What makes a successful superhero game?

[chuckdee]

I'm thinking of the Endgame movie where the spaceship is raining down missiles on everyone and they are all hiding and such, then Ms Marvel comes to just fly through the ship and take everything out. Begs the question of why she couldn't just fly through Thanos to end the whole problem. It was a letdown to me. The game needs to have a way to let cosmic universe supers play at the table with local neighborhood supers. There is a big gap between the two. Like someone showing up at the D&D table with a 20th level PC when the rest of you are 3rd level.

Because Thanos was more resistant than the spaceship? That seems the obvious answer. After all, unless you think she was holding back, he was definitely tanking her punches.

 

[overgeeked]

A system that is capable of allowing heroes of differing power levels to work as a team without the high powered heroes completely overshadowing the lower powered heroes. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying for example.

Yeah, those are hard to design but they are out there. Games like MHR and most of the story-focused games. The much easier approach is to have challenges and obstacles that cater to the specific powers and abilities of the actual characters in the group, like how comic writers do and have done since team superhero comics began.

There seems to be two pretty distinct groups of supers games these days. There are pretty firmly narrative games where the ‘power’ of a character measures their ability to drive or influence the narrative with their chosen skill set, irrespective of what the skill set is. These games seem to make it ‘easier’ to have characters with power sets that would typically be seen as very different in raw power (Batman in the Justice League, Hawkeye in the Avengers etc.). And there are games where power sets are a bit more (small bit more…) simulationist in nature and hence where Superman may indeed be able to punch Batman into a fine red mist if he so wanted to.

Yeah. Not sure it's possible to make a game that appeals to both. Considering that split mostly explains why the top two superhero RPGs are M&M and Masks.

so long as you don’t have a game where every challenge can be solved by simply punching things. And in my opinion good super hero adventures should involve a much wider range of challenges than just combat.

Exactly. That's one crux for me. If it's all heartless, mindless combat it misses at least half of the joy of the genre.

So, a good supers game in play is a delicate balance of system and campaign structure which can be hard to handle. In my opinion it is definitely one of the more challenging types of game to run well.

I've played and run superheroes more often and longer than any other genre. All the tricks I've found stem from reading more comics and reading books on writing comics. Those tricks generally work a treat and only require a small sacrifice in fidelity to any relevant mechanics. But then well-designed superheroes games tend to include many insider tricks of their own. Like giving the heroes Hero points or karma or whatever meta-currency when the villain inexplicably escapes, etc.

I'm thinking of the Endgame movie where the spaceship is raining down missiles on everyone and they are all hiding and such, then Ms Marvel comes to just fly through the ship and take everything out. Begs the question of why she couldn't just fly through Thanos to end the whole problem.

Because then 1) it wouldn't be a superhero story and 2) it wouldn't be an interesting story.

It was a letdown to me. The game needs to have a way to let cosmic universe supers play at the table with local neighborhood supers. There is a big gap between the two. Like someone showing up at the D&D table with a 20th level PC when the rest of you are 3rd level.

As above, the comics handle this with ease and have for decades. Give the team challenges and obstacles that are tailored to different characters. If you have Superman and Batman on the same team, present something only Superman can handle and something only Batman can handle.

Personally, when it comes to Supers games, I prefer a rules-light game that does not use a grid (minis are ok for general positioning, but not required). I say this because the setting for a superhero game can not only range over the space of many city blocks (or whatever) given flight, and superspeed, wallcrawling and the like

Same. The distances are too wild to restrict to a grid.

super encounters require a collective imaginative space that can come into existence through play (i.e. the GM doesn't need to specify there is a newspaper box on the corner to throw at the Rhino, we can assume there would be one there if it is midtown, for example), everything doesn't/shouldn't have to be all laid out.

Oh, gods yes. You're collectively imagining demi-gods and gods knocking into and knocking over skyscrapers in one city this round and another city in the next round...precise maps are not something you can reasonably expect unless we're running in the real world and using Google maps constantly.

