Category: Age of Wonders

My solo-play and fantasy-superhero mashup fiction, using the Crusaders rpg.

Choosing a Supers System, Part 3: Prowlers & Paragons

On By MagicJMSIn Age of Wonders, Superhero Gaming, Tabletop Roleplaying5 Comments

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:

Choosing a Supers System, Part 4

Choosing a Supers System, Part 2: Supers! RED

On By MagicJMSIn Age of Wonders, Superhero Gaming, Tabletop Roleplaying4 Comments

Last time, I outlined my dreams for my next project: Continuing the solo-play, serial writing I’ve done the past year with Dungeon Crawl Classics, but in a fantasy-superhero mash-up story of my own creation. Because DCC doesn’t do superheroes, I’ve opened the door to another TTRPG as the underlying system I’m playing. My general instinct has been that it’s easier to adapt a superhero game to a fantasy setting than taking a fantasy game and adding superpowers. I’m also open to more setting-agnostic games, especially ones that have both fantasy and superhero supplements.

The special requirements for the game I choose are:

  • 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.

I’ve discussed the dozens of popular games that I’ve already discarded from consideration, including all the behemoths in the genre and some of my personal favorites. Today I begin my dive into the eight (yes, last time I said seven… but comments on the last post here, plus Facebook and Reddit discussion, convinced me to add one) games I’m still actively pondering. Truly, I still have no idea which one I’ll choose, but I’m hoping this series will untangle my brain. Each post is meant to be a full dive and exploration, to really pressure-test each system against my needs and wants.

Let’s kick things off! First off is one of the games on the pile I know the least…

Supers! RED

Probably the most annoying thing about Supers! RED is its name, which is just generic enough to make web searches difficult. It’s an abbreviation for Supers! Revised Edition, a 2014 revamp of a game originally published in 2010 by a different author. Any reviews and play-throughs I can find on the game use the “RED” nomenclature, though, so Supers! RED it is. Also, sometimes SUPERS! is all caps, but inconsistently, so shhh.

The original Supers! is a lightweight game system, using handfuls of d6s in a way that I think originated from the West End Games Star Wars system. I don’t own the original Supers! book, but here’s a nice interview with the RED authors describing why they decided to revise it and what improvements they made. Suffice it to say, they clarified rules, filled in gaps not covered (like how you break things or grappling rules), improved the presentation, and added examples and optional rules—so the game is essentially the same, but polished up and with more options. In other words, if you want to buy the game, get Supers! RED by Hazard Studios, not the original.

The core mechanic is that each attribute, skill, and power have an xd6 value, which you roll whenever you want to do something. In combat, opponents also roll abilities or powers to defend themselves, setting the DC to succeed. Each character has four resistances (Composure, Fortitude, Reaction, and Will), and PCs (not the GM) choose when taking damage which resistances to lower, so each character effectively has four distinct “hit point” pools. Indeed, one of the strengths of the system is that the PCs have a good amount of control over how to interpret what happens and why, while still grounding these decisions in dice rolls. For a tutorial on the basic system, check out this short video. Watching that video alone, it’s apparent that Supers! RED is easy to figure out, has a lot of narrative wiggle room, and adapts easily to multiple genres (there’s no functional difference between, for example, an arrow and a laser).

On top of that basic system are several tweaks that give the game some depth. There are combat maneuvers, Competency dice (the game’s meta-currency to give players an edge), power boosts and complications, PC advantages and disadvantages, plus optional rules for dice caps, pushing actions, wild dice, and alternate damage. Even without the options (the one I like best is adding a “wild die” to each dice pool that explodes, making actions have the potential for more dramatic effects, since the level of success matters when determining results of an action), there are interesting trade-offs in playing Supers! RED that hopefully keep the game fun to play despite its seeming simplicity.

One more thing I love (which is similar to my favorite supers game Sentinel Comics RPG): Enemies have different levels of complexity based on how important they are to the story. Major villains are built like PCs, with all the same Resistances and access to abilities. Major lieutenants are “henchmen,” and have an xD value, scaled to the threat they represent and what they use for all attacks and defense. “Mooks,” meanwhile, are groups of nameless enemies with a single xD value. Mechanically, henchmen and mooks are identical but get interpreted differently, one as an individual and one as a mob. This system allows PCs to feel like real superheroes, tackling piles of low-level enemies at a time and making bigger threats feel like final bosses.

