[MHR] Marvel RPG Discontinued, PDF sales ending next week

[jekessler]

I'm planning to. And I just bought the Annihilation pdf.

Excellent! The next Game Day is right on my mother's birthday, so I may miss (I'll try to make it). I'm starting to really look forward to those snark sessions with Kitty.

 

[lin_fusan]

Based on no legal knowledge or experience whatsoever, I would also guess licensing issues, especially if they are discontinuing the pdfs.

Welp, there goes my gaming budget for the month!

 

[Jester David]

I wouldn't be surprised if the "event" structure was their real downfall, ultimately. The game plays well, but they needed better adventure support than "rehash events in the comics".

But, it plays well enough that I want to see if I can find a copy of the core rules somewhere...

Paged. I liked the game but wasn't a huge fan of the presentation. It wasn't the Marvel Universe RPG, it was the Civil War RPG.
Half the Basic Rulebook was a note-for-note retelling of the first New Avengers story which was "meh" at best, and the whole line was really mired in a particular time period rather than a generic version of the Marvel universe: the majority of the content was focused on a single storyline published a half-decade ago.

It was tricky to run the game as a generic Marvel game and emulate the movies or the Avengers cartoons, which are arguably much more popular than the comics. Half the characters from the movie were also absent and the lack of 95% of the villains in the universe also made the game hard to run.
What this game needed most was a Monster Manual.


I also wonder how much the economics of scale impacted the game. Because the Core rules were to be reprinted in the Event books, this halved the sales of core book by essentially publishing two competing products.
And I wonder how many people planned to wait until their prefered Event was released.

 

[Gaming Tonic]

The license for the Marvel Universe is pricey and the sales didn't justify renewing it. I think that the story arc angle and the game being designed for players to play established and pregenerated Marvel characters is where they guessed wrong. Most players I have ever played any RPG with groan at the thought of a pregen character. Gamers are a creative bunch and want to create their characters. There were character creation rules but they were really light on explanation and that might have been a stumbling block for other gamers. Still other gamers are just not into super rpgs. You have already narrowed the marketplace for your game. The Mutants & Masterminds game securing the DC Comics rights and having detailed character gen rules that are aimed at you playing your character amongst the other characters of that universe has had some success. My group received it better as well. Most of my group also enjoys the Hero System for supers so it is fair to say that some of them enjoy a little complexity in their rpg. Personally the news makes me sad as I liked the system and felt fully capable of inserting a group of heroes into the Civil War, Breakout, and Secret War storyline (not in that order) from Plot Points. Then again I named my son after Ghost Rider so I have always, Made Mine Marvel.

 

[Jester David]

I think that the story arc angle and the game being designed for players to play established and pregenerated Marvel characters is where they guessed wrong. Most players I have ever played any RPG with groan at the thought of a pregen character.
Gamers are a creative bunch and want to create their characters. There were character creation rules but they were really light on explanation and that might have been a stumbling block for other gamers.

Agreed.
My players balked at the idea of pregens. And there were precious few random powers. You needed to design mechanics from scratch to make characters which required knowledge of the system and some competency and comfort in game design.

They partially fixed this with a PDF random character generator, but there was still a limited number of powers.

They were also handed a huge movie to use as cross-promotion and absolutely failed to capitalize. They should have had a movie PDF with all those characters and related villains and some other big Avengers does for players to grab the rules and do a sequel to the film.
They half did this with a Thor and Hawkeye but it lacked the Hulk and any villains still leaving the base game with the C-listers from Breakout.

Then again I named my son after Ghost Rider so I have always, Made Mine Marvel.

Johnny or Danny?

 

[Umbran]

The license for the Marvel Universe is pricey and the sales didn't justify renewing it. I think that the story arc angle and the game being designed for players to play established and pregenerated Marvel characters is where they guessed wrong.

That's pretty much, what I meant, yeah.

Most players I have ever played any RPG with groan at the thought of a pregen character.

I wouldn't go that far. I mean, at every gameday we hold, pretty much every character is pregen. I've seen several different campaigns start with pregen characters and take off without problem. The issue isn't with pregen - I think the issue is with characters you cannot "make your own".

 

[Gaming Tonic]

Johnny or Danny?

Johnny

 

[Jester David]

Johnny

I was always a Danny fan, as I got into the character in the 90s. He started a standard 90s grim-and-gritty but his refusal to kill differentiated him nicely.

 

[Greg K]

Johnny

The one and only!

 

[jekessler]

They were also handed a huge movie to use as cross-promotion and absolutely failed to capitalize. They should have had a movie PDF with all those characters and related villains and some other big Avengers does for players to grab the rules and do a sequel to the film.
They half did this with a Thor and Hawkeye but it lacked the Hulk and any villains still leaving the base game with the C-listers from Breakout.

A Movie pdf would likely mean a whole different license than the comics one (weird, I know, but most probably true). then you'd have to get likeness approvals form all the actors, etc. A mess if your main thrust is the comics.

As for missing Hulk, along with Thor and Hawkeye, he was available as a free downloadable from the website. So the movie Avengers roster, at least, could be done with the corebook and a webbrowser.