The Battlesuit Hero

    One of the classic hero types since the Silver Age of Comics is the battlesuit hero.  Unlike most hero types, who are either non-powered that rely on skill and use mostly "mundane" technology (such as Batman and Hawkeye) or have innate powers (Superman, Spider-Man), the battlesuit hero relies almost entirely on a suit of powered armor, typically with built-in weaponry.  The most iconic of the battlesuit heroes is, of course, Tony Stark/Iron Man; there are others, of course, owned by Marvel, DC, Image, and smaller companies.
    There are four basic methods to produce a battlesuit hero in GURPS: Signature Gear, a set of Advantages with various Gadget modifiers, as an Ally, and as an Alternate Form.  I'll discuss each of the four methods.

Signature Gear
    The Signature Gear method is the simplest of the four methods used to build such a character: build the battlesuit as a piece of gear, determine its price tag, if necessary adjust for being a higher TL item, and purchase the whole thing with the Signature Gear Advantage.
    On the one hand, this method may be preferred due to its simplicity.  However, this method requires that the battlesuit has a price tag.  If using one of the suits in GURPS Ultra-Tech or adapting from a design built using GURPS Classic: Vehicles or GURPS Classic: Mecha, the price in G$ is relatively easy to obtain.  On the other hand, it is not always appropriate for one-of-a-kind suits (like most of Iron Man's suits).
    As an example, let's take a TL10 Commando Battlesuit (Ultra-Tech, p. 183, 186).  At TL10, it costs $80,000; in a typical modern-day superhero setting this could appear at TL8 as a prototype.  Due to being two tech levels above the setting, the price is quadrupled, for $320,000.  At TL8, each point in Signature Gear nets a value of $10,000; this means the suit requires "Signature Gear (Commando Battlesuit) [32]".  In addition, Signature Gear means the suit has some form of "plot protection", enabling it to get replaced if stolen or destroyed.
    This cheap price can be useful in a fairly low-powered (250 points) setting.  I don't recommend using this method for 500+ point campaigns.

As an Ally
    As explained in The Captain's Boat (Pyramid #3/71, pp. 32-33), a vehicle - and here I count battlesuits, especially those supported by an integral AI - may be purchased as a base 5-point Ally, without adjusting for Frequency of Appearance.  More customized battlesuits can be built with a higher base Ally cost.
    For a battlesuit hero on a strict point budget (say, 150 points), this can be considered the most cost-effective method.  On the other hand, it is often considered a "point crock," as it makes owning or operating a battlesuit too affordable for some games; a character can get a major benefit for only a handful of points.

Advantages with Gadget Limitations
    The method taken by GURPS Supers is to treat the battlesuit as a set of Advantages, each possessing the "Gadget/Can Be Stolen (Must Be Forcibly Removed) (-10%)" limitation, often accompanied with a few Temporary Disadvantages (Electrical, Maintenance, and Unhealing are common).
    From the point of view of point costs, this is one of the fairer methods, especially when compared to various brick and blaster builds.  However, it can be a pain during character generation, especially when trying to add the limitations for every advantage in the suit.  To offset this, I recommend using a variation of the "Meta-Enhancement" rule from GURPS Power-Ups 4: Enhancements, treating a set of limitations as a single "Meta-Limitation", writing just the Meta-Limitation name (e.g. "Battlesuit, -40%") on each advantage, and a note on the sheet detailing which limitations are used.
    This method often has other questions asked during character generation: "If a part of the suit has is supposed to be Gadget/Breakable, what SM is the relevant body part?" "Do I need Switchable and/or Takes Extra Time on everything in order to don the armor?"  The GM must be ready to answer these questions.  A player may get frustrated with this method and decide to choose a different type of character, one not quite so complicated.

    (Sadly, I'm currently lacking an example build, as the build I was going to use as an example has been replaced by an Alternate Form build.)

Alternate Form
    My current preferred method: build the suit as if it was a racial package and calculate it as an Alternate Form.  This lets you define the Advantages without needing to specify a gaggle of Gadget and Temporary Disadvantages.  Such traits are defined as full-fledged Disadvantages in the racial package.
    After determining the point cost of the "racial" package for the battlesuit, the Alternate Form advantage on the primary character sheet is calculated: 15 + (90% of the racial package cost).  At this point, add the Gadget/Can Be Stolen (Forcibly Removed) limitation directly to the Alternate Form trait.  If it takes longer than 10 seconds to don the armor, you can use the Takes Extra Time limitation (p. B115) to extend the time.
    On the plus side, if the character owns multiple suits he can change into, each additional suit of equal or lower point value is worth only 15 points.
    Here is one build for a battlesuit with wings:

634 points
Attribute Adjustments: ST +24 [240].
Advantages: Clinging [20]; Combat Reflexes (Accessibility: Only On Opponents Whose Style Is Programmed In, -20%) [12]; Damage Resistance 12 (Partial: Torso and Groin Only, -5%; Hardened 1, +20%) [69]; Damage Resistance 30 [150]; Electrolaser: Burning Attack 1d (Link, +10%) [6] plus Affliction 4 (HT-3; Link, +10%) [44]; Enhanced Move (Air) 1.5 [30]; Flight (Winged, -25%) [30]; Infravision [9]; Ladar (Targeting Only, -40%) [12]; Protected Vision [5]; Sealed [15]; Telecommunications (Radio) [10].
Perks: Accessory: Personal Computer [1].
Disadvantages: Electrical [-20].

