Best Superhero rpg?

[ibanez]

So yeah, I've been wanting to run a superhero campaign for a while now, however I don't really know a good system to run it in. The only book I've really looked at is the newest edition of Mutants and Masterminds but from what I've read and seen it definitely has some problems.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I haven't read nor played Champions; you'll have to talk to Josh Kablack to get his opinion on that game, who has extensively played and analyzed that game since the Nifty days.

I can, however, tell you some of the strengths and weaknesses of Mutants and Masterminds.

Weaknesses: It doesn't model the trope of '1 BBEG versus a superhero team' very well. Progress in that game is linear; so unless you have something like Impervious Toughness a PL 14 villain is just going to end up gangbanged by 4 PCs unless special allowances are made by the plot.

Mutants and Masterminds is a ranged combat game. It's based off of the d20 system, but it makes the twin mistakes of making ranged damage just as good as melee damage and eliminating the tactical advantages of melee combat, such as ditching attacks of opportunity. While it's possible though inherently disadvantageous to play a flying brick archetype, characters like Captain America and the Hulk get their asses handed to them in that system.

The stunting system for using powers that you don't have. While in theory this was supposed to prevent players from being locked out of a plot or being shut down by an opponent's strengths such as a blaster not being able to hit an incorporeal foe, what it does is create too much on-the-fly bookkeeping for the temporary powers (though can be gotten around by pre-composing a list of pstunts) and more damningly makes some power sources better than the others. For example, having your power source be 'magic' will always be better than your power source being 'training' or 'hydrokinesis', even though the rules say that the power sources will be equal. This goes back to the 'fighters can't have nice things' problem, though applied to an entire superhero universe.

Like 4E D&D, the powers are also priced in such a way so that assisting your allies is supposed to be less fun then doing it yourself, so you should get a discount. This makes powers like 'Luck' and 'Healing' very broken.

Combat is very swingy. While the health system is set up in such a way to prevent one-hit KOs, because it uses the d20 system instead of a bell-curve you can have a slightly bruised hero to go incapacitated with one roll gone wrong. This is really a preference issue; it's very suitable for, say, Teen Titans or Fist of the North Star but not so much for Dragonball Z or Superman: The Animated Series.

The skill and attribute system suck donkey dicks. Why wouldn't you get your ass a nice power instead of wasting your time on this, unless your DM is one of those 'ROLEplay not ROLLplay' types who will call you a munchkin for not sinking some points into profession/photographer. This would just be a waste of space as opposed to being actively disadvantageous if powers didn't come from the same pool as your skill/attribute scores.


In short, this system does an acceptable job of modelling stories like Teen Titans where the heroes share an equal amount of time as the villains getting curbstomped, no one has a concrete power advantage over the other (the biggest difference is between Starfire and Raven) and you're not supposed to think too hard about your powers.

[mean_liar]

Lago in one.

Ranged combat has no real disadvantage, Magic is the be-all-end-all power source due to Luck and power stunting, etc etc.

I've played a good deal of MnM and abugsed it and everything I try to take advantage of is what Lago points out.

[Username17]

Champions requires extensive agreements between the players and the GM as to the expectations of the campaign. To the extent that it's almost more like a "build your ruleset rule set" than a rule set in its own right. But it is far and away better than its competitors.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

To show you what I mean about Teen Titans being a campaign that used M&M, here's my take on the whole thing:

Beast Boy: His player is a rampant powergamer and clown but the DM warned him ahead of time about abusing the system; so he instead opted to take an extremely versatile powerset that no one really takes seriously and put all of his points into it. He intentionally lowballs most of the plots but when the chips are down he reveals juuust enough power to win the adventure. Jokingly flirts with Raven, has a mild in-game animosity with Robin to the point where it sometimes leads to bad situations in combat. He's more interested in hanging out with his buddies than actually gettng screentime, so doesn't object too much to the GM generally ignoring his character.

Cyborg: Cyborg wanted to make a skill monkey at one point but thankfully realized how much skills sucked in this game, so funnelled all of his points into 'robot body' and 'gadget-making'. While he does have the super-strength power, unlike Starfire it's just something he got for free. He has the best 'advance the plot' powerset (Raven has more, but since she can't control it he's actually the best at it) so he's actually the most important member of the team. They can't even do an undersea or space adventure without him. But since he wisely opted to make his 'make space vehicle' a stunt of his 'create weird gadgets' power it doesn't really affect his utility in combat. He sometimes realizes that he's the most important member of the team but the GM doesn't really structure adventures that spotlight his character, so has an ongoing power-struggle with Robin. After Robin had a plothook thatm ended up with him getting felt up by the GM's pet character, Robin pushed for a Cyborg centered plot in hopes of returning the favor. It didn't work.

