d12 Supers -- Design Goals & Philosophy

So, I wanted to talk about the design goals that went into the new Runebearer d12 Supers game. (I so need a better name for this thing.) This post will go into how the game works, and what influences the decisions I made.

If you haven't done so already, here is the link to the new game. Enjoy.

First and foremost, Runebearer, and its super hero variant, have always been tactical minis games at their core. d12 Supers is no different. Crunchy, tactical combat that feels super heroic is the main goal of the design. Most everything else, from the way skills are handled, to the design of the powers, works towards this goal. I love role playing and narrative, but I think most of that gets handled by the players at the table. What needs to work and feel right is the battle system.

With that in mind, another big goal is that characters are mechanically different in battle. A character that relies on a fire blast is going to be mechanically different than one that relies on an ice blast, or a mental attack. Characters should have situations they excel in, and others where they meet enemies with abilities they find difficult to deal with.

Another goal would be as simple as possible, but no simpler. I think the previous game was fun, but really clunky. Without sacrificing the above two goals, I would like to reduce the complexity of the game and the bookkeeping required to run it.

Ideally, the game has tons of character building options, and all of them are good some of the time, but none of them are good all of the time. I once played a Champions game where every character had a 20 DEX and a multipower. When it comes to building your character I want lots of variation and lots of choices, and all of those choices should have times when they are awesome and other times where they are negated.

I hope that means that the game is designed for people that like to optimize character builds, but it is ultimately hard to min-max. I have embraced the video-gamey notion of "character builds" and I have lots of min-maxers in my gaming circles. I want making characters to be a fun exercise, and enjoyable to those folks, but I want to avoid obvious solutions. I want choices, and ultimately trade-offs to any build. I want my gamers to email me telling me they spent all week creating and tweaking characters. I want people to say, "If I hadn't used Charisma as my dump stat, I might have won that battle."

So... I want a game with tons of character builds, crunchy tactical super heroic combat, and be pretty simple overall. What does that game look like? I think next post, we should make a character and find out!