What Makes A Successful Superhero CAMPAIGN

[Reynard]

That other thread is about system, so I would liek to keep that discussion out of this thread. here, I am more interested in what you think makes for a good superhero campaign. What style of supers works best for you? What sorts of adventures? What sorts of PCs? What have your most successful superhero games been like? What about your failures.

I think the seminal text for superhero campaigns is the original Strike Force sourcebook by Aaron Allston. Though written for Champions, most of its advice and practices are universal for supers games (and some beyond). Making secret ID's matter and engaging in bluebooking for the melodrama both help supers campaigns have the complexity and texture of long comic book runs.

My most successful supers campaign was actually a D&D campaign that reached the superheroic modern era (using Mutants and Masterminds). It was the third campaign after one that started in AD&D 2E and the next using 3.x. Basically magic disappeared for 1000 years and the world developed in a "mundane" way until the equivalent of the 1920s, when magic was unleached again and the world's superheroic age began. That happened in a pulp adventure session. then we played a Golden Age mini-campaign, before moving onto the main heavily silver age inspired campaign. It all came to a head in my own Crisis on infinite Erebars for our group's 20th anniversary. Connections to the D&D lore and past replaced things like North Myth inspired supers, so instead of a group of idiots dressed up like animals for Spiderman villains, we had a group of idiots dressed up by low level D&D monsters as villains.

Anyway, tell us about what you think makes a successful superhero campaign, outside of game system concerns.

 

[overgeeked]

For me, a successful superheroes campaign requires the Chris Claremont formula all the way. Superhero action interspersed with soap opera drama.

You need a good mix of one-off and reoccurring villains to fight, both super and mundane. Building a dislike then hatred then almost toxic friendship with long-term villains is a must. Characters switching sides is also a great bonus.

A tangent of that is you need a good variety of threats and challenges. Some fights will be against bank robbers others will be against world-conquering madmen others will be against alien invaders from beyond the stars. Rescuing people from disasters. Rescuing people from villains of all kinds. A Silver Age vibe helps a lot here. Being able to get really, truly weird always makes things more varied and interesting.

You need a good mix of PC personalities and clashes between them. It’s a Goldilocks zone thing. Just enough friction to keep it interesting but not so much it takes over for more than a session or two at most. Smallville did a great job of detailing how to do this. Find places where there’s disagreement and tension then spotlight that clash. The players can do the rest.

You need a wide cast of interesting NPCs for the PCs to interact with. Mundane people and other superheroes alike. The more the merrier. Fill the world with named NPCs the PCs will have to rescue or bust throughout the campaign.

And to use the DC Heroes name for it, you need subplots. Lots and lots of subplots. Subplots here go beyond the standard definition. It also means player-generated content. Players suggest plots and subplots they want to see in the campaign. This is key to a long-running game. Another way to get that kind of engagement is PCs and players having goals.

 

[Reynard]

For me, a successful superheroes campaign requires the Chris Claremont formula all the way. Superhero action interspersed with soap opera drama.

You need a good mix of one-off and reoccurring villains to fight, both super and mundane. Building a dislike then hatred then almost toxic friendship with long-term villains is a must. Characters switching sides is also a great bonus.

A tangent of that is you need a good variety of threats and challenges. Some fights will be against bank robbers others will be against world-conquering madmen others will be against alien invaders from beyond the stars. Rescuing people from disasters. Rescuing people from villains of all kinds. A Silver Age vibe helps a lot here. Being able to get really, truly weird always makes things more varied and interesting.

You need a good mix of PC personalities and clashes between them. It’s a Goldilocks zone thing. Just enough friction to keep it interesting but not so much it takes over for more than a session or two at most. Smallville did a great job of detailing how to do this. Find places where there’s disagreement and tension then spotlight that clash. The players can do the rest.

You need a wide cast of interesting NPCs for the PCs to interact with. Mundane people and other superheroes alike. The more the merrier. Fill the world with named NPCs the PCs will have to rescue or bust throughout the campaign.

And to use the DC Heroes name for it, you need subplots. Lots and lots of subplots. Subplots here go beyond the standard definition. It also means player-generated content. Players suggest plots and subplots they want to see in the campaign. This is key to a long-running game. Another way to get that kind of engagement is PCs and players having goals.

Excellent list.

 

[Agamon]

For me, a successful superheroes campaign requires the Chris Claremont formula all the way. Superhero action interspersed with soap opera drama.

You need a good mix of one-off and reoccurring villains to fight, both super and mundane. Building a dislike then hatred then almost toxic friendship with long-term villains is a must. Characters switching sides is also a great bonus.

A tangent of that is you need a good variety of threats and challenges. Some fights will be against bank robbers others will be against world-conquering madmen others will be against alien invaders from beyond the stars. Rescuing people from disasters. Rescuing people from villains of all kinds. A Silver Age vibe helps a lot here. Being able to get really, truly weird always makes things more varied and interesting.

You need a good mix of PC personalities and clashes between them. It’s a Goldilocks zone thing. Just enough friction to keep it interesting but not so much it takes over for more than a session or two at most. Smallville did a great job of detailing how to do this. Find places where there’s disagreement and tension then spotlight that clash. The players can do the rest.

