Thinking Of Superhero Games

Reviewing Heroes & Heroines, along with an upcoming superpowered game that I have, caused me to think about games designed to cover people with extraordinary powers. As it happens, at the moment I am not very fond of a lot of them. Champions suffers from a very clumsy game system, made worse by having to learn the system and spend a lot of time to create characters. This last is also a problem with GURPS Supers, but at least that system has developed into a very clever one that manages to deliver more "realism" for less effort than any other game I can think of. It's currently the one that I am planning on running my upcoming game in, but this post is part of a process there.

So, here are the games that are interesting me at the moment, along with links to where to get them.

Villains & Vigilantes — this is currently available in a new edition titled Mighty Protectors, but I haven't had a chance to evaluate that edition yet. I am mostly interested in the 2.1 edition linked here. For one thing, there are no point-buy systems in version 2.1, and I understand that Mighty Protectors has fallen prey to that seductive mechanic. One of the great things about V&V was always that it was just a matter of generating basic stats, rolling up—or choosing—some powers, and filling out the front-loaded calculations. That's part of the reason that I had the FBI Guide series.

Guardians — This is a little attempt to portray what the Original Adventure Game might have looked like if the authors were more interested in comic book superheroics than pulp fantasy. Like V&V, creating a character is more about picking a set of powers than spending points. That's really good from my perspective.

Supergame — The point-buy mechanic for creating characters is less intrusive here mainly because the game is very fast and loose. Still, it's less interesting to me than others in this list, mainly because of the weird, calculator-intensive rules (seriously, you roll d% and multiply that as a fraction of the base damage to find out how much damage you actually do, but only in hand-to-hand combat). Also, like most point-buy games, the players have to learn how play works in some detail before they can really create reasonable characters. There is a supposed third edition of the game now, but it is apparently a complete rewrite by new authors that only keeps the title.

Heroes Unlimited — I feel weird putting this in my list, since I really got most of my experience of it in the first edition, which we mockingly called "Heroes Limited" due to its inability to really handle the genre well. I understand that the second edition has fixed that issue, so I am bringing it back into consideration for my table. A major advantage of the game is that players can pretty much choose to use any of several character creation systems, from relatively freeform to relatively point-buy.

Marvel Super Heroes — The main disadvantage here is that the game is out of print and pretty expensive on the aftermarket. On the other hand, the PDFs at the Classic Marvel Forever website are more or less designed to be printed out, so that's an option. Still among the best possible superpowered games out there. Just don't roll on the tables in the Ultimate Powers Book, since they're really badly done. The selection is great, though. Pick your powers, I guess, and work out the power levels with the Referee.

Heroes & Heroines — This is a really unlikely choice for me, since it suffers from multiple problems such as being out of print, using a point-buy system, and so on. Still, it's not totally off the table for me because the sketched-out system is a perfect place to land a "rulings not rules" game. Still, Guardians is probably a better choice there.

GURPS Supers — Look, this is the only game that can actually handle Wolverine's adamantium-laced skeleton, and frankly I've had some of my superpowered NPCs inspired by the list of advantages and powers in the game. It's also the only game in print that can, more or less, do Dune just off the shelf, including weird things like having access to ancestral memories. The Supers supplement includes, among other things, the best discussion of Precognition as a superpower in a game that I have seen. If nothing changes, this is the game that I will be running. If only it had options to not be point-buy. Also, Wildcard Skills annoy me and the templates here rely on them to a degree, to the point that it's difficult to root them out of some of the templates—guess why I'm considering other games.

Mutants & Masterminds — I am not really fond of D20 games, except that they've allowed retroclones and such to happen, but this one seems alright. Mainly, I'm interested in the Paragons setting, which is pretty close to what I intend for my setting, and the Mecha & Manga supplement covers magical girls, which I do love. It runs a line between point-buy and not by allowing the player to effectively create a new class for their superpowered character or choose a pre-designed, relatively generic one, and then using that in a D20-like framework. Still, Guardians, and for that matter V&V, seems to cover most everything here and better.

Savage Worlds — On the one hand, the dice mechanic revolts my statistics-oriented mind, but on the other hand all of my players are both familiar with and fans of the game. Less intrusive point-buy system, but still a point-buy system. I'll leave it on the table as an option, maybe. I'll have to look at the superpowers system first. I have a suspicion that it isn't robust enough to cover some of my more outré characters.

Man, it sucks that Golden Heroes and Super Squadron are both out of print and in-demand enough to be really difficult to get. Not that I'd necessarily pick one of those, but they would provide a couple more options that wouldn't be terrible.

