What makes a successful superhero game?

[chuckdee]

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.

Though that's one way to do it, it's not the only way and not an absolute. One of my favorite games doesn't follow that paradigm and I've hacked the idea for a superhero game and it worked well... Ars Magica. It really depends on the type of game you want to play and that will work for your players

 

[Thomas Shey]

The problem with the question here is this is one where even more than usual, the answer kind of depends on what the end users are going in looking for. I realize that's a little tautological, but the same people who are looking for what Masks is supplying are not particularly likely to find cChampions Complete satisfactory and vice versa, even though they're avowedly wanting to play in the same genre. Because what elements of the genre they find interesting are somewhat notably different.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm not convinced that a successful superhero game has to represent all power levels, from Hawkeye to Galactus. A lot of painful failures have resulted from trying.

I do think that a successful superhero game has to successfully emulate the tropes people are looking for in a superhero game. Not everyone will agree on the full list, but basically, I should be able to pick up a standard issue of a major comic book, say an issue of Spider-Man or Robin, and be able to replicate the hero crouching in the rafters of a warehouse, watching thugs and then have the PC jump down into their midst and have a satisfying combat that doesn't take all day to adjudicate. (City of Heroes, which I think missed the mark on a lot of superhero stuff, did this aspect very, very well.)

I think combat that takes as long as 4E D&D's did is a mistake, because while the tactical stuff might be fun for some players, careful tactics aren't really a hallmark of superhero comics, fast-paced action is.

And what other scenes the RPG is able to replicate can vary, but it shouldn't be like D&D in that D&D is mostly good at modeling what D&D is like. A superhero RPG should be able to replicate a superhero comic (or movie or TV show, given that it's the 21st century).

All else is details, IMO.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't think it's possible to balance superheroes mechanically. Unless your mechanics are purely about story rather than physics. There's just no way to make Green Arrow equally mechanically meaningful and important as the Flash in a game that even attempts physics simulation.

I think this waaaaaay overstated. Like 10x overstated.

It's obviously not meaningfully true, I'd say. Plenty of supers games manage balance that at least as good as say, D&D 5E whilst having different superheroes. What does "physics simulation" even mean in this context? AFAICT the only supers RPG which does anything even within sight of "physics simulation" is HERO/Champions (which is decent but highly specific) and utterly dreadful for anything but The Boys or similar GURPS Supers, which. M&M, for example seems to do zero "physics simulation" to me.

People need to stop waffling on about modern-ish Superman honestly. He's a grotesque outlier and insanely inconsistent in power level in the comics. Virtually every "superman-style" character in TTRPGs is, if we obsess about the numbers, much less strong, fast (particularly fast-flying and let's be real Superman's super-speed at anything but flying is super-inconsistent in comics/movies - sometimes he doesn't have it at all), tough, and so on than the most powerful versions of Superman out there. Yet these TTRPG characters work just fine and no-one is moaning that they can't lift an ocean liner with one finger or w/e. Just because you can't balance him at his most extreme doesn't make balance in more sane conditions impossible.

It's particularly notable that virtually all the real "offenders" balance wise are a very small group of DC Heroes (and all male, too, because I'm sorry by WW does not present balance issues), who have just been written into excessively epic scenarios because they were effectively "single player" - i.e. all about one character.

Anyone can build a Superman IMO, if they are given enough points to work with. That's balance so far as I'm concerned.

Yup, and you can have Superman VIBES (and be insanely more power than Superman used to be in Ye Olde Dayes) on like, a tiny fraction of the points one of the nastier versions of DC Superman would take. Especially if there's some way to "stunt" or "push" powers, because that's actually something Superman does quite a lot - he doesn't casually do a lot of his more impressive feats, he struggles to do them.

I feel MSH lived there pretty well too.

FASERIP? That was actually really good at quite wide power range we found, it wasn't perfect but it was solid. MSHAG (the one with the cards) was also really good for diverse groups of heroes and villains.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'm not convinced that a successful superhero game has to represent all power levels, from Hawkeye to Galactus. A lot of painful failures have resulted from trying.

Agree completely. You can really just chop off the very top end entirely if you're not explicitly emulating the most elite DC male heroes. That's for bad guys who take special methods to defeat, not for PCs (see the Thunderbolts movie for an example). Marvel's guys just don't really get into that range (not even Hulk), except maybe that awful Sentry, who is a bad DC Expy anyway, and like, I'm sorry I don't really count him as Marvel at all.

And if you do want just the most macho men* in DC to bro out with each other (yes I am doing New Gods erasure here, sorry Big Barda), you can find a game that cuts off the bottom instead. It's not like a powerful version of Superman or a real speed-force-enthusiast version of The Flash would interact with a low-end Robin or, god help us all, Bibbo Bibbowski in any way but talking to them or saving them.

