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Message: <blockquote data-quote="timbannock" data-source="post: 9376678" data-attributes="member: 17913">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.</blockquote>

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