So, what other superpowered games that don't rely on a point-buy system—or which have a really compelling reason to consider them that outweighs the point-buy system—am I missing?

[Obscure Games] Heroes & Heroines

It has been a long time since I've written anything in this series—the last actual review of a game was in May of 2015!—so it is time to dust it off and give some attention to yet another game that hardly anyone has heard of. This time, we're going to address another superhero game, Heroes & Heroines, one of the more ambitious games of the '90s.

In the early '90s, comics had been suffering a bit after the crash of the (mostly) black & white indie comics of the '80s, and mainstream comics were shoveling out increasingly boring storylines. Worse, creators were starting to realize that they deserved a lot more from their creations, both in terms of creative control and financial reward. This led to the rise of "creator-owned" comics, many of them attached to the new publisher Image Comics. In addition, some of the smaller publishers decided to make a bid to take over some of the superhero comics market that was so thoroughly dominated by Marvel and DC. For instance, Dark Horse began its line of "Comics' Greatest World" superhero-comics, and Continuity Comics tried to forge a world by attempting major crossover events between its titles, giving the world the "Deathwatch 2000" and "Rise of Magic" storylines.

Into this ferment stepped a first-time game designer and publisher, James E. Freel III, whose publishing company, Excel Marketing, decided to try to make a splash by licensing as many of these smaller attempts as possible and putting them all into one game system, titled Heroes & Heroines. As the back cover marketing copy said, "No need to buy single or no licensed Comic Book Role Playing Games anymore!" The "single licensed" games that refers to, of course, were the Marvel Superheroes RPG from TSR and DC Heroes from Mayfair Games. The "no licensed" games referred to the likes of Champions and Villains & Vigilantes, or really any other superhero RPG of the time, all of which presented their own settings, unconnected to any actual comic books.

Heroes & Heroines was quickly followed by three supplements, The Maxx, based on the critically-acclaimed book from Image Comics, Deathwatch 2000, which covered the Continuity Comics crossover event featuring the likes of Ms. Mystic, Samuree, Monolith, and so on, and Comic's [sic] Greatest World, adding the characters from Dark Horse's superhero world such as Ghost, Barb Wire, Titan, and Division 13. Unfortunately for me, my ex-wife got The Maxx in the divorce, while I kept the rules, and I never did get either of the other two supplements. I ordered Comic's Greatest World recently from a used book store across the country, but it's still shipping, and it seems that no one in the world is currently offering to sell a copy of The Maxx supplement for the game.

The game itself is surprisingly simple and intuitive. Instead of a "strength" stat, a character is rated for how much weight, in pounds, they can bench press. This isn't really the best choice for an overall strength measure—I'd probably choose overhead press, whether strict press or push press, as a reasonable measure—but it is the one most often used in comic book write-ups when companies publish encyclopedias of their characters, and it's probably fair to estimate overhead press as about 80% of bench press. Intelligence is represented by IQ, which is rated just as real-world IQ tests present their scores, with an average of 100. Other stats don't come from real-world values, but are still fairly simple to eyeball for a given character or person.

Superpowers and skills are similarly straightforward. If a character can teleport, they buy the teleport power. On the other hand, if they pass through dimensions, they buy the dimension travel power. Which costs 5 points less but tells the reader to refer to the teleport power for details, for some reason? OK, the game could really have used some editing and development. Anyway, as noted, characters are designed using a system of points. The extensive list of powers helps in some ways but is a problem in others.

Different powers provide different Attack Ratings, Defense Ratings, and the Mental equivalents. Comparing the Attack Rating of the offensive power to the Defense Rating of the target on a chart gives the chance on 1d20 to succeed in the attack. Damage is subtracted from pools of Hit Points and Mental Hit Points, with a pool being reduced to zero causing the character to fall unconscious, while reducing the Hit Points pool to -8 kills the character. I am not sure why that value instead of, say, -10 or whatever. Taking a large fraction of the character's total Hit Points in one attack has a chance of Stunning the character.

There's not a lot more to the game. At this point in my gaming career, I find that refreshing. I am somewhat attracted to games that are only the barest of frameworks right now. We can point to the original edition of D&D, which was similarly very bare-bones in its approach, relying on rulings by the Referee to handle other situations.

The biggest annoyance with the game, for me, is the lack of editing, which is made worse because Freel is one of those writers who have picked up a lot of very idiosyncratic spellings and usages.