PDA

View Full Version : DM Help Running a Superhero game



comk59
2016-07-03, 04:45 PM
So, since one of my players is traveling to Italy for four months, I decided to do a side campaign until she gets back. I put it to the players, and we eventually decided on superhero.

Now, I've never GM'd a Superhero game before, and I wanted to see if the playground had any advice in regards to common GM pitfalls. I already managed to nip one of my worries in the bud when my players agreed on no murder or angsty anti-heroes (although I'm keeping an eye on the player who loves Watchmen and is asking about non-powered detectives).

Arbane
2016-07-03, 10:48 PM
So, since one of my players is traveling to Italy for four months, I decided to do a side campaign until she gets back. I put it to the players, and we eventually decided on superhero.

Now, I've never GM'd a Superhero game before, and I wanted to see if the playground had any advice in regards to common GM pitfalls. I already managed to nip one of my worries in the bud when my players agreed on no murder or angsty anti-heroes (although I'm keeping an eye on the player who loves Watchmen and is asking about non-powered detectives).

Try to agree on a general 'theme' before the game - things like serious vs. goofy, relatively 'grounded' vs. utterly gonzo, black & white morality vs grey, etc. It's kind of annoying when your team consists of Dudley Do-Right, The Tick, Squirrel Girl, and Bloodspurt the Crushinator.
(Wild Talents' 'Four Color' Axes of Design (https://www.rpglibrary.org/utils/wild_talents_axes/) could be a big help here.)

The players WILL try to KO your archvillain before they're one sentence into their introductory monologue. Give the villain a forcefield or have them speak via hologram, or something.

Don't go too crazy with recurring villains. If the heroes put Vermin Man in jail on Tuesday and he's back out by Friday, they WILL start discussing where to dispose of the body next time.

Go easy on the Government Oversight. PCs, even if they're playing as Captain Patriotic, HATE being ordered around.

Have a fallback plan if the PCs blow it. If the PCs all get beaten through some bizarre fluke, have them end up imprisoned (& break out later), not killed.
(Or possibly, have the alien invasion or whatever succeed, and now the PCs have to lead a resistance...)

Don't go too crazy with the lethal force until you understand just HOW bulletproof the PCs are. Batman may be able to dodge bullets, but he's not rolling dice.

comk59
2016-07-04, 12:14 PM
Thankfully, the system I'm using doesn't have lethality in the base rules. (Although my players said that they want the threat of it, so that's sort of a moot point.)

I might have to steal vermin man though, that kinda fits with the villain lineup I have.

I'll admit, I was planning on having some reoccuring enemies, but you raise a good point. Looks like I'll have to build a few more villains so they always have someone new to fight. There are a couple of villains that I abandoned that maybe I can polish up, like the Red Scare and his Army of Commubots.

Hopeless
2016-07-04, 12:52 PM
Or a hologram so hitting it sets off the death trap?

Point out Perception and Search, spot or investigate may be helpful!

What game system will you be using?

comk59
2016-07-04, 02:36 PM
Or a hologram so hitting it sets off the death trap?

Point out Perception and Search, spot or investigate may be helpful!

What game system will you be using?

Prowlers and Paragons. I actually really like the system on paper, and have heard good things about it.

It uses a dice pool system, where evens are successes and odds are failures, while sixes explode. Combat is done by opposed rolls, skills are done by hitting a target number of successes.

Cealocanth
2016-07-04, 03:32 PM
So, I've both run and played in a few supers games and there's a few things that I would suggest to someone who hasn't done it before.

By far, the most important thing is to have a system that is just as concrete and functional as any other system, that places balancing restrictions on powers. Supers games are where power hungry munchkins go to feel good about themselves. GURPS, Mutants and Masterminds, Savage Worlds (my personal favorite), or any other, have a system that balances the group's powers. Otherwise you will end up with characters who can blot out the sun when they get angry and can will the universe in an out of existence.

Make sure your group wants to play this kind of game as well. Supers come at lots of different power levels. I will use comic book examples to demonstrate. With low powered supers like Daredevil you are basically playing a modern game. There's nothing that they can do that someone with reasonable access to tech cannot. Expect to be doing police raids, infiltration and subterfuge, gun shootouts, and bank heists. More middle of the range supers like most of the X-Men are already playing on a bigger field than most modern games allow. People who can blow up tanks with their eyes are already too powerful for even a high-powered military campaign. Your enemies need to be just as tough, if not tougher, than the players. Expect collateral damage. Lastly, epic powered supers like Superman are an entirely different animals. Your threats need to be cosmic and seemingly unstoppable, and expect their battles to do civilization-ending levels of damage. At this power level, it is really hard to GM.

