"You might be a gamer if...you've been known to have in-depth conversations about the relative merits of Champions, V&V, Marvel, and DC heroes... ignoring the fact that all superhero systems are intrinsically sucky.

You might be a gamer if...you like one of the above systems enough that you yelped when I called them all sucky."
~ The Usenet "You Might Be A Gamer If" List

On an earlier thread, I referred to Icons! as a superhero heartbreaker.  Rather than derail that thread further, I'm starting this one.

I'm not going to bash Icons! specifically because it's part of something I think is a problem with all the major historical superhero RPGs.

Superhero RPGs are a specific case of the general problem that nearly all traditional RPGs are about combat first, foremost and only.  This is, I think, not a controversial statement; one need only look at the relative number of pages devoted to combat rules vs. anything-else rules in pretty much any RPG, including superhero RPGs.

Superhero RPG designers tend to excuse this by claiming that the superhero genre is primarily about combat, so the focus is justified.  Except this has, IMO, never been true.

My test of a genre RPG is whether I can pick up a typical example of the genre source and have rules in the game that let me play out every scene or setpiece in the example, at a level of depth that matches the source.  For instance, the Indiana Jones RPG only needs light rules for seduction; the Dangerous Liaisons RPG needs a major subsystem.

When I pick up just about any comic from the start of the Silver Age on, the superhero combat scenes make up a third or less of the panel count.  The rest of the book is taken up with amazing superhero stunts, rescues, action scenes that are not combat, investigation (if you're reading DC) and/or relationship drama (if you're reading Marvel).  But none of the commercially successful superhero RPGs have ever treated any of these topics with anything more sophisticated than a simple pass/fail skill check (Mayfair's DC Heroes came close, in that the exact same subsystem was used for all conflicts, but there was never any work done to show how to use it to, say, chase down a nuclear missile or put California back where it belongs).

The reason I was picking on Steve Kenson's works is that they're the most recently designed  commercially successful superhero RPGs - I apologize to the designers of BASH and Supers, but I've never seen them in the wild - and yet they're still making the "mistake" of assuming that if it ain't combat, it ain't worth spending ink on.  This is why I called Icons! a heartbreaker. I don't consider replacing MSH's Universal Table and grafting on WW-style Nature/Demeanour rules to be any great shakes given the elephant in the room that is the fact that MSH was originally designed as a pure combat game for superheroes.

TL;DR: Superhero RPGs are almost entirely about combat.  Superhero comic books are not.

What do you think?  Is this a problem for you and your group?  Do you care about the lack of in-depth non-combat rules?  Do you ever play out non-combat scenes like rescue scenarios, interacting with the environment, or chase/stunt sequences?  Does your superhero game have rules for these things?

Or are all superhero RPGs intrinsically sucky?

I think one of the biggest issues for a lot of superhero games is that they don't address the fact that there's going to be inequality in power among superheroes.
 
I mean, Wonder Woman or Superman or even Captain Atom are on an entirely different level than a Booster Gold. But everyone has their part to play in the super-team. The Avengers are the same way; The Incredible Hulk and Wasp or Hawkeye are on vastly different power levels, but it works.
 
There's very few supers games I've really liked. Truth & Justice, ICONS. FASERIP, of course.

I always associate supers with the Adam West school of comic book plots. Combat focus is never a problem as pretty much everything else is a cakewalk.

My problem with superheroes is the hero part. They do try their best not to make their heroes boring but the standards of moral perfection you need to be credible with some fans are ridiculous.

A Punisher like Vigilantee game or a Super Villains game I'm all for though.

Actually I would say superhero games are as much about investigation. Sure there is lot's of action (and I don't hear people complaining) but action is aimed to feed clues, define patterns. But at the end of the day what you have is a case to solve. You need to discover who is behind the crime/global threat or if you know who it is you have to find out how to get to them or just how to defeat them (when Galactus visits Earth it's pretty obvious where he is and what he is doing - stopping him is a whole different ball game).

Also the good combat in a supers game should never just be a straight slug fest; they should always be about something. As the fight rages you are actually trying to stop the villain getting away, protect civilians or defuse the bomb on the bridge.  So sometimes you can win the fight but lose the scene, or lose the fight but still do enough to save the day.

As for downtime or personal scenes, in my experience they feature as much in supers game as any non-supers game. As a GM you provide the opportunities. Some players bite some don't, it's all good.  At least supers tend to keep players centered around their home city which tends to be better for developing a personal life for your character rather than say, deep in a dungeon or if you are travelling all the time.  

As for super systems designed to do things differently, you might want to check out Tim Kirk's Hearts & Souls or possible Smallville (I've not played it, but it is very relationship focused).

