POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check

[Ganymede]

@Ghost said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

What about DC Cosmic, such as Green Lantern Corps and the ROYGBIV spectrum of heroes and villains?

I always found that a bit lame.

But I'm in if I get to be Dex-Starr.

[Tempest]

Fuck lantern corps.

What an uninteresting pile of garbage.

[BobGoblin]

The upswing of cosmic is I think it frees staff to introduce some non canon entities as the cosmos is a bit more expansive. But I'm with gany primarily. You lose a lot of connection with "what we know"

[Ghost]

@Ganymede hahaha Dex-Starr

I see it (GL Corps)like this:

With a smaller roster of FCs (feature chars, Hal Jordan, Star Sapphires, etc) you're dealing with a limitless universe of alien races, but very specific power sets.

So one of the pros might actually be that what a <insert Lantern> can do wouldn't be up to a player to stat out, but instead guidelines to paint within. The classic FCs are just other players and personalities in the mix of a larger soap opera, but amongst the Green Lantern Corps, Hal Jordan isn't overpowered...he's just a member of the Corps.

So, in theory, a Lantern Corps game would be a smaller roster of FCs but allow for a ton of creativity around OC aliens, where they come for, who they are, then apply said character to a bucket of factions that are, effectively, warring for galactic control

• The enraged Red Lanterns
• The clearly NPC controlled Orange Greed of Larfleeze
• Sinestro Corps Yellow
• The Green Lantern Corps
• Saint Walker and Blue Hope
• The mysterious Indigo tribe
• Star Sapphire and the Violet

There would be difficulties in mind, one of them being finding constant stuff, day to day, for Lanterns to do, but when they get together and fight, there's plenty for all of the Corps to scuffle over.

Just another idea.

[Ghost]

Remember I'm not pitching game ideas. I'm just discussing conceptual options/themes within the smaller roster;tighter focus mindset.

[saosmash]

Honestly any superhero team / pirate group / collection of losers can work -- Avengers Academy would be a super fun concept for a game (trying to head off supervillainy in its infancy!).

I think a lot of your ideas here are fun or good although many of them are still too broad for what I would consider focused. Remember to think about the reasons focused works better. Why are these characters continuing to have to interact?

[SunnyJ]

@Ganymede Best Lantern after this legend.

On topic, I think people hit the nail on the head early on. X-Men has two antagonistic groups that can also be allies, plenty of characters and backgrounds, and many tones to explore. You can got to space, prehistory, alternate timelines, talk about a lot of current subjects, TP professor Summer's car, etc. Would vote X-Men easily.

DC/Gotham could also work, but you lose the 'contrasting viewpoints' dynamism, and the power scale goes all over the place.

[Ghost]

@SunnyJ X Men works because on a philosophical level the two polarized factions make sense. The characters (mutants) come pre-packaged with a reason to care.

DC/Gotham could be a bit more difficult due to the different pockets of effort, with plenty of lone wolves, and various approaches to fighting and/or committing crime.

[SunnyJ]

@Ghost Setup a X-Men world like they were in the 80's~90's, and they were a hated, minor anomaly in the country (and not just another brand of superhero like they are today), and you establish two 'pockets' where the freaks can live among their own without fear. That alone should be enough to keep them together, IC, even if a character or another doesn't want to agree with Xavier or Magneto. I did love the 198 run too.

[Ominous]

Slight topic shift; however, something @Apos said and some of the discussion here brought a question to mind.

I avoid superhero games, especially mash-ups, mainly because I dislike MUs about pre-existing IPs. I would prefer a super game set in an original universe. Discussion here, though, has been about existing superhero universes, and Apos said most people play these games in order to be The Batman (TM). Does this mean that an original superhero MU would be unsuccessful from the get-go?

[Ghost]

@Ominous Good question. Might be worth another poll in another thread. I know for SOME the juice is in playing existing characters, and others are die hard OC players.

[Caryatid]

@Ominous I personally would prefer an original theme mutant game. I don't want to just be an audience or play a minor satellite for FCs, or play someone else's concept in the long-run. The OC VS FC spats you see on comic- and movie-themed hero games get pretty nasty too. But anecdotally speaking as someone who has played on any number of mutant-themed games, I feel I'm in the minority. I think it comes down to whether whether a game creator aiming for original mutunts/superheroes can be happy with a smaller playerbase. Maybe 10-20 players at most.

