Dice and Superheroes (or why elegant and powerful systems sometimes suck)

There was a point in my gaming life when I knew that I would only ever play one system -- and that system was HERO System. It all started with Champions which caught my gaming group's imagination with its amazingly detailed hero creation, and dynamic, super heroic feeling combats. With Champions, you could create any hero you could think of, and have him wading through villains, knocking them through walls, and causing all sorts of mayhem.

And, though HERO always got knocked for being complex, it was pretty damn elegant for what it was trying to do -- which was to mechanically simulate the range of powers you see in the comics, while keeping everything balanced so that characters could interact in tactical combat.

The beauty of HERO is that it takes all those wonky super powers, breaks them down, and then categorizes their effects. You have a fire blast? Well that is just an Energy Blast effect. You fire webs out of your wrists? That is an Entangle effect. All these effects come together, along with Advantages and Limitations, to make your unique powers. It really is a pretty cool concept... and yeah, character creation is somewhat of an accounting exercise, but the end result is worth it.

So, with this powerful tool in my gaming group's toolbox, we would never need another superhero game again.

Or would we?

Well no. Not for a dozen or so years, in any case. I ran the heck out of HERO/Champions. All through high school, college, and a good portion of my adult GMing life, I ran some version of HERO System. It served me very well, for a very long time. It was a great game (and still is).

But, after such a long run, you get to know a system, maybe a little too well. The warts start to show, and after so many years, the warts become a focus. Champions is an elegant and powerful supers system, but that ability to do everything, with as few mechanics as it does, comes with a price. Mainly that, though you can make any character with any power in HERO, mechanically, a lot of those characters and powers end up being 90% the same.

Without going into the details of how HERO works, let's take a simple example of a Fire Blast, and an Ice Blast. Both of these powers may have been built with the effect of Energy Blast. Each might be made unique by attaching some limitations to it -- so for instance, the fire blast could be weaker in the rain, while the ice blast cannot be used in 100 degree heat. These limitations make the powers cheaper to buy, and are up to the player to purchase. (Which you often do, because cheaper!) However, in many cases, beyond a few limitations, these powers behave identically on the battlefield.

On one hand, this is great. I only need a single set of rules to handle fire, ice, lightning blasts, etc. This is a strength, not a weakness. But on the other hand, once I am through making a few of these blasters, and I start to look closely at them, I see that many of them have similar powers, and play pretty much the same. Beyond a few minor differences, often relying on GM fiat ("The temperature today... um 97 degrees... woo hoo ice attacks all around!!"), my fire blaster, with his Fire Blast, Flaming Shroud Armor, and Fire Burst Flash Attack, plays pretty close to my ice blaster, with an Ice Blast, Ice Block Armor, and Blizzard Flash Attack.

Some of this is lack of imagination, certainly... can't we build an Ice Blast that say does damage AND freezes your opponent so that they can't move?

You can, and HERO gives you tools to do this. For instance, you could have a power that incorporated an Energy Blast, and a Drain effect -- or Energy Blast and Entangle. And that would sort of work. The issue there becomes one of campaign limits on powers -- to add the secondary effect of the Entangle, you would have to reduce the effect of the Blast. Often, you are left with a crappy version of each -- a Blast that damages no one, and an Entangle that holds no one. You should have just bought two separate powers and each would have been more effective.

So besides dissing my estranged ex-game, what is my point? My point is that sometimes, you can create a system that is elegant, but by making the mechanics of the game cleaner, you have reduced variation. You may be able to simulate more powers, with fewer rules, but in play, those "unique" powers end up feeling very much alike.

Elegance vs. Variations -- In the case of Champions, abstracting all of the blast powers into a single effect, means that you have to work harder to make those blasts different. At their base, they are mechanically the same. On the other extreme, you might have a game where every power is listed separately, and has different mechanics. Your fire and ice blasts are entirely unique powers... but now, what about the guy who uses lightning, or fires concentrated bubbles of time at his opponent? You have just created a game with 900 powers, and probably an unbalanced mess.

All of this is a lead up to me saying I have written a superhero game, based on the core Runebearer concepts. In the coming days, I will be posting here to discuss it... and to explain my unbalanced mess.