"Godlike: Superhero Roleplaying in a World on Fire, 1936-1946" brings the powers of superhumans to the battlefields of World War II, with a grim and bloody respect for the horrors of war.
I. First Look
Godlike's covers portrays a montage of Talents in action, in a style that hearkens to the comics and illustrated magazines of the 1940's. Hardbound and cleanly printed, this is a durable, attractive volume. The art inside is photographic, apparently WWII-era photos and digitally altered versions of them. While evocative, the re-printed, scanned photos aren't always aesthetic. My copy had pages 247-250 repeated; I don't know if this is representative. Page xx makes an appearance, along with the expected typoes, but I found few errors.
II. Chapter Summary
"Part One: Introduction" introduces us to a world of reality-warping powers and bloody beach landings. The author writes, "Godlike is an attempt to marry a solid system with a coherent and interesting setting that's loads of fun to play in." It includes some design notes, the obligatory, "What is a Role-playing Game?", and a monstrous "Glossary of Terms," includes Godlike's "hard dice" and "wiggle dice." Superhumans in Godlike are called Talents.
"Part Two: Game Mechanics" walks us through Godlike's variant of the dice pool system, then overviews Stats, Skills, Resolution, Combat, Damage, Gunfire, Armor, Weapons, Weapon Qualities, Special Weapons, Other Sources of Harm, and Character Advancement.
"Part Three: Character Creation" spends six pages on how to create a character. Surprisingly, this is enough, excepting the extensive Talents rules.
"Part Four: Talents" covers the vast and various powers of the Talented, divided into Hyperstats, Hyperskills, and Miracles. Hyperstats are enhancements of normal stats, such as Hyperbody, allowing a character to lift inhuman weights. Hyperskills are the same for Skills, such as Pistol. Miracles are everything else, whether Invisibility or Heat Vision, that normal humans can't do.
"Part Five: Background" offers a timeline of major events and battles of WWII in the Godlike setting. It covers the appearance of the first Talents (superhumans), the formation of various agencies, and mini-bios of famous Talents.
"Part Six: Now and Then" talks about America during the war yeas, everything from the attitude of the media to racism to slang. In ten pages, it does a pretty good job of evoking the war years.
"Part Seven: The Field Manual" describes weapons and vehicles, Axis and Allied.
"Part Eight: The Campaign" describes how to run a Godlike game, including the Cinematic Action and Four-Color Variants.
"Part Nine: TOG Commando Squads" details the named military unit. The "T" stands for Talent.
"Appendix A: Optional Rules" tell you how to make the game more or less deadly, and offers various other options.
"Appendix B: NPC's" stats the ten first known Talents.
"Appendix C: Open Source Superhero Rules" is a 27 page extra worthy of a review in itself. Basically, it gives you quick conversions from Godlike to That Other Game, along with its own freeform experience system.
III. The Rules
Godlike uses a pool of d10's, up to ten dice. To perform an action, you roll your pool. The number of matches determines the Width, while the number you matched is the Height. Width determines the speed of an action, while Height determines the level of success. It's a fresh take on the dice pool idea, and definitely wins points for speed of resolution.
There are complications. If you roll more than one set, you must pick whether Height or Width is preferable. Multiple actions are brutal; you lose a die, then must produce more than one set. Talents offer Hard Dice and Wiggle Dice. A Hard Die is always treated as a 10. Not only is it more likely to match, but if it does match, it offers the highest possible level of success. Two Hard Dice guarantees total success, barring penalties. Wiggle Dice are even better; they can be used as any roll you desire, after you roll.
Combat uses the same mechanic. Width is used as initiative. Anyone who takes damage loses a match from their roll, so going first is a big advantage. Height determines the location struck, with the Head (10) being the holy grail of injury. Width determines damage done. There are several oddities. Attacks with several Hard Dice will always strike the Head unless you discard part of your pool. Height as location struck means that some difficult shots will simply never hit the legs (the game is ambivalent about Height difficulties versus levies on the dice pool; some of each are used). Width as damage means that fast attacks are also deadly.
Overall, this is a very simple system, tailored to great detail in combat. The result is a fast, narrative play style that produces detailed and graphic representations of injury, bleeding, and death. The aesthetic is pleasing, but the mechanics are a little clunky.
IV. Character Creation
Come up with a backstory. Assign some Stat points, pick Skills, and buy Talents with Will Points. Done.
First, the good. Character creation is mathematically painless. Characters are basically Joe Average (or G.I.Joe, if you will) with one or three amazing powers. Or not so amazing. It's pretty flexible.
I have several complaints, though. Characters receive only six points to add to six stats (Body, Coordination, Sense, Brains, Command, and Cool). That means that you will have a 2 (average) in each if you distribute them evenly. While that is excellent for the everyman types Godlike upholds. It is not, however, friendly to slightly impressive characters, like Marines turned Talent, or fit and capable characters who are also fairly smart. Godlike doesn't offer any way to give up power points for better mundane abilities. The same applies to Skills.
Talents are somewhat based on utility, but somewhat not. More seriously, though, they break their own rules. Really Tough and Heavy Armor have levels, not dice. Harm (the generic attack, one of the most common abilities) adds Extras only to the first die, not all dice, unlike every other Talent. Edges increase the cost per die, while Drawbacks decrease the cost. Wiggle Dice are rightfully expensive, but applying huge Extra costs to them seems a little draconion.
Character advancement is fairly rapid. Strangely, it doesn't take but 6 or 9 experience points to raise your low Stats to rather impressive levels. Adding new Talents is, however, very expensive, requiring a vast expenditure of Will. Increasing existing Talents is much less difficult.
