All Original Supers Game

[Lithium]

@Ghost The problem with Mutants & Masterminds is it is easily broken imho. To much is covered by Afflictions and certain Feats can just destroy the power scale (ie. Brick types taking all out attack feats that give them great chance to hit while reducing defense, which they don't really care about because their main defense is just soaking damage anyways).

M&M looks great at first blush but the holes are pretty easy to spot and abuse imho.

Not that familiar with MWP but I haven't enjoyed any of them since the FASERIP set of rules back in the 80's. The system for MSHRPG with the d12 through d4 system is pretty neat but the only book I saw of that was more focused on playing FC's and there wasn't any reasonable rules for OC's that I found.

[Kairos]

Venture city is a good one, and a decent setting too if you want to bother to go pick it up.

There's a game on DriveThruRPG called 'Base Raiders' about a world where all the superheroes and villains mysteriously vanished leaving all their secret lairs scattered around the world which people and organizations are now searching for and raiding - creating new supers in the process sometimes. I have no idea what the game itself is like - don't own it, never read it, only saw it once on a list of things and read the description - but as a concept it sounds amusing enough. It might even work if someone wanted the framework of an existing comic universe -say Marvel or DC - but didn't want to deal with any of the FC's. (I realize that for people who like to play Marvel and DC the FC's are often a big part of the draw but it's a thought).

Also on the list of DriveThruRPG is great, and so is Fate, there's Jadepunk which is a bit more Wuxia than Superhero but stripped of it's setting the system could also probably be used to support super heroics of varying kinds (I still think Venture City is probably a better bet, but this one runs on FAE instead of Fate Core so it's simpler in some ways)

I suppose if someone really wanted to power a game off of Heroes Unlimited you could... but as much as I have enjoyed playing that game tabletop I'd still be very hesitant to unleash Palladium's Percentile/D20 hybrid on a MUSH. Or a group of people larger than 6, really.

[Ghost]

@Lithium The learning curve on MnM is steep and it's pretty easy to hack. I had to evil-eye a player once for making a clairvoyant telekinetic who created a no-check, no-line-of-sight telekinetic who could use his powers miles away from the actual combat.

D12-D4 (Margaret Weis Prod) system has supplements on character creation and how to make characters. Books are out of print. Upside? VERY RP-oriented. Down-side? Some players aren't used to a system where they can trade bonus dice with other players mid-scene for combo attacks, and the trading of dice, temporary dice bonuses, and use of plot points are potentially hard to track.

[Lithium]

@Kairos I've seen a couple games using the full Palladium system for their games and it's always a mixed bag, I would like to see it with Heroes Unlimited though, would be fun especially if people used random roll character creation.

[Kairos]

@Lithium The system is clunky, yeah. But it's got a lot of good ideas and I am a fan way of the way it classifies heroes broadly enough for similar classes to have pretty wildly different implementations. The list of powers - particularly with the extra powers sourcebooks - is pretty darn long even if some of them are a bit on the silly side (but then, some comics super hero powers are a bit on the silly side) and you're never really at risk for someone rewriting your game reality with any of it. And you're right, the random roll tables can be quite fun (and being a Palladium game, there are a lot of tables you can use).

Plus if folks wanted to go full original game rather than an original heroes game based on Marvel or DC, Heroes Unlimited does have some nice sourcebooks full of setting and characters to use as NPCs. So not all bad by a country mile, just, you know, an old system with all of the problems that old systems have.

[ZombieGenesis]

Systems wise I'm a big supporter of Savage Worlds nowadays. Been working on a c -gen system for a potential SW game in fact. My TT group is currently in the middle of a Necessary Evil campaign and we're loving it.

[Ghost]

@ZombieGenesis Don't you break my heart again on a SW game.

[fatefan]

@surreality There's a game called Coral Springs that pretty much does the "Xavier Academy but not" approach: http://coralsprings.wikidot.com/

[Cupcake]

@fatefan: I played there for a little bit, but there was just no plot movement at a pace fast enough for me so I kind of faded out.

[fatefan]

@Cupcake Right on. I have nothing to do with the game--merely reporting that it exists for anyone looking for that sort of theme.

[Gilette]

@fatefan

It's unfortunately pretty dead at the moment. It was super active when I joined around November but all of a sudden things just stopped. I think it's one of those things where a small number of players were playing an absolute heap of PCs.

It was a pretty nice place, too.

I'd love a Supers MU that was not Marvel or DC and was a good old fashioned grab bag world. Have your animal people, your aliens, your robots, your teenage super academy, your global best of the best league, and so on.

The only problem with it is sketching out a superpowered theme/world gets ridiculously hard to keep anyway realistic or grounded. So, I'd say just do the bare minimum to make it work on the world and encourage players to not go pulling at the threads of worldbuilding and so on.

[Shaggy]

I love the idea of an OC-based supers game. I think it's probably notable that all of the most successful super games don't rely on much in the way of systems at all and are more consent-based with maybe some benchmarks/basic stats but very little in the way of dice rolling. I know that's anathema to some people, but most of the hardcoded supers games I've seen, whatever system they use, don't tend to get very successful.

Just an observation.

[Collective]

I wonder if that is because most systems are kind of terrible for Supers RP to begin with? (Including most of the systems that are made for superhero tabletop games.)

I've always thought something like FASERIP or the modern knockoff, 4 Color is basically the sweet spot for systems. Percentile based and fast, simple and described narratively as well as numerically (Remarkable (30), Monstrous (75), etc. ) Anything that makes MU* combat go even slower is the enemy.

[Kairos]

@Collective

I definitely agree with you that slowing down MU combat is problematic. In any rules system no matter how rules lite it may be adjudicating combat is almost always the most complex portion of those rules simply because of the number of 'moving pieces' to consider.

That said, I would like to observe that even in systemless MU's - I did play on one superhero MU that was pretty much entirely consent based - combat is a slow thing. My experiences both with that and with tabletop RP lead me to believe that it's a function of both the potential stakes and the fact you're using your poses to account for seconds or at most minutes of action in most cases. A lot happens in a very short period of IC time which means that a lot of OOC time is spent figuring out and describing what happens even when there are no dice to be seen.

Long story short, combat in any kind of RP setting is pretty much always going to be one of the slowest activities anyone engages in and the best ways to speed it up - at least in my opinion, take it for what it's worth - are narrative and not mechanical. Make sure everyone is clear what is going on, who is aware of what and what the possibilities are. Also, you know, prompt people for their actions before they need to pose (if you're using a system of any kind that requires rolls or non-narrative player input) and know when the fight has accomplished it's narrative purpose be that to establish a level of danger, to show off how badass the heroes are or to acquire or prevent something and be ready to end it.

[Gilette]

Well, Supers RP has a crazy amount of scale. Someone might want to play someone like Spiderman and someone might want to play someone closer to Superman. Someone might want to play someone who invents things and someone might want to have god-like power at their fingertips. Someone might want to RP about the hardships of saving the day but never being recognised for it, someone else might just want to smash GENERAL GRACKTOR SCOURGE OF THE EYELESS DIMENSION in the face.

It's hard to find a system that allows for all that, while also making things feel different.

You'd want a very simple, flexible system, I think. One that's easy to learn and easy to adapt to any sort of superpowered character. The conflict resolution side of things will depend on whether you want to encourage people to PvP against each other (villains and heroes) or enforce PCs on the side of good (or, at least, not being blatantly supervillainous).

[Misadventure]

There are many super RPGs that focus both on being light and quick, but also on making a different approach to what the focus IS.

I sometimes wonder if those games would suit a decent chunk of players better, or do most players need the distraction of a system to finagle and spend xp on.