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

[VictorC]

... 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.

While I can't speak for everyone, these are the reasons I wasn't a fan. To be fair, the story arc thing didn't bother me all that much. It's not that they weren't railroads (they were), but I rarely use published adventures anyway.

The character/character creation thing was a serious problem for me. I need real character creation rules, not make/pick a catch phrase and arbitrarily assign a die type. Additionally, the entire system regarding experience points and milestones. Not my cup of tea.

But I have to assume they, to a degree, saw this coming and hopefully will put something in their Hackers guide. Something with the same general system, but real character creation rules, hopefully.

 

[Jester David]

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.

They didn't need to advertise it as the "move game" just coincidentally have those characters. Possibly along with a demo event featuring Loki.

And while they did release Thor and Hawkeye, they never released Hulk. Because they were tied to the Events and that was the Planet Hulk period, so the Hulk wasn't around.

 

[Super Pony]

This might not be the version of Hulk you wanted, but they did release him for free.

WhatIf?:Hulk

 

[billd91]

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.

I think you're making a pretty strong point. I'm not a huge fan of DC's universe, but I'm a big fan of Green Ronin's DC Adventures. Not only is it based on a good supers game (M&M) but it cranked out a general rulebook and then followed it up with 2 books that were essentially Monster Manuals - giving the GMs and players a lot of favorite characters to work with and center their own campaigns on. If Marvel did the same, they might have gotten a little more traction.

Ultimately, I think a lot of the general audience for supers games are going to be pretty big comic book (or now animated series) fans. They'll have a lot of event-based source material they can work through if they desire - but it sounds like they don't have a lot of canonical characters (heroes and villains) to work with.

 

[lin_fusan]

I would have preferred not events but "genres" or themes.

A Cosmic book would have space stuff, the appropriate villains and heroes, and ways to run Cosmic stories and such.

A Mutant book would have X-Men, the racial/political stuff, and ways to run those kinds of stories.

That way not only do you get all the Heroes and their appropriate villains but you get tools and rules to run games of that genre. FF4 stopping Galactus would definitely play differently than the X-Men trying to recruit a teenager from a bigoted family.

 

[DnD_Dad]

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

I'll see you in July. Better bring mooks for me too beat on.

 

[Gaming Tonic]

I would have preferred not events but "genres" or themes.

A Cosmic book would have space stuff, the appropriate villains and heroes, and ways to run Cosmic stories and such.

A Mutant book would have X-Men, the racial/political stuff, and ways to run those kinds of stories.

That way not only do you get all the Heroes and their appropriate villains but you get tools and rules to run games of that genre. FF4 stopping Galactus would definitely play differently than the X-Men trying to recruit a teenager from a bigoted family.

That was how the original MSHRPG was presented and it was very successful. If you had a style or a comic that you really liked there was a book created for that. I think the fans that pointed out the lack of villains were absolutely spot on especially in the core rulebook which had a list of B and C villains for Breakout but not much else. Although it might have been the lack of content for Alpha Flight that doomed the game.

 

[Cam Banks]

We had to do the game the way we did it. That's pretty much the long and the short of it. Given some mighty constraints, I think we did an admirable job. The game won three Ennie Awards last year and despite the fact that it doesn't have "real" character generation rules (even though it has the exact same three methods of creating/choosing characters as FASERIP does) and was focused on blockbuster events, we had overwhelmingly good critical feedback.

Again, this had nothing to do with the event model or the rules of the game. It was a licensing/business/costs issue and that's something every licensed RPG eventually faces. It's easy to speculate after the fact, but I'll say at least that nobody at MWP - especially my creative team, including a dozen or more freelancers - is anything but grateful for the success the game has had and the response we've had from fans and gamers.

At the end of the day, though, MWP owns all of the Heroic Roleplaying rules, which have been considered a separate brand of their own from the very start. So while we're not able to publish Marvel books, we're considering ways to keep the game alive in the future.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[Jester David]

We had to do the game the way we did it. That's pretty much the long and the short of it.

I'd love it if you could elaborate.
Are you referring to the Event structure of the books? The focus on characters for those events only? The limited character generation rules and focus on pregens? The predominance of heroes rather than villains?
All of the above?

Given some mighty constraints, I think we did an admirable job. The game won three Ennie Awards last year and despite the fact that it doesn't have "real" character generation rules (even though it has the exact same three methods of creating/choosing characters as FASERIP does) and was focused on blockbuster events, we had overwhelmingly good critical feedback.

You should feel proud of its reception.

 

[Cam Banks]

I'd love it if you could elaborate.
Are you referring to the Event structure of the books? The focus on characters for those events only? The limited character generation rules and focus on pregens? The predominance of heroes rather than villains?
All of the above?

Yes. Yes. Yes. And the last one follows from the second one.

Cheers,
Cam