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November 11, 2004
Best Supers System?
My friend and sometime GM Li took an informal poll of her friends, asking which supers system they preferred. I thought I'd throw that question open to the crowds here, who are likely to have a broad spectrum of experience and some useful comments for Li.
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Comments
Everything pales in comparison to Villains & Vigilantes, which I have played since my tender youth, but "With Great Power" looks promising.
Posted by: Ed Heil at Nov 11, 2004 3:31:58 PM
With such questions are the eternal furnaces of rpg.net fueled!
I'd say it depends on what you want to do with the system. How much crunch do you want? If you want a lot of crunch, Hero seems to cover every possible power or thing a superhero could want to do. On the less crunchy side I'm told SAS is good, although I have yet to check it out.
Also power levels factor into it. DC Heroes/MEGS/Blood of Heroes is good if you're not playing a street-level game and want a reasonable level of abstraction. But there are certain things conceptually about that game (like the combat tables and the exponential scale system) that are hard for some folks to get over. This system remains one of my all time favorites.
Mutants and Masterminds seems to win in a number of categories, but the d20 base is only slightly less crunchy than Hero and that can turn folks off. But it is super-flexible, and if your players have played D&D they should get the hang of it very quickly. It can handle all sorts of power scales (street to cosmic) very well.
WEG's DC Universe almost universally gets the gas face, although I think there's the promise of a really good game in there somewhere. They just didn't execute it very well. I think you could hack that and the d6 Adventure system and make yourself a damn fine supers game.
The newish Marvel Universe game may come closest to simulating an actual comic book if that's what you're looking for. No dice, no randomization - just effort allocation. I've heard complaints that it falls apart for the street-level folks also due to the compressed scale needed to include everyone from The Spot to Thor in the system. For ease of play the old Marvel Super Heroes game with stats like Amazing and Incredible gets high points - I think everyone played it at some point or other and the complete rules could be written on a bubble gum wrapper. An easy pick up game with almost zero crunch.
Some folks seem to like Godlike, but the thought of depth and breadth of die rolls gives me a headache.
V&V was great in its day, but a lack of power levels made it too flat for me. I've heard there's a new version of it out there on the web somewhere and should look at it someday.
Can you tell supers game systems are a kind of obsession of mine?
Posted by: chris at Nov 11, 2004 5:08:43 PM
I do like the "Aeon" trilogy, even if Aberrant is the only "strictly supers" out of the set. Adventure is the most polished of the three in terms of mechanics, even if its the "lowest power" of the set.
Posted by: Paul at Nov 11, 2004 8:01:48 PM
I'm a Hero guy. This is probably because it was my first superhero game and thus I fixated on the tactical aspect of superhero gaming. (Which for me is not exclusive of roleplay, of course.) I don't think anything does tactical superhero gaming as well -- if you like maps, Hero is the way to go. It's also an incredibly flexible system. It's also a pain to learn how to create characters.
I like Mutants and Masterminds for lighter superhero gaming. I think I'll like it more as it evolves; it's a game that really needs a second edition at some point. The first edition is good, but character creation is unclear and various supplements have introduced a bunch of new powers and options and so on. Collecting everything into a rewritten second edition would rock.
Side bonus point for M&M: the Freedom City world is quickly becoming my favorite RPG supers world. Although Hero's Champions Universe is really good too. The DEMON sourcebook for Champs is worth buying for anyone who wants to do superhero horror gaming.
Godlike's core system is kinda fragile; there are easy ways to minimax it. I like it OK but it needs work.
I need to try SAS sometime. My instinctive reaction to Tri-Stat is that I don't like systems which require an attack roll plus a defense roll on every attack, though.
I am interested in seeing what comes of the current crop of non-tactical supers games. With Great Power is interesting. My own Above the Earth is of course superb. ;)
Posted by: Bryant at Nov 12, 2004 11:05:22 AM
Keep your eye out for "Capes" which will be coming soon to a PDF e-tailer near you.
Posted by: Vaxalon at Nov 12, 2004 12:31:27 PM
Jim Henley almost GMed a Nobilis-based supers game. we had created characters, which were based primarly on gifts (special use powers), not the nobilis attributes (though they could be bought.) seems to have great promise...
Posted by: Mike Jacobs at Nov 12, 2004 3:10:05 PM
Well, I'm a long-time HERO system fan. It is starting to show it's age and is heavy on math. On the other hand, these days, the software available makes many operations easier. It remains almost unparalleled in character flexibility, even compared to rules-lite games (which typically limit you to having only a handful of distinct traits). Combat is interesting without being overly tactical (though somewhat heavy on bookkeeping). It also includes player plot control via its relationship disadvantages: DNPC and Hunted, and does a pretty good job on relationship advantages and social effects. The powers metasystem is a strength, but on the other hand it is a tricky art to design powers that work well.
After that, I'm not sure. I was never very impressed with either DC Heroes or Marvel Superheroes. I'm not familiar with Mutants & Masterminds yet, nor SAS or Godlike or Capes. Heroes Unlimited and Villians & Vigilantes both had some interesting points, in a quirky sort of way. I'm pretty unimpressed with GURPS Supers, which seems uniformly inferior to HERO.
