RPG Systems that allow for characters of diverse levels of Power

[Blue]

As an amusing anecdote from a friend. In the original WEG d6 Star Wars, Jedi were much more powerful than non-Jedi mechanically. Well, my friend played a bounty hunter in a game where everyone else was Jedi / force sensitive. Mechanically he could sit back and have popcorn and not make much of a difference. But all of the Jedi could get Dark Side points fairly easily based on their actions, which can end up retiring a character, and as a bog-standard bounty hunter, he did not. So he had 100% lock on all shady stuff going on. It was an odd spotlight balance but he enjoyed it, as much as normally I would use that as an example of a system that didn't handle it well.

 

[Kannik]

I will third Cortex Prime as a system that handles well what is generally meant by characters of different power 'levels.' The way I'd describe it is that each character is roughly equal on their ability to contribute and to move the story forward, even if their 'physical' power level in the fiction differs.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

You want power imbalance? Play RIFTS.

But in terms of point-based supers systems, you don’t necessarily get power imbalances in the campaigns, regardless of the heroic archetypes. If you modeled Supes & Bats in HERO, you’d probably use the same amount of points for each. But where Superman’s points would mostly be spent on personal physical attributes and super powers, Batman’s would be distributed in modeling his wealth, his base, his gear, his connections, and so forth.

 

[Reynard]

As an amusing anecdote from a friend. In the original WEG d6 Star Wars, Jedi were much more powerful than non-Jedi mechanically. Well, my friend played a bounty hunter in a game where everyone else was Jedi / force sensitive. Mechanically he could sit back and have popcorn and not make much of a difference. But all of the Jedi could get Dark Side points fairly easily based on their actions, which can end up retiring a character, and as a bog-standard bounty hunter, he did not. So he had 100% lock on all shady stuff going on. It was an odd spotlight balance but he enjoyed it, as much as normally I would use that as an example of a system that didn't handle it well.

Huh. That wasn't my experience. Jedi had to invest skill dive into Force skills which really did not do much until.you got significantly better. Jedi were like D&D wizards: a step behind until one day they were suddenly a step ahead.

 

[Reynard]

. If you modeled Supes & Bats in HERO, you’d probably use the same amount of points for each.

Not necessarily. If you were intentionally creating Morrison's JLA, sure, but then you aren't actually talking about "characters of different power levels."

 

[Committed Hero]

Ars Magica has three tiers of PCs: magi who are among the most powerful beings in the setting, companions who are slightly above average, and grogs who are normal scrubs. I never felt overshadowed playing non-magi.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Ars Magica has three tiers of PCs: magi who are among the most powerful beings in the setting, companions who are slightly above average, and grogs who are normal scrubs. I never felt overshadowed playing non-magi.

I'd call companions well above average in whatever they specialize in, so no surprise there. They frequently outperform the rather otherworldly magi when dealing with non-magical situations, which is why having a good mix of competencies in a group is vital if you want to be effective. Magic can be awesomely powerful but there are a lot of times when throwing it around will just frighten or anger people, making matters worse where a less flashy approach might not.

Grogs are pretty much an NPC henchman pool for temporary use by anyone when they might matter in a scene rather than a separate role unto itself, although in practice most groups seem to get attached to survivors and have the same player voice particular ones repeatedly - at least while they last. Which frequently isn't long.

No matter how you look at the different roles, you're not stuck in one power tier for the whole campaign so the feeling of being outshone isn't there so much. It's a good system, and might be usefully applied to other types of settings.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Not necessarily. If you were intentionally creating Morrison's JLA, sure, but then you aren't actually talking about "characters of different power levels."

One obvious approach to wild power differences in HERO or M&M would be for your "Superman" character to get a lot of their points from serious weaknesses - kryptonite being the obvious example - that can be crippling to them and them alone. The rules try to discourage going overboard with that sort of thing but it is one way to model powerhouses with Achilles' heels. If the player is okay with being horribly nerfed on a fairly regular basis in exchange for a big edge the rest of the time that's probably okay for the table as a whole as long as the GM is careful about keeping it in mind.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's an interesting point. Narrative magnitude can be a pretty real thing.

In Simple Superheroes #0 people start with a choice of three arrays to pick. Focused, Standard, or Well-rounded.
Focused get fewer higher ranked talents, while well-rounded get more lower ranked talents. Focused characters feel more powerful and indeed in many ways they are at what they chose to excel at. But well-rounded characters also get better relations, which means they regain Strainpoints better, and are a little more willing to spend them to boost their abilities.

Different arrays do feel different. But it's worth noting that because it's a game, I narrow down the range a bit still. There are rules for different power levels (Vigilante-Empowered-Planetary-Cosmic), and you shouldn't mix heroes from different tiers.

And that's kind of crucial if you don't want to have to tightly manage it.

To expand on my prior post a bit, Scion 1e was set up so that the success/potency gap between ranks of attributes got larger and larger as you got up the scale of Epic Attributes; Epic Attribute 1 added one autosuccess, and it was not difficult to drown that out with having a large pool of regular and skill dice. Epic Attribute 6 added 21; even someone at Epic Attribute 5 (15 autosuccesses) was so far behind that any task appropriate for the former was going to be almost impossible for the latter.

On the other hand, MHR only ranged from D6 to D12; so even in extreme cases (someone rolling a pool of 3D6 against someone with 3D12--and that's not a thing that was going to happen much) had potential overlap.

Now, the price here was that some of the gap theoretically present in the latter was illusory; there were ways to buffer that with powers in various ways, but the reality was that someone who was by the fiction vastly more powerful than another character really, well, wasn't if you couldn't ignore the math. With the former it was abundantly clear how strong it was.

But that's an intrinsic tradeoff there; unless your method of making diverse levels of power work is based on operating in different spheres of function (which I don't think usually works nearly as well as some people have it as doing), one of the necessary traits of allowing for variance in power level is not have the power level really differ too much mechanically, so other evening-up mechanics can work.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You want power imbalance? Play RIFTS.

But in terms of point-based supers systems, you don’t necessarily get power imbalances in the campaigns, regardless of the heroic archetypes. If you modeled Supes & Bats in HERO, you’d probably use the same amount of points for each. But where Superman’s points would mostly be spent on personal physical attributes and super powers, Batman’s would be distributed in modeling his wealth, his base, his gear, his connections, and so forth.

Though when this comes up, I always note that even the folks who did the Justice League Unlimited animated show had a couple cheats they frequently did here: 1. They'd sort a lot of the weaker characters so you really almost never saw characters like The Question and Green Lantern on screen at the same time in a situation where their abilities were at all relevant; 2. With the core JLAers, virtually any time you had opposition that really demanded people like Wonder Woman and the Martian Manhunter, notoriously Batman would be in the Batplane, which significantly upped his combat capability.