What system would you use for a Pen and Paper CoH?

I prefer Champions/Hero.

Soapbox time ... Mutants and Masterminds is not simpler than Hero. I used to think it was, but you can get super elaborate on advantages, buying other powers within main powers, tweaking the interaction between feats, skills, and powers, etc. The system is quicker to learn for some people because they know d20, but for a full group that knows Hero, it can go quickly also. The only other quickish thing about M&M is the archetypes/templates for making heroes quickly.

But Mutants and Masterminds, with its under-the-hood hidden complexity, tons of feats, hero points, multiple actions, etc can get just as bogged down if a GM lets it get out of control. Plus, as a personal preference, I find the flat/linear d20 die makes rolls a bit too volatile. I prefer the Bell Curve of the 3d6.

Btw, for those put off by the segment system and turn rigidity of Hero, a good house rule is to put chits in a cup, marked by player or npc group, according to your speed. If I am speed 5, I put 5 chits in. You are speed 6? You put 6 in. The ten thugs with spd 3 get 3 chits that apply to all of them as a group, and your important villains get chits equal to their speed. Then, there is no tracking of segments. Just draw chits, make your moves, and when the chits are all drawn, do post 12 recovery. Got this house rule from a friend recently, and its nice for keeping turns fresh.

Anyway, I love both Hero and M&M, but I think the "simplicity" of M&M is largely illusion.

Lewis

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Random AT Generation!
"I remember... the Alamo." -- Pee-wee Herman
"Oh don't worry. I always leave things to the last moment." -- The Doctor
"Telescopes are time machines." -- Carl Sagan

Oh, I also wanted to discuss a great tabletop storytelling/rpg called CAPES.

Capes is VERY different. There is no GM. Each player is more like an editor at a comic book, or an author. You can describe abything happening, but there is a system of storytelling using the bidding of debt against "goals" placed on the board. Essentially, you are all competing to tell how goals resolve and how the panel and page get written, before the page turns and the scene ends.

The cool part is that from scene to scene, any player could be running a hero, a villain, the hero's spouse, a cop, ninjas, or a swarm of mutant rats. Goals that might be in the same scene are "Thor tries to convince Loki to come home", "Loki stalls Thor long enough for another Hero to intervene". Or in your own game, you could have three goals/conflicts being bid on/unfolding at the same time: Liberty Boy convinces ShadowCaster to make time for life outside the Next Mission; Ninja try to get revenge on Liberty Boy; and MegaApe's bomb destroys Shadow Tower.

Players may hope to acquire debt, generate victory points for future conflicts, and even play each other's characters and villains, all while roleplaying. And characters can be made in as little as 60 seconds.

Good times. Check out CAPES if you want something a little different.

Lewis

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Random AT Generation!
"I remember... the Alamo." -- Pee-wee Herman
"Oh don't worry. I always leave things to the last moment." -- The Doctor
"Telescopes are time machines." -- Carl Sagan

M&M is a simpler system than Hero.

You can make M&M as complicated as the base of Hero, but you cannot make Hero as simple as M&M, and you can make Hero ridiculously complicated.

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You can make M&M ridiculously complicated, and you can have Hero be quite simple. It really comes down to the players. But I know I am in the minority opinion here. So I guess we can disagree and move on. Its all good tho.

Lewis

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Random AT Generation!
"I remember... the Alamo." -- Pee-wee Herman
"Oh don't worry. I always leave things to the last moment." -- The Doctor
"Telescopes are time machines." -- Carl Sagan

FUDGE. But then that's my answer to any 'what system would you use for...' question.

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Arc#314490: Zombie Ninja Pirates!
Defiant @Grouchybeast
Death is part of my attack chain.

For me, it would depend on which group I was playing with and rather it was a "live" game or a PbP.

A home-brew variation of Wushu would be my pick for PbP, since the simplicity and nature of that rule set work well for text-based forum play. (One of the best PbPs I ever took part in was an Exalted port using that system, and Exalts aren't all that far off from supers, in all honesty.)

For a live game? If the people I was playing with were okay with a more complicated rules-set like a lot of others have said, I'd go with Champions. I have very fond memories of my university-era game crew playing that system, and it really can do just about anything with some tinkering and thought.

