Favorite Superhero TTRPG

[PrunellaUK]

Just one more thing I'd add. For me the biggest problem with getting a supers game off the ground is character generation. If your game involves any element of math, like Champions, you will need a group really willing to invest in the game to get traction. Even lighter game systems will require a lot of GM effort to help players over the hump of generating characters, and verifying their builds.

Probably the two easiest approaches in this area are either:

(1) Pre-gens - The game has pre-generated characters ready to play out the gate. I'd say that games based on existing comics IP like the Marvel Multiverse Roleplay Game make this easy because many of the players are likely to have favourite characters they are already invested in.

"Can I play Wolverine?" Sure, here's his official sheet.

"Oh great, can I take Kamala Khan to team up with Wolvie?" Of course you can!

(2) Random Generation - I feel that the Golden Heroes / Squadron UK approach pretty much hits the spot here, and it's a shame more games haven't tried it. Sure, you don't get your perfect character, or your Wolverine clone (there's always someone in my group who wants to be Logan), but you DO get handheld through character gen at Session Zero reasonably quickly. There's a lot less GM effort and you're in to playing relatively quickly.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

(2) Random Generation - I feel that the Golden Heroes / Squadron UK approach pretty much hits the spot here, and it's a shame more games haven't tried it. Sure, you don't get your perfect character, or your Wolverine clone (there's always someone in my group who wants to be Logan), but you DO get handheld through character gen at Session Zero reasonably quickly. There's a lot less GM effort and you're in to playing relatively quickly.

It's a lot more on-brand for the X-Men to get powers you didn't want.

 

[PrunellaUK]

It's a lot more on-brand for the X-Men to get powers you didn't want.

Agreed. It's an approach that captures the awkwardness of some heroes, as misfits, even in a world full of them.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've never found with fully-featured supers (that is to say those that are not incredible one-trick-ponies) random gen produces superheroes that on the whole look at all like the sourceworks. Yeah, you get the occasional Spider-Man, but they're far from the common case, and that's true even in the Marvel mutant books. Unless your system doesn't do combat at all (or only does it narratively) I also find the simpler versions of this often produce characters that are crippled in play since the the writers aren't all on their side (as I noted many years ago, the Legion of Super-Heroes, which was stuffed full of one-trick ponies, some with nothing resembling a defense, only got by because no one would shoot at them until it was time in the story for them to go down, and that was over and above taking advantage of the common convention of "energy blast that can blow through a wall only knocks out a person")

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If you are looking for a finely tuned combat experience, or recreations of your favourite comic book characters, then Golden Heroes isn’t for you. But thing is, the superhero genre isn’t about fair fights, and defeat is rarely final. And having a sharp one liner is just as important as having the strongest superpower or unlimited funds*.

*This message brought to you by Clint Barton.

 

[PrunellaUK]

Golden Heroes-style random character creation gets you to a character, but not necessarily a balanced one. Part of the challenge for players is rolling with what the dice give you. Granted, not all player groups are up for that.

It's worth asking, what supers systems generate balanced characters? I'm not even clear if Champions is perfectly balanced, despite decades of play and revision. I remember both Superworld and GURPS Supers generating some quite unpleasantly lethal and un-comics-like combats.

I can't help feeling that there's something inherently unbalanced in the genre, and a lot depends on the GM to maintain balance. A Batman-style detective might not function so well in a combat-focussed campaign. A min-maxed combat specialist might be on the periphery of a campaign that relied on the expenditure of shoe-leather in crime-solving.

In other words: superhero games by their nature are asymmetric.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's worth asking, what supers systems generate balanced characters? I'm not even clear if Champions is perfectly balanced, despite decades of play and revision. I remember both Superworld and GURPS Supers generating some quite unpleasantly lethal and un-comics-like combats.

Its going to be difficult to get completely balanced characters in supers games because there are so many moving parts (because supers are so varied) that it can be hard to see every possible interaction with them. That said, secondary balance mechanisms like M&M's PL and Fuzion (and later Hero's) Rule of X can pick off the low-hanging fruit; heck even the normal capping Hero had deals with some of that, just inflexibly. You can do things to do so more thoroughly, but they're more work than most people want to bother with, as they either care less, would rather just eyeball it and ad-hoc it, or solve it at the GM's end (the worse way to handle it IMO).

Out of curiosity, was your experience with it with the Worlds of Wonder version of Superworld or the later standalone version? Steve had reworked how BRP hit points worked such that the latter shouldn't have normally been unusually lethal, but I don't think that was done in the former.

GURPS Supers suffered from the fact supers worked pretty heavily against the natural bent of the system, and as such was going to produce something that looks more like Invincible than a typical supers setting. I don't know if the 4e version has addressed this better or not.

I can't help feeling that there's something inherently unbalanced in the genre, and a lot depends on the GM to maintain balance. A Batman-style detective might not function so well in a combat-focussed campaign. A min-maxed combat specialist might be on the periphery of a campaign that relied on the expenditure of shoe-leather in crime-solving.

In other words: superhero games by their nature are asymmetric.

There is something to that, but its not a problem without a solution if one wants to bother. First, you have to note that few superhero comics really lean away from combat all that heavily; even Batman gets in a lot of fights once you start counting. He just also does a lot of other things. With superhero teams there's rarely not sub-specializations, but few are purely combatants, so they should usually serve some other functions. That said, not all skill sets are going to get equal screen time, but that's a problem in all campaigns, not just supers.

