[BNW] The Sneak, Death of a Campaign and more

As has been said similar to a thief in AD+D, the sneak can be useful, but sure he/ she is no combat monster. I think keeping such a player amused is up to the GM and the player.

Limiting? Sure. But if you just take what is there and make every blaster the same, they will all be the same. What you bring to a character is far more important than what you think the limitations of the game are. Why not a Goliath with a 5 Speed and 2 Strength. Sure, you may not be utilizing him to his fullest, but it would be pretty cool. It's the skills and tricks and the way the character is played that will determine if your character is similar to all the other characters. I'd like to see more packages, but if one looks at older comics (pre Jim Lee et al) one will generally see x different types of characters. Are Spiderman and Daredevil really that different? The Hulk, the Thing and Wonderman? Sure characters like Superman can't be made, but he is in a class all by himself anyway.

Well thought out. Interesting. Perhaps the one thing I do find limiting. It seems to easy to paint the picture Black and white and I wonder how long a game can be fun where the PCs are basically fugitives. This is why I've created a Men In Black scenario, where a third group (after delta prime and the defiants) plays a key role. They're not deltas, but they're interested in what makes deltas deltas. I've equipped them with weapons capable of taking down even the tough, a poison that reacts with something in the Delta's bloodstream. The horror on my player's faces when the Tough was taken down in one shot after failing his spirit roll.

So far, the players in my group have had a great time and will continue to do so, I imagine. What will happen when they discover that there are more sinister forces than just Kennedy and Delta Prime afoot. Will they have to team up with DP for everyone's safety?

As I've previously said, BNW isn't about being SUPER-powered, it's about subtle powers. If one wants to min/ max the game, sure it has flaws and some packages are inherently more powerful than others, but isn't this the case with any game?

Fighter's are good, mages at anything but low-levels are good. But who really wants to be the thief whose main job it is to disarm poisonous traps. And the cleric aka Healing Battery. What fun is that?

Cater the enemies to the packages your players have chosen. It can be good for them to get their asses kicked once in awhile, but any group that is comprised entirely of Blasters and Toughs can also be taken down. Check the Gunner's pierce armor trick.

I love the mechanics of the game, they're some of the cleanest I've seen in some time, without being a twinkie system. The Deadlands system it is similar to is nice, but too many dice types, and too many "meaningless" stats. The other game which has caught my fancy of late has been 7th Sea, but that has some limitations as well. I'm not saying that BNW is a perfect system, but what game is? And what fun would it be to play anyway?

I've been playing Aberrant as a player, and enjoying that as well, but it has an entirely different feel and all those dice that White Wolf games require one to roll can be mighty cumbersome. Yes, it does allow for more customizable characters, but truth be told the starting point limit makes a starting character be quite weak.

DC Heroes aka MEGS is fun, but it can take quite awhile to tweak that character just right. The old Marvel game, well it was just plain hard to make a character that didn't immediately elicit responses of "Oh he's a cross between X and Y" since all the power were just powers that an already existing character had.

I like the simplicity of BNW, it harkens back to when I first started playing games (some 17 years ago) where I never felt like I was missing something in Character Creation ("Aww, my character can do what his can just not as well. Where did you find that rule?").

I ordered my copy of Defiants and hope it arrives by tomorrow so I'll have the long weekend to check it out. I'm looking forward to the further supplements and the campaign I'm running. It's the first time in quite awhile I've had fun being a GM.

BNW isn't about your hero being able to fly and lift up trains and shoot bolts out of his eyes. It's more akin to team books of the silver age. Think of the Avengers or the X-men. So many characters could be categorized with the power packages.

I don't think there's any reason a Blaster couldn't shoot from his eyes or The Flame package (forgot the name offhand) couldn't blast from his hands. These are just details.