Superhero Gaming

[Anders]

There's a discussion over on RPGNet about how to make players respect the superhero tropes (specifically regarding combat - using non-lethal power, accepting that sometimes the villain is too powerful to confront directly and so on) and I fired off the following.

What do you think? Am I off-base here?

(As a side-note on the footnote, Smallville is a pretty cool, very indie-influenced game put out by Margaret Weis productions last year. Despite the name it's fantastically adaptable - so far I have seen people mention using it for Star Wars, Buffy and Renaissance-era comedic opera; I'm going to use it for a Medieval courtly intrigues game soon.)

I don't think the problem lies with the players as much as the system. Most supers RPGs aren't good at representing superhero stories.

Sure, they're great at simulating people with superpowers according to different sets of conventions. Champions uses a different set of conventions than DCA, but the rules still focus on allowing you to create a superpowered individual, not a character in a superhero story.

Why do I think there's a difference between these two? Superhero stories - the good ones, definitely, and even most of the bad ones - are much, much more about ideals, emotions and ethics.

Yep, all those stories about grown men dressing up in tights and tossing cars around while spouting cheesy dialogue? Ideals, emotions and ethics.

We've seen many knock-offs of Superman, but what makes Superman Superman is his unbending desire to do what is right and his ability to perceive what that is. Exactly how much he can lift or what would happen if he would punch a normal person in the face isn't interesting because the stories about Superman aren't about that. They're about duty; they're about his feelings for his adopted homeplanet, humanity, Lois, his parents (all four of them); they're about protecting the innocent and making the world a better place.

In the same way, stories about Spiderman are about responsibility; about his feelings for Uncle Ben, Aunt May, MJ, the Osbornes and most of his other villains; about what to do when you are given great power.

And so on. The real conflict in most superhero stories isn't about the powers, it's about value systems: very, very roughly the villains think that Might Makes Right and the heroes go with Spidey's "With great power comes great responsibility", or Desire vs. Duty if you will.

Anyway, all this is a very longwinded way of saying that in my opinion, nearly all superhero RPGs start in the wrong place. They begin by simulating superpowered people, and then, maybe, add in some "personal morality codes" as disadvantages or give some advice on genre conventions. I think that's putting the horse before the cart: the two central questions to any superhero is "What are your ideals?" and "How far are you willing to go to uphold them?". A superhero game that wants to create superhero stories as opposed to stories about simulated superpowered people needs to start there.*

* Yes, Smallville does this to some extent, but I think it's too locked into the soap-opera side of things for this purpose.

[michaelpaciocco]

I don't think you're quite wrong, no. Although, how you get a system to represent the character/ideological structure is kind of a mystery to me. Really, the only way to make it work is if your gaming group is at least genre-savvy enough to realize how it is supposed to go.

I think the reason that most RPG systems don't represent the non-lethal aspects of gaming have to do with the fact that most RPG systems started out of the Dungeon-crawling Fantasy Genre, where, let's face it, even if you're a good guy you're expected to kill things. A lot.

I do most of my GMing using Palladium's "Heroes Unlimited" system, which is a superhero version of their fantasy/Whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-consider RIFTS is. And it definitely has that exact "non-lethal" issue. In most of my games what's ended up happening is that I've had the characters actually deal with the issue of of the lethality of their superpowers and learn by trial and error how to not become horrific murder machines. Which I think is something that helped influence what was probably one of my favorite blogposts of last year

pacioccosmind.blogspot.com/2010/02/superpowers-violence-and-invincible.html

So I can see where you're coming from, but I've always been a fan of taking a limitation and turning it into an asset.

(SIDEBAR: Anyone looking for some play-by-post gaming PM me - There's a forum by a friend of mine looking for some fresh players.)

[jarddavis]

Huge player of Champions and Villains and Vigilantes back in the day.

I think the problem is that you actually have to, you know, game-master.

Aaron Allston put out a great source book for Champions called Strike Force in which he detailed the campaign he had been most involved in through the years. His own Strike Force campaign, breaking down the time-line of the campaign, and pointing out that eventually he wound up with two different groups. One which fit the standard trope, and the other which was a bit darker for those players so inclined.

He introduced me to the concept of blue booking in that campaign. Players detailing events in their characters lives in the time frame between gaming sessions.

I agree with you that SHRPGS start in the wrong place, when you can take a code against killing as a disadvantage. On the other hand, if you GM properly and enforce it, then it can be a good role playing experience.

The real problem with these games is that if you're very good with the rules, you can easily create incredibly powerful characters who overbalance the game too much. I remember starting a campaign with one group of people and throwing them up against at the time, the latest version of Mechanon. Should have been a nice little contest. And because I hadn't been playing close enough attention, one character came in and took him out with one shot. Never did that again. I began insisting on campaign guidelines and restarted the whole thing from scratch. Worked really well from then on. No one had more than a 275 pt character to start with. I wasn't trying to be a rules lawyer, but I was trying to enhance the role playing experience.