If you ignore the first bit of advice and allow your players to make whatever they want, beware power creep. Basically, a player makes a character that is noticeably above the power level of the other characters (think Dr. Manhattan in the Watchmen), and the GM has to scale everything up to compensate. As a result, the other players, when their character dies, will make something to overcompensate for the campaign difficulty, and the GM has to ramp things up again. After a few cycles, it is pretty much impossible to play if characters aren't gods or end with things like "Oh, and by the way, my psionicist has the ability to destroy the universe when she concentrates really hard."

Supers games are remarkably versatile. These are universes in which weird science, magic, aliens, old gods, super-tech, genetic monstrosities, and much more all coexist in the same world. This can actually be a lot of fun, because you will see a wide diversity of characters and more plot hooks than you know what to do with. Here's a normal, balanced super-team (my group from the last supers game we made).


Renegade - An old and grizzled veteran of the Persian Gulf war, chosen for his ruthlessness and cunning to be the chosen weilder of the legendary magic sword, Tyrfing. With it, he is the ultimate warrior, capable of cutting through steel like cloth, running faster, jumping higher, and fighting long on after his body should have given way. Yet with great power, comes great cost, for he now serves the blade's unceasing hunger for souls.
Shakespearean - One of the oldest living people alive and functionally immortal, Mary was many of history's greatest actors. With her unmatched ability to manipulate the minds of others around her and transform her appearance to look like anyone, she is the perfect infiltrator as well as the perfect seductress.
Rain - Born in Hell on Earth, Rain has been through more intense training and rougher upbringing than almost anyone. Her fighting skills are honed to a razor sharp edge, her stealth skills are unmatched, and her devotion to the mission: unceasing. Yet for what she gained from her abilities, she has lost in sanity, for she is forever scarred by visions from the Red Room, and is still being hunted by her creators.
Dr. Penumbra - Michael Umbra was one of the world's leading nanotechnology researchers when he invented a group of nanites that he could control directly with his mind. With the manipulations of millions of tiny machines, he realized that he could accomplish things man could only dream of. He elected to use his powers for good, defending the innoccent with all the power modern technology gave him.
Voltra - Jenny was an olympic level archer before her bow gave way and a stray arrow pierced her heart. Yet having died in battle, and the will to fight on, Jenny returned to life as a guardian of Valhalla, a Valkyrie. Her skill with a bow is unmatched, and she rains death upon her enemies from above the battlefield by controling the power of the heavens themselves. Yet she still hears the call to Asgard, and someday, she must leave this world.


Beyond scattered, right? Yet still fun. Just make sure that everybody knows what they're getting into.

And lastly, don't forget the four-color ham. Unless the group specifies, what people expect in a supers game is an outlandish story about how the Atom Squad defended Star City against Shell Shock's underground mutant turtle army and prevented him from turning the president into a turtle. The ham and the ridiculous nonsense is what makes the game feel like a supers game. So remember, have fun with it.

SimonMoon6
2016-07-05, 09:04 AM
Until you run the game for the first time, it's hard to know what things you will consider to be problems. Here are at least some unique situations to superhero RPGs that I have encountered:

(1) Characters may be of vastly different power levels. Yeah, yeah, that can happen even in D&D with "fighters linear, wizards quadratic" but when one guy wants to be the nonpowered skills guy and another guy wants to be the "push the planet out of orbit" guy, encounters can be very difficult to balance. (It's the old "BMX Bandit/Angel Summoner" problem.)

Solutiions: Either try to avoid that problem in the first place by watching over character creation carefully *or* accept that that can happen and create encounters appropriately. For example, in one game where one PC had godlike powers and incredible gravity control that made most people go "squish" instantly while the other PCs were not so empowered, one encounter featured Aquaman's villain Ocean Master (in his "I know magic now so I'm actually useful in a minor way" version) along with a giant sea monster under his control. The sea monster was a match for the the godlike PC while Ocean Master was troublesome for the other PCs. Of course, this has the problem that the PCs might fight the wrong opponents. But also, an encounter doesn't have to be all about fights. "Someone has to disarm the bomb before it goes off" can be part of an encounter which gives the skills guy something to do... while at the *same* time, there's a fight with a major villain for the rest of the group to deal with.

