But I look at this post and all the responses, and my main responses is that the lack of balance that every one is notating is always going to be found in games that combat is the primary interaction.

As long as you are trying to validate the existence of a ‘sage-type’ character (Prof X here) in a game where combat is king and the measuring stick you are all using, you’re going to have this paradox you describe, or at least so I see it. It would be the same if you created a character who was supernaturally pursuasive and attractive, or possessed great spy skills, or any other skill set that is not combat specific.

Your description of the combat and the scale of toughness is actually balanced well if there are enough social-interaction, non-combat situations where the Hulk’s strength are useless. In other words, I find it as much a setting flaw as a system flaw.

LordVreeg´s last post: Taking Damage

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Demons with mental/magic powers or mind-control that ignores the armor…. yes!

Attack where your enemy is weak, retreat where your enemy is strong. Instead of attacking versus the character’s strong point (armor/toughness) you attack him where he is weak. That’s the main reason you have multiple characters…

The demon attacks the tough-guy who is weak minded, then the mentalists blocks and protects the tough-guy….

Regardless of the system, if one player insists on playing Black Panther and another Thor, the GM is going to have to work to give everyone their “panels” to shine.

Oz´s last post: 3PP 4e support

I will have to agree with chatty (and other people who mentioned it) here. 2nd ed M&M seems to work pretty well in this regard. For whatever power level your campaign is, there is an upper limit of toughness and defense (with some minimal tweaking you can do to trade one off against the other). As long as you encourage your players to put at least a few points into these things, you can usually get a fair handle on how well your players will deal with any threat, and none of them should be so far above the others that encounters will be unfair (at least at default power levels).

Maestro´s last post: 2nd Exam Done!

GURPS is designed to maximize internal consistency. It is not designed as a tool for generating fiction.

Contrariwise, With Great Power and Prime Time Adventures are.

The key is to dissociate character success from Naturalistic consistency. Hell, you can dissociate character success from *player* success, as is the case in Capes.

I can guarantee you: playing Green Lantern, Professor X, or frickin’ *Toad* in any of these would work just fine.

Who would win in a fight: Batman or Superman? The answer is, ‘It depends on who’s writing it!’ When you’re playing an RPG, it’s *your* fiction. *You* are the creator. If this is a problem for you, it’s because you’ve got the wrong tools.

Joshua A.C. Newman´s last post: Robot Checkbox

It seems that the more flexibility the game allows, the greater the potential for imbalance between the characters. Of course, there are also numerous games with little flexibility that are also not balanced…

“You see a group of demons patrolling the hall below you. One of them is carrying a rocket launcher with armor piercing missiles!”

Great…

This works, but it’s somewhat unsatisfying to the guy who wants to play the Hulk.

A variation is to balance with probabilities. The squishies get to have a high chance to avoid being hit. Hulk gets hit by just about everything, but shrugs a lot of it off.

The problem here is that the massive hit eventually gets through, and the squishy squishes.

The best way is to use narrative imperative. If the attack did enough damage to kill, it did enough damage to stun, disable, entangle, and so on. How many times in old comics did a relatively-fragile character take a punch from a rampaging Hulk or other strong guy and survive because “I… *uhn*… rolled with the blow just in time!”?

Hm… come to think of it, this should probably be a full-fledged blog post. Might get to be rather long for a comment. >.>

Reverend Mike´s last post: Session #1: Dead Jeffery On A Rope

Less invincible characters need to stay off the front-lines if you’re going to give the Hulk a challenge there…

It’s a tough problem that is best avoided by avoiding the problem…

Reverend Mike´s last post: Session #1: Dead Jeffery On A Rope

To elaborate a bit: Instead of building a combat scene to challenge the player characters, give them some problem, but don’t create a solution. When they try something, use common sense, the rules and your sense of drama guide how successful they are.

Problems can be hassles with secret identities, creatures from beyond the stars trying to eat Earth or make everyone mad, just another supervillain, or problems with persons the characters care about.

(For games, if you are not inherently allergic to games without lots of rules, check out Truth and justice. On the site’s freebie page you can find PDQ, which is the core system of their games. It is free. T&J is slightly more complicated, IIRC.)