A team of super-heroes seems like the perfect construct for some RPing. The whole team concept for the group to be together in the first place. A reason to come up with memorable villains. It seems like a great way to deal with a musical chairs group. (Alphaman is dealing with an extraplanar threat so is too busy to take part in tonight's adventure!) I'm sure there are hundreds of other reasons that supers rpg are the tits.

And I would love to get deep into some, but whenever I really consider it, I come up short with how to go about running a campaign. Maybe I'm looking at it from the wrong angle. Maybe I'm looking at it through a D&D lens or something.

How do you run your supers RPGs? What does a typical session look like for you? How do you keep the concept "fresh"? Do you handwave the secret identity stuff or make it a major cog in the machine?

Quote from: Kaz;574083A team of super-heroes seems like the perfect construct for some RPing.

It is.

QuoteThe whole team concept for the group to be together in the first place. A reason to come up with memorable villains. It seems like a great way to deal with a musical chairs group. (Alphaman is dealing with an extraplanar threat so is too busy to take part in tonight's adventure!) I'm sure there are hundreds of other reasons that supers rpg are the tits.

All very true.

QuoteAnd I would love to get deep into some, but whenever I really consider it, I come up short with how to go about running a campaign. Maybe I'm looking at it from the wrong angle.

I had the same concerns. Tim (Silverliion ) among other helped inspire me to overcome these concerns. But any it goes something like this.

1. Think of the superhero genre as primarily investigation based game.
It might be criminal, scientific or mystical, but there is always a mystery to solve. So in that respect it has a lot more in common with Call of Cthulhu than D&D. The difference being that at the end of the adventure instead of  going insane and looking all pathetic you get to punch Cthulhu on the nose and knock him out.

2. Plan you games entirely from the villain point of view. Create you cast of villains, each with their own motives and particular way of doing things and let that drive the campaign.

3. Always multi-thread, that is to say keep different plot lines running in parallel and ideally at different stages of maturity. So for instance just as your heroes are about to catch up with Baron Zemo start planting the signs of the upcoming Skrull invasion. If you don't multi-thread plot supers can quickly descend into a formulaic Villain of the week sort of game.  Besides that's how Stan Lee used to write his stories. If it was good enough for him it's good enough for me!

4. Be bold! Go nuts!

First thing I like to do is define with the players what the group is - Why does it exist? What are its boundaries? What are its resources? What is its official status? Where is HQ? What is the HQ like? - then they create characters to fit into that group. For example, when playtesting my son Klaxon's Look! Up In The Sky! game, one of the groups we used were US Marshals, who specifically dealt with meta-humans. They all had a Marshal's star on their uniforms/costumes, had legal status as Marshals, and were empowered to arrest criminals. They had a secret HQ under one of the Boston Harbor islands, with criminal databases, forensic labs, and training rooms. They had a legal section, who arranged for warrants, wiretaps, and such, and had a number of trainees learning the ropes. They actually blew an arrest once by forgetting to give the perp his Miranda rights. The games ran like Police Procedurals on acid. It was awesome!

BTW, agree with everything Soylent Green posted above. And Tim Kirk's your man!

-clash

Lots of things to do with superheroes:

Patrol the neighborhood (or city, or planet depending on scale.)
Fight gangs (or slavers, or planet stealers.)
Search for a wanted super villain.
Stop a super villain from furthering some terrible plot.

Those are just some basic ideas. Its really important to sort of reverse the angle of other games a bit.  In the fiction heroes tend to be reactive, rather than proactive. They wait for adventures to come to them. However, that's often a mistake in gaming to read reactive as non-active.

Superheroes do what anyone else does in a strange and wily universe. They explore the strange realms around them (outer space, underground kingdoms) this usually leads to discovering some heinous plot against civilization as we know it.

Heroes take part in science experiments to test their skills, powers, and abilities. This is common in comics like the Fantastic Four where you have a team scientist, but all sorts of things can be brought to the science lab. Especially if the hero is willing to show off a bit. Of course things go wrong in super universe science labs. Think of a super alchemist unleashing his creations.

Heroes who have life support can explore distant places for samples--what might turn up in the depth of an active volcano that would be interesting?

Things can happen on an ordinary day. Play up the "going on a date/hitting on women/working the normal job" bit, and play it but let that lead to clues to a string of murders, a plot to invade the planet or similar things.

