It’s my second of many superhero TTRPG deep dives (links at the end of each installment to the others)!

Why am I suddenly diving into so many games? I’m planning to continue my solo gaming experience, but this time using a homebrewed world, story, and characters. The setting I’m envisioning is a genre mash-up, basically superpowers layered onto traditional fantasy, with a sprinkling of technology. Could I have started with something simpler? Heck yes, and maybe I should have done so. But I’m enjoying the specific requirements for a project like this one, and using it as an excuse to pour over some games on my shelf that I’ve either never read or have wanted to take for a test spin. Choosing the system has become a time-consuming tangle, but it’s been fun so far.

Speaking of requirements, I’ve articulated them as:

• A superhero game that can be played in a fantasy setting, plus allow for anachronistic weapons and technology. Basically, the superpowers and fantasy elements need to be satisfying, but allow for other genre shenanigans.
• Is neither too crunchy (if I’m consulting forums or rulebooks more often than writing, that’s bad) nor too lightweight (I need to feel like the dice are guiding the story and enhancing the narrative). I want to feel like the mechanics support the story.
• Level-up jumps in power. My idea is that the PCs start as “street level” heroes and become demigods as the story progresses. Something will be pushing them closer to godhood, which is a core part of the story. The game should not only allow for those different levels, but be fun to play at all of them.
• No hard-wired comics tropes (like secret identities, costumes, etc.). The story will be a genre mash-up, so I can’t hew too closely to any overly specific formulas.

My previous exploration tackled Supers! RED, a game that I’d bought after reading its glowing reviews but that I’d never sat down to read cover to cover. The other game in this vein is Prowlers & Paragons, also bought when I was in a superhero TTRPG buying frenzy because of how many people said they love it. What’s different about P&P is how many folks declare loudly that it’s their favorite supers system. When I added it to my “to be explored” pile, it was in large part to give me an excuse to understand what everyone was raving about. Let’s jump in!

Prowlers & Paragons

Prowlers & Paragons was first released in 2013, with the “Ultimate Edition” launched via a 2019 Kickstarter. Before I sit down to read a rulebook for the first time, I often search through easy-to-find game reviews to orient my brain. What’s fascinating (and exciting) about P&P is how many old-school lovers of Champions swear by it, and it seems to be a haven for people who, for whatever reason, bounced off Mutants & Masterminds. Hey, I’m a lover of Champions! I bounced off M&M (at least gameplay… I still love making characters)!

Check out this comment, from Richard in the above DMs Guild forum: “I would recommend this game for players of games like Champions or Mutants & Masterminds who find the math oriented nature of combat to feel very clunky and not very comic book like. Likewise I feel that fans of other narrative games, such as Cortex Prime, could look at this and have a good alternative game to use if their players want more crunch in the character creation. Alternatively I could see this game being used to create a really good fantasy game as well. I have often used super hero rpgs to run Dungeons & Dragons games. I feel character creation is much more fun in such situations and combat tends to work better.”

Squeee!!

In terms of how the core mechanics work, I’m going to use another quotation, this time from a 2022 review from Timothy S. Brannan: “The game mechanic is very basic and very easy to use. Every trait, ability, power, or what have you has a score. Figure out what you want to do, find the right combination, add those numbers up, minus any negative modifiers, and then roll that number of d6s.  “2s” and “4s” are one success, “6s” are two successes.  Compare that to the Thresholds table and you will know by how much you succeed, or fail.”

In a lot of ways, then, Prowlers & Paragaons shares its base DNA with Supers! RED. Everything has a d6 value, and gameplay involves rolling pools of dice. The difference here is that you aren’t adding the dice values in a pool, but instead counting the number of successes. As a result, dice pools in P&P can get large, since the game doesn’t care about your ability to do much math. The book routinely uses pools of 12d6 or more. If you like fistfuls of dice, this is a great game for you.

Combat is the crunchiest part of P&P, with specific terms like “active and passive defense” and “subdual damage,” but everything is theater of the mind and based on the basic mechanics from the review quoted above. Range and movement are abstracted to provide narrative flexibility, and a GM can decide how much things like size and cover matter to combat (or not). There are multiple pages of combat maneuvers, including rules for grappling, stunts, ambushes, defending others, etc. My general sense in reading the rulebook is that the non-combat parts of P&P are about who the narrator is, with a lot of open space to describe what’s happening. Combat, on the other hand, becomes more scripted, with clear initiative order and Health tracking. I’m not sure how I feel about the balance here without playing it.

Also like Supers! RED, character creation in P&P is a point-buy system with an optional random generator if you need a launching pad for ideas. The main differences between the two are a) the overall pool of points is larger (for street-level heroes, I used 12 for Supers! RED and 75 for P&P), b) P&P has more Attributes and Talents, which is what soaks up a lot of those extra points, and c) Flaws serve a different purpose. In Supers! RED, the equivalent of Flaws give you extra points to spend. In Prowlers & Paragons, though, Flaws create roleplaying situations in which you can receive Resolve points, the metacurrency that allows players to add dice, reroll dice, or add narrative features to a scene.