It's only the real extremes that potentially require changing game engine, unless you're absolutely dead set on The Boys-style physics (again, looking at you GURPS Supers, even HERO/Champions isn't "like that").

* = I feel like someone is going to say "But in issues 166 through 183 of Wonder Woman: Unchained: Rechained, Wonder Woman was actually stronger than Superman and..." and whilst that may be correct, I am going to have to refer you to the "DC couldn't do power level consistency if their lives depended on it" clause.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Even Hero isn't trying for a physics emulation in any meaningful way; if it was the way Strength and damage steps operate wouldn't work that way. Its arguably leaning into a vaguely simulationist approach to things, but what it thinks that means is not the same as what something like GURPS means by that.

 

[zarionofarabel]

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?

I'm not super familiar with a lot of different superhero TTRPGs as it's not really my genre of choice. I do think the more "simulation" oriented a system is the harder it becomes to have heroes of differing power levels that can work together without the more powerful heroes performing at a scale that completely outshines anything the lower powered heroes can do. The less the system is built to "simulate realistic physical outcomes" and the more it's built to "emulate the superhero genre" the better it will be at, well, emulating the genre. The caveat being that it is a game that is trying to emulate the entirety of the superhero genre. If the game is built to emulate a lesser aspect of the genre, say only "street level" heroes, then it can be more "simulationist" in nature as the disparity of power level between heroes is much narrower than in say an Avengers or Justice League game. Like I said though, my experience with different superhero games is somewhat limited, so my opinion is less relevant than those with ample experience. If I do run a superhero game though, I want it to feature all levels of superheroes, so a more narrative oriented game makes it much easier to do. Cheers!

 

[Thomas Shey]

* = I feel like someone is going to say "But in issues 166 through 183 of Wonder Woman: Unchained: Rechained, Wonder Woman was actually stronger than Superman and..." and whilst that may be correct, I am going to have to refer you to the "DC couldn't do power level consistency if their lives depended on it" clause.

It isn't just DC. Years ago I was part of the application staff for an X-Men based MUSH, and we'd get people who would write up FCs (feature characters, i.e. ones that actually existed in the comics) with the top end range they'd ever existed in any way and with any power they'd ever shown across 40 years of the character. Editorial control on long running characters is just bollocks.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Editorial control on long running characters is just bollocks.

It does make for Doctor Doom, Magneto and a few other villains being wonderfully well rounded by accident, though.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Even Hero isn't trying for a physics emulation in any meaningful way; if it was the way Strength and damage steps operate wouldn't work that way. Its arguably leaning into a vaguely simulationist approach to things, but what it thinks that means is not the same as what something like GURPS means by that.

Yeah I'd classify HERO as leaning more gamist/tactical than simulationist, whereas GURPS Supers was simulationist, because GURPS inherently is.

It isn't just DC. Years ago I was part of the application staff for an X-Men based MUSH, and we'd get people who would write up FCs (feature characters, i.e. ones that actually existed in the comics) with the top end range they'd ever existed in any way and with any power they'd ever shown across 40 years of the character. Editorial control on long running characters is just bollocks.

That's very true, it's just that the peak power level of DC Heroes tend to be more epic, but yeah if we listed every power that Jean Grey, say, had over 40+ years, good lord, we'd basically have the makings of an entire superhero RPG power list right there! And she'd be full Phoenix Force power level even though she's insane when she's at that level and basically a villain.

I do think the more "simulation" oriented a system is the harder it becomes to have heroes of differing power levels that can work together without the more powerful heroes performing at a scale that completely outshines anything the lower powered heroes can do.

The trouble with this argument is that it's entirely theoretical on your part, because you're not familiar, by your own admission, with superhero RPGs.

If you were, and this isn't a put-down, just like, how it is, you'd be aware that very few superhero RPGs do much in the way of "simulation" (in anything but "genre simulation" sense but that's usually called "narrativist", whereas what we mean is more what @overgeeked called "physics simulation").

So that's not really a thing that causes the problems you might expect because people who design superhero games to be superhero games see it coming. Where it really comes up with places like GURPS Supers, which do jump abruptly from very little simulation to heavy simulation, and where you can have truly insanely disparate power levels - even when characters have the exact same point value! Because GURPS does not handle points values well cross-genre (or even within the supers genre).

We played GURPS Supers with like "400 point" characters back in the day, and my god, one of them was basically powerful enough to take out the Hulk in a fist-fight but was also insanely more powerful because he could fly, go invisible, teleport and all sorts (he was a weird combination of Green Lantern and Iron Man, conceptually). One of them had a 14' tall mecha suit which could annihilate an entire city block just completely gone, and could keep doing so more or less indefinitely (could also fly and stuff). And the other guy hadn't really "GURPSed it" and had a normal, like Marvel Superhero so was basically just Cyclops next to these two freaks who could have instantly killed him.