Other Superhero RPGs

[metaphysician]

Myself, I've played alot of Champions/Hero, a little M&M 1e, and am now running a BESM 3e ( which is alot like SAS Revised, IMO ) game.

Anybody else?

[Bahamut810]

Heroes Unlimited is good...but its either overpowered or get your ass kicked (of course...a lot of Palladium games are like that).

Heroes and Heroines is good too. I dunno if I like it better then aberrant or not though... Tough call, but Aberrants more background/skills orientation does put it far over the top.

[metaphysician]

For Champions and BESM, the two I've used most. . . Champions allows for more precise character design, and supports superhero genre conventions better. OTOH, BESM is easier to run, and handles high powered characters much better.

[archer]

Years ago I played Marvel...fun system, but full of holes. Recently I've played Mutants and Masterminds 2e, I really dig that system. Extremely well-balanced, I'd have to say. It has massive potential for twinkery, mostly because of the volume of rules and details, but if you keep with the original framework of the game and pay attention, the possibilities are awesome.

[metaphysician]

From what I've seen of M&M 2e, its no more twinkable than any other point build effect based supers game. Its just, you have to accept that the *only* thing maintaining game balance is GM's discretion on character build decisions.

[SkyLion]

Years ago I played Marvel...fun system, but full of holes. Recently I've played Mutants and Masterminds 2e, I really dig that system. Extremely well-balanced, I'd have to say. It has massive potential for twinkery, mostly because of the volume of rules and details, but if you keep with the original framework of the game and pay attention, the possibilities are awesome.

I disagree about Marvel Archer...I think the system is remarkable simple and straightforward...so mch so in fact that we have used its Universal FEAT Table and rules to perfectly simulate Rifts, and it actually fixes all of the problems inherant in the Palladium system by comparing everything on the same scale.,,

The other thing Marvel does great, which I know you know Archer, is to allow power stunts for much cheaper, allowing you to build solid themes for a character and expand upon the basics....in Aberrant this is prohibitively expensive.

,,

The other game I like is Champions and it includes a feature which Abberant sorely lacks...the use of power frameworks...specifically Variable Power Pool. VPPs are expensive and complicated to buy, but they allow a character to have a pool of changing powers, which is great fro duplicating such things as gadgets or magic spells, or certain mutable character concepts. The closest thing Abbie has is the Shapeshift power.

[ProfPotts]

Champions, of course, is the industry standard for Superhero RPG (IMHO) - played that puppy to death for years back in the day (mostly GMing, as always).

Golden Heroes was a brilliant game - it's system of rating stuff like the character's public approval rating was way ahead of its time, & the system itself was both very 'comic book action' (time was divided into 'frames' - as in comic book panels) & balanced.

Heroes Unlimited suffers from the usual Palladium 'good idea, naff system' issues - but I've played that one lots too: with the Palladium combat system failing to differenciate between lethal & non-lethal damage, & the OTT rules for firearms, it always tended to skew towards something akin to The Punisher with my group... which was fun in & of itself.

The original, TSR, Marvel was kinda fun - what with the power rating descriptions ('His strength is Remarkable!'). Favourite moment I recall was when a PC with the power to animate illustrations (he carried around a sketchbook full of pictures of Captain America & friends...) ran out of drawings & resorted to pulling a white line off the road & clubbing the bad guy round the back of the head with it... priceless...

The new, diceless, Marvel system I think is really pretty good - but convincing long-time roleplayers to try such a radical departure from the usual type of system is like pulling hen's teeth...

BESM is, as others have noted, a great versitile system - although I've never been tempted to try an out & out superhero game with it.

Mutants & Masterminds is cool too - they adapt the 'level based' D20 system really well to the genre, all things considered, although in the end I guess I'd rather just go the whole hog & play Champions if it came down to it.

[metaphysician]

A note: BESM 3e is a complete rewrite of the old system, and incorporated most of what Guardians of Order learned from their earlier work.

[Heritage]

Let's see, the first superhero RPG I played was Villains & Vigilantees (however the f@ck you spell it) some 20 years ago, with possibly my greatest character ever, Business Clown. He wore an Armani suit and Foster-Grant shades, white gloves and a silver and purple polka dot cape. He inherited a mysterious rubber mask of a clown from his grandfather, and whenever he put it on it fused with his skin, saving the hours of make-up and allowing for quick changes. For superpowers he could create a cloud of darkness and shoot forth a ray than caused people to crumple with weakness, highly unclown-like, I know but that was the point; come to think of it, those powers were probably randomly generated. He was a good hand-to-hand fighter, deftly wielded a bulletproof suitcase and had rollerskate wheels that popped out of the soles of his custom-made Italian shoes for quick getaways.

