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Godlike?

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robh:
Does anyone here play these rules either as an RPG or skirmish?
How quickly do they resolve game actions such as searches or combat? How many characters could a player handle in a game?
Would you recommend them?

Chief Lackey Rich:
Godlike is an RPG, and definitely aimed at the traditional one character per player.  An experienced player could also run a few non-powered GI NPCs as backup, they're a lot more basic than any Talent is and numbers mean a lot in the game, since many supers are not all that durable against military weapons.  Just don't get attached to any of your allied grunts, because they can die in an instant.  I can't see trying to force it into being a tabletop skirmish game.  You'd do better with either one of Four-Color Figures' many rules sets for that, or by using a more "wargame-like" RPG like Champions/Hero Syetem or even Villains & Vigilantes.

Combat is fairly quick and bloody by supers RPG standards, much faster than Champions generally is, a bit slower than (say) the Sentinel Comics RPG or Tiny d6 Supers.  Not quite sure what you mean by searches so I can't speak to that - although the game certainly supports playing as a Talent-centered recon unit if you have the right kinds of powers and training.  I'd give both Godlike and its sequel Wild Talents a rec just for their settings alone, although the game mechanics themselves might not be to everyone's liking.  They feel a bit counterintuitive at times, and they are quite a bit more lethal than most supers games or comics usually are.  Think "The Boys Meet Saving Private Ryan" rather than Golden or Silver Age comics.

robh:
Thanks for the response, very useful.
I have no interest in gaming superheroes as a genre but am considering adding Captain America or Red Skull type characters to an occult themed WWW2 project.

Godlike looks interesting as Talents do not seem totally game dominant like Marvel characters.
I am considering mining it for ideas on how the powers work in game terms, how they may fit with something like Achtung Cthulhu or Verdammnis. But at $20 for a pdf it is a pricey purchase just to read a couple of pages.

Chief Lackey Rich:
You might be better off with West Wind's Secrets of the Reich minis rules, then.  It explicitly includes rules for adding some low-power supers to the rest of the Weird War II stuff.

That said, some of the setting lore for Godlike is online if you poke around a bit.  I couldn't find anything as exhaustive as the modified event timeline in the core book, but there might be something helpful and cheap.  The setting assumes (IIRC) thousands of Talents manifesting during the War, primarily in countries that were active combatants, rather than the few dozen that many Golden Age settings seem to have.  They definitely aren't invulnerable and casualties are heavy (particularly on D-Day, where Allied Talents were used in huge numbers to minimize losses to the regular troops), but their powers can be hugely impactful.  Their main limitation is vulnerability to interference from other Talents (a "clash of wills" can override anyone's powers) and most can be killed easily by attacks they aren't ready for, so surprise attacks, snipers, artillery, etc. can do the job on all but a few Talents.  They can also run out of Willpower, a currency that fuels their reality altering powers and mostly gets used in the aforementioned "clash of wills" thing.

There are a very few (less than a handful) "Wild Talents" who don't follow the normal rules and can absolutely dominate a battlefield.  They aren't under anyone's real control though, and at least one (the Russian "Baba Yaga" - a code name, not the mythological figure) is flat out insane and works more like a kaiju than anything.  The sequel game (set in the 1960s) revolves around a new generation of much stronger Wild Talent-like supers, and gets more into transhumanism and supers-versus-norms questions than Godlike, which is more of a survival/war story game.

robh:
Thank you for the help. I like the background to Godlike so will pick up a copy when I see it at an impulse buy price. DriveThru never go long without discounting older games.

I won't run it as written as I want ideas for a skirmish game rather than another RPG, plus the H x W dice mechanic is so different to anything we have played before that trying to explain it everytime would be a non-starter (I am not sure without playing it that I even understand it to be honest).

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