Necessary Evil

[CapedCrusader]

FYI - If you want to use Necessary Evil, it's based on Super Powers Companion 1st Edition... You wouldn't need to wait.

Also, the Super Powers Companion has options to lower the allowed power level.

[zarlor]

Our current NE campaign has our GM capping the Novice characters at 20 PPs, we get 5 free PPs per Rank but cannot take the PP Edge and doing a final cap at 40 PPs for the campaign. My group is definitely not taking the game too seriously as we've got one guy playing the Blob (as in the 1950's horror movie, not the Marvel villain) whose primary goal is to eat all organic life on the planet eventually (which means his favorite saying to the people he really likes is to them that he will hit them last, isn't that nice of him, er it?), one playing a walking, talking cartoon character that is Marvin the Martian (he's the first iteration that walked off the cel he was being drawn on, not that hack in the Looney Toons cartoons, although he does fully believe he is an actual Martian... he took the Invent power that is trapped so that, essentially, all of his inventions are called into and delivered by ACME... you know, interdimensional transport so that somehow we never see the delivery vehicle but somehow after the allotted time a box parachutes out of the sky, is around the next corner, etc.) his primary goal is to get the parts he needs to finally destroy the earth so he can have an unobstructed view of Venus from Mars, and another guy is playing a full on fantasy dwarf who was the "King Under the Mountain" and has been in hibernation for centuries only to wake into this modern world that is obviously in dire need of having him become King Over the Mountain as well. My character is downright boring, but being a mastermind Super Sorcerer (Arrogant as all hell with a firm belief that everything is all a part of his master plan), who is Fearless with Telepathy he at least keeps the rest of them in check... mostly. And when they aren't in check... well, it was all a part of the plan. I was half tempted to pull a trick out of the Tick comics and take the Elderly Hindrance to basically play "The Terror", evil mastermind extraordinaire whose now well into his 90s and practically decrepit, but I didn't think of that until after we had already started the game. Oh well.

I can see taking the game more seriously could be a lot of fun as well, but even playing it as ridiculously over the top as we have been it's a total blast. I will say that 20 PPs can be powerful with a specific combination of powers (or Dwarf is devastating as a melee fighter and the Blob can be pretty nasty with his entangle/decay combination) but overall it's definitely at the low-end of 4-Color power levels. I'm not even that sure that 40 PPs will be full on Justice League levels but it should be fairly close. 20 PPs is probably a decent cap for a Wild Card characters, though, so you might consider something like a 5 PP cap at Novice and then topping out at 20 PPs. Having played a good 5 sessions of it so far, though, I can't recommend it enough. It really is a ton of fun.

[CapedCrusader]

Yeah, I am attempting to set up a Grimnoire Chronicles game. I am going through the power level issues right now, trying to decide how to handle it. It's a bit different, you get one power only. It can have several effects, but it all has to be based around one power and what you can do with it. Some things you can't spend a bunch of points on, they max out fairly low.

[SeeleyOne]

I realize that Necessary Evil is for the first edition, I was planning to fix it to go with 2nd edition. I would rather my group start with that from the beginning and not have to be converted later on.

One project that I have seriously considered is to make power costs more comparable to edges and racial abilities. That is, an advance is worth 2 points worth. This is technically doable since it is possible to make a defined power, along with any predefined mods for it, and give it an edge cost. Hero Lab supports fractional values, so 0.5 would be worth 1 point, or half an advance. As far as I tested there is no cap on cost (other than that it can cost a ton of edges/advances).

The line of thought that got me to consider such a project is that I don't really like how supers (from what I have read in the PEG forums) is a step up from normal play. That in itself is fine, but there is an inherent incompatibility which irks me. Maybe it is from my decade of playing GURPS, but I prefer all characters to be built with the same costs.

Also I do not like that being a Super is inherently superior to all other Arcane Backgrounds. A decent wizard has to be a Super and remake their powers with the SPC. I dunno, I just feel like it kind of trivializes too many things.

[SeeleyOne]

The project that I mention above would actually be a lot easier if HL allowed both the Powers and the Super Powers tabs to be open at the same time. Then all I would have to do is tweak costs where I deemed necessary.

[Paragon]

M&M is probably, to me, the sweet spot between covering the powers in enough detail to represent heroes right without too much overhead; its easy to find people who swing off either end on that. Its not completely lacking in issues (I think the costing change on skills for 3e was a mistake, but unfortunately its baked into the costs of some other things enough that it can't be easily extracted; and the change in Impervious was not benign, but that's much more easily fixed. The effect of a big linear die roll (from its D20 ancestry) isn't always good either, though the hero point system buffers that a bit).

I haven't actually used SW with supers, so I won't authoritatively comment on it, but I've heard quite a few people have issues with it. That wouldn't surprise me as, honestly, I've never seen a game system not designed with supers in mind that really handles them well (GURPS Supers at least used to be a notorious example of this, though I haven't seen enough comments on the 4th Edition version of it to say whether its been any improvement).

[SeeleyOne]

After some thought, comments here and on the PEG forums, I think I will treat the SPC as more of a mod to handle something like Mythic for Pathfinder. I have come up with a workaround to be able to use Supers and normal powers on the same character.

My group had attemped Supers in GURPS in 3rd edition. It was lame incarnate.