Has anyone else played any of the following?

[PhishStyx]

I want to poll what supers games you folks have played. So here we are. Yay us!

[Digital Arcanist]

I've played just about everything under the sun, but I think my favorite system will have to Hero System. My biggest pet peeve as a super heroic gamer is people wanting to play as the well-known characters of their favorite comics/movies. I find it to go against the spirit of role-playing. Once you sit down to play the Marvel or DC games, everyone just fights over who gets to be Superman or Captain America. Hero system puts such a high cost on cool powers that you can't play like that and are forced really to use your imagination , which I feel is the spirit of role-playing.

[PhishStyx]

I played a lot of both Marvel and DC, had more than 20 characters, and never once felt bad or missed the fact that I wasn't playing a "name" character.

[Digital Arcanist]

With the near limitless combinations of powers and quirks, why would you ever want to limit yourself to something that has 40 years of history already. In my campaigns I enforce a strict policy of no knock-offs. The fact that people have some weird desire to play pre-made characters is what is going to sink the Marvel/DC MMORPG's coming out.

[PhishStyx]

With the near limitless combinations of powers and quirks, why would you ever want to limit yourself to something that has 40 years of history already.

Because that 40 year history has value to many people, me included. So much has happened in Marvel in the last 40 years that a GM can pull from to create a whole new storyline and have it grounded in a context that frequently the players are already very familiar with, that a single writer with months or even several years to spend on a game world could hardly hope to compete for character making details and quality of established in-game factual information. All a GM need do is read and pull ideas from a very deep well of his (or her) chosen comic book universe.

That's not to say that a writer or GM should never create a new setting or universe, but just as certainly, the opposite is also true.

In my campaigns I enforce a strict policy of no knock-offs. The fact that people have some weird desire to play pre-made characters is what is going to sink the Marvel/DC MMORPG's coming out.

Again, I've played Marvel and DC in various forms, not to mention various other supers games, since the early 90's, and I don't think I've ever done a knock-off character. Of course that said, the field is narrowing swiftly for originality in super heroic types.

I'll post some of my characters in the Blog section.

[Digital Arcanist]

I see no problem with using big name heroes as NPC's or pulling plot elements from the comics because that is all part of the setting, but my gripe lies in players choosing to play as pre-made characters. I feel that is another symptom of the cancer known as console-based RPG's.

[Moritz]

I ran a Marvel Super Heroes game allowing the players to pick Feature Characters (FC's) from the book; but not to pick anyone over Unearthly (basically no cosmics). Or they could roll up their own characters. It worked pretty well, but "Sam" had to ruin the game for everyone and it only lasted 2 sessions. I've got the house rules (all 22 pages of them) if anyone is interested. - Yes, I had to write house rules, just for players like "Sam".

[Digital Arcanist]

You needed 22 pages of house rules? I'm interested to see what behavior would require 22 pages worth of rules.

[PhishStyx]

You needed 22 pages of house rules? I'm interested to see what behavior would require 22 pages worth of rules.

Not sure about that, but I know a guy who wrote a home brewed set of point-based character generation rules for MSH, which is kinda cool and really evens out some of the bumpier problems in the MSH game system.

[Moritz]

In my House Rules, I had to literally go through every power (in ultimate powers book) and clarify many of them to prevent rules raping. There are many 'vague' write-ups in the MSH rules. "Sam" is an experienced and crafty rapist. He's always looking to find a means to min-max, power game, etc. Hence the reason I don't play with "Sam" anymore. Heck, no one plays with "Sam" anymore. I will note, 7 of the 22 pages is a time-line detailing the world and where the characters are in all of it.

[Drohem]

Ok, these weren't in the poll selection:

Superworld
Villians & Vigilantes
Golden Heroes
Champions

[PhishStyx]

Ok, these weren't in the poll selection:

Superworld
Villians & Vigilantes
Golden Heroes
Champions

Well, I'm not familiar with either Superworld or Golden Heroes at all, and while I forgot to put in Villains and Vigilantes, Champions doesn't really fit the category that I'm thinking of here. I'm looking for specifically Super Hero games, not generic games tied to supers concepts.

On the other hand, I didn't put in Superbabes either.

[Drohem]

Champions is specifically a superhero system. The Hero Game system was derived from Champions originally.

[Drohem]

Superworld was produced by Chaosium using the Basic Role-Playing system. It was originally one of the three booklets from the Worlds of Wonder game produced by Chaosium based of the BRP system. Worlds of Wonder was really the first true universal game system.

[PhishStyx]

I didn't buy my first Cthulhu game until the last few years. In fact in 1983, I had only bought one non-D&D game book, and that was Star Frontiers.