My group tends to do two types of game settings: Star Wars and some kind of Superhero game. While I think the engine is flexible enough that you could adapt it to any setting - you could do a Doctor Who game, Ghostbusters, 007, a Giant Mecha anime game - with relative ease, doing a Superhero game seems to be a bit harder. Well at least from my 15 minutes of thinking in the shower.

Go look at the endless pages on pages for powers in HERO, plus the assorted add ons and minuses to go with those powers. That's a pretty diverse power set. Sure The Force/Jedi-ness will cover some of that, but coming up with an engine that will do Superman and Ant Man and all the crazy arrows that Green Arrow can pull out - that's going to be quite a page count. What do you guys think - viable campaign setting? Or just too much for the engine to handle?

45 minutes ago, Desslok said:

My group tends to do two types of game settings: Star Wars and some kind of Superhero game. While I think the engine is flexible enough that you could adapt it to any setting - you could do a Doctor Who game, Ghostbusters, 007, a Giant Mecha anime game - with relative ease, doing a Superhero game seems to be a bit harder. Well at least from my 15 minutes of thinking in the shower.

Go look at the endless pages on pages for powers in HERO, plus the assorted add ons and minuses to go with those powers. That's a pretty diverse power set. Sure The Force/Jedi-ness will cover some of that, but coming up with an engine that will do Superman and Ant Man and all the crazy arrows that Green Arrow can pull out - that's going to be quite a page count. What do you guys think - viable campaign setting? Or just too much for the engine to handle?

My guess is too much, but who knows

I think a lot of the powers could be narrative flare on the basic force powers we already have. A lot of arrow is covered with unleash. Perhaps a talent for flight could be "commit force dice to gain the ability to fly at speed equal to dice committed"

It's doable I think. 18 careers, over a hundred or so specs, plus Force powers in Star Wars, so the level of specificity isn't the issue. I think the structure of character development would be different, but the engine would work well imo. There would probably need to be some tweaks to survivability, but nothing impossible to handle.

It's certainly possible. There are superhero RPGs that are fair less crunch-heavy that HERO, such as Wild Talents and ICONs, so I'd say a superhero add-on for Genesys is viable. Granted, topping Mutants & Masterminds 3e is going to be a tall order for me, since I firmly believe M&M is the best darn superhero RPG on the market.

It's just a question of are the PCs going to feel suitably "heroic" in contrast to average people? Even heroes with no real superpowers, such as Batman and Green Arrow are well above the average person. That was one of the stumbling blocks of Margaret Weis Productions' Marvel Heroic RPG, is that the characters never really felt "super," and that while I like the Cortex system, it's better suited to gritter/mundane games (worked quite well for their Firefly RPG).

Absolutely! I think the narrative dice system behind the Star Wars RPG lends itself so perfectly to super heroes. Almost everytime I've introduced the Star Wars games to RPG Gamers... someone has said afterwards "this would be GREAT for a superhero game". I was SURE that FFG was going to announce a Marvel RPG based on this system at the last couple of GenCons (and lost several bar bets accordingly). This is the next best (or maybe even BETTER) thing.

It probably could work, but would require much heavier tweaking. The current force dice system wouldn't work, as (with rare exceptions) most superheroes can automatically use their powers. Superman never rolls to see if his flight turns on. That would totally throw the balancing of powers out of whack with the current game balance.

I'll be curious to see how they handle magic, from a fantasy campaign, as that will possibly shed some light on things.

I read somewhere where it's a matter of "super in relation to what?" If you're thinking a setting where you have Superman on one end and the costumed vigilante on the other, I don't think this system is the right fit for such a massive range of power. If, on the other hand, the superheroes are all relatively equal in power, like The Incredibles , then I think it could handle it better.

3 hours ago, bkirchhoff said:

Absolutely! I think the narrative dice system behind the Star Wars RPG lends itself so perfectly to super heroes. Almost everytime I've introduced the Star Wars games to RPG Gamers... someone has said afterwards "this would be GREAT for a superhero game". I was SURE that FFG was going to announce a Marvel RPG based on this system at the last couple of GenCons (and lost several bar bets accordingly). This is the next best (or maybe even BETTER) thing.

In a way Jedi are superheroes. And darth Vader is the master vilain with an army of mooks.

This game better be able to handle generic superheroes or I'll want my money back.

I don't think it's impossible but I'm sure it would require an entirely separate book beyond the CRB, perhaps with a specific setting and specific ideas about how super-powers work within the setting. If not a licence on a smaller universe then they would probably have to go ahead and create their own setting.

Thinking more upon this I really think it would have to be aimed at Supers with equivalent levels of power. In SW there is no xp or Level cap, Superman could be a 2000 or more xp character. So long as everyone starts at the same level then it should be simple to implement. The game will be a lot about learning to use your powers and master them rather than just starting with everything (unless you start with 500xp more!).

A lot of Superheros are not that reliant on gear, of course they have some, batman, iron man etc, but those that actually have incredible power generally get by on some spandex and a face mask. Equipment will therefore likely be less important, or at least should be less important to some of the careers.

3 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

Thinking more upon this I really think it would have to be aimed at Supers with equivalent levels of power. In SW there is no xp or Level cap, Superman could be a 2000 or more xp character. So long as everyone starts at the same level then it should be simple to implement. The game will be a lot about learning to use your powers and master them rather than just starting with everything (unless you start with 500xp more!).

A lot of Superheros are not that reliant on gear, of course they have some, batman, iron man etc, but those that actually have incredible power generally get by on some spandex and a face mask. Equipment will therefore likely be less important, or at least should be less important to some of the careers.

You could have super heroes who need a certain object to transform/ activate their power (Kamen Rider, Green Lantern) Or use weapons and enhancing items in adition to their powers (spider man's webshooters, Cap America's shield.)

