Mixed Superhero Game Ideas
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I hate to bring up the whole FC/OC thing again but this is something I've been thinking about and thought I'd finally post about it. To be clear, this is not a post about whether a game(any game) should or should not allow OCs. This is about a specific idea and whether or not that idea is a stale turd. So, please, try not to derail the thought train with the old FC vs OC debate.
This is also not a game I'm working on. It's just an idea that keeps needling itself in my brain. A variation on a potential The Strange style game.
The game would be a "multi-versal" type game with 3 distinct areas of play; Marvel, DC, and OC. So you'd have NYC for Marvel, Gotham and Metropolis for DC, and New Centropolis or whatever for the OC game. One unified system so that there could be crossover TPs without having to worry about DC characters being so much more powerful in general than Marvel and all that. Let's assume that's not an issue.
My fear would be spreading RP too thin. You only have X characters and spreading them out over 3 different comic book 'verses might seem to push the limits.
In the end, I realize the ultimate rule about the success of a game applies here, you'll only get out of it what the staff put into it. But it's late, I'm bored, and it was on my mind so I decided to post about it.
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Yes, three locales would spread RP thin.
If players couldn't cross over to another zone to do stories of any significance, why are they sharing a game?
Does all their canon (in this case canon to the PC, not canon from the comics) events, foes and NPCs have to start from their assigned zones? If not, how do you deal with Lois now living in Sunnydale her whole life?
If they can, you immediately run into how far off canon do you allow folks to go, from the start and over time?
Whats to stop Maxima and Jean Grey from hanging out and abusing Superman over in OC-ville?
Can Spider-man have been bitten by a spider irradiated by Kryptonite and either have Kryptonian powers or be poisonous to Superman?
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@Misadventure Mostly convenience. Instead of having to find 3 games to play on (a DC, Marvel, and OC hero game) you can just pop onto one game. And all three universes would be self-contained. DC is DC, Marvel is Marvel, and the OC world would be entirely original. Any crossover would be done through mux-wide TP.
Mostly this came to my mind because any time you have a game that has FCs there's a war when OCs are mentioned. We've seen it here, there are three distinct sides in this fight(one against, one for, and the quieter group that really doesn't care either way).
There's a third reason why this thought popped into my head that ties into the first one, I'm tired of searching for a comic game that allows X only to find the staff are nuts or I don't like something in their theme or something. I was like if there was just a general Superhero MUX that had a Marvel and DC side that had reasonable staff and what not I'd be all for it. But, again, that really ties back into reason #1; having to find 3 games that really do kind of the same thing.
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@zombiegenesis Seems weird to even do a crossover. Could be kinda cool to do a take on the same crisis event in the three universes and see how they play out each time.
As for staff being nuts at these places if you look around and can't see the nutty staffer ...
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My idea for a comic book game inspired by The Strange is the opposite:
Remember Amalgam? Remember Exiles?
The Stage: The Multiverse.
The Headquarters: The Panopticon.
The Players: Original and amalgamated characters.
The Catch: Only a limited (e.g. 3) versions of the same character (amalgamated or otherwise) can be on the game at any one time. (So there are three Wolverines--one is similar to the usual Wolverine, another is Dark Claw, another is a version of Logan who grew to old age qwithout ever knowing adamantium, or maybe gamma irradiate, or or or... etc).
The Plots: If you create a character you get a number. That number is your Universe. You get a room, building privileges inside it, and you can make it be, look, whatever you want. Galactus can be a chicken. I don't care. The Panopticon is staff-regulated. characters go on missions to different universes to fix the multiverse through various actions--some are benign, and some are a little more vicious, which is why the Panopticon also recruits, you know, Deadpools, and Carnages, and Punishers.So you can play in your own world, crossing into the Panopticon occasionally, or you can play in the multiverse, mostly going on player-run missions across the vast expanse of infinite possibilities--and since "universe destroying dangers" can only destroy one universe--if you wanna do that to a universe you created? Fine. Go for it. Only threats to the multiverse and the Panopticon need staff oversight.
