Casting Shadows

The question for today, Day 19, asks us to identify our favorite supers RPG. I enjoy a good superhero game, and will often track them down just to read how they approach the genre and character-building. I do not have exhaustive experience with all the top supers games out there, and there are a few major ones which I have not tried. Supers are one area where my RPG collection is a little lop-sided. While I have a good range of books in print and/or pdf for my other areas of interest, I own very few physical products for supers games. The ones I do have are ones tilted much more toward creating your own characters than they are those which support licenses from Marvel or DC or whatever. I have a fondness for Superworld, and Villains and Vigilantes, and Heroes Unlimited is of course a game I think of kindly. That said, I am always on the lookout for a good copy of the Marvel Super Heroes game from TSR. It has slipped through my grasp many times.

The supers game I ran the longest, and with the most fun was actually Aberrant from White Wolf’s trinity of Pulp/Supers/SF games. I should probably have mentioned Trinity yesterday, but it seemed better to mention it here. While each of the three games has the look and feel of very different genres, there is a continuing thread of the heroic across all three which in a definite sense casts them all as variations on the theme of what does a powered person do with their time?

By the time Aberrant came along I had been running Storyteller games for a very, very long time and it was easy to get this game going around the table. It is a game of massive die pools and intense requirements for tracking power interactions, but it is also a lot of fun when you are comfortable with it. With or without the baked in setting metaplot, Aberrant was a very robust and full-featured supers game which gave players a lot of control over the sort of heroic abilities they wanted to have at the outset, and those they might grow into later. There was a good amount of attention paid to how 90s comics felt, and a good balance of threat and power in the characters from the beginning. With Adventure! and Trinity (Aeon) to back it up, a group had a lot of gaming ideas to draw from and be inspired by, in the core books alone, as well as a very expansive and well-outlined playground in which to throw cars and solve crimes.

I should also mention Mutants and Masterminds, both 2nd and 3rd editions, which I think hold probably the current pinnacle of supers RPG design for novice to experienced players. Our Aberrant chronicle ended up being converted to M&M2nd Ed. during the later part of its run and while that is not something I ever recommend doing, I have nothing but good to say about Mutants & Masterminds. It is not my favorite supers game, however. I just think it’s probably the best.

Funny creatures, aren’t we all?

What is your favorite Supers game?

#rgaday2015