One of my favorite games is the Classic Marvel Super-Heroes game that TSR put out in the 80s and 90s. It, along with Call of Cthulhu from Chaosium, were the games that broke me out of the rut of fantasy gaming and Dungeons & Dragons in the mid nineteen-eighties. It is a game that I go back to periodically, and it still holds up really well in play. And it isn't just with me. I see a few people in my various social media circles talking about their current, or sometimes ongoing, games of the Classic Marvel Super-Heroes RPG as well.
I'm not really a huge fan of Marvel Comics, but that's okay, because the system makes for a really good generic super-hero system that you can use in your own worlds as well. When I was in high school, and college, our games tended to be a mash-up of the Marvel Universe with our own original characters. It gave the opportunity for those in my groups at the time to experience Marvel characters that they were fans of, while interacting with them with their own fictional representative rather than someone else's.
With Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 in the theaters, and the digital version of the FX series Legion in my Amazon Prime queue, it seems like it is a good time to talk about the Classic Marvel Super-Heroes game.
Tuesdays are both the day that I write my column here at EN World and when I run whatever our weekly online game is. With our online game currently playing Marvel Super-Heroes, that sort of lets me double dip this week as I can prep a column and the game from the same materials. Our weekly online group decided to dip back into the game a few weeks ago. This is our second time with the game. The first time we played a psychedelic supers game set in New York City that transposed the ideas of the setting of Zak Smith's Red and Pleasant Land into the disco-era of the 1970s. Drugs, vampires, extra-dimensional mind trips, fools and Studio 54 made up important elements of the game.
Our current game is a little less psychedelic so far, and is developing into an exploration of how super-heroes can impact the structure of the society around them. One of the characters, a super-powered being from another dimension or world (that hasn't been quite fully developed yet) is using social media to learn more about their adopted world.
One of the reasons that I think the Classic Marvel Super-Heroes game has held up so well over the years is that it is a sort of "middle school" game, somewhere between the less developed, and more interested in the simulation of the "reality" of a world and the later storytelling and story games interested in dealing with the "fiction" of a world. The mechanics of the game create a bridge between these two modes of thought in game design.
One of the most important parts of the game's rules would be those dealing with Karma. In its simplest application, Karma is an exploration of the fiction of super-hero genre. When using Karma as an in-game currency, such as to impact dice rolls, the player has to make a decision about what is more important: success right now, success later on in the game, or improvement. Karma is a pool of points that a player can spend to increase dice rolls. You spend Karma points on a 1:1 basis, with each spent point increasing the result of your roll. Of course, spending a lot of points now means that you might not have the points to spend on a more important roll later on in a session.
Karma also serves as experience points in the game. Increases in ability ranks, new powers and new talents are all bought using a character's Karma points. When using a character's Karma, a player has to keep all of this going in the back of their mind. Do they want to increase their character's strength after a few sessions? That means a player will have to take their dice rolls as is, and hope for the best during stressful situations.
It is an interesting idea that I think helps to represent the fiction of super-hero stories. The balance of something being important now with something being important later is always present in super-hero comics (and movies), and Karma does a really great job at providing a mechanical pressure for considering a character's actions within the game.
Karma also acts in a way like the anti-Experience Points of the earlier editions of Dungeons & Dragons. Where a game like D&D rewards players for using violence and death as a tool against protagonists, in the Classic Marvel Super-Heroes game the opposite is rewarded. Killing NPCs and villains causes a character to lose all of their Karma. And, if the group of characters has a shared Karma pool, that death will impact their Karma as well. And, of course, there is still the possibility of legal action within the world.
Karma elegantly combines a few different mechanical elements in a way that helps reinforce the genre concepts of a super-hero comic story. Honestly, I don't think that a lot of use realized what the game was doing when we were younger, but I think that it is the innovation of mechanical elements like this that are the reasons why we still talk about, and play this game, after all this time.
