Download The Awesome System
Ross Howell of Sharkpunch Studios is the designer of The Awesome System. The game is available for ten bucks at DriveThru RPG and uses a lot of D6.
The Awesome System wasn’t written specifically to handle superheroes but does offer that high-octane movie-romp style of game play. I wondered whether the system could be used for heroes and so reached out to Ross with some questions. As it’s Superhero Week, and you can win Amazon vouchers, for taking part it is a great time to take a closer look. All the art you see in this post comes from the roleplaying game.
Introduce us to The Awesome System. What’s it all about?
The Awesome System is an RPG of my own creation that grew out of my dissatisfaction with the pen and paper RPG industry from not being able to find anything like it. I wanted to run episodic, exciting content that felt as close to a television show as possible, with dodgy one-liners, commercial breaks, enemies drawn from Saturday morning cartoons and, most important of all, the opportunity for everyone to have those kind of self-aggrandizing “Big Hero” moments, regardless of what kind of character they were playing, whether a front-line fighter or a back-up support role.
In essence, it’s high-action movie-style action that works best at emulating the sort of cliche-ridden guilty pleasures we all enjoy from video-gaming, 80’s action films and anime. But rather than use that sort of jokey nature as an excuse for getting some bad mechanics past our consumers, we used it as a springboard to make tightly crafted rules and consistencies that evolved into a very deep and nuanced character creation system. You glimpse a little of it each time you make a new character, but at the same time you’ll start to notice other options and build-paths that will take you down interesting avenues.
It’s my personal love letter to the media that inspired me to get into game design and pen and paper RPGs in the first place.
Could The Awesome System be used to facilitate a high powered superheroes game – something like the Justice League? How would you go about doing it? What about a low powered group of heroes – more like the Ninja Turtles or S.H.I.E.L.D?
Absolutely! We’ve played games where the Player Characters were everything from 50-point nobodies all the way up to 300-point badasses who could punch giant robots to death. Character creation is extremely modular and just about any number of points can be used to make something fun and playable.
I think when you’re designing your perfect adventuring party, your main goal is to sit down with the players and ask them what they want to make, and what kind of superheroes they’re inspired by, then translate that into game terms. If they wanted to make a superman-style character, that’s as simple as grabbing Flight, Iron Grip and a Tempest Style for laser attacks. If they want to make the Hulk, they can take Armoured, Giant, Regeneration and as many levels of Brawn as they can fit. Someone like the Flash could have a lot of levels of Runner, Stunt Scale, a very high Speed score and, lastly, dip into the Movie Magic styles to pick up Bullet Time.
I should briefly mention Movie Magic: it’s an entire subset of magical abilities that can be used by characters to emulate their favourite clichés: slowing down time, revealing the villain’s henchmen were secretly your double actions, seducing badguys to the side of good, disabling killer robots will logic puzzles and just conjuring up expensive cars, jets and gadgets for your character to use out of thin air, it’s all there, it’s all fun and it’s all balanced within the ruleset.
What tips would you give a GM planning a superhero adventure in the system?
Powers! There’s already plenty of tailor-made powers for things like flight, super jumping, turning into fire, magical healing, item conjuration, time stopping, shapeshifting and plenty of other things that are right at home in a superheroes game! Rather than tending towards generic powers, like having a “Bolt” attack you can attach an elemental type to, we went for extremely flavourful and fully realized powers that you can just snap-in to your character without any preparatory work involved. A great example of this is the Fire Tempest subset of powers, which involve two different ways of throwing fireballs, a power for lighting yourself on fire to enter a super-mode and two powers to do with dispersing fire and moving through fire, that can be delightfully combined to make the leaping flames at your command your very own method of transportation.
And despite this, we’ve never had somebody come to us saying they can’t make the character they want to make. That’s what the system is about, ultimately: unrestrictive flavour that doesn’t limit you to only a brief set of character options.
The Awesome System has support vehicle action. Would you keep that in, adapt it or drop it entirely from a superheroes game? Why?
Absolutely! Vehicles have strengths, Brawn values and Hit Points just like characters, so it’s easy to balance them against each other. It’s unlikely the players will be doing much driving themselves when they can fly as fast as a sports car, but that sort of frantic driving/flying action is still great fun.
