I was
supposed to finish this post yesterday, but a combination of work and celebration got in the way. Ah, well...Happy (belated, now) Fourth to all of you who appreciate the freedom you've been gifted in your respective homes!
Naturally, at a time when
Light City is always rattling around in my cerebrum, America's Independence Day makes me think of this guy...
...and this guy...
...and of course this guy...
So...let's also talk about Supersoldiers, shall we? As I move through through the superhero archetypes (as I see them applying to RPG classes, anyway) for Light City, I 've known that something in the vein of Captain America needed to be included. As with Batman, exactly what that is depends on the perspective you take in thinking about Cap. You can focus on the patriotism, of course, making him an inspirational symbol. When I included
a red, white, and blue hero in my Dogwood City project last year, for example, I gave him a little ally-buffing ability.
You could also zero in on the way Cap handles a shield, which may make him a member of the Marksman class (the next one I hope to release for Light City).
For some reason, though, I'm drawn a bit more to Cap's basic power set...just that he's a badass fighter at the peak of (or just beyond) the normal human physical max. I think part of it is that I think of DC's closest Cap comparison to be the guy who has somehow become one of the company's showcase villains over the past several years...
A Deathstroke/Captain America class should be easy enough, right? I'd say so. So easy, in fact, that it's pretty much already there in
Swords & Wizardry Light...they're really just high-level, high-stat Fighters! So how do I make this jibe with my goal of making Light City classes roughly comparable in power level to the basic SWL options...?
I've been thinking a lot about Light City power level after some thoughts from commenter X-Plus Kaiju Collectors Crew on
my last LC post, and I actually really like where all of this has led me. It seems reasonable to me to trade off the multiple attacks vs. 1 HD enemies that Fighters get (which I honestly find a little awkward because the player basically needs to somehow be aware that an enemy only has 1 HD...) to give a Supersoldier a stat boost. Maybe even +1d6 to all the physical attributes...and probably INT too.
The beauty of putting an adjustment like this into SWL is that I could see it making a basic character
feel pretty super...but the actual stat benefits are small enough that it really wouldn't break anything!
I should probably stat up a few characters at some point, along with exploring what a "basic" Fighter would actually look like in the Light City Universe...
