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Your battle system is not a “battle system”, it is a critical piece of storytelling written in math and “Kapow!” special effects. Put another way; any mechanic you could use in your battle system is like a genre of writing and putting a “Action Movie” combat system into your “Creeping Horror” RPG is a terrible idea (unless that’s what you are aiming for, like Aliens!) You NEED your combat system to keep the feeling of the game you want to run.Look at D&D’s combat system. Combat is built to be enjoyed, it’s a BIG part of the mechanics. Hit Points have no negative effects until you run out of them, a la Conan the Barbarian, you can have a thousand cuts and bruises and still swing your sword as hard as someone who just woke up and joined combat. This is the ambiance of the system… the tension is in party composition and tactics with few real negative effects from fighting and generally enough HP to likely survive your appropriate challenge.Now look at something like Call of Cthulu. You don’t have many hit points and weapons do a terrifying amount of damage compared to that small number of hit points. While taking damage doesn’t slow you down, you simply probably can’t take many hits so the tension is ‘can I afford to risk combat at all??’ and healing is SLOW so the wounds you do take are much more likely to persist into the adventure. Also; combat isn’t the only “damage” metric, investigators have Sanity. It’s a much higher value but so Many Things reduce it and healing it is very limited.Do you see the ambiance differences between these systems? If you plugged CoC combat into D&D you wouldn’t have D&D anymore. Combat would be too scary for the Hack n Slash feel that D&D aims for and this break in ambiance would make the game unrecognizable.Most systems don’t understand this, so they take D&D combat mechanics and just plug it into another world. As long as it is a hack n slash world, maybe it’ll kinda work.If you are building a combat system LOOK at what is out there and play a bunch of them. Each mechanics rewards or penalizes certain aspects of the game so THAT’S what you want! Mechanics that help your game feel RIGHT in the story you want to tell!Health, Damage and Healing have a huge effect on the Story of your combat system: Do wounded characters take penalties as they get damaged, or are they tip top and then suddenly unconscious? How many hits with an average weapon and strength/skill does it take to drop a PC? How difficult or slow is healing? Changing these values has HUGE effects on your game feel and on character design, especially Healing speed and frequency.Armor, Weapons and CRUNCH are important, but less so than the previous. Does armor make you harder to hit, or does it absorb damage? Do the weapons have meaningful differences or do they all generally do the same thing? Is there a mechanic for getting a Critical Hit or doing exceptionally good damage? Something where the PCs would go “YEAH, take THAT” or “Oh sh**”? Is an individual action a single dice roll or are there charts and saving throws and looking up rules? (Not all bad! MERPS has hella cool tables and Morrow Project had an aiming receptacle to determine hit location!)Magic may not exist in your world but I gotta say, I believe there are fewer well loved systems WITHOUT some type of Magic (or Mutant Powers or Psionics or the like) than there are Magical ones. Is everyone magic, or just some people? Is magic distrusted and feared or considered just an approach to problem solving? Does magic just happen, or do you need tools or special substances for it to work? Can you cast spells in combat or only as rituals with hours of prep time? Does magic have inherent side effects (Like the corruption from chaos from Warhammer, or Sanity loss in Call of Cthulu or Paradox from MtA)?Other Forms Of Combat or Damage, like the Sanity mechanic in Call of Cthulu, or Corruption in a demonic themed game. The more powers you call upon, the more likely you are to be taken over and lost as a PC. Can a player Hack certain types of enemies and either disable or convert them to your cause? Can your divine or profane characters Turn or Banish certain enemies outright? One system had Luck dice that would be traded back and forth from PC to GM and back as needed.Encumbrance and Exhaustion. Do you care that one player has “Viking Longboat” written on his character sheet? Is there a penalty for fighting for hours or days at a time? Can you wear full plate and sprint from fight to fight? These are unpopular choices but VERY much add to the pain, and flavor, of a game if you deem them critical enough to monitor. Encumbrance in a Fantasy Game seems overkill and nitpicky, but in a Zombie Apocalypse game it’s a well established part of the genre you CAN’T just take the entire grocery store worth of supplies with you!Weird Stuff. I’m not suggesting these, but knowing that others have gone here maybe will inspire you. A Wild West game where you use Poker Cards instead of dice, or a mystical game where key aspects of tarot cards replace a key mechanic in combat. Or Rock/Paper/Scissors/Lizard/Spock. Or an App on everyone’s phone that you use to determine outcomes in combat. I’d be super cautious about these but, they DO exist.Play around with these options and see what kinds of STORY you get from these combat systems because in the end, if your battle system doesn’t support the feel of your story it will fail, no matter how cool you think it is. :(

