I recently felt the urge to find a rules-lite system for playing superhero games. Like most nerds I love superheroes; it’s a very unique genre bursting with its own weird tropes and traditions. It’s not surprising that superhero games are popular in the TTRPG space.

What did surprise me as I began to search for a game is that there are a lot of superhero RPGs out there. I found over 25 games that seemed compelling, at least at a glance, and that’s just rules-lite games; there are even more games if you include crunchier systems. But crunchy games aren’t the focus of this piece.

The Criteria

Before I start talking about the games I found, I should quickly talk about what I was personally looking for in a superhero system. If you want the same things out of a superhero system, the research I did will hopefully be very useful to you. If you want the opposite of what I wanted, the list might still be instructive in some way, maybe.

• Something rules-lite. As a GM I feel comfortable with making rulings on the fly, but I am still looking for a system that would mechanically encourage players to do certain superhero-y things [e.g. save people]. If a game was basically just incredibly simple action-resolution mechanics with some rules about point-buying superpowers, that was a major negative.

• On a related note, I eventually realized that it was a major selling point for me if a game had literally any consideration for secret-identity type stuff. There’s so much more to superhero comics than people fighting each other.

• For a lot of people it’s important that the power-levels of the superheroes in their game are accurately reflected, like having Batman be a thousand times weaker than Superman. I don’t really care about that; I mostly want a system where every superhero is equally good at doing different things.

• It was important to me that a system allowed players to do creative things, instead of having more binary combat [e.g. Pikachu attacking Onix after getting water on it, Spider-Man defeating Sandman with a vacuum cleaner].

• I wasn’t interested in settings, and if a game had a setting too integral to the intended experience that was a disqualifier [e.g. Aberrant].

Some Notes

Before I start discussing these superhero RPGs in earnest, I need to clarify a few things:

• I haven’t played literally any of these games. I also can’t afford to buy the rulebooks for all of them for the sake of this piece, and I wouldn’t have the time to read all of them even if I did. These impressions are based on product descriptions, reviews, forum posts, podcasts, videos, and, rarely, rulebooks if I can access them.

• These are basically the impressions of someone who is window shopping; if I speak negatively about a game, please take my opinion with a grain of salt, because my opinion is ultimately not based on personal experience, and of course what sounds unappealing to me might sound appealing to you. I think I make my preferences and biases very clear here.

Another thing worth mentioning; a lot of superhero games that otherwise are rules-lite have complicated character creation. But since that’s all very frontloaded in a game I’ll be ignoring character creation-related crunch. The complexity of actual gameplay is ultimately a lot more important outside of a one-shot context.

I’m going to divide all of these games into a handful of broad categories. These will probably be self-explanatory to anyone who reads Cannibal Halfling, but so we’re all on the same page:

• ”Traditional” games. These are games that, broadly speaking, are a bit more “old school” in design philosophy. Characters roll dice against numbers for action resolution, and there isn’t a lot of free-form / narrative driven stuff embellishing those numbers. Non-superhero examples would be most versions of D&D and GURPS.

• ”Story” games. These are games that are more focused on shared storytelling, narrative-first mechanics. Some people derisively say that these games have a “writers’ room” approach to gameplay. Non-superhero examples include most PbtA games and Primetime Adventures.

• ”Inbetween” games. These are games that fit somewhere between “traditional” and “story” games. I think a good litmus test for an inbetween game is if the GM can’t make a reasonable guess of what’s going to happen, even if the action resolution mechanics are very normal. You’ll probably disagree with me on what constitutes an inbetween game a few times, and that’s ok. Non-superhero examples include Teenagers From Outer Space, Maid RPG, and Ghostbusters.

• ”Other” games. Strictly speaking, all of these “other” games fit into one of the three aforementioned categories, but instead of covering the entire superhero genre/spectrum they’re focused on specific sub-genres, or maybe even something more granular.

Once again, remember that I haven’t played any of these games and I’m making my categorizations based on how people describe these games. Apologies if I’m ever a little off-base.