To wrap my head more fully around the system, I made a starter character, keeping it a low-powered PC with a more classic fantasy base. Here she is:

I’m not going to go into all the ins and outs of what’s on the sheet, but a few quick notes: You can see that from all the white space that the system does not contain a lot of detail (although admittedly this is a low-level “pulp hero,” about as basic as it gets). It was easy for me to grasp the character creation process, what trade-off choices I was making, and how to build what was in my mind’s eye, even only reading through the book once. Start to finish, Evlyn took me about fifteen minutes to make.

Interestingly, there isn’t anything particularly “fantasy” about Evlyn when looking at the sheet, though I had a fantasy trope in mind when building her—namely, the bookish scholar pulled unwittingly into danger. What’s heartening is that, although she’s meant to be a scholarly and investigative character, Evlyn is still useful in combat. As far as I can tell, in fact, there’s no such thing as a “useless in combat” Supers! RED character because of the open-to-interpretation nature of the Aptitudes and Powers, and the flexibility to attack or defend with anything on your sheet that has a d6 value as long as you can explain it.

Why Supers! RED Works For Me

As the above section illustrates, Supers! RED is an incredibly flexible system, grounded in creatively explaining how the few words and dice-value on a character sheet interact. Falling off a building? I’ll use my Ice Powers as a defense, creating a frozen slide to keep me safe. Someone’s throwing knives at me and hits? The damage is to my Composure, because they didn’t physically hit me but now I’m freaking out. I’m attacking a group of 2D mooks, doing 1D damage? I land on one of them, then spin a kick, sending a second one into a third, cutting my number of foes in half before they can blink. All the rules in Supers! RED are ways of increasing or decreasing the number of d6 used, and the effect adds or subtracts from the available d6s next time. It’s elegant and open to whatever interpretation works in your game. As a result, it’s a system that can basically work in any genre, all with a 168-page rulebook and nothing else. For a genre mash-up game, that’s a boon. In fact, I took glee in a Reddit comment from a player that said they’d played a multi-year Supers! RED fantasy, sword-and-sorcery campaign without superheroes.

Speaking of campaigns, I love the game’s clear scaling of power levels. Pulp heroes are 10-15D total in value, all the way up to cosmic legends of 50D value. I can imagine starting my PCs at 12D characters like Evlyn, awarding them Competency Dice each milestone or adventure, and letting them spend those Dice to improve their Resistances/Aptitudes/Powers, purchase Boosts/Advantages/Powers, or reduce Complications once they’d hit 15D, and then every 5D after that. After only eight “level” jumps, the PCs would have moved from barely enhanced humans like Evlyn above to a true cosmic demigod. This is exactly the sort of power jump that I consider a core part of the game I run next.

Because of the sparse, easy-to-understand system, making NPCs on the fly or improvising situations appears absurdly easy. The deeper I went into the rulebook, the more I thought that I could convert any adventure in any game system into Supers! RED without hassle. For a GM, the game is silly-easy to prep and requires simply the ability to translate situations into appropriately sized d6 pools. Oh, there’s a wildfire? That’s a 3D hazard. Twenty lizard men come pouring out of a fissure in the earth? Let’s call those two 2D groups of mooks, oh and let’s say they have a leader who’s a bruising 3D henchman leader. The simplicity of Supers! RED keeps the focus on vivid description and away from rules lawyering.

My Supers! RED Hesitations

I have one big worry about Supers! RED and three smaller ones. My largest hesitation is probably obvious: The system may be too lightweight to be satisfying. Making Evlyn’s character sheet was easy. Staring at it, though, it’s difficult to find inspiration for creativity. She has four Aptitudes and one Power… those five values must literally explain every single action she makes, adventure after adventure, until she levels up and adds 1-2 more (and that assumes that I add Aptitudes or Powers instead of solely increasing the value of those she already has). Will I get bored describing enemy after enemy in similarly restrained ways? Is a 3D fire elemental going to feel different enough from a 3D gang of skeletons to be interesting? The strength of Supers! RED is its open-to-interpretation, narrative focus, but I’m looking for something that gives me a feeling of tension and exhilaration when I roll the dice. I’m worried that I may not be giving myself enough narrative tools to enhance my writing versus simply, you know… writing.