This is why M&M fell flat for me. Being based on 3E d20 style mechanics the powers were written out too much with a grid in mind (caveat, 2E M&M was the last I looked at).

This is nearly opposite to my approach to D&D which is very much minis and terrain, etc. . .

It's all about the scale. It just works for D&D in a way it doesn't for superheroes.

Personally, my favorite superhero system is the Marvel Saga Card game from the late 90s, which my friends and I homebrewed slightly better character creation rules for. It was the longest and most successful supers game I have ever run.

I went digging through some old game storage boxes and came across my copy of that recently. The box itself was smashed to hell but I still have all the cards and books. At least I think I do. I never really tried it, much less played it. What was so great about it?

 

[DarkCrisis]

Ive been looking for a good and easy to run Superhero game and waiting to see what the Invincible one looks like thats coming KS soon.

 

[overgeeked]

I can't say it any better that that, so I will add "mechanics that promote synergies in team fighting itself."

Supers gaming suffers from a variation of James Bond's laser watch problem, where the emulation of other media in an rpg strains to operate. If a character has two powers, but one is vastly more useful than the other, what's the reason for including the weaker one at all? Especially in a point buy system where resources might be allocated more efficiently.

To me that's one of the big arguments against point buy systems. It's not possible to mechanically balance Superman and Batman. It's a fool's errand to try. If someone has rank 1 fish telepathy it should be on their sheet regardless of the efficiency of a point buy system.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

To me that's one of the big arguments against point buy systems. It's not possible to mechanically balance Superman and Batman. It's a fool's errand to try. If someone has rank 1 fish telepathy it should be on their sheet regardless of the efficiency of a point buy system.

Well, you can always mechanically balance a system by introducing a meta-currency.

Example:

Take any system and add a currency "story points". You can spend a point to make any roll affecting you either a success or a failure. If multiple people contribute to a roll, you can keep adding until you are the winner. If there is a clear winner, they choose the result.

Give Superman 3 story points / session.
Give Batman N story points / session.

For any reasonable measure of effectiveness and assuming at least a half-dozen meaning rolls in a session, if N=0, Superman is more effective and if N=10000, Batman is more effective.

So somewhere in between, they are balanced.

---

This may seem a bit theoretical, but it is how you can have Rose Tyler and Doctor who play effectively together in DWAITAS. And it's a solid option for FATE-based supers games.

And you could make an excellent case that it emulates the way comic book writers portray their heroes as their powers wax and wane depending, to a very large extent, on who they are up against.

 

[Micah Sweet]

A system that is capable of allowing heroes of differing power levels to work as a team without the high powered heroes completely overshadowing the lower powered heroes. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying for example.

Can you think of a non-Narrativist game that does this well? Or is the claim that a successful superhero RPG must have a Narrativist base?

 

[cranberry]

I think the two most important are lots of choices for creating a character, and balance.

For any TTRPG, balance seems like an obvious answer, but for a superhero game, it's critical.

I mean, if everyone can build a Superman, there is no challenge.

 

[Thondor]

Designer of Simple Superheroes #0 here. I'm currently running sessions of the in-development variant Supervillains Unleashed.

As many designers do . . . I have opinions about what makes a supers game great.

One is rather strong and isn't what some here say they want: heroes from different power tiers - DON'T DO IT, just don't. Your players are playing a game. They shouldn't ever be that unequal. You can have heroes that FEEL like they are at different power tiers but that is more about the focus and types of powers they took, not about their "base" power. No one should ever think - that guy should just get vaporized because . . .
Simple Superheroes gets this feel primarily with different starting arrays, and how people improve their hero. For example heroes with weaker Talents have more Talents and are also more connected to the world and recover strainpoints easier.
You pick what power tier you play at and every player has a hero at that tier (vigilante, empowered, planetary or cosmic) all that changes is how you interact with normal people at each tier.

Narrative, Simulation or something else? I wrote a post here about how I think there is a third option that Simple Superheroes and a few others take. A Framework approach.

