Any Supers Game that feels Super?

[Wofano Wotanto]

When you try to do something, you build a dice pool out of a relevant Power your hero has, a Quality they have, and their current Status.

Worth noting that if you really, truly can't find a way to include a power or quality you get a default d4 in that part of the pool. It's rare since the GM is encouraged to be open-minded about player arguments for why a given p/q fits, but when it happens you've still got a die to work with. Since you often read your Mid or Max die for effect having one small die doesn't hurt as bad is it might sound, and you can still apply bonuses to a default d4. It's hard to wind up in a really hopeless situation.

I also really like that you don't need the Close Combat quality to punch someone, but you might still want to take it not only so that you can always apply it pools involving melee (where that speedster in the example might have some trouble justifying Finesse if he was currently in full shackles), but maybe also work it into a pool to, say, sizing up a foe's fighting style to Hinder them or Boost yourself, or even an ally. "Watch out for his left hook, Sidekick Boy!" is an entirely legit way to Boost with (say) Intuition + Close Combat + Status.

Whether the results are "street level" or "Superman level" is not in the definition of the power, but in how I describe the result.

Yeah, weird how the less strictly simulationist you get the easier it is to adapt your power scaling, isn't it? The narrative approach has some real advantages with the supers genre.

The "mortality optional" aspect of the game is also pretty important for the comic feel. The stakes aren't life-or-death for you unless you (not just the GM or the mechanics) think it's dramatically appropriate for them to be, and you recover health so easily in montage scenes that going Out in an action scene doesn't cripple your gameplay for the rest of the session or cause a massive drain on the rest of the party. It's often kind of hard to get players to buy into that at first if they've come from more traditional RPGs, but the engine expects you to take damage and even rewards you for getting beaten up faster than the scene tracker changes GYRO zones. Even TPKOs rarely result in anything worse than waking up in a villainous deathtrap or being auctioned off to aliens or something.

They didn't give everyone an "Out" ability for nothing, although I'll concede that aspect of the game could be a little more varied. The card game gives everyone three options IIRC, not just one.

 

[Starfox]

Yeah, weird how the less strictly simulationist you get the easier it is to adapt your power scaling, isn't it? The narrative approach has some real advantages with the supers genre.

Quoted for truth.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So, with respect, I was responding to a post that specifically referenced M&M, so, no, not wrong system. Thanks.

With similar respect, while he referenced Kenson designing M&M, he was specifically pointing at Icons. I just went back and checked to see if I was mistaken. To quote: "Steve Kenson, designer of Mutants & Masterminds, did: it's called ICONS."

 

[Umbran]

With similar respect, while he referenced Kenson designing M&M, he was specifically pointing at Icons. I just went back and checked to see if I was mistaken. To quote: "Steve Kenson, designer of Mutants & Masterminds, did: it's called ICONS."

Geeze, dude. I was presented with an analogy. I addressed the side of the analogy I have some understanding of, because that's how you freakin' use analogies to glean information!

You inserting yourself is not assisting this process, so please get off my back.

 

[pawsplay]

Best overall supers system is probably still DC Heroes 3rd edition. It has scaling (even better than M&M), a good combat system (and quicker than Champions), a mix of old school roll-and-go mechanics with a Hero Point economy that allows a more dramatic focus, and really clean character sheets, even for relatively complex characters.

Savage Worlds is a good game system for putting the game system in the middle for dramatic resolution and combat, and pushing it out of the way for the rest. The Super Powers Companion is versatile and good.

BASH! is a tremendous system that rarely gets talked about. It's rules-lite to rules-medium, very clean, and very fast.

Champions 3e through 6e and M&M 3e are all tremendously good, but aren't quite as drama-driven.

Champions Now! is too quirky for me to generally recommend, but for someone with my tastes, it's tremendous. It's a very clean execution of early Champions style play with a lot of streamlining, but where it really shines is how it talks about building a campaign. The tone can vary wildly but it could be anything from Teen Titans angst to a retro four-color campaign to something in the Brave New World style. It doesn't really do very top-end superheroes, at least, it's not intended for it, but it will balance a Nightwing with a Cyborg, or a Wolverine with a Cyclops with a Jean Grey.

 

[timbannock]

Not sure if you've made your decision yet, but I'll add my two cents.

