Collateral Damage, TTRPGs, and Humanoid Typhoons

With great power comes even greater insurance premiums.

In Dragon Ball Z, our heroes are powerful martial artists capable of casually destroying the moon at the beginning of the series. Goku, the greatest of the great martial artists with a heart of gold, is always quick to move his titanic battles out of populated areas into wastelands. The great villains of Dragon Ball Z are marked by their gross indifference to civilian lives: from Nappa destroying East City to Buu killing every person on Earth.

Traditional Western superheroes work along the same lines. In Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, pursuit of the villain always takes backseat to saving civilian lives. Spider-Man stories are inseparable from dense urban playgrounds and the people who live in them. Spider-Man can’t take battles out to the wastelands of Upstate New York so he does everything he can to minimize the damage of his work (with varying degrees of success).

Movies like Man of Steel and Avengers, which relish in destruction of cities, follow up these epoch-defining events with drama in later movies (of varying quality). Destruction, “collateral damage,” is important in tales of powerful people going at it, so how do TTRPGs manage it? Few examples:

Masks: A New Generation

Masks is a Powered by the Apocalypse game about a crop of new heroes learning to balance self-growth and mastery of their powers with the demands of their peers and adult authority figures. Early on, a young hero may take a powerful blow from a villain. When this happens, they roll 2D6 and add +1 for each “condition” marked. If the hero rolls 10+, they have three options: one of them is “lose control of yourself or your powers in a terrible way”.

There is also unleashing your powers. This is equivalent of letting loose with your powers to achieve something you otherwise achieve with normal use of your powers at the risk of the GM making hard moves on failure. The Nova, a playbook, is all about trying to reign in and channel destructive power.

As heroes develop and unlock adult moves, they may unlock Overwhelm a Vulnerable Foe.

Collateral damage in Masks is often caused by villains but it is important when heroes cause collateral damage because avoiding collateral damage is the ultimate trade-off. When you take a powerful blow in the fiction, your hero has been pushed into a corner and is lashing out wildly, their emotions fueling their powers. Later in your story, you’re now powerful enough to do that kind of damage at will. Now it becomes a choice for your character to put themselves in harm’s way, or externalize the costs to your foe and innocent victims.

Masks hammers in the cost of causing collateral damage front and center in the list of GM moves.

Great stuff. You can trace the thought process from Point A through B to C for these systems. Now, let’s look at something funny.

GURPS: Balance Unlimited

GURPS stands for “Generic Universal RolePlaying System.” GURPS was old enough to drink by the time Masks hit the scene and, like many games to come out of the late-80s and 1990s, it has a deep simulationist streak. It is also everyone’s least favorite answer to “what system should I use to run X” besides maybe Fate.

In core rules (The Basic Set), if you want to get down and dirty with collateral damage, you get a battle map and when a shot misses, you trace where it goes. GURPS has optional systems for bullet overpenetration, just in case you wanted to do some ridiculous Sniper Elite shit. When GURPS: Powers rolled around, the authors created an optional system for us theater of the mind players: the Collateral Damage roll.

There is something that tickles my brain about this chart. It makes me think of an anime I watched years ago called Millionaire Detective: Balance Unlimited. Whenever the hero of that show did something, like steal a luxury car from a visiting dignitary or caused a lot of damage to buildings, he activated his superpower (unlimited money) and his AI would CashApp a whole lot of angry people in real time. Episodes would end with the amount of yen paid out. Season one ended with $3.9 billion USD in payouts.

I, the GM, have a pretty good idea of what “$1,000” in damages looks like from my years of recreational drinking and driving, but the emphasis on dollar amounts first reveals a difference in mindset between GURPS and Masks. In GURPS, each entry increases the dollar cost by 10x and effects follow from that because its easier to remember and “rational”. In Masks, all that math is skipped and you go straight to the part where a bus full of children is dangling off the bridge.

GURPS suggests Iron Man would have these two following him around 24/7.

If I’m running a cyberpunk campaign using these rules, all of a sudden a “gatling carbine” with its 40 RoF and 4d damage per shot is very dangerous for me to bring out in a bar scuffle.

Like Masks, the collateral damage of GURPS is about learning to harness your abilities effectively. If I’m Goku, my average Kamehameha can destroy Earth. How do I get around this? I position myself so I’m never shooting at the Earth and lower my power output to the minimum amount necessary to win. In effect, I’m taking a -2 modifier for each -1 modifier on the collateral damage table.

In Masks and GURPS, true power is the ability to leverage your abilities to achieve your goals. Destruction comes easy in superhero and Shonen franchises. Nappa’s destruction of a city didn’t mark him as powerful; it marked him as evil and slightly incompetent.

Parting Shots

Dragon Cobolt’s tweet inspired this post.

In superhero fiction, the superhero’s primary duty isn’t to fight the Big Bad. Their primary duty is to save people! There has been superhero fiction where this isn’t the case, but when I say “superhero”, nobody is thinking Watchmen or The Boys. TTRPGs spill a lot of ink on combat systems (a post for another day and another writer) and coming out of something like Dungeons and Dragons to superhero RPGs, it is easy to laser-focus on what you can do.

I can shoot lasers from my eyes in combat so I do 3d6 lethal damage to my foes when I hit is the wargamer reading. The superhero reading is “my eyes can kill if I’m not careful”. Even in games of amoral mercenaries, like your average Cyberpunk Red crew, it might give some texture to your decision to bring one weapon over another if collateral damage is something to worry about. Instead of creating people to rescue, you’re probably creating bloody vendettas for later.

Anyway, hit this button now :gun: