The Gaming Den

So, how is it ? My son playthrough of Lego Marvel got me hooked on it. What do the Den hivemind think of it ?

Thanks in advance.

Troll thread or not, I'm legit interested in a discussion or even OSSR of Marvel Heroic Roleplay. It's one of those Before Times RPGs you see referenced in stuff like Binder of Shame and Knights of the Dinner Table so I'd like to know what's what.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Troll thread or not, I'm legit interested in a discussion or even OSSR of Marvel Heroic Roleplay. It's one of those Before Times RPGs you see referenced in stuff like Binder of Shame and Knights of the Dinner Table so I'd like to know what's what.

Marvel Heroic Roleplaying was published in 2012.

You're thinking of Marvel Super Heroes.

And now I've suddenly lost all interest.

Everything that needs to be said about the Marvel Super Heroes RPG (the good old FASERIP) is here:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/what-role-p ... ure-drunk/

So, huh... I understand the Den dont know MHR. Ok, thanks anyway.

I played a session of it with one of the designers when it came out. I was impressed at the thought that had gone into creating a system that would produce the sorts of interpersonal dynamics that you find in superhero teams. And with polyhedral dice, too.

A shame it didn't receive as much financial as critical success. Good works frequently don't.

I think what killed it for any of my friends that might have been interested in it, is no chargen crunch. I know, if you and the GM are on the same wavelength, you can write anything down and as long as it sin good faith, you won't get called a munchkin. That being said, making characters that may or may not get played is part of the appeal. You can talk at length about HERO's flaws and trap options, but at the end of the day it's fun to put a character together in it, even if they stink mechanically.

Without a chargen system, the game doesn't really offer anything more, for me and my peers, than FATE or FUDGE or any other "it's not Oberoni, it's adjusting the dials" system.

Well, Im not really a supers fan. But my son recent vibe and my contact with the Cortex system (through the Leverage rpg ) was enought to get me excited by this.

What looks interesting to me is the more light and narrative system where the abilities you can use at any time are subordinated to the ficition at hand.

What dont looks so interesting is the fact the game seems designed to run adventures as-is from the comics, which sound very railroadish to me.

So far I've only run two quick combats to get a feel for the system. The thing I like most about chargen is you only need to stat out important traits, and even those cover a general range. I tried Mutants and Masterminds, but got frustrated trying to pin down stats and skills. Is Thor's Intelligence 12 or 13? How many skill points does he have in Intimidate vs. Persuasion?

It's one of the newfangled games that RPGnet drools over, so it's probably mathematically and mechanically shit, but for now it is helpful to get benchmarks for the horde of supers I've been making.

A quick skim of their scenario books suggests that they aren't too railroady. There's plenty of room for the players go go off track and a few ideas for divergent scenarios.

Reading some reviews and play reports I got the impression the game has some "indie" sensibilities that I appreciate, in special the way it ditches number crunching in favor of drama and dillema based conflicts, with characters driven by personal struggles and motivations (the Milestones concept is particularly neat). In fact, the way some conflicts escalate reminded me of Dogs in the Vineyard somehow.

BTW, this is the second time I get hooked by a game which themes I dont like (Supers is not my thing), but the rules are sufficiently interesting to make me want it anyway.

Marvel Super Heroes had a mind-numbing system whose trappings were pretty good at reflecting Marvel comics heroes.

The creation process, while kind of fuckerated because it involved rolling on lots of charts, could create some pretty interesting supers.

It'd make for an interesting OSSR. I don't have my copy any more though sadly.

Last I looked the rules for the old FASERIP were freely downloadable.

Man, those were the days.

Hrmmm... I didn't have the core book but I have an old Marvel Superheroes Adventure Module. I don't think we ever played it though so I lack the firsthand rage at how stupid the system is.

silva wrote:Reading some reviews and play reports I got the impression the game has some "indie" sensibilities that I appreciate

You do this all the time.

Is this really how dumb you are? You hook onto games and start fellating them to everyone all over the place exclusively because you heard rumors that maybe it's a certain flavor of wanky MTP rules lite failure.

You don't even bother actually reading the damn things yourself some shady anonymous nobody somewhere says "yeah bro, this is totally MTP, you like MTP right?" and you are all like "FUCK YEAH!, MTP is awesome, quick I need to get on the internet and fellate this game I haven't seen RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!!".