Proactive:
Some good suggestions on how Superheroes can be less reactive. Investigating larger schemes and big bads is one. So is providing underlying narrative of them actually being able to say reduce corruption in the police/courts, and similar.

Supervillains Unleashed doesn't have that problem -- villains are very active. As the GM I get to just react to what the heroes are doing with various superheroes, media, cops, etc. It's been a blast so far.

 

[Theory of Games]

To me that's one of the big arguments against point buy systems. It's not possible to mechanically balance Superman and Batman. It's a fool's errand to try. If someone has rank 1 fish telepathy it should be on their sheet regardless of the efficiency of a point buy system.

Point-buy systems aren't attempting to balance characters. The point limit is a by-product of the genre: normal people get X points, fantasy adventurers get Y points or superheroes get Z points. The points provide varying levels of PC capability allowing them to "do cool things" in their designated setting. Normal people get squished in superhero settings.

Actually, none of the superhero rpgs I've ever read or played or run have tried to balance heroes - and they shouldn't. In Marvel Super Heroes, Thor is way more powerful than Captain America. With MASKS, a PC who can lift 200,000 pounds is going to be more powerful than the normie chic who's great at Mixed Martial Arts. There genre is too diverse for balancing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There seems to be two pretty distinct groups of supers games these days. There are pretty firmly narrative games where the ‘power’ of a character measures their ability to drive or influence the narrative with their chosen skill set, irrespective of what the skill set is. These games seem to make it ‘easier’ to have characters with power sets that would typically be seen as very different in raw power (Batman in the Justice League, Hawkeye in the Avengers etc.). And there are games where power sets are a bit more (small bit more…) simulationist in nature and hence where Superman may indeed be able to punch Batman into a fine red mist if he so wanted to.

I lean more ‘simulation’ in my play preferences, and so do my group. Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion is the best game of this type that I have personally played. Others include GURPS Supers, HERO Champions, DC Heroes (a long time ago), and a very small amount of Mutants and Masterminds; you can see the through-line there I am sure.

For me, a good supers system has to give you lots of widgets to build your character out of, and hopefully these are reasonably well balanced in terms of how useful they are. So rather than having characters with the ability to impact narrative directly, it’s about modelling their powers and abilities which then allow them to impact the narrative indirectly. This can still handle the Batman vs Superman issue in my personal opinion, so long as you don’t have a game where every challenge can be solved by simply punching things. And in my opinion good super hero adventures should involve a much wider range of challenges than just combat.

After that, the campaign premise or structure is the other tricky thing for supers. Classic supers with ‘villain of the week’ are extremely reactive so players may feel deprotagonised as they are always reacting to what NPCs are doing rather than driving their own agendas. I aim to combat that on two levels.

The first is by having ‘nemesis’ NPCs for the PCs, ideally defined by the player for their own character. This gives them a hand in creating the narrative and type of challenges they’re are likely to face in the course of the campaign. Longevity of the nemesis is driven either through a genre assumption that enemies will be captured and sent to some kind of restitutional facility, or though effective layering of their criminal gang so that the PCs can’t quickly get from the thugs on the front line to the criminal mastermind at the top of the tree.

The second thing is to have an overarching scheme in motion which the lesser villains are contributing to (either knowingly or unknowingly) and have this start to be revealed as the PCs deal with lesser threats. At some point they will have picked up enough clues or hints to start getting proactive and come up with ways to investigate the super-plot which might otherwise not present itself directly. This switches the campaign from a responsive mode to a pro-active mode (though they likely need to juggle keeping lower level schemes down at the same time).

So, a good supers game in play is a delicate balance of system and campaign structure which can be hard to handle. In my opinion it is definitely one of the more challenging types of game to run well.

Agreed. I lean process sim for the most part, and want my superpowers to have distinct mechanical effects. My favorites are TSR's MSH, M&M, and Ascendant. At the same time, I believe genre sim is really important to a superhero game, more so even than fantasy or sci-fi, and feel some mechanical enforcement is in order to discourage folks from gaming the fun out of playing people with superpowers in the modern world.

It's a delicate balance to achieve.