I’ll cover my other three gripes quickly because they’re all minor. First, Supers! RED has very little support as a game system. There are no player or GM forums, there’s no module on Foundry VTT or any other virtual tabletop, and few supplemental books exist by Hazard Studios or other third parties. That’s fine, but I often mine forums and supplements for inspiration, ask questions of fellow GMs, and use the VTT to immerse myself in the game experience. None of that is possible here.

Second, I’m surprised to find that the lack of randomness–both in character creation and game play–is an unwelcome shock after playing so much Dungeon Crawl Classics (which is famous for how laden it is with random tables). There’s a random character creation variant process at the back of the rulebook, but it doesn’t really work for me and honestly feels a little half-baked. Thinking about it, I would probably make random characters in a different system, then quickly translate them into Supers! RED. That’s a fine workaround, I suppose, but strikes me as pretty silly if I’m going through all of this trouble to pick my game system of choice.

Finally, as someone who almost became a comic book artist after college, I’m utterly uninspired by the artwork in Supers! RED. I feel terrible saying it out loud, because I know how difficult good artwork is. A real joy about PF2E, however, is the rampant Wayne Reynolds art. DCC is famous for its old-school approach, led by Doug Kovacs. Heck, Johan Egerkranz is almost the entire reason that I bought physical copies of Dragonbane and Vaesen. For me, the art in a game is best when it sets my mind on fire with possibilities, wanting to lose myself in the world. Any superhero game is trying to attract comic books fans, which is a visual medium defined by its artists, so I’m a little baffled when supers TTRPGs get this wrong. With Supers! RED, I’m distracted by how little I enjoy looking at the book. Add to “the art problem” the lower quality paper and print from my print-on-demand copy of the rulebook, and I find the sensory experience of the game frustratingly poor. I am looking past a lot of blech to see the possibilities in this game.

Are any of these last three reasons enough to ditch Supers! RED as my chosen game? Absolutely not. It’s the lightweight gameplay that’s the primary worry. But since I have seven more systems (unless I continue to find more… lord help me) to consider, I suppose that everything is a factor. Speaking of which…

One Game to Rule Them All

I have a feeling that, at the end of this assessment process, I will have a pile of games that weren’t exactly right for my current project but that I desperately want to take for a test spin. In future installments, I’ll take the time to rank each system here. The game at the top will be the one I choose to solo-play next, but a handy ranked list will help kickstart me next time, if there is a next time. For now, though, I’ve only done one full exploration, so this section is as sparse as it gets:

Top Contender: Supers! RED

Next time: The exploration continues! If you have thoughts about this system or others I should add to my pile, I’m all ears!

Choosing a Supers System, Part 3

Choosing a Supers System, Part 1: What I’m Not Playing

On By MagicJMSIn Age of Wonders, Superhero Gaming, Tabletop Roleplaying15 Comments

It has been great fun over the past six months playing Dungeon Crawl Classics solo, documenting my sessions as both a game log and fantasy fiction (if somehow this sentence is news to you, start the dozens of installments here!). I’ve learned a ton from this experience, not only about DCC and solo play, but how I might relaunch a similar series using a superhero TTRPG (which, as I’ve said, is my first love) in an entirely weird homebrewed setting, operating without the safety net of published material. That’s right: Today I officially switch gears.

I’m not done with DCC, not by a long shot. But I’ve had a story idea niggling in my head since before the pandemic, and the past year’s posts have provided clarity on how I might explore it. What I had originally conceived as a series of science-fantasy/superhero mash-up novellas works better, I think, as serial fiction, and solo play keeps the project energizing for me. So, at least for now, I’m planning to move my DCC love into GMing an online campaign for a group of players while simultaneously turning my solo-play/fiction energy towards my brain-worm of an idea.

