Project Nemesis is a fan driven website for games that use the One-Roll Engine (like Nemesis, Wild Talents, Reign and Monsters) or Chaosium's Basic Roleplay System (BRP) (like Call of Cthulhu) and the Delta Green setting.
Though WT is angled towards an Ultimates/The Authority kind of supers,
the system is designed to be easily tweakable up and down the scale
from gritty to four-color. The first and foremost need-be for four-color is an intrinsic like Resilient.
Intrinsic: Resilient (10 Points)
Whether it’s because of incredible willpower, luck, or just a tough
skin, your body is exceptionally resilient. After combat ends, and
after you’ve recovered Shock damage normally (page xx), all Killing
you’ve taken turns to Shock.
Resilient makes it much easier to recover from harm, and the GM should
carefully decide whether to use this intrinsic at all. In four-color
games, many or even all characters might have it, while in a gritty
game it might be forbidden altogether.
You can also tweak how damage is taken and healed very easily. Optional Rules: Damage Tweaks
Are your players tired of getting their heads knocked off at
inopportune moments? At the GM's discretion, they can try some damage
options to make their lives more livable.
• Wound Shift: A character can spend Willpower to change the hit
location of a wound before taking the hit, during the resolve phase of
combat. It costs the width of the attack in Willpower to change the
roll’s height by 1, up or down. This does not affect the height of the
attack roll in any other way (you can’t use wound shift to make it miss
altogether), and it can only be done when the wound is taken.
• Shaking It Off: If you want a more over-the-top game, allow
characters to negate damage by spending Willpower points to “shake it
off.” One point of Willpower buys off 1 point of Shock, and 2 points
buy off 1 Killing.
There are lots of ways to handle this. Maybe
characters can buy off damage as it happens, during the resolve phase
of combat. Maybe it only applies to attacks that they can see coming;
or maybe helps against any and every source of damage. Or maybe they
can only buy it off after the fight is over and the dust has settled.
How you explain it is also up to you. Perhaps it only applies to
characters with some kind of superhuman defensive power (i.e., they
have a power with the “Defends” quality; see page xx), so it’s the
character’s protective power in overdrive. Or maybe it’s just luck,
fate, or divine grace. What really matters is the end result—the
character spends Willpower and avoids or reduces injury.
• Die Hard: With this middle-of-the-road modification, the ratio
of Shock to Killing damage is increased. Instead of 2 Shock to 1
Killing point of damage, it’s 3 to 1, or even 4 to 1. This makes
characters far more resistant to non-lethal damage. In the standard
damage scheme, 4 points of Shock to the head knocks you out and 4 more
kills you; with the “Die Hard” option at 3 to 1, it takes 12 more
points of Shock to kill you.
• Nothing But Shock: All Killing damage changes directly to
Shock. An attack that inflicts 4 points of Shock and 4 points of
Killing instead does 8 points of Shock. Additionally, Shock damage
“bleeds” from limbs to torso before being converted to Killing; only if
both the limb and the torso are filled with Shock does further damage
turn the limb’s Shock boxes to Killing. This option is perfect for
four-color games of the “superhero cartoon” variety, where a hero or
villain can take a serious beating before there’s any real risk of
lingering injury.
• Four-Color Recovery: This option allows important characters
to recover from Killing damage more quickly than usual even without
medical treatment. If all Shock damage on the character has healed,
once a day pick a hit location and roll Body+Health, with the total
Killing damage on the location as a difficulty number (to a maximum
difficulty of 10). If the roll succeeds, 1 point of Killing becomes 1
point of Shock.
Even these do not represent the end of the possiblities -- they just
cover the basics. Make up your own if you like; it's one of the
beauties of the system. It's very easy to do.