Strangething

Long ago, I was talking about superheroes and games with a friend. He mentioned how superhero comics tend to make their popular characters immortal. If only for commercial reasons. We wondered what it would be like if it worked the opposite way, with supers burning out and dying young. In an RPG, you could give the PCs an overcharge mode, a sort of instant win button, but with an increasing risk of death each time you use it. I was struck by how that could give a game a strong theme of self-sacrifice. Then I forgot about it, until I got to a certain point working on my Fate supers game, the Gift. I call it Ultimate Effort.

Many powers let you act on a super powered scale. What does that mean?  The Gift normally only uses two scales: normal and super. Occasionally you might see a scale above super, usually called cosmic. Rarely, you might need an ad-hoc scale for sub-human power, like if a super villain hits you with a shrink ray.  When you take super scale action against super scale resistance, you don’t need to do anything special. Scale only needs rules when acting across scales.  Most of the time, a super powered character acting against normal resistance automatically succeeds. Don’t bother to roll in most cases. In an action scene, it doesn’t even need an action. If you do roll for such an action, roll with a +4 bonus.  If you've read Dresden Accelerated, that number will seem very high. It's the level described as "godlike" in that game. A smaller value would make for a more forgiving game. But it breaks suspension of disbelief if someone can lift 50 tons, and then lose a wrestlin

 I ended my last post with the list of mantles from my draft document. (Thank you blogger for making that image the thumbnail for that post. 🙄) You may have noticed some of the names are a bit overwrought, like they could be infinity stones or something. The language felt appropriate for a supers game.  In the setting, the term mantle, and many of their names, come from a super with psychic powers. He was one of the first to write about how the gift works, and his grandiose terminology stuck. So what's a mantle? It's a themed collection of powers that gives you a ready-to-play super hero in one step. Think of it as a template. Each one comes with lots of suggestions on how to customize it to fit your concept. I intend to make a section on making your own mantle, and character creation is essentially point-based. But it is very useful to me as a designer to have a list of character types that the game needs to support. Creating the mantles without a power list was actually easi

The big setting post is in progress. In the meantime, lets talk about character creation.  The Gift uses Fate: Accelerated Edition. I toyed with renaming the five approaches, but decided against it.  My first version of this game used Fate Core, but I didn't like how powers made certain skills useless. There's no point in taking physique if you're not super strong, or Athletics if you're not super quick, and so on. The FAE approaches don't have that problem, because super strength isn't the same as being "super forceful." 

More about my super hero RPG project, The Gift . Lets talk about the setting. Like the rules, the setting has been designed to be playable, rather than try to encompass everything seen in the comics. The typical super hero setting is a ridiculous everything-goes mashup. I love the sort of weirdness that type of setting enables. But I like to work out how society would react to weird stuff. Ponder the consequences. So I decided to keep it simple. All people with powers get them from the Gift. They are a bit like Marvel's mutants, but with a few little quirks.

The Gift is my game in progress about superheroes, powered by Fate Accelerated Edition . I have two main design goals: Simple character creation, and giving players a real sense of power. Most supers games have complex character creation to accommodate the weirdness of comic book characters. The inevitable result is a complex system that requires a great deal of system mastery. Rather than grapple with that complexity, Fate Supers uses templates called Mantles of Power . A term I swear I did not steal from Dresden Files Accelerated. A mantle gives you a well-rounded package of powers. You can add more powers and stunts to customize your character to your liking. It seems almost blasphemous to make a supers game that isn't designed to give the players maximum flexibility for building their characters. But why? Are weird characters really essential to the genre? Why not sacrifice flexibility for clarity? As for the sense of power, that's pretty straightforward. There are onl