chuckdee
Adventurer
Same here. Thankfully, I caught myself before I spent an insane amount to get the same books just so I could have a PDF.
What makes a successful superhero game?
- Thread starter overgeeked
- Start date
Thomas Shey
Legend
Oddly enough, its not really a deconstruction (except to the degree Omni-Man is a dark Superman, but then, those are a dime a dozen these days). Its just a fairly conventional superhero setting missing one element.
Thomas Shey
Legend
There's a reason I call those people-with-powers settings rather than superhero ones.
chuckdee
Adventurer
Well, no one would say Cap, Bucky, or Black Widow aren't superheroes. But I could see running a Winter Soldier type game in Godlike/Wild Talents.
Part of the problem is that the superhero genre is actually very, very broad and narratively variable, so what the rules of reality are depend heavily on the genre. A JLA game is quite different from an X-Men game which is very different from Invincible which is extremely different from Young Heroes in Love, despite superficial similarities.
I’m in the camp that says point-buy power balancing is almost entirely a waste of time. Yes, your character can bench press the Moon, but how much can she affect the story with her biceps? That’s much more important. Will she flatten any NPC or PC 90% of the time? Can she deal with obstacles more easily than any other PC? Is the campaign more about relationships, personal growth, or the nature of heroism than who can beat whom in a big fight?
One thing I think now is absolutely essential for superhero (emphasis on the hero) games is that there should be good fun mechanical support for actual heroics - saving people, rescuing people, natural disasters, saving the city. That should be absolutely front and centre in the system, more so than combat, in any superhero game, and not just sidelined to Chapter 11: Natural Disasters and the Grappling Rules. You honestly don’t see this a lot and I’ve usually made up my own rules most of the time. Icons isn’t bad and I’ve been quite inspired by the Danger Patrol (not superhero but an excellent system for escalating danger).
(For instance: we’re currently running an X-Men game set in 1995, using MSH. In the last session, the PCs (directed by Destiny, who in this universe is a blind billionaire and the patron in the chair) had to deal with the appearance of “Magneto” (actual identity unrevealed) whom they knew would appear at a Sentinel publicity festival in San Francisco. The resulting battle between Magneto and the Sentinels would kill hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent bystanders since neither side would give any f*cks about collateral damage and friendly fire. The PCs therefore had to spend the first few rounds saving lives while diverting the battle away from the crowd before they could engage the bad guys meaningfully. There were a lot of big hero moments - catching thrown boats and buses, pulling kids out of the way of plasma blasts, the brick tanking a laser beam head-on to protect others despite not having enough invulnerability to do so - and they all needed good rules, which I mostly improvised.)
I’m in the camp that says point-buy power balancing is almost entirely a waste of time. Yes, your character can bench press the Moon, but how much can she affect the story with her biceps? That’s much more important. Will she flatten any NPC or PC 90% of the time? Can she deal with obstacles more easily than any other PC? Is the campaign more about relationships, personal growth, or the nature of heroism than who can beat whom in a big fight?
One thing I think now is absolutely essential for superhero (emphasis on the hero) games is that there should be good fun mechanical support for actual heroics - saving people, rescuing people, natural disasters, saving the city. That should be absolutely front and centre in the system, more so than combat, in any superhero game, and not just sidelined to Chapter 11: Natural Disasters and the Grappling Rules. You honestly don’t see this a lot and I’ve usually made up my own rules most of the time. Icons isn’t bad and I’ve been quite inspired by the Danger Patrol (not superhero but an excellent system for escalating danger).
(For instance: we’re currently running an X-Men game set in 1995, using MSH. In the last session, the PCs (directed by Destiny, who in this universe is a blind billionaire and the patron in the chair) had to deal with the appearance of “Magneto” (actual identity unrevealed) whom they knew would appear at a Sentinel publicity festival in San Francisco. The resulting battle between Magneto and the Sentinels would kill hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent bystanders since neither side would give any f*cks about collateral damage and friendly fire. The PCs therefore had to spend the first few rounds saving lives while diverting the battle away from the crowd before they could engage the bad guys meaningfully. There were a lot of big hero moments - catching thrown boats and buses, pulling kids out of the way of plasma blasts, the brick tanking a laser beam head-on to protect others despite not having enough invulnerability to do so - and they all needed good rules, which I mostly improvised.)
