my 'work in progress' supers rules

in this post I will start to lay out some of the ideas behind the rules.  I suppose the best place to start is to explain my motivation to design my own rules when there are several sets of perfectly good ones available.  In the dim and distant past that was my late teenage years, we occasionally punctuated our mainstay dungeons and dragon campaigns with mini campaigns of many flavours - runequest, traveller and, for me the most memorable, Champions!!  We had many a happy session beating all manner of supervillains, throwing cars at each other and knocking characters through walls.  As you can see it was only the fights that have stuck in my mind all this time.
     I still have a copy of the rules but a much later version and had considers using them to recreate the battles of my youth. However, there were two issues with this;
1) the character generation rules are complex
2) there is a lot of character bookkeeping thereby limiting the number of characters you can easily run.
I also had a few of the marvel herocliks and I saw a painting thread on the Lead Adventurers Forum (many in fact but sunday hero being the most influential with his excellent painting!) so decided to try and repaint some of mine.

Being reasonable pleased with the result my wargamer's obsessive nature kicked in and I ordered a few more from Troll and Toad in the US.  As I was only interested in the figure not the base I could get the cheapest option on each character as some have multiple versions and prices vary depending on rarity and value for points within the game neither of which was an issue to me.  

After buying and painting my new figures I realised that I had not thought things through properly and now I had 2 of the fantastic 4, a couple of Avengers, Magneto but not many mutant brotherhood to give him a hand.  Luckily Santa rectified that for me so now I have enough major and minor heroes and villains to play the game that I was planning on developing.

And so finally on to the start of the game.  If I do ever manage to get them finished I will make them freely available to anyone silly enough to want a look. However, that day is a long way off......

Each hero/villain has a board that track health and lists abilities.  one is below - please excuse the roughness of it as it is still work in progress as the post title suggests.

This is the board for Titania and here is the figure.

As can be seen from the picture, the board is divided into several sections;

• health, comprising body and stun
• movement, comprising speed and movement
• combat, comprising offensive powers/abilities
• defense, comprising defensive powers and abilities
• other, comprising all powers that don't fit in the other boxes.

Stun is the amount of damage a character can take before they fall to the ground, body is the damage a character can take before the are out of the fight.  1 body is equivalent to a full track of stun.

Movement is the number of units (inches/squares/hexes) that a character can move when activated. Speed is a measure of how quick their reflexes are.

Offensive and defensive powers and abilities are pretty self explanatory, and other is everything they can do that is not yet covered.  Some powers are obvious where they go, others are more open to debate but as long as they are there I am not too bothered if they seem a little odd in their placement... it seemed to make sense when I did that card. 

Titania is a pretty straight forward - she has pretty good body and stamina values, a good attack and defenses based on her tough body.  She is commonly known as a brick.  Other characters have much more complicated boards giving the character more options to chose from.  As an example, here's Captain America's

I think I will finish here for this post.  Next time I will start the battle report as it will be easier to show how the fledgling rules work in practice.