For me, it started with Villains and Vigilantes.
I was already fairly insular as a child. I was the kind of kid who shunned others; for me a perfect afternoon was spent reading a book in the shade of a tree. As strange as it may sound, comic books were a social activity for me. They forced me to go out to the local comics and cards store, pick up whatever I was reading that month, and get into idiotic debates about the nature of vibranium. It was through the kids at the comic store that I first stumbled upon Dungeons and Dragons, and that was another social activity for me, albeit one even more thoroughly disapproved of by my dad than comic books were.
Then one day it all came together. I was listening to one of the endless debates about the sharpness of Wolverine's claws vs. the impenetrability of Captain America's shield when my eyes, glazing over from sheer disbelief no doubt (bull, my memories say: they know full well I was leaping in and out of the argument with statements like "But Cap's shield is proto-Adamantium, it's even stronger than Adamantium!") and I saw the first Super-Hero RPG I would ever play. Oh, but not the last.
Come with me, please, on this long sojurn into the very darkest inferno of my development, let me be the Virgil on this trip to the depths of a geek's formation. For I played Superhero RPG's, and by God, I still do.
V&V wasn't the first Superhero RPG, of course. Sean Patrick Fannon's Fantasy Roleplaying Gamer's Bible credits that to Donald Saxman and his Superhero 2044, a game I freely admit I have never played nor even seen a copy of. For me, V&V was it: the first time I even conceived of combining my all-consuming RPG habit with my all-consuming comic book habit in any way, shape or form. (For me at that time, comic books were synonymous with super heroes. I've learned since then.) I wrestled together my friend's Russ and Scott (okay, I kind of hated Scott, Scott can go f... er, I mean, let's not discuss Scott much) and forced them to play it immediately.
From this small beginning (nobody liked that we were forced to play ourselves as superheroes; we were all in junior high!) we went on to play Chaosium's Superworld for a while. This was about the same time that Crisis and Watchmen were making impressions on our little circle, and so we were primed for what came next: namely, the licensed game lines Marvel Super Heroes from TSR, the makers of D&D, and DC Heroes, the Mayfair games ruleset originally intended to be the Marvel game before they lost the license bid to TSR. These two games hit our world like a bomb, mainly because unlike the game that synonymizes unlicensed superhero RPGs to this day, Champions (which I'll get to) they were carried in our local comic store. Russ bought DC Heroes and I bought Marvel Super Heroes and we immediately swapped the books back and forth between us, eagerly trying to answer the eternal questions of comics: could Thor kick Superman's ass or not? Was Iron Man tougher than Batman? We came to no conclusive answer on this, even though (as I pointed out) the DC Heroes rules had a much, much larger scale than the Marvel rules with the FASERIP stats and the chart system. However, when Marvel put out the Ultimate Powers Book, we soon started the most lopsided RPG campaign in the history of the world.
The Marvel system was a pretty good, and nicely simple, system of checks against a chart. However, it was still a system that let you randomly generate a character, and the UPB allowed for a whole range of powers and abilities to be randomly generated. Russ was running the game as well as playing a character he created who had a very Daredevilish feel and power suite, as I recall, and that miserable bas... I mean, Scott has an Iron Man-lite character (more like Fabian Stankowicz, as I recall), while my 'cousin' Jenny played from time to time as Spinning Jenny (she never got over the V&V system and the 'play yourself' aspect): but I ruined the campaign single-handedly. Imagine a game consisting of a wannabe Daredevil, a wannabe Iron Man, a wannabe Whirlwind, and... well, the UPB was very good to me. I was basically playing Thor and the Silver Surfer in one guy. I had powers I never even bothered to use. It warped me... we'd have games where Russ would have to concoct a reason why Terrax the Tamer and the Super-Adaptoid were teaming up with the Beetle and the Owl.
Thanks to Dragon Magazine and their Ares section, I eventually discovered Champions. Love it or hate it, Champions has been the Superhero RPG of the past two decades, the standard by which all are measured. The first version of the game I owned was, I believe, the big blue book with the George Perez cover: I'm often mocked by Champions die-hards when I tell them this. The reason we migrated to Champions and that I kept buying the books even after I was in college and my gaming group had migrated to parts unknown (my copy of the Ultimate Powers Book somehow ending up in Scott's hands, that moth... I mean, that jerk) was because of the point buy system: I spent a lot of time concocting various characters with that system. You could sit there with a notebook and spent a couple of hours coming up with a character, tweaking exactly what you wanted the powers to be and how they would work, choosing elemental controls or multipowers... I'll admit that I never had as much fun playing Champions as I did creating characters for it.