I, uh… own a lot of games, superhero and otherwise. Indeed, collecting superhero TTRPGs has been a hobby of mine, and I’ve even tried to document every superhero game ever published (this list is neither current nor comprehensive… I get bursts of energy to update it a couple of times a year). For me, then, one of the most profound questions to answer is: What the heck game system do I use for my solo play?!

This decision is a weighty one. At any point in time, of course, I can switch game systems in the background without messing up the story (and might even want to do so from time to time). What I believe deeply, though, is that the underlying system fuels the narrative, and will either work with or against me when I’m writing. Besides, I’m choosing which game I’m going to dedicate months, if not years, of my life to playing. Do I pick something already familiar to me or something brand new? Do I go rules heavy or rules light? Do I reskin a game built with a strong setting or choose a system that’s inherently setting agnostic? Etc. etc. etc. These questions feel almost overwhelming. Scanning my bookshelves and PDF libraries, I’m paralyzed by choice.

As a result, I’m going to dedicate multiple posts to sorting out my thinking on this topic. Settle in, boys and girls, because the next several weeks are going to entail a lot of TTRPG navel-gazing. By the end of this first series, though, I’ll have selected a game system and be ready to dive into the setting and character creation.

First, a note about the story I want to tell: It’s a post-apocalyptic Earth that has become, with the fall of modern civilization, a feudal, fantasy-like setting where humans face off against monsters. No one remembers the world as it was. Suddenly a set of superpowered people—think comic book powers layered onto fantasy archetypes—emerge. What is the origin of these strange abilities? What do these powerful beings herald for the world? Can they save humanity? You get the idea.

My oddball requirements for this project are:

  • 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.

To help bring my unique story to life, today let’s talk about the systems that I am not considering, even though this list represents many of the most popular games in the superhero TTRPG genre, past and present. Heck, a lot of these games are true favorites of mine, and some represent literal years of memories. For one reason or another, however, each doesn’t sound quite right for this specific project.

The OGs

Villains & Vigilantes was my first superhero game, and something I played through middle school and high school. I was immediately enthralled by the art of Jeff Dee and Bill Willingham, which would become constant inspirations for my own drawing. My first time playing in a long campaign of any kind was a wild V&V series of adventures GMed by dear friend Ted. At one point in that campaign, our group of heroes entered an alternate dimension, and, upon exiting, each PC’s power set and appearance completely changed, permanently altering our heroic identities. It blew my mind how satisfying sticking with the same character over long story arcs could be, and how gonzo wild superhero tales can become.

Why not take V&V for a nostalgic spin, then? The revised edition of the original rules, which is what I played during those years, is a product of the early 1980’s and, truly, does not hold up well in terms of creating satisfying characters, simulating comics action, or telling deeply narrative stories. On the other hand, after a lengthy legal battle, Jeff Dee and Jack Herman finally released a more modern, updated game in 2017, called Mighty Protectors. This third-edition of the game, which I own but have never played, has an old-school vibe but seems to, based on many positive reviews, hold up well under today’s modern scrutiny. Which is all to say that I’m tempted. For this project, however, I worry about all three of my requirements above. It seems like work to make the system into a fantasy world, character creation is gradual and incremental, and some Disadvantages are hardwired into tropes. As a result, I’ll save Mighty Protectors for a future project.

A special, side-note shout-out to Longshot City, a delightful superhero hack of the very-weird Troika! system. Longshot City, to me, has an even better V&V vibe than Mighty Protectors, and is something I would immediately be comfortable playing solo. It also, however, suffers from all the same issues in terms of fit for this project. Making characters is a hoot, though. I recommend checking out this game.

The single superhero game I played for the most years of my life, the one that unseated V&V and became my obsession through college, graduate school, and beyond, was Champions. Indeed, the first long campaign I ever GMed was with Champions 4th edition, with the sweet George Perez cover. I also still own the 3rd, 5th, and 6th editions of the game, the latter of which is the current edition and has its own fantasy supplements. Champions introduced “point buy” systems for superhero character creation. The rulebook is an absolute tome, with a mathematical, balanced answer to creating any superpower or character concept possible, and it’s a system I know back to front. In addition, because it’s all based on points budget, my “level up requirement” is easy to handle in Champions; if I want a jump in power, I just need to, for example, add 50 points at story milestones.

