I’d like to put together a superhero-themed one-shot, to run in situations where my current slew of DMs want to play a few sessions as characters, or when they’re not up to DMing. I’d also like to really get into the weeds on one particular system that I could conceivably run a longer-form game in the future.
Tone would be pretty light-hearted, like somewhere between Spider-Gwen and The Tick. I would likely discard the setting stuff for whichever system I used.
I loved City of Heroes and theoretically love the idea of people playing both heroes and villains, but I can’t really imagine a way that could work without half the group sitting and watching as the hero side does one thing, then the hero side sitting and watching as the villain side does another thing, etc. They’d have to be working together on the same thing, I think.
@Tulpa recommended Wild Talents, which looks really cool. I’m scoping this one out primarily for the system, which uses something called the ORE system:
The One Roll Engine introduces players to the basic ideas of ORE. In a nutshell, ORE uses a dice pool of d10s. Often this is a “Stat+Skill” formula, but in the case of powers a single number may be used. No more than 10 dice are rolled ever, although having a pool of more than 10 dice can come in handy as dice are lost to penalties. When dice are rolled, players look for matching sets. The matched number is called the “height” and the number of matching dice is called the “width”. So if you roll four 8’s, that’s a height of 8 and a width of 4 (and a very impressive roll). Height is usually used to reflect quality of success while width is used to reflect speed, but there are a lot of fiddly exceptions to that.
When players buy dice in something (like a Stat or a Skill or a power), they can choose to purchase regular d10s, “hard dice”, or “wiggle dice”. Regular d10s are just that: you roll them and take whatever number you get. Hard dice are automatically a 10, and are generally considered to reflect maximum force or effect with no option of holding back. Wiggle dice, the most expensive dice to purchase, allow players to choose whatever number they want; a single wiggle die guarantees a matched set on any roll. Hard dice cost twice what regular dice to purchase, and wiggle dice cost four times what a regular die does.
Reviews say that it’s easy to abuse this system, but, I’m not so much worried about that. I’m good about enforcing a rule or making changes if it looks like it’s gonna fuck up the game.
I’m also hearing Mutants & Masterminds is pretty good. Looks like that one’s a d20 system, but has really cool ideas for chargen.
From this RPG.Net review:
The core mechanic is the same as other d20-based systems; roll a d20, add various modifiers as appropriate, and compare the result to the target number, or Difficulty Class. However there are a number differences between Mutants and Masterminds and other d20-based systems. There are no character classes, the closest equivalent being packages of traits which are more of a convenience or archetypes, which are an excellent range pre-generated example characters which means you can start with a character pretty much right away. The entire game is run entire with the d20 with no other die involved, there are no hit points (using grades of damage instead), and there is a metagame resource of Hero Points. These are used to improve a roll, dodge, invoke a feat, escape death etc, and are acquired therough narrative elements; setbacks, complications, heroism, and roleplaying.
Any of y’all ever been in a game like this? Have any thoughts on what was fun and adventurey vs tedious or frustrating?