Note to self: if enraged mob of Champions/Hero System players tear me asunder, this was where I went wrong.
I should mention GURPS Supers here, even though it's really a sideline of the GURPS universal system: to be honest, the best thing about GURPS Supers is that, because it's a GURPS game, you can use all those meticulously researched GURPS supplements with it. I often buy those for use with whatever system I'm currently besotted with: they convert easily. Still, I own it, I've played it, I've had good times with it.
Since then, I've diversified my collection greatly, even if I don't hardly get to play much anymore: the last big superhero games I was in were the Aberrant game and the GURPS Supers Chessmen game run by someone who has never done any films with the word 'fury' in the title nor made out with Shannon Tweed on camera (which you should ask him about: Chessmen was an exceedingly fun game, all told) although I've tried to strike up a few here and there. I find myself leaping to buy whatever new Superhero based RPG's come out: in the past few years I bought White Wolf's Aberrant game entirely for the system (which I found to be surprisingly good, considering I don't like the Storyteller system all that much), followed up by Pinnacle and then Alderac's Brave New World (I liked the setting better than the rules), Guardian of Order's Silver Age Sentinels game (they're currently publishing the game supplement/adaption for Warren Ellis' run on The Authority) and even the game that brings it all full-circle for me, the d20 system based Mutants and Masterminds. I even purchased the recent self-published Marvel RPG, a diceless game that seems better suited to sitting down with a friend and having Thor beat the heck out of the Hulk, so in a way it's a return to basics. On the other hand, it's a diceless game, and not a terribly compelling one... it's no Amber.
Yeah, I left Heroes Unlimited out. Sorry, I never played it or owned it. It did exist and I did know about it. They did the Teenage Mutant Ninja Heroes game, which was the best-selling RPG for a while.
One of the things I like most about superhero RPG's is the mythologies they create, especially in the nonlicensed games. Champions is of course a leader in this, but other new games like Silver Age Sentinels, Brave New World and Mutants and Masterminds do this as well. M&M actually has two settings as well as an adaption of Dan Brereton's Nocturnals, and the M&M home settings include a silver age DC-flavored one called Freedom City as well as the Meta-4 universe, which feels more skewed towards Marvel... they're both pretty interesting so far. It's interesting to watch people take what they like from comic books and mix and match: Silver Age Sentinels in particular feels an awful lot like Kurt Busiek's Astro City merged with the Avengers/JLA earth he almost created in JLA/Avengers (and I honestly think JLA/Avengers would have been better as an RPG supplement than as a comic) and Brave New World is a four color dystopia writ large, one unfolding from a Golden Age of mystery men punching out Nazis. Imagine if the Justice Society became Watchmen, basically. I don't know why I'm such a mark for reading through these 'alternate universes' based on comics that never happened: maybe it's the same reason that I enjoyed Valiant comics so much. Hell, at this point the Champions Universe has rebooted as many times as DC has!
I'd intended this to be more dispassionate and less, well, gushing than it ended up. I didn't even mention some marginal cases like West End Games' Torg (an excellent game of high pulp weird action, complete with superheroes) or their release of a new DC Universe RPG which doesn't really measure up to its predecessor in any significant way (which, as I mentioned before, is still being published, after a fashion, as the Blood of Heroes game using what's now called the Mayfair Exponential Game System... the system I like, the presentation of Blood of Heroes, not so much), or the long-vanished Nexus the Infinite City which was as close as you'r ever going to see to Grimjack the RPG - if you can find a copy, it's worth it just for the Three Doctors - there are more, of course, these were just the ones I had the most experience with. In the end, this fortunate combination of gaming and my obsessive comic book immersion actually helped make me more social and outgoing: without them, I might well have hidden in my room and read all my life.
Wait, why would that be bad, again?
Anyway, feel free to mention everything I missed, got wrong, forgot to include, or even stuff you just plain want to talk about. I didn't even mention City of Heroes and one of my fellow Curmudgeons will probably punish me for that.
Posted by Matt Rossi at October 28, 2004 3:27 PM