23 hours ago, thedonnie said:

I do have a question...do you have any idea how to handle those characters like Batman who have tons of gadgets on them at any time? I was thinking of something for Hawkeye or Green Arrow could be handled by Energy Projection but Batman types are still not able to be done properly from what I can see.

Take a look at the Wealth and Intelligence trees. With Intelligence, you can use Mechanics to build gear from the Science Fiction and Space Opera settings, which gives you access to sophisticated items nobody but other super-intelligent gadgeteers have (I also let my super-intelligent player buy approved items from the Edge of the Empire corebook). Confronted by sharks? Use Careful Planning to declare that you brought your bat-shark-repellent with you. Wealth gives you a Batcave (complete with crime lab), an Alfred, and eventual access to batmobiles, batwings, and batboats, all charged to your bat-credit-card.

In the old Mayfair DC Superheroes game, there was something called the Batman option you could use during character creation. Basically, all the points set aside for buying powers could now be used for skills, stats and even equipment. These characters would often start the game more powerful than the superpowered ones, but it evened out quickly.

While we're talking about Batman what would you guys think about making Utility Belt a "skill" that works somewhat like a summon spell? Certain items would be a given, grapple gun, Batarang, smoke bomb, gas mask (gotta be ready for joker gas). Whenever the PC needs a new piece of gear he makes a Utility Belt roll. Just an idea.

On 10/3/2018 at 9:44 AM, glewis2317 said:

In the old Mayfair DC Superheroes game, there was something called the Batman option you could use during character creation. Basically, all the points set aside for buying powers could now be used for skills, stats and even equipment. These characters would often start the game more powerful than the superpowered ones, but it evened out quickly.

While we're talking about Batman what would you guys think about making Utility Belt a "skill" that works somewhat like a summon spell? Certain items would be a given, grapple gun, Batarang, smoke bomb, gas mask (gotta be ready for joker gas). Whenever the PC needs a new piece of gear he makes a Utility Belt roll. Just an idea.

I like that idea. It would need player buy in up front because why wouldn't the player just turn a story point?

Could you tell me what you used to make these talent trees? If it's cool I would like to adapt a power for my campaign, but want to change it a little. I love these btw and plan on running a pulp street level one shot at some point for my group, great work!

VERSION 2.8 NOW AVAILABLE

Another smallish update. I have some fixes I want to get done re: suggestions about Teleportation, but what I'm most excited about right now is the NEW COVER! JustinCase messaged me last month with a beautiful new cover design, which really nicely fuses the old Marvel FASERIP style with the Genesys lineart-and-blueprints style.

Other updates include a few spelling fixes and a few extra paragraphs on the subject of limitations. I've also added a few new example limitations based on what players and NPCs in the game I'm now running are starting to do.

Another new thing is a small change to the "No Mere Mortal" rule. Having actually playtested the rules, it's clear to me that Brawn becomes kind of a god-stat, and so I've replaced the rule that gives you twice your Brawn to unarmed attacks with one that just gives you Brawn +3. That way there isn't such an overwhelming difference between a bruiser-character and a character that chooses to be a technical fighter (using the talents from RoT that let you replace Brawn with Agility or Cunning).

When I have some time and I've run some more sessions, I'd like to add an example adversaries section. A question that's hanging over me is whether to include my Simplified Adversaries or to convert the adversaries I'm creating for the game over to the standard Genesys statblocks.

Regarding the new cover: I like the overall design, but the colors are quite painful to look at. Your screen may be calibrated differently than mine, but on mine; the yellow negative space is more vivid than the cover's contents, the orange accent lines disappear into it for example, and it also clashes very badly with the red elements of the cover content. As an alternative I would suggest something closer to a faded parchment yellow.

Regarding the contents: Awesome stuff as always. The layout is very clean, everything is perfectly readable on a skim through, and the selection of power trees seems quite broad and nicely filled out.

In true comic book fashion, I've decided to introduce cover variants (thanks again to JustinKase): FASERIP Yellow and Grey Passion .

Taking some feedback I've gotten here and on Reddit, I've re-named the Teleportation power to "Phasing" and have introduced Teleportation as its own major power. I've also introduced Invisibility.

Teleportation

Camouflage

Would love some feedback on the ability costs.