On the main character sheet, I list the following:
Advantages: Alternate Form (Battlesuit) (Gadget/Can Be Stolen: Forcibly Removed, -10%) [585]

    (Yes, this is my build for the Beetle for my Marvel Reboot project.  I would have used Iron Man as an example, but I'm still working on his suits' racial packages.)

    Each method has their own strengths and weaknesses.  Personally, I prefer the Alternate Form method for battlesuit characters, as it combines a point cost comparable with other superhero abilities with a simplistic method.

Designing an Effective Super-Hero in GURPS

     As many long-time readers know, I've been working on a "reboot" project of the Marvel Comics Universe since about 2007 (has it been 9 years already?!), using GURPS as the system to create the characters.  In that time, I've had the opportunity to make about 200 individual characters ranging in point value from -10 points (Turk Barrett) to over 34,500 points (the Watcher), with the majority between 200 and 3000 points.
      Of course, many of these characters weren't designed with a set point value given, and most of them have oddball numbers.  For reference, I have the original Avengers at a wide range of points: Ant-Man (Hank Pym) at 450, Captain America at 992, the Hulk at 3,654 (Banner at 13 before his Alternate Form for the Hulk), Iron Man currently at 490 (and set to skyrocket as I redo his armors from Signature Gear to Alternate Forms), Thor at 1,728 (and possibly set to go up when I get around to redoing him), and the Wasp (Janet van Dyne) at 410.  Quite the wide range of points, and only half the team at round numbers.
      So how do I go about designing the characters?  First off, I look at them in two steps: Step 1: Who are they without powers/before they got powers?  Step 2: What are their powers?  I tend to ignore point values for this genre, though in an actual game I would probably give point values.  In a game based on the X-Men, Avengers, Fantastic Four, New Teen Titans, Outsiders, or Justice League, I find a good rule of thumb for superheroes (and anti-heroes, villains, and non-villain antagonists) is about 150 to 250 points before powers, with up to between 750 and 850 points in powers, rounding the cap at 1,000 points . . . unless one is a "brick" concept (which itself has variation: Hulk, Giant-Man, Thor, Ben Grimm, and Colossus are all technically "bricks"), in which case I would assign between 1,250 and 1,350 points, bringing the character to 1,500 points.  This is because the traits inherent in a brick tend to be fairly pricey - Super ST, Damage Resistance, and Injury Tolerance: Damage Reduction in levels that make a brick viable tends to get expensive.  (I'm not one for adjusting the overall pricing of traits, because I know I'll end up breaking things on some scale.)
      For super-normals like the Black Widow, I treat their cinematic traits as their "powers".  Several of my "super-normals" are hyper-competent with high skill levels (16+), others just have a lot of skills at professional levels (skill level 12 to 14).

Start with the Concept.

     Let's take one character I had, an expy of Hank Pym from a few spots in his career: Jorge Hernandez/Hombre Gigante.  He was an inventor type with size-changing ability (based on Pym's Ant-Man and Giant-Man identities) and the ability to shrink items to carry on his person in his pockets (ala "Doctor Pym, Scientific Adventurer" from his days in the West Coast Avengers).  The GM - who was going for a somewhat grittier Iron/Dark/Dork Age type game than I prefer - agreed that the growth ability classified him as a "brick", so I had up to 1,500 points to play with; the GM was using the rules I set up for a different game, summarized above.
      Jorge ended up being 250 points with his stats, mundane advantages (including the Artificer Talent*), disadvantages, and skills.  Tacking on Shrinking to get him down to about 4 inches tall, Gadgeteer, Gizmos, Affliction (Advantage: Shrinking), and enough Inventor! skill to be useful got him to 600 points.  The rest I dumped into Growth 2, Super ST (Growth ST), DR (Accessory: Only When Using Growth), and IT:DR (Accessory: Only When Using Growth), wrapping him up at around 1500 points total.
      After that, and this is a step I rarely take with my Marvel Reboot project, I double-checked things to optimize the character, shuffling points around and raising skill levels as needed.
 * Yes, I know Talents and Wildcards are not supposed to be used for the same thing, but the GM and I both agreed that letting Talents give conditional bonuses to a Wildcard when the Wildcard was being used in place of the regular skill the Talent covers would not break things, and is relatively in-genre.

