Heroes in a Superhero World

[Ximenez]

So 20 years ago, I created a very detailed fantasy campaign setting as my senior honors project in college. I got away with that because I did a lot of research into medieval agriculture and demographics and then worked out the impact of magic on those numbers, so that I know how many people are in the world, how long people would live, how many cities the world could reasonably support, and so on. 

 

With all this done, there's no way of getting around the fact that some people in this world will eventually accumulate whole lot of character points. About 1 in 250 people will eventually be able to accumulate 250 CP. Sure, a lot of them have spent a lot of points on Followers and Bases, but there are still a considerable number of VERY high-powered people around. For example, the home city of the campaign (population 40,000) has half a dozen people with 500+ points. At that level, opponents are overwhelming no matter how you approach them--for example, my 600-point mob boss is not primarily combat-oriented, but he could still wipe the floor with my entire party even if they caught him without any of his bodyguards or henchmen around. I'm curious if anyone else has run a game where the world is filled with potential opponents that are way beyond the capacity of the party to deal with, and what that looked like.

[Tasha]

Yeah, people do it in D&D all of the time. It's called the Forgotten realms. There are a ton of people who are nearly Demi gods in their personal power. Just like in any superhero world the number of really dangerous individuals tend to be balanced against one another. ie there's just as many Good guy Mages/Clerics as there are Liches, Dragons etc.

 

Honestly I think you are overthinking the whole thing, but with your research if someone complains about characters with Elminster's power. You can point to your research and point out that you are actually lowballing the number of super powered people in your game world.

[Prometheus]

I've played in a game where the average man on the street was a match for PCs. It was an exercise in frustration, and the players--myself included--fell to minimaxing their characters just to survive a pickpocket on the street. As a group we started instinctively opting for "flight" over "fight" if it was an option. Having become invested in our characters we really didn't want to see them die to a street thug with a blackjack. I'm not even kidding about that.

 

Speaking with the GM at one point to figure this all out, his basic philosophy came out: if the PCs weren't facing the threat of death he didn't see the dramatic tension and couldn't imagine we would either. When I got a look at some of the NPCs we'd somehow vanquished I saw that he was also building characters with far more points than a PC, but that a disproportionate amount of that was going to characteristics and skill levels.

 

To take the example above of your mob boss, he'd build him on 300 pts in a 150 pts campaign (those numbers are pre-5E, so they may sound dated). He wasn't really building a 150 pts character with 150 pts of experience though; some 250 pts were invested in characteristics and combat alone, and that's not the same thing at all. What struck me immediately was the question "why?"

 

Why is a mob boss that physically awesome? Why is a urchin pickpocket a nigh-undetectable ninja? Why is a random guy in a bar an Avatar of Death? There's some hyperbole in there, yes, but the point I'm trying to make is that a challenge to the PCs doesn't have to threaten them with annihilation. And if it does it should be rare, or explicitly understood as part of the campaign (Only the Strong Survive as a "World Law" or something), or eventually the message the players will get is that the GM only wants to kill their characters.

 

And that game just ain't much fun.

[Hyper-Man]

Besides Followers and Bases there are several other Perks to dump points into (Contacts, Favors, etc..).  Knowledge Skills are also where such characters could and should spend a LOT of XP on.

[Ximenez]

Funny that I didn't think about D&D, where that's the natural progression of the game. OK, problem solved. And Prometheus, they're powerful enough to be cool. In the first adventure, they defeated a gang of 20 skilled normals (took out 7 and got the rest to run). As for your DM, he kind of missed the point that HERO characters are supposed to be hard to kill. To use the (2nd ed) D&D analogy, the mob boss is like a high-level rogue--he's not going to stand up to a high-level fighter in a swordfight, but he's got more than enough skills to deal with low-level characters. He's a match for about a 250-point fighter, but he's no Avatar of Death. And he is one of the most powerful people in the city--enough to give the ruling Count pause. 

[Prometheus]

Well, I don't think he missed the point so much as he actively ignored it. There was an internal logic to it, it just didn't jibe with what we as players expected and with the cinematic durability that HERO characters tend to have.

[NuSoardGraphite]

I run my fantasy hero efforts in Terry K Amthot's SHADOW WORLD setting, which is absolutely brimming with ridiculously overpowered individuals who could squash even the most powerful PCs like an insect.

 

Generally, the PCs are not meant to face off against these guys. they are the movers and shakers in the world setting. they start wars and interfere with magic and cause destruction etc. they are catalysts for change. they are the reason stuff is happening.

 

It is however, quite easy for the players to become distracted by these forces and think that they should vanquish them, which is nigh on impossible for most PC groups.

 

But the average man on the street? in general, they are as nothing to most PCs. In combat, the PCs should out perform them every time (the ones oriented toward fighting anyway). should have little trouble dispatching them. and would under normal circumstances, be in little danger of being killed by the average man on the street.

 

At the same time, theres always the possibility that someone could get lucky. even though in a straight up fight, a PC fighter should win against a normal civillian 99% of the time, there should always exist that possibility that the civillian could get lucky, roll a critical, hit the PC in the (unarmored) face for double damage and kill the PC outright. the same can be said of a PC facing off against the settings most powerful heroes and villians. there is always a chance, however slim. this is why is support such optional rules as locational armor, hit locations, critical hits and impairng/disabling rules.

[Ximenez]

That's an interesting perspective. I don't use critical hits and misses because I don't like to have the balance of power (and the story arc that goes with it) upset by a die roll.

[NuSoardGraphite]

That's an interesting perspective. I don't use critical hits and misses because I don't like to have the balance of power (and the story arc that goes with it) upset by a die roll.

Its actually quite rare for the die roll to upset the balance of power in hero. why? the bell-curve generated by rolling 3D6 for attack rolls and skill rolls make extremely high and extremely low rolls very unlikely. the bell-curve really makes skill matter. a +1 or +2 advantage is a big deal on 3D6. and when you get a lucky roll, like a 5 or less, it's truly lucky because it is a 1% or less chance of happening, unlike other game systems that use a straight dice roll such as D20 or D100. so i feel that when a player rolls that once in a campaign roll of 4 or 5 on an attack roll, that should count for something special. especially when in the fight of their life against an overwhelming foe.