What makes a successful superhero game?

While it's probably been discussed upthread, @overgeeked , have you checked out Icons: Assembled? I really like it as it plays fast but has some granularity. I can convert old MSHRPG stat blocks to it with minimal fuss.

overgeeked said:

Yes, and it absolutely does not work in that game. The Doctor still runs around outshining all other PCs constantly. Because C7 forgot to include anything like a cap or limit on story points. So yes, the Doctor starts with fewer story points, but, importantly...the Doctor can earn story points at exactly the same rate or faster than the other characters. So it looks like it works on paper but it doesn't actually work in play.

For example, the 12th Doctor starts the game with 8 story points while all the companions start the game with 12 story points.

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So … you are disagreeing with the number of story points the doctor starts with? Um, I think there’s a pretty easy fix to that. In fact, as I said in my original post, you can balance the game easily by choosing this exact number.

I am assuming you were in, or ran, a DWAITAS campaign — did you (or the GM) not consider making that very simple adjustment to make the game fun for you?

Saying “it absolutely does not work” is vey harsh for what is essentially a dial you can trivially adjust to have exactly the level of balance you want. If your campaign didn’t want a doctor who outshines the rest (which is the default, I agree), it is really easy to adjust. It might have been nice if the writers had given you explicit instructions that you can do that to achieve the balance you like, but you’re an experienced RPG player — I am surprised you didn’t think of this trivial house rule to fix your campaign.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I was not giving out many story points each session; it was a long time ago, but I think it was maybe an average of 2-3 per person. How many did you or your GM give out per session? It seems a ton of work to think you could give out more than 4-5 per person, but if people were getting 10+ per session, that would be an issue. But that would make exceptional results really easy to buy, so for my my style of gaming, where I like to have failure and hard choices, I am not so generous with meta-currency.

aramis erak said:

Funny, but all of the ones I've played except MSHAG have workable playable stats for cosmic level Supers.
MSH/RMSH/AMSH, Marvel Heroic, Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, DC Heroes, Champions, Champions New Millenium, V&V, and Sentinel Comics. (I have, but haven't used, GURPS: Supers)

The thing is, in almost all of them, it's not a random gen starting PC level. (It is "rating them from the books" buildable in all.)
Both GURPS and Hero have the ability to build and run demi-gods as PCs... as evidenced by Hero/RM Mythic Greece, and by GURPS Lensmen. Insane point levels.

V&V is quite random, but I saw a PC that felt Supes level.
MSH/RMSH/AMSH — Only buildable by the rating an existing character method.
MSHAG: no. Not meaningfully.
DCH: clearly, it includes Supes himself.
MHRP: it pushes the scale just a bit, but so does Galactus.
Champions and CNM: Doable, not even too high a point total; credible at 500 points; non-optimized, around 1000. Every power ever used? maybe 2000. Full on Greek Gods are 3000-5000.

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Yeah. I'm just being a nerd about it: Superman has no real limit to his strength, but DCA/M&M 3e has him maxing out around 400K tons. Not even close. Same with the Hulk (no strength limit). There's really no way to put "unlimited" into a workable play experience that doesn't end up breaking everything. I've tried to create Superman with GURPS and I spent nearly 3K on his strength alone before finally putting the book away.

But I'm not looking for simulation because it doesn't exist. I know because I went looking for it in each genre. I'm perfectly satisfied with genre emulation, and ttrpgs that get that right without having an overcomplicated core system tend to be the most popular in their respective segments. Like Mutants & Masterminds

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

You'd think, but City of Heroes/Villains decided that no one in their superhero game would have secret identities and would spend all their time working on crafting. And we've certainly seen superhero movies where it seems very much like those in charge were not just confused about superhero tropes, but may have actually hated superhero comics.

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CoH suffered from the fact the people producing it, amazing a job as they did in some ways, were still utterly stuck in the traditional MMO expectations. It was obvious when I was involved in the abortive attempt to make a CoH TTRPG, when you looked at the "we don't have treasure and magic items, really" from the game.