Traditional Games

Marvel Super Heroes

Let’s kick things off with possibly the most traditional superhero games, retroclones of TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes. FASERIP seems to be a pretty straight clone, while Astonishing Super Heroes adds a “revamped Karma system inspired by modern narrative RPGs”.

People who grew up with Marvel Super Heroes seem to have a lot of fond memories of it. Even though the game requires referencing a big table for a lot of action resolution stuff it’s usually considered to be rules-lite, at least by the standards of the 80s.

In an episode of the Splatbook podcast Kyle Latino said “the TSR FASERIP Marvel games do not produce tales that look at all like what happens in the comics”, which confirmed what I was assuming about Marvel Super Heroes and its derivatives. I’m not sure how much the Karma system in Astonishing Super Heroes changes that.

Supergame

There isn’t a lot of discussion about the third edition of Supergame online. It was described by RPG.net forum user burbleflurp as being “Icon’s more traditional cousin”. I watched a video by Babies with Knives about its mechanics and it sounds like a game that has tools to create superhero characters, but without much to facilitate superhero storytelling outside of players and GMs making a concerted effort to do that. I elaborate more on this when I talk about Tiny Supers.

BASH

BASH is a bit more popular than Supergame, but still not very widely discussed. Thankfully an RPG.net user named Stacie_GmrGrl wrote a highly detailed review of BASH that seems comprehensive. The action resolution mechanics use multipliers designed to create very dramatic and swing-y results in an attempt to emulate comicbook storytelling. Players choose advantages as well as disadvantages during character creation; weaknesses are certainly welcome in a superhero game. The book also supports low-level, high-level, and cosmic-level powers.

BASH also has a system that gives players advantages or disadvantages depending on how they spent points during character creation; characters get hero points if they didn’t spend all their points, and setback points if they overspent. Hero points allow more street-level heroes to fight alongside stronger characters, and characters can spend hero points to make certain things happen, which adds a small narrative element.

BASH provides tropes and optional extra rules for eleven different superhero sub-genres, including pulp heroes, super teens, and science fiction alongside mainstays like golden age and silver age. There are no secret-identity-type mechanics I can see, though; the review mentions a subplot system that includes personal subplots as a thing that can happen, but that sounds very cursory. While I wish BASH did have more of a focus on out-of-costume gameplay, for the most part it seems like a compelling option for traditional supers play.

Supers RED, Triumphant

A designer named Simon Washbourne created a game called Supers! in 2010. He sold the rights to a company called Hazard Studio, which created a second edition called Supers Revised (also known as Supers RED). Then Washbourne made a new superhero game called Triumphant.

Both games seem to be like BASH, which is to say, rules-lite superhero games focused on combat that are more substantial than some of the more rudimentary games like Supergame. A mechanic unique to Supers RED and Triumphant is that powers can only be used once per round, which is designed to prevent players from spamming their most useful ability. There are other games that also focus on fight scenes, but with a more narrative focus [Sentinels, Icons]. But if you want to approach superheroes from a more traditional angle Supers RED and Triumphant are well-regarded options.

Golden Heroes / Codename: Spandex

A game that caught my eye was Golden Heroes, which received a free retro-clone in the form of Codename: Spandex. Golden Heroes is probably most well known for its character creation system and its rules related to “downtime”, which is to say, what superheroes do when they’re not fighting crime.

Unfortunately the downtime mechanics are incredibly rigid; it’s basically just a system where a player describes what they do while they aren’t fighting crime and the GM tries to see where that would manifest via experience gains. The rest of the mechanics can’t really be described as rules-lite by any reasonable standard.

Golden Heroes sounds great in concept, but in execution it’s a bit lacking and dated. The PDF for the retroclone is available for free online if you want to give the rules a once-over for yourself.

