From Superfriends to Watchmen: The Extremes of Superheroes

[Cassandra]

For many of us the Superfriends were our first exposure to heroes in media. The stories were often silly, the characters appropriately cartoonish, but the good guys always won, and acted like heroes. On the other end of the spectrum is the Watchmen, where the characters were costumed, but were they heroes? Nite Owl 2 was the closest to be a standard superhero, Silk Spectre 2 had the moves and the looks, and Dr. Manhatten had the power, but even they didn't hold back and bring the villains in alive.

My question is this? Are your heroes good people who use minimal force, resist the urge to be judge, jury, and executioner, protect the innocetn, and usually win in the end because the GM approves and rewards good behavior? Or are you in the game to punish the guilty, devoted to justice to the point of your characters having no personal life, wading through a river of blood and gore?

Just wondering.

For the record I'm more Wonder Woman first season.

[Kap]

I don't think the protagonists of Watchmen were presented as heroes. They were just as big creeps as the villains they fought. Unfortunately Marvel and D.C. decided that all their mainstream superheroes should be remade in the mold of Watchmen, so we've had a couple of decades now of creeps passing themselves off as superheroes. I'm still waiting for the pendulum to swing back.

Give me the Super Friends (or any season of Lynda Carter Wonder Woman) any day!

--Kap

[Epiphanis]

I've played it at both extremes depending on the context of the campaign. As a GM, for most superhero games I prefer to impose some sort of Code vs. Killing, because my own tastes run to Silver/Bronze Age and not Iron Age stories and I think far too many PCs focus on power fantasies while neglecting the "heroic" side of things. These conversations inevitably highlight popular moral controversies, and inevitably prompt someone to argue that it is immoral NOT to murder certain people in cold blood. I do not take this position.

[Ozymandias]

My heroes are good people, but they are people, and come with all the problems and humanity of that. They're not going to be paragons of humanity or anything, but they're not going to be psychotic (well, not usually) or creeps. I rarely have my supers kill, even if the campaign is darker, but that doesn't mean they'll pull their punches when they need to put their enemies down.

[AmadanNaBriona]

I prefer to see more mature and reasonable treatments of the complex questions of force and the private application of such to exert one's will.
I don't need, or usually even want, my Supers campaigns to be blood soaked Iron age festivals, but I similarly can't comprehend the attraction for the saccharin fake world imposed on the Comics industry by the HUAC and Senator McCarthy's witchhunts. As far as I'm concerned, setting a Supers game in an unexamined Silver age setting is like playing a Hogan's Heroes game without even considering the implications of milking Nazi camps for comedy.

[Mister E]

If they ever fought, the Superfriends would murder the Watchmen by accident à la Superboy Prime.

[Derek Hiemforth]

As I suspect most would be, my Champions campaigns tend to be between the two extremes (with the obvious exception of my Challenge of the Super-Friends convention games). However, they definitely tend to be closer to the Super-Friends end of the spectrum than the Watchmen end. My Champions games tend to feature characters who have Silver/Bronze age ideals, though the pressures of an imperfect and not-so-idealistic world can result in those ideals not always being upheld...

[Ndreare]

In our project counterstrike setting killing a monarch (super) releases there energy and awakens a new super. So the players try very hard not to kill the bad guys instead wanting those powers in prison, rather than having go hunt down a new vbad guy.

[Ozymandias]

In our project counterstrike setting killing a monarch (super) releases there energy and awakens a new super. So the players try very hard not to kill the bad guys instead wanting those powers in prison, rather than having go hunt down a new vbad guy.

See, in my group, you'd probably get more villain deaths that way. You already know that that monarch they fought is evil. If they can concentrate the monarch powers in the hands of good (or at least non-evil) people, then no more villains. I mean, you'd still get people like my character, who would object, but as a whole, the characters would probably go for the kill, more often than not.

[Mister E]

In our project counterstrike setting killing a monarch (super) releases there energy and awakens a new super. So the players try very hard not to kill the bad guys instead wanting those powers in prison, rather than having go hunt down a new vbad guy.

This reminds me of Machiavelli's notion that, if you are going to criminally kill a rival prince & take over the princedom, you must likewise kill every member of that prince's household, family, friends, & sympathizers. Success must be total.

Otherwise the criminal killing of the rival prince will be problematic just as you describe.

[Mister E]

See, in my group, you'd probably get more villain deaths that way. You already know that that monarch they fought is evil. If they can concentrate the monarch powers in the hands of good (or at least non-evil) people, then no more villains. I mean, you'd still get people like my character, who would object, but as a whole, the characters would probably go for the kill, more often than not.

Death over immortality.

[phoenix240]

I try to keep my games heroic but "realistic" in the sense that the heroes are people, they're not perfect and when you decide to act in capacity most superheroes do killing and death are a possibility. You're engaging in violence and while most of them don't typically set to murder their opponents like police officers (most) of them accept the potential of death as part of the responsibility they've taken on.

[Ndreare]

See, in my group, you'd probably get more villain deaths that way. You already know that that monarch they fought is evil. If they can concentrate the monarch powers in the hands of good (or at least non-evil) people, then no more villains. I mean, you'd still get people like my character, who would object, but as a whole, the characters would probably go for the kill, more often than not.

This was also the original approach in the games background before the players came along. The problem came that the new Monarch would be out there unknown and become a whole new villain. By arresting the Monarchs and imprisoning them long term you remove the potential of more issues coming later. The typical imprisonment was not for corrections but mitigation. A captured monarch was injected with a compound which forces them into a coma. Then they were basically vegetables and can be kept under control for as little as $30,000 a year. As opposed to mitigating the extreme damage they inflict and hunting them down every time.

[Laundry Knight]

I am among those that prefers in the middle but would rather lean towards Super Friends than Watchmen. It's not because I think killing badguys is necessarily wrong, but I think a story needs some kind of tension, and for ultra powerful supercharacters, the tension should be not abusing their power. If you are doing a Dirty Harry, or a western then the tension is that bullets really hurt and not very good for ones health.

[Vulcan]

Try playing with a GM who thinks the heros should live up to silver age ideals... while living in a rusty iron world. Gets old quick.