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RPGaDay 2015

19th: Favorite Supers RPG

Ah, supers! Now we’re in my wheelhouse! I think I can claim that I have played, run, or am at least familiar with at least a technical majority of super-hero roleplaying games ever published.

I love super-heroes. I love comic books. These are things you need to know about me.

Now, I’m gonna do it – I’m going to mention Lowell Francis again: his Patreon page provides links to all of his Histories of Roleplaying Genres blog posts. Of interest here, of course, is his History of Superhero RPGs.

My own history with supers rpgs runs something like this:

Villains & Vigilantes. We played this as soon as it came out and loved it. Having played D&D for a couple-few years before V&V was published, being able to play a super-hero in an rpg was terribly exciting. It’s a fun, won my game, with random character generation and cross-reference charts! That’s how nerdy kids in the old days spelled “fun”.

Then Champions came out, and nothing was ever the same again. V&V had a lot in common with D&D and other rpgs of that era, but Champions was a while new ball game. Did I say V&V was nerdy fun? Champions was the game of champion nerds. It’s all about fiddly calculations and squeezing every bit of utility and power out of every fraction of a character creation point. I consider myself pretty smart, but you have to have a certain kind of brain to love and to master Champions.

Don’t get me wrong – I like the game; I just know that my own noodly proclivities will send me down rabbit holes in Champions that I will regret spending so much time on. But it’s a beautiful system; you truly can build anything from the building blocks that are the Hero system.

DC Heroes. I have a real fondness for this game, I think because it seemed like such a relief after the crunchiness of Champions. It felt like a more “mature” approach, somehow: the fiddly bits were pretty easy to grok, it had that wonderful Action Point scale, and I still carry a torch for that 9-grid attribute block.

[Long gap with little supers gaming. Sadface.]

Then Mutants & Masterminds hit! M&M is one of the most robust game systems I have ever had the pleasure to read, play, and run. It is rock solid. Like Champions, you components of the system allow you to build pretty much anything,g but without much of the Hero system’s crunchiness. I knew the game was impressive when I realized that Captain America being able to walk away from a fight with the Hulk actually made sense in M&M and worked mechanically.

M&M captures the pulpy feel of super-hero comics despite it’s crunchier aspects. As I mentioned my RPGaDay2p15 post on sci-phi games, I have considered using M&M for Star Trek, and as a big Star Trek fan that is no small complement from me.

[A couple years gap with no supers gaming. Also sad face.]

Smallville.

I could go on for a while about Smalville, the Dramatic version of the Cortex Plus system. Suffice to say:

1. It’s one of the few rpg rules books I own a hard copy of.
2. It’s one of the few rpg rules books I have read all or most of.
3. Character creation is a collaborative, creative process that produces rich results.
4. I dig the core mechanic, which regularly asks you why your character is even in a given scene or encounter.

Those are the supers games that I’ve played or run at length. I’ve been in a few very short games using the Marvel Super Heroes Role-playing Game (aka “FASERIP”) over the years, and liked it okay. I’ve also had a couple of flirtations with Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, also a Cortex Plus game. I’d be happy to play more FASERIP, and I’d love to get in on some face-to-face MHR action.

Worlds in Peril was brought to my attention recently. I’ve skimmed the free odd version of the rules, and it is very narrative, and I mean that in the best possible way. Powers are essential a set of descriptive statements. Over all it seems very promising.

If I had to run a supers game right now…I love M&M but I’d rather not have to run it again… I might try Truth & Justice… I’m not in love with the fiddlier bits in Smallville (I’m working on a hack of it with the help of the Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide)… I’ve been wanting to use Danger Patrol for something, so I think I’d give that a try, but it’s not a supers game, per se.

I guess my vote would have to be for Mutants & Masterminds as my favorite supers rpg. It may be the strongest supers game ever made.

ALIGNMENT CHECK!

RPGaDay 2015

15th: Longest Campaign Played

Geez, these are getting harder!

I honestly don’t know. However, I can probably narrow it down to two contenders.

The first would be “Saviors”, relatively low-powered supers game using the Hero system, run mostly by Lowell Francis (man, he keeps coming up in these RPGaDay posts, doesn’t he?). I can’t even tell you how long it ran, but it seemed like a very long time – and I mean that in the best possible way. It was the kind of game where you just couldn’t help but be invested as a player: stakes were high, character death was a real possibility, and schemes were going on that you often felt you could do little to stop. I think I can safely say that for everyone involved it remains a hallmark of our gaming history.

The character I was known for in that game was The Word. He was a mysterious, perhaps insane, highly-principled, lives-in-the-sewers, trenchcoat-wearing, relentless vigilante inspired by the Rorschach character from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen comic book miniseries. He had what looked like a Christian cross on his face, but was never intended as a “Christian character”. I just liked the stark, idealistic iconography of it, especially for a mask. The horizontal beam hits right where a character’s eyes would be. He also had what looked like a priest’s collar with that little exposed white square, which combined with the vertical beam of the cross to sort of make the whole thing look like an exclamation point.

 

The other contender would have to be whatever my friend Scott Hamlin called the AD&D games he ran back when we were both stationed at Fort Hood, TX back in our Army days. I feel like our weekends consisted of buying comic books, eating at restaurants, and playing D&D – in fact, we had a nasty habit of commandeering a large section of a restaurant, ordering lots of  food, and gaming too loudly for hours and hours. It was an absolute blast. That went on for a year and a half, give or take.

If you see someone online with the user name “Daz Florp Lebam”, that’s me; that was the name of a very silly character I ran in Scott’s game.