For those of you who have ICONS, I would like to know how good you think it would be for a Golden Age style campaign? ie. the superheroes of the late 30s and 1940s.  The particular differences from later styles would mainly be that a significant percentage of the heroes of this period should have no powers at all (aside from a good left-hook or what have you) a few might have a trick gadget, and those with powers will usually have only one power or a very limited set of powers (ie. Hawkman can fly, flash can run fast, etc.), and disadvantages should be notable (ie. Hourman is quite powerful but his powers only last for one hour).

Would you have to do a lot of modification of the random system for character generation in order to make it fit these parameters?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;397043For those of you who have ICONS, I would like to know how good you think it would be for a Golden Age style campaign? ie. the superheroes of the late 30s and 1940s.  The particular differences from later styles would mainly be that a significant percentage of the heroes of this period should have no powers at all (aside from a good left-hook or what have you) a few might have a trick gadget, and those with powers will usually have only one power or a very limited set of powers (ie. Hawkman can fly, flash can run fast, etc.), and disadvantages should be notable (ie. Hourman is quite powerful but his powers only last for one hour).

Would you have to do a lot of modification of the random system for character generation in order to make it fit these parameters?

RPGPundit

You could just limit the starting Origin.  Trained or Gimmick for most everything.  Trained will limit the number of powers, and provide more specialties.  Gimmick means that powers come from devices.  The Golden Age did still have Wonder Woman, The Spectre and Superman (even if he did just leap tall buildings instead of fly)....with Hawkman, another thing to consider is that his Mace is such a part of him that it would be a Strike device, and not just random equipment, so that would be a power.

Shouldn't be hard at all to do.

Off hand I'd say it's not a good candidate. Sure if you wanted to you could cut out 75% of the powers and limit Abilites to a rating of 6 but you would have to scrap the current random generation rules. Once you've scrapped most of the powers (which is one of the areas the game shines  - clearly a lot of thought has gone into how to package each power set) and the random generation rules (which are crazy fun) I'm not sure what is left that could not be done better with some other game.

You might be better off with SotC -half of the example characters in SotC are effectively golden age supers.

Quote from: Soylent Green;397055Off hand I'd say it's not a good candidate. Sure if you wanted to you could cut out 75% of the powers and limit Abilites to a rating of 6 but you would have to scrap the current random generation rules. Once you've scrapped most of the powers (which is one of the areas the game shines  - clearly a lot of thought has gone into how to package each power set) and the random generation rules (which are crazy fun) I'm not sure what is left that could not be done better with some other game.

You might be better off with SotC -half of the example characters in SotC are effectively golden age supers.

In my experience, with about 25 random characters, I only have a small handful that break "mortal" limits in ability scores.

And, as noted, it's not like EVERYONE in The Golden Age were "mystery men".

In the interest of science, I ired up the character generator and rolled up 5 characters. I guess you are right, most of them can just about squeeze into the preternatural space golden age heroes live in.

The characters are below (I did not bother with Specialities or Qualities or Orign bonuses)


Prowess  5
Coordination  6
Strength  5
Intellect  4
Awareness  4
Willpower  2
Stamina  7
Determination  4

Powers
  Binding 6
  Leaping 3

Point Total  35

-------------------------------
Prowess  6
Coordination  5
Strength  6
Intellect  5
Awareness  5
Willpower  4
Stamina  10
Determination  3

Powers
  Invulnerability 4
  Affliction 4
  Elemental Control 4


Point Total  43

-----------------------------------------
Prowess  7
Coordination  5
Strength  5
Intellect  5
Awareness  5
Willpower  2
Stamina  7
Determination  2

Powers
  Blast 7
  Force Field 5
  Burrowing 4


Point Total  45
----------------------------------------
Prowess  3
Coordination  5
Strength  2
Intellect  7
Awareness  2
Willpower  6
Stamina  8
Determination  3

Powers
  Healing 5
  Supersenses 6


Point Total  36
-------------------------------------
Prowess  2
Coordination  5
Strength  5
Intellect  8
Awareness  6
Willpower  7
Stamina  12
Determination  2

Powers
  Elemental Control 8
  Telepathy 5


Point Total  46

Pundit, what's your usual go-to superhero RPG, and why do you think it might not be a good fit?

Quote from: The Butcher;397094Pundit, what's your usual go-to superhero RPG, and why do you think it might not be a good fit?