[Ganymede]

@Ghost said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

Good question. Might be worth another poll in another thread. I know for SOME the juice is in playing existing characters, and others are die hard OC players.

I was on this X-Men high school game where all the mutants were in a compound, and were all OC. The FCs were bit players, if I recall, but most of the action took place between all of the OCs. I kind of liked it, but activity was sort of low.

You could go full rogue, though, and make a Mutants in Space game. Like, have a bunch of people launch off to find a better world out there, with some bit-part FCs and OCs heading into outer space to find strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly go.

[Apos]

@Ominous Hmm, what I more was getting at was that ones that are allow those FCs tend to be about those FCs, and then it's difficult to do dynamic change around them. If I didn't make Arx, I probably would have made a full OC/original theme modern day superhero type game, since I like the genre so much. I just don't like bumping into the hurdles around existing intellectual properties, and I don't really think it's niche, it's just very much an all or nothing proposition imo.

[Ghost]

@Apos said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

@Ominous Hmm, what I more was getting at was that ones that are allow those FCs tend to be about those FCs, and then it's difficult to do dynamic change around them. If I didn't make Arx, I probably would have made a full OC/original theme modern day superhero type game, since I like the genre so much. I just don't like bumping into the hurdles around existing intellectual properties, and I don't really think it's niche, it's just very much an all or nothing proposition imo.

Some OCs have a hard time selling themselves on the WIDE FOCUS games because (IMO) of a few reasons:

• the OC is not relevant to current RP
• the OC may not fit into the same vision other players have of the game
• the OC is not important, in concept, to the setting
• there is no mechanism that gives existing PCs a reason to care about new players or OCs

I feel the xmen/brotherhood concept would mitigate a number of these issues. So long as the OC was in theme, a mutant, and not a super distracting concept (anime in disguise!), a well devised faction would have purpose to accept said OC into their numbers.

[WTFE]

@Ghost said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

I will note that I am a supporter of dice-assisted resolution and have found that super hero MUs with the diceless, cooperative systems work really well so long as everyone involved is role-playing in a relaxed, reasonable state. However, not all players operate the same, and have seen people abuse the diceless system.

TL;DR: diceless works so long as everyone is cooperative and copacetic, but unethical players will use said lack of dice to their powerpose advantage.

Unethical players will use dice to their power pose advantage too. It just shifts the point of their being assholes around.

Dice are not the great equalizer their advocates seem to hold them. Here's a trivial hack off the top of my head: in chargen make your character invincible, for all practical purposes, in one specific area: say ranged combat. Give them loads of numbers on a ranged attack and loads of numbers on damage avoidance/elimination. Then just carefully avoid any scene in which your advantage can't be used. Suddenly you have a character who cannot lose when played, even though the all-holy dice are there to adjudicate things.

There's a million ways for assholes to be assholes. There's only one sure-fire way to stymie an asshole: don't be there. Avoid the fucker and walk away. This could be as blatant as:

<asshole> has arrived.
home

[Apos]

@Ghost I am certain with a great deal of effort that it could be mitigated, but I think the stories around the FCs are so core to the settings that it would present a constant challenge, and I think that's just always going to be extremely difficult to reconcile if you want to include existing IPs. I just personally find it cleaner to go, 'okay not an existing IP universe at all', but that's an entirely different kind of game.

[Ghost]

@Apos You may very well be right.

One of the positives of the existing IPs is the learning curve factor, because many names, locations, organizations, and the general makeup of the setting is something many players would have some knowledge of (I.e. I don't read Marvel comics, but I love the movies and Agents of SHIELD). It can also be one of the negatives for some players (You're playing the character wrong!). Another plus, Marvel (for example) comes with hundreds of NPCs to pool from for plots.

The trick with an original setting, or a setting that might exist in the Marvel universe (for example), but only utilizes original characters, is selling super hero fans and players why they should care about your vision of the setting. You will have to transfer the knowledge of how the original setting works, people, places, organizations, concepts, etc and hope incoming players buy it as worthy of their time.

So long as players like it, they'll play, but some concepts prevail over others because of built-in fan bases, which is possibly (IMO) why I think some of the other all-original super games have failed.

[surreality]

@Ghost Even with an existing IP, it'd likely be possible to tweak it some to create a space for it to exist. For instance, a Xavier School variant established in some part of Europe, etc.

[Ghost]

@surreality Another good idea, as was the idea of "in space". Thanks for the input.