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
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V&V is still the only game I've played more than a couple of times that required me to use a calculator for chargen. It's that pesky carrying capacity. The point-based revision I helped work on in the 90s (and that ended up largely spinning its wheels, because Dee wanted both money AND control...we could give him the control but not the money, anyone who could give him the money would want to keep the control) would have been even worse. There were Hero-style multipliers and dividers, but they were powers of 7/8 and 8/7. Eek.
Mutants & Masterminds has an additional well-developed setting or two as part of their Superlink. Omlevex is essentially mid-1960s Marvel pastiche, done pretty well. And then there's the Crucible City MUX, which has what amounts to several fan-made sourcebooks available online as support material (I play Myrmidon and Kiryu at CCMUX).
I own Heroes Unlimited, but it was really the wrong game for me at the time. Largely low-power types, and your starting education was way too important (it determined your skill points, and with powers so weak, skills became uber-important). The strongest character you could possibly get might be able to lift a compact car, and no one had more tha one superpower (the 2nd edition was really proud about fixing that...great, now you can have two or three really weak powers).
Golden Heroes was another I tried out, but for similar reasons of low power level never really got into. It tried some interesting and different things, but it was more 2000AD fed through a G-rating filter than anything else.
I actually have a photocopy of Superhero 2044 that the game's creator sent me about ten years ago after I mentioned the game on Usenet.
Let's see. There's Guardians, a digest-sized game that used percentils and let you buy total immunity to either physical or energy damage (but not both) and had some funny if amateurish art. Enforcers, which I really got into for about a year but which collapsed despite support from White Wolf Magazine in the months before Vampire happened. Brave New World, which is template-based and starts with the assumption that all the COOL supers are all dead and you get to play one of the lame ones in a world run by evil government conspiracies (I only own it because a friend was garage-saling his games and I snagged it for five bucks). Blood of Heroes, which a former member of my Modern Knights playtest group helped create from the DC Heroes engine once the license lapsed. I forget the name, but there's this fantasy superhero game (Dominion?) set in a hollow world that launched with a LOT of hardcover, full color books and I was so intimidated by the initial investment that I passed on it.
I'm sure I'm forgetting games I actually own (and I'm leaving Stuperheroes out on purpose). And, of course, there's Modern Knights, the game I wrote and which is only available as a PDF because the publisher got nailed in the dot.bust just before we were gonna go to press and is now too poor to pay printing bills. Sigh. At least I have credits in Aberrant and Adventure. :)
Oh, and I almost forgot. V&V was the first superhero game I played, but the first RPG superheroes I have made were 8th level Fighters ("Superhero" being the level title) in AD&D, with various spell-like abilities tacked on. :)
Matt--since you mention Silver Age Sentinels (which I've always seen as heavily DC-flavored, probably because of the Superman / JLA analog), have you read the prose anthologies (Path of the Just and Path of the Bold) set in the SAS universe? They've got a bunch of stories by comics writers--Ostrander, Steven Grant, Mike Barr, Robert Weinberg, etc. And *cough* I've got a piece in PotJ, too.
Oddly, despite being an RPG and a comics fan, I don't think I've ever played a superhero RPG. I own a few, but the opportunity to play them never came up.
What about Godlike? It's a superhero game where the heroes are just soldiers in WWII rather than costumed adventurers.
I was never much of a roleplayer; I got into roleplaying in 1983 or so, when I was a wee fourth-grader. My friends and I played a mish-mash of Dungeons & Dragons and AD&D, never realizing that we were ocmbining two separate game systems. Within a year or two, we had discovered Villains and Vigilantes; I still remember that we had a team of heroes based on insects. Somehwere in my Dad's basement, there's probably still a copy of the rulebook and the "To Tackle the T.O.T.E.M." module I owned.
