...Comes Great Responsibility or Supers RPGs Part 2

 Greeting Adventurers!

Taking a break from writing Hydra Hobbies products here for some pondering and reflection on rules and superhero gaming. I've been a supers RPG gamer since back in the early 80's. I started reading comics back in the 1970's with Batman, Justice League, Captain America and the Fantastic Four. As it progressed into the 1980s my brother and I got heavily into comics especially the Marvel Universe. It started with Micronauts, GI Joe, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. There was some Marvel subscription deal where if you got so many titles in your subscription you got another title free. So, with our free one we choose X-Men because the name sounded cool. No other reason. We had never even read or seen an issue. While we were waiting for our first issues I went to the local drug store (the only place in town where you could buy comics) and bought an issue. It was X-Men #134. John Byrne. Smack dab in the middle of the Dark Phoenix saga. 

We were both gobsmacked and we were hooked. Avengers quickly followed as well as other titles like The New Mutants and Alpha Flight etc. I started to branch out into DC Justice League, Green Lantern, Firestorm, and Teen Titans among others. Ah, the late bronze age. We also subscribed to Dragon Magazine. Around 1983 I saw an ad in Dragon Magazine for the yellow box Marvel Superheroes RPG Game (FASERIP) and knew I had to have it when it came out the next year. On a trip to the Twin Cities, I found a copy at the famous Little Tin Soldier (the hang out of Dave Arneson and crew of the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group) hobby shop. As my brother was buying his Traveller little black books I grabbed up all the MSH stuff: the yellow box, Breeder Bombs, the GM Screen etc. It was my first foray into supers gaming and it was amazing. Amazing for a 12-year-old that is. 

My interests moved on and in 1989 The Batman movie came out and I picked up a copy of the DC Heroes Batman Gamebook while I was at some mall in Chicago. This was a separate "full game in a book" for DC Heroes. I was intrigued while reading it so I also bought some Batman sourcebooks for that system at Gamer's Paradise at the nearby Harlem Irving Plaza mall. The rpg was somewhat complicated and really didn't play well at the table. It's complicated AP system really dragging things down. More on that later.

Years later, I gave the Hero System a try and played both Spider-man and Captain America with some friends. I was a player and not a GM for that and it appeared kinda cool. I began to dabble in other supers games and found V&V. I played a bit of that with the classics Crisis at Crusader Citadel and Death Duel with the Destroyers but I was a bit taken off by having to play "as myself" with powers, which were rolled randomly (I had stretching and telepathy!) I liked the Hero system a bit better but didn't own any of the books and none of my local FLGS carried it so I forgot about it and moved on.

Forward to the early 2000's and my time at Steve Jackson Games. I was invited into a Hero/Champions game run by a local comic/game store owner and had a very fun but short romance with that system, more on that later as well. During this time, I started to experiment with other supers systems like Supergame and Superhero 2044. Also, since I did work for SJG, I did have a fling (call it a summer fling ala Spider-Man: Far From Home) with GURPS Supers but that didn't last long as that system really didn't do well with Supers, at all. That campaign eventually switched to MSH FASERIP and the Karma advancement system really killed the vibe of that game. My players felt let down with the difficulties advancing their novice supers spoiling the really excellent combat system.

I went back to the HERO System 5th (Champions) and really got into it. I traded books with Steve Long of Hero Games and got nearly everything in print for that system. I dug in hard. I made super after super not only from the Marvel Universe but creations of my own and ports from other games I had played in. I really dug it for a time (I even had the cool special d6 Hero Dice that you really didn't need because standard sixes were really all that was required). Sadly, this system fell very short at the table with its copious amount of math and bookkeeping required and the fact that combat that literally took hours and hours to play out.

I was left still looking for a system that could scratch my super itch. I explored Golden Heroes, Godlike, Silver Age Sentinels and Heroes Unlimited. All of which were lacking or very complicated. About this time several Marvel games came and went. All very lackluster except for the Marvel Heroic RPG by Hickman and Weis. It appeared cool but when brought to the table became lackluster and a tad confusing for my players, it only lasted one session.

A friend of mine then tried to sell me on Mutants & Masterminds and I didn't really "buy in" at first. I think I got the free Quickstart and toyed a little with the DC Adventures official port on a borrow from my friend. I took a deep dive into Green Lantern and the system opened up for me like a pandoras box. It combined the best of character point power creation from the Hero system, the simplicity of the "roll 20" for everything system of D&D 3.0, and a unique "death spiral" of conditions rather than traditional hit points. Its level system was also really good without having actual character levels. It's a bit complicated to explain but works great in practice allowing the GM to dictate the power level of their campaign without restricting the advancement of the PCs supers. Much more on this later. I really got into this system like I did Hero and boy it came at a sweet spot at that time because Green Ronin was really cranking out products for M&M 3e and I was loving every one of them, especially all of the officially licensed DC Universe stuff. It has slowed down since then and they are coming out with a 4e (which I'm avoiding because I'm still really diggin 3e and I have so many physical and digital copies of everything that I feel that I'm into that system with what we call in business "sunk costs" and don't want to change. Not to mention that 4e is going to be backwards compatible and is just a tweak of the rules rather than an entire complete change of the mechanics. I'm staying with 3e.

I brought M&M to the table and it worked. It was fast and it was fun. I got raves from a friend in my old group that worked for the DC Online game (she was a big-time producer there) and we didn't even use the DC port! Now that is saying something.

I sorta shelved it for a time as the players in my group have really focused on D&D 5e here for the last few years. In the meantime I've checked out some other supers games such as ICONS, Masks: A new Generation, Capes, Living Legends, BASH, Paragons, Base Raiders, Comic Book Adventures, Heroes who wear Masks, Sentinel Comics RPG, Super Atomic Supers, and new versions of The Batman Game, Hero System (6th I think?), Marvel Multiverse RPG (the newest MSH RPG which shows promise but I've yet to really take a deep dive with it) and the new SWADE Supers add on which includes the fantastic Doom Guard (another one I need to take a deep dive into. I know SWADE really well but not the Supers part). As I mentioned before I also got the .pdf of Mighty Protectors and then the hardcover. Recently, that con game with Jeff Dee has lit a small spark with me.

For the last part of this series, I'll take a trip through all the Super RPGs that I've mentioned with some more depth to those I took to the table and a smaller personal review blurb to those that just didn't fit my style and the reasons why.