ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying
ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying is a pen and paper system, released by Ad Infinitum Adventures, which is settled in comic universes. Instead of turns you count time in pages of the comic book you're in. It's that Avantgarde.
You need 2d6 to play.
The overall game focuses less on character progress and is mostly about the law of awesome. Unless your GM wants to be hardcore and give you grim origin stories, you can start as a frigging super hero. Forget fighting sewer rats or goblins for 7 levels. In fact there is zero grinding. The only gain that isn't impermanent equip that you loot from whatever your GM comes up with consists only of so called determination points which serve as a boost to your rolls along with general stat adding and advantagemongery. These determination points can be spend to increase rolls and are gained from doing badass shit and that's as level-up as it gets. You can collect infinite of them, so if you want to farm and then be the equivalent of a high-level character who wins at every roll after holding back for most of the campaign just do it.
There are 6 attributes.
- Prowess
- Coordination
- Strength
- Intelligence
- Awareness
- Willpower
The powers system is almost like any generic magic system. Instead of basic schools or elements or whatever your first key categories are:
- Offense
- Defense
- Alteration
- Control
- Psychic
- Movement
You first determine / choose the amount of powers you have and then which categories they come from.
Then you get to choose specific skills from a category. And THEN you may fluff them out just the way you want. For an example you can have a "Blast" ability and simply explain your GM that your character's blast is made of vodka because that's your character's super power. If he comes at you asking stupid questions, you may simply put a logical explanation in your qualities.
These are three short keynotes that make up your characters lore and personality.
You can be lazy, and the GM rolls with it. And I mean cartoon writer level lazy. "He fell into a new experimental vodka factory basin. Now he is Atomic Liver!".
The neat part of this game really is how you can bend the core stats through the powers. Playing this feels a little bit like watching six yoga girls do borderline odd / almost hot poses.
In the end the game is not meant to tell the heroic tale of some dude, but to create a comic.