But I definatly agree about the pwoerleevl of all characters shpulmd be able. You don't want to be the Hawkeye in a team full of Thors.

Perhaps that's how the different "careers" would be split up. Tech Specialists (Batman, Iron Man), Super Enhanced (Superman, Wolverine), Mind/Psychic Supers (Xavier), World Altering (Storm). Some of the iconic characters would bridge multiple careers such as Cap who would have something from Enhanced and something from Tec Spec.

If I was in charge - and with Fantasy Game Design like this, sure what the hell - I might steal a page from City of Heroes . They had a pretty good breakdown of power sets (that could easily translate into careers):

* Blasters (shooty-shooty types. Archers, fireballs from the hands, eye beams, BFG people)

* Defenders (the support types - slow the enemy, heal folks, entangles and so on)

* Scrapper (Kung fu dudes, melee, fire fists, wolverine claws and the like)

* Tankers (The Brick - the Hulk, Superman, the tough as hell dudes)

* Controllers (The mind control power sets)

There were a couple more here and there (and the mirror version for City of Villains) - but that pretty much covers all the major archetypes.

10 hours ago, Desslok said:

If I was in charge - and with Fantasy Game Design like this, sure what the hell - I might steal a page from City of Heroes . They had a pretty good breakdown of power sets (that could easily translate into careers):

* Blasters (shooty-shooty types. Archers, fireballs from the hands, eye beams, BFG people)

* Defenders (the support types - slow the enemy, heal folks, entangles and so on)

* Scrapper (Kung fu dudes, melee, fire fists, wolverine claws and the like)

* Tankers (The Brick - the Hulk, Superman, the tough as hell dudes)

* Controllers (The mind control power sets)

There were a couple more here and there (and the mirror version for City of Villains) - but that pretty much covers all the major archetypes.

Don't forget the Peacebrings and Warshades! Kheldians FTW!

Yes, I played the hell out of CoH back in the day. My main was a 50 Kin/Rad defender. Followed by a 40-something Dark/Dark defender, and a 38 Peacebringer. And a bunch of 20-somethings that I didn't play often.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled forum thread…

While I'm not sure Genesys could handle a broad range of super-powered individuals, I do think that so long as the PCs are on roughly the same playing field, it could indeed work.

Don't know how many folks here remember, but Pinnacle did their take on a supers game titled Brave New World. While the setting was fairly dystopian, the PCs generally had a single "theme" for their powers with minor/secondary powers related to that theme. So something along those lines could probably work pretty well for Genesys.

1 hour ago, c__beck said:

Don't forget the Peacebrings and Warshades! Kheldians FTW!

Yes, I played the hell out of CoH back in the day. My main was a 50 Kin/Rad defender. Followed by a 40-something Dark/Dark defender, and a 38 Peacebringer. And a bunch of 20-somethings that I didn't play often.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled forum thread…

Lordy do I miss Saturn Five; my Energy Melee/Invulnerability Tanker...

Virtue server FTW... /torch

Using CoH as a theme could be phenomenal.

...I may have to add that to my list...

4 minutes ago, DarthGM said:

Lordy do I miss Saturn Five; my Energy Melee/Invulnerability Tanker...

Virtue server FTW... /torch

Using CoH as a theme could be phenomenal.

...I may have to add that to my list...

Count me in on your dev team!

I'd buy that for a dollar! Several, in fact.

My two favorite characters was Great Beyond the ice/fire blaster. I loved my supercharged AOE blizzard, making bad guys flop around like a bunch of fish. And Scarlet Arrow, the Arrow/Trick Arrow archer who managed to get all the way to 50 without ever buying a movement power. She was a blast to play.

3 minutes ago, Desslok said:

And Scarlet Arrow, the Arrow/Trick Arrow archer who managed to get all the way to 50 without ever buying a movement power . She was a blast to play.

...how did you...?

Wow. That's hardcore...

You'd be suprised how fast she could run with just the natural running enhanced with all speed Enhancements. And she did have that free hover power that every character got, so she could get to high places in an emergency. When I played her in our Pen and Paper HERO superhero game, her only superpower was one inch of flight - basically you could walk across a room twice as fast - but it had the modifier that made it nearly possible to dispel (it would take something like about 10,000 points of Dispel to turn off her flight).

On 28.6.2017 at 4:26 PM, Split Light said:

It probably could work, but would require much heavier tweaking. The current force dice system wouldn't work, as (with rare exceptions) most superheroes can automatically use their powers. Superman never rolls to see if his flight turns on. That would totally throw the balancing of powers out of whack with the current game balance.

I'll be curious to see how they handle magic, from a fantasy campaign, as that will possibly shed some light on things.

I never roll on force jumping either, I just take the maneuver.

Magic should be rather easy, just make different aspects of the magic basic force powers, add a tree to become more prominent with each aspect and allow combined rolls for heavier combined effects of several things at once. For example combine fire with enhance and BAM fire fists.

6 hours ago, DarthGM said:

Lordy do I miss Saturn Five; my Energy Melee/Invulnerability Tanker...

Virtue server FTW... /torch

Using CoH as a theme could be phenomenal.

...I may have to add that to my list...

My username for this forum, Split Light, was my Energy Melee/Invulnerability Tanker in CoH. I loved that character. I had some many alts in that game. I have hopes that at least one of the new CoH clones in production (City of Titans, Valiance Online, Ship of Heroes) can approach it.

Actually, thinking about it - the CoH brand is probably cheap enough to licenses with very little overhead, but clearly comes with at least some brand recognition and nostalgia. I wonder if it would be in the realm of possibility for FFG to pick up the name? I guess it comes to if they peruse branded supplements (well, above and beyond the obvious one already on the books ) for the range.