What elements are you expecting to find - elements you consider mandatory for a Superhero RPG to be worth your trouble?
First and foremost: it supports -my- ideas. HERO, M&M, GURPS Supers, and even the Fate version of Kerberos Club all do a wonderful job of giving me a toolset to make dang near anything I could want, no matter how absurd. Ghost aliens? Sure. Magical cowboys? No problem. Giant mecha pilots? Doesn't matter if the mech is the giant or the pilot is, either way a good system will have me covered. Games like Aberrant and AMP and Godlike rein things in, requiring players to share a common origin, but they provide a solid framework to support me within their constraints. I won't be making any vampire samurai in Aberrant, but I can make a bio-manipulating master swordsman for example.
Sensible. No one wants to play a genre that's sandbox in nature without the ability to truly customize the super they're making down to the tights, ticks, and tiara. A litmus test I use to determine if a Supers RPG is worth its salt is to take an iconic superhero from comics - Wolverine, Superman, Thor, Batman, Squirrel Girl -
don't judge me - and see how accurately I can emulate them in the system. One of my favorite systems to create characters out of (although incidentally I've never had the chance to actually
play it) is
Heroes Unlimited. It covers just about every power, origin, and archetype you can imagine and even has roll charts for everything so you can simply let the dice create a completed character from scratch.
My vision attempts to remain fairly faithful to OSR mainfaire. While your traditional class/race/etc system is fairly archetypal and limited in terms of creativity and customization, I believe I've touched on a good basis for having my cake and eating it as well.
Players will build their characters by choosing
Origins or
Archetypes (haven't decided on naming convention yet, but they stand in logically for classes), such as
Mutant or
Bio-Experiment or
Alien or
Cosmic, to name a few off the top of my head. This serves to isolate the nature of their awesomeness and offers a growth template partly to determine what powers they get, but more typically
how characters (and their powers) grow, change, or improve over time. Much as a D&D/PF character class grows stronger, gaining new abilities and empowering old ones, characters will acquire new powers, strengthen existing ones (and possibly evolve or change them), acquire Feat-like options to customize and compliment their existing capacity, and more through their Origin/Archetype's growth track.
That said, IMO, the best supers achieve this goal of supporting player ideas by giving them effects driven rulesets (HERO, M&M) rather than exception driven ones (Aberrant, AMP). Systems where players can design their characters' powers themselves, rather than picking from an approved list (which are of course helpfully expanded with a series of supplements you are expected to buy).
I'm not familiar with the terminology, or perhaps your usage. Would you elaborate on the relevancy of "effects-driven" vs. "exception-driven" here?
With the basics covered, what topics and concepts specific to Supers-themed environments are you hoping to discover have been fleshed out in the game?
Honestly, M&M and HERO have pretty well done all the history and navel gazing aspects at this point. What I like are unique new villains, organizations, and weird world aspects. I idea mine the heck out of HERO books for M&M games for example, but you can always use a setting book as an alternate universe for example.
That said, one thing to establish early on if you're making your own setting is: is this four color or realistic? Are you going for more of a Marvel/DC supers feel, where the status quo never really changes and the world isn't struggling from PTSD after countless near destructions*, or are you looking for more of an Astro City vibe, where heroes actually get old and retire and the average person on the street knows a charm or two to protect themselves while in "that part of town".
When it comes to setting, I'm actually thinking about being generic enough to cover most of your tropes and tables/generators to draft up new ones. No sense in creating a system that's so versatile but then limiting it to, say, 60's-era capes and cowls. I'm outsourcing opinions right now to get a better idea of what kind of elements I might need to cover in the book so that the DM and players can have the resources they need to do handle whatever kind of theme and feel they want.
Finally, as you finish reading through the book, what are some bits you're glad aren't present in it - either topics that weren't covered or aspects that were left undefined?
The more I think on it, the more a metaplot is probably a bad move. They seldom (if ever in supers RPGs?) get finished, and really make the world feel like the publisher's/freelancer's than my own. Like signature NPCs, world history, organizations, new nations, etc. are all good things. But then telling me "in the next book, we blow up 90% of this stuff, but you'll have to wait to find out which" is just bad marketing and makes me feel like I'm reading a failed comic rather than playing in a game world. It's my bias though.
I couldn't agree more. I want to provide as much help in generating and simulating a system as I can to help get - and keep - the ball rolling for a GM, but I honestly feel like a preset meta-environment would be a detractor. They don't add much and they unnecessarily alienate players who might want to do somthing different.
(*one of these days, I keep telling myself, I'm going to work on a system free sourcebook that's nothing but super-hero apocalypses the heroes failed to stop, and what the different worlds look like afterwards. A whole chapter devoted to supers-and-zombies for instance, exploring the difference between Marvel Zombies and the eX-Heroes novels for example, and how to work those different ideas into your own campaigns. And then other chapters would explore more unique disaster scenarios.)
Cool! Post-apocalyptical supers where "It All Went Wrong" ala
Dark Sun sounds like a great environment to explore!