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Because ladies and gentlemen, I have tried to analyze the combat system in Exalted Second Edition. I have looked at the Gadget creation rules in DC HEROES. I have rolled up Palladium characters. Hero System takes too much math, my hide.
Now I have gone over all this at least once, but if one wants to promote the idea that the game system could be learned by grade-school kids, a good way to do it might be to have a HERO System game where the characters are grade-school kids.
Aaron Williams is a cartoonist who is probably most famous for the Nodwick series featured in the later issues of DRAGON magazine, which introduced gamers to his "cute" style and gentle, mostly family-friendly humor. More recently Williams developed his own comic book series, PS238, about the misadventures of little kids in a superhero universe who inherited superpowers, and the history of the super-culture around them, including the special schoolteachers who have to train them in the use of their powers. With the success of this comic, Hero Games made the unusual decision to make a licensed game on Williams' series, and author/game designer Steve Long furthermore decided to make The PS238 Roleplaying Game not as a Champions supplement, but a self-contained RPG that's "fun for children of all ages!"
The book is medium-size for a Hero paperback (184 pages including a couple blank pages in back). Since it's based on Williams' work, it actually has a lot of great cartoon art, including a full-color wraparound cover with several of the kids flying around outside the school, with the school's two supervillains-in-training arguing off to the left. Chapter One: Welcome to PS238 describes the school itself, which developed after what is called "The Cranston Incident", in which one of America's major superhero teams discovered both that US President Cranston was a telepath who used his powers to gain an edge on the political opposition, and that some of his enemies in Congress had learned this secret and were plotting to assassinate him. The heroes confronted both sides and defused the crisis by hammering out a deal: The legislators agreed to not run for re-election, while the heroes proposed creating a public school for young superhumans in order to defuse backlash against supers and encourage responsible use of powers among the new generation of "metaprodigies." As part of the deal, Cranston resigned the Presidency for "health" reasons, agreed to have a psi-inhibitor permanently bonded to his head, and became the first principal of the new school, while the hero team became the core of the new faculty.
The school's "secret identity" is the Excelsior Public School for kindergarten through eighth grade, where the super-kids are integrated into the normal student body for most of their classes. But hidden "lockervators" and special classrooms lower to secret levels below ground where the metaprodigies are given specialized instruction in the use of their abilities. These levels are actually 3 miles down (hey, it's a cartoon) and Chapter One provides a cutaway diagram and descriptions of each level.
Chapter One also describes the world outside the school, including the Midwestern town where it's based, which was recently renamed "Wonderburg" when a large part of it had to be reconstructed after a recent alien invasion. This world is generally supers-friendly, and a "good samaritan" law makes it possible for them to perform heroics without getting routinely sued. It's also mentioned here and in one of the comics that Las Vegas is something of a sanctuary/neutral ground spot for both heroes and villains. The chapter also briefly describes two potential threats to the school: Certain anti-super factions in the Congress that use the bureaucracy to keep tabs on PS238, and the elite and vaguely sinister "Praetorian Academy" that is trying to poach students.
Chapter Two: Faculty and Staff gives us basic HERO System writeups of the former "Union of Justice" members who retired to become the faculty, along with one other hero-turned-teacher, Principal Cranston and brief descriptions of some other support staff. In terms of most Hero Games products, they're fairly basic characters, without many Disadvantages or Background Skills, but they get the point across. As adults, and experienced heroes at that, they're generally going to be tougher than most of the kids, even though most of them are not designed to be "combat efficient."
Chapter Three: The Student Body gives writeups of the main super-children in the comic. It starts with a one-page review of their training and expectations, many of which stress the need to maintain a secret identity and not reveal the school's existence to outsiders. While self-defense training is a requirement, students are expected to summon an adult rather than get in combat themselves. In the game, it's later explained that the kid characters are built on 150 base points with up to 50 in Disadvantages, and while some of these characters are actually built on less points than they're entitled to from their Disadvantages, a few are built on more than that (in a couple cases a LOT more than that) in order to properly design their powers. In this case the most expensive kid is Ambriel, whose "guardian angel" power makes her effectively invulnerable by protecting her from harm and keeping her out of trouble. So far my favorite of these guys is Zodon, a Mad Scientist (of the enlarged-cranium-in-a-hoverchair variety) who was effectively sentenced to PS238 to keep an eye on him. He swears frequently, but the school's handyman/master Gadgeteer put a censorware chip in his brain that turns all his profanity into non-sequiturs.