It usually defines some - or in some cases all - of their attributes; attributes in RPG terms, as present on a character sheet.“Peak human” means the highest value that it is possible for a normal human, a non-superhuman to have, based on:maximum genetic factorsmaximum trainingor both in synergy.“Low superhuman” then means one notable step above that. Most RPG systems use a sufficiently coarse-grained scale that low superhuman is simply 1 point higher than peak human.To use my (as of yet unfinished) RPG design project, Sagatafl, as an example, where all Primary Attributes are genetic in nature:the human (homo sapiens) average value is 3the maximum possible value is 9 (anything above 9 will always be magical enhancement, the use of technology at least quite a bit beyond what we have today, or fairly drastic genetic modification which in virtually all cases needs to be done before or during foetal development in order to be realistic)and as -4 is defined as complete absence of ability, the lowest a human can have is usually -3, which for any primary attribute would be absolutely, incredibly crazily cripplingWell, I might as well present the whole list of general-purpose (primary) attribute definitions, although do note that 11 is not the maximum of the scale.11 Clearly superHuman (beyond low SH)10 Mildly superHuman (low SH)9 Human maximum (peak)8 Famously High (serious auto-Fame starts happening here)7 Extremely High6 Very High5 High4 Above Average3 Average2 Below Average1 Handicapped0 Crippled-1 Very Crippled-2 Limited Ability-3 Almost no Ability-4 No Ability(Each point above average is 1 standard deviation, and each point below average is about 1.5 standard deviations, so the breadth of the 3 areas indicated above, poor, average and high performance, covers attribute values of 1 to 6 - anything higher or lower is outside that range, the very thin tail ends of the bell curve.)Peak human is thus a 9, and low superhuman is 10.Anything above 10 is beyond low superhuman (and as Sagatafl isn’t in fact concerned with modelling high-powered superheroes - the only phenomenon that I have no interest in simulating - it’s not a problem that the system starts breaking down in ridiculous ways when you throw values much higher than 12–13 - or maybe 14 - at it).Some superheroes are defined, explicitly or implicitly, as being at “maximum possible that is not superhuman” for one or usually several (sometimes, but very rarely, all) attributes, although of course superhero creators and superhero writers don’t always slice up the attribute pie the same way Sagatafl does.Captain America, for instance, is peak physical attributes.For the genetic primarly attributes, Dexterity and Agility he’s a 9, and possibly also for Constitution. He certainly has a gigantic Endurance interval, and he might have a lot of Combat Fatigue Points he can burn.However, his “I can do this all day” line from one of the movies indicates that he’s very, very capable even when not using any extra effort. Maybe he is strongly towards the red fibre muscle type end of the spectrum? Or perhaps the super serum changed him to be that way?The character creation advice for Sagatafl is that if you want to build a warrior then you should lean a bit towards white, pick Minor White Muscle Fibre Type, but if you want to build a soldier, you should lean a bit towards red, Minor Red Muscle Fibre Type.So if the serum was designed with creating a super soldier in mind, it fits that either it leaves Muscle Fibre alone (based on the assumption that only capable soldiers will be selected for the upgrade) or else induces a shift towards red, or a shift towards red only if normal or white.After all, soldiers tend to Jog around with longarms and hide in trenches and bunkers, not Run around and kick and punch people (even people severely in need of being punched)…Strength is the odd one out, in Sagatafl, as it’s trainable (so, naturally, it’s a Secondary Attribute). Plus the whole thing where Captain America grows taller (much taller!) and develops a more wide-and-broad-shouldered Nordic-type bone structure because of the super serum. That’s wildly unrealistic.Neither the Height nor Build stats are supposed to change at all after physical adulthood, as they are genetic, yet Rogers goes from what looks like Height 3 (168 cm, average height for a medieval man) or less to Height 4.5 (183 cm, taller than an average modern man), and from what looks like Build 2 to Build 5 or so (I’m probably Build 4, and my shoulders aren’t that