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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dbm" data-source="post: 9607462" data-attributes="member: 8014">To the original question, I think it’s a little bit of option A and a little bit of option B. Superhero media is at an all time high, so probably has more fans than it has had in a long time. That means the intersect between supers fans and TTRPG fans is probably at its highest ever?I think supers as a genre suffers for accessibility and staying power a little in comparison to fantasy. The dominant supers stables (DC and Marvel) seem to generate interest in playing specific characters rather than leveraging slightly more open archetypes or broader character types. And those IP characters are usually locked behind temporary publishing partnerships. So, a smaller range of systems that people are actively looking for and those games often fall out of print. Which stops a game getting a big install-base like D&D has, and that in turn makes it harder to get a game group together specifically to play supers. Yes, there are expy characters but people are less likely to know what they are looking for here. My personal favourite super system is Savage Worlds with the latest Super Powers Companion. SWADE as the core engine is already great for pulp action and supporting a wide range of scenes / challenges. The SPC adds on an effect-based powers system and some campaign rules to tweak things to better simulate supers media. An interesting aspect of the SPC is that the powers are built from a completely different pool of resources than ‘regular’ character development, and your powers themselves hardly ever improve. This means character growth can happen in terms of learning to use your powers better but the powers themselves are fairly static. I find this very effective in longer term play as you can start of really powerful without the issue of a power growth curve on top of that making characters unchallengeable over time. And while supers characters in media have variable capability based on the current author they don’t typically go through the ‘zero to hero’ arc unless it’s a key theme of the series, like Invincible’s own story arc. You can implement that if you want to (it’s a trivial house rule) but static power levels is the baseline.</blockquote>

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