Miscellaneous Traditional Games

There are a handful of other traditional supers games I did not write about [Kapow, Supers Unleashed, 3D6 Supers, Metagene] because there didn’t seem to be a lot of discussion about them online, and also they seemed uninteresting to me because they didn’t give me the impression they were designed to do anything except superhero fighting. The comments I made about Supergame probably would’ve applied; apologies for how dismissive that sounds, but I did the deep dive on over 20 other games and there aren’t a lot of things I can say about games with rudimentary point-buy systems, a list of superpowers, and simple D6-based action resolution tables; they’re basically just different flavors of the exact same thing.

Inbetween Games

Tiny Supers

Starting the inbetween section we have Tiny Supers, a game that uses a variant of the West End Games D6 system. The system doesn’t have the kind of story mechanics one might expect from something like a PbtA game, but its use of character goals and such makes it more narrative than you might expect for a game using a nearly 40-year old system.

Two things made me disinterested in Tiny Supers. The first is that it uses the D6 system; since I was already using the D6 system to play Spooktacular it seemed too similar to what I was already using.

Nothing in the game description on DriveThruRPG, or this review I read, made it seem like Tiny Supers had anything specific to offer beyond stock superpowers for character creation. There was no indication it had any mechanics related to things like secret identities.

To be clear, a GM can probably bring all of that stuff into a game of Tiny Supers without too much hassle if they do the planning and work with their players. The D6 system certainly can support a Peter Parker-sim that includes activities like taking photographs and coming up with excuses to leave social events. It’s just that it’s nice when a system has some dedicated mechanics for these things, because if the product description is anything to go by, the GM would be grafting all of these things onto the game themself.

You may be wondering why I consider Ghostbusters / Spooktacular to be a good game, and Tiny Supers to, at very least, not sound like a good game. The answer is simple; Ghostbusters has more narrative reinforcement than Tiny Supers because Ghost-Busting is a highly specific task, which naturally guides players. Being a superhero is too vague for a system that doesn’t provide some mechanical reinforcement for gameplay. It just seems way too loose mechanically. Is that bullshit? Maybe, but I’m sticking with it.

Prowlers & Paragons

Prowlers & Paragon uses simple d6 dicepool mechanics that remind me of the “Legend” variant of the WEG D6 system at a glance [instead of 3, 4, 5, and 6 being successful, it’s even numbers, and a 6 counts as two successes]. People say this game has a narrative feel, which is probably because degrees of success are possible and sometimes the player is allowed to describe how their character failed.

During character creation players are encouraged to do some worldbuilding. RPG.net user RainOnTheSun says the game “asks you to note down three connections, people who are part of the character’s life (whether they like it or not), and three details that can be used as plot hooks. One about your character, one about another PC, and one about something external, like an NPC or a secret.” These are small touches, but they’re meaningful.

Something that makes Prowlers & Paragons stand out is that the artwork seems more 80s and 90s inspired than most of the other games mentioned here, which mostly are attempting to emulate the Silver Age. In practice the GM and players will ultimately do the most to define the tone of their setting, but it’s still worth mentioning.

More sources I looked at related to P&P: 1, 2

Truth & Justice

Truth & Justice, from Atomic Sock Monkey Press, uses the Prose Descriptive Qualities system. I own a copy of Ninja Burger, another game that uses the PDQ system, so I already have some familiarity with it. Something interesting I discovered while doing research is that Truth & Justice was a direct influence on the later Marvel Heroic and Sentinel Comics systems, which implies a lot of good things.

As described in this review by Sophie Lagacé [and this comment], Truth & Justice has mechanics designed to replicate superhero stories. To put things simply, when characters take damage in fights it usually has a direct effect on their personal lives, and characters gain experience by allowing “Revoltin’ Developments” to happen. Those sound both pleasingly simple to use and also condusive to superhero storytelling.

The product description for Truth & Justice says that it includes an “exploration of superhero tropes”, with advice on how to integrate them into gameplay. Considering that Zorcerer of Zo by the same writer is acclaimed for its GM notes, it’s likely that Truth & Justice also has useful material. Unfortunately Truth & Justice doesn’t seem to be available for purchase in PoD form anymore.

