Supers-Fu

First off, grab Karasu’s Struggle Trait.

Do some pointless renaming:

Chi = [b]Vitality[/b]
Yang = [b]Clobber![/b]
Yin = [i]::something supery::[/i]

Add in a few other tweaky meta-rules:

The power of Conflict

Players initiate Struggle scenes (where they may or may not shift a point between the poles of their Struggle), and if they shift happens (regardless of which way it goes) they get a point of Vitality. They roll in these scenes against the trait they want to change- failure, and the shift happens… but the other way.

Collateral Dice

Players can grab extra dice- Collateral dice- above and beyond a scene’s die-cap. They can as much as double their die pool this way. However! Anytime one of these Collateral dice rolls a 1, it creates some kind of new secondary Crisis within the scene. You throw a tanker truck at the giant robot? It bounces off and explodes, setting a building on fire. The People Are in Danger! This essentially creates a new Goal in the scene which must be bought off with Clobber! successes before a certain time runs out. Each 1 on a Collateral die creates a Goal of 3 (you need 3 successes to avert the Crisis), and a Time of 1 (you have 1 Turn to do it). Roll 3 1’s, and you have 3 Turns to accumulate 9 successes. Of course, your teammates can (and frankly, should) help with this. Collateral Damage need not be the direct result of Hero actions- the Villain could blast a bridge, causing people to fall off etc. The player who rolls the 1’s describes the Crisis.

Don’t Worry! I’m virtually invulnerable! Oh! Ouch!

Brick types are tough because their players can describe invulnerable details… but sometimes characters are really tough… or lucky… or just good at getting the hell out of the way. A player can decide one of his traits works this way, and it is never rolled against in play. Rather, its rating minus the base 2 points is added to his Vitality. This can make a hell of a difference- and gives a character potentially as much as +3 max Vitality. Depending on how you Refresh this (between scenes, between sessions, between stories), it can be an greater or lesser advantage.

Damn! Dropped my Lightsaber… err… I mean my Fiery Justice Sword!

Setbacks make good sense here- of the V2.0 type as described by Indra. A Setback requires 3 Clobber! successes to pay off (1 per Turn, minimum), though you can pay them off in chunks if you like. You friends can help you recover from them too- Super-teamwork is a genre staple.

Yes yes! I AM super, aren’t I?

I figure about 8 points will give you a nice solid Super, somewhere in the X-Men to the Spiderman range. Powers need to be fairly specific (Eye beams, mega-strength, weather control) but no need to be dicky. No ‘omni-powers’ that do everything though. No need to be a dick.

[i]Character Examples[/i]:

The Fab Five

A groovy super-team from the 60’s who were frozen in a time-bubble until the year 2000. They want to bring peace, legalized drugs, and free love to a more complex and cynical world. And kick some villains in the naggers in the process. Oh, and in case you haven’t guessed, they all got their powers from drugs tainted with weird occult energies.

[b]Dr. Zero[/b]

[b]Vitality[/b]: 3
[b]Traits[/b]: Zero-Effect 5; Counter-Culture Rogue Scientist 4; Mystic Meditation 4; Charismatic Intellectual 3
[b]Weakness[/b]: Flasharounds (like flashbacks, but forward, backward, and sideways in time) 1
[b]Description[/b]: The leader of the Fab Five- Dr. Zero is a powerful teleporter who claims to partake of the mystical Void that came before all things, which allows him to vanish from existence and reappear anywhere else he can visualize. He got his powers while meditating through a powerful LSD trip. He’s a gray-at-the-temples rogue scientist and intellectual. Sort of a counter-culture Reed Richards is you will.

