marvel super hero squad online rewritten

Marvel super hero squad online rewritten Pc#
Marvel super hero squad online rewritten series#

The multi-armed Doom Squid, whose main role in the campaign is getting punked in team-fights, inevitably gets a bigger response from the players than the guy he’s working for. The villains with the most player buy-in in the campaign aren’t people who were introduced as an intentional big-bad, but the mookish folks who are easily slotting into plot-after-plot and come with specific, comprehensible goals and memorable hooks. 2) NPC VALUE IS DRIVEN BY REPETITION, ENGAGEMENT, AND INTEGRATION, NOT STATS Character change in the campaign is now either narratively driven (“It’d be interesting if Shock was no longer possessed by a ninja spirit”), or the result of logical progression (“you’ve been trying lots of thing X with your powers/skills let’s give you an actual dice in it now”). Few of the XP systems I’ve come across ingrate the approaches of gaming and comics well, so we largely made the decision to get rid of them. This campaign has used a two different systems so far, and I’ve encountered a lot more in the past.

Marvel super hero squad online rewritten series#

Changes to their powers tend to be gradual and narratively-driven (Spiderman and his villains getting slowly more powerful over the decades, as they master their abilities and one-off stunts become regular usage), or they tend to be an all-at-once shift of the status quo designed to prompt the question of “where to from here?” (Spiderman getting the venom suit, or becoming the owner of a multi-million dollar tech company with a series of advanced gadgets from his R&D). Superhero characters tend towards the iconic – they’re characters who, in the words of Robin Laws, “imposes order on the world by reasserting his essential selfhood.” We don’t watch superhero narratives to see how the character changes, but to see them apply their powers and their driving character conflict to the different conflicts. XP systems in RPG systems are usually focused on character-improvement, scaling up power levels over time and replicating the kind of learning-curve that’s often associated with the dramatic arc of fantasy characters where naive farm-boys evolve into warrior-kings and powerful sorcerers.

Here’s the thing, though: I doubt any XP system is going to scale well for superhero gaming.

Marvel super hero squad online rewritten Pc#

The downside is that having a should-be-Cosmically-aware-on-Silver-Surfer-levels PC in a game that was focused on a much smaller scale wasn’t the best possible fit. The upside of this was that the Marvel system handled that scaling well in terms of making everyone feel equal. We used Milestones for about twenty sessions, after which one of the more mathematically inclined players had scaled his character up to a power-level equivalent of Thor through a few judicious choices. It’s primary focus is getting Marvel characters moving in-and-out of teams, with every character resetting to default after an “event.” This doesn’t happen in a group where players are attached to their self-created characters, and particularly not at the pace Marvel assumes. The Marvel Heroic system we’re now using had its own problems if you use the Milestone XP system as written, with heroes scaling even faster if you devoted XP to purchasing power upgrades simply because the system was never meant for long-term play. If we’d followed the original experience point rules laid out in third edition M&M for 150 sessions religiously, the PCS would now be PL 18 – roughly the equivalent of your big, world-shaking villains like Thanos or Apokolips in your average comic book universe. We kicked off this campaign in session one with PL8 Mutants and Masterminds characters, placing the PCS on roughly the level of your average teen-hero comic book character. 15 THINGS LEARNED ABOUT SUPERHERO RPGS AFTER RUNNING 150 SESSIONS OF MY CAMPAIGN 1) MOST SUPERHERO EXPERIENCE POINT SYSTEMS SCALE POORLY FOR LONG-TERM PLAY This post is a companion piece to my 2012 post, noting some of the ways my thinking about running superhero games have evolved or changed since the first write-up. The two original characters have gone on hiatus so the players can bring in new heroes, and the team now includes an alien circuit acrobat, a rogue winged monkey from the parasitic demi-plane known as Oz, and a Mexican speedster/shadow-sorcerer whose powers stem from a number of gods. In game, the duo of Shock & Awesome have grown to a full-fledged superhero team dubbed SMAX.

Over the last six years we’ve switched systems, going from 3 rd Edition Mutants and Masterminds to Cortex’s Marvel Heroic RPG system, and accumulated three additional players (although session-by-session attendance varies). Now, six years later, we’ve just played session #150 of the same campaign, which definitely makes this one of the longest RPG campaigns I’ve ever run. So back in 2012 I wrote up a list of 13 things I’d learned running a Superhero RPG campaign for thirty sessions, and it quickly became one of the most read posts I’ve ever done.