Story Games

Masks

People make threads on /r/RPG asking about superhero games once every two or three days. In every one of these threads someone will invariably suggest Masks, even if the person who started the thread specifically said they didn’t want to play Masks. I made my own thread on Reddit, said that I intended to play Masks but still was looking for something else, and I was recommended Masks twice.

Masks is a very highly regarded game that uses PbtA mechanics, specifically designed for teen superhero drama stories. It’s for Teen Titans and Young Justice type games, and not much else. Which is fine. Like I said earlier, I definitely intend on playing Masks at some point, but obviously it’s not a very “general” superhero game.

Marvel Heroic RPG

Marvel Heroic RPG is a game infamous for going out-of-print after existing for only a year because the cost of the Marvel license was too high. Which is a shame, because people really love this game.

The game is basically built around a system where players can make their characters perform worse in order to get points they can use later. Brian Washburn in his review says “Strip away the complexities of the dice-rolling system, and it looks like [sic] to me like the foundation is a storytelling game where players and GM bid against each other for success or failure of actions, governing control over the direction of the plot.”

The variant of the Cortex system used for Marvel Heroic is said to produce very compelling stories, and it’s probably the most highly regarded Marvel TTRPG. Unfortunately the gameplay is almost entirely focused on “in costume” elements. There’s nothing about this game that precludes players from roleplaying things related to secret identities, but there aren’t a lot of mechanics related to that. The irony here is that the Smallville RPG, which shares a designer and system [kind of], is focused almost entirely on the “soap opera” element of comics. A happy medium between the two would be fun to see.

More sources I looked at related to Marvel Heroic: 1

Sentinel Comics

Sentinel Comics is a game that always appears when people talk about superhero games, and I probably see it suggested more often than any game that isn’t Masks. When people talk about Sentinel Comics they often describe transcendent moments where their characters managed to do incredible feats with their powers. From what I heard in the System Mastery episode on Sentinel Comics, this seems to have been a mechanical focus of the game. Combat scenes move through color coded phases designed to ramp things up as they continue.

The System Mastery hosts said the system seems to be Cortex-inspired. This makes sense, because Cam Banks, one of the designers of Marvel Heroic, also worked on Sentinels. They also said the game has a great random character generator that almost always creates a compelling character.

I’ve done a lot of reading on Sentinel Comics [1, 2], and it really doesn’t sound like there’s a big focus on non-action stuff in this game, especially on a mechanical level. The product page on Greater Than Games’s website doesn’t advertise any social mechanics either.

Sentinel Comics seems like a great game for emulating superhero teams getting into fights, but it otherwise sounds like a game that leaves all the other genre trappings to the players and GM. I’m kind of surprised by how unappealing this game sounds to me, considering the hype.

Worlds in Peril / Galaxies in Peril

Continuing in story games we have Worlds in Peril and Galaxies in Peril. The former is a PbtA game and the latter is its Forged in the Dark successor.

In Worlds in Peril characters can get extra dice for rolls by damaging their “bonds”. It sounds like balancing a normal and superhero life is a big focus in Worlds in Peril. A common complaint seems to be that Worlds in Peril is not great at being a PbtA game, something people also say a lot about Dungeon World. This seems to mostly be because it doesn’t use playbooks the same way most PbtA games do.

The way powers work in Worlds in Peril is that players say what would be easy for their character to do, more difficult, and impossible. A user on DriveThruRPG named Christopher described the combat as being more narrative than the combat in Icons, which sounds like high praise.

The only thing that seems really troubling about Worlds in Peril to me is that a recurring complaint about the game is that it’s sometimes difficult to parse how things are supposed to work, but otherwise it seems like a great game. Unfortunately there is no Print-on-Demand option for Worlds in Peril, or any other kind of print option I can see. You may have noticed by this point that I only complain about a lack of a print option when I actually want to play the game.

More sources I looked at related to Worlds in Peril: 1, 2, 3

Galaxies in Peril doesn’t sound as appealing, despite having cool Kirby-inspired artwork. People describe it as being a poor implementation of FitD mechanics. Granted, this is not too dissimilar to the PbtA-related complaints Worlds in Peril received, but this criticism appears a lot more for Galaxies. I haven’t been able to find as much discussion about this one, and it generally seems less well received.

