SG,

QuoteWhat do heroes do when they are not figthing?

OK, this requires a clever answer. Clever in that I will re-interpret the question to mean "What do the heroes do when they are not fighting the BBEG?" And this is where the strength of Advantages and disadvantages systems come in for most Supers games. There is a lot of crap on there that, if not exploited, translates into dull characters with free points. But, if you throw all their enemies/rivals, dependant NPCs, etc. at them in between mahjor battles, it makes for great RP.

QuoteIf you are running some evil mastermind plot, how to you fill the gaps in time between major incidents?

Ideally, everything the PCs encounter is part of the master plot. That zombie invasion 3 sessions ago? That was the mastermind's first experiment of his new weapon. that damsel in distress, a pawn used by the BBEG to find any weaknesses of the PCs. etc. The best master plots are never revealed to the PCs. But discovered by them once the pattern is worked out.

QuoteHow do the even learn about the evil masterminds plots?

Well, that is the thing about conspiracies. They are only as good as their co-conspirators. someone will talk, or inject their own signature move into the mix. In other words, either the plot will give itself away (the thugs are hitting the banks in order of their EIN number in the IRS database) or the PCs will get a break an capture and interrogate a minion who will drop a hint.

  Each of these has more than one answer, but I think my examples will get your creative juices flowing...

  Also, look at your BBEG, try and figure out why he is evil. For instance, the Joker wants Batman to find him. He revels in that back and forth struggle between himself and his nemesis, right? Not all BBEGs will be like that, but there is a certain amount of stagecraft required from your BBEG, if he is going to dress in a cape and make demands of the UN, right?

Golden Heroes had an idea - the Daily Utility Phase. This was meant to be a certain number of 'points' a week which accumulated from the 'rest of the time when not beating up henchmen'. They could be used to Patrol (increasing the status of the hero), used for training or building gadgets.

I'd change this somewhat. Make these points negative. Let's say you get 7 Use Phases a week if you do nothing.

Figure out how many Use Phases they have and make them decide what to do with them. Do they have dependents? That's at least one a week. A full time job? Assign 3 to it. Training? One maybe? And if you start to miss some out? What happens? You get divorced? You lose your job? You begin to lose your edge.

In one game I played nearly 20 years ago, my PC was a copper as well as a superhero. His absences got him suspended and then fired. And then he couldn't maintain payments on his apartment. Is it any wonder why superheroics are often a job for the rich?

But then even the rich have to be seen. Have to pay taxes. Have to attend jury duty. Shareholders meetings? And what happens when the market crashes and they've not been paying attention? i.e. Lex Luthor spends more time looking after his business empire than attacking superman.

So, that's what you do in between. That's the downtime.

And how do you hear about Mastermind plots?

Again, Golden Heroes beat us to the punch with Campaign Ratings - including Detective Points. You're rated on how approachable you are, how good a detective you are, what contacts you develop. And this helps the GM gauge whether you find out about the problem before the Evil Mastermind has built his death ray or you respond to it after he's destroyed Cleveland.



That said - I always loved the Troubleshooter power which was in the Marvel Ultimate Powers book. It teleported the PC to the inciident, with or without backup or their armoured powersuit.

I wish I had more time to answer your question fully, but I'm actually quite late:

Superheroes do lots of things when they aren't fighting the bad guys. So do dungeon delvers, starship captains and what have you.  Any character from any game you care to mention does lots of stuff when not fighting badguys. Why is it so hard for you to figure out what Supers do?  There, at least, you have the examples of the comic books, and the mechanics that are virtually considered mandatory for a supers game in terms of disadvantage (secret identities, dependents and so on...)

What does Spider man do when he's not wall crawling? He hangs out with Mary Jane and Aunt May. What does Tony Stark do when he's not Iron Man?  He runs a mega-business empire or invents new crazy shit to make money off of! Or he runs SHEILD, but thats another thing.

Aside from the Punisher, virtually any comic character (or those from the movies) you care to name answers that question month after month in voluminous detail.

It is, to be frank, a silly question.

Silverlion,

The is a really good collection of intelligence spreading methods, thanks. What it does highlight is how much depends on actual make-up of the team/party.

