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More roleplaying games you should play: Marvel Super Heroes, and…

admin — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:29:20 +0000

For those of you coming in late, this post is the first in a series of sequels to “Five roleplaying games I’ve played, and you should too“, which covered my thoughts and feelings (oh, those feelings) on:

Dungeons & Dragons
Traveller
Champions
Skyrealms of Jorune
Top Secret/S.I.

Feel free to go read that as a primer.

This post was originally going to contain five more games, but it grew so much it became obvious that if I didn’t hack it up into smaller pieces no-one was ever going to read it. So, here’s the first of five parts, with the others turning up in the next week or so. Don’t worry, your favourite is probably included.

6) Marvel Super Heroes or DC Heroes

Yes; I’m cheating a bit here, and giving you a choice. Why? Because both of these games simulate their respective comic book universes so well, and c’mon – everyone’s got a favourite from The Big Two. Deep down.

Let’s start with Marvel Super Heroes though, which is easily my favourite superhero RPG. Marvel holds an eternal place in my heart for a number of reasons, but overall it’s just because I’ve had the most fun with it. I had fun with it when I was 11 or so; fun when I was 17; fun when I was 28… and I’m pretty sure I’ll have fun with it again.

As you can tell, it’s been something of a constant companion, the old reliable game system that I keep coming back to when others have come and gone. I’m sure it’s similar for those who are long-time lovers of Dungeons & Dragons, who know the system back to front and can practically name page references for rule checks. I’m not quite at that level – not any more – but for a while, it was pretty close.

Marvel’s beauty, for me, was always in the simplicity of the Universal Table – the appropriately named table on which you completed just about every action. These days, having one mechanic for everything in an RPG isn’t that big a deal, but back in 1984 it was a bit of a revelation to young Stephen.

Coupled with the absolutely genius idea of giving statistics descriptive ranks (admittedly, attached to numbers), which made it immediately clear that with a Fighting rank of Amazing, Captain America was pretty much capable of kicking anyone’s ass (unless they had Amazing Strength), Marvel was incredibly easy to pick up and play. It helped that the original, yellow-boxed Basic Set had an introductory feel easily as good as anything that ‘red box’ Basic D&D could conjure up.

And besides all that… you got to play Spider-Man. It doesn’t get cooler than that. Or didn’t for me, anyway.

I’m sure I’ll come back to Marvel Super Heroes – it’s really my game, and nothing else comes close to it, even though I see more flaws in it as the years go by. For now though, despite the slightly dodgy legal ramifications, I will happily point you towards Classic Marvel Forever (.com!) who host freely downloadable PDF versions of just about everything ever published for MSH. Try the original Basic Set; I’m pretty sure you’ll be happy with it. Of course, if you’d like physical books, there’s always eBay, and excellent out-of-print sites like NobleKnight.com (who were offering an MSH Basic Set at $35 when I wrote this).

DC Heroes, on the other hand, I can’t recommend as whole-heartedly. Mayfair Games put it together, debuting in 1985 after the original Marvel set hit, and while originally I was enamoured by the cluttered box art (not what you see here, which is Second Edition) and the impressive roster of character cards included, for some reason it never quite clicked with me.

Built around what’s now known as ‘MEGS’, or the Mayfair Exponential Game System, to accomplish the very difficult feat of having Batman and Superman in the same system, DC Heroes had one simple rule; a single point increase in anything is double the previous point in values. Therefore, someone with 10 Strength was twice as strong as someone with 9 Strength, and someone with 11 Strength was four times as strong as the 9 Strength guy, for instance.

Even my young mind was somewhat blown by the maths when I looked at the character card for Superman (50 STR) compared to the one for Wonder Woman (45 STR).

(Bear in mind, when the original DC Heroes debuted, Crisis on Infinite Earths had just finished, and Superman was still powerful enough to push a planet out of orbit. After John Byrne’s reboot of Superman, the DC Heroes Second Edition reduced his stats considerably – but still kept him as the most physically powerful hero in the game.)

While the ‘every point doubles power’ rule did mean that Superman and Batman could be on the same team, when it came to creating your own characters, I found that the lack of granularity didn’t work for me. After all my gaming group had been playing with Marvel Super Heroes for the better part of a year, where having ‘Amazing’ in an attribute was pretty special, and getting up to the ranks of ‘Monstrous’ and ‘Unearthly’ was pretty much unheard of. The idea that every point doubled power just seemed over the top.

I’ve seen many people praise DC’s simplicity in this regard, and also because the same scale was applied to everything – speed, time, range and so on. It worked pretty much the same way in Marvel though, and the Universal Table felt considerably easier to read from where I was sat. Needless to say, despite some enjoyable enough adventures playing Batman and friends (no, we never did run Superman as a character), DC Heroes never quite caught on with my gaming group, with the exception of my friend Tim, who liked it enough to run a campaign, and ended up giving me his Second Edition of the game. I’ve still got it, but more as a curio than anything else.

Over the years DC Heroes managed to make it to a Third Edition (although I’ve never seen it) and even spawned a stand-alone Batman Roleplaying Game off the back of the 1989 movie. Eventually the licence disappeared, and West End Games produced the DC Universe Roleplaying Game in 1999, but that seems to have failed, a bit like the various Marvel follow-ups.

Today there are no current licenced roleplaying games for Marvel or DC, although of course the DC Universe Online and Marvel Universe MMOGs prove that there’s still potential interest in ‘living the comic books’. Unlike Marvel Super Heroes and DC Heroes, however, these MMOs will fall short of doing the one thing you all want to do: play your favourite hero.

For that alone, these games are worth playing.