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The Ten Best Superhero RPGs--


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According to Topless Robot

 

Champions is listed at #2, after Mayfair's DC Heroes game.  This is part of what the author had to say--

 

"After two decades of playing Champions, I've found that the game is a perfect tactical simulation of comic book action. It's a kind of Star Fleet Battles with superheroes. But I've also found that the heavily mechanical character creation rules have two flaws. First, as inspired as effects-based powers are, the super math geek can manipulate the balance of the game to get extra-competent who push the boundaries of balance. As a small - and not particularly advanced example - players often buy 1 extra inch of movement so that their "half move" is one inch more than normal. Character creation can be heavily mechanical-exploit oriented, which I believe affects the feel of play. Second, it can be intimidating to new players. There are few games that take as long to create a character in as Champions. Only GURPS is more challenging since GURPS requires the same amount of time Champions would take to create Batman to create your average Little League ball player."

 

Like many here, I don't really see his first point as a flaw.  In fact, it was recommended for players in the supplement Champions II to buy an extra inch of ground movement for their characters.  I think of it as part of the rules, like the way in chess that each distinct piece moves differently.  The player works within the rules to to attain the best advantage, and the other players and the gamemaster are doing the same.  As for his second point--like most RPGs, Champions is not as difficult as it first appears--once a potential player takes a closer look at the game to study the rules, the complexity falls away.  Of course, having experienced players around to answer questions and check the math helps a great deal, too.

 

Anyway, the article is a great read.  There it is for anyone who's interested.

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I think it is a little silly for that reviewer to call out a game for being, well, a game. Sure, the Hero System is a fine-grained combat simulation, but there is still a lot of simplifying abstraction underneath all its apparent complexity. Movement is quantized into 1 or 2 meter chunks, and the standard quantum of activity time, a Phase, is allowed to be split in half. That leads to issues of rounding, naturally. That is all part of it simply being a tabletop game rather than a computer-driven RTS (which can divide all player activity into much finer quanta, to the extent that it actually appears to the players as continuous, "real-time" action). Champions and SFB are/were fairly revolutionary in using a Speed Chart to evenly distribute character activity according to a speed stat; other games with far less granularity are even worse in the number of ways in which movement and attacks can be gamed by players for maximum advantage.

 

But more importantly, not all players min-max the system. It is probably true that the ones who love the system because they can easily discern all its moving parts probably will be min-maxers. They are engineers of a sort, and part of the fun is seeing how to make the game engine really perform (for them). But there are also a lot of roleplayers out there who build for concept, not point optimization, and the Hero System is just as good a game for them as for the min-maxers. The fact that min-maxers and powergamers don't always mesh well with roleplayers is a social problem, not a system problem.

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Insofar as I remember, the Mayfair Expoential Game System (MEGS) for unintentional targets.  The closest thing to the "bad miss" you describe is rolling double ones, which according to the rules is a complete failure, which I always took to mean that nothing happened.  Besides, the only way you could get the column shifts necessary to inflict enough damage to destroy the moon would be to roll doubles several times over--and if you roll doubles that many times, you're going to hit your target, no matter how hard he dodges.

 

Did this happen in a game, that soemone missed and destroyed the moon?

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I'll just say  that I do not agree with the list.

 

Clearly, I like Champions best.

Marvel FASERIP totally deserves to be up there at about #2 on the list. If you want simple, fast paced and fun, it's awesome.

TMNT is NOT a good system. And I never thought of TMNT as the super heroes' genre book for Palladium. Technically that would be,um, what's it called? Golden Heroes?? Anyway, an actual superhero genre book.

The d20 supers system is too... I dunno, simple? Lacking in granularity? Not sure, but I don't like it.

For the rest of the listed games I've never played them so I can't really say.

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from a thread on rpg.net

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?639534-Hero-Traditional-roll-under-or-switch-to-roll-high&p=15730513#post15730513

 

 

 

One trick I've had success with for new HERO System players is writing their Attack Rolls as if they were Skill Rolls.  In other words, instead of the 11+OCV-DCV thing, just write down their common attacks on their character sheet, with the 11 already added in.  For example, say we've got a character with STR 20, OCV 7, DCV 6, a 1d6 HKA Sword (2d6 w/STR), and +1 Combat Skill Level with Blades:

[table=width: 500]
[tr]
    [td]Attack[/td]
    [td]Roll[/td]
    [td]DCV[/td]
    [td]Skill[/td]
    [td]Effect[/td]
[/tr]

[tr]
    [td]Punch[/td]
    [td]18-[/td]
    [td]6[/td]
    [td]---[/td]
    [td]4d6N[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
    [td]Haymaker[/td]
    [td]18-[/td]
    [td]1[/td]
    [td]---[/td]
    [td]8d6N[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
    [td]Sword Strike[/td]
    [td]18-[/td]
    [td]6[/td]
    [td]+1[/td]
    [td]2d6K[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
    [td]Dodge[/td]
    [td]---[/td]
    [td]9[/td]
    [td]---[/td]
    [td]vs. all attacks; Abort[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

So when he attacks with, say, his sword, he knows his "attack roll" starts at 18- and his DCV at 6, add he's got a +1 skill bonus he can add to either.  When he rolls the dice, however much he makes his attack roll by is the DCV he hits.  (Frex, if he rolls a 13, he can easily see that he makes his roll by 5, so he hits a DCV of 5.)  :)

 
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I have virtually every commercially sold superhero RPG there is or was, and even the best of them had/have their faults. Of them all, I feel Champions offers the most bang for the buck, hands down. The more interesting question, to my mind, is which game deserves to be called second best (and morbid curiosity makes me wonder which one is the absolute worst).

 

I think once you get past the top three, you are talking about systems burdened with too many compromises to really compete, except perhaps in terms of fostering nostalgia.

 

The top candidates for second best, I think, would be: Marvel (FASERIP), DC Heroes (MEGS), and M&M (3rd). Few other systems enjoyed the level of publisher support those games did/do.

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So I've gotta ask. Which is the worst supers game then?

I've read reviews online that make Avengers of Justice sound like the worst superhero RPG ever committed to paper. I've never seen a copy so I can't confirm or deny. But my candidate for worst ever would probably be GURPS Supers 1st ed. While Superhero 2044 may be objectively worse, GURPS Supers 1st ed. still gives me apoplectic fits, so it goes straight to the bottom of my list.

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You might be thinking of the Marvel Super Heroes Basic Set. Judging from the writing and presentation style, it was definitely aimed at a younger audience. However, the Advanced Set was pretty much a straight up RPG with all the usual bells and whistles. Now, the use of descriptive terms to indicate power levels was unique to the FASERIP system, and some people liked it and others didn't. I guess having your character's Strength rated as "Monstrous" made the game feel cartoonish to some. Never really bothered me, to be honest.

 

What probably bothered me more was being impressed that the Hulk could adrenaline surge in MSH up to Shift-Z Strength, which is listed as "up to 1000 tons" (a kiloton), and still find himself being almost three orders of magnitude weaker than pre-crisis Superman (his MEGS Strength of 25 lets him lift on the order of 800,000 tons, nearly a megaton).

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GURPS supers! I have played that. I'd forgotten. I'm not sure if the version I played was 1st ed. I think it was.

 

I didn't like it either. It did not work as a supers game and the mechanics for putting limitations on powers was... bad. It was just a straight percentage. Easier for the maths I suppose but made building characters weird. Can't remember enough details to say any more but I didn't like it.

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