Supers Foundations

Several years back I wrote an article for Pyramid that did not make the cut. I had hoped to write it as a book, possibly a series of books but GURPS has largely moved away from the Supers genre. I feel that is a loss to the players and that GURPS really can do supers campaigns very well.

When people talk about playing Supers in GURPS they have a couple of concerns that make them wary of actually doing it.

1. Its impossible or cost prohibitive to build bricks at the same point costs as other characters. I disagree with this sentiment, especially with the rules for LOG ST. Super Effort on ST was introduced in GURPS Supers  but is a bit complicated and clunky to use. LOG ST enables Lifting ST like we see from very powerful brick type supers.
2. Defenses are too expensive compared to attacks. Every game charges more for defenses than attacks. The real issue here is most people look at high levels of DR and find them too expensive compared to high tech weaponry.  The real solution here is Injury Tolerance: Damage Reduction which reduces the injury taken, If you think about it your favorite supers do not ignore most attacks, they shrug them off. They may not take visible damage but they grimace or grunt when hit by comparable foes. IT:DR represents this perfectly.
3. Building powers requires a lot of time and math.  This is really the most accurate complaint in my opinion. The math is simple addition and multiplication, not hard.However while you can build pretty much anything in GURPS it may take a lot of time working it out.

The Foundations article was written to point these things out and offer suggestions to speed up character design and offer tactics and ideas for building and playing effective supers in GURPS. I focused on bricks as that is where most of the complaints are and in a magazine article I was very limited in word count. Had that been published I may have written followup articles for various archetypes and made some notes towards that.

I just uploaded a bunch of pages describing my suggested system which instead of templates suggests prebuilt individual abilities and lists of simple advantages that fit various archetypes and power levels. Further I included the stuff I wrote for bricks,

You can find the main page here..Supers Foundations and the brick stuff is on the brick page linked from there.  Most of the archetypes have little or no worked examples as yet, Ill add as inspiration or interest/requests merit.