Game Balance and One-Trick Ponies

Fix to Vigor Point Values

Running some combat tests onĀ Cosmic Cutthroats, I find I may have been a bit generous with Vigor Points.

  • Old Formula: Awesomeness Level + (highest 2 of Body, Guts, and Edge).
  • New Formula: Awesomeness Level + half of (Body + Guts).

Reducing VP by about 6 across the board will make fights go faster, especially against Goons. And that’s 6 per Injury State, so it’s more like reducing by 24 VP overall.

Characters in this game have plenty of defensive options, and the Armor and Barrier Powers are reasonably cheap (although there are ways around them, like Joint Strikes and Triumphs). The goal is to make it so it’s best not to get hit, if you can help it!

One-Trick Ponies

Speaking of game balance, the most boring superhero in any point-based game rules would have to be a total one-trick pony. Let’s write up a Cyclops clone. Let’s call him Eyesore. Now, Cyclops isn’t boring, I like him! But at their simplest, his Powers are easy to represent, mechanically.

So, at Awesomeness Level 5, he gets 750 Upgrade Points. We want a minimum Level 6 in all Attributes, so that costs 180 UP, with 570 left.

Let’s just max out Blast. Blast is Step 5, so at AWE 5, the highest Level we can go is 40. He can do 6d12+1d6 damage, which is a little more than a starship strangelet torpedo. That’ll cost 440 UP, leaving 130.

We want to max out Ranged Combat Attack, Athletics, Toughness, and Willpower, so he’ll be tough to harm in any way. Advanced Skills like Ranged Combat Attack are Step 3, and Athletics is Basic, so Step 2. Let’s spend 3/4 of the remainder on these two, so around 98 points for these two. For 100 points, he can buy 16 more Levels of each.

Finally, for 28 points, he can buy each of the remaining 2 Skills at Level 7, making him fairly resistant to physical and mental attacks. He has 2 more UP to spend, maybe on a Skill Focus with some Ranged Combat Attack maneuver.

If we decide he needs some protection, we can make him less of a Cyclops clone, and more of a walking tank. Trade off half his Blast for Armor. He can buy Armor and Blast both at Level 17 for a total of 440 UP. He has armor equivalent to a space corvette, and he dishes out 2d12+1d8 damage, which is still a little more than a shot from a handheld rocket launcher.

But … he’s boring. We’ve given him no non-combat skills whatsoever. Even his armored version isn’t impervious to damage, another hero with an Environmental attack (like Claws with Cuts Through Anything) could take him out. He’s reliant on seeing well to attack, so being trapped in the dark will still make it tough for him to eye-blast the bejeezus out of things. And nothing protects you from having your EDG whittled away by social attacks.

A real conversion of Cyclops from the comics would probably be Lesser Demigod AWE, but only a few of those extra points would go toward improving his eye beams. Maybe only just adding a few Boosts onto them. All the rest would be Skills, Traits, and a few Attribute bumps.

So the moral is, yes, you can max out one or two Abilities. It’s not even that hard to make a walking battleship, but you’ll be a one-trick pony, and it will be ruinously expensive. The system will encourage you to make a Character with interesting abilities and things to do outside of combat.

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