I don't have one. I've never found one that truly satisfied. The only real superhero campaign I've ever run, Legion of Superheroes, is actually being run with Star Wars D20 Revised using power-rules borrowed from Silver Age Sentinels D20.  I find this merely acceptable for the Legion.

What I'd really wish would be for the publishing of a Golden Age Supers supplement for Two-Fisted Tales. That'd be awesome. But I've also heard very good things about ICONS, so I had some hopes...

RPGPundit

I do recognize, by the way, that only about 75% of golden-age characters were just "Mystery men" (and that a sizeable percentage of these had gimmicks or gadgets that would probably fall under "supers" rules), and that there are some powerful supers in the golden age (I wouldn't have superman or wonder woman, but I would have Green Lantern for example, who's pretty crazy-powerful).

So the thing wouldn't be to necessarily eliminate any of the powers you might find in a standard ICONS game; it would rather be to figure out how to skew the random generation system downward somewhat, so that a greater percentage of characters generated would have 0 superpowers, and those that had powers would generally tend to have less numbers of superpowers, relying generally on one or two abilities.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;397155I do recognize, by the way, that only about 75% of golden-age characters were just "Mystery men" (and that a sizeable percentage of these had gimmicks or gadgets that would probably fall under "supers" rules), and that there are some powerful supers in the golden age (I wouldn't have superman or wonder woman, but I would have Green Lantern for example, who's pretty crazy-powerful).

So the thing wouldn't be to necessarily eliminate any of the powers you might find in a standard ICONS game; it would rather be to figure out how to skew the random generation system downward somewhat, so that a greater percentage of characters generated would have 0 superpowers, and those that had powers would generally tend to have less numbers of superpowers, relying generally on one or two abilities.

RPGPundit

You could limit origins to Trained or Gimmick.  You could house rule the Number of Powers table so that above two or three or so, you swap Powers slots for Specialities (this has the net effect of the Trained Origin, just removing the limitation that all powers are only "from" training or devices, which can get iffy to explain at times), essentially giving skills for powers (and this, in turn, grants them more Determination to use, as Specialities don't count against your starting Determination, but Powers do).  Or you could just adjust the Number of Powers table so that it only give 1-2 or 1-3 powers.

Golden Age Icon's
2d6
2-7  Trained Hero (Per Usual Ex: Batman, Green Hornet, Alias the Spider)
8-11 Gimmick (Per Usual, Ex: Hawkman, Hawkgirl, Airman, Green Lantern )
12-  Sub Table A

Sub Table A
2-7     Artificial (Ex: Human Torch, )
10-11 Transformed (Ex: Captain Marvel, Amazing Man, Green Lama)
12      Unearthly (Ex: Superman, Mercury/Makkari)

What does the original version of that table look like?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;397182What does the original version of that table look like?

RPGPundit

2-4: Trained
5-6: Transformed
7: Birthright
8-9: Gimmick
10: Artificial
11-12: Unearthly

Another trick I've used to run ICONS in Sword and Sorcery is to reset the Attribute benchmarks so that 10 is the max for the genre.  Works great!

Quote from: RPGPundit;397154I don't have one. I've never found one that truly satisfied.

I didn't, either, until a thread in these very forums made me check out BASH UE.

I suspect ICONS will suit you fine (I haven't really played it, but you seem to like FATE 3.0 which is the core of the ICONS engine), but as long as you're hunting for a supers system, you could do a lot worse than BASH UE.

Quote from: RPGPundit;397154The only real superhero campaign I've ever run, Legion of Superheroes, is actually being run with Star Wars D20 Revised using power-rules borrowed from Silver Age Sentinels D20.  I find this merely acceptable for the Legion.

:eek:

Quote from: Tommy Brownell;3971842-4: Trained
5-6: Transformed
7: Birthright
8-9: Gimmick
10: Artificial
11-12: Unearthly

Hmm. Frankly, I think you could probably fix this for Golden Age play (assuming that each of the terms above is as self-explanatory as I would assume) by doing the following mod:

2-4 Trained
5- Transformed
6- Birthright
7- Trained
8-9 Gimmick
10 Artificial
11-12 Unearthly

(or alternately keep 5-6 as transformed, 11 as unearthly, and 12 as birthright).

RPGPundit