broad!).Crazy unrealistic!But anyway, the maximum human Strength in Sagatafl is 10, but it’s also hard capped by twice the character’s Build, with Build 3 being average (I’m Build 4, while the typical value for a Scandinavina man is probably 3.5) and Build being able to be as high as at least 6 (I haven’t made a final decision yet), and it being more difficult, requiring more effort/time, to train your Strength up to a value that equals twice your Build (so Build 5.5 is useful), and to a lesser extent up to 1 below 2xBuild (thus, Build 6.0 is useful too).It’s not particularly clear what Build Captain America has, it could be anywhere from 4.5 to 5.5, but his muscles might not be natural (in spite of how the super serum is described some of the time), in the same way that Peter Parker is extremely much stronger than he looks, and it seems to me as if his Strength, his ability to lift things (which is easier to observe than how hard he can punch or kick) is notably beyond the humanly possible, meaning he’s 2–3 times as strong. (Although again, those could be extra effort lifts, burning Combat Fatigue Points. We don’t see him doing it as often as The Hulk).On top of primary attributes, Captain America also has or should have some good derived attributes, especially Reflexes which basically needs to be extremely high in order to enable him to survive in a combat-heavy superhero context, enabling him to do things that even someone like Black Widow can’t do. The derivation of Reflexes is undefined as of yet (I had an old one, but I’m unhappy with it) but might be from Dexterity, Intelligence and Perception. Assuming a weighted average, Cap won’t have a very high score there, in superhero terms, but it’s very plausible that the super serum boosted his Reflexes directly.Balance? Well, yeah, he needs that too, but as it’s based on Agility and then modified by the Reflexes modifier, it’ll automaticaly be extremely high on its own, so that works as it should.PhysTrain is derived from Constitution and Will, so that goat basically shaves itself. It’s possible that the serum boosted PhysTrain further, beyond the derived value. It requires a lot of training to maintain that much muscle mass, and even more so that much Endurance (since Captain American only ever rarely actually challenges his cardiovascular system by doing extreme efforts of endurance), and we don’t see him training much.I’m honestly indifferent to whether or not his PhysTrain was boosted by +2 by the serum. It’ll be extremely high either way, and since it’s not a tabletop RPG campaign, where characters must choose how to spend their time, including spending many hours per week on maintaining muscle Strength and CV fitness, time that could otherwise have been spent on other things, it’s not so important..Other characters, from superhero fiction or from elsewhere, may be at peak in some of the same or other attributes. Will is one possibility (I don’t think Captain America has Will 9, but he definitely has extremely high Will).Sherlock Holmes is an obvious example of a fictional character with Perception 9. He’s not superhuman, but he is incredibly perceptive.“Everything. That is my curse.”- Holmes, when asked what he sees. “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)Of course, he doesn’t see everything. But he does see 99.999% of what is humanly perceptible. And hear 99.999% of what is humanly perceptible. And smell 99.999% of what is humanly perceptible.A realistic Holmes cannot do anything about stimuli that are so faint as to be beyond the human threshold of perception, i.e. any Sense Roll with a Roll Difficulty of 13 or higher.For that, you need an animal (or humanoid, such as a felinoid) whose relevant Sense is more acute than a human’s. Cats and dogs typically lower Sound and Smell RDs by 2 (a realistic felinoid maybe by 1 each), but a bloodhound would lower Smell RDs by 4. Even though it is rolling fewer dice than Holmes, since it doesn’t have Perception 9, it has a chance to detect olfactory stimuli that Holmes is guaranteed not to notice.Or for that matter a human with Sense that is more acute than normal. Humans with a -1 RD bonus to most or likely all Senses can and do exist (in the same way that most felinoids lower Hear/Smell RDs by 1, some specimens are born with particularly acute ears or noses, lowerign that RD by 2).And it’s possible Holmes has -1 RD to all Senses. As far as I know, Doyle wasn’t inclined to create proper sheets for his characters.