V. The Game World
It is cool. And yet not. These guys obviously did their homework. The timeline alone shows the benefits of research and thought. But whereas Harry Harrison's alternate Civil War changes everything starting from one seemingly minor event, Godlike supposes that the game world history is almost entirely like our own. Their advice, if the players decide to kill Hitler in 1942, is basically, "You're on your own." This is clearly an alternate history game, and yet, the assumption is that the War progresses much like the real one.
Talents, by the way, are not mutants, but simply people who (through force of will) gain the ability to warp reality in a few specific ways. They encompass psychics, superheroes, and even primitive magicians. The first known Talent is a Nazi flier. Others surface in one conflict after another; by the end of the war, Talents are surfacing at an alarming rate, in the hundreds. All Talents recognize each other when using their powers. Super-science appears as Goldberg Science, the ability to create miraculous, but irreproducible and scientifically impossible gadgets. Insane Talents become much like Mage's Marauders, or Aberrants Tainted monsters, immensely powerful but chaotic, delusional, and inhuman.
The game offers a unique perspective on superheroes. They get the miraculous powers. But in Godlike, they're infantrymen, spies, and commandoes, and they face a very real threat of getting killed. A Talent with terrifying magnetic powers can still be killed by a Molitov cocktail, or a sniper. A superstrong brick can still be asphyxiated by cyanide gas or smoke. Rather than battling Nazis in the manner of Captain America, characters are soldiers. They get the shakes, they want to go home, and most of all, they die. They die. It's like "Saving Private Ryan" (to whom the designers make a nod) except the soldiers are miraculous Talents. It reminds me somewhat of the "Wildcards" anthologies, with its weird (sometimes even humorous)powers and its cold depiction of the deadliness of superhuman might. It also has shades of GURPS's somewhat realistic IST setting. What it lacks is a strong connection to the comics genre. It also doesn't have the satire of Aberrant. It is a very human game, particularly, a game about humans amid the inhumanity of war. Talents have amazing powers, but face an even greater danger of death than others, thanks to the responsibility that has fallen on them.
Despite the sheer density of background information, I found myself eyeing the GURPS WWII book on the same shelf where I found Godlike. Godlike is a setting game as well as everything else. Its strong ties to history make it attractive and focused, but also constrain its characters and events. There is no JLA, no President Luthor, no lost Atlantis, and no Skrull Empire. There are severe (if few) restrictions on what characters can and can't do. There is no mind-reading, advanced science, no permanent transmutation, for instance. The question arises, then, "If Godlike plays like a WWII game, why throw in the superhero stuff?"
On the other hand, it's a damn good WWII game.
Curiously, it offers no suggestions at all about how to handle female Talents. The only one mentioned is a European freedom fighter. It seems unlikely the US Army would ignore the abilities of a bulletproof, superfast Talent, woman or no, but Godlike leaves the question unanswered, and perhaps unasked.
VI. Open Source
The Open Source, seemingly an afterthought, actually opens up many more opportunities than I can consider at length. But to be brief, they're well-constructed, balanced rules, that borrow heavily from Godlike's house system but are extremely compatible with D20 products. I'm not sure of the wisdom of taking Godlike's setting and porting it over to hit points and Saving Throws, but they did an admirable job. It's pretty bare bones, though. To recreate the tactical detail presented in the house system, you'll need a tactically detailed D20 game to run as the skeleton. Powers are purchased using the same Will system, except that instead of dice, you just buy Ranks.
VII. Evaluation
One of the biggest problems I had with this game was the dispersal of information. It wasn't until I had read it cover to cover that I really felt like I had a grasp on the mechanics. The definition of a wiggle die doesn't really help me until I understand about sets, tall sets, height, and width. But a good GM should be able to coach new players through it.
I think the dice pool mechanics (especially combat) could use a little ironing out. In the quest for elegance, they didn't leave much room for wiggle. Things like Cover, called shots, and aerial combat require a lot of good GM-ing and fudging to handle. "Pick a number and go" is not a very viable solution in a game where Height and Width interact in unpredictable and significant ways. For instance, "Shooting him behind that will be difficulty 8" doesn't work if he wants to aim for the leg. I also found myself with many questions, like, "Does Knife go with Body or Coordination?" and "Do I get one point of Base Will for every die of Hypercool AND the bonuses listed for superhuman dice?"
On the other hand, I applaud the originality here. The mechanics are new and elegant, with a lot of potential. The game world is brave and intelligent. The game handles diverse Talents robustly, and the rules for flamethrowers are amusingly grisly and fatal.
It's definitely not a waste of your money. But if you plan on playing and not just reading, you might want to think twice. Godlike is geared to a fairly specific and unusual setting. It may be difficult to get players willing to invest in characters who could step on landmines or have their hearts stopped at any time. It is not merely gritty and realistic, but gritty and realistic in a time and place where many, many people died. While the horror and dark fantasy genres have flourished, the "mowed down by machine gun fire" genre doesn't yet have the same following. In terms of lethality and detail, it's a relative of GURPS, despite the abbreviated character sheet and simple resolution system. Even different ammo types have different characteristics.
As a generic superhero game, it has several disadvantages. First, the Talents are fitted, and limited, for a specific setting. There is no telepathy, for instance. Second, while options exist, the game by default assumes wartime lethality. But the Talents system is flexible enough, and the game system basic enough, to use the Godlike rules for games in different eras or timelines. Godlike Vietnam springs to mind, for instance, or a game set in the WWII era of the GURPS IST setting.
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