Best (but simple) Superhero Game out?

[Madmaxneo]

I run MSH/FASERIP with a few hacks:

1) I replaced Karma and advancement with hero points. You get 1 hero point at the start of each adventure and get more for completing encounters, doing cool stuff, etc Hero points can be spent for a bunch of stuff including negating an attack, boosting damage, getting an extra action, etc. or can be banked to raise stats 1-for-1.

2) I made the skill system a little bit more free-form (so someone might have the Farmer skill and somebody else might have the Football skill) and broke it into ranks that run from +1 to +3 (novice to master)

3) Lastly and most importantly, I rely heavily on the character modeling option in the advanced book. I work with players to decide what their powers should be, what the starting ranks should be, etc. so that everything matches their character concept and is relatively balanced. Powers are fine-tuned to match whatever the player wants rather than needing to work exactly like the version in the book.

All of these options emphasis FASERIP's fast and loose play and push it further into the direction of storytelling game, but my players generally appreciate it!

I have done pretty much the same in the past.
1. I still used karma but expanded to be much like your hero points idea. Which wasn't much expanding if I remember correctly. Didn't the regular karma rules already handle most of that stuff?
2. Did you make up rules for this and how did you handle advancement/improvement? Or is it something you do on the fly and approximate balance?
3. To be honest I rarely used the modeling options in the rules. I mostly took a character concept and helped the players (if they needed it) develop the heroes as they saw fit. It was more free form and story driven that way. I am not sure if I want to do that this time, though it might work pretty well.
Bruce

 

[Spatula]

Are you talking about the Margaret Weis/Tracy Hickman production of Marvel Super Heroes?

Yes. While not perfect (what RPG is?) I find that it emphasizes what's important and interesting about each character, and has some interesting balancing mechanisms to deal with the issue of power disparity between PCs. But there's not a lot of room for mechanical character advancement, which is true to the genre, but it sounds like that would be a deal-breaker for you.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I know it's not in the running anymore, but I have to say one last, KEY thing I like about HERO: even though PC generation is complex, when you actually play the game, @90% of what you need to play is in your character sheet. The books largely sit to the side, unused.

So, while you may spend a lot of time in PC generation, during play, things tend to run smoothly and quickly,

 

[Madmaxneo]

I'd love to be able to check out the last rendition of Marvel Super Heroes but it isn't available anymore (I think the license ran out). Back in the first few years of the decade I got all excited and ordered a newly published Marvel Super Heroes game. I don't think I had ever been so disappointed in a game as when I looked through that book. Game play was based on these red and white dots (life or power tokens or something like that). At that point I decided that they would never be able to out do the original Marvel Super Heroes.

HERO does sound interesting and it might be something I would want to look into in the future as I do like complex character creation, but it's not appropriate for what I want to do for this game. Besides I don't really have the time to learn a new system, which is the primary reason for wanting something simple.

Bruce

 

[WayneLigon]

I'd love to be able to check out the last rendition of Marvel Super Heroes but it isn't available anymore (I think the license ran out).

You mean the Margaret Weiss game? I played this 3-4 times and I liked what I saw. We had a team of fairly diverse power levels and it was a very simple system to learn with some really neat little things you could do. Huge drawback for me: no real chargen system - you're encouraged to crib and estimate from the writeups present in the game, which would be perhaps good if they had done a 'Handbook to the Marvel Universe'-style supplement series like Marvel Classic had (Perhaps to this date the most ambitious and amazing supplement series I've seen for any game. The sheer amount of work is just astounding). It was hard for me to swallow the idea of 'you must buy supplements from us to get a good picture of how to create characters', even though it's almost certain that was a Marvel requirement.

but it's not appropriate for what I want to do for this game.

ICONS is about the simplest superhero game I know. It might, in fact, be too simple - it eventually proved to be so for our group, at least, but you certainly can learn it in a very short period of time. I keep wanting to fool around with it more, because it seems like one of those games that, if I find that one little thing I did wrong, it will become the game that solves all my problems with M&M. I know there are supplements for it that might make it more palatable, but I have not personally read them. One, 'Great Power' is basically a 1.5 version of the game, and Kenson says a new edition of the game is 'fairly inevitable'. (Another fantastic reason to read Kenson's blog is that he frequently takes animated series episodes and breaks them down in game terms).

It has random power and stat generation like Marvel Classic, and yes you can wind up with people of vastly different power levels, so that seems to address one of your needs.

There is a super powers supplement for Savage Worlds. Unless we missed something terrible important, though, it seems impossible to do actual four-color supers with the system. It seems much more suited for people with a much lower level of powers (both in number and quality) than most people might consider 'superheroes'.

There is a generic clone of Marvel Classic called 4C or Four Color. I have no idea how well they succeeded in this goal.

I would love for someone to do a FATE book with four-color supers but so far I've seen nothing that approaches that idea.

 

[Bagpuss]

That's... a lot to get from a single aspect. And, in general, in order to get value out of an aspect you need to spend a fate point. And, invoking it gives you just a +2 on your roll. That's not likely to get a character to consistently be able to lift ocean liners, unless you've just re-scaled the entire system. And then, *everyone* is lifting ocean liners, because getting a +2 on a roll isn't all that hard.

Aspects are always true even if they are not invoked. Aspects don't need to be invoked to give value, they just have to be accepted by the group, to have whatever meaning you attach to them.

For example if you have the aspect Invisible, then you are invisible, you shouldn't even need to make a stealth roll unless you give some other clue that you are there. Then if you are forced to make a stealth roll because (say you accidentally knocked over some pans, or a walking on a squeaky floor) then you can invoke Invisible for +2 on the roll.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I'd love to be able to check out the last rendition of Marvel Super Heroes but it isn't available anymore (I think the license ran out).

They couldn't afford to keep the license - but Amazon still has a few in stock. Bear in mind that it's an excellent RPG if a little swingy, but won't be anything like what you are used to; the rules are largely there to draw out descriptions of what is going on from the players almost on a "Name it and claim it" principle. It's also one of those systems that will clunk until it clicks and then it will be very easy - but takes a conceptual shift. However when it does click it can really draw people into scenes. If it interests you, I'd recommend rpg.net as a good place to find people who know the system well.

(There have been four Marvel RPGs so far - and all have their fans and detractors).

 

[Spatula]

If [MWP's Marvel Heroic Roleplaying] interests you, I'd recommend rpg.net as a good place to find people who know the system well.

The forums over at MWP are also back, and much more focused than RPG.net. Although it seems they've lost all the posts from the old boards. which is a real shame. There was a ton of advice and player-created writeups there.

 

[Neonchameleon]

The forums over at MWP are also back, and much more focused than RPG.net. Although it seems they've lost all the posts from the old boards. which is a real shame. There was a ton of advice and player-created writeups there.

Thanks. Hadn't realised they'd come back.

 

[Highland Raider]

SUPERS! by Simon Washbourne, creator of Barbarians of Lemuria, or his follow-up TRIUMPHANT! Though I'm familiar with the former and have run several sessions with it, I have not done so with the latter, but SUPERS! is a fast system that is fairly complete as-is yet (like most rules) can be added to by a GM with an overabundance of time.