In general, though, I find that whenever I run a superhero game and wonder "how do I deal with THIS situation?", I just turn to my extensive knowledge of comic books to see what the comic book writers would do. "How did the JSA balance having a cosmic character like the Spectre alongside mundane people like Dr. Mid-Nite or Black Canary?" Answer: Well, how about the Spectre has to go stop two planets from crashing into each other, while the other heroes have other things to do.


(2) Story structures are very different.

In a D&D game, adventurers can just wander around and look for trouble. Or, they can go make trouble. They're in charge of their destiny and they can change the world.

In a superhero game, the PCs stay at home and wait for something to happen. Or maybe they patrol the city. But either way, they can't be proactive. They have to wait for something to happen and then they have to support the status quo, returning everything back to normal.

It's very hard to have a "sandbox" game in a standard superhero universe. I've always found this very limiting. In one campaign back in the 80's, I used to have a "newspaper" handout with various headlines, some of which showed some reactions to the previous adventures but most of which were adventure hooks, allowing the PCs to investigate whichever items sounded interesting. Otherwise, it's hard to get a hero group motivated to go do something. (Oddly, it's easier to motivate an individual superhero than a superhero group.)

I've often thought that the next time I run a superhero game (if I ever do), it would not be in a standard universe, but one where everything is under assault from some outside force, a situation where the heroes are the underdogs, rather than just the super-cops patrolling the beat. Example 1: Aliens have kidnapped all the superheroes on the planet (except the PCs for some reason) and are invading. Example 2: During the timeline of Crisis on Infinite Earths, "worlds will live and worlds will die" but the PCs' worlds aren't the worlds that are expected to live... unless the PCs do something to change that.

(3) Characters can have scenario-ending powers.

It's easy to balance "super strong guy" with "shoot lasers from his eyes guy" since they are only useful in combat. You could send them down a D&D dungeon and have a generic adventure with people who can't do anything but fight.

But what if a PC can read minds? Or teleport? Or scry across long distances? Okay, yes, these are problems that *could* occur in a D&D game, but these tend to be minimized in those settings. If someone can *only* read minds, then it's not fair to always say, "Sorry, this guy's immune just like the last guy." You've got to let these powers be usable, but you have to create scenarios that aren't defeated instantly when someone reads the police commissioner's mind to find out that he is secretly Evil Clown Man, sending the PCs on dangerous missions in an attempt to kill them off. Likewise, you can't have a scenario defeated by someone who can teleport. Many DMs are "low level D&D DMs only" who think that a sufficient obstacle to a player could be a locked door. That's low level thinking. Superheroes should never be blocked by a door.

Mars Ultor
2016-07-05, 01:38 PM
Common issues are that everything is too complex because the villain is so smart and powerful; everything happens in the same place ("The midtown bank is being robbed by robots, for the eleventh time!"); they're boring heroes with no personality and sparkling teeth; and they create backstories but never actually get involved in their real lives.

Monster Bashing: There's a super-villain that creates monsters to defeat the heroes. The group gets together to defeat the creature and sometimes learns a clue to the villain's identity. Other times it's simply a matter of bashing the thing until it's defeated, there's no mystery to solve, there's not role-playing involved, it's just fun to blast and smash.

Not in My Backyard: The party has to travel sometimes, not everything happens in Gotham, or New York, or the Tri-State Area. Robots are attacking the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben has disappeared, why is the Giza pyramid glowing? Also, why doesn't anyone speak English? Can Gargantuan Man remember his high school French?

Let Me Tell You, Brother: After the heroes defeat the villain, I often have them interviewed by a pesky and ever-present reporter. While speaking into a pen (in lieu of a microphone), I sum up what the heroes have done in the worst terms and then ask them to defend themselves. They always make it worse. "Captain Ultor, while I'm sure the city is thankful that you and the Victorious Trio have defeated the Dominator again, how can you justify . . . ? And then I pick one: the outrageous property damage, that the Dominator was released by the DA because they acted as vigilantes last time, putting civilians in danger, or sometimes I just let them talk and see where we end up.

I really, really have to go right this second: I always make sure that sometimes things occur when the characters are involved in their backstories. They said they have an elderly relative, a girlfriend/spouse, a genius nephew, let them them suffer for it.