After the sixth grade, my role-playing friends and I wound up in different schools, and I never really played much after that. I still bought RPGs, though, and tried to play them with my borther (four years my junior), the occasional friend I could cajole into joining us, and 2 or 3 times a year, a bunch of cousins. During that period, I bought the Marvel RPG, and I know my brother bought the Perez-drawn Heroes Unlimited Revised, along with Palladium's compatible Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rulebook. And I absolutely revelled in the RPG-equivalents of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe that came out in the late 80s (or was it the early 90s?) and were more up-to-date than their comic book counterparts.
But the one RPG that always captured my attention was Gamma World. It's probably overstating things to say that it's criminal that nobody ever produced a comic based on Gamma World, but only a little. And yes, I know there have been post-apocolyptic comics, but none of them captured that combination of a high-tech society brought to ruin, radioactive mutants with amazing powers, barbarians running around with Stone Age or medieval weapons, and sapient plants and animals that was Gamma World.
I'm pretty sure that was Steranko and not Perez who did the cover of Heroes Unlimited, Jason. (Either way, love both those guys.)
And while it wasn't exactly a Gamma World comic, DC Comics did publish Gammarauders based on a sister game TSR put out.
Oh, and Chris - believe it or not, I've never even seen a copy of Godlike: don't know how that happened.
Oh, and Dave, that hardcover game you're talking about sounds like it might be Providence, but I'm not sure.
Matt -- you're right about Steranko; I don't know why I said Perez -- the style is clearly Steranko's, plus Steranko's signature is visible even on the tiny image of the cover I linked to.
As for Gammarauders, I vaguely remember the book, but as I recall, the book (and for that matter, the game) was played very slapstick and tongue-in-cheek. I always hoped somebody would publish a post-apocolyptic book more in the pulp tradition. Kirby came close with Kamandi, but by that point in his career, everything he did came out a little to Kirby, if you know what I mean (and that's not a knock on Kirby -- his 70s stuff was great, but it's all got a whiz-bang feel to it that detracts from the underlying setting and stories in favor of whipping you along from crazy idea to crazy idea, making Kirby his own genre).
Yeah, Providence would be it.
I've seen Godlike, but after buying the crappy Foundation (the first D20 Supers), I set my standards pretty high for attempts to wedge supers into the D20 license, and Godlike didn't meet 'em.
M&M I gave a try mainly because it was OGL rather than the full D20 license. And because I found it online for $20.
Alex - sorry I missed your comment before. No, I've not read the SAS fiction collections. Glad to hear you got in there, though: congratulations on some esteemed company there.
Jason - well, yeah, I kind of agree that Kirby's ideas could overshadow everything else, but I forgive him for it, being that he's, well, Kirby and all.
Some additional reflections....
One of the reasons D20 supers games don't generally seem to work for me is the leveling system. D20 is essentially a fantasy game, with the "Hero's Journey" theme being strongly tied to the advancement system. So you start out a wimp who has trouble fighting off an annoyed housepet, but ramp up fairly quickly into a respectable threat. Superheroes, however, almost never progress that way. They go from housepet-bait to minor godlings as part of their origin story, presuming they ever show up on screen as a normal. And after that, improvement is generally slow and incremental, leaving aside the occasional plot device.
V&V used levels, but even in the rather flawed 1st edition (most people actually played 2nd) they recognized the fundamental point that supers need to be impressive right out of the gate. Leveling up in V&V is still important, but it generally results in only minor boosts in raw ability. Levels are mostly a reflection of combat skill.
M&M hews more closely to the regular D20 theory of ability advancement with level, but unlike most other D20/OGL supers games, starts the default PC at 10th level. 10th level lets you have a pretty good starting character, and you can even have them be combat flops by simply not buying up their attack bonuses to reflect someone who was a normal three days ago.