And hilariously you do this regardless even of the games declared genre someone says "the rules? THERE ARE NO RULES" and your mind is BLOWN.

On FASERIP: its been up for ages online - I'd assume the rights to MSH went to WOTC when they acquired TSR but they likely can't continue publishing it since the license would belong to Marvel.

http://www.classicmarvelforever.com/cms ... dules.html

I've GM'd it about four times. Generally fun apart from:
-having to roll on a table to do anything
-hemorrhaging all your karma points if you kill someone.
-random roll chargen (usually I've just used existing heroes.. which is still in no way or shape balanced).

MHRP was written for the Cortex system, which by itself is basically HeroQuest 2.0 applied to misery tourism in order to get Soap Opera emulation.

The failure in MHRP, however, is that the game kinda had to comply with Marvel's back-then strategy, which means the book was made specifically for you to play marvel pre-gens (same as Marvel Online) as opposed to include actual chargen rules to create your own superheroes.

Also, there's no character advancement and power rules are 100% MTP... which is to say, non-existent.

While you can no longer purchase the PDF due to Marge having decided not to extend the license, I'm sure you can get it elsewhere if you want to give it a look.

We tried to play a game, but couldn't get beyond character creation. It was a lot of this:

CCarter wrote: -random roll chargen (usually I've just used existing heroes.. which is still in no way or shape balanced).

Existing heroes had clear winners and losers and I didn't actually like the winner heroes so I wanted to make my own hero... and those rules were kinda shitty. I think we started to make characters and then said fuck it and played Rifts. Because making characters in Rifts was less tortuous. Really.

I still remember stupid stuff like being an alien makes you more powerful than being an altered human. And being an altered human makes you more powerful than being a mutant. Totally arbitrary bullshit.

At least for the module I have the characters offered are within a magnitude of being the same weight class. Could choose between Moon Knight (maybe he was an NPC?), Hawkeye... I think Spiderman was by far the most powerful option.

Aw yeah, I found a picture of the adventure's cover.



I think someone bought it for me for Christmas or something, not realizing that it was a bit hard to play without the core book.

CCarter wrote:On FASERIP: its been up for ages online - I'd assume the rights to MSH went to WOTC when they acquired TSR but they likely can't continue publishing it since the license would belong to Marvel.

http://www.classicmarvelforever.com/cms ... dules.html

I've GM'd it about four times. Generally fun apart from:
-having to roll on a table to do anything
-hemorrhaging all your karma points if you kill someone.
-random roll chargen (usually I've just used existing heroes.. which is still in no way or shape balanced).

My main complaints were:

• It was way too easy to roll up a character with no combat usefulness
• The fact that attack powers did a static amount of damage led to annoying combats (e.g. if your attack power did 30 damage, you could only hurt an enemy with 40 armor on a critical hit or by spending XP).

Dogbert wrote:MHRP was written for the Cortex system, which by itself is basically HeroQuest 2.0 applied to misery tourism in order to get Soap Opera emulation.

What is this misery tourism thing?

Silent Wayfarer wrote:What is this misery tourism thing?

As I mentioned, there's no character advancement, but still, over the course of a story arc, you get XP you use to buy stuff (even if at the end of each story, all XP and progress are reset).

You only get XP in two reliable ways, and both imply the GM bending you over. The first one is the GM using "Doom Dice" against you (proto metagame currency), and the second is that you get XP whenever the GM scores a natural 20 against you... so, the game is all about suffering.

Huh..are you sure we sre reading the same game, Dogbert ? From my reading the main form of earning XP is through Milestones, and these look pretty unambiguous to me. Each character has a pre-made achievements patch which rewards 1XP, 3XP and 10XP in this order. So for example, Captain America milestones is..

"Mentor the Hero"

1 XP: when you choose to aid a specific hero for the first time

3 XP: when you aid a stressed out hero in recovery

10 XP: when you either give leadership of the team to your chosen hero, or force your chose hero to resign from the team.

Btw, I dont think d20 are used in the game (the steps are d4, d6, d8, d10 and d12), so its impossible for the GM to get natural 20s right ?

So the real question is, when is someone going to run a ridiculous PBP FASERIP game here?