To me, that’s kind of the “role-play” aspect of the superheoic genre, not really the mechanics.
So the GM has to present the players with options to do heroic things beyond punching Prof. Terribad in the face. But then the players have to make the decisions to perform those heroic acts beyond punching Prof. Terribad in the face. And TBH, for certain PCs, punching Prof. Terribad is their “raison d'être”, while others will be doing everything they can to minimize collateral damage and unintended casualties caused by all combatants.
(See, for instance, the original incarnations of DC’s Hawk & Dove.)
And part of THAT is depends on whether your players can really get inside the superheroes they’ve created.
I’ve mentioned several times in this board that my best ever campaign was a supers game set in an expanded version of the Space:1889 setting, using HERO for the mechanics. I really peaked as a GM running it- I’ve never even come close to the level of worldbuilding, storytelling and game management than I did running that game. It lasted for over a year.
But at least half of that campaign’s success was due to the 100% buy-in I got from the players. Not only were their PCs created in harmony with the setting, they really played within their characters’ boundaries as written. Even when doing so had negative consequences, characters who had “codes of honor” didn’t take cheap shots, for instance. Characters with more passive/pacifistic builds contributed to victories without compromising their ethics. Etc.
And not to put too fine a point on it, when I tried to run a campaign years later in a different city with different players using the same setting and M&M as the mechanical ruleset, it was a slow-motion disaster. It fizzled in just a few months. Not only was I not as locked in, but the players were somewhat…detached. (One guy didn’t realize that the campaign included the potential to go to the Moon, Mars and Venus until a month after we stopped playing it.)
overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
In another thread people were talking about genre and tone, characters and plot, setting and style, etc. I think that’s a plot difference more than anything. The characters are superheroes. The setting is one where superheroes exist. But the plot of this story is X or Y. If your story isn’t about spandex-clad vigilantes saving the day, you don’t really need rules for powers and derring do. You need rules for what the plot is about. Whether it’s romance or coming of age or whatever.
Yep. The Cortex superhero games did a great job of this. Smallville focused on drama while MHR focused on the beat-’em-ups. I almost think having two character sheets for one character would be the way to go. One side is the action-adventure nonsense while the other is the soap opera nonsense. Some groups stick with one side of the sheet and others go back and forth.
Doesn’t MSH have that? Karma rewards for saving people? Or do you mean mechanics for actually saving people? Must be the latter.
Sounds fun.
I default to clocks for most things lately. The building’s on fire and there are a dozen people trapped inside. Even if you put the fore out, the building will collapse in 3 rounds. Go.
But that is one thing I think DC Heroes got right that MSH did not, the AP table. It makes a lot of those little moments that much quicker and easier to resolve. What’s the weight? How fast is it moving? Am I fast enough to catch it? How far away will it land?
I think my all-time favorite superhero move is the interpose. It’s iconic. Putting yourself between danger and an innocent. Blocking the laser blast or energy beam with your body to protect an innocent bystander. For a superhero game to be successful it has to have some way of doing that.
That all sounds excellent and it’s always great to hear of a campaign really coming together that way.
That said, I think we’re talking at cross purposes. Yes, how the heroes act and the choices they make are often mostly down to roleplaying and inhabiting their characters. But many of those choices will be shaped by the mechanics and their characters’ stats. If Omniman can do almost everything better than everyone else in terms of affecting and changing the story, that’s a mechanical problem. If Tinywoman’s best go-to move is to murder people then she’s encouraged to do so by the mechanics. If there are no rules apart from “make an Agility check and I’ll tell you descriptively how it works out” for rescues then rescues are boring and that is a mechanical problem. It combat is more tactically fun and interesting than anything else then that’s what the players will default to, barring other issues.
Similarly, narrative games have mechanics that are designed to be gameable and affect player choices. If you get a benny for playing up the Thing’s self-loathing and getting him in trouble you do it so that you can activate his It’s Clobbering Time ability later. If that mechanic isn’t there, then Ben’s player has no incentive to roleplay an anxiety breakdown on Yancy Street and so he probably won’t.
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Tonguez
A suffusion of yellow
I'd argue that Bucky and Black Widow arent superheroes. They are Super-spies, anti-heroes and so fit as genre adjacent.
MichaelSomething
Legend
That reminds me, the Invincible TTRPG is having a Kickstarter; eventually...