Because there are so many parallels between the two, I thought it might be fun to try and recreate my character Evlyn from the last post to see how it might differ here:

Comparing the two Evlyns from Supers! RED and P&P, you can see that, even with a street level hero, there is more detail here. Indeed, I’ve heard new players sometimes feel intimidated by the sheer number of Attributes, Talents, and Powers, especially if they’ve entered expecting a “light mechanics” system. That said, most of that sheet is fluff (though I like the many ways to add flavor), and since everything is expressed in a simple Xd format, once you’ve stared at a few characters sheets it’s all easy to grasp. Making my first PC took a little more time than Supers! RED, but not much. Like any points-buy system, the biggest trick was the “add one point here, take away two there” fiddling at the end to make sure I used exactly 75 points. Overall, I felt that I had plenty of points and options to make the character from my mind’s eye.

Why Prowlers & Paragons Works For Me

I worry that Supers! RED is too light mechanically, and Prowlers & Paragons is a definite step up in complexity. Combats can get crunchy, and things like chases and hazards are handled in “goals,” or multiple steps to resolve the situation. Because the “who gets to narrate” question is a core focus of the game, it’s a little odd to think about it in solo play. Thankfully there’s a “traditional results” variant rule that creates a table reminiscent of Blades in the Dark, changing the narrate-and-respond structure of resolving actions into “failure,” “success,” or “failure/success with a twist” which the GM can dictate. I love those mechanics, and it’s something I often find myself weaving into other TTRPGs. Also, like Supers! RED, we have tiering of enemies into Villains (full stats), Foes (same stats, half health), and Minions (one xd6 value), which creates encounters where PCs can feel especially super. Which is all to say, Prowlers & Paragons seems to have a lot of things I want out of my next game.

The system also has easy, clear jumps in power level built into the system since everything is based on point-buy character creation. Check out this glorious table from the core rulebook:

Perfect! I can easily see, instead of allowing PCs to spend the incremental Hero Points they receive at the end of each successful adventure, forcing them to save up until reaching a certain threshold. This sort of sudden jump in ability is, mechanically, what I’m hoping to create, and P&P makes this part of the storytelling easy and straightforward.

Finally, I want to say it’s a minor thing, but the more superhero game books I read, the more it matters to me: The Prowlers & Paragons book is gorgeous. Some of the art makes me wish it was a full comic book, and the layout is clean and easy to follow. Bouncing around chapters to find information is easy. The writing is clever and often delivered with a wink. After half a year with Dungeon Crawls Classics’ absolute monster of a rulebook and its scattered supplements, it’s delightful to have such a well-assembled book.

My Prowlers & Paragons Hesitations

Despite the quotation earlier in this exploration, I think the base P&P game requires some work to make it fit cleanly into a fantasy setting. Several of the Talents–Professional, Science, Technology, and Vehicles–are aimed at a decidedly modern comic book experience, and missing are things like Lore and Magic/Arcana. Similarly, several of the descriptions for Motivations, Flaws, etc. lean heavily into modern comic book tropes. None of these problems are crippling to my ability to play it in a fantasy setting, but it’s not out-of-the-box ready. As I’ve said before, I’m leery of homebrewing a system before I’ve even had a chance to play it as intended, and though the core game here is simple to grasp, it’s unlike most other TTRPGs I’ve played.

The biggest stumbling block for a fantasy setting is Gear. For me, equipment in P&P is caught in a weird limbo between narrative and crunchy. Characters can basically have whatever mundane gear they want, but these items often have mechanical boosts or effects. At some point, equipment is good enough to justify becoming its own Power, but that point isn’t obvious to me. Armor and weapons have tags that have defined mechanical impacts as well, some of which mimic Perks or Flaws that would normally cost or give you Hero Points. When thinking about a fantasy world where the PCs have superpowers but others don’t, the whole thing feels like a mess to sort through. I wish there was a P&P supplement that fully explored alternate settings like sword-and-sorcery or cyberpunk, which would help me feel more confident in how to navigate the many issues I see ahead.

I have a few other minor gripes about the system that already make me want to fiddle with it. For example, why doesn’t a character’s Motivation, which is given more than a full page in the book, somehow provide ways to generate Resolve? Another example: when making Evlyn, the only distinction between Blink and Teleport seems to be about combat, and so buying both felt overly taxing on my points build. I read in some reviews that P&P is easy to “break” from a balance perspective, and I’m just beginning to sniff at the edges of this problem even from a single read through the book. There is a way that a highly crunchy system like GURPS Supers or a highly abstracted system like Supers! RED works better for me, which is a surprise to discover.

Finally, I’m bummed to see that Prowlers & Paragons neither has a vibrant, active community nor even a creator website where I can find discussions, alternate rules, sample builds, etc. for inspiration (though I do believe a small Discord server exists). There’s no VTT support that I can find. These absences aren’t an enormous barrier, but they are discouraging to my confidence for committing to it for more than a one-shot foray.

One Game to Rule Them All

When I began my exploration into Prowlers & Paragons and reading reviews, I was sure that it would rank ahead of Supers! RED. Much to my surprise, I can more easily see committing to Supers! RED, and, while writing this post, often found myself thinking “this would be easier to figure out in Supers! RED than here.” My worries about Supers! RED being too lightweight and thus not keeping my interest remain, but P&P simply didn’t pull me in, despite its flashy presentation. In fact, if Supers! RED had the same art and layout, I’m pretty sure that the decision would have been ridiculously easy to make.

To be clear: I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum; if P&P is your favorite supers system, that’s great. Feel free to argue with me in the comments. For me and for this particular project, however, I see too many ways it doesn’t quite match my hopes for it, despite the ridiculously-lovely rulebook.

As a result, our top contender hasn’t changed…

Top Contender: Supers! RED

Not currently in consideration:

• Prowlers & Paragons
• A whole bunch of other games!

Choosing a Supers System, Part 4