Superhero RPGs

Superhero games are, IMO, one of the greatest challenges known to game design. An RPG tries to emulate, more or less, the entire world. From how a bullet interacts with one's stomach to how a detective solves a murder from the moment they walk onto the scene to the end where they catch their perp.

Most *co-all-ugh* game designers do not have real world experience in these areas. I've never been shot. I've never been framed for a murder I didn't commit. I'm ashamed to say it, but I've never even gotten into a high speed car chase. I'm so boring.

But we make presumptions. A lot of them. And we watch TV. From that wonderful resource, we draw conclusions. A lot of them. People don't like being shot with guns. People don't like being knifed with knives. In prison you always run the risk of being raped and having to choose sides. If you light a flame near any sprinkler ALL of them will go off. Etc, etc.

Okay, movies and TV that we often look to for inspiration in matters that we have no real experience in can be very fake. But we often rise up to the challenge, seperating the chaff from the wheat. Actually what we do is wait for those particular movies/shows that come on that seem to 'get it right' and make our presumptions from there.

More or less, we get it right or close enough that players can deal with it. Guns inflict damage on people. Skill + Stat roll to be perceptive enough to notice that evidence. Skill + Stat roll to intimidate the street scum. The mechanics vary but most people are fine with boiling things down in this way. Maybe it's not always correct. Shadowrun and Cyberpunk, for example, allowed you to be perforated with a lot of bullets before you were dropped. Shadowrun was possibly a more realistic simulation but there were a hell of a lot more rolling to determine that. I take some offence when system allows a character, such as in Top Secret/SI, to hold a grenade in their hand and let it explode. But whatever. You make due.

So...superheroes. Nobody...but nobody has ever had bullets bounce off their eye, torn metal doors from their hinges and leapt over skyscrappers (that aren't models) in a single bound. So truly we have an entirely fictional frame of reference. Further this is complicated because our frame of reference exists in comic form or a few movies/cartoons.

There are plenty of superhero games out there. Many of them have some really great elements to them. None of them have ever quite done it right. I almost think if you could steal from each one of them...you would have your Holy Grail of gaming. The best damn superhero game evar.

Let's review a few:

Mutants and Masterminds
A lot of pepole think this is the greatest supers game ever. Which only convinces me that people as a whole are really dumb. I tried to like this game. It's shining grace is that it's damage system is good in thought if not execution. You make a Damage 'Save' (like a Saving Throw). If you make your save, you're fine. If you fail it by a certain amount, you are hindered, stunned or even knocked out. The mechanic works in principle but in practice damage varied a lot. So you never really knew if you would drop a foe or not. And sometimes a 'tuff tank' would be taken out in the first hit that they took, just cuz it used a damn d20.

Champions
Also another game that many of us think foldly of. Ahh...Champions. I think somehow a lot of us fell in love with this game when we were young and...I dunno...could contribute a large portion of our brain to unlocking it's juicy mysteries. It is a game where, if your GM knows it inside and out, can sing and dance. But it requires a huge commitment to learning the rules. The complicated, math heavy rules. Character creation can be wildly unbalanced. But when Champions worked...it worked really well. This is a game that could use a huge over haul. They practically invented the point cost system which allowed you to do any god damn thing you wanted with your character. Want to shoot lasers from your toes that only affects enemies during the light of day but dogs are immune? There is a calculation for that. I also liked how you could figure out Body (lethal) damage when rolling Stun (bruising) attacks. I loved the idea that my villains could kick a Captain America type so hard so as to break a rib.

Champions created a lot of the mentallity for a lot of future superhero games. But it's shown it's age. It's much too complex to hold the interest of a lot of modern day players.

Savage Worlds ~ Necessary Evil
Savage Worlds is my game of choice for a quick/pulp style game. It has it's flaws but what game doesn't. It still works. Necessary Evil is their supervillains game but I just took the powers rules and ran it for two superheroes games.

Necessary Evil does one thing right. It decided that nobody cares if Spiderman or the Human Fly put more points into Wall Crawling. Because...really...c'mon. It's a crap power. But Marvel to Champions, there was a a power level attached to Wall Crawling (every power really). But at the end of the day, it truly does not matter. Thus Necessary Evil made Wall Crawling a very low cost power and based any rolls made on it against the Strength of the character. Done and done. Spiderman is stronger than the Human Fly, so he sticks 'good' to walls. Simple. Effective.

Necessary Evil needed much more work on all it's powers and there were a lot of powers that were missing. But it's a very good step in the right direction.

Marvel Saga
First off. I will not be talking about the classic Marvel (FaseRip) system. It worked back in the day. It's terrible now. No really...I tried it out a few months ago...it really sucks now.