Found a small typo on page 7. The Signature Power description cuts off mid sentence

Signature Power
Tier: 4
Activation: Passive
Ranked: Yes
Choose one of your power trees. Each turn, the
first time you spend strain to activate abilities
on that tree, reduce the strain cost by 1 to a
minimum of 0. This talent may only apply to

The "Signature Power" talent is cut off at "This talent may only apply to". What does it only apply to?

Love this. I’ve wanted to do superheroes for a while. I’ve been working on a conversion using the magic rules as a guide, but this is so much better.

Well @IndianaWalsh I've no words to thank you for all this hard work.

I've played as GM Superheroes RPG like Mutants and Masterminds for years and absolutely want to try a campaign with Genesys.

I think that your work is the most advanced, complete and (for what I can understand) even playtested.

Just a question: how do you set the XP price for each power? Ther's guideline or something like that (besides using Star Wars Force Powers as a starting point).

Hope this can help if someone else play with these rules.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1C1FKQiKIVuHgiDTlPQcgt1tikRg1_rmL

Please note that I'm totally unable to use a graphic software, so this is my maximum result.

15 hours ago, Lord_Lele said:

Just a question: how do you set the XP price for each power? Ther's guideline or something like that (besides using Star Wars Force Powers as a starting point).

When there's a force power that corresponds or is fairly similar, I use that as a guideline. Otherwise, I *try* to price things based on what talents can do, or price them in relation to one-another. For example, Teleport was priced out based on what it would cost to take a few powers from the flight and phasing trees that could have replicated the effect of teleportation (i. e., the ability to get from point A to point B and ignore obstacles). That said, a lot of these things were priced out fairly haphazardly; I post stuff in the Discord but there's such a large volume of abilities that it's difficult to get feedback on every single one.

Things I'm still trying to puzzle out (although I haven't had as much time since the school year started and more of my time is going towards actually *running* my game)
Gear: Superheroes don't really acquire wealth through adventuring, and while the Wealth power has allowed me to abstract this somewhat, I'd eventually like to develop a wealth-level system for gear acquisition like exists in, for example, Rogue Trader.

Shapeshifting: shapeshifting can be accomplished somewhat clumsily with Limitations ("I only have access to this power when in a certain form") and talents (such as the shapeshifter talent from Terrinoth or my own "Henshin Hero" talent), but I'd prefer to figure out a more intuitive means of integrating shapeshifting, as well as pricing out the disguise aspect.

Combat: Genesys combat is weird; most fights take only a couple rounds, especially since superpowers give characters a lot of ways to deal more damage, bypass Soak, etc. In addition, since these rules tip the scales towards melee combat, Brawn-focused characters have a pretty huge advantage, since Brawn applies to combat checks twice (once through success from skill rolls, and again since Brawn is added to melee/brawl weapon damage) and it applies to soak as well. One of the PCs in the game I'm running is an immortal knight with 5 brawn who's invested extremely heavily in Durability powers, and it's created a bit of an imbalance since any adversary that can get past his Soak is incredibly dangerous to the other three characters. I'm puzzling over a few solutions to these issues, including giving all starting PCs +5 or +10 Wounds, de-coupling Brawn from Soak, or even (and this would be the most radical) doing away with the soak-wounds-crits system altogether in favor of a combat momentum system like in Adeptus Evangelion.

Vehicles: My supers rules interact with the vehicle rules (Wealth lets you get easy access to them) but I haven't really figured out how certain powers (speed, for example) should interact with the vehicle rules, or whether it's really appropriate for vehicle-scale weapons to be as dangerous as they are in this setting.

Investigation: A big part of superhero-ing is investigating crimes and supervillainous plots. In the future, I'd like to try my hand at integrating some of the concepts from GUMSHOE into Genesys.

Ease of Use: at the moment, fully utilizing this ruleset requires having the core rulebook, the Terrinoth rulebook (for heroic abilities, magic gear, and talents), and this PDF, and switching between the three documents as well as any additional homebrew material you might want to integrate; especially for players new to Genesys, this can get pretty confusing. I did up a character creation guide with links for my home game, but pretty much all of my players ended up missing something. I'm not sure there's an easy solution to this that doesn't involve integrating all the relevant material into a single document, which is somewhat sketchy IP-wise, but I'm aware that it's a problem.

@IndianaWalsh I think that in an superhero settings a good rule that we can steal from Mutants and Masterminds is the Power Level that put a cap on both maximum damage and maximum fortitude (or soak, in our case).

For example, you can have Power Level 15: the SUM of character SOAK and his maximum base damage (before success are applied) must be 15 or less.
If you have SOAK 5, you can have a weapon or an attack that has max 10 base damage.
If you have SOAK 10, then you can have attack that has max 5 damage.

