Superheroes and RPGs 2: Game balance and team composition

First, an audiovisual aid, courtesy of YouTube and That Mitchell & Webb Look (Thursdays at 21:30 on BBC2, don't miss it). Presenting Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit!


"Your ability to summon a horde of angels is making my BMX skills look a bit redundant." Now, clearly BMX Bandit is a victim of bad game design. A properly balanced role-playing game will never allow two characters of the same level of experience to be so widely disparate in power level. It's as if Angel Summoner's player was allowed to spend 10 points on Angel Summoning to become the best angel summoner in the world, while BMX Bandit's player had to spend 10 points on BMX Skills to be the best BMX rider in the world -- without anyone at any stage pointing out to the game designer that summoning angels is an ability that's a tad more useful than BMX riding. Even if Angel Summoner is only half as good an angel summoner as BMX Bandit is a BMX rider, he's still ridiculously over-powered by comparison because angel summoning is a ridiculously useful power.

The relevance of this to superhero teams should be obvious, yet strangely the same mistake keeps coming up again and again: writers pair somebody who's really really good at, say, archery, or talking to fish, or changing the colours of flowers, with somebody who can lift planets or control the minds of up to a thousand people at once. And then they struggle to come up with a villain that can plausibly menace Ms Planetlifter without instantly crushing Mr Make The White Petals Pink into a red mist.

However, RPGs, having given us the diagnosis, can also provide the cure, for while game balance is important, it is important chiefly because the low-powered players in an imbalanced game are likely to feel sidelined and underappreciated. One way of making sure this doesn't happen is to de-emphasise powers and abilities. The more a game focuses on roleplaying as opposed to showing off your character's kewl powerz, the less important power balance is -- and likewise, the more a superhero comic focuses on character as opposed to ass-kicking, the less important power disparities are. I think this is how the X-books have managed to survive without imploding under the weight of implausibility. I mean, when you've got Phoenix on the team -- and I'm talking about the original, Jean Grey, full-on, cosmic entity, star-eating Phoenix, not any later retreads that weren't frighteningly powerful -- why bother letting the others play at all? She can cheerfully wipe the floor with almost any conceivable opponent. But although the X-Men do quite a bit of wiping the floor with their opponents, that's not what the X-Men comics are fundamentally about. X-books are, in general, about relationships and character and metaphors for civil rights; and occasionally they are about very bad science and exceedingly dubious philosophy. The kicking and punching and making things explode does happen, but it's not the heart of the concept, so it's all right for there to be a goddess in human form and a guy with a tail who can teleport short distances on the team at the same time. The stories they'll be featured in will be about self-belief, and romantic love, and resisting oppression, and Nightcrawler can take part in those kinds of stories just as well as Phoenix.

Another option is to force the team to work together by contriving situations where everybody's unique skill is needed; but this requires you to be very, very clever with your plotting if it is not to come over as excessively convenient. The danger you come close to with this option is that you'll end up with something like a TV show Bart and Lisa Simpson were once seen to watch: Knight Boat, the boat version of Knight Rider. The boat is chasing a villain in the sea when -- oh noes! -- the villain goes ashore where the boat can't follow him. But that's OK, because there's a canal! "There's always a canal!" Lisa comments scornfully. You don't want to end up in there's-always-a-canal territory with your low-powered characters -- providing them with something to do at the expense of the credibility of the plot.

A third way of handling this (perhaps a subset of the second) is to give your high-powered character a specific weakness or lack that leaves them dependent on other characters. For instance: a character who's insanely powerful may be from another planet and have difficulty with human social norms; they need to hang around with their low-powered friends because no amount of planet-crushing ability is going to help them deal with their landlord or the pizza delivery guy. Maybe they can't talk; maybe their powers fluctuate; maybe they need some specific dingus to keep themselves charged up (rest, water, chemicals, radiation, food, sunlight, the hearts of stars; whatever's thematically appropriate) and when they're not charged up, they're just as vulnerable as any civilian; maybe they're prone to fits of incurable mental illness and only their best friends can help them out of it; und so weiter. It's not hard to come up with a fairly original variation on this theme, though I suspect it's harder to come up with a variation that will allow you to keep writing whatever kind of plot you're most interested in rather than forcing you in a certain direction. The trick is to come up with something that's not too gimmicky (I think the textbook example of a gimmicky weakness is the Green Lanterns' allergy to yellow things, though if somebody can come up with a non-gimmicky, non-handwavey explanation, I'm all ears), not so crippling as to turn the question around and make readers wonder why the low-powered characters are hanging around with Mr Godlike But Only On Alternate Tuesdays, Otherwise A Quivering Wreck. It also has to be something that can plausibly come up in the middle of whatever kind of plot you're most likely to be handling.

Ultimately what you have to try and achieve, when combining characters of radically different power levels, is the creation of a story that does not provoke any of your readers to ask the question "Why the hell are these people hanging out together?" -- or, if it does prompt the question, it quickly provides a satisfying answer. This is the comic-book equivalent of a good GM giving all the player characters something interesting to do without making any of them feel they're being pandered to. It's tricky, but it's worth it.