More Details From Marvel RPG Writer

Matt Forbeck, the writer of the upcoming official Marvel Multiverse RPG, talked a little more about the game on his blog.

Marvel to Launch Official 'MARVEL MULTIVERSE' Tabletop Role-Playing Game in 2022

Matt Forbeck announced on Twitter that he’s working on a new in-house D616 Marvel RPG due for a 2022 release! It looks like there will be an open playtest. What’s the D617 System? “… the all-new D616 System, an accessible and easy-to-learn system for newcomers to tabletop RPGs and a natural...

www.enworld.org

He confirms that you can create your own characters, as well as play existing Marvel characters. The last Marvel game was the 2012 award-winning Marvel Heroic Roleplaying by Cam Banks and Rob Donoghue, powered by Cortex Plus. Prior to that was Jeff Grub's 1984 Marvel Super Heroes (known as FASERIP due its its attributes of Fighting, Agility, Strength... etc.), and a couple of other games.

The current game borrows that latter idea, with MARVEL standing for the abilities of Might, Agility, Resilience, Vigilance, Ego, and Logic.

Read more from Matt Forbeck at the link below!

The New Marvel RPG

On Friday, Marvel announced its plans to publish a new tabletop roleplaying game called the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game. Normally, I’d be pretty excited about this because I’m a…

www.forbeck.com

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It wouldn't surprise me if we see something like what you describe in the second paragraph: a Class system with Talent trees.

Given that Forbeck and the press release felt the need to call back to Dungeons & Dragons circuitously, it seems plausible that he's looking to the market leader for ideas. Level and Class has worked well for Fantasy, and I would be very interested to see that approach with Marvel characters.

I've seen an awful lot of Supers RPGs over the years, and the ones which have attempted to use fixed classes have pretty much all been disasters, because tons of comics characters just aren't going to comfortably fit in any class, and you end up either having tons of classes with tons of overlap, or like three classes which still manage to pointlessly restrict you and prevent you from replicating comic book characters.

Levels are even worse, if done in any traditional way.

Level and class has absolutely not "worked well for fantasy", by the way. That's simply not true. Class works well for fantasy, but D&D's level system is pretty godawful for most fantasy settings and characters. D&D is it's own subgenre, significantly deviant from any other kind of fantasy.

You might say "Well D&D is successful!!!!", and yeah, it is, because it's from 1974, and people who play D&D generally want to play D&D. But people coming to a Marvel game will often want to play Marvel characters, and class and level aren't going to work well for that, period.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

You might say "Well D&D is successful!!!!", and yeah, it is, because it's from 1974, and people who play D&D generally want to play D&D. But people coming to a Marvel game will often want to play Marvel characters, and class and level aren't going to work well for that, period.

3E's 20th level commoners are a great example of how silly it gets, along with designers (and DMs) thinking that anyone important has to have high levels in pretty much every version of D&D.

 

[Parmandur]

I've seen an awful lot of Supers RPGs over the years, and the ones which have attempted to use fixed classes have pretty much all been disasters, because tons of comics characters just aren't going to comfortably fit in any class, and you end up either having tons of classes with tons of overlap, or like three classes which still manage to pointlessly restrict you and prevent you from replicating comic book characters.

Levels are even worse, if done in any traditional way.

Level and class has absolutely not "worked well for fantasy", by the way. That's simply not true. Class works well for fantasy, but D&D's level system is pretty godawful for most fantasy settings and characters. D&D is it's own subgenre, significantly deviant from any other kind of fantasy.

You might say "Well D&D is successful!!!!", and yeah, it is, because it's from 1974, and people who play D&D generally want to play D&D. But people coming to a Marvel game will often want to play Marvel characters, and class and level aren't going to work well for that, period.

Well, well see what they do here.

 

[Greg K]

Level and class has absolutely not "worked well for fantasy", by the way. That's simply not true. Class works well for fantasy, but D&D's level system is pretty godawful for most fantasy settings and characters. D&D is it's own subgenre, significantly deviant from any other kind of fantasy.

Agreed. D&D levels (and I would argue classes) are awful for most fantasy settings and characters. The combination of class/level is especially awful for licensed characters and, especially, fails for supers for reasons you mentioned in your orignal reply

 

[Umbran]

3E's 20th level commoners are a great example of how silly it gets, along with designers (and DMs) thinking that anyone important has to have high levels in pretty much every version of D&D.

Is that an issue of levels, or of holding NPCs/monsters to using the same design precepts as PCs?

 

[Parmandur]

Agreed. D&D levels (and I would argue classes) are awful for most fantasy settings and characters. The combination of class/level is especially awful for licensed characters and, especially, fails for supers for reasons you mentioned in your orignal reply

shrug it's worked well in my experience.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Is that an issue of levels, or of holding NPCs/monsters to using the same design precepts as PCs?

I think it's an issue of no one, including the designers, being able to separate temporal power from game power and having very few knobs to turn.

Maybe the greatest smith in the world doesn't have to have high hit points and be relatively great in battle, as a 3E 20th level expert would be, or also have an exceptionally high stat that would manifest itself in multiple ways, as it does in 5E.

5E is better than 3E in this regard, as NPCs and monsters no longer are bound to the same structures as they were in 3E (I didn't play 4E, so I don't know how it worked there), but I think the simulationist impulse is a problem many times in D&D, like with this one.

 

[Parmandur]

I think it's an issue of no one, including the designers, being able to separate temporal power from game power and having very few knobs to turn.

Maybe the greatest smith in the world doesn't have to have high hit points and be relatively great in battle, as a 3E 20th level expert would be, or also have an exceptionally high stat that would manifest itself in multiple ways, as it does in 5E.

5E is better than 3E in this regard, as NPCs and monsters no longer are bound to the same structures as they were in 3E (I didn't play 4E, so I don't know how it worked there), but I think the simulationist impulse is a problem many times in D&D, like with this one.

That's a mainly 3E thing, in my experience.

 

[Greg K]

shrug it's worked well in my experience.

which class/level supers have you played?

 

[Parmandur]

which class/level supers have you played?

I have never played any Supers game, actually, can't get past the "reading the rules" part. Speaking more to my experience D&D and D&D like games. I would like to see a Supers game that works more like D&D, personally. Or to go in a radically different direction, Traveller, but I'm not going to get my hopes up.