The Ongoing Campaign: Supergame

Showing posts with label Supergame. Show all posts

Saturday, March 9, 2019

Thinking Of Superhero Games

Reviewing Heroes & Heroines, along with an upcoming superpowered game that I have, caused me to think about games designed to cover people with extraordinary powers. As it happens, at the moment I am not very fond of a lot of them. Champions suffers from a very clumsy game system, made worse by having to learn the system and spend a lot of time to create characters. This last is also a problem with GURPS Supers, but at least that system has developed into a very clever one that manages to deliver more "realism" for less effort than any other game I can think of. It's currently the one that I am planning on running my upcoming game in, but this post is part of a process there.

So, here are the games that are interesting me at the moment, along with links to where to get them.

Villains & Vigilantes — this is currently available in a new edition titled Mighty Protectors, but I haven't had a chance to evaluate that edition yet. I am mostly interested in the 2.1 edition linked here. For one thing, there are no point-buy systems in version 2.1, and I understand that Mighty Protectors has fallen prey to that seductive mechanic. One of the great things about V&V was always that it was just a matter of generating basic stats, rolling up—or choosing—some powers, and filling out the front-loaded calculations. That's part of the reason that I had the FBI Guide series.

Guardians — This is a little attempt to portray what the Original Adventure Game might have looked like if the authors were more interested in comic book superheroics than pulp fantasy. Like V&V, creating a character is more about picking a set of powers than spending points. That's really good from my perspective.

Supergame — The point-buy mechanic for creating characters is less intrusive here mainly because the game is very fast and loose. Still, it's less interesting to me than others in this list, mainly because of the weird, calculator-intensive rules (seriously, you roll d% and multiply that as a fraction of the base damage to find out how much damage you actually do, but only in hand-to-hand combat). Also, like most point-buy games, the players have to learn how play works in some detail before they can really create reasonable characters. There is a supposed third edition of the game now, but it is apparently a complete rewrite by new authors that only keeps the title.

Heroes Unlimited — I feel weird putting this in my list, since I really got most of my experience of it in the first edition, which we mockingly called "Heroes Limited" due to its inability to really handle the genre well. I understand that the second edition has fixed that issue, so I am bringing it back into consideration for my table. A major advantage of the game is that players can pretty much choose to use any of several character creation systems, from relatively freeform to relatively point-buy.

Marvel Super Heroes — The main disadvantage here is that the game is out of print and pretty expensive on the aftermarket. On the other hand, the PDFs at the Classic Marvel Forever website are more or less designed to be printed out, so that's an option. Still among the best possible superpowered games out there. Just don't roll on the tables in the Ultimate Powers Book, since they're really badly done. The selection is great, though. Pick your powers, I guess, and work out the power levels with the Referee.

Heroes & Heroines — This is a really unlikely choice for me, since it suffers from multiple problems such as being out of print, using a point-buy system, and so on. Still, it's not totally off the table for me because the sketched-out system is a perfect place to land a "rulings not rules" game. Still, Guardians is probably a better choice there.

GURPS Supers — Look, this is the only game that can actually handle Wolverine's adamantium-laced skeleton, and frankly I've had some of my superpowered NPCs inspired by the list of advantages and powers in the game. It's also the only game in print that can, more or less, do Dune just off the shelf, including weird things like having access to ancestral memories. The Supers supplement includes, among other things, the best discussion of Precognition as a superpower in a game that I have seen. If nothing changes, this is the game that I will be running. If only it had options to not be point-buy. Also, Wildcard Skills annoy me and the templates here rely on them to a degree, to the point that it's difficult to root them out of some of the templates—guess why I'm considering other games.

Mutants & Masterminds — I am not really fond of D20 games, except that they've allowed retroclones and such to happen, but this one seems alright. Mainly, I'm interested in the Paragons setting, which is pretty close to what I intend for my setting, and the Mecha & Manga supplement covers magical girls, which I do love. It runs a line between point-buy and not by allowing the player to effectively create a new class for their superpowered character or choose a pre-designed, relatively generic one, and then using that in a D20-like framework. Still, Guardians, and for that matter V&V, seems to cover most everything here and better.

