Aust Diamondew said:
Many years ago TSR published a Marvel roleplaying game, the rules were very simple but we had fun with it, don't know where you could find it and if you did not sure if it'd be worth purchasing.
Well, as my use of the word "another" denotes, the previous existence of DC and Marvel games is not news to me.
I actually got in RPG's through TSR's Marvel Superheroes, rather than D&D (which, with its rigid classes and arbitrary rules, seemed kind of lame at the time).
It had a lot going for it. The 10-tiered ranks focused on descriptors and not just numerical values (Feeble, Poor, Typical, Good, Excellent, Remarkable, Incredible, Amazing, Monstrous, and Unearthly) and made it easy to remember enitre blocks of stats for characters. Even today, 20 years after my last game, I can rattle off stats for most any Marvel hero or villain without a reference. And everything used these scores, from movement powers to direct-damage attacks to checks that require the equivalent of saving throws.
It had some downsides, of course. It was not a good system for low-powered characters like Punisher or Daredevil., and using fixed numbers for damage and defenses meant that you were bound to wind up in situations where two evenly-matched characters couldn't hurt each other (and this extended to classic hero/villan combinations, like Iron Man and Mandarin).
Still, I thought it was a great basis for a system. And oh, those brightly-colored covers were such wonderful eye candy.
I also recall a more recent attempt that used cards instead of dice. I don't think it ever blossomed, as it was sort of a ham-handed attempt in some respects.
Mayfair's DC Heroes seemed like a crap attempt at a game. It had specific powers for everything (there was a heat vision power, for instance, not just a generic customizable energy bolt power). And it had nine ability scores: there was an array with three physical, three mental, and three spirtual scores, which was a little cumbersome if you think about how many superheroes are purely physical.
Anyway, I think it's high-time for another licensed RPG. I know Marvel licensed their IP to WotC"s Heroscape, Wizkids' Heroclix, and Fantasy Flight's strategy board game, so how hard would an RPG license be to get?