In Heroes Unlimited there is a massive skill list and a lot of the powers have to do more with travel, healing or perception than fighting.

I absolutely do not want anything in the rules dealing with investigation more than powers that could help and ignorable skill checks. I get bored just thinking about the complex interaction of story game dice rolls designed to model an investigation. That shit all sucks.

When it comes to investigation I want the players to answer the riddle with their own power of thought. When it comes to relationships, I want the characters to RP, just just relate what happened. I don't want any rules having to deal with it.

Most heroes games are pretty successful in doing what they need to do - relating how characters move and fight, and what their powers and abilities do. While I've never played Mutants and Masterminds, it is really big round these parts and lots of people have played multi-year games of it. I mostly play HU and think it is great.

Hero's combat section is dwarfed by it's character creation section .

In general, I prefer lighter games. Supers! is actually quite good, and has simple combat. I also like Icons and BASH.

As far as combat sections being detailed, they HAVE to be. It's the one part of the game where you can get killed. And no matter how many internet forum discussions say combat isn't the main reason for gaming, most gamers still get excited when the bad guy shows up to fight.

Whatever MSH (FASERIP) was designed for, it's an awesome system that I've been using to (very successfully) run pulp Call of Cthulhu scenarios with for the last year, 75% of which have no combat.

And even in the game itself, the characters are required to meet social obligations, and this effects their Karma (the primary resource in the game). So, if Spidey misses a date with MJ because he's battling the Scorpion, he loses Karma, but if he manages to get Aunt May her meds on time and sell some pics to the Bugle so he can afford rent, he gets a bonus to karma, which he can then spend to defeat bad guys.

Having a lot of combat rules doesn't mean a game only has to be about combat, it simply means that combat is the only situation that requires a lot of rules. This has been a basic truth about RPGs since D&D BX.

I got in to RPGing via supers gaming, with TSR's original Marvel Super Heroes (the FASERIP game). That was the first RPG I ever bought, played and GMed, about 27 years ago.

Despite buying two editions of Mayfair's DC Heroes and also Marvel SAGA, the TSR MSH (in both basic and advanced versions) is also the only supers game I've ever played, so all told I've not tried a supers RPG in about 25 years. Despite being a comics fan I've never felt like I understand supers gaming.

As a Marvel fan first who was trying my first GMing as a teenager and using the published modules, I think the main problem I had was that the characters in the 80s comics I was emulating were mainly reactive. A D&D party takes control of the adventure, even if they're just deciding which tunnel of a dungeon to go down next. Spider-Man, on the other hand, just swings around town until he finds a mugger, or the Green Goblin starts trying to kill his girlfriend. Trying to do this in an RPG always felt to me like a collection of fight scenes, each of which ended with the players finding a note saying "this way to the next fight".

Of course, with all this hindsight I can see ways to make the games work better, but in doing so they would have drifted further from the genre emulation that drew me to them in the first place.

After running MSH games for a year or so I joined another RPG group in our school as a player instead of GM. They were playing Palladium Fantasy, and I never looked back, really. Funnily enough, my most successful MSH game was one where I ran the Mutant Massacre story from Uncanny X-Men as essentially a dungeon crawl in the Morlock tunnels

Quote from: Ian Warner;470240I always associate supers with the Adam West school of comic book plots. Combat focus is never a problem as pretty much everything else is a cakewalk.

My problem with superheroes is the hero part. They do try their best not to make their heroes boring but the standards of moral perfection you need to be credible with some fans are ridiculous.

Yeah, for a lot of people Adam West's Batman or the Christopher Reeves Superman still define the genre. But hopefully the new generation of superhero movies will give people a broader and not quite so camp take on the genre.

That said, animation is where it's really happening (outside of the comics themselves of course). The Batman The Animated Series of 90s and Justice League series that followed are works of art. The quality of the dialog, characterisation puts most live action movies to shame - and not just superhero ones. Same goes for Hellboy - the direct to video animated movies are actually a lot better than the live action ones (same actors provide the voice talent).

And some of the more recent Marvel stuff is pretty good.  
I mean if you want to see some seriously flawed heroes the "Unlimited Avengers Movie" does that pretty well. You don't have to go to Punisher extremes just to be messed up in the head.

But then again, not everyone needs to like superheroes. It is a weird genre, there is not escaping that.

Quote from: Grymbok;470268As a Marvel fan first who was trying my first GMing as a teenager and using the published modules, I think the main problem I had was that the characters in the 80s comics I was emulating were mainly reactive. A D&D party takes control of the adventure, even if they're just deciding which tunnel of a dungeon to go down next. Spider-Man, on the other hand, just swings around town until he finds a mugger, or the Green Goblin starts trying to kill his girlfriend. Trying to do this in an RPG always felt to me like a collection of fight scenes, each of which ended with the players finding a note saying "this way to the next fight".