The simplest thing to do is look at your local crime blotter in the newspaper. People broke into an apartment? Whose apartment was it? In our universe usually just for money, in supers universe? It was to kidnap a scientist, or find some hidden plans for a mind control device, of course there will be more break ins and the heroes get a chance to stop it.

 Plot things out, play the supervillains in your head as a character, decide what they want, and what they need to do to get it, but let them fail just enough for the heroes to catch on.

Plot things like a mad scientist, a wily obsessed necromancer, and so on--what do they want and why? How can they go about it?

Let your players make their own nemesis, or common supervillain run-ins. Take those things they made, and likely dial them up some then run away with them as if you were a player too--just realize you aren't, your the bad guy, the fallible bad guy, and whatever you plot the plan is to let the PC's eventually have a chance to catch "you."

Imagine a D&D PC, evil, with superpowers, and think "what would they do?" then add in modern elements.

Watch a bad soap opera, buy a few cheap  superhero comics from the dollar/quarter whatever bin (try and avoid crossovers unless you can buy the entire set.) And see whats going on in it. Change the flavor a bit and steal.

The whole thing with superheroes is that they're half mad science, half crazy fantasy, mixed with a touch of pulp  daring, and a dash of hardcore soap opera.


Ask your players what they'd want to happen in "their" characters comic book, then take that and use it (much later than the early games.) Also play around with it.

Have the players make a few NPC's they interact with--friends, lovers, non-powered foils. Then take them and tangle them up in some crazy problems that only a superhero can help them with (especially if its their foil.)


Many early comics could be: (insert as appropriate


A/An
 ape
 scientist
 wizard
criminal

 steals
 kidnaps X

 to take over the world
 change their fortune
 make a person love them
 make that person love them



If there were still a lot of very bad soap operas on the air, you could steal from their as well, because those things have almost as many resurrections and evil plots and lost twins as comic books.

If you want start with a "dungeon"  an ancient tomb has been uncovered but something terrible seems to have been unleashed by the explorers, and its killing people, go to the tomb and find out how to stop it. Only there isn't any treasure or levels to be gained just lore about the terrible thing that was entombed! Traps and variety of guardians wait in the tomb.

Quote from: Kaz;574083And I would love to get deep into some, but whenever I really consider it, I come up short with how to go about running a campaign. Maybe I'm looking at it from the wrong angle. Maybe I'm looking at it through a D&D lens or something.

Superhero comics don't lend themselves well to traditional RPG campaigns.  The characters don't get more powerful, there's no assumed adventurer > conqueror > king style progression, continuity is fuzzy at best, and everything will get rebooted once a decade or so.  Superhero comics are more like daytime soap operas in execution - individual story arcs with major developments, and in between everything reverts to the original status quo.

QuoteHow do you run your supers RPGs?

It's ludicrously out of print, but Aaron Allston's Strike Force book is the sine qua non for running long-term superhero campaigns.

Some general advice:

Get buy-in.  IME a lot of players that will gladly sign on for a superhero game will then turn around and start bitching about what's wrong with the superhero genre and then try to "fix" it.  The superhero genre isn't simulationist; the players have to accept the conceits of the genre and play to them or it's not going to work.  If you have a Warren Ellis-style deconstructionist and a Grant Morrison what's-so-funny-about-TJAW loyalist in the same group, you're screwed before you begin.

Read the source material.  There's hundreds of years of comic book back issues out there, and you can easily lift plots, ideas, settings, characters, etc.  This isn't a genre built on original ideas.  Steal shamelessly. Read team books, not solo books (see below).

Understand the genre.  Superhero comics are not science fiction, not social justice activism, not D&D with spandex, not Delta Force with spandex, etc, etc.  Marvel comics are 1950's teen romance comics with superpowers; DC comics are two-fisted pulp detective comics with superpowers, and both have a hefty whack of Heroic Myth in them.  Most stories are morality plays.  Also it's a visual genre, which means big, unusual, mad, wonderful settings and characters.

It's not about combat.  Superhero stories virtually never, ever end with a climactic boss fight where the PCs spam the bad guy with their best attacks until he falls down.  They do end with a major confrontation, during which the PCs use what they've learned about the villain or come up with a clever tactic or use the Power of Heart to overcome the bad guy.

QuoteWhat does a typical session look like for you?

Generally I run a single story arc in two or three sessions.  Superheroes is a reactive genre; Something Happens, the PCs are made aware of it, and have to choose how to respond.  Sandbox GM techniques, like a villain timeline - what's going to happen should the PCs not interfere - is helpful but don't spend too much time on it, as it's going to fall apart almost immediately.