Sadly, I've kind of gotten out of gaming over the last ten years. I still occasionally like to break out the V&V rules and role up quick characters, but that's mostly to draw them out.

[Anders]

Good to hear your input.

However, I disagree that it's mostly a question of game-mastering. I may have over-read on Forge-type RPG-theory, but I think the main question is what type of gaming the system encourages.

Most RPGs, not just the ones about supers, focus very much on describing the physical and mental capabilities of the characters, with the assumption that the players will furnish emotions, morals, relationships and everything else that makes the character more than just numbers. Some go a step further and add rules for (some of) those things as well, like Champions and GURPS. Likewise, most games reward overcoming challenges - you get XP for defeating enemies, or successfully completing missions, or other task-based actions. There are exceptions, but many of those boil down to "GM fiat".

As a counter-example I'm going to use the Smallville system mentioned above. Instead of attributes and skills, the main stats of a character are their Values and Relationships. Values are Power, Love, Truth and a couple of others that not only have a rating but also a statement - for example, the sample version of Clark has "I must protect the innocent" as his statement for Justice, while Lex has "I'm the victim here". Relationships are similar, with a rating and a statement. Clark has "Oliver is reckless", while Ollie has "Clark won't make the hard decisions". When you try to perform an action you roll one of your values and one of your relationships (with possible extra dice from powers and other abilities, but those two are the main ones). You either roll against the GM's dice pool or against another character's Value+Relationship, with the contest escalating until one of them takes too much Stress (which includes physical injuries, fear and anger) or gives in and lets the other character get what they want. The main way to increase your abilities is to "challenge" your values and relationships: when you conclude that you were wrong about a person or one of your convictions it is temporarily reduced in value but you get the equivalent of XP. (There are other ways to get it, including getting rid of Stress, so you want to get some of that too.)

This is a system that focuses much less on measuring physical capabilities and much more on the soap-like elements of Smallville. This has several effects, not the least being that you can have Clark, Ollie and Lex all in the same scene without one being more "powerful" than the other - sure, Clark can toss Lex across the room without effort, but since the system focuses on what you want rather than what you can do it doesn't matter more than that Lex can buy the Clarks' farm with his pocket change. The system also rewards behaving in that Smallville-like way of never being able to decide what you think of the people you care most about (Lana-Clark anyone?) or what ideals you need to hold most important.

Anyway. That's what I was getting at: the things that most RPGs shuffle off to "playing your character" doesn't have to be pure fluff, it can be part of the system; be the system in fact.

[jarddavis]

I would hate Smallville with a passion then. It would drive me nuts to roll every time my character needed to make a values check of some type.

Besides, lets face it, most role players are more interested in hack and slash. The people who all get into games like that became White Wolf games fanatics and started LARPing. People who play GURPS or Champions like it because the rules allow them to role play in multiple settings. The rules defining character ability are important to them. Especially those two games in particular because the whole point is to design your character.

[Anders]

Which is fine. All games are not for all people, and vice versa.

The people who all get into games like that became White Wolf games fanatics and started LARPing.

Yeah, not so much. WW's games may have had some of that, but they hardly had a monopoly on attracting non-hack & slashers. Pendragon, Ars Magica and others have also attracted such players, and people who want to play non-hack & slash have done so in all kinds of games, even D&D.

On another note, the White Wolf games aren't actually set up to do what they claim. Rules-wise they have very little support for anything other than typical crunch-heavy, task-based gaming; they just pretend like they do.

Furthermore, the reason most players want hack & slash is that that's nearly all they can get. It's like saying most comic readers want to read about superheroes: when one genre dominates a medium to the point that, in the eyes of those who haven't tried it yet, that genre is the medium, you won't attract anyone not interested in that genre. In other words, potential players not interested in hack & slash have stayed "potential" because RPGs are still viewed as "D&D and some minor variations thereof".

Finally, I'm not talking about making games that appeal to gamers in general or that follow the conventions of gaming. I'm talking about making games that actually simulate superhero stories. Champions is great if you want to play a tactical combat game with superpowered characters, but it's got fuck-all when it comes to systems support for what happens in superhero comics beyond "and then the Hulk hit him and knocked him half a city block away", which, frankly, I find to be the absolutely least interesting aspect.

[michaelpaciocco]

I guess where we disagree with you Anders, is that Jard and I feel that the job of the GM is to illuminate those conflicts through the storytelling - the conflict of actually playing in characters (which is something in the Palladium system, that you get the XP for, and when you fail to do so or step outside it, are actually given insanities).

Speaking for myself, for someone who's run a weekly superhero game for...crap, going on 7 years now (about 4 different campaigns - I can tell you about each of them some other time if you're interested) plus some play-by-posting on another Proboards forum, I think that's the GM's job is to RP out all the moral and ethical questions for the players to go through. That's the interesting part of the GMing part to me is "will they do X? or go down path Y?" and figure out the consequences for each.