Marvel Heroic is the best, because of how it does such a good job of threading the needle of a highly narrative/fiction-first game with a fairly trad mindset, all in a medium crunch game that really nails the roleplay aspects via the Milestone system. It's a bit hard to come up with original characters for it because you need to put effort into defining the fiction of your characters' powers (for the Powers, SFX, and Limits) and their personalities (for the Milestones). But there's a literal metric crap ton of examples across a bajillion sites easily reachable by Google, and the Basic Rulebook core book and/or Civil War Premium Event Book are still passably affordable second hand. Cortex Prime can of course rebuild the game easily, and give you a few extra tools in your toolbox, as well, if you want to go that route.

Sentinels Comics is pretty great, and possibly better than Marvel Heroic at really nailing the escalation of combat in a supers game in a fun way. It doesn't give your characters as much mechanical "personality" as Marvel Heroic does, but the powers and combat rules are great, if a little bit of a learning curve, while still handling that "narrative but still trad in some ways" thing that (IMHO) Fate and PbtA games don't do well.

ICONS is probably the best of the more "trad" options. I haven't done much with it, but I've liked just about everything about it. I just happen to like fiction-first stuff a tad more, and that's why Marvel Heroic wins for me, but it's a very close race.

I've played FASERIP a LOT (original Marvel Super Heroes mostly, as well as the FASERIP retroclone; I have not tried the recently released Advanced FASERIP which supposedly has some great revisions). I even wrote a remix/retroclone of it (Astonishing Super Heroes, which is being revised by others as the more complete Heroic RPG, which just completed its Backerkit campaign). I do have a huge soft spot for it, but while I think the nostalgia factor is big, I think it's a system where you have to go into it either keeping all the players at relatively the same power level, or just know that certain things will completely break. Only then does it work. I ultimately couldn't deal with that once I found the above systems and played them more; I simply can't go back to FASERIP. But as far as trad games go, I think it's one of the few that made one of the best attempts at covering all the power levels pretty well. It failed, but not abysmally by any means. I find MEGS/DC and others of that ilk get to granular, whereas FASERIP still played pretty fast, even though it was (sometimes) irrevocably broken.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

ICONS is probably the best of the more "trad" options. I haven't done much with it, but I've liked just about everything about it. I just happen to like fiction-first stuff a tad more, and that's why Marvel Heroic wins for me, but it's a very close race.

Out of curiosity, have you tried Prowlers & Paragons Ultimate Edition? If not, you really might want to take a look. I would probably have agreed with you about ICONs prior to P&P coming out, but these days it slightly edges out ICONS in the "lighter trad supers game" category for me.

Admittedly, I may be biased. P&P's game engine is sufficiently similar to Four Color Studios' Goalsystem minis games that it earns a nostalgia bump by association. Been playing Scott Pyle's skirmish minis games for a quarter of a century now and that tends to skew my opinion.

ICONS sure does have a lot more support though. P&P has some great stuff too but there just isn't all that much of it.

 

[timbannock]

Out of curiosity, have you tried Prowlers & Paragons Ultimate Edition? If not, you really might want to take a look. I would probably have agreed with you about ICONs prior to P&P coming out, but these days it slightly edges out ICONS in the "lighter trad supers game" category for me.

Admittedly, I may be biased. P&P's game engine is sufficiently similar to Four Color Studios' Goalsystem minis games that it earns a nostalgia bump by association. Been playing Scott Pyle's skirmish minis games for a quarter of a century now and that tends to skew my opinion.

ICONS sure does have a lot more support though. P&P has some great stuff too but there just isn't all that much of it.

I have not. I see it brought up in these terms often, though, so I really ought to do so!

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

I have not. I see it brought up in these terms often, though, so I really ought to do so!

I mean, you might not need it if ICONS is doing the job for you already (they really are pretty comparable in terms of teh niche they fill) but it sounds like you've got a case of the same "let's try every supers rule set that comes out just in case it's awesome" bug I suffer from.

IIRC the DTRPG preview for P&P is ridiculously long - 25 pages or something - so you can at least get a good look at it instead of the usual half a dozen page snapshot.

 

[Theory of Games]

Is the M&M in "Most supers ttrpgs can't touch that level of power but M&M can." Mutants and Masterminds, or is it ICONS, or something else? I'm asking because this is not at all the impression I got playing Mutants and Masterminds, it felt like it had a pretty low power ceiling, but I was not the GM and didn't read up on the system and how it scales so I may be in error.

You probably had a gm running a 'Street-level' game which M&M does easily. But if you want to turn it up to something cosmic like Justice League, that's where M&M shines. So many of its competitors fall apart at high-level play.

I want to recommend The Authority because the game uses the original Authority comic book art (very very good) but the game uses the Tri-Stat system from Silver Age Sentinels. I didn't like it but you might?

Or you could play Heroes Unlimited and have a super who can lift ten tons but can't knock down a bathroom door.