Inspired by Pundit's Blog, I was curious what everyone thought would be the best rpg for a Golden Age superhero game. To me, it should handle the original Superman and Batman, as well as Doc Savage and the Green Hornet.

In general, I think the average power level would be a bit lower than modern supers. Say a modern hero would be 100 points, the Golden Age hero would be 80 points. I'd also expect to see more guys with no powers but plenty of guns and being good with their fists.

A good question. What kind of gaming do you want to get from the Golden Age? What aspects of play do you want? Pure fisticuffs and crime fighting? Morally/Political stances on things?

Superhero games are easy to come by, so common you can hit them with faceless tennis racket and hit ten of them.

My suggestions in general. First what not to use:  Villains and Vigilantes. Hand to Hand generally blows without powers to back you up.

Golden Heroes/Squadron UK
It always gave me a Golden Age feel, but its mechanics are  a bit odd and dated..

Icons
Can handle it very well especially since one type of origin works very well for Golden Age.The "Trained" origin gets one power and a lot of skills. This works very well for a lot of Golden Age types. Other types can be emulated as well.

I used it to create "Steel Thunderbolt" who is a very Golden Age PC that I randomly rolled both the name and powers (I rerolled a few times to get something that fit the name, admittedly.) A slightly superstrong hero with steel "thunderbolts," javelens that look like your archetypical representation of a lightning.

It might take some oversight and tweaking to get it there.


Savage Worlds+Supers Companion (or Necessary Evil)
Can work great, powers tend to be lower powered on the base level and without attack powers some heroes will want to pick up guns.

Hero
Can handle it of course, mechanically. Its just not very inspiring.

My own Hearts & Souls is more "Silver Age," and I feel Truth & Justice is much the same.

Heroes Unlimited
I might get booed for this--but as a superhero aficianado, there is another game I'll bring up: Heroes Unlimited. If you keep careful watch on allowing things like "Invulnerability" and don't allow mega heroes, it should work wonders. (Keep things like Body of Steel out, or power down a bit--most the "Body of'" tend to be more powerful in general than other powers.)

I'd almost suggest the previous version. Revised, instead of 2E, or whatever (Blue cover.) Simply because psionics and magic were a bit more workable, and were somewhat more superpowered. But the newest edition works.

Things like "Stage Magician," "Hunter/Vigilante", the occasional Mutant/Alien whatever works. You'd need to drop or limit cyborgs, and robots would be more androids and mind transferred than pilot ones (At least on the hero side) and Hardware heroes would be less common. (Many people had guns but few did so with fervor.)

Then again its a hoary system, and not ideal for nigh any gaming but low powered supers, and despite knowing far better games, I think its can do that ideally.

Marvel Superheroes
(The Advanced Set) also worked well for back in the day, just drop the "no killing" karma loss (but don't award for it either.) And it would work fine. Do "model" characters rather than roll, or keep power ranks low (rolling on the "Mutant" chart instead of the Robot one for ranks) and keep all heroes generally on that single chart.


Spirit of the Century or Adventure!,
Both pulp games might work very well. Since Golden Age Supers were often simply artistically rendered pulp heroes. (Rather than literary ones.)  I can't decide which would be better, Adventure has a lot of the "powers," but has scene editing which some people don't care for. SOTC has meta too, but less intrusive if done right via Aspects, but its powers stack in such a way to make Superman a slightly tough build. Not impossible though, just careful decisions.

Mutants & Masterminds
Lots of people love M&M, and 2E did have a Golden Age Supplement, which is (as of this post date, on sale for $3 USD regardless of what game you get, it might be worth getting that book.

4 Colors
You can also take a look at Cynthia Celeste Miller's 4 Colors I'm not as familiar, due to bad memory but I seem to recall it being awesome.

You also might look up reviews of Supers! Sadly my memory of it is dim, and I need to get print copy so I can fix it firmly in my mind

There is another who I can't think of right now but it had a very Golden Age feel, and if I think of it later I'll share it.

Quote from: danbuter;488011In general, I think the average power level would be a bit lower than modern supers. Say a modern hero would be 100 points, the Golden Age hero would be 80 points. I'd also expect to see more guys with no powers but plenty of guns and being good with their fists.

You know, I don't think this is really true to the spirit of Golden Age characters. I mean, sure, Golden Age Superman was a shadow of what he eventually became in terms of power, but there were plenty of characters like Ibis the Invincible and the Specter who could do pretty much whatever they damn well pleased.

With Hero, you almost have to know what you want before you begin character creation - The rule-book is so wide-open that you can't just "look at the options and pick ones that look neat".

That may or may not be a problem for you.

Regarding the Spectre or IBIS the invincible, what they really prove is that point-buy is again a massive fail for RPGs in general and supers RPGs in particular.