It is equally tempting to dip back into the nostalgia lake of Champions. But, and I say this with great affection, the HERO System is work, man. Creating characters—heroes or NPCs—can take hours of tinkering, and combat can be equally persnickety. I’d like the system to be in the background for this project, not the primary time commitment. I’ve loved putting in the math-miles in the past, but not this time. For all of these same reasons, I am also not considering GURPS Supers, which is a point-buy generic system that I’m sure at least one person thinks I’m stupid for not using. GURPS is really, really, really flexible as a system, but if I wanted to use something generic here that’s based on balanced, simulationist math, it would be the HERO System, which I know far better.

One of the original superhero games that still has a surprisingly cult-like following is the original Marvel Superheroes, which pioneered the famous FASERIP system. I own the original yellow boxed set in 1984, and the advanced set released a year later. Marvel Superheroes has a terrifically narrative approach (especially for its time) and can be a lot of fun to play. The game never really captured my imagination for creating new heroes, though, and I find it’s better suited to a “I want to play Wolverine and fight Deadpool” sort of game experience than a homebrewed world with novel characters. It’s important to nod my cap at FASERIP, but it’s not my system of choice.

I’m more tempted by the most recent Marvel game, the Marvel Multiverse RPG. I like that it’s actively supported by Marvel and still pumping out sourcebooks. I also know that the Glass Cannon Podcast crew love it. The more I’ve read about Marvel Multiverse, though, the more detractors I find, suggesting it has some real balance issues, that some character concepts are currently impossible to realize, and that there is less of a focus on character advancement. Even more, the game and setting are deeply interwoven, so it seems difficult to use for a non-Marvel game, and, especially, a fantasy setting. I’ll also not be delving into the other Marvel (or DC, for that matter) games from over the years.

Another nostalgic favorite of mine that is oh-so-tempting is Golden Heroes. I’ve written a deep dive look at Golden Heroes, so I won’t rehash it here. Suffice it to say, I’ve spent a long time thumbing through my copy of Squadron UK (its more modern successor), wondering if this project might be the time to bust it out. Good sense tells me, though, that the fun of Golden Heroes has always been rolling up characters, not so much the gameplay.

The People’s Favorites

The game many, many people consider the granddaddy of superhero TTRPGs is Mutants & Masterminds. With over twenty years of updates, supplements, and support, the M&M community and resources are vast. At its core, Mutants & Masterminds is a d20 system recognizable to fans of Dungeons & Dragons, but it is a game uniquely its own, and specifically designed to tell superhero stories. For years and years, I had a Hero Lab account for the sole purpose of making M&M characters in my spare time, even when I never had a group with which to play them. Character creation here is also a point-buy system, and it has so many options that pretty much any idea is possible.

Although making characters (PCs or NPCs) in M&M is not quite as time-consuming and intense as in Champions, it’s still significant, tinkering work. It also has d20 baggage from D&D 3E that I don’t love, including the restrictive action economy that doesn’t, in my opinion, simulate the cinematic, superpowered battles that are the stuff of my daydreams. For all these reasons, I enjoy making characters in M&M more than playing it. The staying power and popularity are nothing to sneeze at, though. Mutants & Masterminds deserves its flowers and would be easy, because of its adjacency to D&D, to use in my homebrewed setting.

The only game I hear talked about more than M&M is Masks, a Powered by the Apocalypse game meant to simulate and capture the spirit of teen superhero drama. Gone are the fiddly, crunchy bits in all the games above in favor of pure, thematic, storytelling gusto. Masks was somewhat of a revelation for many people, able to tell stories that superhero games to that point had struggled to tell. Unfortunately, like most PbtA games, Masks fits a very specific niche in terms of genre and is thus mostly unable to tell stories other than teen superhero drama. Since I want my tale to be broader than that, I’m skipping this system.

