A couple of years ago I wrote an RPGnet review of a free, homegrown fantasy RPG called Mythweaver. The author, Michael Desing, recently sent me a review copy of a superhero game, Guardians of Metro City, which is available for purchase at RPGNow. In the course of this review I'll be making occasional comparisons to Mythweaver (the website referenced in my review of Mythweaver is defunct; the new homepage for both games is here). Guardians has nearly twice the page count of Mythweaver, but a large chunk of that consists of sample characters; the actual rules are only slightly longer.
Contents
One of my major criticisms of Mythweaver was that it used game terms before they'd been explained. Guardians avoids that by putting a glossary up front, right after the introduction. I didn't quite understand all the definitions right away, but that's to be expected. Unlike Mythweaver, which was a 2d6 system, Guardians uses a dice pool. The basic system isn't all that unusual or complex, but it has aspects different enough from most systems to warrant some explanation. Your basic score ("rank") in an ability is used to derive either a Dice Pool or a Benchmark Value (BV). It wasn't immediately clear to me what BVs are used for, but on reading further I discovered that they're usually added as "automatic successes" to trait rolls – you roll the Dice Pool for a trait and add the BV for relevant skills, combat abilities, or whatever. In other cases, the BV is used as a multiplier to determine the magnitude of an effect, such as damage.
As for the dice themselves, a roll of 3-4 gives you one success while a roll of 5-6 gives you two. It seems like counting successes would tend to slow things down, but presumably it gets easier with practice. The Difficulty Target (DT) of an action determines how many successes you actually need to, well, succeed. If you roll 1-2 on all the dice, you botch (which means you fail regardless of any bonus successes you have, and lose a turn). This avoids one problem that the revised Storyteller system suffers from – highly-skilled characters (with large dice pools) are less likely to fail, but more likely to botch when they do fail, since it only takes a single "1" to botch. In Guardians, more dice mean less chance of botching, which is as it should be. The system also has one consequence which isn't immediately obvious: since bonus successes are ignored in the case of a botch, and skills add bonus successes, your skill level has no bearing on how often you botch – that's determined entirely by your trait level. I'm not sure I like that.
The first steps in character creation are to pick an origin and a template. There are six of each, so you can choose them randomly if you like. The origins are Alien, Artifact, Construct, Mutant, Mutate (i.e. experimental subject or freak accident victim) and Techno. Each gives a +1 bonus to one of the secondary traits, except for Techno, which gives a +2 to Armor. The assignment of bonuses to the different origins seemed rather arbitrary to me – in most cases I could think of examples that fit, but I could just as easily think of counter-examples. Of course, changing the bonuses would be a trivial matter, but then why bother assigning specific bonuses to them in the first place?
The templates each provide 10 points, variously distributed among Combat, Powers, Skills and Traits. In brief, the templates are as follows (examples are my own interpretation):
- Athlete: Traits are primary (e.g. the Flash)
- Brawler: Combat is primary, traits are secondary (e.g. Batman, Captain America)
- Bruiser: Traits are primary, combat is secondary (e.g. Hulk)
- Channeler: Powers are primary. This is what's usually called a "blaster" (e.g. Cyclops)
- Controller: Powers are primary, skills are secondary. Also manipulates energy, but in more varied ways than a Channeler (e.g. Iceman)
- Savant: Points are spread out more-or-less evenly (e.g. Superman)
As in Mythweaver, the primary traits are Dexterity, Might, Persona (which focuses more on perception/awareness than personality), Reason and Stamina. Characters gain 15 points to distribute among them, plus a number of points per level determined by template. Thus, the statement that a template "does not lock a character into a specific mold, but instead gives a shape to the character at creation" is arguably backwards, because it actually has less influence at character creation than it will later in their development.
Each primary trait has a secondary trait associated with it: Avoid, Grapple (which is actually the ability to escape being bound or grappled), Sense, Will and Endure, respectively. The descriptions of primary traits say that "The Dice Pool [of the primary trait] is used as the basis of [the secondary trait]." This was misleading at first because I took it to mean that the secondary trait is equal to the Dice Pool of the primary trait. In fact, as explained on the next page, you get one point per level to add to a secondary trait of your choice, and this value adds automatic successes (in the appropriate circumstances) to rolls of the primary trait.