[Anders]

I'm not saying you're doing it wrong, absolutely not. I'm just saying that IF you have problems with the players not adhering to the tropes of the genre you're playing in, THEN maybe you should have a look at the system you're using and what sort of behavior it encourages.

But all this discussion (interesting though it may be) is kind of an aside to the reason I posted here originally, which was to tap your superhero brains rather than your gaming brains regarding what is at the core of superhero stories.

[jkcarrier]

Jan 4, 2011 3:43:30 GMT -8 Anders said:

I'm just saying that IF you have problems with the players not adhering to the tropes of the genre you're playing in, THEN maybe you should have a look at the system you're using and what sort of behavior it encourages.

If the players are rebelling against the tropes, it may just be that they're not that interested in the genre, at least not the version they're being offered. You can try to bribe and/or coerce them into following your vision, but I'm not sure how productive that will be in the long run. If the players want to play superheroes with lots of "super" and not much "hero", then the GM might be better off to just let them, and adjust his plans accordingly.

[michaelpaciocco]

What is at the core of the superhero genre?

If you ask me, it's about power. Who uses it, how they use it, why they have it or why they use it the way they do.

To me, the best superhero games I've run or played in all play with this particular subset of questions - yes, there's the origin story, and there are task-based missions etc, but at the core, the character conflicts are all centered around the power they have, and how to use it properly in the context of their fictional millieus.

More on this later...probably.

[Anders]

Jan 4, 2011 13:50:52 GMT -8 jkcarrier said:

Jan 4, 2011 3:43:30 GMT -8 Anders said:

I'm just saying that IF you have problems with the players not adhering to the tropes of the genre you're playing in, THEN maybe you should have a look at the system you're using and what sort of behavior it encourages.

If the players are rebelling against the tropes, it may just be that they're not that interested in the genre, at least not the version they're being offered. You can try to bribe and/or coerce them into following your vision, but I'm not sure how productive that will be in the long run. If the players want to play superheroes with lots of "super" and not much "hero", then the GM might be better off to just let them, and adjust his plans accordingly.

It doesn't have to be conscious rebellion (if it is you should be able to clear things up with a discussion) but simple lack of understanding of the tropes - "But Wolverine kills people all the time! Why can't we do that too?" But it could also be that they are trying to "do well", like defeating the challenges the GM throws at them, and often that means the system will encourage them to behave inappropriately.

Take Champions, for example. When a character takes enough STUN to get knocked out, they will relatively frequently be close enough to 0 that they can wake up later in the fight. The best way to prevent this is to hit them again: it's easier to hit them when they're unconscious, and you'll frequently do enough STUN to keep them down for the rest of the fight. However, it's not very heroic to kick a man (or woman, for that matter) when (s)he's down, so a group of players who don't want to use that tactic is put at a disadvantage by the rules. In a tough fight with high stakes, the players may be forced to make a choice between winning and behaving unheroically, not because it's appropriate for their characters but because the rules force the choice upon them.

[jensaltmann]

Jan 4, 2011 13:50:52 GMT -8 jkcarrier said:

If the players want to play superheroes with lots of "super" and not much "hero", then the GM might be better off to just let them, and adjust his plans accordingly.

Absorb it into the storyline: how long before the public turns against the supers, and what do they do to get rid of them.

[Anders]

Jan 4, 2011 15:11:29 GMT -8 michaelpaciocco said:

What is at the core of the superhero genre?

If you ask me, it's about power. Who uses it, how they use it, why they have it or why they use it the way they do.

To me, the best superhero games I've run or played in all play with this particular subset of questions - yes, there's the origin story, and there are task-based missions etc, but at the core, the character conflicts are all centered around the power they have, and how to use it properly in the context of their fictional millieus.

I think this meshes quite well with my own view.

[michaelpaciocco]

Oh, for the whole "Don't beat a fallen opponent to death" simply introduce the GM-Fiat/Genre Trope of "Past a certain level of beating/unconsciousness, there's no way a bad guy is going to get back up to fight, and will simply surrender to the authorities once they've arrived."

Let's face it, if all the bad guys in comics acted the way Villain NPCs did, every Marvel comic fight would have to be a fight to the death. Put it this way - the Wrecking Crew are freakin' Asgard-powered - so we know that they could, in theory, after a sufficient pummelling, just get back up and keep going at it until say, Thor, had to kill them all dead. But this doesn't happen because there is this entrenched genre trope of surrendering once a certain level of superiority is clearly established. This meshes with real life too - Even most real fights (MMA, boxing, barfights, what have you) don't go to death because after a guy has been beaten silly for a bit, the "winner" simply leaves it be or the fight is called (in the case of fighting-based sport).

[Anders]

Jan 5, 2011 22:11:51 GMT -8 michaelpaciocco said:

Oh, for the whole "Don't beat a fallen opponent to death" simply introduce the GM-Fiat/Genre Trope of "Past a certain level of beating/unconsciousness, there's no way a bad guy is going to get back up to fight, and will simply surrender to the authorities once they've arrived.

This is exactly my point. The rules matter.