Tabletop Rolplaying.

I checked a bit until my laziness thwacked me in the back of the head and said stop it!

But a thought hit me. Because I REALLY like this game and the setting, I was wondering if anyone has thought of making a Roleplaying gamebook for City Of Heroes? Or a Source book for a known system (Mutants and Masterminds is a great system that keeps in the comic mode.) or just generic information book. You know highlights of the city, known heroes and their powers... Origins for various heroes, villain organizations and all that. All put into one or more books.

Personally I'd be willing to buy several books if necessary.

I've considered doing the same thing I did with The Matrix (bad movie or not, still a good concept to game with), which is to say that I plugged it in with the system I am most familiar with: West End D6. I did this, of course, with the help of a website that had already done a good bit of other information, and I run a game about once every other week now.

West End D6 is fairly open-ended, and makes for a pretty easy transition if you're familiar with the system and the universe you're translating it into. There are also quite a few open-ended systems that are much simpler, if less cinematic. *checks some old links* Can't find anything in my old bookmarks. :-(

Nonetheless, you can (You, not me. Me = lazy. You :-D . ) easily google some open gaming systems designed to work for anything, provided your GM is off-handedly creative and mildly decent at math.

*gets all inspired to draw up some City of Heroes character sheets*

If anyone is familiar with West End D6 (other than they hate it), let me know if you have any ideas in the way of this; I'm interested.

I would also recommend that if you convert this to any kind of system, you not cling too rigidly to the in-game system. In fact, totally make crap up and just put it in Paragon. Won't be the first drow to hit these city streets. :-(

I'm sure someone somewhere has mentioned this but the game "Silver Age Sentinals" is really pretty close to the CoH setting. It's a good system but a bit number heavy for my liking. However, Guardians of Order supports it well and keeps up good supplements and info on it in general. I'd reccomend checking that out.

Oh. Missed this thread before. I'll get right on a website with Hero system specs for this game. ^_^

I figure I'll treat everybody Ls 1-15 as 150 pt base, everybody Ls 16-30 as 250 pt base, and 31+ as 350 pt base, adding 50 pts apiece for lieutenant, boss, AV, Monster (Jurassik, Hamidon, and others, 550 pts? eesh.) I'll probably also drop "normal agent" organizations down 100 pts, and pump really inhuman things like DE up 50 pts. (Ha. Nebel Rifle: 50 pts.)

I've tossed around this idea for the Marvel Universe RPG - I've got stats for the Circle of Thorns, 5th Column, Lost, and Hellions since I sent my players to Paragon City on a mission a while back. Main reason I didn't was I didn't want to get in trouble if I put up a web page with this information on it, but I am probably going to be doing a full writeup in the near future since once I get my MURPG group up and running again, I'm going to use Paragon City as the campaign setting instead of the standard MU.

Any takers? Seattle area...

Really? That high of point bases? Keep in mind that a level 1 hero in CoH is just starting to discover their powers - 150 points seems way, way too high to me. I haven't thought that hard about exact details yet (I'm still in the 'trying to get my D&D3-a-holic friends to consider stepping out of the dungeons' stage), but, gut feel, I'd say 50 or maybe 75 points would be an appropriate base with maybe 5-10 points for each level above 1. It might also be appropriate to award double (or even triple) XP in Hero, both to offset the low starting point base and to reflect CoH's rapid advancement. (Maybe reducing that multiplier as the point totals increase - say 50 points base, triple xp until 100 points/level 10, double until 150/level 20, and normal thereafter - again reflecting that they've hit the standard Hero power level and that leveling in CoH slows as you advance.)

For the bad guys, I would focus more on modeling their abilities than worrying about their CoH levels, but would base point totals on the range of levels they appear at (Hellions - CoH: levels 1-10/Hero: 50-100 points), adding maybe 20 points for an lt and 50 for a boss (or less)...

In any case, the thing to keep in mind is that, compared to what's normal in Hero (and most other games), CoH is a pretty low-powered supers setting. There are a lot of supers around, but, individually, they're not really that powerful.

Fated-- I think your impression of the power level in Paragon may be slanted if you're forgetting that this is like, a huge nexus for superpowered heroes and villains from across the world, in the biggest city in the U.S., and even guys like Nebel elite take supersoldier serum just to try and keep up.

I mean, it's just gonna be hard to place, regardless.

But I'm thinking at 550 pt base (this is under FRED, btw, in which the starting standard hero category has been IMO correctly adjusted to base 200 + up to 150 disads) for a world-class monster, I'm not too far off. I mean, my normal human agents, e.g. Nebel Rifle, are only 50 pts base. With skills, that's a pretty gimpy rifle.

I do recall Paragon's place in the world, but I think we have different views of where that places it in comparison to normal supers settings. Or, to put it another way, we have different views on when CoH characters become true "superheroes". I see them starting out as "super-normals" with just one or two piddly powers that don't really do all that much. Equating that to a standard Hero character with 100, 150, or 200 base points (at work, no books, can't look up the system's description of how powerful each of those point totals is meant to be) doesn't seem right to me.

Consider that most starting Hero characters, in my experience, have multiple decent attacks, a servicable defense, and a moderately-developed travel power - even back in the Champions 3D days (when most of my actual play experience was; I've read FRED, but never played it) when 100 points was the norm. A starting CoH character can't even remotely match that. It takes them until at least level 6 to even get the basics of a travel power and level 14 for it to 'mature'. Unless FRED has increased the costs of things more than I've noticed, I just can't see a level 1 CoH character as being in the same league as a 100-point Hero character, much less his equal.

I don't know the system you people are referring to so I'll speak in general terms.

How powerfull you make the starting characters would all depend on what kind of story you would like to tell.

Start with your average soldier/policeman/gangster. All gaming systems have stats for your standard goons.

Then think about your story. If you're telling a nitty-gritty lowpower story (Batman, Spiderman, heroes who will die from gunfire, swords and so on) make sure that starting combat characters can whack 4-5 ordinary goons or something like that

On the other end of the scale you have people like Superman, Hulk, The Avengers, you know the kind of guys that singlehandedly take on armies without breaking into a sweat. Find the kind of bad boys you want them to fight, and make sure they're tough enough

As long as you balance the powerlevel of the PCs and the NPCs don't worry about the numbercrunching and focus on the storytelling

And I love the concept of a system independent sourcebook/players guide to CoH

blessed be

Ok, I brought it down slightly, after having just worked out point totals for the 5th column types. You can probably get more behind this:

Low level (1-15): Base 100
Mid level (16-30): Base 150
High level (31+): Base: 200

At high end of mid or high level: +25

If Human/Agent (Hellions, skulls, most 5th, crey, nemesis, etc): -50 pts

Lieut +50
Boss+100
Monster & AV +150

That makes a hellion slugger 50 pts, and Hamidon 375 pts.

Anyway, in 5th ed Hero, yeah, 200pts base is a starting superpowered hero, and has not increased costs of things, but it now has a more consistent outlook on enforcing disads and snickering at heroes behind their backs if they have less than 20 pts in skills. ^_^