Spun off from the "Ethics of Telepathy in Supers" thread...

Let's talk about KILLIN!!!! in Supers RPGs.

Bren brought up some good points on Pulp Heroes and their varying proclivities on dealing with bad guys. I'll defer to his details on Pulp Heroes over mine - because they varied more widely than standard comic-fare given that they were often multi-media affairs, but tended to have their roots in pulp novels and radio serials. Those novels and serials were huge influences on comics later.

A Little Context...
So while as Bren points out, Pulp heroes often used non-lethal methods to deal with their opponents, others used lethal force with varying degrees of regularity. This was true of early comics too - or at least implied. The closer to those pulps ones gets the more lethal the comics were. Batman kills people with uncommon fashion, usually by punching people into environmental hazards - often on purpose. (He hung a mental patient from the Batplane as he flew over Gotham in Batman #1 and said "He's probably better off this way.") Golden Age comics had some... crazy standards of violence and whacky stuff. The noir aspects of the era outlived most of the other conceits especially in RPG's that go beyond just Supers of this era.

But the trend definitely slowed down and came to a campy halt once the Comics Code landed in 1954. Which coincides with the rise of the Silver Age of Comics. For the most part, this is the era that defined modern Supers that we know of today with DC's and Marvel's respective pantheons being updated at the beginning and end of the Silver Age respectively. The Comics Code forbade graphic violence, and supernatural elements. But the genre was still defined by these constraints. The no-killing "rule" started here. But with the advent of the modern form of Marvel Comics in the early 60's - they pushed back almost immediately.

By the early 70's several "landmark" events happened where Stan Lee published comics without the approval of the Code Authority forcing a change in the rules. The Bronze Age is when comics matured dramatically. Very adult-themed storylines began to show up, that led to the direct evolution we see today in the Modern Age where the contrast of Supers in the "real world" conflict with out rosy-imaginations of the "Good Ol' Days".

So where do you stand in Supers in RPG's where heroes either kill bad guys? Anti-heroes? How do you handle it?

I game for escapism, so my comic book gaming is 100% Silver Age-Comics Code.  But that's just a matter of taste.

Depends on the type of game you want to play.

I think every superhero game I've ever GMd (from TSR Marvel onward I've pretty much tried them all, me and my guys are big comic nerds) has ended up dancing along this line at some point. Nowadays I don't think of it in binary terms, like "Lethal ON/OFF", but more in terms of how realistic I want the game word to feel. For the most part, my players run heroes that are the "banish, capture or reform" type, but like you say, every now and then there's a "landmark" moment when they take the gloves off and someone gets banished to the sun's core, or one of the Evil Underwater Cities gets its dome cracked open, or whatever.

Personally, I like that balance. Iron Age styled games just come off as murder simulators to us, though one of my personal favourite campaign arcs (one campaign, a billion different systems over the years) had them transported back to pre-Code Pulp World, where the characters were shocked and horrified at the levels of violence.

I don't quite understand the idea of *wanting* to be a mass-murdering Super, since it's so trivially easy. Giving context to your supers game other than "Well we're supers, we save people just because it's what we do" is important to me. That's probably the big distinction between Silver Age DC and latter Silver Age Marvel.

I liken it to my Sandbox style GM-style. You can do what you want. The world will react accordingly. It's another reason I try to ground my PC's into their background and the setting. So they have something to fight for or something to lose. If they ditch all that and try to go Murder Hobo... well again, the world will react accordingly and I'll flip the Campaign Header around from Supers to Villains and they'll quickly learn why the Avengers/JLA are not to be trifled with.

Of course there's killing for a reason... and killing "just because".  There's a large gulf in that ellipse. Wolverine (unless he's berserking) doesn't wantonly kill people. The Punisher kills a lot of people by his code.

I don't have an issue with anti-heroes in my games (I use FASERIP and I have my own rules for anti-heroes that make it a lot steeper to advance though they get fewer restrictions on Karma) as long as they adhere to a code of some sort.

First, I pretty much never play supers games. But if I did, I would not want to artificially avoid deaths. I like setting up interesting situations and then playing them out to see how those situations would play out. Artificially preventing things from happening that would otherwise happen, usually seems to me like the opposite of what I usually want.

Of course, there are plenty of non-lethal situations that can be fun to game. And there can be plenty of good reasons not to kill people. In fact, I'm usually more sensitive to reasons not to kill people than most other players around me in most games. I'm the guy whose characters tend to object when someone wants to kill prisoners for convenience, when there's a reasonable alternative and they aren't someone who we agree should be dead. I like the baseline human behavior to be not killing without a good reason.

But when resolving action and fighting with deadly weapons, generally a lot of people tend to die.

And in comic books, as well as in other fiction and games, I tend to think it's lame and annoying when the situation supposedly involves using deadly weapons, but no one (or almost no one, or way fewer than should) actually gets killed by them. I also think that if the supposed effect is to avoid messing people (kids?) up with violence, or to model good attitudes to violence, that making combat out to be safe is a particularly backwards way to go about it.

