Superheroic T&T

[zanshin]

Average human potential is 10.5. , equating to 105 IQ (say) . Heroes become superhuman once they go beyond 18 in a stat, is how I have always interpreted it.

[kwll]

So all level 2 and higher delvers are supers?

And at level 10? Capable of transforming Galactus into minced meat?

I am not trying to be sarcastic here, just hoping to make sense of all this. The way I see it, since attribute values augment (at a very high rate at that) through experience, I don't think they represent exactly the raw physical or mental capabilities of a character. If you take Runequest, for example, attributes are separated from skills, and their value does not vary through time, or very little. That's why I think that Strength in T&T represents more "how good I am at using my strength" than "how strong I am". Looking at it that way, it is more like a skill than an attribute proper. It would also explain why talents have so little impact in the result of SRs after a few levels...

So, if I go further in my analogy, what attribute value corresponds to a 100% skill level in Runequest? Again, I am not trying to translate a game into another, but rather to have a feel of scale with this game.

Don't you think that putting limits to levels achievable by characters in attributes / powers (depending on power level) is necessary for a T&T based supers game?

[zanshin]

I don't play my T&T that way - it just scales quite naturally. I like the characters to be on a level playing field(ish) but after that I just make sure they face a challenging threat level.

I don't see a need to balance it or create references in the way you describe.

If a character has a strength of 40 they could be grotesquely muscled, or phenomenally able at using their leverage, its up to the player to decide how they envision their stat.

A Runequest character with 100% skill will succeed at a straightforward task (one with no penalties) under pressure 95% of the time.

A 7e T&T character with a stat or talent of 16 will succeed at a straightforward task (L1 SR) 94.5% of the time.

I think T&T gets superheroic much more quickly than Runequest. Thats because T&T is a drama oriented game of heroic action , while Runequest aims to be a more realistic simulation of characters in heroic and antagonistic situations.

Does that help?

[kwll]

Yes it does, and I agree that the comparison with Runequest is maybe not relevant. Now if I understood it well, one should not be very much attached to the numbers themselves, but rather their relative values within a particular game. Still, you need to be able to grade characters/foes/monsters against each other? So what tools do you have to do that?

[zanshin]

*Shameless plug warning*

If you look at Dare to Daro, my article on T&T stunts in TrollsZine 1 (available to browse on the excellent www.tunnelsandtrolls.com ) I use a benchmark of 40 MR = 1 level of saving roll when you are doing a stunt that is against an opponent.

Elsewhere on this site there is discussion of competitve use of saves with characters.

I would say aventurers/heroes are no more than 1% of society - they are exceptional, and with a supers game, you have justification for their stats to become extraordinary. Someone with 36 Con would be three times as dense as a normal person. They probably have to shave with a Bowie knife

[ProfGremlin]

Hmm...

I've followed some of the discussion and it would seem to me that you could solve part of this by simply introducing another Type: the Citizen. Treat them just as regular T&T does it's Rank 0 Citizens: no powers, no extraordinary skills just the average guy on the street trying to keep his dreams alive.

I suppose, for the sake of argument, you could do something akin to the old DC Comic's Who's Who and rank heroes according to their strength. Figure out how much weight each strength point could lift and then simply assign strength scores to existing heroes.

[kwll]

Ah! I got it now: no need to try to figure out how to compute attribute values for supers, as plain T&T already is a supers game! So we just need to come up with nice archetypes for most of the super types, describe the powers, and we are done with it! Is that what you had in mind, zanshin?

And yes, I already read Trollszine 1 (it's the only one so far, but I plan to read the others in time), and your article is very interesting.

ProfGremlin yours is a very good suggestion, but I recently acquired DC Adventures (M&M3), and that might be a better starting point in this regard.

[zanshin]

That expresses my take on it very well kwll. I appreciate my perspective on T&T is not the only one, but it works for me

[cartomancer]

Just a quick post to say i'm loving these rules! Big thumbs up (and i'm not even a big fan of superheroes or supers gaming). :0).