Raven: She's New Meat who's unfamiliar with the system but not to roleplaying in general, so she put a lot of points into 'let the GM decide my powers for me' power, which works out very well for her. When the GM doesn't balance an encounter too well he usually gives her a temporary power such as letting her telekinesis work on foes or letting her hulk out into some giant tentacle monster. She's not really interested by the combat system so for the most part just blandly uses her telekinesis powers to chunk objects at people and stays out of the way. She has a lot of non-combat skills (unlike Cyborg, they're actually skills) that do not really fit the genre so the DM often has to bend an adventure to make her skills fit in. Probably has a crush on Robin, but isn't assertive enough to fight Starfire for it so just tries to blatantly flaunt her sex appeal in a passive-aggressive way.

Robin: He's probably played with this GM before and knows what kind of encounters the GM likes to set up, therefore feels confident about not really having a badass ranged attack (letting Starfire or Cyborg carry him as the plot requires). While he does have good melee attack that lets him chew through mooks like crazy and stack all of the advantages feats give him, his primary mode of combat is usually disabling effects and giving bonuses to his friends, which makes him vital to every combat without necessarily stealing the show. Has some problems with Beast Boy and Cyborg, but since the girls love him they back him up.

Starfire: A noob who doesn't know what she's doing even though she thinks that she does; she ignored character-building advice from the GM and Beast Boy and it really shows. Her real powers are only blast and flight, which sadly (or fortunately, depending on your POV) are pretty much all you need to succeed in Mutants and Masterminds d20. She dumped a lot of points into useless skills like 'fly around the universe' or 'shoot lasers from eyes, too' or 'super strength'. More interested in flirting with Robin than actually playing the game, so unlike Raven doesn't really contribute anything to scenes; occasionally the DM will try to give her plothooks to make her character more involved but it doesn't really work.

GM: The GM structures adventures so that people get screentime as opposed to something that makes any kind of objective sense. Cyborg and Raven make it really easy for him to pull whatever plot he wants out of his ass, so he constantly does it. Has a weird sexual fixation on Robin and Raven. Beast Boy tried to get the GM's attention, too, for some unknown reason but it didn't take. Enjoys robots, probably a bit too much. He's not very good at worldbuilding so pretty much lets the PCs do whatever they want, only introducing characters to advance the plot. His players really love the characters he invents on the fly, though he doesn't really have a way of predicting which ones will become popular. For example, he had no idea that everyone would love Red X or Terra so much so hastily wrote them into the plot. Sometimes he gets a little too attached to a GMPC, which worked out in the most awesome way with Slade but not so much with Brother Blood.

Specific Characters:

Slade: He was just a character the GM introduced so he could have his long-awaited scene of a big strong man feeling up one of Batman's disciples and purring into his ear, but to the GM's surprise everyone loved the character. He was designed to be just a martial foil to Robin but since he realized how much BBEGs sucked in Mutants and Masterminds after the Plasmus/Cinderblock curbstomp decided to make him a criminal mastermind, too, so he could use a lot of robots. After the Red X debacle, which was originally supposed to end with that character replacing Robin but was scrapped after being too powerful, the whole 'how could you do this to your friends' issue gave enough character development to both Slade and Robin that this was generally agreed to be the point where the campaign hit its stride and Slade was here to stay.

Brought back alongside Terra in the vain hope of backing her up with his criminal empire would make her a more threatening villain but thing s didn't quite work out and he had to hastily write her character out of the campaign--unfortunately, he rolled a string of natural 20s instead of just 'normal' successes so his villain got killed, too. Sadness.

So after the Brother Blood thing (see below) the GM decided to just use a baddie the characters were already familiar with for the final arc of his campaign, which he had to planned to end on a big bang. And decided to go all out; he'd use a motherfukken DEMON this time... but what if it turned out to be Brother Blood 2.0? Ergh, well... what if he eased the players in with Slade again, but with DEMON POWERS? Strangely enough, it worked really well. All of the players were hot and bothered by Slade burning off Raven's clothes, even Robin, and everything was going really well... until he decided to kill off Slade to demonstrate how big and bad Trigon really is. And the plot kind of got away from him at that point.

Titans East: The GM realized that he was giving too much focus to Robin even though Cyborg was the hardest-working member of his group; he always tried to cover for the GM's plotholes and brought snacks. So as a reward, Cyborg gets an arc where he gets to do the thing he was pushing for all along--a plot where he gets to be the leader and the hero!

