Blood and Justice - Character Creation

I'm currently working on a Google Doc (private at the moment) laying out the bare changes and mechanics of Blood and Justice: Superheroic Roleplaying Game, so I thought I'd take you as I go along.

For those of you that don't know, Mutants and Masterminds, the game B&J will be based on (Yes, I'm aware of the risque acronym, but I like the title Blood and Justice too much to give it up), uses a point buy system to build your characters. M&M calls them Power Points, but since that term is not OGL, I have renamed them into Justice Points.

You get an amount of JP based on the Power Level of the campaign, which at the standard Level 10 is 150 JP. These points can be spent to increase your attributes, buy skills, feats and powers, and attack and defense bonuses.

I'm changing some stuff around, though. In M&M, improving your saves (Fort, Reflex and Will) was a power, which is very silly to me. Instead, I've made increasing your save bonus part of the core JP purchase.

I've also added the Soak value, which was originally Amazing Save (Defense). Since I plan to use damage dice in B&J, this Soak value is basically a passive defense that will eat up damage inflicted on you. 1 JP will give you two points in Soak, meaning if you spend 8 JP on Soak, you'll have 16 Soak (ignoring the first 16 points of any attack).

Most of the JP costs have remained the same from M&M, but I am currently trying to figure out skills. Instead of the 40 skills in M&M 1e, I am going to use 14 skills from the 3rd edition of M&M (not including the combat skills). This means that less skills do more, so I'm altering the JP cost for 1 point of skill rank to either cost 2 or 3 JP (leaning more towards 3)

Anyway, this will all come out in testing, but it seems fairly solid to me. Next up I'll talk about attributes, which aren't too different

Blood and Justice - Planning

So like I said, I am starting some preliminary work on a rules-lite hack of Mutants and Masterminds 1e for Blood & Treasure, and though try as I might, some things in B&T just can't work on the levels that M&M can escalate too.

So what's staying in B&T?

- All of the combat system, including movement, encumbrance and so on
- Status and environmental effects
- Advantage/Disadvantage

And what's not

- Reverting to 3.5 skill ranks
- Reverting to 3.5 saves

And what's new!

- A full adaptation of the HP damage rules from M&M, including Soak rules and better integration of knockback
- Possibly a sample setting
- Hopefully reduced feats as well
- Removal of Amazing Save as a power and being a core component (ala M&M 2e)

I tried hard to keep ranks and saves and rolls as is, but it's not really feasible, especially at higher levels. So really, I'm just standardizing skill rolls, which I don't feel is a large issue

For feats, I'm going to do away with pure skill bonus feats, as the system can already hit high levels without them. I'll also knock out any feats that don't apply by being too specific (like Blind Fight)

Stay tuned as I figure out more

What Do You Get...

When you combine Blood and Treasure with Mutants and Masterminds 1e?

A little something called Blood and Justice.

Keep your eyes peeled to this space for more