Chapter Four: Gamemastering PS238 is the GM's chapter, starting with brief advice on the setting: Because the super-kids are not supposed to be crimefighters, they don't get into the same sorts of situations as Champions heroes. Much of the stories are about the interactions between the kids and their environment, which means that it's usually better to have characters that are fun to roleplay than ones that are optimized for combat (though many of the kids are combat monsters, relatively speaking). Thus the chapter has a two-page list of story ideas; anyone who's familiar with the comic, or with any number of anime series about kids in school, should be able to come up with more.
Then the book has Hero's traditional "GM's Vault" section of stuff only the GM should know, although several sections actually refer the reader to the PS238 comic itself. Finally there's a brief list of NPCs, including the teleporting bully Charles Brigman, the powered-armor agents of the Praetorian Academy, and the immensely powerful Rainmaker.
Chapter Five: An Introduction to the HERO System tells the reader how HERO System works. I'm not going into great detail here because I already went over the ins and outs of the system in the link above. But basically: Rolls for Skills are made on 3d6, as are rolls to hit somebody else in combat. You want to roll low. You want to roll high mainly when you're doing damage or using a Power. Every 5 points of Strength (STR) yields 1 die of punch damage, and likewise Powers that use dice (Energy Blast, Mind Control) do 1d6 per 5 Active Points, minus any Defense ability a character has. Powers that don't use dice have an assigned rating (i.e. being able to turn Desolid like a ghost is 40 Active Points, the same as 8 dice of Energy Blast).
Chapter Six: Character Creation goes over how to make PC kids in this setting. First it gives a few broad character archetypes for designing a PC; it's noted that there are several Gadgeteers and super-advanced intellects in the setting, and there also seem to be an inordinate number of supers and super-kids with the "FISS" combination - Flight, Invulnerability, Strength and Speed (and for some reason, they all seem to be vulnerable to the same alien metal...).
The rules mostly correspond to HERO System standard with a few differences. For instance, a standard adult character gets a base of 10 in all Primary stats but the child characters (PCs) start with a base of 5 in all stats, except COM, which is 8. This is because kids are not only not going to be very strong, they're not going to have the level of intelligence or skill that an experienced adult would have, even if they're preternaturally bright.
The chargen rules provided here are simplified compared to HERO System 5th Edition Revised, since they don't include Perks, several Skills and the more complex Powers. For instance Dr. Positron is a robot/artificial intelligence hero who has built several different versions of "himself" to help watch the town, each having its own appearance, gender and personality. In standard HERO System "he" would be considered to have the Duplication power, but this was too complex to include in the book, and in story terms it makes just as much sense to say the same character sheet works for all the personae, especially since Positron would count as an NPC.
Moreover, PS238 presents the Powers in something of a two-tier system: Pages 95 through 99 describe "template" powers on a very basic level, and usually in a manner appropriate to the setting (e.g. Shrinking is called 'Tinyness'). Pages 100 through 103 provide a list of Gadgets (many of which can fit into a Gadget Pool or be built as Powered Armor); these are fairly complex because they use Limitations (since the Gadget is a Focus, it requires a Limitation by definition).
What's neat about this is that the examples give basic writeups that are fully functional in HERO System terms but do not strictly require full knowledge of the rules. For instance, the PS238 staff has access to "anxiolytic gas" that erases memories and thus allows them to keep the school, and students' Secret IDs, safe. Now this does have a full HERO System writeup to describe the gadget's limitations and final cost, but it also describes its basic effect. So you can write it as: Minor Transform 8d6 (person into person with different set of memories, heals back normally or when reminded of what's been lost), Based on EGO Combat Value (Mental Defense applies, +1) (160 Active Points); OAF (-1), All or Nothing (Transform either works in one attack or does not work at all, -1/2), Limited Target (humans, -1/2), No Range (-1/2), 1 Charge (-2). Total Cost: 29 points.
OR you could just say: "You hit somebody with this and they forget what they just saw. If you want to buy it, it's 29 points for 1 dose per day."