What made him great was he never cracked jokes and was ultra-cool and a bit of a hardcase, kind of like Batman in greasepaint; whenever the NPC cops would say, "Thank god, it's Business Clown!", I would bust out laughing. Later on he found an alien blaster, which he cleverly disguised with a 'Bang!' flag to confuse his enemies and kept in the briefcase. And of course his catchphrase? "This clown means business!"

Champions has always intimidated the hell out of me due to its complexity, but everyone tells me if you put in the time you WILL create your the best superhero possible to your exact specifications. I really like both versions of M&M but 2nd edition is I think a little better.

I've owned TSR's Marvel Super Heroes for years, but only read it for the first time recently; I think it's awesome, and it's the system I'm using to define and balance my characters in my comic book, based on a variant point buy system I found online. It actually features a combat system I could run - me, Heritage the Rules Hippy!

One of these days I'd like to play BESM - I know at least one group that used its rules to run a game based on The Tick animated series ("Arthur! My mustache is touching my brain!"), which sounded like a real hoot.

[Chuckg]

For Champions and BESM, the two I've used most. . . Champions allows for more precise character design, and supports superhero genre conventions better. OTOH, BESM is easier to run, and handles high powered characters much better.

On the other hand, while superhumans can sensibly interact with each other in Champions, combats involving vehicles, heavy military weapons, and/or the destruction of large buildings or structures, tend to notably strain suspension of disbelief, because the Champions stats for all of the above? Could have been done better.

[metaphysician]

I don't think its the building/vehicle stats that were screwed up, per se. Rather, I think the problem is the interface between the supers rules and the building/vehicle rules.

Vehicle rules work fine in a heroic-level game context, and supers rules work fine when fighting between supers. However, the total immunity of all objects to Stun damage breaks everything down when the two interact.

[ProfPotts]

Really? I ran Champions for years & had no problems with people Vs stuff interactions... ::confused

[metaphysician]

Which edition were you?

Or, for a better test question: did heavy modern tanks have Def 20, 19 Body, and carry a main gun that did either 6d6 RKA or 8d6 RKA?

[ProfPotts]

4th Edition.

The only real vehicle issue I recall (it was while back) was the ridiculous explosion you got if you actually sat down & worked out what an average car's gas tank would do if it blew up whilst full...

::nuclear

... Buildings I remember being mostly there so that people could get blasted through walls for impressive knockback damage...

'Real world' guns (especially heavy weapons & the like) could often generate better damage than your average 60 pt. attack power, especially if you used some of the rules for customising & special ammo & stuff - but then the game was always more 'silver age' comic book (where soliders could be threatening... in large numbers...) than something like Aberrant (where people with guns are there to be laughed at). In fact I seem to remember an NPC villain, 'Gunner', who had Normal Char Limit & a machinegun managing to cause quite a lot of grief to the heroes... but then, I'm not the sort of guy who likes to see the 'supers' get their own way all the time... ::wink

As for the DEF 20 tank... well, that's what that Penetrating thing was for, right? ::sly

[metaphysician]

Quite true. There's ways for even 350 point supers to make life hell for mundane military. Its just, they aren't titans striding the Earth unconcerned about those puny mortals ( like Q6 novas are ).

[astronomer]

I played a lot of Champions in college, and found it worked out very well. It was the most flexible and reasonable game system I've come across (and yeah, I liked variable power pools!). I also ran Marvel and DC, because I'm into the whole comics scene. They were fun, but not as easy to run game mechanics-wise. I like the campaign background, 'cause it was wide open and fully developed. GURPS was interesting, but its very generic nature made it a little too bland. You either bought one of the umpty dozens of supplements or put in a lot of work to add meat to the bare bones. Never tried Rifts, although I've known people to swear by it (and at it; mega-damage handweapons!).

[metaphysician]

What I've heard about Rifts- the setting has a degree of worth, at least before Siembieda basically turned it into Nazi apologia.

The mechanics, OTOH, were about the worst to come from Palladium.

[Chuckg]

Re: 'Nazi Apologia' -- that was the War on Tolkeen series, where, basically, the kingdom of Tolkeen got invaded (and obliterated) by the Coalition States, who from the very beginning had been explicitly modelled on the Nazis. As in the first book explicitly saying 'Emperor Prosek got most of his best ideas re: politics from this book called 'Mein Somethingorother' written by this Hitler guy, who he really liked.'

Siembeda then proceeded to rig the entire storyline so that Tolkeen, which had up until this story arc been a kingdom of Neutral Good *immediately* descended into pacting with demons, violating every single one of the Rules of Land Warfare, and every other atrocity known (including necromancy, infernomancy, and cripes, you name it, they did it), so that despite the fact that the Coalition themselves were ethnically cleansing the civilian population, indiscriminately area bombing civilian structures nowhere remotely near valid military targets, and running extermination camps, they were still one-up on Tolkeen.