How Much DR and IT:DR are Needed For a Brick?

     That depends on what you expect to go up against. Most bricks are said to be "bullet-proof", while the primary weapons shown being used against them are pistols and sub-guns.  Most of those weapons top out at 3d damage, with 2d+1 being the average.  In GURPS, "resistant" to damage means that it stops all damage 50% of the time, and reduces the worst damage by 50%.  In a 3d pistol's case, such as the .50AR Desert Eagle, DR 10 is enough to resist damage, and DR 18 is 100% proof against it.  Getting up to rifle rounds, the typical assault rifle does 5d damage, while police snipers and hunting rifles do 7d; therefore DR 18 is resistant and DR 30 fully proofed against assault rifles, while for snipers DR 25 and DR 42 are the numbers to resist or be fully proofed, respectively.
      Because many supers run into lasers of some sort at some point in their careers, adding a few levels of Hardened to the DR isn't out of genre for bricks.  Also, while I do not add No Signature to my own bricks, it may be useful for folks like Superman and Captain Marvel (both Marvel's and DC's) whose "armor skin" doesn't appear to be "armor" at first glance.
      Bricks also tend to hit rather hard, and a brawl between bricks has been known to demolish buildings without the bricks taking much damage themselves.  This is where Injury Tolerance: Damage Reduction on top of DR comes into play.  DR reduces the damage taken by a set amount, but a brick may do about 40d damage (average 140 damage, max 240), and is expected to be able to take similar hits as well as dishing it out.  (Very few 'bricks' are actually 'glass cannons'; it's just not in-genre!)  IT:DR reduces the rest of the damage taken not by a set amount but to a fraction.
      For example, I gave Jorge IT:DR /50 and DR 25, not counting the DR from his uniform (DR 12/4*, with the 12 being against piercing and cutting, and the 4 everything else).  So against a 40d (140 damage) punch he reduced the damage from 140 to 111, then further reduced it from 111 to 2.22 (I have to double-check to see if that rounds to 2 or 3).  Given his Growth Super ST raised his ST from 12 to about 30-ish, that was barely a tickle.
      So a brick needs a lot of DR and IT:DR; take as much of both as your GM allows.  Super-strong scrappers like Spider-Man rely more on their IT:DR, often with "Crushing Only, -40%" on it.

Balancing Blasters and Bricks 

     Blasters are your glass cannons; they dish out damage but really can't take much.  They occasionally do wear armor of some sort or have abilities that provide it, such as the Human Torch's fiery aura, but for the most part they're relying on the bricks to take the damage while they dish it out.  One thing I've been - perhaps rightfully - accused of in my Marvel Reboot project is making my blasters fairly weak compared to bricks.  Most of my blasters do damage in the handgun to rifle range, with 3d to 7d damage being typical.  One has a 6d×3 burning explosive attack, but that attack also drains the character of his FP when using it.
      So, how do you balance a brick who can punch for 30d and a blaster who shoots for 8d?  If the brick fights the blaster, the blaster gets pulverized, unless the brick pulls his punches.  The trick is letting the blaster hang back and not get into melee at all.
     Another option, which may be viable in a setting, is to let the blaster buy a 30d ranged attack and build it with Variable (+5%), letting him dial back the attack so as to avoid hitting others with pulverizingly lethal attacks.  Such a blaster is still a glass cannon, but he's better able to harm the bricks that have a load of DR and IT:DR.
      Most blasters, however, work in conjunction with what are known as controllers, those that act as "battlefield control".  An classic example is Cyclops of the X-Men working with Iceman and Marvel Girl, both of whom helped keep the bricks at bay so the blasters can hang back, letting the scrappers and fellow bricks close to melee.
      Remember that in most cases, a hero team is not built as a bunch of solo heroes; they're made with the intent that the heroes work together and playing to each others' strengths.

Scrapper?

     Scrappers are basically your melee glass cannons.  Spider-Man and Batman are both technically scrappers.  For a scrapper, you want to deliver your damage in melee; this can be either a weapon with Weapon Master, an Innate Attack with a Melee Attack limitation, or some combination of a striking skill (Brawling, Boxing, or Karate), Trained By a Master, Striker, Striking ST, and/or Super ST.  Defensively, you want to load up on Enhanced Defenses, particularly Enhanced Parry and Enhanced Dodge, though shield-wielders like Captain America love their Enhanced Block.
      Some IT:DR on the scrappers isn't a bad deal, as it lets them survive blows by bricks that inevitable connect, but most will lack DR unless they wear armor, and not many wear the right amount of armor to take hits from a proper brick.

Well, that's all for this week.  Next week, I promise I'll give an example brick or three.