The simplicity of the task resolution helps a lot too. The Classic Marvel Super-Heroes game used an interesting table-based resolution system that was robust and simple at the same time. You rolled percentile dice against the rank of a power, ability or talent (added any relevant column shifts), added Karma if you had it and felt that you might not roll well, and consulted a table on the back of the rulebook. Success was determined by the color of the result of your roll on the table, with greater results leading to more awesome things happening within the game.
This table-based resolution ended up being so popular that TSR used versions of it in other games as well, like their licensed Conan role-playing game, and in a revision of their science fiction game Star Frontiers. None of the other table-based games proved to be as popular as Marvel Super-Heroes, however. The zeitgeist of a great system married to a popular property is a hard one to beat.
I did try other super-hero games before Marvel Super-Heroes, mostly a friend running a few sessions of an early edition of Champions for us, but none of them clicked the way that the Marvel game did. Even with me being a diehard DC Comics fan, the classic DC Comics game from Mayfair Games never really did it for me either. For me, it was just the ease and simplicity of the FASERIP system that Marvel Super-Heroes used that would win out for me each time.
Don't think that there aren't faults to the game. One of the biggest problems with the system is that there isn't a lot of granularity to the rules when it comes to the ranks used to describe the powers and abilities of characters. This means that the abilities of the less powerful, and so-called "street level," types of characters can end up looking a lot alike. One could argue that this is a feature, because the capabilities of the characters themselves in the comics can sometimes blur together, but it makes finding a niche for your character in an ongoing game difficult. One of the things that I did for the expansion of the 4C retroclone that I've worked off and on the development of was to add more ranks to the game, to give characters more granularity. When you can have Black Panther, Iron Fist and The Punisher in an adventure (because, why not?), you end up having to look to their personalities and externals sometimes to differentiate their capabilities.
While the "no killing" rule of Karma helps to enforce the morality of comic book super-heroes, it also came right before the time when comics would "grow up" and start to accept the fact that the violence inherent in their stories could lead to death and dismemberment. A couple of years after the release of the original Basic rules, and the same year that the revised Advanced rules came out, comics like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns would change the sensibilities of how comics would treat violence. A few years later, with the rise of Image Comics and their grim and gritty approach to super-heroes informed by those seminal books, a game about super-heroes that didn't kill was deemed as quaint by some. Obviously, the simple answer would be to just drop the rule that killing causes Karma loss, or dramatically lessen the amount of Karma lost, but some people would shift to games where morality wasn't as baked into the rules, like Palladium's Heroes Unlimited game.
This also brings up another issue that some had. There were two versions of the game. The Basic game (as the original edition was called) was revised into a new edition in 1991 used a simplified version of the rules with less granularity. In 1986 the Advanced version of the game was published, with more granularity to the ranks used to describe powers and abilities, more powers and talents, and a greater amount of detail over all. My personal preference is to use the revised version of the Basic rules, only because I like the simplicity of it, and you get all the rules that you need to run a game in 64 pages. However, the two versions are 100% cross compatible, so you can use material from one game in another version. The "best" version comes down to personal preferences of the group.
If you are so inclined to check it out, because you have never played the Classic Marvel Super-Heroes game, there was a deal made (allegedly) in the early days of what we now know as the internet between Marvel Comics and TSR that would allow that PDFs of the game could be circulated, as long as they were non-commercial. I don't know of the veracity of those claims these days, but it is hard to put a genie like that back into the bottle. It does mean that there are a number of decent quality PDFs of the game that are easily downloaded. This has facilitated online play for our group.
There are also a couple of retroclones of the game available (not to mention "inspired by" games like Steve Kenson's ICONS). I recommend checking out the Four Color rules, as they are the best clone, and they avoid infringing copyrighted material unlike another clone.
If you have never checked out the game, and you like either super-hero games or Marvel Comics, I suggest doing so. There is a really good game in there that has held up well over the years.