Gorgon Zee said:

So … you are disagreeing with the number of story points the doctor starts with?

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No, I’m disagreeing with the idea that story points are in any way a means to balance these characters. Even starting the Doctor with zero and the companion 12 the Doctor wildly outshines everyone else. Even removing story points from the Doctor entirely, start at zero and never earns any, the Doctor still outshines everyone else.

Evaniel said:

While it's probably been discussed upthread, @overgeeked , have you checked out Icons: Assembled? I really like it as it plays fast but has some granularity. I can convert old MSHRPG stat blocks to it with minimal fuss.

Loading…

www.drivethrurpg.com

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It’s a great game. Doesn’t get the love it deserves.

Thomas Shey said:

CoH suffered from the fact the people producing it, amazing a job as they did in some ways, were still utterly stuck in the traditional MMO expectations. It was obvious when I was involved in the abortive attempt to make a CoH TTRPG, when you looked at the "we don't have treasure and magic items, really" from the game.

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Yeah, definitely a failure of the imagination on their part. If they wanted to have people out there doing things, with the goal of improving their bases, it should have been an alternate XP bar or skill tree or something.

Still, mixing it up with crowds of goons was fantastic and always felt comics-accurate.

Thomas Shey said:

Anyone who thinks Hero is a physics engine has a very bizarre idea of physics. A simple examination of the damage to lift ratio of Strength shows that.

Now, if you want to say you want narrative expression rather than representative expression, that's fine, but let's drop the "physics engine" nonsense in reference to Hero, shall we? I can point at at least two supers games that function somewhat like a physics engine, but Hero isn't one of them; neither is M&M or a number of other representative supers games. They're representing the way powers and such tend to work in supers settings rather than the dramatic tropes primarily (though they also have some degree of representation for that too), but the way those powers work is very much also a genre trope; its got nothing to do with "physics" in any meaningful way. In fact it usually produces results that the occupants of the worlds involved don't realize or acknowledge is true.

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Hero came out of an era of simulationist game design and, yea, it's a physics engine, trying to simulate a version of the real world. Wargamers created these early supers game and the entire supers genre in the hobby has been hobbled by this thinking.

There's a number of newer supers games that actually feel like comic books and I appreciate them. But I'd love to see more mainstream games created with those ideas.

Hero with it's 3 hour fights trying to simulate physics never, ever felt like a comic book.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

Yeah, definitely a failure of the imagination on their part. If they wanted to have people out there doing things, with the goal of improving their bases, it should have been an alternate XP bar or skill tree or something.

Still, mixing it up with crowds of goons was fantastic and always felt comics-accurate.

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I suspect it was less a failure of imagination than conservativism about getting too far from the elements that had proven themselves to be successful in other MMOs, even though they didn't make much sense in a superhero context.

Elvish Lore said:

Hero came out of an era of simulationist game design and, yea, it's a physics engine, trying to simulate a version of the real world. Wargamers created these early supers game and the entire supers genre in the hobby has been hobbled by this thinking.

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No, its really not, and repeating it doesn't make it true. If its "simulating" something its the way superpowers and such classically work in comics, and that has remarkably little to do with physics in any sense, and using it in discussion distorts the discussion because it suggests something that isn't true in the vast majority of systems taking that tact.

Elvish Lore said:

There's a number of newer supers games that actually feel like comic books and I appreciate them. But I'd love to see more mainstream games created with those ideas.

Hero with it's 3 hour fights trying to simulate physics never, ever felt like a comic book.

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Yet it did and does for many people, so perhaps noting that this is a perception and taste issue would be helpful. Among other things, I should note that many comics (at least of the time) took up a large amount of their landscape depicting fights, so that being a large part of the game landscape is only going to feel off to people who don't think that parallelism is relevant.

Its a common argument that's what's important in comics is what the heroes think and feel about what they're doing, not what they do, but the source works themselves sure spend a lot of time on the latter for that, and to act like that doesn't also matter for some people is to privileges your own priorities; and using a term like "physics engine" denigrates those who feel otherwise and distorts the discussion.