Also, the plot arc proceeded to grant ridiculously lucky breaks -- we are talking Mary Sue levels of script immunity -- in favor of the Coalition, such as them being able to drive an entire army of hundreds of thousands of men through the Land Of You Will Be Inevitably Eaten Alive By The Zerg-Like Alien Insect Horde without, in fact, being eaten alive, thus able to catch Tolkeen right in the flank.

Oh, I'm sorry, did I say 'drive through'? I mean 'drive into, hide in the middle of for weeks, and then drive back out of'. Despite the fact that up until this point, it was essentially a law of nature that trying to move through the middle of the Xiticix Hive territories was a 100% guaranteed trip to being bug food, seeing as how the best description of the Xiticix are 'The Zerg, on fertility drugs, after being left alone to breed in resource-rich territories for a century'.

Or, Tolkeen being so gosh-darn Ebul with the Black Magick that they managed to terminally offend allies (formerly Coalition allies) whom the Coalition had then betrayed and tried to usurp and murder /last/ year, but were willing to rejoin the Coalition /this/ year because, well, dammit, Tolkeen was icky. The Coalition, of course, accepted the prodigal lambs back with loving arms.

... imagine this kind of crap repeating for an entire six-book adventure/campaign series pack.

And then, at the denouement, after Tolkeen has been utterly expunged and the Coalition reigns triumphant -- and no, don't be silly, of course the players aren't supposed to *change* this metaplot event, they're just living and adventuring in it! -- Siembeda then editorializes muchly, in editorial voice, in the last book that it was all Tolkeen's fault the war happened and things got so wrecked.

You see, they should have just let the Coalition have their land. Fighting back against the evil only requires more evil and makes you into evil. They should have just fled into lands further west and...

(The fact that you can't move a nation of millions over post-apocalyptic territory without mass die-offs, as well as the fact that the lands further west already have owners and Tolkeen's people would have to kill them and take their stuff to have a kingdom to re-found their nation, thus meaning war-war anyway, made absolutely no impression on Siembeda's argument).

It was at this point that I realized that the author's trip around the brink of madness had ended, as he'd just jumped straight off the brink and down the hole into the very center of the madness. And the plot had gone with him.

So, really, if you want to investigate the Rifts settings? Try not to go much past the middle-to-late World Books. When the metaplot starts hitting the Tolkeen War, *stop*.

Not that the writing before then is touched with any particular genius, but at least it's sometime entertaining, and devoid of, you know, Nazi apologia.

(add) Basically, the Coalition weren't at all bad villains. It's when Siembeda started writing them as the protagonists, instead of the antagonists, that it got horrifying.

[Chuckg]

And yes, the mechanics of Rifts are some of the most horrifically buggy crap to survive the 80s of gaming.

[SkyLion]

The other thing (aside from rediculous levels of arms racing that occurs as the books progressively munchkinize) that you will notice is that suddenly the Coalition got HUGE! The original numbers published for the Coalition States would never support an army of such magnitude. On the venerable Quality in Rifts webpage (filled with those of us who love the idea of the setting but are grasping for a playable game) once had a critique explaining that to field such an army, along with the necessary support staff would push the population of the Coalition rediculously higher than it should have been. The other crazy thing is how they could build create and maintain such an uber-high tech army when the ability to read is outlawed...

[Chuckg]

I hate to defend Rifts even in the tiniest particular, but the literacy thing didn't offend me -- even the core book acknowledged that the Coalition needed a literate technician class to function, it couldn't survive just on having the 'aristocracy' (CS officers and important politicians) knowing how to read.

So, basically, the Coalition population was only (ballpark guess) 95% illiterate, not 99.9+%. That other 5% can still build you a lot of high-tech guns and vehicles, especially given how sophisticated automation was. (If you can build automata as relatively sophisticated as the Skelebot, you can have some really bitchin' automated machine tools and assembly lines.)

Edit: Less than 1 in 20 people among the general population have Network+ certification, much less anything higher, but the Internet is a ubiquitous part of First World society anyway. There are precedents for large complex high-tech infrastructures that only a very small Priesthood Of The Machine can actually build, maintain, or repair.

As for maintaining it -- I see a totally Soviet-style system, where the weapons and vehicles are built as simple and rugged as possible, and anything above a total no-brainer "It works better if you plug it in" or "Field-strip and clean it" repair requires sending it back to the depot, or swapping out prefab modules, or both.

So, the literacy thing is one of the few things that *didn't* bug me.