Next up are Talents. As mentioned before, these include Combat, Powers and Skills, as well as Reputation (which is awarded by the GM) and Resources (determined randomly). The latter two seem to be included under talents simply for lack of a better place. Reputation is described as determining how people react to you, but there are no guidelines on when to use Reputation and when to use Persona. As for Resources, there are no guidelines on how to use that at all. In fact, the only time it comes up again is in the rules for purchasing gadgets.
Combat talents are broad: Aim (for ranged attacks), Focus (for indirect, power-based attacks), Melee, Thrown, and Strike (used as a damage multiplier for unarmed attacks – weapon damage is determined by buying the weapon as a power). Skills (of which there are 12) mostly cover different fields of knowledge (Crime, Law, Nature, Science, etc.), but also include Animal Handling, Balance (athletics), Contacts (networking), Spy (covert skills), and Vehicles.
The list of Powers obviously can't be comprehensive in a game of this size, but it covers most of the usual suspects. Some powers have a fixed cost while others have a rank, which may in turn be converted to a dice pool, bonus successes, or effect multiplier. The pricing seems a bit illogical – for example, Night Vision and Wall Crawling both cost 1 point. The Omni-Gadget power, while clever in its design, seems especially overpowered. It allows you to buy BV-1 powers, each at BV-1, one with unlimited uses and the rest useable BV-1 times "per day (or adventure)". That last bit seems like a pretty crucial distinction, yet there's no guidance offered in determining which to use. One organizational problem crops up in the Powers section: several of the movement powers refer the player to Table 3.01 to determine effective range or speed. The problem is, Table 3.01 appears 6 pages after the movement powers!
Enhancements and Limitations are priced in hero points, which are Guardians' version of experience points. You start with 10 hero points and can take up to 10 points' worth of enhancements or 50(!) points' worth of limitations. In both cases, some apply to powers while others are personal advantages or flaws (such as Attractive, Sidekick, Allergy, Dependents, Hunted and Secret Identity). There are only 5 enhancements listed, compared to 20 limitations, although several of the latter are minor, major and severe forms of the same thing.
After a brief description of "other abilities" (namely Armor, Health and Initiative) and a step-by-step summary/example of character creation, we move on to Gameplay, which begins with a full-page chart (the aforementioned Table 3.01) that lists "Sample Difficulty Targets, Success Results and Intensities" – there are columns for weight, heat, cold, hardness, distance, speed, time and cost. Thus, I can consult the chart to find that lifting a 10-ton weight requires 10 successes on a Might roll, while 5 successes on a Hyperspeed roll allow me to move at 200 mph. It's an interesting and useful approach, though it's not clear to me what the time column is for. After the chart comes advice on assigning Difficulty Targets, rules for spending hero points to gain bonus successes, and definitions of range (short, medium, long, etc.) and game time.
Combat Resolution covers the usual bases. You get a number of actions per round equal to your initiative roll, so a single round could drag out quite a bit. Successes gained on an attack roll (over and above the DT) add to damage, while armor reduces it. If your Health is reduced to 0, you're "felled" and can't take any more actions that round. At the end of the round you make a recovery roll to get back up; once you fail a recovery roll, you're out for the rest of the fight. (It's not clear whether you actually regain any Health if you succeed at a recovery roll.) Next there's a table of Combat Options such as improvised weapons, "amping up" (sacrificing actions in return for bonus successes) and attacking multiple targets; it also includes rules for falling damage and knockback. Unless you've got a high Grapple, you run a pretty high risk of being knocked back with nearly every blow, and taking a lot of damage in the process!
Running the Game starts out with a discussion of options for campaign world design, covering "world view" (Black and White, Shades of Gray, or Grim-n-Gritty), era, divergence from the real world, frequency of super-powered characters, and average power level. Hero Point awards and character advancement are dealt with next, and team points are introduced. These are earned for teamwork, and pooled to purchase vehicles or bases for the team. There's a handful of GMing suggestions (which encourage flexibility), advice for creating and running villains and normals, and a sampling of genre conventions.
