What's your favorite superhero TTRPG and why?

[Thomas Shey]

There's a lot of urban fantasy that's essentially just supers doing Shakespeare in the park.

To a degree, but it tends to stand out when a very high percentage of characters in the setting are sort of one-offs, and not treated as though being one-offs is unusual (there's a huge amount of Special Snowflakes as urban fantasy protagonists, but they're pretty much acknowledged as such).

 

[Fenris-77]

I was really just indexing urban fantasy that trends toward the upper echelons of the power matrix. This isn't even a thing that's specific to a given IP. The Dresden Files, just to pick an example, doesn't really start off like that, but once you get to the most recent handful of books describing the characters as supers becomes a lot more reasonable. That's not to say that I'd file those books under 'Superhero' instead of Urban Fantasy, but rather that RPG systems that are 'Supers' become far more appropriate to model those characters, and that the perils and challenges faced by those characters tend to be much more in keeping with what you'd expect from a superhero narrative.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's all fair. From my wife's descriptions of things that go on, it pretty well describes most of Ilona Andrews output.

 

[MidnightBlue]

I'll still consider City of Mist as dipping its toe in the waters of the supers genre since the creators presented it that way, but it definitely is a different flavor of supers than your four color or other more common varieties. Urban fantasy is also a good descriptor.

The game is awesome, by the way. I love the noir flavor and drawing on myths and major cultural icons, even pop culture.

I had a blast making a group of pregens built on the "myths" of the classic Universal Movie Monsters Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, Wolfman, The Mummy, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Invisible Man. I've always meant to go back and add a rift of Bride of Frankenstein and Phantom of the Opera to complete the originals.

Another game I enjoy and appreciate for its narrative systems.

 

[ART!]

That's a tough call, because I've played a lot of them, and although there's a few that I played a lot of at one time or another, nothing has stuck to the point of currently being a go-to game for supers.

That said, I think Truth & Justice would be my pick for favorite. It has a nice balance of narrative and more traditional/old-school mechanics.

Villains & Vigilantes had a nice loose, original D&D quality to it. Considering it was basically the first supers rpg, it's a pretty amazing game.

I played a lot of Champions in the '80s and '90s, and it's an incredibly robust game, butit's not my cup of tea now.

Mutants & Masterminds is equally robust, and it's the supers game I would recommend to anyone familiar with d20 OGL games, but again it doesn't suit my tastes now.

Icons, Supers, and BASH all have their strengths, too.

Masks is brilliant, but there's a narrative bent to it that I find oddly constraining.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Controversial opinion coming here... I don't get why people want to to have Hulk and Hawkeye operating at the same power level.

Poor Hulk and Thor constantly belittled in discussions of superhero RPGs and comparative ability!

Well.............. Probably a tangent that should be broken off as a thread in the media section but the comics do not have Hawkeye and Hulk in the same league. Not even close. They're closer in power to one another in the MCU but still not, you know, close.

Kidding aside, I don’t think they’re as different as you say. I mean, from a brute strength or raw power angle, sure, Hulk’s basically the apex.

But Unearthly or Class 100 Strength aside…the two characters are both shown to be effective in the comics. They just go about it in different ways.

So any game that is going to expect two characters like these to coexist should likely be designed to do so. Or at the very least, designed not to inhibit it or to screw one player over.

So if the system boils down to opposing maths and not much else, then that may be problematic. But if the system is more flexible then it should work like it does in the comics.

To give some specific examples (because I feel I must), in the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes cartoon, Hawkeye defeats the Hulk by threatening him. The Hulk laughs….and anger gone, he turns back into Banner and Hawkeye takes him into custody.

In Solo Avengers issue 12, Hawkeye does indeed defeat the Abomination. Ultimately he takes him down using an adamantium tipped arrow that releases an incredible electrical charge (designed with the intention of destroying Ultron if he ever showed up again).

And in West Coast Avengers Annual 2, Hawkeye takes out She-Hulk in a one on one battle. Basically, he keeps her at a distance, manages to knock her into water, uses some explosives to keep her from surfacing, then when she does, he hits her with a KO gas arrow just as she’s gulping air….and it knocks her out long enough for him to claim victory.

He’s pulled off all kinds of crazy things over the years. Not to the absurd level of Batman….but to me, how a game handles this kind of stuff is a huge indicator if I’ll enjoy it or not.

It’s one area where MSH from TSR kind of falters, which is a shame because otherwise that game would be nearly flawless. I’ve only played Marvel Heroic a handful of times, but it seemed less of an issue.

 

[Aldarc]

There's a lot of urban fantasy that's essentially just supers doing Shakespeare in the park.

That's basically Greg Weisman's Gargoyles.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Highly random question, but still related to the OP:

Has anyone here actually played Underground?

I really loved its transgressive tone and setting when it came out, the mix of powers and guns (meaning not modeling guns as powers) and even the way it shamelessly ripped off the Marshall Law comic. But even as a dumb teen I looked at the system and knew enough to stay away from it.

I think Dennis Detwiller mentioned in a podcast interview that there were some very tentative discussions with the creator about rebooting it, but that real-world political stuff made that kind of satire sort of impossible. It really was a product of the 90s, and imo probably couldn't survive an update intact.

But anyway, I'm mostly curious if anyone managed to either play it as written, or was inspired to use the setting for another system. Or was Underground yet another interesting, but read-only game?

 

[billd91]

He’s pulled off all kinds of crazy things over the years. Not to the absurd level of Batman….but to me, how a game handles this kind of stuff is a huge indicator if I’ll enjoy it or not.

It’s one area where MSH from TSR kind of falters, which is a shame because otherwise that game would be nearly flawless. I’ve only played Marvel Heroic a handful of times, but it seemed less of an issue.

There are other crunchy systems, like Champions and Mutants and Masterminds, that can handle this with a variable power of some sort. Those would, in fact, be reasonable ways to handle a power that's as variable as Hawkeye's (or Batman's) special arrows/gadgets, particularly since they often seem to pull out just the right one for a situation.
Of course, even then, there's no guarantee of it working depending on the dice rolling - a contrast with a narrative system that determines if you succeed by the die roll first and then backfill in the explanation why.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Highly random question, but still related to the OP:

Has anyone here actually played Underground?

I really loved its transgressive tone and setting when it came out, the mix of powers and guns (meaning not modeling guns as powers) and even the way it shamelessly ripped off the Marshall Law comic. But even as a dumb teen I looked at the system and knew enough to stay away from it.

I think Dennis Detwiller mentioned in a podcast interview that there were some very tentative discussions with the creator about rebooting it, but that real-world political stuff made that kind of satire sort of impossible. It really was a product of the 90s, and imo probably couldn't survive an update intact.

But anyway, I'm mostly curious if anyone managed to either play it as written, or was inspired to use the setting for another system. Or was Underground yet another interesting, but read-only game?

Never got a chance to. Very few of the groups I’ve belonged to have expressed an interest in Supers gaming,