Superhero RPGs

Superheroes

We're a big fan of the superhero genre - the telling of stories not too dissimilar to the myths of the past. The idea of characters, larger than life, performing great deeds of heroism and villainy, of human pathos and hubris.

Not so big a fan of the 'perpetually bound to the same, unchanging characters, for generations' thing -- a big part of this would be to allow the characters to age, hand off to the next generation, and keep going, but that's more an 'us problem'. Also not a fan of the 'no hero is allowed to be happy' thing that keeps going on, and the big glowing 'reset everything to zero' button.

Anyway.

The one thing we do find difficult is trying to find a good tabletop roleplaying game for playing heroes. The first one we ever encountered was the Classic Marvel Super Heroes RPG (or what we like to call the FASERIP system after the attributes for the game).

The game is a relic of its times - everything is charts, and random dice rolls, including what type of hero you are, what your attributes are, and what powers you get.  Not really a good idea, we feel. The big thing with this game was, you could make anyone. The GM's book had a chart which allowed you to figure out just how strong your character was in any given attribute by comparing it to other heroes.  Did you want to be stronger than the Punisher, but not as strong as Captain America?  Okay, then your Strength is this. You're about as athletic as a gymnast?  Then your Agility is this. With that little tool, anyone could make the hero they imagined. Let the player pick out their powers instead of rolling, and there was a nice chart which showed you how strong your power needed to be to extend this far, or cover this much of an area, or last this long.

And, it wasn't entirely unplausible to roll those kind of stats, so if a player picked them, cool. It'd be much like a GM in D&D simply saying 'pick your attributes, let me see them'.

This is what, we feel, makes it perhaps one of the best superhero games ever made - you could make the person you want to make. We mean, consider the Avengers.  Captain America, Hulk, Iron Man, Black Widow, Vision, the bloody Scarlet Witch, and ... Hawkeye.  Or the New Mutants, Sunspot, Cannonball, Wolfsbane, Karma, Mirage, Magma, and ... Cipher.

The power levels are all over the place there, but they're still a team. The players could actually do this if that's what they wanted to do.

Ever since then, it seems, games wanted to focus on 'balance' in a mechanical sense.  You all have the same point values, you all have the same power caps, you're all 'only allowed to be this good'.  Champions, GURPS Supers, even Mutants and Masterminds all want the heroes to be more or less in the same range.

You can't have Cipher and the Hulk in the same party.  It's 'just not balanced'.

We're sorry, what's wrong with having The Hulk and Rick Jones in the same party?  Or Green Lantern and Green Arrow (which had their own team-up comic).

Marvel Heroic sort of went the same way as Classic FASERIP did.  You made who you wanted to make, there wasn't really hard limits on the kind of character you could design. Wanted Hawkeye? Cool.  Wanted Silver Surfer? Sure. The current 616 game engine left us a little cold. It felt really restrictive on how you could build your character and what you could do with it. It felt like a step back.

Then you have systems like Masks - which ... isn't really a superhero game as such. It's more a vessel for telling stories about teenage drama where the teenagers happen to be superheroes -- where being a hero complicates things. It isn't a power fantasy. It might be Greek Storytelling, though, but being the superhero isn't the focus as such, and the way powers are defined is a bit limiting.

Of all the modern superhero games out there, we feel that, perhaps, Mutants and Masterminds is closest to what we're interested in. Sure, Level 10 isn't really cosmic, but it has a lot of flex for making who you want to make.  Maybe if the players were allowed to choose their initial Level, regardless of what the other players pick, you'd have something.  "Okay, this Street Level is L8, this mid-Level is L10, and this beast of a character is Level 15."

Less fixation with keeping everyone level, and more on letting them decide the kind of story they want to tell, you know?

Does this mean some characters are just better than others? Yes, it does.
Does that matter?  No, it doesn't.
You can find our opinion on mechanical game balance in another post - tl;dr: balance comes from a steady GMing hand, and mature players. It doesn't come from mechanics.