Typically in the first session the PCs will discover the Dastardly Plot and begin investigating.  There will be an escalating series of encounters during which the PCs wil learn more about the villain, his motives, his henchmen, etc.  I try to arrange things so that by the end of the first session we're at a cliffhanger or similar dramatic breakpoint.  In the second session the PCs should have shifted from reactive to proactive and begin assembling what they need for the Final Battle, which winds up the story arc.

QuoteHow do you keep the concept "fresh"?

You can't.  The costumed superhero genre is completely mined out, and it was always based on cliches and stolen ideas in the first place.  Going into a superhero game your focus should be on putting your own spin on the stock ideas: the alien invasion, the lost city, the world-conqueror, the world turns against the heroes, the evil mirror universe, etc.  Each of these can be rehashed a few times (Starro the Conqueror, Atlantis Attacks, the Mole Men, the Apokolips Gambit, etc.) but when the group starts feeling like this has all been done before it's time to wrap up and put the superheroes away for a while.

QuoteDo you handwave the secret identity stuff or make it a major cog in the machine?

Some plots and ideas work in a solo book but don't work in a team book. Anything to do with secret identities is one of those.  Make sure the players know that they're in a team book that's about the adventures of a team of heroes.  If either the GM or a player runs off and tries to do a bunch of character-focused stuff that's only relevant to one PC, that's boring for everyone else.  If your group is feeling particularly experimental you can do troupe style play if you really want to run what amounts to Action Comics/Detective Comics/Wonder Woman/The Flash/Green Lantern/Aquaman alongside Justice League of America.

Wow, 5 posts in and this thread is already solid gold. I'm getting half a mind to run a supers game as an intermission for WFRP. Keep up the good work, gentlemen.

Indeed.

Give them all stuff to do, on any team you'll almost always find a break down that looks something like: Brick, Brains, Blaster, Sneak.

I'm not sure why that is but you tend to get that, this of course applies to team books that either started out as a team book, or was set up from the groups first appearance to be a team. Its not so clear cut when you look at the Avengers or Justice League--albeit they have those and related roles, they're a bit different because those heroes were singular comic heroes first, team heroes second. Make sure you are clear to your players that sometimes something comes up, and one hero is going to be good at it, so let them shine. Everyone gets their chance.

An interesting aside is that the X-men is a bit of a unique team book (Blaster, Blaster, Sneak, Brain/Psychic, Brick) to begin with but a bit of mixed up in minor ways as you had Cyclops, Iceman, Marvel Girl, and Beast, but they all were good at several areas.


In team books, the team heroes interact and play a lot of each other--personalities need to conflict, but not so much that the group don't click as heroes, just enough conflict to be believable and not overwhelm the game.


A typical session for me depends on if I'm cold starting (new adventure) or wrapping up previous thread/continuing the previous threads. Usually it has "something going on" that challenges the characters. at its basic level. Yet, I focus on the internal a bit. I've run games where the costumes never came on and the "heroism" was put aside to delve into the characters personality and choices, and other times I've had games where superheroes in costumes were all that was seen. Typically though it starts out tying in the last game session into this one, either in the moment, flash back, or a brief re-telling in a characters voice what happened. Then we move through the current events that are impacting the hero, and follow through the "comic" to get to the resolution of some thread, and finally a bit of dangling plot, a bit of a resolution, and a "next time."

One of the tough things with superhero comics, is they embroil themselves with elements of all genres, action, adventure, exploration, fighting, heroism, science, and more all come up in play. Very much its a genre-blending that ages of comic created that its so smooth we don't realize its quite as kitchen sink as it really is in play.

Anything, and Everything can happen in a comic. Talk to your players though about what they DO want, and what they don't want. Some people don't want to do the secret ID thing if its going to be spoiled by "realism" the first game session.
Get a consensus, or solid compromise on such things when you pitch the game.

Get the tone/feel (serious, gritty, lighthearted, variable) get a handle on how many extremes they want in magic/tech. what time period its in, what kinds of crimes they want to see and stop with their characters. What kinds of things they want to come up (relationship drama, job drama, what have you.)

Quote from: The Butcher;574303Wow, 5 posts in and this thread is already solid gold.

It really is. Reminds me of why I fell in love with therpgsite. Some really smart roleplayers here.

