Customer Reviews

Godlike: Superhero Roleplaying in a World on Fire, 1936-1946

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Godlike is a game set in World War II that manages to play with and break most previous super-heroic conventions.

If you want to play 4-color All-Star Squadron type WWII capes and cowls, that option is there but the default setting for the game is a gritty and brutal world where the players don't wear costumes to show their powered status out of fear of enemy snipers taking them out.

The game probably owes more to George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards or Saving Private Ryan than standard super-hero comic books.

The book is self-contained and while supplements will be coming out, none are necessary to break the book out and play a successful campaign. Furthermore, in an alternate history game, a supplement is only a library (or an Amazon.com) away.

The system makes combat fast and brutal. Their O.R.E. (One Roll Engine) gives damage, hit location, and initiative in one easy to-hit roll. The character creation is also quite simple, a nice change from past super-hero systems with mind-numbing number crunching.

All in all I can't recommend this book enough, it is a great role-playing game.

One of the best superhero games on the market. Uniquely simple, the Godlike system allows for fast and easy play. There are some flaws in the system, namely hard dice, but no system is perfect. The setting is great and the book does a good job of developing the World War II era. My biggest problem with the book is that many original copies had poor binding. Luckily, the producers of the book will allow you to send it back and get a new book with good binding.
If you are a fan of superhero gaming, this is the game for you.

I've been a bit of a fan of Detwiller since picking up some of his Delta Green material awhile back, so I thought I'd take a look at his version of a superhero RPG. Godlike was originally released in 2001 through Pagan Publishing and is now supported by EOS Press, although there's only been one major supplement in the interim, "Wild Talents" in 2006.

This book introduces Detwiller's take on superheroics, which is basically that life is nasty, brutish, and short in wartime. The uber-legendary Talents amongst the cast of Allied and Axis NPCs top out at 150 building points--PCs generally will start with 25. This means that they'll have one pretty cool power, but with major limitations. Maybe you can lift a jeep, but you're as vulnerable to a round through the head as anyone else. Or perhaps you DO have the power of invulnerability to weapons fire--but only if you see it coming, which does you little good when a sniper's got a scope on you. Or you stumble into poison gas. Also, there are certain Talents (so-called Zeds) who suppress everyone's abilities just by walking into range. Even if that weren't a factor, when Talents battle each other, they tend to interfere with each other's powers and make them more difficult to use, so random bystanders can pick them off with a few carefully placed shots.

This is in keeping with Detwiller's overall intent--a consideration of why, if superheroes existed, they didn't just end WWII in four days on their own. In the Godlike world, the Talents are seldom powerful enough to have a chance to make really significant impacts. And there are literally tens of thousands of superpowered individuals, so whenever one of them might start wreaking havoc somewhere, a half-dozen opponents will quickly show up to stop him or her. Overall, the life expectancy of the average battlefront Talent is not good at all.

The game uses an interesting dice pool mechanic based solely on 10-siders. (Vaguely reminiscent of the d6 approach of West End's Star Wars RPG for you old-schoolers.) The higher your attribute or skill, the more dice you can sling. You want to get matches to succeed--the higher the pair (or trio, or quad...), the more awesome your success. Often, you only need a single match of any kind to succeed, but in other cases you have to get at least, say, a pair of sixes. So, a matching pair is critical, but as important is getting as many of a kind as possible, because that determines how fast you perform your action. So, if you roll five d10 and come up with a pair of 9s, you succeeded really well...but you didn't go as fast as the guy who rolled three 3s. This becomes important in combat situations because the faster guy can mess with the slower guy's roll. Depending upon your character build, you may also have paid building points at the outset to ensure that for a given skill or power you will ALWAYS have a pair of 10s in your pool, or you can always deploy a wild die to expand a matching pair into a triplet so you go faster.

The book includes plenty of stuff on how to create your character with attributes, skills, and powers (plus flaw if you need to cheapen the cost of desired builds), a list of equipment, weapons, and vehicles (but not in nerdy detail where the author feels compelled to expound on the virtues of the German Tiger II tank versus the Soviet T-34), background details on how the various combatants treated and deployed their Talents, and a huge section that goes through the entire war to list major battles and developments and the roles played by assorted Talents. Scattered throughout this last are sidebars about prominent Talents--when they manifested, what side they're on, what their powers are, what kind of background they have, and what they did in the war and, if they survived, in civilian life afterwards. (Ten of these NPCs are fully statted out toward the end of the book.) Memorable Talents are the Immortal, who is, well, immortal, to the point where his body reconstitutes itself even if completely destroyed; Lord Yama, apparently also immortal and evidently some kind of minor Indian god with the Word of Command who ends up founding his own nation of Assam; "Super-Man", who became ultra-powerful but vehemently anti-war, and who ended up with a lobotomy for his troubles; Aesgir, who could break nearly anything, was nearly invulnerable, and who could ferry entire groups of people through the pocket dimension of Valhalla (essentially a walking-speed teleport); and of course the out-of-control and completely mad Baba Yaga, who manifested through vile Soviet experiments on their own citizenry and who turned into a large hut on pincered tentacle-legs with enough strength to casually toss tanks around.

