Monday, March 29, 2021

A "Heroic" Interlude

Folks who read through my back posts containing the "review" tag will find very few as relates to RPGs or gaming in general; instead, most of these are reviews for various films and television shows I've watched, most (all?) of which could be called part of the "geek" genre (science fiction, superhero, fantasy, etc.). It's been a while since I've written one of these reviews, but it doesn't mean I've stopped watching this kind of thing...just means I've stopped blogging about it.

But the fact is I've probably watched more "geek media" since the pandemic started. Not necessarily because we've been shut in (that's part of it, though) but because my kids are older now so some of the shows we previously skipped with them have been rewatched. And (often) rewatched multiple times.

The last month or so, that's been Marvel stuff found on Disney Plus. We streamed the Wanda-Vision series and now we're watching the weekly installments of Falcon-Winter Soldier as well as the previously cancelled Agent Carter (which none of us saw at the time it was being made. Too's excellent.). Along with the old Chris Reed Superman and Avengers films (including Black Panther, Doc Strange, Iron Man, etc.), and the multiple viewings of DC's Wonder Woman films, I've been steeped up to my eyeballs in the cinematic superhero genre. 

[the family also enjoys the old Adam West Batman TV show on occasion...still a hundred or so episodes yet to be streamed!]

I have not seen the most recent re-edit of Justice League, so I can't comment, but my taste in superheroes probably does run along a more "Disney-fied" vein. Heck, I enjoyed WW84 quite a bit...for me, it was reminiscent of the Wonder Woman I grew up with (in TV, cartoon, and comics)...campy and fun. My kids liked it a lot less than the first film (because they love the WWI stuff), but I just can't get behind a WW with a sword and shield, getting all stabby like a Greek hoplite or something. Give me more magic lasso any day of the week. 

*ahem* But that's DC stuff, where the power levels scale way off the chart of plausible (remember when Superman reversed time in that first movie?!) and I'm still (mostly) a "make mine Marvel" kind of guy. 

And, man o man, do I love love LOVE the Captain America stuff. The Falcon-Winter Soldier is right in my sweet spot for the genre. As far as "lore" goes, Cap has some of the best, and Falcon, Bucky, Zemo, U.S. Agent (!! Shout out to Wyatt Russell who is, like the perfect casting choice! Can't wait for him to turn psychotic!) just really gets me cranked. It's just such a cohesive bunch of comic book gobbledy-gook with plenty of Marvel soap opera mixed in to this idealistic concept set against the shady backdrop that is the military-industrial complex. 

*sigh* I could gush on-and-on about all these characters (and Carter, too! She's part of the whole Cap stuff), but I will spare my gentle readers. However, I will say that all this "hero stuff" has inspired me to once again look at the idea of running a superhero game (see Trey? You're not the only one!) and Lo And Behold the system I've been looking at most recently is NOT the B/X-based system sitting on my design board but (rather) the old Marvel Super Heroes RPG from TSR...a game I "gave up on" some decades back. I'm tinkering with it at the moment, especially with its universal FEAT mechanic, finding ways I could scale it down AND up at the same time.

[hmmm...that last bit probably makes sense to no one but me]

Unfortunately, as usual, I'm a bit pressed for time so all explanations (if any...sheesh I'm bad about this stuff) will have to come out in a future post.  What I do have time to say, at the moment, is the following:
  • I think (I think) that, for me, the super hero comic book as a source of "lore" and as a genre may be a dead one. I just don't care very much about "the ongoing story" because most of it is Let's just leave it at "I don't care" but ESPECIALLY I don't care about all the new "hero teams" that have been created over the last 20 years (mixing various heroes and villains like a Wild West version of NFL free agency with no salary cap). Just. Don't. Care.
  • I think the cinematic MCU is fairly coherent and is a good model to try emulating. Trey, over at Sorcerer's Skull, started doing an analysis of cinematic supers (how they differ from their comic counterparts) and I think that's a pretty good place to start.
  • Some may detest the light-heartedness and camp that creeps into these films, but I enjoy much of it, not least because it's too hard to take the genre uber-serious. While I appreciate the new DC films since (and including) Nolan's Batman trilogy, there is something I find very pretentious about using grim-dark to tell stories about characters in tights and/or hot pants with silly code names. I like that the actors take the material seriously, but the writers and directors (i.e. the filmmakers) needn't do so. Damn. Have some fun with it! 
And these three bullet-points I think are my new jumping off place for my own private Super-verse. A core "bible" of titles that doesn't play mix-and-match hell for "innovation." A downplaying of four-color costumed shenanigans with lower power levels (though still powered). And a willingness to not take the thing too serious, to allowing humor and the occasional eye-wink to show up.

The supers genre doesn't (generally) make for great "art," but it can still be fun, escapist fantasy. The same could be said about RPGs.  But I have to say that the more I consider the genre, the more differences I find from the D&D genre, and the more I feel I want to escape from systems that build on D&D's design tropes. Jeff Grubb's MSH was a far cry from the opus of Gygax and Arneson, despite some similarities (ability scores, power classes). I kind of want to go back to that well...I think there's still water there. 

All right. Later, gators.


  1. Ooh, I still love TSR’s Marvel system. And it had great source books. It hits the sweet spot on many levels.

  2. I never was in to comics, but my friends were so we played some champions and maybe some marvel nack in the early 90s.

    I never realy got into it as it seemed more about have a fight here then over there and not really much else. I would give it another shot i guess if someone had a campaign lined up that was more than a string of slugfests.

    1. I was not as "into comics" as many kids, but I read them...mainly on road trips (the fam would drive to and from Montana twice a year...about a ten hour drive).

