with.
 
Those bullet points that fall into a rules gap are usually simple to solve by just bolting on some custom mechanics. Those that directly go against the nature of the game system are trickier; too many of them and its a clear indicator that the game system is the wrong choice for the source material, one or two and maybe it can be worked around or possibly I might just decide to live without the problematic ideas the bullet points represent and drop them from the adaptation or tweak to a more solvable analogue. However, I might decide to hack the game system to work differently to allow for the ideas represented by the problematic bullet points.
 
 
Moving into this specific project...I played street fighter style fighter games a long time ago in the 80's and through the mid 90's, but they were never my favorite. I preferred the Tekken / Virtua Fighter / Soul Edge / Soul Caliber style of 3D fighter much more, and stopped playing that sort of game entirely sometime after the PS2 era because I stopped buying consoles and going to arcades.
 
 
With that preamble and disclaimer out of the way, if I were to make a punch list of bullet points that I would want to capture in an arcade fighter RPG it might look something like this:
 
combos power meter of some kind; possibly tied to combo must follow block abilities every fighter should have at least one finisher move and / or signature ability   
 
 
If I were going to do this using the Hero System, I would consider...what feature of the Hero System lends itself particularly well to doing this as opposed to using some other game system? And are there any official or fan-based resources available for the Hero System that already cover what I'm looking to do?
 
The answer to these two questions is...custom Martial Maneuvers and Powers, and in 6e*, the Hero System Martial Arts (HSMA6e) book. In addition to offering a plethora of existing martial arts "styles"...aka packages of maneuvers and related abilities...it also offers a bunch of examples of made up styles and guidance to make your own made up styles (perfect for wackier street fighters), and of course Chapter 2 starts off with a subsystem to build custom maneuvers allowing unusual styles and signature moves to be easily defined.
 
*In earlier editions of the game, Ninja Hero, Ultimate Martial Artist, etc offered basically the same content. 
 
If you want something beyond maneuver based martial arts, it also offers copious guidance and write ups for abilities using the Powers rules. It also has deep rules coverage assessing how existing rules can be applied or reinterpreted from the perspective of a martial arts focused game, and extending the rules to cover certain concepts such as combos (which this book refers to more generally as "sequence attacks"). It also has a one-column write up on "video game martial arts" in the "martial arts subgenre" section.
 
So, personally, I would sit down with HSMA6e and write out 8-10 characters modeling street fighter type archetypes, or just direct conversions of existing IP characters from my favorite fighter game using the resources available in HSMA6e, and see where that got me. Do the characters match my expectations? If I run a few simulated fights using them am I able to capture the feel I'm looking for?
 
I kind of already know from past experience that all my bullet points except for one would be easily covered using the content in HSMA6e...but a power meter sort of build up mechanic as found in some fighter games would be a gap in coverage...HSMA6e has write ups for a "power up" or "rage meter" effect that fills a END reserve that can then be used to fuel certain abilities which is pretty close to the idea and would work for some characters, but doesn't quite do it for me as a general mechanic...however I wrote up a custom "Threshold" framework many years ago (http://www.killershrike.com/GeneralHero/ThresholdFramework.aspx) to model abilities tied to a build-up or meter type mechanic and I would use that to cover the "power meter of some kind" bullet point.
 
So...in summary...I would strongly recommend you check out HSMA6e first and model some characters and just note any gaps or things you feel are missing before starting to tweak / rules patch / homebrew. I'm pretty sure you'll find that nearly everything you want has already been covered in HSMA6e.
 


 

Then what I recommend you do is write up a backpack (or use an existing write up), for general use. 
 
Take that write up and tweak it slightly to replace the OIF with perhaps Restrainable, any other small tweaks that seem appropriate (if any), and use that for the "Ysoki" racial ability.

D&D as the first rpg set the trend, and had first mover advantage plus hit on the zeitgeist of its times.
 