I see the problem, and as a fairly new supers GM, I had the same misgivings. Above all you don't what the supers game to be a villain of the week thing.

But that's why I say supers are an investigative kind of game. A typical supers plot work like a typical Call of Cthulhu plot. There is some conspiracy, some big mystery or threat which is presented gradually over a series of incidents. So initially the players have to try to piece together enough information before they can take the initiative and go on the offensive. So yes, in a sense it is reactive, but not more than a lot of other popular genres.

Quote from: daniel_ream;470225My test of a genre RPG is whether I can pick up a typical example of the genre source and have rules in the game that let me play out every scene or setpiece in the example, at a level of depth that matches the source.  For instance, the Indiana Jones RPG only needs light rules for seduction; the Dangerous Liaisons RPG needs a major subsystem.

When I pick up just about any comic from the start of the Silver Age on, the superhero combat scenes make up a third or less of the panel count.  The rest of the book is taken up with amazing superhero stunts, rescues, action scenes that are not combat, investigation (if you're reading DC) and/or relationship drama (if you're reading Marvel).  But none of the commercially successful superhero RPGs have ever treated any of these topics with anything more sophisticated than a simple pass/fail skill check (Mayfair's DC Heroes came close, in that the exact same subsystem was used for all conflicts, but there was never any work done to show how to use it to, say, chase down a nuclear missile or put California back where it belongs).

Rules for combat tend to go more in depth because combat plays differently. PCs can die, so rules need to be clear and complete to avoid death by GM fudging (at least, this is a common enough perception that finds its way into how games are designed). Also, since players take turns doing "something" until the fight is over (instead of chipping in only when they have something specific to contribute) designers feel the need to vary what that "something" is.

Death doesn't have to be at stake in a supers game (depending on what sort of comics we're emulating, and whether we see script immunity as worth scrapping), but people still want variety in the crazy fights that can happen. So a more free-form approach could be made to work, depending on how you want to go about it.

On the other side, clear investigation and relationship rules have always been a sore spot with RPGs. A truly functional solution to those problems would change RPGs from then on (maybe) in all genres. But many would still prefer to go free-form here. Still want the RPG to look like it focuses on this stuff? The solution is extensive GM advice on these sorts of stories, and other considerations of genre. Because mysteries for investigation and relationship-centered adventure come less easily to inexperienced (and even intermediate) GMs.

Quote from: daniel_ream;470225Superhero RPGs are a specific case of the general problem that nearly all traditional RPGs are about combat first, foremost and only.  This is, I think, not a controversial statement; one need only look at the relative number of pages devoted to combat rules vs. anything-else rules in pretty much any RPG, including superhero RPGs.

Well, disagree. Combat is a game subsystem that tends to get an inordinate number of pages devoted to it, for various reasons:
-the stakes are whether the character lives or dies, so its much more important that clear results are outlined
-the situation itself is complex, and requires more rules to simulate.
Contrast with say, social interaction. At bare minimum you can get by with a rule going ('you talk to the guy and roleplay your Charisma, and if I'm unsure he'd be convinced, you roll a Charisma check').

On the question of suckiness - Of the several you mentioned, my favourite would be MSH/FASERIP (played this recently)- though, I guess it is mostly combat. Of the others I'm fairly ambivalent on DC Heroes and only passingly familiar with V&V or Champions - and totally unfamiliar with Icons, but it looks below the complexity threshold I'd like.

Quote from: daniel_ream;470225But none of the commercially successful superhero RPGs have ever  treated any of these topics with anything more sophisticated than a  simple pass/fail skill check (Mayfair's DC Heroes came close, in that  the exact same subsystem was used for all conflicts, but there was never  any work done to show how to use it to, say, chase down a nuclear  missile or put California back where it belongs).

As far as missile chases go DC Heroes has reasonably exact movement rules - probably too exact to make a chase fun, I suppose. As long as you have an approximate weight for California, you can work out how many Hero Points it costs Kal-el to move it. On other fronts -  this is a game which has three different attributes governing social interaction (one telling you how probable it is that people like you (Influence), the other how much (Aura), and a third giving your resistance to it (Spirit).

Check out Silverlion's Hearts & Souls.

Quote from: Sigmund;470290Check out Silverlion's Hearts & Souls.

Damn right! Best supers game out there, hands down!

-clash

I've long believed that the perfect supers game would be midway between V&V and Heroes Unlimited.

Palladium stripped down to the essentials with no concern at all for relative power level balance.  The V&V aspects I'd like include the legal system rules, the truly random power system, and the general let's play this thing attitude.

Attempts to balance V&V completely miss the point.