(I know there is at least one write-up for Holmes in an old edition of GURPS Horror, and the Castle Falkenstein RPG might have a write-up too (I’ve read that Doyle and Holmes are separate NPCs in that setting). GURPS Mysteries contains a generic Great Detective write-up, suitable for a Holmes or Poirot (the author, Lisa J. Steele, advises to tone down the IQ stat for a more modest character, such as Columbo). But GURPS doesn’t deal with graduated sensory stimuli thresholds, and I’d be really surprised if Falkenstein did.)One thing Holmes would have, blatantly obviously, is Trained Perception, to reduce his penalty for Casual Perception rolls (most serious detectives learns this in the field, including politice detectives and field investigator FBI agents, after some years or at most a decade), and Trained Observer, to enable him to make Observe Maneuvers faster.And he was probably also born with HyperAttentive too, to further reduce his Casual Perception penalty (to zero - that’s what makes him really awesome, that even for casual Perception rolls he rolls all 9d12).Hyper-Awareness - TV TropesHe is also extremely likely to have been born with Talented Observer too, further speeding up his Observe Maneuver times.Being able to perform Observe Maneuvers quickly is clearly going to be very useful for doing a Sherlockian Gaze, regardless of what way I eventually end up squaring that circle.(In fact, since I need Sherlockian Gaze to be learnable, in principle, one of the ways to make it less useful for most people to learn it is to have the inborn Talented Observer specifically, and Observe Maneuver time in general, be an important factor in usefulness: If you can’t use the ability at a single glance, you come across as creepy, staring intently at the target for many Seconds or even a full Minute, and/or you may not have enough time to actually use the ability.)Sherlock Scan - TV Tropesand(Note how blatantly unrealistic the above scene is. Albert Stroller has to use the gang’s shared superpower, stopping time, in order to perform a Sherlockian Gaze on the man, because neither he nor Danny Blue can perform Observe maneuvers quickly enough under normal circumstances.Also note that the terminology is wrong. Cold reading is a feedback-based technique, used by fortune tellers and other charlatans, as well as by legit entertainment mentalists. Woody Harrelson’s character, in “ Now You See Me”, makes very, very good use of cold reading, speaking very rapidly while closely observing the mark’s facial expression and posture, and possibly also his breath pattern. Quite likely well beyond what cold can realistically do, at least in terms of speed/time used, but it’s an example.The Gestapo character, Major von Hapen, also uses cold reading on Mary Ellison, in “Where Eagles Dare”, a much more realistic depiction, this time including skin-to-skin contact so that he can feel her pulse going up, when she’s increasingly unable to pass as someone who was born in his home city, Düsseldorf.).A non-fictional character, a historical character, who may very well have had Intelligence 9, is my absolute favourite renaissance man, Leonardo of Vinci.“Absolutely ridiculous. I don’t paint.”- Tony Stark, Iron Man (2008)So is Tony Stark Intelligence 9?No.I think he’s actually higher.While he is less versatile than Leonardo, intelligence only defines an individual’s potential, and Stark has simply chosen to (or possibly not had the opportunity to) not explore and exploit the full breadth of his inborn potential, but instead focused on the (still fairly broad) multiple fields of engineering, science and technology. And that whole cave-with-a-box-of-scraps thing… I do think that suggests Stark is supehumanly intelligent. Notably, but not by much. That’s exactly Intelligence 10.(In another answer, not yet finished, I derive that Rick Sanchez’ Intelligence in Sagatafl would probably be 13, and thus his real-world IQ is 250 (at SD 15), since each point of Intelligence above 3 is 1 SD while (each point below 3 is more like 1.5 SD.))Intelligence 10 is consistent with truly incredible intellectual achievements, including creative achievements, such as invention - but it’s notable that Stark didn’t invent the arc reactor; his father did. And Stark himself built a large Arc reactor long before the events in that cave in Afghanistan. The real achievement was massively(!) miniaturizing an already-existing piece of technology. Provided that the Creative derived stat is also extremely high (checkmark for Stark, checkmark for Leonardo), and that the relevant skills are high enough, such as Physics, various Engineering skills, and so forth.It’s also worth noting that Stark isn’t the only genius “on that tier” in the MCU, or even in the Marvel comics universe.Far from it.There’s Reed Richards (not currently owned by Disney/Marvel, but they might get rights to the F4 back soon), Hank Pym, and Peter Parker too.The Wakandan princess Shuri from “Black Panther” is said to be notably more intelligent than Stark.So is she Intelligence 11? She might well be. Taking into account Sanchez at 13, there’s plenty of room on the scale even though it is deliberately very coarse-grained.(In comparison, the typical Intelligence of someone with a PhD is 5, and the typical Intelligence of a science Nobel Prize winner is 7... Someone famously smart, such as Einstein or Feynman, would be an 8, corresponding to an IQ of 175.)And that’s also important, the use of a coarse-grained scale. Some RPG systems use a very fine-grained scale, where e.g. human attributes are defined on something like a 1–100 or 20–100 or 20–90 scale.