Dan is absolutely right that there were incredibly (ridiculously, even) powerful heroes in the Golden age.  The difference, however, and what lead the OP to suggest the "80pt instead of 100pt" thing is that there were also far more heroes in that era than in the modern era that had nothing other than "a costume and a good left hook". So the answer is that the statistics, the PROBABILITIES of the Golden Age are skewed in comparison to the other "ages".  

In my ICONS game I reflected this by having a much higher chance than normal of getting Trained or Gimmick, and less chance of things like Birthright, Transformed, or Artificial.  I didn't remove any possible origin, just shifted the odds.  So there was a chance you might be the Spectre, but odds are that you'll just end up being the Crimson Avenger instead .

And I could do this because I didn't run a fucking point-buy game.

RPGPundit

Godlike is set *in* the Golden Era. Maybe it might be worth a read.

Quote from: RPGPundit;488250Regarding the Spectre or IBIS the invincible, what they really prove is that point-buy is again a massive fail for RPGs in general and supers RPGs in particular.

Dan is absolutely right that there were incredibly (ridiculously, even) powerful heroes in the Golden age.  The difference, however, and what lead the OP to suggest the "80pt instead of 100pt" thing is that there were also far more heroes in that era than in the modern era that had nothing other than "a costume and a good left hook". So the answer is that the statistics, the PROBABILITIES of the Golden Age are skewed in comparison to the other "ages".  

In my ICONS game I reflected this by having a much higher chance than normal of getting Trained or Gimmick, and less chance of things like Birthright, Transformed, or Artificial.  I didn't remove any possible origin, just shifted the odds.  So there was a chance you might be the Spectre, but odds are that you'll just end up being the Crimson Avenger instead .

And I could do this because I didn't run a fucking point-buy game.

RPGPundit

I can do that in Hero. "Bob, you're playing Batman, so all your superpowers have to be gadgets and you can't buy anything over 50 AP. Also, you get all the skills. Bill, you're playing Superman, so you can't buy more than ten skills, you don't start with a bajillion dollars and your limited set of superpowers is capped at 120 AP."

And Hero supports this without any modding.

Quote from: Tetsubo;488285Godlike is set *in* the Golden Era. Maybe it might be worth a read.

True, but by default, it's incredibly gritty. I'm not sure it would be a good choice for that reason.

Yeah, it doesn't feel very super if you can get taken out by some mugger with a knife. I like the idea of going with a pulp game, and just making the characters extra tough. They are usually pretty limited on what powers are available, though.

I will have to second the nomination of Marvel Super Heroes.  If you leave the Superman level stuff to NPCs, you can assign them Shift X, Y or Z powers and abilities, and there are always the Class 1000, 3000, 5000, and Beyond categories for the truly cosmos/reality warping entities.  I think a fairly mundane level of characters would fit into Golden Age stuff better anyway.

Just make sure you keep a firm hand during chargen, or you may end up with a group of stupid assholes.  

Quote from: Tetsubo;488285Godlike is set *in* the Golden Era. Maybe it might be worth a read.

It is, but its not really standard "superhero" stuff. The characters generally don't go around in costumes, from what I recall, and the whole thing is meant more to be a sort of "realistic" examination of an alt-history sort; its more a "WWII game with superpowers" than a game about golden age superheroes.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Narf the Mouse;488291I can do that in Hero. "Bob, you're playing Batman, so all your superpowers have to be gadgets and you can't buy anything over 50 AP. Also, you get all the skills. Bill, you're playing Superman, so you can't buy more than ten skills, you don't start with a bajillion dollars and your limited set of superpowers is capped at 120 AP."

And Hero supports this without any modding.

Yeah, but will Bob be happy with the GM telling him he's getting 50 points while Bill is getting 120? With random generation, on the other hand, both players get to roll the dice to see if they get lucky.

That's right. Its cosmic fairness.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Dan Davenport;488295True, but by default, it's incredibly gritty. I'm not sure it would be a good choice for that reason.

The Golden Age was pretty gritty and violent. This is the time when Batman carried a gun, and shooting bad guys in the head was common practice for "superheroes".

The thing is, There's really two "Golden Ages"...the actual one, which was excessively violent and dark, and the idealized version that's been put forth in comics themselves since the 80s, supported mainly by writers like Waid and Robinson. This version is bright, four-coloured, and extremely moral and goofy.

Quote from: RPGPundit;488398It is, but its not really standard "superhero" stuff. The characters generally don't go around in costumes, from what I recall, and the whole thing is meant more to be a sort of "realistic" examination of an alt-history sort; its more a "WWII game with superpowers" than a game about golden age superheroes.

RPGPundit

That's true. godlike has no costumes and is not about stopping crimes. In a way its a game about a superpowers without being about superheroes. But I do like how all the powers are based on willpower; the characters actually alter reality around themselves via their will.

Godlike's setting is all window-dressing though. The system can be used to run "regular" supers with pretty much no customization necessary.