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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dbm" data-source="post: 9729692" data-attributes="member: 8014">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.</blockquote>

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