A quick sidenote that Worlds in Peril attempts to broaden PbtA into more general superhero tales, but I haven’t been super interested in that game. The creators eventually adapted it into a game I really like, though. Speaking of which…

Close, But No Cigar

So, Worlds of Peril begat a really intriguing game in a different system, Galaxies in Peril. I absolutely love Blades in the Dark’s mechanics, but (and I know these are both controversial statements) the setting of Doskvol turns me off, and I have zero interest in playing scoundrels. As a result, I often keep an eye on Forged in the Dark games that have different settings or flavor. The idea of a supers FotD game was immediately appealing, and I’ve devoured the Galaxies in Peril book cover to cover twice. There is a procedural element to the mechanics that would make for excellent serial storytelling, and it’s fundamentally a system that focuses on the meatiest part of adventure tales, with a fun narrative way of interpreting die rolls. For a long time, when I envisioned playing games in my homebrewed setting, I assumed that I would use Galaxies in Peril.

Unfortunately, the more I’ve considered the reality of using this game, the more I realize that the city that replaced Doskvol in Galaxies in Peril is highly specific, and not at all conducive to classic fantasy. To make it work, I would essentially have to create my own city, with my own factions. I ultimately might end up doing exactly that, but having to do it all as prework is daunting. I’d still love to play Galaxies in a longform campaign, but like many games in today’s post, I get the sense that it’s most fun right out of the box, embracing the baked-in setting.

When people ask me for my favorite superhero game, my current answer is Sentinel Comics RPG. Sentinel Comics does so many cool things that other games don’t that it blew my mind when I first played it. Character creation is semi-random and yet creates wholly satisfying PCs. Combat, with its innovative, timed Green-Yellow-Red mechanic, is epic and fast-paced. The environment is an actual NPC in combat, with its own moves that change any scene cinematically. Game sessions are called “Issues,” and there are story milestones once you’ve created a “Trade Paperback” worth. So cool! Running it as a GM is a joy. Everything about Sentinel Comics is just so fun. And yes, the game takes place in its own “Sentinel Comics” universe, which is four-color, bright-and-shiny in theme. But there’s nothing about the setting that is hardwired into the mechanics, and it’s an easy system to reskin.

The fatal flaw of Sentinel Comics, at least for my purposes, is that it has basically no level-up advancement at all. This omission makes some sense, since comic book characters over time rarely get more powerful… they just change. Sentinel Comics assumes that the fun is seeing those changes in characters without obvious jumps in power, sort of like my high school game with Ted. It’s a system that very much mimics the experience of comic books at every turn.

I’ve thought long and hard about whether I could make Sentinel Comics RPG work for this project, and I just don’t think it’s fit for this particular purpose. Alas. If you haven’t heard of the game and love superhero stories, though, I can’t recommend buying it highly enough.

Another modern system that has sorely tempted me is City of Mist. The basic conceit of City of Mist is that each PC is an avatar of mythos that sits just beyond human perception. PCs can be embodiments of Thor, or Little Red Riding Hood, or the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, or whatever. Pretty much anything goes in City of Mist, both in terms of character concept and powers. Thanks to its Fate-like system, playing the game is less about measurable stats and more about thematic “tags,” qualitative descriptions attached to characters. If you can argue for why a tag works in a situation, you get a bonus to your 2d6 roll (and, like PbtA, every roll is a 2d6 roll and considered a “move”).

Thematically, there is a lot about the game that works well with my homebrewed concept. If I replace the modern city with a fantasy world, the same toggling between “Logos” and “Mythos” is not only possible, but something that I want to actively explore in my story. The lack of crunchy mechanics means that fighting with swords or eyebeams is irrelevant, and though City of Mist, like Sentinel Comics RPG, doesn’t have an “advancement” mechanic per se, changing the thematic tags does fundamentally shift characters in ways that can feel like growth. A lot fits here.

I’ve consumed a ton of City of Mist reviews, listened to interviews of the creator and actual-play podcasts, and read the books cover-to-cover. What I’ve come to understand is that a) the system is extremely narrative, open-ended, and feels unlike most other TTRPGs, and b) the quality of gameplay is highly dependent upon (as with many narrative games) the skill of the GM and trust of the players. What I cannot for the life of me figure out is whether City of Mist would be terrible for solo play. It seems like much of the richness of the game lies in the collaborative storytelling mojo between people, so my fear is that during solo play it would feel sort of, I don’t know… rule-less. Which is all to say that City of Mist intrigues the heck out of me, but I want to play it with a group before committing to it solo. Champions is too much crunch. City of Mist, I’m afraid, might be too little.