So the GM had an out-of-character meeting with the players minus Cyborg and asked them if they would temporarily take on the roles of NPCs for this plothook and they agreed. So Robin picked Speedy so he could humiliate the character for making him look bad in an earlier plot, Raven picked Aqualad/Tempest because she has the hots for him and water is just another form of telekinesis, Beast Boy picked Mas y Menos for extreme amounts of versatility and power that he could turn up and down at a moment's notice, and Starfire got Bumblebee in hopes that Robin would notice that fine piece of sexual chocolate. It didn't work, probably because Raven was getting a lot more antsy for Robin's attention at this point and he was a huge fan of Ranma/Tenchi.

The plot went great at first. It expanded on the HIVE subplot the GM introduced but aborted, it gave the players a chance to play new characters alongside their old ones to make the originals look better, and Cyborg was having a blast. Unfortunately, the GM got a little too attached to Brother Blood and made him overpowered (after enacting a VERY hated 'the Titans East win anyway' asspull) so had to use a literal deus ex machina to save the situation even when Beast Boy pointed out a better way to resolve it. Still, the players enjoyed the characters so much that the GM brought the Titans East back in a later adventure.

Terra: She was originally intended to just be a one-shot character after the GM got criticism from his buddy Geoffrey (who ran the more 'adult' Justice League game) for not really having any superheroes in his universe aside from the Titans and Aqualad in it, but she unexpectedly caught on with the players--because who doesn't enjoy blonde waif orphans with angsty backgrounds? Beast Boy, who is a big fan of blonde waifs, took an unexpected liking to this character but the GM was sort of uncomfortable with playing girls so tried to shoo her out of the scene. It didn't work too well, until the end of the campaign when the GM was in a bad mood decided to reintroduce her as a final 'fuck you' to the players. It ended up with an otherwise really successful campaign ending on hurt feelings.

[koz]

*awesomeness*

You sir, are dramatic win.

[Gelare]

Champions requires extensive agreements between the players and the GM as to the expectations of the campaign. To the extent that it's almost more like a "build your ruleset rule set" than a rule set in its own right. But it is far and away better than its competitors.

-Username17

This has been my experience, too. I've played HERO, and if you're trying to break the game, it's not even a challenge. The players and GM need to agree how things are going to go, and then it's pretty fun.

[Josh_Kablack]

however I don't really know a good system to run it in.

Well then, that by itself pretty much eliminates Champions - it's an awesome metasystem, but unless you have a number of players in your group who already grok it, it's unlikely to be worth the learning curve for you as a GM.

Instead I would recommend you go houserule M&M or dredge up FASERIP Marvel or Blood of Heroes (previously DC Heros before they lost the license). Or work off Frank's Fantastic basics on this forum. If you are looking for something on a Daredevil/Batman level, I could also see Feng Shui working, but that's more action movie than superheroic oriented.

Those are all potentially workable systems for superheroics that are relatively light and easy to learn.

I've heard mixed things about Marvel Saga, but never actually had any experience with it myself.

Avoid Heroes Unlimited, Abberent and the blashphemy that was Champions New Millenium like the plague - they flat out suck and have little in the way of redeeming comedy.

You should also avoid GURPS Supers - it's not as bad as the previous three, but there's just no point. It takes as much effort to learn as Champs, but far less balanced and with worse support and a smaller userbase.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Mutants and Masterminds does have the distinct advantage of being able to teach your players how it works in an hour if they're already familiar with d20. Hell, if all they want to do is play blasters and don't mind using the pre-printed archetypes, it could go down to thirty minutes.

Mutants and Masterminds' biggest deviations from the genre is the BBEG system. However, again, if your players movement modes don't deviate too much from one another, you run supervillain teams, you hold PCs to the same creation standard (i.e. if one person spends 20 points on skills, everyone has to), you don't hold people to differing power sources to a different standard, and your players don't mind taking a dive you can have a decent again.

In other words:

The sides have roughly the same number of members on it:
If one person has superspeed or superflight, everyone has it:
If you have melee characters then either these people have superspeed or superflight or everyone is a melee character:
You realize the suckiness of the attribute/skill system and the slight advantage of the feat system and make everyone apply their ranks equally:
You don't sweat role protection too much:
You watch out for the typical abuse of free-power creation systems (such as applying negative modifiers to powers that never come up):
You make everyone have the same power source or force yourself and the players not to give a care when someone does enough sit-ups to learn how to travel back in time:

Then the system works.

It sounds like a pretty narrow system. And truthfully, compared to the superheroic genre at large it is. But you can still run One Piece, Naruto, and Teen Titans pretty well with it--and for a lot of people that's enough.

[ibanez]

Or work off Frank's Fantastic basics on this forum.

I haven't read it before and a quick search turned up nothing, link?

