The Gift, aka Fate Supers
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 only two scales to worry about, normal and super. Scale is a massive advantage. Sorry Batman fans, this is not a setting where a well-trained normal can mix it up with real supers! That's why every mantle has a defensive power. No squishies allowed!
Player characters have a pool of Energy points, separate from Fate points. (This idea I did steal from Dresden Accelerated.) Your mantle determines how you can spend Energy. Any character can take super strength, but one with the mantle of strength has an energy pool to back it up.
Still not enough power? There's an Ultimate Effort rule that lets PCs do game-breaking things like knock a planet out of orbit, raise the dead, turn back time, or other astounding feats. But that level of power comes at a price. Doing it too often might kill you.
Having pre-set powers is a bit of a departure from what I'm used to with supers games, but I can see it having its niche. Would the Mantles of Power be intended to cover all the main superhero archetypes, or are there some you'd deliberately leave out (like Aberrant does psychic powers)?
ReplyDeleteUltimate Effort sounds like it could be tough to balance. If there's an element of risk, how would you set the chances of complete disaster so that it's not free power, but also so that players aren't too afraid to try and push things?
The Gift is a single-origin setting. There are no high tech heroes or sorcerers, just the mysterious Gift. I made that decision to make the world building easier. I'll write a post about the setting when I get the time and energy.
ReplyDeleteAs for Ultimate Effort, the balancing factor is that every time a character uses it, they move closer to doom. I'm thinking of two ways to handle it. There's the predictable way, where players know exactly how many times they can go nuts before loosing their characters, and the randomized way, where you might blow up the first time you use it. I'll probably include both in the final version.
Also, bear in mind that every character has access to UE.
Probably a wild ride for the GM. Like a D&D game where every PC starts with a ring of three wishes.
I didn't realise there was a dedicated setting -- yes, if you get the opportunity I'd love to hear more about the Gift!
DeleteAnd I wonder if you could split the difference a bit with Ultimate Effort, where players could choose how much risk to commit to for the corresponding reward, but the final result was random. So, for example, one level of UE isn't likely to kill you, but it's not going to accomplish much, whereas pushing it to the stage of throwing mountains about is likely to end with you splattered over the next panel?