I think we're on the same vibe. I once nuked a PC (well, the USA did) as he crossed the line from anti-hero to strategic-level threat. One of the characters is a highy-trained cult assassin, but her schtick is that one of the other PCs is playing her god and forbids her from killing. Of course, sometimes he 'leaves the room', so to speak. I can usually tell when an evil NPC or villain is going to merit that kind of attention, so I'm pretty much in charge of pacing. And of course, a lot of the time there isn't party consensus on whether an NPC warrants permanent removal from the setting. Makes for some nice inter-party conflict. But if your have too many NPCs like that the game starts to turn into a kill-list, which is not what I'm going for when I play supers. On the other hand, a complete lack of a killing is probably skewing too Silver Age for us over the long haul. And I do have one PC who maintains his own personal list, no matter what. No matter what game or genre we're playing, now I come to think. Gee, maybe I should talk to him about that.

They do sometimes sideswipe me and take a fatal dislike to someone out of the blue, which is a lot of fun, because then I know I have someone who's going to torment them for ages.

I've never ran a straight-up Supervillains game, though one campaign had them playing as villain-versions of themselves for a while, Mirror Universe style. For a game where they actually played villains on the make, I'd probably look at Blades in the Dark's set-up for structure, though something more super for the engine.

My superhero campaigns are not what you would consider modern age. They take pieces of the pulp/golden age, silver age and bronze age. But hug pretty close to the line on morality to the silver age.

It's my comfort zone.

I was never really into super hero comic books (more horror for me), but I do like the old pulp crime fights, like the Shadow and Doc Savage.

The Shadow would kill dozens of people a story. Doc Savage had. a code of not killing, but his henchmen didn't and they would often "accidentally" kill the villain at the end and have a good laugh about it. (At least the ones I've read, it was not uncommon). The Spider would not only kill villains, he'd brand their foreheads.

I grew up on the latter Bronze Age era of comics.  So if I were to run a superhero game, killing bad guys wouldn't be *completely* off the table... but it would be A Moral Quandary, with consequences and fallout for many issues, er, game sessions to follow.

Of course, if you don't want the heroes to go all Punisher in a game, it helps if not every villain is a murderous psychopath.  While the bank-robbing villain is a cliche these days, I think it would be good to have a healthy mix of those sort of malcontents in a four-color campaign; the sort you can sock on the jaw and not feel awful when they eventually escape from prison (most of Flash's rogues gallery fall in this category).

Depends on the rea played in and more importantly the tone of the sessions.

Is it gritty pulp and serial heroes gunz-a-blazin?
Is it early comic book mayhem where sometimes criminals didnt make it to the justice system.
Is it some Comic Book Dark Age where the villains slaughter people in droves but the heroes refuse to put the mad dogs down.
Is it some balance where you try not to kill for obvious reasons. But some will pull the trigger of necessary.

I usually lean to a balance. The heroes should not be slaughtering people. But they wont just stand back and let a villain kill again and again. Classic Marvel as it were.
But a dystopia can be tons of fun and I had a blast GMing Aberrant.

Quote from: Omega;1025380But a dystopia can be tons of fun and I had a blast GMing Aberrant.

I've always wanted to run the Savage Worlds Necessary Evil campaign for that reason, but I don't like SW and so I've never bothered. But I've gone too far in the dystopian direction before, which made the PCs literally abandon earth for one of the better ones the players knew about, the metagaming bastards. Good times though. Who doesn't like vampire-cyborg police states and disintegration booths?

Well, what if you were playing a WW2 Supers game, with the PC's being Allied Superheroes, would it be OK to kill Fascists? (And by that I mean, Nazi, Italians and Japanese, depending on which combat theatre they were in.)  Because they'll be trying to murder the PC's back, if not first.

I've run numerous superhero games in the past, ranging from Pulp heroes to cosmic level games where entire systems were at stake. Each game had its own set of rules for what was allowed (or not allowed) in regards to killing. Pulp Heroes did kill, but not indiscriminately. I've run 2 or 3 Golden Age games. In one, the heroes didn't kill at all, and tended to take a "we're better than you" attitude because of it. Another one the heroes had no problems killing Nazis, etc, but didn't go out of their way to do so all the time. The third one was a mix, where killing was considered ok, but they would sometimes take the moral high ground. I've run plenty of Silver Age games, where killing didn't happen, because heroes just didn't kill.

I have run Iron Age style games, but they tended to fall more along the lines of the Suicide Squad comics, and not Image Comics and their gun porn and multiple pockets on costumes attitude. The characters did kill, but only when necessary (with one exception). One character was a vigilante because his wife and daughter were killed by Russian mobsters. Normally, he would wound opponents, but when he fought Russians, he showed no mercy. The consequences of their actions fed future storylines (such as a man becoming a vigilante who tried to hunt them all down because his child was killed during a running battle the players had with said Russian mobsters on a highway). By the end of the campaign, the character who hated Russians turned himself in after they broke the Russian mob in their city, and he personally killed their leader. It was actually pretty fun. Of course, I had players who didn't turn each session into a slaughterhouse; they spent more than one session doing non-combat stuff (investigations, etc). They would take money from criminals, and use it to help improve bad neighborhoods, fund programs for recovering drug addicts, etc.  They still tried to make a difference, even though

I like my superhero game high on drama and low on the body count.