(Rolemaster does this, and MERP too; I don’t know what HARP does... The system used in the first four Elder Scrolls CRPGs also used a 1–100 scale. Darklands seems to be using a percentile scale for attributes although it’s unclear since they very rarely - if ever - go higher than mid 40s, unlike the skills. The SPECIAL system used in the first Fallout CRPGs is an example of a coarse-gained scale, 1–10).In such a case, obviously “low superhuman” doesn’t mean 101 or 91, respectively.“Low superhuman” needs to mean “notably”, ”noticably”, better than it’s possible for a human to be..Another superhero interesting to look at is Batman. What’s he like?I did a partial look-into on this issue, some years ago, exploring what kind of character creation currency budget you might need to create him (can he be done on 240 GP? The answer was “almost certainly yes”), looking only at primary attribute costs, since he is an incredibly expensive gentleman to build largely for that reason (if you’re through-the-roof potential in most or even all primary attributes, then skills are going to be fairly cheap).I ended up deciding that he probably doesn’t have any 9s, with Will being the most obvious case where he might be a 9.But he has a whole lot of 7s and 8s.Intelligence 8 is obvious, beause whenever he’s contrasted with the other Justice League members, Batman is the smart one, preparing for every single fucking contingency, whereas when they operate alone, I’m sure, in their own stories, many of the other members can actually think remarkably well. Because, you know, superhero fiction isn’t usually as great on capabilitistic consistency as serious tabletop RPG campaigns have to be.Then it’s arguable whether he has Dexterity 7 or 8, Agility 7 or 8, and Perception 7 or 8 (in the DC comics, he’s frequently defined as “the greatest detective” ever - but I still don’t think he can rival Holmes on Perception, or that he’s even meant to).Batman is at least Constitution 7 (I’m thinking he does have a bunch of Endurance levels - but far fewer than Captain America - and then a truckload of Combat Fatigue Points to burn for intense physical actions. Unlike Cap I don’t have a mental image of Batman doing a huge amount of long-distance Running. Take whatever number of Endurance levels is required to Jog a marathon in a reasonable time, whatever that ends up being, then add 1 more. That’s all Batman needs. He’s not a soldier. He’s a warrior. Of the ambush predator variant, not the long-range direct action type).It’s important not to overlook Charisma.Unlike Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne isn’t always meek and unassuming, and as Batman he is very, very intimidating. Charisma, in RPG terms, is often misunderstood as likability, but it’s not (although it does form the basis for Impression Rolls, except when you need to use Casual Charisma). The Intimidation skill is heavily based on it, for instance. But again, he’s not at peak. And he also invests quite heavily in Reputation-building. Charisma 7 might function, but I think this is the one of the cases where it’s most important to err on the side of caution and say 8. After all, how did he build this Reputation in the first place? Oh yeah, that’s right, he did it by using his Intimidation skill to scare the shit out of criminals, again and again and again!(Agility is the second most important case - Batman needs to not get hit, and the Dodge skill is heavily based on Agility, so he should probably have Agility 8.)So with Batman not being at peak human at anything, except possibly Will (because, you know, I do get some energizer bunny vibes from Captain “I can do this all day” America, but they’re much stronger from Batman), what is he?Well, what he is is a term very frequently used in superhero RPG design and discussion:He is a supernormal, a superhero without superpowers and without superhuman attribute values (one created within the confines of not exceeding stats that it is humanly possible to have).Peak human, for a Sagatafl primary attribute, is a 9 (for secondary attributes, tertiary attributes, derived attributes, and so forth, maximum values are usually something other than 9, and some may not have a directly defined maximum value, instead relying on maxima that apply to the stats that the derived stat is derived from, so that there is an emergent maximum but no rules-mandated one)Low superhuman is a 10, in a primary attributeAnd a supernormal is someone who doesn’t go beyond peak human in anything and doesn’t have any innate superpowers, but who can still participate alongside traditionally powered superheroes as a peer. Often they’re martial artists (unarmed, swords, archery) and/or acrobats (Batman’s Robin, Black Widow), or inventors (although in fact many such inventors aren’t realistic, if they’re confined to peak human Intelligence - certainly not that cave-gadgeteering genius playboy billionaire philanthropist!)