After page 103 the book has a more complete set of Powers rules. The Powers described up to this point are basic examples of superpowers the main characters already possess, but if the GM or player wants to design something outside those lists, this section provides the rules to make it. Again, the rules are mostly complete, avoiding some of the more complex Powers (like Shape Shift, although there's a sidebar option for that). Also it gives the rules for how you can apply Advantages (like Area Effect) to a Power with a multiple of the Active Cost, or apply Limitations (like Focus for a Gadget) to reduce the cost. Obviously the intricacies of Power design are where all the math comes in, but the book has an easy-to-use table on page 131 explaining how a given value in Advantages increases the cost and how Limitations reduce it.
Chapter Seven: Combat and Adventuring gives the rules for how combat scenes work. It starts with rules for how Perception works, because as in other games, combat may start with a factor of surprise (there are also Powers like Flash that can blind a character in combat, so you need rules for that). Outside of surprise conditions, characters move in order of highest Dexterity first, going down. Again, combat works by rolling low on 3d6 -in this case the base roll is 11 or less, adjusted for the difference between the attacker's Combat Value (OCV) and the defender's Combat Value (DCV). So a character with OCV 5 attacking a target with DCV 3 would have +2 in his favor, and would need 13 or less to hit. There are of course a LOT more potential modifiers, including Combat Maneuvers and the like, but that's the gist of it. As mentioned above, every 5 points of attack is usually 1d6 of effect, minus any potential Defense (a character with a 5d6 punch hits a character with Physical Defense of 5 and gets 5 BODY and 17 STUN - the target takes no BODY and 12 STUN). Doing STUN greater than the character's Constitution with one attack Stuns the victim and causes him to lose his next action; doing more total STUN than he has maximum STUN points causes the target to be Knocked Out.
After this there is a one-page description of Presence Attacks (where a character uses his Presence characteristic to awe a crowd for combat effect). The chapter concludes with a brief "combat" example based on two of the PS238 kids using their powers in a game to push a hoverball towards a goal.
Chapter Eight: The Environment has exactly two pages, not counting art: "Living in a Dangerous World" (the damage ratings for various environmental effects, including falling) and "Breaking Things" (the Defense and BODY of various objects, so that you know what it takes to break them, or how much damage they do as weapons).
Chapter Nine: Equipment reviews regular equipment like vehicles and weapons (as opposed to gadgets that are bought as Powers). It also has a useful three-page Glossary for system-specific terms, and a typically complete Index. After the Index, there's a great closing touch.
SUMMARY
The PS238 Roleplaying Game needs to be judged on two criteria: First, does it work as an adaptation of Aaron Williams' setting? The answer is a definite yes. The second question is: Does it work as a self-contained game, and by extension, does HERO System work on a stripped-down level? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is also yes. Much like Sidekick, PS238 strips the HERO System to its core while still including essential power creation rules, and explains them in such a way that they can be grasped not only by non-HERO players but by non-HERO GMs who would be interested in picking this game up.
If there is anything to complain about here, it's two things. Well, three things. First, at $31.99 this is a bit pricey for a 184 page paperback, but then it IS a self-contained version of HERO System rules.
More substantively, the book touches on some of the issues with running a kid/youth focused campaign, giving several plot ideas on pages 54-55, but it really doesn't go over the dramatic elements of such, except in passing. For instance, Captain Clarinet, the over-responsible son of a superhero, finds out that his parents are getting divorced and blames himself. A young girl ends up dying and another student has to weigh the ethics of using his powers to bring her back. Cliques, fads, and such are not really dealt with. PS238 may be an unusual setting, but as the Sky High movie (and of course, X-Men) demonstrate, the Super-School concept has enough precedents to be its own sub-genre. In some respects, Teen Champions was a better book for these subjects, or at least would have been if the art, concepts and execution hadn't sucked so much in comparison to Williams' work.
And on that score, the game book doesn't give us that much information on its source material, at least not to the extent that I've come to expect in a licensed RPG. Unlike (say) the BUFFY RPG or some other adapted works like the BESM d20 Trigun RPG, this book doesn't feature a chronology of what happened in each of the issues (except to say that the writeups cover the characters as of issue 29), nor does it give publishing information on the series except a credits reference in the fine print to the comic's website (www.ps238.com) which does have an archive on the webcomic. But the site does at least allow the reader to learn the full details of the setting, and provides a great advertisement for the trade paperbacks.
Style: 4
Thanks to the character writeups and generous use of Aaron Williams' art, The PS238 Roleplaying Game does a great job of conveying the spirit of the comic.
Substance: 4
This book maintains enough of the core HERO System rules to function as a complete game, and one that can be easily learned.
In closing, you will kneel before Von Fogg. That is all.
