What makes a successful superhero game?

[overgeeked]

This is a riff on a similar thread about horror. With Fantastic Four and Superman in theaters, the DC Heroes reprint Kickstarter getting closer and closer to fulfilling, and M&M playtesting 4E…I’m feeling a bit nostalgic and in the mood for superheroes.

By “successful” here I mean that it works as a superhero game, not whether it makes money for the company.

So, what do you think? What makes a successful superhero game?

 

[zarionofarabel]

This is a riff on a similar thread about horror. With Fantastic Four and Superman in theaters, the DC Heroes reprint Kickstarter getting closer and closer to fulfilling, and M&M playtesting 4E…I’m feeling a bit nostalgic in the mood for superheroes.

By “successful” here I mean that it works as a superhero game, not whether it makes money for the company.

So, what do you think? What makes a successful superhero game?

A system that is capable of allowing heroes of differing power levels to work as a team without the high powered heroes completely overshadowing the lower powered heroes. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying for example.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I fell for HERO hard when it first hit shelves as Champions. Every supers game I’ve purchased since then has had merits, but falls short for me. The closest contender has been Mutants & Masterminds.

What they have in common is they both have incredible flexibility in character creation.

The other games are all more limited in that regard, BUT they usually do a very good job of modeling a certain subgenre or underlying intellectual property.

 

[Corinnguard]

As a fan of Mutants and Masterminds 2e, I liked using the RPGs Point Buy system to create customizable superpowers that make your character feel unique and thematic.

 

[dbm]

There seems to be two pretty distinct groups of supers games these days. There are pretty firmly narrative games where the ‘power’ of a character measures their ability to drive or influence the narrative with their chosen skill set, irrespective of what the skill set is. These games seem to make it ‘easier’ to have characters with power sets that would typically be seen as very different in raw power (Batman in the Justice League, Hawkeye in the Avengers etc.). And there are games where power sets are a bit more (small bit more…) simulationist in nature and hence where Superman may indeed be able to punch Batman into a fine red mist if he so wanted to.

I lean more ‘simulation’ in my play preferences, and so do my group. Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion is the best game of this type that I have personally played. Others include GURPS Supers, HERO Champions, DC Heroes (a long time ago), and a very small amount of Mutants and Masterminds; you can see the through-line there I am sure.

For me, a good supers system has to give you lots of widgets to build your character out of, and hopefully these are reasonably well balanced in terms of how useful they are. So rather than having characters with the ability to impact narrative directly, it’s about modelling their powers and abilities which then allow them to impact the narrative indirectly. This can still handle the Batman vs Superman issue in my personal opinion, so long as you don’t have a game where every challenge can be solved by simply punching things. And in my opinion good super hero adventures should involve a much wider range of challenges than just combat.

After that, the campaign premise or structure is the other tricky thing for supers. Classic supers with ‘villain of the week’ are extremely reactive so players may feel deprotagonised as they are always reacting to what NPCs are doing rather than driving their own agendas. I aim to combat that on two levels.

The first is by having ‘nemesis’ NPCs for the PCs, ideally defined by the player for their own character. This gives them a hand in creating the narrative and type of challenges they’re are likely to face in the course of the campaign. Longevity of the nemesis is driven either through a genre assumption that enemies will be captured and sent to some kind of restitutional facility, or though effective layering of their criminal gang so that the PCs can’t quickly get from the thugs on the front line to the criminal mastermind at the top of the tree.

The second thing is to have an overarching scheme in motion which the lesser villains are contributing to (either knowingly or unknowingly) and have this start to be revealed as the PCs deal with lesser threats. At some point they will have picked up enough clues or hints to start getting proactive and come up with ways to investigate the super-plot which might otherwise not present itself directly. This switches the campaign from a responsive mode to a pro-active mode (though they likely need to juggle keeping lower level schemes down at the same time).

So, a good supers game in play is a delicate balance of system and campaign structure which can be hard to handle. In my opinion it is definitely one of the more challenging types of game to run well.