At the other end, there are ways to equalize combat capability somewhat without having everyone identical. The animated Justice League is kind of a poster child here, as Superman was somewhat compressed down, and they did things like anytime there was a really hardcore opponent, they'd stick Batman in one of his vehicles with missiles and the like. They also quite clearly separated off the original JLA (which tended to be punchier) from latter day members in the Unlimited version, so you pretty much almost never saw the more powerful members actually working with the weaker.

There are other methods that work in the fiction but are harder to make work in a game unless you have a very cooperative player group like putting like up against like and only up against them (so Batman ends up only fighting against Sportsmaster not against Black Adam). Even with people who are genre-savvy and appreciative it can be tricky to make that work, however, since among other things it can feel much more artificial in a game. (I've never done it with supers, but I did it with a Scion 1e game because once you got to demigod its a virtual necessity, and its a tricky juggling act).

 

[billd91]

Golden Heroes-style random character creation gets you to a character, but not necessarily a balanced one. Part of the challenge for players is rolling with what the dice give you. Granted, not all player groups are up for that.

We did the random power generation with Villains and Vigilantes. Part of the challenge/fun was to try to spin the hodge-podge of powers you got into a semi-coherent identity.

It's worth asking, what supers systems generate balanced characters? I'm not even clear if Champions is perfectly balanced, despite decades of play and revision. I remember both Superworld and GURPS Supers generating some quite unpleasantly lethal and un-comics-like combats.

We loved the hell out of V&V, but it too could generate some un-comics-like combat. Mostly, it did OK, but ablative hit points and their recovery sometimes made it hard to bounce back as a hero if you took you lumps early in a caper. It did have the benefit of playing faster than Champions and powers were easier to work with as well.

I can't help feeling that there's something inherently unbalanced in the genre, and a lot depends on the GM to maintain balance. A Batman-style detective might not function so well in a combat-focussed campaign. A min-maxed combat specialist might be on the periphery of a campaign that relied on the expenditure of shoe-leather in crime-solving.

In other words: superhero games by their nature are asymmetric.

You've got a definite point here. The superhero genre itself is fairly unbalanced and narrative heavy. It think that's why Masks is as intriguing as it is. But for those who still do like a bit of more modeled superhero combat, my go-to lately has been Mutants and Masterminds. The lack of most ablative stats like hit points/stun points/etc does a lot to boost the comicbooky feel of combat to me.
I overall agree that superhero games have asymmetry. Part of the problem is the genre being so broad in story potential and character potential. And that's why I've largely felt that if you can GM a superhero game effectively, incorporating things for both Thor and Hawkeye or Superman and Batman to do to advance the game in your caper design, D&D's balance between martials and spellcasters is a lot easier.

 

[PrunellaUK]

Out of curiosity, was your experience with it with the Worlds of Wonder version of Superworld or the later standalone version? Steve had reworked how BRP hit points worked such that the latter shouldn't have normally been unusually lethal, but I don't think that was done in the former.

It was the Worlds of Wonder edition, IIRC. Though this was 40 years ago, and my memory is hazy. I recall it was easy to stack up lethal damage and my character was cut in half by a villain's minigun.

GURPS Supers suffered from the fact supers worked pretty heavily against the natural bent of the system, and as such was going to produce something that looks more like Invincible than a typical supers setting. I don't know if the 4e version has addressed this better or not.

I played GURPS a lot over the years, notably in a long-running Tékumel campaign. It's a system that works in very specific settings and genres, and not others.

Full disclosure: I have recently been helping Chaosium with their QuestWorlds line. One thing that struck me from my review passes on the rules is that the system clearly states what it is, what it's useful for, and what it's not optimised for. Yes, QW does pulp adventure well. No, it does gritty genres less well, and specifically, it's weak at horror and psychological horror.

I think when dealing with setting-agnostic systems it's always good to interrogate what they do well and what they don't. And supers settings cut hard against systems striving for any degree of realism, simulation, or mapping to real-world decision-making. Perhaps later editions of GURPS discovered a fix for this, but the first edition of GURPS Supers was, if I recall correctly, a grave misstep.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It was the Worlds of Wonder edition, IIRC. Though this was 40 years ago, and my memory is hazy. I recall it was easy to stack up lethal damage and my character was cut in half by a villain's minigun.

Yeah, that version spun too directly off core BRP, which worked okay for FutureWorld and MagicWorld, but not so much for SuperWorld.

I played GURPS a lot over the years, notably in a long-running Tékumel campaign. It's a system that works in very specific settings and genres, and not others.

Full disclosure: I have recently been helping Chaosium with their QuestWorlds line. One thing that struck me from my review passes on the rules is that the system clearly states what it is, what it's useful for, and what it's not optimised for. Yes, QW does pulp adventure well. No, it does gritty genres less well, and specifically, it's weak at horror and psychological horror.

I think when dealing with setting-agnostic systems it's always good to interrogate what they do well and what they don't. And supers settings cut hard against systems striving for any degree of realism, simulation, or mapping to real-world decision-making. Perhaps later editions of GURPS discovered a fix for this, but the first edition of GURPS Supers was, if I recall correctly, a grave misstep.

Its usually possible, to various degrees, to tune individual use-cases of a generic system to fit the genre you're trying for better (both Savage Worlds and Hero do this to some degree with optional rules to modify core assumptions) but you do have to do the heavy lifting, and at least the first version of GURPS Supers didn't do so. I suspect this was because of how early it was in the evolution of the system, or because of biases of the system administrators (there were problems with some other early products; the Witch World sourcebook, while not bad as a summary of the setting, tried to shoehorn the magic from the setting into the basic GURPS magic system, and it didn't work even half right. Later on they showed much more willingness to do more than one magic system to fit different settings).