Posted by: John Kim at Nov 12, 2004 8:16:06 PM
I played an awful lot of HERO back when I was younger, but I haven't done much with Hero 5. I've run a few superheroic games with BESM 2e, and a Teen Titans game using the Cinematic Unisystem variant found in Angel. Lastly, I think that Nobilis could do a bang-up job with the genre.
Posted by: Jadasc at Nov 13, 2004 12:05:36 AM
My only two experiences actually playing supers was back in the 70s -- V&V and Superhero: 2044. V&V was fun, but S:2044 was really, really excruciating...
What I've read of M&M is decent. The Hellboy game looked really nice, too. GURPS-Lite, and it felt pretty damned good. Never did play in the game I was invited into.
Posted by: Scott at Nov 14, 2004 10:31:27 AM
I'm not really a supers fan, but I have tried a few of them. Nothing did it for me as much as Villains & Vigilantes - I found it simple and that it did the job well.
Posted by: Simon W at Nov 15, 2004 1:46:24 PM
The king of superhero games is MEGS (The Mayfair Exponential Game System, as originally seen in Mayfair's Superhero game DC Heroes and later reused (with serious retuning) in Mayfair's cyberpunk pseudo-superhero game Underground. The good old superhero rules are still available from Pulsar games as Blood of Heroes. As far as I can tell, Blood of Heroes is basically the last editional of DC Heroes with the DC specific characters and world information replaced with a generic version.
MEGS scales beautifully, the key being the exponential tables. Too many games assume linear progression; this means that Superman fighting Batman simply clobbers Batman. While realistic (well, as realistic as any fight where someone wields a train as a weapon can be), it's not fun. In the comics Batman could easily stop Superman for a while. Batman's doomed in long run, but it wouldn't be as easy as Superman KOing a random mook.
Also cool is how unified the system is. Everything comes down to the three magical tables and a list of super powers. One table maps from real world values to in game values (necessary because of the exponential progression). Another table compares an acting value to a defending value (Typically Dexterity vs Dexterity for physical, Intelligence vs Intelligence for metal attacks, Influence vs Influence for magical attacks). That table gives you a target number to suceed. If you succeed, look to the last chart to compare power versus defense (Strength vs Body, Will vs Mind, Aura vs Spirit).
The list of super powers is long; it's hard to find an idea you cannot encapsulate using the rules. The focus on super powers is so strong that many special effects (notably weather) are actually references to super powers with the same effect.
Character generation is point based. Armed with the huge list of powers, a healthy pile of modifiers to tweak the powers, and rules to handle special cases (Is the power inate? Is the power from an item (making it cheaper)? Are you willing to pay more to ensure that it cannot be stole from you?). Chargen takes time, but you'll get exactly what you want.
The only down side is that out of the body Blood of Heroes might not scale down to very low level games well. Underground showed that it was possible, but in the process rebalanced the tables for a lower-power game. Still for most traditional superhero games (X-Men, Fantastic Four, Teen Titans, Batman, Superman, Green Arrow), it will work great.
Posted by: Alan De Smet at Nov 15, 2004 3:46:18 PM
I believe that, for overall playability, Mutants & Masterminds is the best on the market right now. It has the smoothest combats without sacrificing a high degree of power customization. More importantly, you can make it as complex as you want and, more than any system since Villains & Vigilantes, you can have very enjoyable all low-power campaigns.
However, for pure mechanics, I have to give the nod to Champions. The Hero system is mature enough to cover just about anything. It is way too complex to introduce younger roleplayers to, but if you haven't dug into Champions and you love roleplaying systems, you owe it to yourself to dive in!
If I had to buy one first, I'd buy M&M, but you have to own both if you're a serious roleplayer.
Posted by: Pete C at Feb 1, 2005 6:09:06 PM
Nobilis all the way bay-bee!
You turn Auctoritas around, tack it onto Spirit so it's pumpable, and you have a toughness attribute ready for the Hulk. Spend a bunch of SMPs and survive a nuclear strike or Asteroid M exploding.
Also, Realm is a great way of handling the gadgetry and magic that heroes can come up with in the Batcave or Baxter Building or secret workshops of all kinds.
Split Aspect into seperate Physical and Mental stats, define Domain as a series of pumpable powers (Spider Sense, Webshooting, Walk-Walking), and use Gifts to build anything else you need, and you're ready to take on the world!
Posted by: Jonathan Walton at Feb 2, 2005 4:14:36 AM
HYBRID is the best rpg in the universe: a tri-stat rpg @ C#: all rpgs are based on this tri-stat rpg @ C#: the gods used this/his rpg, before it was created by its author, to create the universe, by the gods seeing into the future for best set of rules for universe: that being the HYBRID rpg. Its author is reincarnate of Khrisna, Buddha, Christ, Mohammad, Nostradamus, & himself: he split his soul between good & evil, before being reborn in his current form.
Posted by: xx at May 27, 2006 1:47:38 PM