Another way to simulate invulnerability that I was thinking about is to change the Durability tree, by removing Soak bonuses (even Armor) and instead add Immunity to damage, like for example:
- Immunity to one hand weapon (pistol, knife)
- Immunity to two-hand firearms (rifle, shotgun)
- Immunity to explosive (any weapon with Blast)
- Immunity to terran vehicle weapon

In this way, your superhero is still invulnerable to conventional weapon, but his enemies are supervillain with Elemental/Energy/Quantic/Sonic/Thunder/etc... attack that still inflict damage.

What do you think?

On 1/14/2019 at 1:47 AM, IndianaWalsh said:

Combat  : Genesys combat is weird; most fights take only a coup  le rounds, especially since superpowers give characters a lot of ways to deal more damage, bypass Soak, etc. In addition, since these rules tip the scales towards melee combat, Brawn-focused characters have a pretty huge advantage, since Brawn applies to combat checks twice (once through success from skill rolls, and again since Brawn is added to melee/brawl weapon damage) and it applies to soak as well. One of the PCs in the game I'm running is an immortal knight with 5 brawn who's invested extremely heavily in Durability powers, and it's created a bit of an imbalance since any a  dversary that can get past his Soak is incredibly dangerous to the other three characters. I'm puzzling over a few solutions to these issues, including giving all starting PCs +5 or +10 Wounds, de-coupling Brawn from Soak, or even (and this would be the most radical) doing away with the soak-wounds-crits system altogether in favor of a combat mome  n  tum  system like in Adeptus Evangelion. 

In my opinion that sort of situation with the overpowered villain is staple to superheroics.

Take Infinity War for example (again, Infinity War, not Endgame #DontSpoilTheEndgame). You don't see Spider-Man dealing much damage to Thanos with his proportionate spider strength punches and kicks. At best he's a distraction. That said, Spider-Man saved the unconscious guardians with his abilities and helped to almost remove the gauntlet from Thanos's grasp.

Some villains (and heroes) should just be super powerful, and in that case, the weaker in combat heroes need to have other means of heroics, whether that's through fighting minions, rescuing others, using witty banter or flashy moves to distract the big bad or any other means you and your players can think up.

If there still needs to be a limitation, my preference would be to look to the strain system. Every time your immortal death Knight reduces damage through their abilities, they suffer 2 strain. Sure they are nearly immortal but eventually they will run out of stamina and pass out. Superman, Wolverine, Luke Cage, even Hulk are all incredibly durable characters but none of them are depicted as having infinite stamina. Superman eventually uses up his solar energy and takes damage from villains attacks, wolverine can be knocked out regularly, Hulk gets tired and turns back into Banner, Luke Cage also gets knocked out on occasion.

I just ran my first supers game using your rule set. It was awesome! Thank you so much!

I am having one difficulty though (and I had this with the Star Wars Move Power as well). Hitting someone with a large object (via Telekinesis, Strength, or Size Manipulation) is the most damaging attack available in the game. It trumps everything else at personal scale and has no drawbacks that I can see. I'm trying to come up with some modified rules that don't make hitting someone with a silo 3+ object an instant win.

Here's what I'm considering:

• You must upgrade the difficulty of the attack once for each silhouette the object is greater than yours (it's unwieldy, likely to collapse under its own weight, easy to see coming, etc).
• If you are in an interior space you add one setback die for each silhouette the object is larger than the intended occupants (reduce by one if in an appropriately large room).
• You may elect to eliminate both of these penalties by having the attack inflict Blast on a successful hit doing damage equal to your Brawn plus the object's silhouette plus uncancelled successes. If the object is silhouette 4 or more blast effects all within short range. You may activate blast with this attack with a triumph or 3 advantage even on a failed check. Most objects are destroyed by this attack method.

What do you all think?

1 hour ago, FinarinPanjoro said:

I just ran my first supers game using your rule set. It was awesome! Thank you so much!

I am having one difficulty though (and I had this with the Star Wars Move Power as well). Hitting someone with a large object (via Telekinesis, Strength, or Size Manipulation) is the most damaging attack available in the game. It trumps everything else at personal scale and has no drawbacks that I can see. I'm trying to come up with some modified rules that don't make hitting someone with a silo 3+ object an instant win.