FATE

A lot of superhero material has been made for FATE, and there seems to be a consensus that the generic FATE system is particularly good at doing superhero-related gameplay. The way I’ve heard the FATE system described makes me inclined to agree. Some people describe FATE as not being rules-lite, but I’ve heard people speculate this perception comes from the rulebook poorly explaining its mechanics, and also people not used to more narrative games struggling with its style of gameplay.

Evil Hat, publishers of FATE, have released some official superhero material. They released a Venture City setting, which includes some superhero-specific rules. The cover of the FATE System Toolkit has a superhero on it, and presumably also has some guidelines. I have to admit, any system that requires me to cross-reference multiple books to see which rules replace other rules, and things to that effect, is a major turn-off for me. And so buying one or two Evil Hat FATE books to cobble together a superhero game isn’t appealing to me.

Thankfully, other people have used the FATE SRD to make their own superhero games using the system, which are entirely self-contained.

Icons, written by Mutants & Masterminds creator Steve Kenson, is inspired by FATE but doesn’t use the FATE/FUDGE dice. Unfortunately this means that I wouldn’t have an excuse to buy more dice. It’s apparently also inspired by Marvel Super Heroes and Marvel SAGA. From what I’ve read Icons doesn’t seem to have anything like Truth & Justice’s mechanic where getting hurt also damages a character’s personal life, and looking at the table of contents in the preview it doesn’t seem like there are any other kinds of social rules. But FATE’s broad mechanics inject a lot of storytelling stuff into a game for players and the GM, and so that’s probably where a lot of the narrative flavor comes from.

People say that a lot of the fun in Icons comes in the form of rolling up a random character and having fun with the often silly end result. There are also mechanics for making non-random characters if that doesn’t sound appealing. From what I’ve learned Steve Kenson is a real superhero system nerd, and so I have faith that he made a meaningful game that fulfills some kind of unique purpose.

Daring Comics has been described as being more of a “toolkit” than other FATE superhero systems. It’s described as being less rules-lite than normal FATE or Icons, and people seem to either love or hate Daring Comics for its approach to FATE mechanics. RPG.net user lissilambe says “I think [Daring Comics] hits a middle ground of Fate-driven narrative engine and solid mechanical powers many people who prefer a grounding would enjoy”, which seems to sum things up. Daring Comics can be used as a stand-alone book, which makes it a compelling FATE option for people like me who would rather not have rules spread across multiple books.

There’s another FATE game that uses a single book, Wearing the Cape, which was described by RPG.net user Delgarde as being “the Goldilocks option” relative to all the previous options I mentioned. It’s described as being very easy to use, and it has a focus on things like collateral damage and how that affects the way the public views superheroes. It’s based on a series of superhero novels, but the included setting doesn’t have to be used.

Finally there’s Four-Color FAE, a free guide to doing superheroes using the simplified version of FATE known as FATE Accelerated. I have to admit, using a small PDF to put together a supers game is unappealing to me for different but similar reasons to using multiple official FATE books. Still seems like a neat option for people looking for something both very rules-lite and very narrative, though.

With Great Power

With Great Power is a game from 2005 that uses playing cards instead of dice. The gameplay is specifically designed to emulate comicbook storytelling, specifically iconic silver age stuff like The Amazing Spider-Man. The personal life of each hero is a major factor in the game, and according to an RPG.net review by Carl L. Congdon, the worse a superhero’s life is, the more dramatic their ultimate success. With Great Power is mechanically designed so that characters are more likely to fail towards the beginning of the game, with success becoming increasingly likely over the course of gameplay.

That’s beautiful. With Great Power seems like a game that really understands what makes superhero comics entertaining, which makes it one of the most compelling sounding games I’ve discussed here. That being said, it seems to be built for one-shots or short campaigns, and it’s not exactly a “do anything” game like most of the others I’m discussing here. It has the same “problem” Masks has in that way. The hosts of the System Mastery podcast also said that With Great Power is designed to more-or-less tell a single kind of story; if I played this game once every year or two I doubt that would bother me, but that is something to keep in mind.

