Simple Superhero Systems

[Doug McCrae]

The first two drafts are more pulp sci-fi than supers.

If you'd played it, you'd know it was supers. If you've not played a game, or even bothered to read past page 3, you're in no place to issue 'warnings'.

It is explicitly supers - you play members of a super-powered crime-fighting team. You can tell it's supers from the super powers the characters get.

I have to admit that I've only skimmed the rules but I think you're both right. Most of the Styles are pulp archetypes - Agent, Commando, Daredevil, Detective, Explorer, Intrepid, Flyboy, Warrior, Two-Fisted, Professor - such as you might see in any pulp magazine or cliffhanger serial from the 1930s onwards. The Atomic is clearly a Superman-esque superhero with Atomic Strength, Atomic Flight and Z-Ray Vision. The other Styles - Alien, Ghost, Mystic, Psychic, Robot - are either non human science fiction characters or straddle the line between pulp and superhero like the Golden Age (mostly) comic book characters Zatara, The Green Lama and The Spectre.

It looks great - exactly the kind of thing I enjoy.

 

[aramis erak]

If you'd played it, you'd know it was supers. If you've not played a game, or even bothered to read past page 3, you're in no place to issue 'warnings'.

It is explicitly supers - you play members of a super-powered crime-fighting team. You can tell it's supers from the super powers the characters get.

I have played it. It's very pulp. It fits the mold for a few of the techno-heroes of golden age, but it's not supers at all by silver age nor modern standards, and it barely hits it by Golden Age.

 

[Aldarc]

I would suggest Savage Worlds. It's a pretty easy system, in an of itself. Simple enough to play theater of the mind, yet has enough complexity to allow for distinct characters and concepts. With SW being a point-based system, it allows for different levels of super hero power levels, depending on the power level of game you want. I don't think it does Galactus-level supers that well, but it's great (in my opinion) for low to mid-level supers games. The Super Powers Companion is a must have, but the Core book and the SPC will run you about $30. I've run quite a few supers games using SW (including playing in a great City of Heroes themed game at Gen Con) and it does a great job mechanically and thematically capturing the genre.

I would wait, however, for the upcoming new edition of Savage Worlds.

Venture City, which is powered by Fate Core would be easy to convert to Fate Accelerated to make a simple super system for lunchtime activities.

My work group uses Fate Accelerated for most of our lunchtime games and we manage to squeeze our games into the lunch hour.

I second FATE Accelerated. The great thing about it is that it's also very adaptable, so you can easily change the Approaches to more closely fit the genre and characters of superhero stories without worrying about the whole system crashing.

I will likewise voice my support for Fate Accelerated. There are a lot of easy-to-turn knobs that one can turn to increase or decrease its complexity.


Wearing the Cape has probably been one of the most strongly recommended Fate supers books that I have encountered.

I love FATE and FATE Accelerated dearly, but with the wrong group it turns into endless debate about the exact connotations of words in your traits. And unfortunately, I don't think you can find out you're playing FATE with the wrong group until about four sessions in. If this is a casual pickup game you might, oddly enough, want something with more structure, not less. With less you have to make up your own structure.

I suppose that I am thankful then that I have not had a "wrong group" yet, but I game almost entirely with good friends. I hear your point, but I also find the "debate" useful as it helps both the GM and player come to graps with understanding and conceptualizing their character. If they want a few wording changes for their aspects early on for clarifying things, then I am okay with that. But I also find that it's better to start with only about three aspects to start - high concept, trouble, and an other to round out the concept - so that the player can discover the other aspects through play.

The Cypher System is also fairly straight-forward and simple, being incredibly useful if you come from a d20-centric perspective. There are rules in the Cypher System Rulebook for running a supers game.

 

[Gradine]

I have played it. It's very pulp. It fits the mold for a few of the techno-heroes of golden age, but it's not supers at all by silver age nor modern standards, and it barely hits it by Golden Age.

So it's more "fly around on a jetpack and punch nazis" than it is "super-powered soldier wrapped in a flag punching nazis"?

 

[aramis erak]

So it's more "fly around on a jetpack and punch nazis" than it is "super-powered soldier wrapped in a flag punching nazis"?

That's how it comes across to me, both on read and in play.

Especially with the The Wigs as the initial "scenario"... Rocket City, transformable building/giant robot, rocket cars...
Very pulp.