Detwiller brings an interesting authorial voice to this work, especially in his introduction, which is unusually frank for the industry. This particular work may not be to the taste of everyone, especially those who want their PCs to start out with powers at least in the Iron Man range, but for those who have been yearning to mix WWII squad-level combat with low-level gritty superpowered heroics, this'll be just the thing.

One of the reviewers of this book has a bias for the d20 system and it shows through, unfortunately, quite well. I'll tell you up front I have a bias as well, and its basis. After owning and playing both the d20 Modern RPG Core book and Godlike, it's Godlike I kept. Having played d20 once before and having played Godlike once before I will tell you Godlike allows for more rapid conflict and task resolution than d20.

There is no broken system here in Godlike. The rules are not very complex compared to what I've seen from d20. There are no classes that force you to move in lock-step within some arbitrary 'level'. You build a character with a certain number of points. On the second page of the character creation chapter there is a summary called "How To Make A Character". The first thing it tells you is "Talk to your GM (gamemaster)". If you want/need more points to create the character you want then follow the instructions. The worst thing he or she will probably say is 'no'.

The art direction, layout and typesetting for this book works for me. It all goes to reinforce the feeling that the war this book deals with is serious business without flogging you with angst or despair.

The d10 dice pool mechanics provide for a bell curve, explained on the second page of the game mechanics chapter. Even the hypertext d20 System Resource Document recommends using three d6 if you want a bell curve in a d20 game.

The gaming community need this game ported to d20 like a fish needs a bicycle. There are many d20 sourcebooks out there for running supers and there are many d20 sourcebooks out there for running WW2 adventures. Godlike blends both genres in a superb fashion. The ORE engine is not d20. I can't tell anyone it's better, for the same reason I can't tell anyone raspberry is better than strawberry. I can tell anyone reading this review that if you want a fun gaming experience that doesn't collide with the rules that are supposed to help bring the experience to fruition that you owe it to yourself to go to the website at arcdream dot com and download the Godlike quick play rules and the tutorial. Then consider buying this book. I doubt very much you'll regret the purchase. Thank you for your time.

This is a very impressive game, and even if you don't role-play, the background info is worth reading for the pure enjoyment. Two things stop me from giving it the 5 stars it would otherwise deserve: A weak binding (at least on my copy), which makes me scared to reread it for fear it'll start falling apart; and all the typos. It's hard to believe that with all the care, the skill, and the sheer LOVE that was obviously put into this book, it was sent to the printers with multiple, really distracting typos on every page. I hope there will be a second edition soon to fix those problems, because otherwise, it's 5 stars all the way.

We went to Gencon this year, and one of the games we played was this one. We had always wanted to see what it was like, and were pleasantly surprised. The book is so well researched that the feel of the era and the war is brilliantly executed. It's also not 4 colour superheroes, it is a 'grittier' sort. You play ordinary people who have developed one power, often a very limited power with drawbacks. This makes you better than the average soldier, however, so Uncle Sam wants YOU! The first person to develop these powers was a German, and so it gives more fuel to the Nazi fire.

The writing is good, the lay out is great, and the mechanics are interesting and well thought out so as to make the game go fast. Brilliant!

Where to start...How 'bout the introduction. It gives a good amount of information on what to expect in the game, what went into designing the game, items you'll need to play, reference materials for background to the game (not required) and a good glossary of terms.
Next- Game Mechanics. We're getting to the meat now. This is a well written section (as is the entire book) that discribes how to resolve actions, combat and damage. It uses a dice pool based on 10 sided dice. Higher numbers are better and you look for matching numbers for the result, so the larger the die pool, the better. One roll will give you both how well you succeed and your damage (if your in combat). VERY easy once you get used to it.
Pt. Three is Character Creation-These six pages give you the info you'd need to make a basic character. Each character is detailed using six stats. Once you've assigned your points to your character is time to move on to-
Pt. Four- Talents (aka-Powers) These sixty two pages will finish up your character. Talents range from Flight to Healing to Transform. Each power is bought in terms of # of dice (dicepools..) and are powered with your WILL characteristic. No Will? NO Power!
The rest of the book contains Background material for the time (World War 2) along with information on various "super-men" from around the world. The whole book has a good 40's feel to it by using photos (some doctored, some not) like the "Time" magazine with the "Indestructible Man" on the cover.
Also, a "Field Manual" is included covering the firearms, tanks, artillery, etc of WW2. As is a section on running a "Godlike" Campaign.
Finally, besides a great index, are the "Open Game Content" rules. Yes, you can play Godlike with the d20 system if you'd like to.
Overall, a terrific product and one of the best RPG products produced this year. A few typos here and there, but if you're interested in World War 2 and Super Hero gaming, this is the book to get.

