Marvel Super Heroes
Jun 5, 2017 17:45:16 GMT -8
Post by sbloyd on Jun 5, 2017 17:45:16 GMT -8
Marvel Super Heroes is often called FASERIP in some fan circles.
FASERIP is the acronym for the base, or "primary," stats for your character - Fighting, Agility, Strength, Endurance, Reason, Intuition, and Psyche. From these you can also get your derived, or "secondary" abilities: FASE combines to determine your Health score, and RIP combines to form your Karma score. Health is pretty straightforward - you get hit, you lose health, you run out of health, you're KO'ed and start dying (by losing ranks of Endurance). Karma is more complex - it's kind of a combination of XP, used to purchase new powers and things, and Benny pool used for modifying dice rolls and stuff. The other two secondary stats are Resources and Popularity, used for buying stuff and for determining reactions of NPCs.
Then, of course, there's the powers. It's what we're here for, right? SUPER POWERS. Talents are skills. Contacts are, well, contacts.
The system works off of a chart, and percentile dice. Just about everything in the game has a Rank, ranging from Shift Zero, which is abysmal, to Beyond, which you can probably guess at. Every Rank has a column on the chart, and every column is color coded with white, green, yellow, and red results; white generally is failure, though a particularly difficult feat might require a yellow or red result. If you're Shift Zero, just getting a green result needs at least a 66, and a red result won't come up unless you get a 100. Yellow and Red results can also function as critical effects or as required difficulty (if you wanna make a called shot with a shooting attack, you need a yellow result).
To generate a character, first you need an Origin. There are five Origins: Altered Humans (Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man, for example), Mutants (like the X-Men), High-Tech Heroes (Iron Man is obvious, but any hero whose powers derive from gear goes here, so the Black Knight would be a High Tech, even though it's his magic sword that gives him powers), Robots (beep boop), and Aliens. Every Origin has its own effects on character generation; High Tech heroes start with intrinsically higher Resources and Reason, but must have a Talent related to their powers. Your origin also dictates which table you roll on to generate your FASERIP stats (High Techs tend to be geared-up normal folks, so the chart for rolling their stats tends to land them in the Normal Folks range, Mutant and Altered Humans top out lower than Robots and Aliens, et cetera).
I've rolled 25, which means my sample dude here is an Altered Human. Altered Humans get to raise one primary ability one rank when generated.
F - 53 - Excellent (16)
A - 68 - Remarkable (26)
S - 30 - Good (8)
E - 73 - Remarkable (26)
R - 15 - Typical (5)
I - 32 - Good (8)
P - 51 - Excellent (16)
So... nothing mind-shattering, but better than average across the board ('cept Reason, which is Typical). I haven't applied the extra bump to one stat yet; I wanna see whether his powers suggest something. His Health right now comes to 76, and his Karma is 29. Resources start Typical, with a roll on the Ability Modifier Table, but I get bupkis there. Popularity starts at 10, with some modifiers (Mutants and folks who hang out with Mutants get dinged, publicly known heroes get a bonus, secret identities get dinged, etc.) So Sample-Man gets a 5 for initial Popularity.
There's another chart (remember, this is TSR, Lords of the Charts!) to determine how many powers, contacts, and talents you get. Sample-Man gets (54!) 3 powers (with an extra slot available), in the widest possible result set. For talents, (03, ugh) 1 talent with 5 extra slots. Contacts (73) get one contact with three extras possible. I could buy another power by reducing Resources two ranks, but I don't wanna be Hobo-Man.
MORE CHARTS! Three powers... a Distance Attack, a Movement power, and a Body Control power. You get to CHOOSE what powers from each of these categories, though there are numbers next to 'em so you can randomly generate. 'course, that's when you end up with someone able to Animal Transformation (self) and Detect Mutants.
Sample-Man will have an Energy Bolt, Flight, and an Alter-Ego transformation. Pretty generic so far. Rolling ranks (all Power level ranks are rolled on the same table, the one Robots use for FASERIP stats), he gets Incredible for his Energy Bolt power, and Remarkable for Flight. Alter-Ego doesn't need a rank, but you do have to generate "Normal Folks" stats for the alter-ego form. I'll skip over that now.
He has a Scientific talent; Physics is always a fave for energy-invested supers.
As a Contact, we'll go with... his older brother is a Police Detective.
I'll use that rank-bump from stat generation to bring Agility up to Incredible (36), because it seems like that might be important to have. This brings his Health to 86.
Flipping past all the folderol (charts for distance ranges by rank, each different depending on if it's movement or attacks, and ranks for resistances of different ranks (how strong is Vibranium for example?), I hop to the back to the power descriptions. Energy Bolts can be energy-type damage, or force-type damage; I'll go with Force. Back in the day, I had an Energy slinger that accidentally killed people with energy-damage projectiles, and that's, um, bad.
His Flight power is the same energy, used as propulsion.