[Josh_Kablack]

Sadly, a tabled work-in-progress, but here're the two relevant threads:

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=49001

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=49327

[angelfromanotherpin]

If you'd like something (much) simpler, Truth & Justice might fit the bill.

[Username17]

If you'd like something (much) simpler, Truth & Justice might fit the bill.

Or Strange Synergy if you're going that route.

-Username17

[Sir Neil]

I had no idea Mutants and Masterminds doesn't totally suck. I might pick that up -- which edition works better?

[Lago PARANOIA]

2nd Edition Mutants and Masterminds. Things are priced a little more fairly (though they're still bullshit), Sorcery no longer owns your face off mechanically--just conceptually--and some of the standard cheese loops such as super strength stacked with a low-powered Strike with a bunch of kick-ass modifiers on it are closed. But it's not that big of a deal.

Like I said about 4th Edition, it's not a great or even a good game, but it's servicable. Myself, I would just learn Champions if I was already familiar with the HERO system or if I wanted something more 'street' or Batmanny where people spent just as much time in the investigation phase as they did in the combat phase I would make everyone Shadowrunners and gut the racial, astral travel, and summoning rules and give people extra hitboxes depending on how durable I wanted the superheroes. If I wanted something low powered and more in the combat phase I would snag some Feng Shui.

[Josh_Kablack]

Here's what Google search turn up of my prior posts on Champs/Hero as a system:

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=48 ... highlight=

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=64 ... highlight=

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=10142

[hogarth]

My two cents:

Champions does a better job at coming up with good building blocks (e.g. "Ice Blasts" and "Plasma Bolts" are all the same thing with different names) and pricing powers (e.g. Desolidification and Invisibility are expensive, space travel is cheap).

Mutants & Masterminds does a better job with making "normals" suitably puny (e.g. you can knock one out/kill one in one blow) and making powers suitably vague (e.g. you can use weather control to do various one-off stunts that you wouldn't necessarily want to pay points for).

But any superhero game is going to have problems, since some things that are reasonably common in the comics (e.g. dimension travel or time travel) don't make for a well-balanced game. So you'll always have to work with the GM to find a good "sweet spot".

[Lago PARANOIA]

For you Mutants and Masterminds fans out there, I heard that there was some 'Superlink' supplement or whatever that was basically M&M's version of FATAL.

Confirm? Deny?

[mean_liar]

Superlink is like the MnM OGL... you're going to have to be more specific than FATAL, which is basically just saying "really fucking horrid".

[Lago PARANOIA]

Okay, I'll try to be more specific.

Something about Plain Brown Paper Wrapper games, I believe. The setting takes place in the Iron Age and has a 'twisted world' version of Freedom City. Everyone in the setting has their personalities horribly twisted to be Drawn Together, but for serious.

Does that help?

[hogarth]

Who cares about pre-packaged settings for a superheroes game?

[mean_liar]

Okay, I'll try to be more specific.

Something about Plain Brown Paper Wrapper games, I believe. The setting takes place in the Iron Age and has a 'twisted world' version of Freedom City. Everyone in the setting has their personalities horribly twisted to be Drawn Together, but for serious.

Does that help?

Yes.

"Bedlam City".

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14132.phtml

Decent reviews though, and not just the one I linked to. I haven't seen it though.

[Sir Neil]

Alright, I have some math questions for M&M 2.

First, tradeoffs. (Characters can trade attack for damage, and armor class for damage saving throws, in either direction.) How far can it go before the character goes from "flavorful" to "crippled"?

Secondly, bell-curves. What happens if you replace 1d20 with 3d6?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Impervious Toughess is Better Than You, so you should trade AC for as much damage saving throw as your DM will let you. Remember you can make your other saves Impervious, too. There's also powers with a range of 'sight' which means that you can't dodge them anyway. They're ridiculously cheap and unfair, though, but it's still an advantage.

The jump between attack and damage isn't as stark, though, but it's still better to trade for attack--especially since you can just target a weak saving throw or go for a critical hit. You don't want to trade for TOO much attack however, because of the Impervious Toughness thing (see above).

3d6 would without a doubt make combat last longer, because under the d20 scheme there's a fair chance of you getting instantly knocked out from any attack after failing a saving throw; however you don't gain anything from being super-awesome at your saving throw and failing it by a little bit leads you to taking future penalties.

[mean_liar]

There's another route to take from Impervious Toughness if you're being a jackass: tradeoff in the other direction, but only to -5/+5.

Jack your Defense up with a Shield or Dodge Focus or whatever is cheap and use Luck (you should have this anyway) and Ultimate Effort (Toughness) to save your ass if you actually get tagged.