New Marvel RPG?

[Cam Banks]

Basic Game is now live at DriveThruRPG. Links in my signature!

Really proud of my entire team, from concept to execution. Was a ton of fun to write, and seeing it now in the wild makes me very happy. If you haven't already checked in with your local game store, we've got dozens of launch parties happening all around North America in anticipation of the book's print release at the end of this month! Sign up, have a good time, and share the love!

Cheers,
Cam

 

[Piratecat]

Whoo hoo, bought my copy!

Mr. Banks, it looks gorgeous and fun. The burning question remains, however. WHERE'S MY MAN-THING?

 

[Umbran]

WHERE'S MY MAN-THING?

That, sir, sounds like an extremely personal question.

 

[Relique du Madde]

Now that the same is out, I could see "Avengers vs X-Men: What Should have happened" games/campaigns being a new Superhero RPG meme once the events starts this April.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

I don't see the point in starting lowly as heroes. That's your call. No comics do that: what you see is what you get. Captain America hasn't gotten stronger, he's just more famous. Neither has Spider-man. Heroes are heroes. The only reason homebrew heroes would be weaker is because the players don't believe they're stronger, or need the actual comic heroes to be on a pedestal, so they build their characters "weaker". Meh.

EDIT; Ninja'd by...well EVERYONE.

Also see Perez's NEW TEEN TITANS or Christos Gage's AVENGERS ACADEMY.

Or honestly any legacy hero who adopts the mantle of their predecessor. Wally West, Kyle Rainer or Bart Allen.

Or Jean Grey before Phoenix compared to after Phoenix. Wolverine before his encounter with Shingen Yoshida and after. Each one represents a change and obvious growth in the character.

And a supers game doesn't only represent the superhero comic medium either. If you take into the account various shonen manga they're pretty much all about the characters starting out relatively weak and then over the course of time getting INSANELY powerful. Saint Seiya, Yu Yu Hakusho, Bleach, Naruto, One Piece...

 

[fireinthedust]

Ah, yes, if you fast forward through approximately fifty years of comic book history, you will see that some characters have increased in power. You're right.

HOWEVER I would like to point out that this is an incredibly slow process, usually, and is usually much slower than RPG speed (unless your group enjoys montages)

Wolverine has been retconned so often that now he's been himself for about a hundred years. This includes before he fought Yoshida (though there is a question of public perception as power: the publishers then thought he was better, so they buffed him).

The point is that the way comics work (imho) is that they take an idea and just continue you, at best polishing rough edges.

Really, it's more like the bad guys get easier rather than the heroes getting better. Or the heroes just get more awesome, adding to their math, but not expanding their powers per se. They get more refined and have more suspension of disbelief.

Meh, it's a bit of both, but primarily its not an XP genre.

And a supers game like the Marvel RPG isn't about gaming with shonen manga. It's about playing Marvel characters. Could be used as it, but it's designed (I assume) with Marvel Comics in mind.

 

[Relique du Madde]

And a supers game like the Marvel RPG isn't about gaming with shonen manga. It's about playing Marvel characters. Could be used as it, but it's designed (I assume) with Marvel Comics in mind.

I disagree with you on many levels here. For starters, there is a Marvel Manga-verse, Anime version of Marvel characters, and the various animated marvel universes. Therefore, playing a "shonen manga" styled game set in one of the Marvel universes is a legit playing style.

Also, I personally don't think playing as a Marvel character is particularly interesting. For me, the Marvel RPG is about my fanboy desire to create a character and having it interact with Marvel characters in the Marvel Universe.

I would never want to play a Civil War event rail road where you play as Spiderman and end up having to do everything he did during the event. Nor am I personally interested in playing a "What if" campaign where I control Spiderman during the Civil war while being anti-registration instead of being pro-registration. I would rather play as my own character like "El Flame-o" (who is a Latino version of Pyro but can psionically create fires as well as control them) so that I could be a thorn in Iron Man's side and lead a rebel group of mutants (X-Force) against the SHRA as part of Captain America's anti-registration resistance group.

 

[Greg K]

Also, I personally don't think playing as a Marvel character is particularly interesting. For me, the Marvel RPG is about my fanboy desire to create a character and having it interact with Marvel characters in the Marvel Universe.

Same here provided the interaction is limited to occasional guest appearances.

I would never want to play a Civil War event.

Me neither.

Actually, the Marvel Universe has been, pretty much, dead to me since 1990 or 1991 (For the New Mutants and X-men, my interest had already ended in 1987 with Louise Simonson taking over the former and the conclusion of Fall of the Mutants for the latter). The only things of any interest to me from that point were Spiderman and Daredevil until some time before 1995, Kurt Busiek's Avengers , some of the Marvel Knights stuff (including the Kevin Smith and David Mack runs on Daredevil), and Captain America:Winter Soldier.

 

[Agamon]

I've been playing in an online "launch event", and this game is great. The narrative style is a lot of fun. Deciding your action and then looking at your sheet to see what dice to use is nice change to the usual vice versa. The elegant play between the players' dice pools and the Watcher's doom pool works well.

Making your own PCs isn't too tough, if that's what you want to do. I think that one will get the most out of the game by really getting into the character, which is often easier when you've got the backlog of history like the Marvel heroes. But if you're willing to invest into a new creation, it'd work fine.

 

[mikelaff]

hey -over on the BAMF podcast - Stacey Montgomery gave a review of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and ran a few of us through a short demo scene.
You can check it out here if you like