Foundation, as mentioned earlier, sucks. Aberrant D20 disappointed me, because starting at 3rd level results in REALLY wimpy PCs by Aberrant standards. I haven't actually tried a conversion yet, but I'm guessing that a starting character in the original Aberrant game would need to be at least 6th or 7th level in Aberrant D20. Adventure D20 works better, because the base power levels aren't supposed to be very high for the Inspired. Haven't read my copy of Trinity D20 yet, but I suspect it'll work out okay, given how the original game was already class and level based in effect, if not in so many words.
Er, make that TWO potential curmudgeons who might jump you, Matt... but City of Heroes owes a heck of a lot to all of those games mentioned and probably more.
First SHRPG for me was Champions (2nd, blue box), followed (I think) by V&V, then the Marvel and DC one-two punch. I still remember V&V torturous method of calculating 'carrying capacity' and the annoying but kinda clever exponential character creation system of DC. ("So how do we get Robin AND Superman into one system...? Oh yeah, every point doubles power level. Cool.")
Recent years have seen me drift away from RPGs and SHRPGs in particular, but my new job and new RPG-friendly workmates mean I may get back into the hobby before too long.
I like the look of the Adventure / Aberrant / Trinity series - a trilogy of RPGs with a shared background intrigues me... and I always did love the pulps. Justice, Inc. anyone? :)
Godlike is not d20. Not even close. You must be thinking about a different game system unless there is a d20 system for Godlike as there is for Silver Age Sentinels. I have not played the game, but am very intrigued by it. On their website they have a section where they describe how to make 4-color heroes from the rules.
The levelling approach to supers is problematic. Daredevil will simply never be at the power level of the Hulk. Although Spidey did beat Firelord once. However, all heroes have their powers increase after their origins. It seems to be a comics rule that power inflation will happen for a certain number of issues, but then becomes at a canonical level. The Fantastic Four are probably the most identifiable example of this.
Chris - Dave's wrong but he's right, too: as you guessed, Godlike has a d20 system appendix similar to the way SAS does, and it was heavily marketed in magazines like Dragon as a d20 supers game. I'll have to find a copy and take a look at it... I remember being turned off by it being WWII, if only because I felt that Brave New World had done WWII pretty well in their 'Glory Days' supplement.
To my mind, M&M is a point-based game: they've taken everything you get by levelling and made it cost points, and the only thing levels do is tell you how many points you have and what your upper level is. I really like it, I think it's the best d20 system game out there (I REALLY like the damage save) although I'm also very fond of SAS and the Tri-Stat system. Both seem like refreshing streamlinings of the Hero System, to my mind (I'm one of the few Champions players I know who liked Hero Fuzion, I think) and I'd like it if they kept going for years and years.
The levelling problem isn't that big a deal to me: some characters have clearly levelled quite a bit. Superman went from leaping 1/8th of a mile to flying unaided in space between 1939 and 1949.
Godlike is pretty cool for its setting, which tries to combine Wild Cards style "regular folks with amazing powers" with gritty, Saving Private Ryan or Brothers in Arms military ops.
It's very different from any "Golden Age" superhero setting - the superhumans usually have a single superpower, and remain very human and mortal. There's a very detailed WWII timeline, which the superhumans don't really alter that much (supers on all sides cancel each other out).
And some of their ideas are really neat, like the "Crazy" talents or characters like Sheol (a jewish woman who can upload "souls" into her mind) and Baba Yaga (like a very scary Hulk, except in the form of a hut on chicken legs).
The same people talked about producing at least two sequels, featuring cold-war superspooks and contemporary superteens, as well as a more generic game called "Wild Talents", which would have more flexible and powerful superhumans (more in the style of comic superheroes) and various alternate histories based upon them. Haven't heard anything about this in a long while...
Godlike is really cool. Very well-written (except for some they-should-have-known-better revisionism about the US home front during the war), splendidly illustrated, lots of great concepts, an excellent and easy to play gaming system...
...and it's nearly impossible to use for an ongoing campaign.