I agree about the importance of downtime. The question is how to introduce, or at least encourage it.

Say the team comes back from Central Park having just beaten up a giant monster. The team's scientist players says he's taking some samples back to his lab to examine, which is cool. There is a chance for some downtime for the other character. Do you wait for the player to come up with a downtime activity  on their own accord or do you as GM should you need to prompt it and if so, how?

Spike,

Yes, "What to heroes do when they are not figthing" is a silly way of putting it. However the answer is not as simple "same as any other game".

Everyday activities player characters might engage in, like going to a bar or into a shop, aren't always that straight forward in a traditional four-color supers world and the result can be jarring (though it can be used to great comic effect like the scene in Spiderman 2 in which Spidey, in full costume, rides an elevator with a regular person and loud muzak playing in the background).

Some heroes have secret identitities, some don't. Some have rich personal lives, some, especially if they are not quite human, have very little life outside the job at all. So if you put it all together, in the same team you may have in which some players can share downtime scenes because they know each other's secret identities, others can only have solo downtime scenes while other still might struggle to have any sort of downtime scene.

I am not saying these are problems thats cannot be dealt with, but there are a complication specific to the genre. A GM that is aware of this complication could potentially before the game starts set some ground rules like "you all know each other secret identities" to avoid some of these issues, or not. But it becomes a reasoned choice either way.

Getting a feel for the specific issues with Supers games is exactly what I want to get out of this thread and so far I've found a lot of very interesting being raised.

MSH gave you Karma (the experience and how do do cool stuff points) for doing mundane life things. It also had a strange few bits that gave you reward for showing up at say supermarket openings. (I'm not sure any classic Marvel heroes had done this, at the time the game was out for decades before...) However, fulfilling commitments was a way to get points to do cool stuff.  Depending on the game you can either award experience/drama points or the like for doing the out of costume stuff at a higher proportion to time. So that you have more to spend on the cool, fight the bad guy moments.


I think one of the hardest aspects of superheroic gaming is the fact that comic book heroes, often DO a lot of what is seen as down time, but is still role-playing the character. That  combined with the makeup of the group may vary a bit more due to power selection and you create two not easy to resolve problems. How to portray "the downtime" as exciting as the "uptime" (Perhaps part of that is simply considering it as interesting and not thinking of it as "downtime" so much as just different uptime.)

Quote from: Soylent GreenI agree about the importance of downtime. The question is how to introduce, or at least encourage it.

It may be beneficial to have the players provide a list to the GM of activities their characters might be routinely doing and contacts in their daily life outside of those in their hero line of work.  I think it is also important for players to establish a home base (Metropolis, Gotham, Hell's Kitchen, etc...) with a level of challenge their character would be optimal for.  This is also helpful to establish a hero's individual face time.  

That to me is the hardest part of running team superhero games.  Finding methods to deliver individual face time and challenges without keeping other players in any length of downtime.  This may require the GM to break down the group from time to time so the heroes can work away from the group as a whole.  

Another thing to consider is where a hero is starting from.  Are they starting from their origin, established, or even legacy characters?  The more established they are the more background a player will have to supply explaining their exploits and nemesis.

It does kind of depend what sort of Heroes game you're running, but I think that yes, in almost every case, the heroes will have personal lives, and those will be very important.

Even in my Legion game, where the characters all have public identities and spend their full-time working (and mostly living) in Legion HQ, their personal lives are extremely important to the game.  In part, it is their relationships and friendships with each other and the other PCs, and in part it is the question of "what do they do when they're not fighting the Fatal Five"?

Some of them have family, some of them have created a family, some of them have outside-the-legion girlfriends, etc etc. and all of these are important.

RPGPundit

Well my conclusion after reading all these posts (thanks guys, it was very helpful!) is that I can't really start planning a supers campaign without first knowing who exactly the player characters will be. Some might say that is obvious and it applies to all roleplaying games, not just supers. Of course if that were the case then published scenarios would not exist.  

So yesterday I took the plunge, we spent the session rolling up characters and talking through the rules and then just played a bored game. But I'll start a new thread for that.