[13th Age/Archmage] If you hacked a supers game, how would you handle classes? (1 Viewer)

So I thought it could be interesting to do a hack of 13th Age, but for superheroes. It's all very nebulous and not guaranteed, but it seems to be doable. 13th Age power scale is much higher than D&D, so you can emulate superheroics well. For races, I thought I'd do origins instead (so like Alien, Created, Mutant, etc.), and I was considering your OUT to be instead your "One Unique Power", which is a power that no one else in the game world has.

However, this leaves classes, which are kind of counter intuitive in a supers game. Is Superman a blaster or a bruiser? Is Batman a skilled normal, or is his absurd wealth a power in itself? I was thinking of going along broader range effects based classes, so a bruiser would just be a primarily melee fighter.

Thoughts? Ideas? Has anyone else worked on a supers hack?

You might trying plugging Icons and OUT into Deeds Not Words, but I'm not sure how we'll it would take backgrounds since it takes its skill list pretty seriously.

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/17590/Deeds-Not-Words-Revision-11

13th Age would be a pretty good fit for a lot of superhero stuff. The escalation die, the abstract positioning rules and the freeform skill system all fit very nicely with the superhero genre.


Classes in superhero games are a thing I've often thought about. On one hand, you have some clear types of characters (super speedsters, elemental controller, living god, sorcerer supreme, King of Atlantis, the guy with a bow, etc.) that show up time and again. On the other hand you have some characters that don't easily fit into any one category. In fact one essential feature of the superhero genre is how omnivorous it is: almost anything is possible, breaking the rules is the norm.

I think the best solution would be a loose class system. Maybe each character is allowed to take one talent/power from a different class by default. And some characters use some multiclassing rules. Superman might be a multiclass Bruiser/blaster.

smarttman said:

I was considering your OUT to be instead your "One Unique Power", which is a power that no one else in the game world has.

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I'd be wary about making OUT into a mechanical thing instead of a story thing. It would create difficult game mechanic questions for a GM to adjudicate and it would water down the story potential of the OUT.

I would start by looking at the Gamma World edition that spawned out of 4e D&D. It's not really a super hero system, but it's definitely in a similar vein, particularly with things like mutant origins. I would take the ideas from Gamma World and then apply them to 13th Age.

Rotted Capes is one of the few supers RPGs with a vague class system. They have Blaster, Brawler, Controller, Heavy, Infiltrator and Transporter.

There's also the strains of AMP: Year One, but there is some overlap in there

Maybe something along the lines of the Druid class's Talent setup would work. It'd let characters have one major and one minor power set, or three minor ones, which would seem to cover most playable supers concepts.

Bobcat11 said:

Maybe something along the lines of the Druid class's Talent setup would work. It'd let characters have one major and one minor power set, or three minor ones, which would seem to cover most playable supers concepts.

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Yeah, this could work pretty well.

You could also look at what is and isn't covered already. One Unique Thing covers a hero's special gimmick, and Backgrounds could be renamed into Origins, and used as a sort of raw "make up a new power on the fly" thing.

From there, you could say "pick three Talents", and each Talent gives you one or two starter powers beyond its base benefit. You can take feats to augment those powers.

CarpeGuitarrem said:

Yeah, this could work pretty well.

You could also look at what is and isn't covered already. One Unique Thing covers a hero's special gimmick, and Backgrounds could be renamed into Origins, and used as a sort of raw "make up a new power on the fly" thing.

From there, you could say "pick three Talents", and each Talent gives you one or two starter powers beyond its base benefit. You can take feats to augment those powers.

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Granted I'm not familiar with 13th Age, but how would nigh-omnipotent types like Dr. Strange or Molecule Man be handled by that?

Thanos6 said:

Granted I'm not familiar with 13th Age, but how would nigh-omnipotent types like Dr. Strange or Molecule Man be handled by that?

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Doctor Strange is only occasionally omnipotent. He's mostly just omnicompetent and clever, with a knack for blasting and ritual magic. He's also Sorcerer Supreme. You don't start playing Doctor Strange, you start playing Stephen Strange, med student and dabbler in the magical arts.

Molecule Man is . . . a unique encounter. If we're talking Molecule Man at the height of his power, he went toe-to-toe with the living embodiment of the universe. And threw the match.

At low-level? Some kind of basic elemental manipulation building up to being something like MM when he first met the FF.

I actually just re-read Secret Wars II recently (highly underrated series in my opinion) which is why MM came to mind.

I assume that like most systems, modeling gods is a problem.