To try to do something unique with the rules for vehicles, we have anything engine-powered move a set distance in the facing their driver wants every single turn. If the vehicle gets knocked off-kilter, then the driver can’t fix it until their next turn comes up, meaning a cheeky superhero could totally knock a villain’s jet off-course and watch it go spiraling into nearby mountains. That sounds worth keeping in to me!
How can players use the stunt system to better reflect super powers and heroics?
The heart of the Stunt System lies with doing superhuman things and testing your character’s limits and to explain how that works, I’ll have explain a little bit about the mechanics behind stunts! Or you can check out this cool comic, which it explains it better than I ever could!
Anyway, the basic format is that for the majority of your dice rolls in your campaigns, you’ll roll a fistful of d6’s, take the highest and announce that as your result. If you roll a 6, you get to roll an extra dice to add on to that, just like in plenty of other pen and paper games. This means getting anything higher than a 10 can, statistically speaking, be pretty unlikely! When you throw Stunts into the mix, you spend two of your Awesome Points to make one colossally mean roll, adding all your dice together, meaning rolls like 50, 60 or anything up to 100 or 200 is suddenly pretty plausible. If someone in your party says, “I want to throw that bus,” you can just figure out a perfectly crazy difficulty for the roll, something like a 50, and watch them drop the points to make it. If you’ve ever had cognitive dissonance occur in your pen and paper RPGs, D20 systems in particular, where a total novice can roll a d20, get a 20 and beat the world’s greatest grandmaster in a challenge, then a mechanic like that should be a breath of fresh air.
In short, the Stunt System lets you make the rolls that separate supers from normals.
Which are your favourite system for running superhero RPGs in?
I was pretty impressed with Wild Talents when I played the kickstarted version! It’s a pretty clever system with some interesting ideas on how to make a superhero. I’d also give it a go in Over The Edge for its ability to give you a well-realized character very quickly, or Savage Worlds because I think the pulp atmosphere would translate really well to a Four Colour-style superhero game!
Do you have any tips for GMs who wish to have recurring super villains while avoiding them being completely out of the player character’s league?
This is an interesting one! I think “recurring villains” is often a matter of personal taste, since it often ties directly into running a game that’s considered unrealistic. For a villain to be truly elusive and survive a long time in a game firmly grounded in reality, he or she has to always be thinking many steps ahead of the party and be equipped to survive any amount of lucky rolls that the party might throw their way! It isn’t enough just for your campaign’s villain to escape on a convenient zeppelin when you’re done having them fight, any party worth their salt will usually have snuck into his hideout the day before and planted remote mines on said zeppelin. That or the party sniper will roll that natural 20 you really don’t want to see and you’ll have no choice but to put that particular villain’s sheet through the shredder.
Therefore, I think ultimately this boils down to a matter of your game’s tone. I’ve run games where I’ve told my party they can fire on an escaping villain and they’ve assumed it was some trick to try to make them waste their resources. If you explain to your players beforehand you want to build a recurring cast of villains instead of coming up with new ones every week, they’ll usually get the idea and play along! And it also helps if your setting has some sort of in-game equivalent of Arkham Asylum or the Phantom Zone, a poorly-secured “prison” that spits old badguys out as the story requires them!
In The Awesome System, we wanted to hardcode this sort of recurring villain interaction into the rules directly. When a Player Character picks up the Rival Weakness, they can implement adjustments such as “Rival is unable to be killed” that make the Weakness cost more, making that sort of bitter pill easier for the party to swallow. Additionally, when a Weakness stops being relevant, players are made to buy it off with their experience points, so if a player has to choose between killing their arch-nemesis for good, or letting them escape so they can pick up a sweet new Power, we like to think most people will even be getting that villain’s coat for them.
If you’re quick enough and are reading this post on the day it was published then Superhero Week could earn you a shopping trip! Find out how.
This is a post from 2014’s Superhero Week. If you want to check out other superhero-themed goodies then pop over to the Superhero Week collection page or visit a random superhero posted with this teleport link.