With Great Power is the oldest game in this section, excluding FATE; it seems like an early innovator in the superhero RPG field. The only problem is that there are two versions of With Great Power, and the second edition is apparently a complete reinvention of the original’s rules. The second edition is “Descended from Monkeydome”, but I’m not familiar enough with Monkeydome or Swords Without Masters to know what that means. According to Jason D’Angelo, the second edition “truly is the same game, even though all the rules have been changed”. I’ll have to do more research to discover which version of the game sounds best for me, but I definitely want to play a version of With Great Power.

Other Games

Spider and Man

Spider and Man is an “other” game that really interested me. It’s a Lasers & Feelings hack about Spider-Men from different dimensions teaming up to avert a catastrophe. The game has a few nods towards the new Spider-Verse movies in its text, but it’s mostly trying to evoke the two-part finale of the 90s Spider-Man cartoon. The Game Master is even referred to as Madame Web!

Unlike a lot of other Lasers & Feelings hacks that are basically just conceptual art pieces that can’t really be played, Spider and Man has enough weight to function as an actual game. It helps that it’s trying to evoke something highly specific. I’ve already placed Spider and Man into my folder of “Lasers & Feelings Hacks I Will Actually Play”, next to Phasers and Feelings and Tactical Waifu.

Psi*Run and Mutants in the Night

Continuing with the “other” games we have Psi*Run and Mutants In the Night, two different games that seem to be emulating gritty X-Men-type stories. Psi*Run is about psychics escaping from experimentation, and Mutants In the Night is about a Days of Future Past situation where all mutants are persecuted. Psi*Run was designed by Meguey Baker, and Mutants In the Night uses Forged in the Dark mechanics.

Spectaculars

Spectaculars probably belongs in the “story games” section, but I’m putting it here because it comes in a box with a bunch of playing cards and discrete molded pieces. It doesn’t really sound like a board game on a gameplay level, but also the intended experience requires the use of a lot of physical stuff.

In Spectaculars players start with nothing and gradually create an entire superhero universe; it’s a premise that isn’t really shared by any of the other games here. It even has mechanics designed to emulate things like Marvel acquiring Angela from Image Comics, which sounds like some nerdy fun.

If I did most of my tabletop gaming IRL and I had a group that met regularly, I could see Spectaculars being a worthwhile investment. I also live in continental Europe, which means that even if I did have an active IRL group it would probably be way too expensive to import either way.

Cold Steel Wardens & Mutant City Blues

Our final “other” games are Cold Steel Wardens and Mutant City Blues. Cold Steel Wardens is a game designed to emulate gritty street-level stuff like Daredevil and The Punisher with investigation mechanics included. Mutant City Blues, which uses the GUMSHOE system, focuses on doing detective work in a superhero universe even more heavily. Each game is trying to emulate different varities of comic, and both games are also well-regarded. It really says something about the popularity of superhero RPGs that the niche of “superhero detective stuff” is well-covered.

Loose Ends

Before we get to the conclusion, there are a few more games that I should quickly mention:

• Some people say that Risus is a great system for superheroes. I agree, but with the caveat that most people would probably be better served by a more dedicated system for anything designed to last longer than one or two sessions.

• There’s an old Batman game that uses a simplified version of the system Mayfair used for their DC game. There are two problems; it still isn’t rules-lite, and also it has been out-of-print for decades. It’s very cool in concept, though. I’m surprised there aren’t more licensed games that zero-in on a specific character; it probably hurts that only one player gets to be the superhero, and everyone else has to be an original character or a sidekick [although I know people who would legitimately rather play as Nightwing or one of the Batwomen].

• West End Games made their own DC system, DC Universe, using the Legend version of the D6 system. It didn’t get great reviews, and it was printed on newsprint or something.

• Marvel self-published a diceless RPG, but apparently it’s not that great. Another curious footnote in superhero RPG history.