Speaking of too little crunch, I like that we have so many “rules light” superhero games like Tiny Supers and BASH, but I likely need more heft. I’ll be trying out some light-rules systems in upcoming installments, but these feel a bit too light.

A game that I originally placed into Part 2 of this exploration is Scion. On the surface, Scion has a ton of features that feel exactly like what I need for this project: Like City of Mist, it’s a game about humans becoming inhabited by myths. There are clear jumps in power levels that are both story-driven and tied to mechanics, and each power level has its own book associated with it: Origin, Hero, Demigod, and God. The Storypath System seems cool and a huge improvement on the first edition of the game, with the right balance of dice-rolling and narrative focus. From everything I’ve read, combat is fast-paced and fun.

I ultimately decided to shelve Scion for two reasons. First, like City of Mist, the idea of urban fantasy feels hardwired into the game. The specific gods in Scion are tweak-able, but the game expects that you’re playing off the major pantheons and mythos, whereas I’m planning to create my own divine forces. Would it be possible to replace their detailed explanation of cosmology with something homebrewed, and replace the modern aspects of the setting with traditional fantasy? Maybe, but I feel a little lost at the full scope of implications. Which leads me to my second reason for not using Scion: I don’t know if it’s the way Onyx Path writes its books, but I’ve read through Scion: Origin a handful of times, and I just don’t “get” it. I’ve read tons of TTRPG rulesets and supplements, and there is something oddly impenetrable to me about the way the game is showcased. It’s a beautiful book and I absolutely love the concept (American Gods is one of my all-time favorite novels), but my eyes glaze over every time. If I’m not grokking the rules the first several reads, tweaking it right out of the box feels nigh impossible. Like City of Mist, I need to play Scion with a group before going solo.

Finally, it’s worth briefly touching on other popular systems that I’m not considering for this project:

  • There isn’t another game like Spectaculars, and I would looooove to play with a regular in-person group. At its heart, Spectaculars is a journaling game that invites a group to spontaneously and organically create the world as you go. Innovative. Cool. I really hope they release digital journals at some point so I can drag my online group into trying it out someday. For this project, however, the assumptions the game makes about embracing superhero tropes doesn’t fit my goals.
  • I’ve written a deep dive into Aberrant, but wow does it seem like a lot of work to fit into a custom, fantasy setting. The world of Aberrant, and by extension the whole Trinity Continuum, feels fundamental to the game design. Could I force-fit something like Trinity: Aegis to make my concept work? Like Scion and City of Mist, with a system I don’t know well, it’s too much effort.
  • Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion takes the very cool SWADE system into the world of superheroes. I like Savage Worlds, in general, and find it fun to play. It can also easily toggle between fantasy and superpowers. From everything I know about it, though, and everything I’ve read, it is far better for “pulp” stories than epic ones involving demigods. I’m going to start small in my tale, but eventually want to get big.
  • I’m intrigued by Claim the Sky, the superpowers expansion for the Cypher System. However, in reading through reviews of the Cypher System, it seems to not so much have fans and detractors as a lot of… middling. It’s a solid generic system that some people think is slightly too fiddly and others think is slightly too narrative. It’s unclear how the vastly different role the system expects GMs to take versus players would work in a solo game. Basically, I don’t have any good reason to break the seal on these books and pilot them through such a complex project as this one.
  • Just for the sake of completeness, I don’t have any interest in dusting off my old copies of Superworld, Heroes Unlimited, or Silver Age Sentinels. I didn’t really love these games when they were new (okay, I had some fun with HU), so they’re not really in the running here.

Alright, alright, enough about the pile of games that I won’t consider for this project. Next time, let’s begin a much deeper look at the SEVEN (yes, really) games that I’m currently exploring as my game system of choice. I truly don’t know which one I’ll choose at the end, but fingers crossed that all this navel gazing will help clarify my muddled thoughts.

If you have thoughts about any of the games above—including any you think I’ve prematurely ejected—please comment below. You can also feel free to guess as to what systems I am considering, if you’re a superhero game afficionado.

Until then!

Choosing a Supers System, Part 2!