You need a wide cast of interesting NPCs for the PCs to interact with. Mundane people and other superheroes alike. The more the merrier. Fill the world with named NPCs the PCs will have to rescue or bust throughout the campaign.

And to use the DC Heroes name for it, you need subplots. Lots and lots of subplots. Subplots here go beyond the standard definition. It also means player-generated content. Players suggest plots and subplots they want to see in the campaign. This is key to a long-running game. Another way to get that kind of engagement is PCs and players having goals.

Good point. The most successful supers game I've been in was a M&M pbp game here back in the mid-00's. Lots of drama and player conflict.

Though one of my current games is Marvel Multiverse, and we're all enjoying putting out fires, trying to save the world from the big bad evil organization. Plenty of rp, but drama between the PCs is pretty limited.

 

[Tonguez]

Something to challenge every PC no matter what there power level or focus is. Multiple objectives in each scene and a good dose of drama

 

[zarionofarabel]

For me, a successful superheroes campaign requires the Chris Claremont formula all the way. Superhero action interspersed with soap opera drama.

You need a good mix of one-off and reoccurring villains to fight, both super and mundane. Building a dislike then hatred then almost toxic friendship with long-term villains is a must. Characters switching sides is also a great bonus.

A tangent of that is you need a good variety of threats and challenges. Some fights will be against bank robbers others will be against world-conquering madmen others will be against alien invaders from beyond the stars. Rescuing people from disasters. Rescuing people from villains of all kinds. A Silver Age vibe helps a lot here. Being able to get really, truly weird always makes things more varied and interesting.

You need a good mix of PC personalities and clashes between them. It’s a Goldilocks zone thing. Just enough friction to keep it interesting but not so much it takes over for more than a session or two at most. Smallville did a great job of detailing how to do this. Find places where there’s disagreement and tension then spotlight that clash. The players can do the rest.

You need a wide cast of interesting NPCs for the PCs to interact with. Mundane people and other superheroes alike. The more the merrier. Fill the world with named NPCs the PCs will have to rescue or bust throughout the campaign.

And to use the DC Heroes name for it, you need subplots. Lots and lots of subplots. Subplots here go beyond the standard definition. It also means player-generated content. Players suggest plots and subplots they want to see in the campaign. This is key to a long-running game. Another way to get that kind of engagement is PCs and players having goals.

This.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Claremont being invoked makes me think you'll need to keep thorough and impeccable notes, as when you bring back that minor character from session 2 in session 50, and everyone's mind is blown - you'll know you'll have made it.

Similarly, you'll need to keep terrible notes, because you'll be spinning out so many subplots that you'll never be able get back to most of them (hello Nimrod!) so why bother...

 

[Eyes of Nine]

More seriously, and mostly just adding to what folks have said so far. What kept me coming back to superheroes back in the day was the relationships between the characters. Whether it was the Jean-Scott-Logan triangle, or the deep frenemy relationship between Xavier and Max. Even the relationship between Doug and Warlock. So at the table, play up those moments when there can be interpersonal relationships, and if you can select a rules set that supports that, all the better.

On the flip side, having villains who are both awful and relatable. Mojo is an interesting villain, but Claremont's Magneto is better because you can empathize with his actions, even while condemning them.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

In my oft-mentioned (by me) Champions 1900 game, the PCs were part of the interplanetary police force known as G.A.I.A. They had jurisdiction on Earth, Mars, Venus & the Moon.

It was my best ever campaign, and it worked because I had 100% buy in from the players in terms of setting conventions, PC designs, and really roleplaying their PCs.

Other factors to its success:

1) I ran it somewhat sandboxy. It had an overall metaplot for the campaign, but also a bunch of missions that popped up unrelated to it.

2) The metaplot and the side missions’ origins lay within stuff cribbed from the core Space:1889 campaign setting, my own ideas based on fiction from contemporaneous settings, plots I could file the serial numbers off of and place in 1900, stuff in the PC backgrounds (including Disadvantages) as well as the table talk of the players themselves. Sometimes, the players’ ideas about what was “really going on” were better than my own, so I just stole them and did rewrites. This meant that they occasionally thought they’d “read my mind”, which reinforced their enthusiasm.

3) I made an internal broadsheet for G.A.I.A. that detailed rumors about what was going on in the setting, as well as recaps of the prior session’s action. The players were largely free to pick which rumors they wanted to investigate. Rumors that didn’t get picked disappeared after a couple of mentions- handled by other G.A.I.A. teams- unless they were part of the metaplot.

4) the work I put into the villains paid off. Mechanically, there wasn’t necessarily much new. But dressing up the familiar archetypes in the aesthetics of the era was refreshing. The one I think made the biggest impression was the guy in steam-powered super armor sporting twin arm-mounted flamethrowers, and he was just a minion of the BBEG & BBEGF. Not only was his initial reveal a surprise, but his willingness to use his flamethrowers even if his allies were in the line of fire marked him as a seriously evil mofo, and a threat to be taken down ASAP.

It was a lot of work on my end, but it didn’t feel like work. I was so inspired, it really flowed.

I suspect the players did a bit of their own homework, just based on how well their PCs fit the setting.

 

[Committed Hero]

Player buy in is almost as important as in a horror game. At a minimum I would want all players to agree whether secret identities are important or not (since this affects the kind of personal stories you can use), and whether the heroes will be keeping to a moral code with respect to killing enemies & such.