What makes a successful superhero game?

[Dannyalcatraz]

Personally, i like street level supes. Peak human/enhanced human/low level superhuman. For those types of games, i found that WoD works surprisingly well ( with some elbow grease). Characters feel like heroes, they are above regular joes in power, but are still vulnerable to regular threats.

Can confirm.

I was part of a GURPS: VtM playtest, and ran a Brujah whose build involved maxing out his physical stats (Potence; Celerity) and his generation (he had been taken by an ancient vampire). But his Embrace also drove him insane- he thought he was a superhero because of his physical abilities.

The end result was a PC who was one part The Tick and one part Blade.

And mechanically, it actually worked. He really did feel like a low-powered super being in play.

I’d love to try a similar experiment with a Mage character.

 

[chuckdee]

My gripe with supers is they have too much plot armor and if they die, they mostly come back trough some shenanigans. They almost never just stay dead. While this works in comics (personally, it bothers me even in comics, that's why i stopped caring about mainstream superheroes long time ago), it makes for dull game.

It doesn't have to be this way. We played a bloody street-level supers games where death was just as possible as it was in other genres. We also played WW2 supes using Godlike, and let me tell you, there's no plot armor in Godlike.

 

[Thomas Shey]

When it comes to supers game, only dedicated system i tried is GURPS. And that system has it's own can of worms.

GURPS was probably the last game I'd have tried to have work with superheroes (as compared to people-with-powers) because so many of its assumptions fight it. And best I can tell at least with the pre-4e versions, it worked about as well as I expected.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It doesn't have to be this way. We played a bloody street-level supers games where death was just as possible as it was in other genres. We also played WW2 supes using Godlike, and let me tell you, there's no plot armor in Godlike.

This was actually one of the problems for people trying to play conventional supers with Wild Talents (and the fix they had for it swung too far the other way).

 

[dbm]

He really did feel like a low-powered super being in play.

The Savage Worlds Horror Companion has a module for ‘playing monsters’ which uses the super powers rules behind the scenes to balance up the abilities of vampires, werewolves and so on.

A good effects-based supers system can do pretty much anything within its resolution

 

[dbm]

GURPS was probably the last game I'd have tried to have work with superheroes (as compared to people-with-powers) because so many of its assumptions fight it. And best I can tell at least with the pre-4e versions, it worked about as well as I expected.

GURPS 3e took two swings at Supers in the course of that edition. V1 was a train wreck, v2 was a lot more usable.

4e supers is more difficult in some ways, as the interlock of systems is much tighter in 4e. So there are more and stronger undesirable consequences to pushing the GURPS engine to really high point totals. 3e had more ‘wiggle room’.

 

[Thomas Shey]

GURPS 3e took two swings at Supers in the course of that edition. V1 was a train wreck, v2 was a lot more usable.

It still suffered in some area from playing the "price by rarity" game which I think works really badly with superheroes at least.

4e supers is more difficult in some ways, as the interlock of systems is much tighter in 4e. So there are more and stronger undesirable consequences to pushing the GURPS engine to really high point totals. 3e had more ‘wiggle room’.

I felt unqualified to say since, while I think I own the 4e Powers book in PDF, I haven't really had the wherewithal to read it.

 

[chuckdee]

This was actually one of the problems for people trying to play conventional supers with Wild Talents (and the fix they had for it swung too far the other way).

I personally didn't care. I like the idea of supers in a world where they weren't inherently protected by the fact that they were supers. There are also alternate rules for Wild Talent and GURPS (where you don't have that problem, either) that make it more survivable.

 

[Tonguez]

My gripe with supers is they have too much plot armor and if they die, they mostly come back trough some shenanigans. They almost never just stay dead. While this works in comics (personally, it bothers me even in comics, that's why i stopped caring about mainstream superheroes long time ago), it makes for dull game.

Thats another reason I like FATE - there is actually no 'rules' for dying in the game. A character thats defeated can be 'taken out' but what that actually means is up to the player/GM. If they decide its dead, then its dead - if they decide taken out means falls of a cliff, but the body was never found - so be it.

It works well for Supers precisely because Supers never die unless its dramatically important for them to do so.

 

[darjr]

Some friends of mine wanted me to run a Deathwatch 40k game for them at a convention. That game is stuffed full of crunch about guns and armor and monstrous epic enimies and how to dispatch them. How to build these godlike Space Marines of different units that normally detest each other.

After reading it I thought how the h*ck am I going to challenge them? Nothing in the book really could, unless I stacked a ton of epic things agains them. Even a game of attrition would have taken way to long for a convention slot. What was I going to do? But I wanted to run this game.

Durring prep it began to dawn on me that the games crunch was only really good for making background music that fit the theme. To keep the players feeling immersed in the idea they are Epic Superhero like marines in the thick of things, while the real game was them dealing with each other. During the game it was clearly best doing it that way. They easily cut through everything i had to throw at them, I even trippled some things. But the whole time they would poke at each other verbally. Using lore to banter and even accuse each other of potential betrayal and not being a TRUE MARINE of the EMPEROR! Almost came to blows between PCs several times.

In a lot of ways the actual game had very little or no mechanics. I suppose all the tech and combat mechanics could have just been narritive fluff. Except not in this case. It really had to be there for this game to work. Sure maybe it went to far with all the combat and tech rules, and I absolutely would have appreceated more support for the actual game, or at least more of a clue by four in the text. But maybe that would have hurt things.

At some point they figured out the real bad guy was the Inquisitor who sent them to die and the last hour of that game was something else as they in character monologued how they may have stark diametrically opposed views of how to be a marine they were going to kumbaia, hug it out, and kill that chaos corrupted pile of tentacles.

I need to find a similar Superhero game with a similar group of lore invested folks. Maybe that DC M&M book.