The Saga system had terrible character creation but it used cards instead of dice. 5 suites (4 for the main stats and 1 for Doom!!!!) Your hand represented your Health and your 'attacks'. If you built a Strength based character you were hoping for Strength cards. If you played a Strength card you got to flip the top card of the deck and add those cards together. If you fliped a Strength card...you got to flip again and keep on adding. Somehow, this system just seemed far more exciting than rolling dice. Thus it wins for the superhero feeling. An exciting system makes for some exciting battles.

There were a few problems with healing and how the GM could make the battles challenging for the characters.

Marvel Universe

Still not talking about Classic Marvel. This is yet another Marvel game. They just keep trying and trying, don't they. The Marvel Universe game was a very unusual attempt. It's diceless. But it uses tokens where players allocate to their actions. The concept intrigues me. A lot. On paper it sounds like a delicious type of rule but in practice it fails to do super heroics justice.

In practice, it's very tactical. There would be a steep learning curve. As Daredevil...how many tokens do you allocate to leaping down a building acrobatic style? Also, once you figured out if something worked, you could just do that every single time. For example, I figured out that Captain America could simple 'win' against Sabertooth everytime by putting a lot into Defense and little into attack. Sabertooth simply couldn't hurt Captain America. There was no variable to tell whether Cap could manage to get his shield in the way every round. Likewise, Gambit would lose most of the time to the Blob, unless he put everything into his blast attack, in which case he would beat the Blob every time.

It was a weird system and too on/off for me. But with some work, that could be a real gem. If the was a good reason to divide your resources up (like some into movement, attack, defense, perception, etc) and some risk vs. reward...then maybe it would be a system that would be cooking with gas. But too much resource management is bad. So...let's just say it would be delicate to handle.

Truth and Justice
Okay, nobody has heard of this one. It's by an indie company called Atomic Sock Monkey. They have a core mechanic which is charming and works very well for one shot games. The idea is that you have a bunch of traits, like: Brave, Spiderman, Aunt May, Works at Daily Bugle, etc. When you are attacked and would take damage, you can cross off any trait, even if it's not physical. The GM can interprete this in any capacity. If you crossed off Aunt May, maybe you were thinking about her and it's disrupting your fight. Or maybe she shows up at the scene, thus causing you problems. Or maybe still, because you used her trait, it's going to have
It is, a great concept, which fails only because one would presume that you would want to use your heroes more than twice. The obvious problem is that the player is inclined to use/abuse their Aunt May traits while keeping their Porportial Strength of a Spider traits. After a while, it's gotta get kinda annoying to bring Aunt May in every freakin' comic. Of course maybe this explains all those awful storylines where Doc Ock wants to marry Aunt May or where she became a herald of Galactus. No really...this sorta crap did happen.

Godlike
This was a very neat attempt at making a WWII Supers game. They had an interesting dice mechanic which worked reasonable well. The system itself was unclear in places, however. All powers required 'activation' and weren't, by default, always on. So if you built your hero in a particular way you were, godlike, but only for like 1-2 fights. After that you're out of juice. Powers were a points buy. Kinda awkward all told.

???? (Can't remember the damn name!!)
There is another game, whose name I cannot remember. But it was very distinctive and the concepts stick with me until today. It's a Supers game set in a crazy, crazy cyberpunk future. The governments use Science!!! to build Supers. But almost all of them go bat fuck crazy, so they figure out when building them, if you put them into a VR (Virtual Reality) for a while before hand, a VR where they are good and noble and people give them apple pie and they save kittens from trees). After the VR training they are reasonable well adjusted (i.e. NOT baby-eating) heroes who fight for a world gone wrong.
What was really well done was a innovative character creation system. It was not the first of it's kind but it was better than most. Basically, you started your character...as the government planning on building him/her. You have, if I recall, 5 areas where you have to divide your money into. You have your core person, the training of your core person, the Powers that you're going to infuse him with and the doctor who is going to install these Cybernetic/Bionic powers, and the psychologist who is going to help your character afterwards. It was one of the more interesting systems out there. It's like saying...we have 6 million dollars to build this guy. Do you start with a very fit person? And/or a soldier with a lot of training already (you don't want a pizza delivery guy with superpowers, now do ya?). Oh and how much money are you going to allocate for the parts to put into this guy? Running out of money are we? Well...maybe we could just skimp on the doctor, get one of those 2nd rate, 3rd world country doctors. Hmmm...maybe we should consider that pizza guy...cuz the money is getting tigher...). It was one of the very few 'fun' character creation systems.

Those are all the Supers games that I played. I never got to play DC Heroes (which Black Industries is re-making) nor Villains and Vigilantes which sounds just a bit too lame for me to try.

In every Supers game there is one key element, one thing that make it different from, say, Cyberpunk or D&D. One element that made it 'super'. If you could just...what's the word I'm looking for...steal! that element from each game...would you create the greatest superhero game evar?!? Well...I dunno. I've been trying. But not very successfully. Cuz if I had, you would be banging down my door to play it. ;)

But I'm not giving up hope. One day...one day...