So... we have Neutrino-Man! Mild mannered Nate Nicker, physics grad student, accidentally irradiated by a project he was working on and gained the ability to transform into the Nucleonic Avenger!
FASERIP is the acronym for the base, or "primary," stats for your character - Fighting, Agility, Strength, Endurance, Reason, Intuition, and Psyche. From these you can also get your derived, or "secondary" abilities: FASE combines to determine your Health score, and RIP combines to form your Karma score. Health is pretty straightforward - you get hit, you lose health, you run out of health, you're KO'ed and start dying (by losing ranks of Endurance). Karma is more complex - it's kind of a combination of XP, used to purchase new powers and things, and Benny pool used for modifying dice rolls and stuff. The other two secondary stats are Resources and Popularity, used for buying stuff and for determining reactions of NPCs.
Then, of course, there's the powers. It's what we're here for, right? SUPER POWERS. Talents are skills. Contacts are, well, contacts.
The system works off of a chart, and percentile dice. Just about everything in the game has a Rank, ranging from Shift Zero, which is abysmal, to Beyond, which you can probably guess at. Every Rank has a column on the chart, and every column is color coded with white, green, yellow, and red results; white generally is failure, though a particularly difficult feat might require a yellow or red result. If you're Shift Zero, just getting a green result needs at least a 66, and a red result won't come up unless you get a 100. Yellow and Red results can also function as critical effects or as required difficulty (if you wanna make a called shot with a shooting attack, you need a yellow result).
To generate a character, first you need an Origin. There are five Origins: Altered Humans (Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man, for example), Mutants (like the X-Men), High-Tech Heroes (Iron Man is obvious, but any hero whose powers derive from gear goes here, so the Black Knight would be a High Tech, even though it's his magic sword that gives him powers), Robots (beep boop), and Aliens. Every Origin has its own effects on character generation; High Tech heroes start with intrinsically higher Resources and Reason, but must have a Talent related to their powers. Your origin also dictates which table you roll on to generate your FASERIP stats (High Techs tend to be geared-up normal folks, so the chart for rolling their stats tends to land them in the Normal Folks range, Mutant and Altered Humans top out lower than Robots and Aliens, et cetera).
I've rolled 25, which means my sample dude here is an Altered Human. Altered Humans get to raise one primary ability one rank when generated.
F - 53 - Excellent (16)
A - 68 - Remarkable (26)
S - 30 - Good (8)
E - 73 - Remarkable (26)
R - 15 - Typical (5)
I - 32 - Good (8)
P - 51 - Excellent (16)
So... nothing mind-shattering, but better than average across the board ('cept Reason, which is Typical). I haven't applied the extra bump to one stat yet; I wanna see whether his powers suggest something. His Health right now comes to 76, and his Karma is 29. Resources start Typical, with a roll on the Ability Modifier Table, but I get bupkis there. Popularity starts at 10, with some modifiers (Mutants and folks who hang out with Mutants get dinged, publicly known heroes get a bonus, secret identities get dinged, etc.) So Sample-Man gets a 5 for initial Popularity.
There's another chart (remember, this is TSR, Lords of the Charts!) to determine how many powers, contacts, and talents you get. Sample-Man gets (54!) 3 powers (with an extra slot available), in the widest possible result set. For talents, (03, ugh) 1 talent with 5 extra slots. Contacts (73) get one contact with three extras possible. I could buy another power by reducing Resources two ranks, but I don't wanna be Hobo-Man.
MORE CHARTS! Three powers... a Distance Attack, a Movement power, and a Body Control power. You get to CHOOSE what powers from each of these categories, though there are numbers next to 'em so you can randomly generate. 'course, that's when you end up with someone able to Animal Transformation (self) and Detect Mutants.
Sample-Man will have an Energy Bolt, Flight, and an Alter-Ego transformation. Pretty generic so far. Rolling ranks (all Power level ranks are rolled on the same table, the one Robots use for FASERIP stats), he gets Incredible for his Energy Bolt power, and Remarkable for Flight. Alter-Ego doesn't need a rank, but you do have to generate "Normal Folks" stats for the alter-ego form. I'll skip over that now.
He has a Scientific talent; Physics is always a fave for energy-invested supers.
As a Contact, we'll go with... his older brother is a Police Detective.
I'll use that rank-bump from stat generation to bring Agility up to Incredible (36), because it seems like that might be important to have. This brings his Health to 86.
Flipping past all the folderol (charts for distance ranges by rank, each different depending on if it's movement or attacks, and ranks for resistances of different ranks (how strong is Vibranium for example?), I hop to the back to the power descriptions. Energy Bolts can be energy-type damage, or force-type damage; I'll go with Force. Back in the day, I had an Energy slinger that accidentally killed people with energy-damage projectiles, and that's, um, bad.
His Flight power is the same energy, used as propulsion.
So... we have Neutrino-Man! Mild mannered Nate Nicker, physics grad student, accidentally irradiated by a project he was working on and gained the ability to transform into the Nucleonic Avenger!