In the 60's, early 70's Tolkein's books entered the public domain in the US on accident due to a bizarre clause in the US copyright laws regarding import of books from other countries. Ace published a bunch of royalty free copies at a reduced cost compared to other books of the time. The themes of the books in regards to "back to nature" / anti-technology and an overall anti-war sentiment meshed well with the counterculture movement of the day (what we think of as hippies these days), and the idea that the "pipeweed" hobbits made and smoked was marijuana found favor with the same group as well (Tolkein himself stated it was just a kind of tobacco). Consequently, Tolkein-isms and similar derivatives became a cultural phenomenon of the era, and you end up with wizards painted on the sides of panel vans and rock ballads such as The Battle of Evermore and so on. It resonated with a lot of people who did not conform to the mainstream norms of their day, particularly creatives. In the downstream ripple of that, we get D&D and other vaguely Tolkein-esque content including some early video games made mostly at colleges by young techies who were hip to the youth culture of their day. 
 
Superheroes on the other hand had their original heyday in the 1940's and then again later in the 80's. For a very long time, they were seen as being strictly for kids. This began to change in the 80's and 90's, and of course the last decade has been insanely big for superheroes. 
 
Unfortunately, most people only know DC and Marvel characters from the movies and TV shows, and for whatever reason both Marvel and DC have never really been able to get their act together when it comes to RPG's and videogames. There's been a lot of good rpgs published. I myself enjoyed Marvel FASERIP from TSR in the 80's, Marvel SAGA (the card one, which was actually pretty fun if you gave it a chance), and Marvel Cortex+ (which was a GREAT game). But either they don't catch on, or they are not supported and die off, or the license lapses. 
 
I think that perhaps part of the problem with getting more people hooked on superhero rpgs is that fantasy stories are mostly literary; you read them and imagine them in your minds eye. They attract readers who are good at imagining things in their minds eye. This is the very same skill one needs to get into and enjoy roleplaying games. Superhero stories are mostly comic books / graphic novels or now movies and tv shows; you experience these stories mostly by looking at pictures or cinematic representations. You don't have to imagine anything in your mind's eye...what is happening has been drawn or acted out for you to look at. It is a visual medium, and it draws people who appreciate a visual medium and want to be SHOWN what it is vs imagine it for themselves. There is some overlap; some people enjoy both traditional textbased books and graphical books, but a lot of comic book fans are not big readers in the general sense.
 
 

A lite-hero book similar to Basic Hero or Sidekick, priced to sell.  I intro'd way more people to the Hero System successfully using those books than by any other means combined. I used to buy 5-10 at a time and give them away. If the game isn't gaining new players, it's dying. The way to get new players is by lowering the bar / making the product more accessible, available, and attainable. 
 
 

I'm not sure how "statistically neutral" they are after they're canceled. I have a bunch of casino dice, but I never use them for games, just collecting. For those who really must have them, I'd recommend a few sticks of  unused casino quality dice. Here's a link to the Gamblers General Store: https://www.gamblersgeneralstore.com/dice/casino-quality-dice
 
I have several sets of Q-Workshop dice, including some in metal. The most readable are the Dwarven and the Tech dice. I roll metal dice in a special felt-lined tray to protect the tabletop.
 
The vast majority of my 6-sided dice are Chessex. I've been using more of the 16mm dice lately, but I have a large number of the 12mm dice. They generally have a good weight, and roll well. (non-metal Q-Workshop dice can feel a little light).
 
The Hero dice are good, but tend to be a bit large and heavy. I use them occasionally, when I remember to bring them.
 
The Tech metal 6-siders are to the left in the picture, with the Dwarven metal 6-siders next to them. Next to the blue polyhedrals are some metal Steampunk dice, which are a little bit less readable unless the light's good.
 

Physical Manifestation does exactly what you describe, and it is a small limitation because the physical manifestation can be targeted after you've made it. That's how I would model this type of effect, and it is how I've done it in the past. Physical Manifestation is a lim custom made exactly for this sort of ability.
 
However, it could just be the SFX for a HKA.
 
 

Object Creation has a long list of things it can't do, including not being able to make something that can work as a weapon. 
 
 

I agree with No Metal.  I find they're also LOUD on most tabletops.  I also prefer rounded corners to sharply squared corners.  Last:  if they're translucent, then I prefer them to be darker rather than lighter.  Might be just me but I find overly transparent harder to read quickly.
 
For games where I'm consistently rolling 10+ dice, I actually prefer smaller ones.  Think I had a bunch of 8mm.  Otherwise...yeah, Chessex has always been good.  
Hmm, here's a site to consider:
 
https://www.dicegamedepot.com/dice-sizes/
 
One other thing:  for killing attacks, 1 die that's clearly different from the others, to be the stun mult.  (Unless your KAs are 1 die + a lot.)