Another thing to remember: If a hero wants to try something that has at least a narrow spider-silk thin amount of plausibility to it--let the hero attempt to do it.

Using their entangling attack to glide? If they can make it seem sensible? Sure.
Use force blasts to weld? Let them do it. (Dear Cyclops writers, you have a lot to explain...)

I run a constant MnM 3e and DC Adventures campaign with my group when we aren't doing anything else.  Actually our MnM group is about our longest running campaign currently, counting 2e moving to 3e MnM.  Allot of the previous posts are correct though, but the villain of the week works also and can be kinda fun as well as cliche' but hey its comics.

I've also been known to peruse Wikipedia (for hours, at times ), reading entries on superheroes and stories used by both DC and Marvel.

I'm not above stealing a good plotline (like Days of Future Past), to use in my games.

My biggest problem is making sure everyone's on the same page of "what type" of superhero game we're playing. "Dark Avenger" types (Spawn, Punisher, etc) don't mesh well with "4color" (Spider-man, Superman, Batman, etc).

I tend to prefer the latter, most of my friends the former.
(I tend to think the latter sets up less work for the GM, too. It's nice to pull the Joker out when you need a homicidal maniac, instead of invent 6 different guys, cause the heroes keep killing your bad guys...)

Quote from: Silverlion;574325Give them all stuff to do, on any team you'll almost always find a break down that looks something like: Brick, Brains, Blaster, Sneak.

That's a Champions-ism.  It doesn't actually hold up in real comic books.

In general, anything you read about how superhero comic books work that comes from any Champions book should be completely ignored.  Its genre advice has never really matched the source material.

In general, I don't do superhero gaming unless I'm the Game Master.  This is, in large part, because I do not acknowledge superheroes as a distinct genre in its own right. Instead, I see it as something overlaid upon another genre; the above-mentioned summaries of Marvel and DC's core assumptions illustrate my position sufficiently for this thread's purposes.

The first thing to go is always Status Quo Is God.  From the get-go, superhero campaigns that I run will reshape the world and everything in it, with only the matters of how and in what time left to be determined.  The presence of super-powered individuals, and the technologies that inevitably arise from such a presence, demands such radical change.

The second thing to go is usually Reed Richards Is Useless.  If the PCs don't jump at the opportunity to seize the initiative and start benefiting from their abilities--especially if they are like Tony Stark and get them from specialized technologies of their inventions--then NPCs will (e.g. Justin Hammer) and in practice we soon hit one of those Nothing Is The Same Anymore moments.

The player-characters in superhero campaigns that I run quickly become the power-players in the milieu.  Their might alone demands respect, but often it becomes true that these characters come to command incredible economic, political and social power that makes the governments and corporations of the world deal with these individuals as equals.  Secret Identities are often little-used, or used in a more conventional manner, because would-be foes that try to target the PCs via friends and family soon cease to exist.  (This, of course, is because http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThouShaltNotKill rarely exists in my campaigns as a convention, and people are far more pragmatic in dealing with viable threats.)

TL;DR I run superhero campaign as if the world is real, and history diverges from the first session.

Quote from: Novastar;574408My biggest problem is making sure everyone's on the same page of "what type" of superhero game we're playing. "Dark Avenger" types (Spawn, Punisher, etc) don't mesh well with "4color" (Spider-man, Superman, Batman, etc).

I tend to prefer the latter, most of my friends the former.

Do you have problems with people agreeing on what game to play (i.e. Dark Avengers and CCAers clearly self-identify but refuse to play in the other mode) or do you have people who agree to one mode and then play in the other (i.e. everyone agrees to play CCA and then somebody shows up with a Punisher clone)?

My experience has almost always been the latter, but that's part of a larger rant on how most gamers don't really understand "genre".

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;574422I run superhero campaign as if the world is real, and history diverges from the first session.

I could do that, but it'd be no fun for me. Half of the fun of running supers for me is the subplots involving the secret identities of the heroes.

What fun is running adventures for Superman if there's no Clark Kent? That's the best part of the Christopher Reeve movies. Lois is like a world-class reporter and yet she can't seem to figure out his identity, despite him just changing his hair slightly and wearing glasses, not to mention disappearing just before Superman shows up at just the right moment.

I'm not a big fan of realistic heroes. Nobody wears spandex and the villains always die. Tim Burton's worst crime in the Batman movies was killing off the Joker and Penguin.