Savage Worlds — On the one hand, the dice mechanic revolts my statistics-oriented mind, but on the other hand all of my players are both familiar with and fans of the game. Less intrusive point-buy system, but still a point-buy system. I'll leave it on the table as an option, maybe. I'll have to look at the superpowers system first. I have a suspicion that it isn't robust enough to cover some of my more outré characters.

Man, it sucks that Golden Heroes and Super Squadron are both out of print and in-demand enough to be really difficult to get. Not that I'd necessarily pick one of those, but they would provide a couple more options that wouldn't be terrible.

So, what other superpowered games that don't rely on a point-buy system—or which have a really compelling reason to consider them that outweighs the point-buy system—am I missing?

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Obscure Games: Supergame

After nearly a year away, I am returning to the Obscure Games series of reviews with a very odd entry.

In 1980, Jay and Aimee Hartlove published the first edition of their superhero game, Supergame, and followed it up in 1982 with a revised and expanded edition. I only have the second edition, so that is what I will comment on here.

Supergame is based on the idea that a superhero game should be able to handle nearly any character from any genre. In the introduction, they talk about a party of player-characters consisting of an alien from outer space, an African witch-doctor, a knight in shining armor, and a gunslinger from the Old West. To this end, they introduced a point-buy system (which, I believe, was the second to see print, the first being found in Superhero: 2044). Characters in the game are assigned 250 points to divide between characteristics, skills, powers, and so forth.

The characteristics are pretty straightforward, consisting of Strength, Dexterity, Physical (basic hit points), Agony (hit points for nonlethal attacks), Intelligence, Ego, Psychic Power, and Charisma. Various tables and formulas are used to determine the number of physical and mental actions allowed to the character in a combat turn, ground movement rate, leaping distance, hand to hand damage potential, healing rates, and so forth. Different powers cost varying numbers of points (“Breathe water as well as air” costs 10 points, “See in all directions at once” costs 20). So far, so good, but nothing groundbreaking until we remember that this was in 1980/1982, the first edition coming out a year before Champions hit the shelves.

Armor is divided into four different categories, covering blunt trauma, other physical attacks, energy attacks, and “exposure” (heat, cold, and so on). Armor costs half as much as an equivalent attack (the attack costs 1 point per point of damage, while armor costs 5 points for 10 points of protection). After that, shields and other equipment are dealt with.

Combat includes several different systems. The first, for hand to hand combat, requires a calculator, since the chance of hitting is the attacker’s value divided by the sum of the attacker’s and defender’s values, expressed as a percentage to roll on d100. There are various modifiers that apply to each party’s total value, making it necessary to recalculate the chance nearly every round of combat. There is, fortunately, a chart that covers the main range of values (0 to 100 in 5-point increments), so it can be just looked up most of the time. Worse than that, though, is the fact that, when a hit is scored, the exact amount of damage done is figured by taking the damage potential and multiplying by a percentage determined by the roll of d100.

Fire combat, naturally, uses an entirely different system. First, the player and Referee total up the modifiers, then the shooter rolls first 1d6, modifying it by the modifiers, and then a second d6. If the second d6 comes up greater than the modified value of the first d6, it is a hit. Fire combat doesn’t use the d100 method of determining damage, either. Instead, a hit location is rolled, which determines whether the injury is Heavy, Medium, or Light. These represent the full amount, two-thirds, or one-third of the missile weapon’s damage potential.

There are additional, and different, systems for determining the success of conical attacks, magical attacks, and mental attacks. Further, there is a system for “Charisma attacks”, which are basically attempts at persuasion.

Supergame is a beautifully incoherent game, with some strange design choices that I can’t say I understand at all. Still, I like its quirky nature, even if I will probably never run it (I ran it once when I was younger, but that game was a bust in part because I really didn’t know what I wanted from it, and in part because I was in a power-gaming phase, which is no good for a Referee). As far as I know, there were two supplements released for it (Reactor, which I own, and Heroes of Poseidonis, which I do not; I'd like to get the latter, but no way would I pay the $100+ that people online are asking for it, even if I had the money to spare), and one issue of Different Worlds magazine included an article in which Jay and Aimee Hartlove provided stats for a number of comic book characters. As far as I know, that is all the support the game ever received.