If the group were new to tabletop RPGs and not so interested in heavy mechanics, I'd pull out my copy of Silver Age Sentinels. GOO's system might not be the most detailed, but it's very easy to teach people in my expereince and reasonably good at getting the job done without getting in the way of people's ideas.

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@Brightfires - @Talisander
That chick what plays the bird-things...

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"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."

I'm not a fan of simplicity & believe that d20 ruined gaming, at least from a rules perspective.

My favorite game of all time from the standpoint of pure mechanics was Deadlands, a wildly idiosyncratic system that was inseparable from its setting. The cookie cutter takeover of d20, with its foolish insistence that every 'universe' play by the same interchangeable rules, killed my interest in following the industry.

and mechanically, d20's were a bad idea in the long ago when Chivalry & Sorcery made them the centerpiece of its system & they're still a bad idea.

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The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.

My City Was Gone

I have successfully run a CoH campaign using the Hero system. It was more complicated for me as I had to translate everyone's character into Hero and build all the villians, but for the players it was streamlined enough.

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Supers systems that I've tried:

• GURPS Supers
• Champions
• Aberrant
• Marvel Super Heroes
• Silver Age Sentinels
• The Supercrew
• Mutant City Blues
• Mutants&Masterminds
• Savage Worlds

With a little bit of shoehorning, add:

• Marvel Heroic Roleplaying (from Margaret Weiss Productions, haven't tried it yet)
• Panty Explosion Perfect (it has an X-Men hack (and a Star Wars hack and a WH40K hack... and a few others, but basically it's a game about Japanese schoolgirls)
• d6 Adventure (just lacks tights)
• Feng Shui (again, lacks tights)
• Apocalypse World (again, lacks tights)

Of all these, my favourite of the ones I've tried is The Supercrew, which is a superhero RPG posing as a superhero comic. It's smart, it's built around the superhero story rather than to try to simulate fictional (and unbalanced and broken) superheroic natural laws that only works because there's an author writing the script.

And it's fast and fun - and pretty easy to adapt to City of Heroes. (in practice: you define most of your primary set as your 2 power, the nova/kill-all power as your 3 power, and most of your secondary set and/or ancillary set as your 1 power).

Second on the list is Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, again because it's about the superhero story rather than simulating the fictional (and unbalanced and broken) natural laws. It has a key-based experience system (i.e. you get experience for completing story-arc based goals) and very flexible power system.

Third would be an Apocalypse World hack, because that game is one hundred percent awesome! It's one of the few games that really brings character interactions and relations into the game as a major element,

Pretty much all of the rest falls into the natural law simulation trap, which in my humble opinion is boring. The one exception is Mutant City Blues, which has a cool idea (whodunnit based rules and a scientific link between superpowers that can be explored in a very CSI-like way), but fails being a superhero game because it's rules are for sleuthing. Panty Explosion Perfect would perhaps work as well and avoids the natural law simulation trap, but I'm not best friends with the Perfect edition.

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Still @Shadow Kitty

"I became Archvillain before Statesman nerfed himself!"

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"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."

This probably says something about me as a gamer, but my base system of choice would be TORG.

In my estimation, super powered roleplaying is just another kind of multiple-genre roleplaying. Likewise, at its best, super-heroics are a very cinematic type of combat. TORG was designed to support both of those sorts of gameplay.

The existing superhero rules for TORG could be adapted easily enough to support CoH powersets and the Drama Deck would easily stand in for every sort of inspiration, as well as performing its primary job of making the combat cinematic like it should be instead of making it a big number crunching game. In fact, when you talk about simulating a trial, where multiple players need to be accomplishing multiple things at the same time in order to succeed, then the Drama Deck is the perfect sort of dynamic game mechanic to simulate that.

For those not familiar - TORG uses a logarithmic difficulty scale, which can conceptually handle moving a planet like Superman if you're so inclined to do something like that. The two driving mechanics are "possibilities" which conceptually represent the ability to influence reality and mechanically are used for second chances and improved dice rolls, and the drama deck which allows players to store up game-influencing events, grant themselves or others sub-plots, and plan a strategy for playing out a major "boss" fight, if they're so inclined.