Fittingly for a WW2 game, the milieu of Godlike is deadly. You're on the frontline most of the time, you get shot at a lot. And when you get shot or blowed up real good, you die. And in any scenario run using the rules and setting of Godlike, that's going to happen a lot.
Splendid game, but too lethal for a campaign, unless you dig rolling up new characters every game.
Last I heard, Wild Talents was coming as soon as they found enough money to print it.
Jason and I were apparently separated at birth, as I also got into gaming around 1983 and the fourth grade. The same cousins who introduced me to the X-men also introduced me to Villains and Vigilantes courtesy of "Crisis at Crusader Citadel." This sparked an intermittent but long-running campaign that rambled through elementary, middle, and high school. It will surprise no one (Matt least of all) that I kept an obsessively detailed continuity, even long after the game had stopped running. I think my last contribution, fewer years ago than I'd care to admit, was a gritty Suicide Squad "homage" set in the continuity of the V&V modules, saddling Enforcer of the Crusaders with a team of furloughed convicts (including several Crushers) who'd just as soon kill him as listen to him. I think I still have the notes for the explosive, high-fatality finale somewhere...
Villains and Vigilantes was my favorite system for a long time and I still have fond memories of it, idiosyncratic calculations and all. About ten years ago I dusted it off for a Wild Cards campaign (our group wouldn't switch to GURPS for another year). I ended up adding on a skill system and an experience system lifted heavily from DC Heroes, taking it about halfway to a point-based game.
The gaming group converted to GURPS shortly thereafter, and when the time came for the aforementioned Chessmen campaign it proved fairly suitable. (Matt modestly declines to mention that we had a rotating GM slot filled by several capable individuals, himself included.) One of the great things about superhero comics is that they're frantically, omnivorously inclusive of other genres, so if you're trying to run a game that includes superspies, Lovecraftian horrors, film noir detectives and futuristic superteens as well as traditional four-color heroics, GURPS makes for a pretty flexible basic system.
And that quick summary takes me from 1983 to 1999 (or 2000 if you include the Calvinos sequel, or 2003 if you include the one-shot "Payback" sequel to the sequel). And you know, if I had the time to spend on a superhero game and a group to game with here in Tennessee, I'd do it again.
I've played Godlike (interesting), Marvel Super Heroes (now THAT was a twisted campaign with adult overtones -- but what do you expect from a bunch of sailors and college students?), GURPS Supers (one of my favorites), and Heroes Unlimited... and I own or have owned in the past Heroes Unlimited, DC Heroes, and some Champions supplements (Golden Age Champions, in particular). I'm working on a Silver Age Sentinels d20/BESM d20/Ravenloft campaign currently, set in an anime-style version of the Amalgam universe...
Geez -- a V&V lovefest, I love those! While I was introduced to RPG's through D&D I am profoundly ambivalent to heroic fantasy (swords & sorcery style I should clarify). V&V took all the good from role playing, added essential 4-color atmosphere(I always thought the module set was a genius-level work of world-building without world-defining, and stood next to the big two with no shame at all. Even with the Floop Brothers.), topped it off with math-geek appeal (later completely overworked IMO by Champions).
What's not to like? To this day, alongside Mercenaries, Spies and PI's the only RPG to gain significant (ie notebooks worth) of mindshare.
Dave -- you worked the point based upgrade to V&V? I tweaked that for a PBem pulp campaign. Freaky. Between that, and catching your name in the White Wolf Pulp book, this world is getting waay too small for my comfort.
I actually LOVE the diceless Marvel Universe RPG. We are wrapping up an 18 month campaign now and it afforded us just about the most fun I've ever had gaming. I did play V&V back in the day. I remember meeting Jeff Dee at a con and being thrilled to death that he would talk to me about the game. Right there in the hall! w00t! We later switched to Champions and then, more or less the instant it came out, DCH. I ran two separate DCH campaigns over two years or so. Then I gave up gaming for a decade.
Also, for those who never saw Superhero 2044, it was one of the worst games ever.
