Super Heroes With Great Power Discusson

With Great Power is a narrative supers game, similar to DitV but closer in style to Primetime Adventures, that has a laser-focus on essentially generating comic-book stories.

These sorts of games are sort of love-it or hate-it, since it gets away from the traditional system-as-simulation model of most of the games we play. After reading through the book (which I got as a PDF here), it's got a lot of interesting takes on the archetypal superhero story.

The game basically boils down to a melodrama-generation system; your character, rather than being a collection of standardized numbers, is a set of different Assets (Power, Duty, Conviction, Relationship) that describe him. You then pick a few of those assets that most closely relate to the theme of the story (the theme is always a binary, like Power vs Responsibility, Freedom vs Belonging, etc), making sure that you have at least one asset on each side of the theme.

Gameplay itself is a simple cardplay mechanic, and is driven by the status of Aspects; you can endanger one of your aspects in order to draw more cards (risking, for instance, your magic sword, or the safety of Belle Beauty in order to defeat a villain), or you can discard to bring one of your aspects closer to safety.

I know this is a pretty terrible explanation, but I want to make sure it's clear before I run any one-shot with this system (which I plan on doing).

If you want the PDF email me, but consider buying it because it's obvious the guy put a lot of work into it.