I think the strength or weakness of a system is doing to come down to how well it handles the story of the game and not just the details of the combat. That's what TORG is all about. Giving the players a game mechanic for influencing the story.

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H: Blaster 50, Defender 50, Tank 50, Scrapper 50, Controller 50, PB 50, WS 50
V: Brute 50, Corruptor 50, MM 50, Dominator 50, Stalker 50, AW 50, AS 50
Top 4: Controller, Brute, Scrapper, Corruptor
Bottom 4: (Peacebringer) way below everything else, Mastermind, Dominator, Blaster
CoH in WQHD

I'd go with Mutant & Masterminds 3rd edition (which is also the engine behind the latest DC RPG): It isn't as crazy complicated as the Champions/Hero System (IMO) but comes close to same level of ability to model characters.

As a second choice I'd go with White Wolf's Aberrant superhero RPG. It is a solid rule set, though the character options are less wide (but then so are the ones here). The big problem with it is that it is harder to distance it from the admittedly awesome Trinity setting when playing / running it so it would kind of get in the way of itself.

Though somewhere in the back of my head I want to bust out the old TSR Marvel RPG with the color band table on the back. Great memories there.

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Want better looking NPCs Contacts? Check out this NPC Contact/Trainer/Etc Revision Thread and Index
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Remember: Guns don't kill people; Meerkats kill people.

I am a Champions/Hero System fanatic from way back (as in, 1982). Up through 4th edition it was the best RPG system I had ever used. Its flexibility is unparalleled. But so too is its potential complexity. For anyone trying to do superhero action in a way that is both logical and detailed, Champions/HERO is the way to go. But I would use the 4th edition of the rules since they (still) represent the best compromise between flexibility, elegance, and complexity IMO. The 5th edition, while addressing some holes found in 4th, is like Abduction from the Seraglio, it suffers from too many notes, as it were. And the less said about the 6th edition, the better.

The other frequently expressed complaint about Champions is the time it takes to complete a battle. It is true that it can take many hours to conduct a full-on battle between 6-8 hero PCs and an equal number of villain NPCs, especially if characters are fairly evenly matched. There are, however, little tricks you can employ to speed things up, like not using the speed chart directly (or computerizing the phase sequence), forgoing post-12 recovery, not allowing villains who are down to take any recoveries at all (this is an especially good rule to use on thugs/minions). But the truth is that one does have to go out of one's way to find ways to speed up combat in Champions because the default approach of using all the standard rules (which don't even include the "heroic level" options like hit locations, wounds, long-term endurance, etc.) does tend to yield time-consuming battles. This is not the game for "quick 'n dirty" RPG action, not unless you spend some time before-hand streamlining the system for your campaign.

I can't recommend GURPS Supers since it is based on the GURPS engine, which strains under the stresses of truly superpowerful characters. So much of GURPS assumes that a normal human power scale is the baseline for everything, that too many subsystems and basic mechanics have to be utterly reworked to handle characters with the strength potential of Superman or the movement speeds of the Flash, etc. And in my experience, all those re-jiggered mechanics don't really work properly or satisfactorily.

All the other games mentioned may offer faster, looser play, but they will almost certainly sacrifice detail and the ability to accurately mimic the powers of CoH (assuming that is a priority). Mutants & Masterminds might do about as good a job as Champions, but it is based on the d20 system which I have a number of issues with from a basic design point of view, so I can't whole-heartedly endorse that either.

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NOR-RAD - 50 Rad/Rad/Elec Defender - Nikki Stryker - 50 DM/SR/Weap Scrapper - Iron Marauder - 50 Eng/Eng/Pow Blaster
Lion of Might - 50 SS/Inv/Eng Tanker - Darling Nikkee - 50 (+3) StJ/WP/Eng Brute - Ice Giant Kurg - 36 Ice/Storm Controller

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The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.

My City Was Gone

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Still @Shadow Kitty

"I became Archvillain before Statesman nerfed himself!"

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MArcs:

The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)