I've been doing some thinking about the Black Era (still need to post the big thread about that), and got to thinking I needed a monster design system, so GMs can create their own PA horror beasties easily.

I also got to thinking about supers, on account of I've been playing Champions Online, which is totally frickin' awesome.  

And in both cases, I found myself having the same solution pop into mind every time, a solution of sorts, that is already written in to that king of D6 games:  Star Wars.

More specifically, that ingenious little droid chargen system they had there.  Droids are funny things, they have a lot of human stats and skills and things of course, but they also don't really use equipment, so much as they're strapped with all sorts of goodies that do different things.  Almost like superpowers . . .

Star Wars' solution to this was quite simple.  Anything the droid is liable to want to do that isn't going to have a skill attached, is probably going to have a mechanical effect of some other kind, and if it has a mechanical effect that effect must come in dice, right?  So therefore you just spend your dice from chargen to pay for that effect.  If it's not something that causes a die effect, then it's either treated as mundane gear and ignored, or it just costs 1D.  There's also a few other niggly bits for adding movement and such, and I'm simplifying, but that's the gist.

And so I thought, well, this is perfect for both purposes.  When we're making a monster, we just decide how many dice to build it with, and build it like a character, and any cool effects or powers it has, we buy those with as many dice as the effect.  If it's got a claw attack that does +2D damage, then it spends +2D damage to get it, and so forth.

We can do the same thing for superpowers. Figure out what the effect of the power desired is in dice, spend that many dice.  Wanna shoot laser beams?  How much dice to they do?  Wanna heal yourself like Wolverine?  Same question.  Obviously in this case there's some more interpretation involved than that in some cases, but hey, it worked for Powergame.    

One obvious complication is jerks like the Green Lantern, who can just summon whatever the hell they need willy nilly.  In DC Heroes they called this "Omni Power", and there was a fairly complicated set of rules to adjudicate it's use that were frankly Kryptonite to our youthful growing minds.  My GM refused to allow it, because it gave him headaches.  Literal headaches.

So in the case of those guys, we make them set aside a pool of dice at chargen that they can use to call upon whatever they want, BUT, those dice cost double.  Sorry guys, the price of cosmic power and all.  Maybe half again as much if they have some sort of good limitation on what powers they can pull from their ass, and not none of that shit about "can't harm yellow", I mean like, "can only use powers they've stolen by contact with another super" or something cool like that.  Stuff that's REALLY limited, like "can only summon bladed weapons" or anything else that will mostly have the same effect every time, is just a regular power, and wouldn't need to pay extra for I think.

We can also combine effects too, if we want to be clever about it, into a single power.  For example, say I want to make my perennial favorite anti-hero of my own design:  Deathstryk.  Among the many powers granted him by his duty as Hell's bounty hunter, is the power of death itself, which manifests as the ability to sap the very life from living beings to fuel his own.

So here we've got two effects:  the damage, and then the healing he receives for doing said damage.  Again, the same principle applies: spend the dice, get that many dice in power.  So we spend 3D for the damage, and another 3d for the healing effect he gets when he uses it.  So when he hits with it, he rolls the dice for the damage, and does that much both to the target as damage, and to himself as healing.  

The 1e guidelines for droids also give us some handy ideas for how to handle some of the bits that are fuzzier on the dice thing.  At a cost of 1D, you can add 5 meters to your basic speed, or an extra limb, or modify your weight (50kg heavier or 10kg lighter).  So potentially here, we have the bare bones of how to handle things like flight, for instance (spend 1D per 5m speed or somesuch, but keep that die value handy, it'll be useful for chase rules).  Stuff like extra limbs, spend 1D.  Wanna make a guy really large/bulky, spend the dice for the increase.

We can also invert that kind of stuff to create powers.  Want a power that slows guys down?  Reverse the speed cost, and use it as a penalty to the target.  Want a power to shrink guys? Same principle.

Area effects are probably important to cover too.  The default assumption is spend 1D, get 1D of effect, but that doesn't work as well when that 1D could turn into, effectively, a LOT of D, because you're hitting lots of guys at once.  So maybe we make that cost a little extra, say +1D per, hey, there's that 5 meters again.  Maybe a little large there, but you get the idea.

I'm being pretty freewheeling with this, because frankly, I've always felt you kind of have to be with supers.  I love DC Heroes and other systems with more defined powersets, so long as the powers you want are there, but if they aren't, you're on your own.  Perhaps better to start with a system that gives you the tools to build your own, but simple enough you can even house rule things on the fly just like the real comic writers do!  Plus, by going freeform and open-ended, it encourages people to make their own powers altogether instead of copying ones from famous heroes already known.  

So what do folks think here, am I totally off base?  Am I just repeating something already done I just didn't know about?  It all sounds good in my head, and obviously is a YMMV thing, but it seems like a quick and dirty way to go about it.  D6 is pretty flexible about this kind of thing.  

Thoughts?  Your own ideas on how to handle specific powers, or possible problem ones?  I haven't figured how best to handle how many dice the player gets, should they just be kept a single pool, or broken down like most D6 games do it, skills/attributes/etc. and just give the players an additional "power dice".  This might be a case to bring the dreaded ads/disads into play as well, at least in so far as classic weaknesses and the like.