[b]Earth Mamma[/b]

[b]Vitality[/b]: 6 (+3 points from a *Trait)
[b]Traits[/b]: Geo-Somatic Transformation 5; Vitality of the Earth 5*; Commune with Nature 3; Earthy Beauty 3
[b]Weakness[/b]: The Earth Cries Out! (senses damage to the environment as physical sensation) 1
[b]Description[/b]: Earth Mamma became one with the Earth after taking some mystical peyote- she can transform into a huge amazingly powerful and nigh-indestructible she-giant of stone and dirt and green growing things. In the summer, she flowers dramatically. She and Dr. Zero are long-time lovers, but they have an open relationship. Of course. She is greatly disturbed by the state of the environment in the 21st century, and has trouble staying on the right side of the law sometimes when dealing with it.

[b]Bogart Smoke[/b]

[b]Vitality[/b]: 3
[b]Traits[/b]: Physiological Disoperation 5; Mellow out Dudes 4; Outlaw Chemist 4; Find a Hookup 3
[b]Weakness[/b]: Sometimes… too mellow. 1
[b]Description[/b]: Bogart Smoke found he could discorporate his body into a cloud of smoke after smoking a whole suspicious-tasting joint. Anyone who breathes in his smoke gets… lets say… mellower. And they find each others jokes much funnier. He’s an expert in psycho-pharmacology, and sees taking direct control of neurochemistry as the sacred duty of Science, and the ultimate extension of what God began by giving Man freewill- the Will to perfect the Self though Reason. Most of the time, he’s too mellow to really peruse his goals aggressively though. He has the uncanny ability to hook into the local drug scene- even after 40 years of stasis-sleep.

[b]Soul Surfer[/b]

[b]Vitality[/b]: 3
[b]Traits[/b]: Aqueous Form 5; Water Control 4; Surf! 4; Tall.. and Blonde 3
[b]Weakness[/b]: Dude! Dude… duuuuuude? 1
[b]Descriptio[/b]n: Soul Surfer loves the Ocean, and gained his powers after an incident with a bottle of ancient Mescal in which a magical genie was imprisoned (in the form of the worm), and an ill spoken wish “Dude… like, the Ocean is like everything. I…dude… I would totally want to, like… BE the ocean. Or something. Dude.” Even in his human form, he likes to float on his board a column of animated water he holds in suspension with his powers.

[b]Fire Flower[/b]

[b]Vitality[/b]: 3
[b]Traits[/b]: Broiling Hot Fiery Aura 5; Flight 5; Women’s Studies 4
[b]Weakness[/b]: Temper Temper!
[b]Description[/b]: Fire Flower burned her bra, and stuck flowers in the barrels of guns, and when she was trapped- insensate from all the drugs she’d taken- in a fire caused by a knocked-over hookah pipe, she became the fiery icon of female liberation. When Fire Flower conjures her aura, she is surrounded in a burning haze of plasma flowers, and can fly faster than a jet fighter. She’s a peacenik hippie… but pinch her ass, make a chauvinistic crack, or reject the Love, and she’ll go off like a beautiful bomb filled with fire… and love. Mostly fire.

Details

[comment author="Russell August 09, 2005, at 03:43 PM"]More specific examples would be handy here.[/comment]

Exaggeration

Superhero fights are all about exaggeration. A punch doesn't knock a man back, it knocks him through a wall. A villain doesn't snicker, he cackles maniacally.

Mooks

Legions of henchmen have a comparitively small presence in most superhero comics- the best a Golden or Silver Age hero could hope for is a "gang" of a half-dozen hoodlums or spies.

However, some modern books, like Warren Ellis's [i]The Authority[/i], give our heroes plenty of nameless minions to fight. After all, why would an evil dictator clone just one superbeing when he could clone a thousand? Why [i]shouldn't[/i] our heroes face the entire Air Force of a parallel Earth?

Stalemates

While Golden Age heroes were rarely above fisticuffs, the extended fight scene was rare. As in movies of the time, a fight was brief and decisive.

In the sixties, however, Marvel Comics began treating conflicts between super-characters as prizefights, with flurries of furious blows and a clear victor rarely emerging until the end. (And plenty of stuff getting wrecked along the way, too.)

RPGnet Thread

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?p=4319156

[i]By: Bailywolf[/i]