 

[aco175]

I'm thinking of the Endgame movie where the spaceship is raining down missiles on everyone and they are all hiding and such, then Ms Marvel comes to just fly through the ship and take everything out. Begs the question of why she couldn't just fly through Thanos to end the whole problem. It was a letdown to me. The game needs to have a way to let cosmic universe supers play at the table with local neighborhood supers. There is a big gap between the two. Like someone showing up at the D&D table with a 20th level PC when the rest of you are 3rd level.

 

[Corinnguard]

Begs the question of why she couldn't just fly through Thanos to end the whole problem.

True. She could have done that, but then she would have left in order to spend some time getting Thanos out of her hair, off her skin and out of her uniform. A little too close and personal even for her.

Edit: This scenario did happen btw between Superman and the Flash in DC's DCeased storyline. It wasn't pretty and the act backfired on Superman.

 

[Committed Hero]

A system that is capable of allowing heroes of differing power levels to work as a team without the high powered heroes completely overshadowing the lower powered heroes.

I can't say it any better that that, so I will add "mechanics that promote synergies in team fighting itself."

Supers gaming suffers from a variation of James Bond's laser watch problem, where the emulation of other media in an rpg strains to operate. If a character has two powers, but one is vastly more useful than the other, what's the reason for including the weaker one at all? Especially in a point buy system where resources might be allocated more efficiently.

 

[el-remmen]

Personally, when it comes to Supers games, I prefer a rules-light game that does not use a grid (minis are ok for general positioning, but not required). I say this because the setting for a superhero game can not only range over the space of many city blocks (or whatever) given flight, and superspeed, wallcrawling and the like, but super encounters require a collective imaginative space that can come into existence through play (i.e. the GM doesn't need to specify there is a newspaper box on the corner to throw at the Rhino, we can assume there would be one there if it is midtown, for example), everything doesn't/shouldn't have to be all laid out. This is why M&M fell flat for me. Being based on 3E d20 style mechanics the powers were written out too much with a grid in mind (caveat, 2E M&M was the last I looked at).

This is nearly opposite to my approach to D&D which is very much minis and terrain, etc. . .

Personally, my favorite superhero system is the Marvel Saga Card game from the late 90s, which my friends and I homebrewed slightly better character creation rules for. It was the longest and most successful supers game I have ever run.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

There seems to be two pretty distinct groups of supers games these days. There are pretty firmly narrative games where the ‘power’ of a character measures their ability to drive or influence the narrative with their chosen skill set, irrespective of what the skill set is. These games seem to make it ‘easier’ to have characters with power sets that would typically be seen as very different in raw power (Batman in the Justice League, Hawkeye in the Avengers etc.). And there are games where power sets are a bit more (small bit more…) simulationist in nature and hence where Superman may indeed be able to punch Batman into a fine red mist if he so wanted to.

My personal experience is that the former reliably preserve a "superhero"-type experience, that actually feels like the comics, movies and so on. The very best-designed (albeit highly-specific) superhero RPG I've ever seen, MASKS, is clearly this type.

Whereas the latter is always, always living near the edge of 'descending' into being The Boys! And the more "simulationist" it is, the inherently closer it is to that edge!

Some it's a few feet from the edge, because literally all the players are very studiously making their superheroes act heroically, and the GM is doing the same with the villains, making sure that Badguy Hulk Expy doesn't just one-shot incompetently played Batman Expy, even though he easily could, and so on, and maybe the system has some kind of narrative tokens or the like to help with that. But sometimes they're absolutely teetering on that edge (esp. with say, GURPS Supers or the like), or just straight up falling over it directly into The Boys-land.

And maybe The Boys-land is where you want to live! But I feel like that's not actually a "superhero" setting, that's a sort of "gods and monsters" deal that deconstructs (and does not reconstruct) superhero comics as part of its aesthetic.

(I shouldn't exclude the middle too much here - like, M&M is pretty firmly in the middle imho, at least last I looked at it.)