There is a bunch of things to like about both the game system and the world offered by this RPG. While not unique, the dice-pooling system allows combat to proceed at a decent enough pace to keep the main meat of the story from being bogged down. The background is well thought out and the writers did a good job weaving their differences into the real WW2 history, but they wasted far too many pages going over the small non-changed details when a simple timeline would have presented the material just as well while taking up far less space.

On the down side, the list of skills is not anywhere near where the skills are bought - and the master list itself contains a great number of inconsistencies. Both the Editor and Binder should be taken outside for a good thrashing. There are so many grammatical errors throughout the book that you don't even attempt to understand anymore. However, it is those cases where entire paragraphs end up contradicting previous paragraphs that will have you really scratching your head. The binding is just so bad its not worth re-hashing the issue - think the original Champions BBB binding.

In conclusion, this is a solid effort and welcome addition to the superhero RPG arena. It still needs a great number of rough edges knocked off, but by its 2nd or 3rd edition I believe it could stand as an equal with any other the top-tier RPG.

Greatest Strength: World feeling
Greatest Weakness: Will system

It is WW2. Nazi Germany has expanded its reign of terror throughout Europe with the help of individuals with paranormal powers that defy the laws of man and God. But these individuals do not go unchecked, for on the side of freedom are those with amazing talents of their own. Individuals willing to fight and die for their families, beliefs, and their country. Welcome to the roleplaying game GODLIKE.

I wanted to like this game. I really did. Unfortunately, you have to be Godlike to fully understand the game system. First, the primary system is not D20, its d10. Gamers familiar with the White Wolf games such as Vampire: The Masquerade (or most recently Demon: The Fallen) understand the dice pool system. Characters have X number of dice to roll depending on their attributes and skills. The storyteller sets a difficulty for success from 1 to 10. The more successes you roll, the more complete your success is.

But then the creators felt the need to present D20 rules, in of all places the appendix, for those looking for rules more compatible with The Game (the book's not-so-veiled reference to the traditional Wizards of the Coast system). And this is where Godlike is anything but. In its attempt to embrace the best of the d10, d20, and the tri-stat system, Godlike becomes messy and convoluted.

Characters have six base stat scores: Body, Coordination, Sense, Brains, Command, and Cool. A rank of 1 is below average, a 2 is average, and 5 is the highest. Players automatically start with one point in each stat. Then you get six additional points to spend between the stats. That's not much. You either end up with a dead-average character or an individual with one or two really good stats and several below average ones.

You get 20 points to spend on skills, but no skill can be higher than its related Stat. So if you want a swim skill of 2, you need a body stat of 2. Designing a sniper with a rifle of 4? You need a Coordination of 4 as well (which means at least two other stats are a 1).

The stats, skills, and combat rules are explained in part two. Part three explains character creation. Yes, we learn how to run combat before we design our character. Part four explains the special talents that set the Godlike apart from mortal men and women. At least, it appears to be an explanation, but I got lost when they started talking about hard dice and wiggle dice and how to purchase them (apparently they provide automatic successes somehow). Talents and the special dice are purchases out of a point pool assigned by the storyteller based on the level of game he wants to run, much like the tri-stat system used by Guardians of Order.

Parts five and six are actually the best parts of the book, as they provide the details of the Godlike setting from 1938 to 1945. The timeline is nicely done to include important figures among those who possess Talents and their place in the world. If it wasn't for the price tag, I might suggest getting the book just for the information in these two chapters and then using D20 Modern to create a similar game.

Godlike's cause is not helped by its bland design. It is poorly illustrated with what looks like generic clip art and black and white war photos. I fear the binding would not hold up to frequent use. My reviewer's copy is already showing signs of wear.

Hardcore gamers with experience in different game systems may find Godlike entertaining once they wade through the rules. The game does nothing, however, for new gamers or gamers who only play the d20 system. While the story has the potential for an exciting and dynamic game, its designers were so intent on not being like The Game that they destroyed the system entirely. I would be very interested in seeing this storyline redone under traditional d20 system rules. Both the game and the gaming community would be well served if this happened.