Here's what I'm considering:

• You must upgrade the difficulty of the attack once for each silhouette the object is greater than yours (it's unwieldy, likely to collapse under its own weight, easy to see coming, etc).
• If you are in an interior space you add one setback die for each silhouette the object is larger than the intended occupants (reduce by one if in an appropriately large room).
• You may elect to eliminate both of these penalties by having the attack inflict Blast on a successful hit doing damage equal to your Brawn plus the object's silhouette plus uncancelled successes. If the object is silhouette 4 or more blast effects all within short range. You may activate blast with this attack with a triumph or 3 advantage even on a failed check. Most objects are destroyed by this attack method.

What do you all think?

I think the easiest solution is just to reduce the damage per silhouette but leave the other rules intact.

So maybe it's 5 damage per silhouette, starting at 5 with a Silhouette 0 object.

So it would look like:

sil 0: no difficulty, 5 damage+successes

sil 1: 1 difficulty, 10 damage+successes

sil 2: 2 difficulty, 15 damage+successes

sil 3: 3 difficulty, 20 damage+successes

sil 4: 4 difficulty, 25 damage+successes

Thanks for the feedback. I considered that already the problem is this only solves the problem up to silhouette 2. 3 and above are still instant win hits with almost any hero you can create with the rules who don't have the Durability power that gives them armor 2 versus physical attacks.

It seems to me that if someone tried to hit a target with a silo 3 Mack Truck and Trailer, it would likely hit all their friends standing nearby as well. Blast is really more appropriate than only being able to hit a single person with an object that large. It should be an area attack because the object is likely larger than the area occupied by the target and everyone in engaged range of them.

Note: My original Blast suggestion is instead of the normal damage inflicted on a successful hit.

Alternative Thought:

What if large objects were treated as doing Brawn plus Silhouette damage, but also have linked equal to silhouette? This would require more advantage to make devastating and allow soak to apply to each activation of linked.

Or it could be treated as Auto-fire and even increase the difficulty once (which would also allow the damage to be spread to multiple targets instead of using Blast to do this) and make it comparable to what a super with energy projection/auto-fire upgrade can accomplish in one round.

37 minutes ago, FinarinPanjoro said:

I considered that already the problem is this only solves the problem up to silhouette 2. 3 and above are still instant win hits with almost any hero you can create with the rules who don't have the Durability power that gives them armor 2 versus physical attacks. 

I mean, consider the Thermal Detonator from Star Wars. 1 difficulty check to hit a character and deal 20+ damage with Breach 1 and Vicious 4, 2 advantage can hit every target within Short range for similar damage that arguably can't be reflected or parried.

This is a 3 difficulty check to hit a single character and deal 20+ damage that could be reflected/parried and is reduced by soak.

If you want to make it more challenging still, then add +1 difficulty per range increase beyond short, just like the range increases for magic spells, so at medium range you're throwing around 4 purples for that 20+ damage. If you try to throw something of silhouette 4 at any range beyond short, it's an Impossible check at that point and now it costs a Story Point just to attempt.

Other option which would be easier, is just cap the silhouette you can affect to 2.

Another option still is to learn to work around it rather than limit it.

So your character has an insta-kill button at a difficulty of 3+defense+upgrades+environmental effects. Don't send a single adversary against him then. Target the biggest threat first. Also, consider despairs and multiple threat to endanger the lives of innocent bystanders if they are chucking around sil 2+ objects in public, and consider the damage this has on the environment. Just because Superman can throw a building at you doesn't mean he's going to, since he has a moral code.

But thermal detonators are one use, expensive, and rare. The problem is buildings, trucks, etc are everywhere.

My problem isn't the heroes. It's the villains which I'm running. My players expect to be able to fight someone who can do what Superman can do but due to the scale conversion the fight would be too one sided- even if they should have comparable power levels through energy projection, magic, or the like.

I'm trying to come up with a consistent set of rules so that the iconic "throw a train at someone" moments can happen and be fun for the players.

I've also thought about allowing a defensive roll like the Coordination check that allows you to mitigate falling damage.

Hey, I posted some proposed house rules on using massive objects as weapons in another thread, but they specifically reference IndianaWalsh's Superpowers supplement so I'm posting a link here.

Using Silhouette 2+ Objects as Weapons

Great work!

Robot Pal (Improved) is listed in both tier 4 and tier 5 talents (though the one in tier 5 says it's a tier 4).

Will there be any more powers added to the document?

Is there any way you can make a PDF of just the powers.