• If you wanted to go full story game you could use Ewen Cluney’s Entanglements with Primetime Adventures and create the superhero soap opera of your dreams, but it feels like cheating to mention this combo here.

In Conclusion

You’re probably wondering at this point which of these games I ended up adopting as my primary supers system. The answer will probably only mildly satisfy you, but I ended up choosing a small handful. Many of the posts I read mentioned things like players recreating their characters in different systems as they tried to find something they were truly satisfied with, and I guess I will not be exempt from this journey.

These are the three main games I narrowed things down to:

• Truth & Justice. This game seems like a good mixture of old-school game design and modern storytelling sensibilities. Very simple mechanics with some design choices conducive to recreating superhero storytelling. The writer of With Great Power recommended Truth & Justice as a more traditional alternative to his own game. The only problem is that there is no Print-on-Demand version available, even though Atomic Sock Monkey’s website advertises one.

• Worlds in Peril sounds like a game that focuses on the aspects of superhero comics that I care about. The only real problem I have with it, at least in concept, is that there’s a certain level of redundancy with both Worlds in Peril and Masks using the same system for a broadly similar genre. Also there doesn’t seem to be any print option.

• With Great Power seems to be a brilliant emulation of old Marvel comics, like the Master Planner Saga. It’s not exactly a “general” kind of superhero game built for potentially never-ending campaigns, but it seems like a great option for one-shots or shorter campaigns. The second edition is available in PoD form.

With these additional ones:

• Masks for a teen superhero drama campaign eventually.

• Spider and Man for doing an eventual Spider-Man TAS Finale-themed one-shot.

• Risus for any other superhero one-shots I do in the future.

And finally, if you’re not like me and you don’t give a shit about a superhero game replicating things like “Parker Luck”, which is to say a game focused on team-based combat and not so much on secret identity downtime, these seem like the most compelling options:

• Icons, Wearing the Cape, and Daring Comics seem like great FATE-relation options for different reasons. Icons is a popular and well-regarded game created by someone with a ton of experience playing and writing superhero games. Wearing the Cape is a simple game built around core-FATE that not only is acclaimed for being a good supers game, but also as an introduction to FATE as a system. Daring Comics seems like a great option for anyone who wants more crunch, and from what I’ve read a lot of that crunch sounds like it’s frontloaded in the character creation.

• Sentinel Comics is a very popular game that seems purpose built for creating dynamic, comicbook-style fight scenes. It has a well-made random character creation system that almost always creates compelling characters. One of its main designers, Cam Banks, also worked on the well-regarded Marvel Heroic. It sounds a little less open-ended than the FATE games I just mentioned on a mechanical level, but at the same time that’s in service of creating climactic moments; definitely a trade-off that will be worth it for some people.

• For people who want more traditional gameplay, BASH, Supers RED, Triumphant, and Prowlers & Paragons all seem like solid options.

Teachable Stuff

There are two things that I learned while writing this that I hope are very instructive to game designers.

Ad copy in the form of product descriptions and such should not be an afterthought. A lot of what made individual games here sound compelling and unique were things I had to find in forum posts and reviews. Almost every superhero game advertises that players can make characters with any powers they can imagine, but unique mechanics were often implied or not specifically mentioned at all. These are important things to advertise, especially in a very crowded market.

Before I started working on this piece I was working on a game that could very loosely be described as a superhero game, but I decided to put that on hiatus after looking at some of the simpler games here. Many people probably would probably agree that there should be mechanics in a game that guide players towards certain kinds of behavior for the sake of genre emulation / storytelling, but it’s all too easy to pick up an SRD and make a veritable nothing-game. I’m going to spend a lot of time thinking about how to make mechanics for the game I was working on that are conducive to telling the kinds of action-comedy stories I wanted it to create, instead of making something where the GM and players have to bring that stuff to the table themselves.

Anyways, that’s all I have to say about low-crunch superhero games, at least until I actually play one of them. I hope you learned something; I think I learned too much, and I now need to think about something else.