There are two lingering hiccups I have with a Savage Worlds Supers game. The first is the Heavy Armor power modifier. The second is the untrained skill penalty.
Heavy Armor seems to create a form of an arms race with super powers. I like the idea of the Heavy Armor tag. It's good that certain vehicles are pretty much impervious to small arms fire. But with the PCs it becomes a necessity to buy the Heavy Weapon modifier with every hard hitting attack power. It's super cheap to buy the Armor power and throw in a few points to get complete invulnerability to normal attacks. Unless their assailant turns around and buys the Heavy Weapon modifier, so you have this never ending circle of power advantages to counter each other.
So I opted to only allow the Heavy Armor modifier if at least 5 power points were put into the Armor power. The exception to this was if the Partial Armor weakness was taken. This allowed armor to be negated with a lucky shot. So I felt it balanced out some to counter the Heavy Armor modifier.
The other lingering problem was with untrained skills. I like how Savage Worlds splits skills from attributes but for a supers game I can see players not able to get enough skill points to throw around. You could have a super strong hero completely unable to climb and failing just as much as a regular Joe. Or a hero with ungodly agility unable to throw a rock and hit the side of a barn if their life depended on it. That didn't quite make sense.
To get around this for trained tests, I am allowing the linked attributes to skills be used instead. This might break the game some so I'll have to see how well it works (the Gifted power is one thing that needs to be further tweaked). I might potentially allow it to be used just to tests of physical ability. But for now I'll take an attitude of waiting and seeing how things pan out.
I'm still worried that without a minimum toughness, some players are going to get rolled over. But for now I'm on the fence if that is absolutely needed. Until then, here's a condensed version of my house rules.
Untrained skills - Players can opt to use their ability scores for unskilled rolls instead of using the default d4 die. Players still get a -2 penalty and the ability used must match with the linked skill attribute (ex. shooting can be tested using agility). The Gifted power can only be linked to one attribute. If a player wants to apply it to multiple attributes, the power must be bought again for each attribute they want it to apply to.
Heavy Armor Modifier - This modifier can only be bought if the player has a minimum armor of 10 (5 power points). An exception is if a player takes the Partial Armor power modifier, then there is no minimum armor value required to purchase the Heavy Armor modifier.