The rest, oh dear Lord, did it bug me.

[Chuckg]

As for other RPGs, I'm going to post a link to an obscure indie game called Wushu.

http://wiki.saberpunk.net/Wushu/HomePage

Wushu's weaknesses are that if you want mechanical 'crunch', this game is the antithesis of such. Also, non-mook challenges are pretty much set up only to be handled as one-on-ones, team-vs-team or team-on-one combats are harder to run than they think.

But for quick pickups, solo games, or creative improv, it really can take off like a bomb. I speak from experience.

And it's free, so, what's to lose?

[ProfPotts]

Yeah Rifts-wise I always figured that the Coalition had sorta' evolved itself into an icon-driven society (sorta' like where we could all be heading now...): why learn to read when all around you are touch-screen & voice-activated user-friendly computer systems? It's kind of like the attitude some people have today when they say, 'Why read the book - I'll just wait for the movie' taken to the n'th degree.

Of course, in Rifts, you can also study / read banned material to learn all about magic & monsters & stuff. So someone in the CS who wants to learn to read, but has no good career-based reason for doing so, is going to be seen a bit like someone who doesn't ever want to be a pilot wanting to learn how to fly (but not land) an airliner... ::unsure

Not that the powers that be don't encourage this sort of attitude for their own political gain... 'cos governments don't do that sort of thing, right? ::sly

I started playing Rifts when it first came out & I have to agree that it had some good ideas, but was poorly executed, & has just gone down hill ever since. The whole game world is sadly illogical & unbelievable if you scratch the surface even the tiniest amount, & the combat system rapidly degenerates into a game of accounting & attrition (generally the most effective tactic is to just stand there with the biggest gun & the best armour & exchange blasts with the other guy until the one with the least credits - & therefore the inferior weaponry - falls down). Even the XP system encourages killing bad guys in combat over actual role-playing...

The new (::cough:: 'Ultimate' ::cough: edition is an improvement, but it's far too little too late.

On the other hand, I have managed to take certain elements of the Rifts setting & use them as the basis for a successful D20 Future game... which is the sort of thing I think lots of people end up doing (ditching the system & just keeping the bits of the setting they like).

As for the editorial Ego-fests... megalomania much? ::rolleyes

[SnakeEyes]

I'm surprised to see that GURPS has been barely mentioned- and described as 'Bland'. I once played in a GURPS supers game, as a member of a group of supervillians... it was fantastic. My GM immediately decided that since my character was a (very) patriotic Canadian, he would have America annex it. So, by the time the game was set, my character had turned into a pyrokinetic cult-leading 'freedom fighter'. The rest of my team included a super-intelligent young girl whose parents were rich-gits and spoilt her rotten- so when she asked for an transmission electron microscope, several chemicals (including nitric acid, sulfuric acid and glycerine) and a hovercraft... She got them. Of course, we stole the last one, but that's beside the point. The team also had a shapeshifting alien, a telekinetic 'loner' and... oh great I've forgotten the last characters... but it was fun to create mayhem instead of playing do-gooders.

I'm glad someone mentioned Wushu- I bought the entire set of books from RPGNow! And was using them in same week. Such a good idea, and encourages more imagination from players when playing PnP.

Cheers,

SnakeEyes

[Heritage]

I own a lot of GURPS stuff, but I've only run it a few times and played it twice, both times at GenCon, and both games were very weak, but obviously that has a lot more to do with the guys running the games than the system itself. A generic system demands a lot of a GM, because lacking a built-in background it's a bit of a vacuum they need to fill, and those two were not up to the challenge; in the hands of a talented GM, I'm sure it would've been a very different story.

[Finbar]

GURPS is also one of those systems that has a lot of great ideas, but has some issues...In essence, if you are trying to have a game where statistically average characters are the norm, it's great, but, well, when you have a problem building a basic construction worker with less than heroic points, there's something wrong with the system. Thrown in the one mental stat that covers so much area, and it gets really weird...

FR

[Captether]

Lessee, got into Heroes Unlimited, Rifts, TMNT and a bit of Champions, but I always found those to be too crunch heavy. The games usually broke down into arguments about a rule tidbit.

Favorite White Wolf "super" games was Street Fighter (yeah, I actually liked that one), and Werewolfs Freak Legion. Pentex and its "mutant factory" appealed to me greatly as a storyteller.

Recently, I have been very interested in the Four Color RPG. Its a free game, put together by the talented Cynthia Celeste Miller author of the Cartoon Action Hour rpg.

I will be posting a homebrew campaign setting for the four-color game soon...

[Alex Green]

I will be posting a homebrew campaign setting for the four-color game soon...

Always a good thing.