Wild Talents Advice

/WILD TALENTS ADVICE
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Here's how to tone down WT lethality:

1.) Miracles with the Attacks quality inflict Width in Killing as a default. You can reduce it to Width in Shock for -1 point, or increase it to Width in Shock and Killing for +1.

2.) Shock doesn't stack up into Killing. When a limb is full of Shock, any additional shock goes to the target's torso instead of piling up in that limb.

3.) Weapons with Spray don't add their rating as bonus dice.

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Maybe it's because I've been playing for years, but it's fairly easy for me and the other player with whom I share GMing to keep things balanced at the point where we want it. We haven't had any accidental party wipes and have dialed in the finer points of the system enough where there's little chance of anything really breaking as far as combat is concerned.

The real key, as you mentioned, is that everyone needs to be on the same page. If the players want to play the Justice League, then all of the PCs should fit into that theme, and you probably want to tailor the rules accordingly (which the rulebook includes suggestions for). If they want to Play X-Men, that's a whole different power level, and if they want to play in the Watchmen universe, that's another level still (and you probably want to keep them away from Dr. Manhatten). The point is that creating a party of characters in WT *must* be collaborative, because the game has practically no internal balancing mechanics. Even the point costs are practically meaningless; WT should have kept something along the lines of Godlike's Will Points for power creation instead of siloing it all together. As it stands, after 3 years of playing the game I pretty much do a new NPC's point calculation after the fact, out of personal curiosity.

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here's a list of things that have almost caused a tpk in my game,

1) the party got into a car crash
2) a hobo with a sniper rifle (though that was also my party being idiots)
3) botched grenade throw. a single grenade took half of them down (though they were slightly injured from suppressing fire)

and on top of that, I've had multiple people get one shot (or at least got knocked down to zero willpower. which is almost just as bad) from standard combat. And this is just me soft balling them. though to be fair they got better at the whole "not dying thing"
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