And if your character gets frozen (due to inactivity or you just get busy and freeze them)? Someone else can app a similar one--but not yours. Your Wolverine is YOUR Wolverine. You might have to wait for a Wolverine slot to open up, but the stories you told are yours, the relationships are yours, etc.
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@coin That was pretty much my setup for my The Strange knock-off. I was calling it Shards of Reality. Something happened(no one knows what) in the Prime Reality that created "fictional bleed" which resulted in endless shards that represent pretty much any reality you can think of. Players could either play a character from the Prime Reality(probably a member of PRIME, people who travel from Shard to Sharl stopping Bad Things from happening) or a denizen of a Shard(say Wolverine in a Marvel universe where all the heroes were infected by vampirism). Players could do what they want with their shard or adventure to other shards. Characters could even be different people in different shards(Jon Smith in the Prime Shard becomes Batman in Shard 23 or Namor in Shard 37 or a nameless Stormtrooper in Shard 14 or whatever).
It's an idea I'd actually been thinking about for years, a one-stop shop for RP, but The Strange had a really decent take on the fictional bleed so I stole a lot of that to further refine the idea. Of the game that will probably never happen.
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@zombiegenesis said in Mixed Superhero Game Ideas:
@coin That was pretty much my setup for my The Strange knock-off. I was calling it Shards of Reality. Something happened(no one knows what) in the Prime Reality that created "fictional bleed" which resulted in endless shards that represent pretty much any reality you can think of. Players could either play a character from the Prime Reality(probably a member of PRIME, people who travel from Shard to Sharl stopping Bad Things from happening) or a denizen of a Shard(say Wolverine in a Marvel universe where all the heroes were infected by vampirism). Players could do what they want with their shard or adventure to other shards. Characters could even be different people in different shards(Jon Smith in the Prime Shard becomes Batman in Shard 23 or Namor in Shard 37 or a nameless Stormtrooper in Shard 14 or whatever).
It's an idea I'd actually been thinking about for years, a one-stop shop for RP, but The Strange had a really decent take on the fictional bleed so I stole a lot of that to further refine the idea. Of the game that will probably never happen.
Yeah. I've had the above idea since before I read The Strange, it just coalesced entirely when I did.
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I'll admit that, as migraine-inducing as each crossover game's particular theme-weaving details can be to learn (are Sentinels a thing? did Maxwell Lord develop them? was there a JSA, and was Captain America part of it?), I find myself more interested in them as opportunities for more supers RP than specific universe theme/canon allows for.
Maybe it's because I know that if I want to have scenes with only [comic book publisher] characters, I can do so pretty easily--but I can also try to flex my imagination in interesting ways to see how I might tie together character hooks & themes across publishers.
Plus, it means (usually) more RP since the people who really want to play Character A can do so even if it means playing with characters from other universes. It also seems like OCs have an easier time when they're not tethered as closely to a specific canon. This is a guess, though, since I tend not to play OCs on such games ... though an OC-only supers game would be awesome, too.
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For what it's worth, the more that I play mixed-universe games, the more I find that the disparity in power between Marvel & DC at the higher level characters gets more difficult to reconcile if you're using a numerical stat system. Heavyweights in the Marvel Universe just can't stack up to their DC counterparts. Thor, Hulk, and Juggernaut all top out around 100 tons of lifting, while Superman, Doomsday, and Wonder Woman surpass that by orders of magnitude. There's only been 1 time that I can think of when a Marvel character displayed DC-level strength, and that was in Secret Wars where the Hulk held up a mountain to keep himself and his companions from being crushed after it was dropped on them.
Yes, most of the times, the strength/power comparisons get handwaved in the comics, especially in the Marvel Vs. DC fights, but that's because the characters so rarely interact. On a MU, you have these characters interacting much more regularly, even if you only do 1 or 2 crossover events a year.
I'm probably in the minority, but I'm fairly burned out on FC super games. A lot of this has to deal with the heavy competition for the big name characters. With OC games, you can create obvious homages, but at least they're your character(s) and you can bring them to life without relying on previous comics canon, current comics storylines, or having to ret-con what a previous player may have done. You're also more free to write your own character without having to worry about how it might affect the prospect of a future player picking the character up at a later date.
