I'm a little late to the party since the game's license has been pulled by Marvel but I'm still curious about it. I have the core-book but I haven't had the opportunity to play yet (hopefully soon). As a super hero role playing game how does it stand up/compare to the others like FASERIP, Champions and Mutants and Masterminds? The premise and implied play-style appear to be very different but the mechanics strike me as odd but interesting but I don't have much experience with other Cortex based games.

It's very gamey and narrative focused.

I found it to be WAY too much work and futzing around with dice for the trouble.

It's fans like to blame Marvel for canceling the licence but I suspect it got canned because nobody liked it and it didn't sell.

I played it for several months and enjoyed certain aspects of the game, but that's because we tended to play it very stripped down.  Where it got fiddly, it got fiddly fast.

Quote from: Piestrio;686705It's fans like to blame Marvel for canceling the licence but I suspect it got canned because nobody liked it and it didn't sell.

I don't think it had to do directly with sales. Every release jumped to the top of the dtrpg list and stayed there for a bit.

I think it has more to do with:

A. MWP bungling physical product. Seriously, out of the 6 books published, they only managed to get 2 of them to printers. This wasn't a problem with the game, it was a problem with their management.

combined with:

B. REALLY high expectations from Marvel. They are riding the movie zeitgeist right now. I imagine they were expecting a much higher return than they were getting, and the return they were expecting was probably higher than an RPG was going to produce, especially when the physical product was managed horribly.

But, either way, we are both speculating. But: there is no evidence the pdf copies sold badly, and plenty that they sold well. The physical releases on the other hand. Well yeah, fuck that shit.

Quote from: RunningLaser;686708I played it for several months and enjoyed certain aspects of the game, but that's because we tended to play it very stripped down.  Where it got fiddly, it got fiddly fast.

What did you find fiddly?

The fiddly part for me was that I felt like the dice pools were playing poker with each other.

Quote from: Nexus;686712What did you find fiddly?

I remember having my character picking up an object, like a steel girder or some-such, and using it during a fight.  But it wasn't as simple as picking it up and swinging it around, I had to turn it into an asset for it to be used.  Then there were things like making complications- little stuff that tripped me up.  

Lot's of dice to roll as well, and each time you went to do something, you had to go through and see what dice it was possible for you to roll.  "I'll use my Cunning Fighter distinction, this affiliation and this power...."

All in all, it wasn't something that I was used to and I never fully "got it" as the months rolled by.  Combats seemed only to end when the Watcher wanted it to.  Towards the end, we just used it in a very stripped down way.

I was happy that I got to play it, but in the end I like my supers games simpler and more straightforward.

MHR is one of the few RPGs that when people dismiss it as a "storygame", I don't disagree. It's a very system-orientated abstract system that makes a number of assumptions that I think killed it, as it's intentions seem to rest on players mostly playing established characters in published railroads, adopting the PoV of a comicbook writer rather than taking on the role of a character. It's woefully under-supported, with the core rulebook providing an abysmal amount of info in comparison to other Marvel RPGs. There's some interesting ideas badly implemented and buried under a lot of crunch existing only "because game".

In short, it doesn't come close to touching MSH/FASERIP as an rpg, but if you just want a game where Kitty Pryde and Thor are 'balanced' and you're more interested in combat than the actual soap-opera-like comics Marvel is famous for, it's not bad. Though you'd probably be better off just getting into Heroclix

Quote from: Emperor Norton;686709But, either way, we are both speculating. But: there is no evidence the pdf copies sold badly, and plenty that they sold well. The physical releases on the other hand. Well yeah, fuck that shit.

The very best pdf sales are under even mediocre print sales from any decent game line (barring indie crap no one buys). Having great pdf sales means you sold 300 copies. That's shit for real book sales.

I think the game could have held on if 1) it charged $10 more cover price, 2) it went with a b&w interior, and 3) they immediately starting putting out "handbook of the MU"-style hero/villain rosters.

Quote from: danbuter;686731The very best pdf sales are under even mediocre print sales from any decent game line (barring indie crap no one buys). Having great pdf sales means you sold 300 copies. That's shit for real book sales.

Even if you have exact numbers to back that up, it has no connection to "no one liking it". They screwed up physical releases a lot, and without question that hurt their sales. Which is once again a management issue, not an issue with the game itself.

I would be interested to see what numbers though you have to back up that PDF sales are a huge order of magnitude less than physical copies. I'm not disbelieving you, I just would like something other than a random post on the internet. High sales for ANY RPG, physical or pdf are not exceptionally high, barring a few special cases.

Of course, if you want to say that pdf sales mean nothing, then I guess everyone here who heralds how much money WotC is making by releasing the pdfs of TSR era stuff and how its so so popular based on them shooting to the top of the lists when they are released area also zero evidence of interest.

We had fun with it but there was a serious lack of real consequence. You get physically mentally or emotionally stressed out and you are out of a scene.

Maybe it was our GM but there were no real "oops you're dead" moments. Ever. Mind you we have the same issue with Fate.

Quote from: BarefootGaijin;686746We had fun with it but there was a serious lack of real consequence. You get physically mentally or emotionally stressed out and you are out of a scene.

Maybe it was our GM but there were no real "oops you're dead" moments. Ever. Mind you we have the same issue with Fate.

You generally don't have "oops you're dead" in Fate, anyway.  Death can happen, but it's not a big emphasis of the system.

What you have, if things aren't going well, and your GM is doing his job, is an accelerating snowball of suck that will make your life a living hell.

But if you don't have a GM that's used to doing that, it can be a pretty tepid experience.

I assume the same thing is true with MHRP.

Quote from: Emperor Norton;686740Even if you have exact numbers to back that up, it has no connection to "no one liking it". They screwed up physical releases a lot, and without question that hurt their sales. Which is once again a management issue, not an issue with the game itself.

I would be interested to see what numbers though you have to back up that PDF sales are a huge order of magnitude less than physical copies. I'm not disbelieving you, I just would like something other than a random post on the internet. High sales for ANY RPG, physical or pdf are not exceptionally high, barring a few special cases.

It was from various threads from guys who worked at rpg companies. I didn't save the links, though. Feel free to believe or disbelieve, I'm not playing your lame-ass forum game of "prove it!".

Cortex is a shit system... Unfortunately MWP refuses to realize this so it gets saddled to even more licensed property... And because of this, I refuse to buy product from them I otherwise would have gotten due to the Licensed IP (Supernatural, nBSG, Serenity, Marvel, and now Firefly)

Cortex is the only RPG that makes me actually angry trying to play it... The dicing mechanic is shit... Even talking about it makes me unreasonably angry... In 30 years of playing RPGs, I have NEVER encountered a system that makes me want to punch someone... I really gave the system a try. I played it 4 times before I gave up... Each game made me angrier and angrier...

Which, I don't like being angry... I'm a pretty laid back person and it takes a lot for me to get mad... But holy shit... Cortex is a good way to fast track me there...