Technology covers weapons, vehicles, bases and gadgets – vehicles and bases are purchased with team points, which means that Batman can't get his Batmobile or Batcave until he hooks up with Robin. (Rules for using Resources instead would have been handy here.) Since each is covered in a page or less, there obviously isn't room for many options. Furthermore, a high-end base is so prohibitively expensive that I wonder how players could ever afford one – team points are meant to be given out one or two at a time, and the sample base costs 1,000 points. Most of this goes towards the cost of the floor space and the structural integrity of exterior and interior walls (there's no provision for underground bases), which is obviously a waste of points unless you expect to be having fights there. A few more options for facilities would have been far more useful; the list only includes labs, libraries and workshops, each of which gives a skill bonus. Permanent gadgets (which are paid for with team points and installed in a vehicle or base) help to make up for this lack, though. Gadgets emulate superpowers, and in lieu of a list of examples, there are rules for designing your own.
The final third of Guardians consists of appendices. Appendix A gives stats for a Superman-clone at two different levels. Appendix B gives stats for the superhero team that he formed, the eponymous Guardians of Metro City; there are 6 in all (though one is a sidekick). Appendix C has an assortment of 11 super-villains. Appendix D gives stats for a half-dozen types of "normals", and Appendix E has stats for animals – although there are no rules for creating an animal companion for your hero (sorry, Phantom), or for that matter, rules for non-sidekick assistants like Alfred. Appendix F lists adventure hooks (in 6 categories, with 6 examples of each). The final page is a character sheet, which I must say is one of the ugliest I've ever seen.
Style
I described Mythweaver as "A simple, classy, old-school, vanilla fantasy RPG." Guardians isn't as simple as Mythweaver, nor is it fantasy, but it's definitely old-school and vanilla. So how does it rate on class? Well, I didn't enjoy reading Guardians as much as I did Mythweaver, though that may be partly due to my preference for fantasy over superheroes. My first impression on skimming through it was "Boy, that's a lot of tables!" (Then again, Mythweaver has a lot of tables too.) The writing style is mostly clear and straightforward, with occasional touches of humor. I found a few scattered typos, which I reported to the author, and most of them have now been cleaned up. The illustrations are by the same (unidentified) artist as those in Mythweaver; I didn't like them as much, but again that's purely a matter of personal taste. I gave Mythweaver a 3 for Style, and Guardians is about the same – with a bit more polish but a bit less charm – so it earns a 3 as well.
Substance
Guardians avoids some of the flaws that Mythweaver suffered from (terms used before they're explained, holes in the rules), but has some new ones of its own (a steeper learning curve, more complex character creation, and too many "special case" rules – although some of that may be inevitable in a superhero game). The biggest problem is the extra layer of complexity introduced by needing to convert rank to a dice pool, bonus successes or a multiplier. This is further complicated by the fact that increasing rank gives diminishing returns (i.e. rank 1-2 = BV 1, rank 3-5 = BV 2; rank 6-9 = BV 3, etc.), which is both harder to memorize than a linear relationship, and more susceptible to min-maxing. I imagine this is mainly an issue during character creation and leveling up; still, the system would've been more streamlined if the author had done away with rank and just made the benchmark value the basic score.
I'm don't know any other superhero RPGs well enough to draw comparisons, but I suspect that there's nothing Guardians does that isn't done as well or better by other games. The main thing it has going for it is its price. Aside from the rather clunky system, I didn't notice any obvious flaws or glaring omissions. It may not be as elegant as Mythweaver, but it's functional, and it does have a few nifty ideas (e.g. being "felled", Table 3.01, team points, creating gadgets with the powers rules). I wish I could muster up more enthusiasm for it, but in the end Guardians gets by with a 3 for Substance. It does what it's intended to do (though not with any great flair), and it doesn't pretend to do anything more.