      The original game WAS (mostly) centered on many ways it was just another war game with war game sensibilities. The Advanced game did a lot to shift the focus to campaign play, which led my group of friends to a fairly involved game (circa 1986-7).

  3. I love that game. I wouldn't overthink rule tweaks. If you are doing your own universe you can avoid some of the weaknesses of the set (like how do you make an adventure that includes Thor and Ant-Man with squishing the latter)... If you are focusing on the lower end of the spectrum, I'd just roll with the rules as written. They are excellent for that four-color camp!

    1. One of the things I think MSH does well is make it so that characters of disparate powers can work together (though I'd say the Supers! RPG does the job a bit better). I'm just going to tighten the system a idea is to have a smaller game but not necessarily a low-powered one. There will be room for Avengers-class heroes...not sure if I'll get to the tier of the DC heavy hitters, though.

  4. I played the Hell out of MSHRPG in the 80s. It is a solid system, but think about the rules lite 1e ICONS as well (not the bloated 2e version).

    1. ICONS is one I’ve checked out in the past, but don’t actually own (surprising, because I own a dozen or so different super-genre RPGs). I’ll check it out.

      I have to say: I wrote quite a bit for the new (as of yet unnamed) game today, in addition to sketching out most of the rules. I’m quite excited by the thing. I may have actually designed a supers game that doesn’t suck (too much)!

    2. Ha! Okay, I read through Steve Kenson's ICONS this morning and it is very VERY similar to my own design! Right down to using D6s and a "10 point scale" (although my ten points range from -2 to +7). Both ICONS and my own game are fairly obvious builds off of MSH, but the difference in design choices are interesting (he drops Endurance as a primary stat while I drop Fighting; he retains talents in the form of "specialties" (which I don't) while I retain karma (which he replaces with "determination").

      However, there are a LOT of similarities, up to and including the reduction in scale, the origin types, and the powers listed (we might have different names but the effects are more-or-less the same).

      I think I'll stick with mine, though. Kenson's work has some obvious FATE influences (as he states in his intro) that I'm not totally down with. It's also too big, sorry to say...I think (hope?) my book will be shorter than 100 pages when its done.

  5. My biggest problem with supers RPGs is the generally reactive nature of the heroes in the source material. Sure, Batman or Daredevil patrol their beats, but most of the time, the villains act first and the heroes react. Makes the games a bit rail-roady for players. The default goal of most heroes in comics is to restore the status quo, which the villains have disrupted.

    It's also hard (for me at least) to get into the soap operatic side of things, both as a player and as a GM. I don't think I've played a supers game that really had anything codified for that. Of course, I've only played MSH, Heroes Unlimited, and Hi/Lo Heroes for dedicated supers, and a short-lived attempt at it with d20 Modern and another with Gamma World rules.

    I think the right campaign set up could alleviate the first problem by doing something like Age of Apocalypse (or Star Wars) where the villains are in control of the world, and the players have lots of freedom to decide how to engage and reset the world to the former status quo.

    For the soap opera stuff, maybe that would work better now that I'm older and most of my group are more mature as well.

    I'd really love to get a good supers game going some day. So I'll be looking forward to what you come up with.

    1. The "soap opera" thing is tough, and one of the weaker aspects of the original MSH game (to its credit MSH TRIED to do this...unlike, say, HU) often leading to railroady-ness and worn-out tropes, especially when using the Marvel IP and pre-gen adventures. My own MSH group used NONE of the actual Marvel stuff, creating our own world and our own "drama," but we were a fairly melodramatic bunch of kids.

      ICONS (which I have on the brain at the moment) seems to do a better job of this with the way they handle their "determination" mechanic, but I haven't played it.

      MOST RPGs designed since the mid-late 80s have been "reactive" in nature because they attempt to "Create Stories"...stories with plots crafted by a GM that the PCs are required to resolve. This is one of the reasons D&D is such a great game: it gives the players a drive (money! power!) and then lets them find a way to accomplish it. D&D's motivations don't work with the Supers genre, because at best the "heroes" would become pompous celebrities (and at worst supervillains!)!

      Playing supers in a post-apocalypse setting or against some threat from outer space (c.f. Days of Future Past and Aeon Trinity, respectively) is fine, but it runs the risk of devolving into a series of staged fights that might as well be the supers equivalent of D&D4E which (for me) gets stale after a while.

      That all being said, I don't think the super hero GENRE is about being "aspirational" (aspiring to become a bigger, beefier hero). I think it's about the fun of being a hero Doing A Job (the "job" being hero work) and balancing that against the characters' personal lives. In a PA world, that job might be fighting the revolution. In the Avengers' world, the job might be investigating global threats to world stability. For Batman or Daredevil the job is keeping the streets clean of criminals, etc.

      I THINK that, just like D&D, the focus and attention has to be on enjoying the ride, not on the end game. Most superheroes don't die, after all. They just get their issues/TV show cancelled.
      ; )

    2. For the social dynamics of Super Hero games in ICONS, I've had players pick 1 secret identity ally (family, friend, coworker -Aunt May, Ma Kent, etc), 1 super identity ally (Jimmy Olsen, Commissioner Gordon, etc), 1 normal guy super foil (JJ Jamison), and 1 normal guy secret ID foil (Lois Lane). That seems to help set up the soap opera dynamics for a supers game.

    3. That's not a bad idea. However, as the GM I'd rather not be stuck with creating all the "drama" myself (i.e. taking on the role of four very specific NPCs for each player at the table).

      The game "With Great Power" does a good job of setting up these foils as character aspects that can be endangered or used like any other character resource, and I see shades of that in ICONS. But I want to find a way to bring the melodrama forward and dump it in the players' laps, not just working it for them.