How Do You Like Your Super Hero TTRPG Games/Campaigns?

[overgeeked]

Eh. I love Planetary as much as anyone does, but I feel like the Shadow and even the Spirit are closer to superheroes than Doc Savage is. If they're not separate eras, they're a continuum where some of the characters (like Tarzan) don't really work next to full-fledged superheroes, while others definitely do.

If we’re talking real-world, then yeah the pulp heroes are separate in that they started before comics proper and were in a different medium, the prose pulp magazines of the ’30s to ’50s. If we’re talking in-fiction, then I’d put most of the pulp heroes as street-level supers.

 

[Blue]

These days my gaming groups only dabble with super hero one shots. We tried a few engines like Mutants and Masterminds and the old TSR Faserip, but one I really enjoyed was Sentinel Comics because I felt it did a better job of simulating comic books as opposed to simulating super powers.

I'm really interested in Sentinel Comics RPG. Reading it, the GYRO concept really seems great. How does the game feel different then others you've mentioned?

 

[Reynard]

I am on the side of really disliking "comic book emulator" style RPGs. I don't think you gain anything by dividing actions up into panels and scenes into pages, etc...

 

[Tonguez]

Eh. I love Planetary as much as anyone does, but I feel like the Shadow and even the Spirit are closer to superheroes than Doc Savage is. If they're not separate eras, they're a continuum where some of the characters (like Tarzan) don't really work next to full-fledged superheroes, while others definitely do.

Why would Tarzan not work next to full-fledge superheroes? He’s interacted with Batman and is strong and agile enough to stand alongside enhanced humans, has enhanced senses and can tame/summon animals…

 

[Blue]

I am on the side of really disliking "comic book emulator" style RPGs. I don't think you gain anything by dividing actions up into panels and scenes into pages, etc...

In many, it's little more than a narrative framing technique, one we don't think about much because it doesn't exist in plentitude outside comics and graphic novels, and superheroes are the only genre strongly if not primarily associated with those mediums.

But using panel descriptions to foreshadow and then frame an oncoming threat, or to celebrate a particularly telling bit of play, works fine.

Some have more mechanics to it, like MHR having Action Scenes and Transition Scenes, with the latter being used to recover from the Action scenes and build up resources, but really that just another beat method and that's been around in storytelling since forever (and Robin Laws wrote about those in connection to RPGs long before a supers RPG took them up).

Others can call something a panel instead of a turn, highlighting that one main action is happening in it. But it's functionally the same.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Why would Tarzan not work next to full-fledge superheroes? He’s interacted with Batman and is strong and agile enough to stand alongside enhanced humans, has enhanced senses and can tame/summon animals…

Because Tarzan's adventures are about stabbing people to death or throwing them off cliffs, etc. Leaving aside the milieu is different, it's tonally not the same kind of adventure.

Marvel and DC writers, many of whom love Tarzan and company, regularly try to make this stuff work with standard superheroes with the Savage Land and D-tier characters like Ka-Zar and it works OK. Sometimes.

Pulp stories are different than even standard street level stories, for the most part. And that's fine.

 

[FrogReaver]

I feel like a more narrative approach might work well for superheroes. The genre isn’t really whether they defeat the villians, it’s more about how they grow, how society views them, trying to find solutions around no win situations, what kind of collateral damage there is, how they maintain a normal life while being a superhero, etc.

 

[Tonguez]

If we’re talking real-world, then yeah the pulp heroes are separate in that they started before comics proper and were in a different medium, the prose pulp magazines of the ’30s to ’50s. If we’re talking in-fiction, then I’d put most of the pulp heroes as street-level supers.

So where would you put newspaper comicstrip heroes like Mandrake and The Phantom? Are they Pulp heroes or full comic superheroes?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So where woulf you put newspaper comicstrip heroes like Mandrake and The Phantom? Are they Pulp heroes or full comic superheroes?

The Phantom is probably the closest to a traditional superhero because of all of his trappings, including a costume that just doesn't work in real life, his crazy lair and his borderline insane rings that brand people he punches with them.

 

[Reynard]

On the subject of long super hero campaigns: if you have never read it, I highly recommend Aaron Aalston's Strike Force. It is a Hero/Champions specific book, buy the important parts are completely system agnostic. Allston manage to run a long term campaign with multiple groups and solo heroes, embracing the very Bronze Age interpersonal conflicts and melodrama of the era. It is a master class not just in running a long term.supers game, but any long term game.

I do not own nor have read the more recent update, which includes a lot of essays by other supers RPG luminaries, if I understand it correctly. At the time of the Kickstarter, I did not believe one could improve upon AASF. But one of these days I should grab at least the PDF.