Back in November of last year while talking about network effects and how they make you play D&D, I dropped a little bomb. I stated that there has never been a good mass market RPG in the superhero genre. At the time, no one took the bait, but I can imagine some easy dissent there. What about Champions? What about Marvel Super Heroes? How can you possibly hate FASERIP? But yet, I do maintain my position. While there have arguably been good superhero games, none of them have reached mass market popularity and, by the way things are going, none of them ever will. It’s not the fault of any particular game or its design, at least not directly. Instead, the instinctive way that a game designer wants to approach comic book superheroes is one that’s fundamentally at odds with ever seeing broader popularity.

Of course, as one would naturally surmise, that means there’s a different way to write a superhero game that could see broader appeal and generally be more easily used to tell superhero stories. We were even close to having a game that fit in this template actually see some measure of success; what killed it was of course nothing to do with the game but rather the other reason that superhero games can never really succeed, licensing. So let’s look at the flavors of superhero games we get, the flavor of superhero game we want, and why the two aren’t likely to match.

You can’t wargame superheroes

Champions, and its successor creation the Hero System, helped popularize the high-detail point-buy system. Although the game was originally relatively light (the beginning to a story told across many RPG properties), by its fourth edition in 1990 it had become notably complex; it was likely this complexity and unique dedication to mathematical consistency that inspired the spinoff of Hero System at the time. By the time the 5th edition of the Hero System was published in the early 2000s, Champions had mostly dropped off the map, excepting an MMORPG which was knocked down to free-to-play after only two years.

Hero System soldiered on as a tabletop simulation toolkit, locked in a fierce battle with GURPS for the top slot in generic crunch (which it eventually lost, though for reasons having nothing to do with superheroes). Its origin story, though, ended up being, if not forgotten, at least ignored. GURPS, in contrast, evolved from a fantasy game, though the core mechanism of its successful genericization, point-buy character creation, was the same as that of Champions. It’s that point-buy system which, while a solid platform for a generic game, becomes a problem for a superhero game based on superhero tropes.

Think of a comic book. In most cases, you’ll first think of a single character. Batman. Superman. You will then start thinking of ensembles; we have the Fantastic Four and the Justice League, the X-Men and the Avengers. When you dig down into those ensembles, though, you’ll quickly get into a range of characters that, to put it bluntly, contraindicates using mechanics to balance out their powers. The Justice League has both Batman, a mortal human with a lot of money, and Superman, a godlike alien who’s nearly invulnerable save for one exotic element. The Avengers combine Iron Man, a…mortal human with a lot of money, with Thor, a literal deity. There is no ‘balance’ here.

The notion of a relatively consistent power level works for some comic stories; one could argue it works for the X-Men (though I don’t care to get into the details, it’s just that the lack of balance is less egregious than the earlier examples). In superhero RPGs, though, balance is enforced through mechanics, and the setting is built around that to justify it. Ultimately this means that the settings of purpose-built superhero games are, for the most part, forgettable. While cyberpunk has given us Night City and Shadowrun’s unique vision of Seattle, the superhero equivalent, Champions’ Millennium City, isn’t something most people remember.

So if superhero stories don’t lend themselves to mechanical balance, if said balance makes them boring (and I truly believe that), then how do you have a good superhero game? The way to make a superhero game good is to treat the game characters the same way you treat characters in a comic book, granting them screen time according to the story rather than the magnitude of their powers. You have to make superhero games narrative.

Superheroes versus superhero stories

Looking back to the golden age of comics, superhero stories were relatively simple; it’s a fairly mainstream argument that simplicity is one reason comics retained their popularity through World War II, even in the face of paper rationing. As you move into the post-war era, though, comics were changing and superheroes weren’t the main draw anymore. Superheroes left standing around the implementation of the Comics Code in 1954 were generally so sanitized and so silly that the entire genre needed to pivot, and the resulting pivot was towards more science fiction elements and more character development. This resulted in the time period known as the Silver Age of comics, running from the mid 1950s through the 1970s.

It’s not a particularly controversial statement that superheroes and comics grew up alongside the sword and sorcery fiction which inspired D&D; Michael Moorcock (for one example) not only wrote during the Silver Age of comics but was also friends with Alan Moore. Fantasy was first to roleplaying, though, likely in part because the setpiece battles like Helm’s Deep lent themselves more to the sort of setup that gamers were already using than, say, a one-on-one or several-on-several melee depicted in a comic book. It’s also worth noting, though, that the second element of RPG fandom which powered the first wave of D&D and imitators, science fiction and fantasy fans, were driving towards games like D&D and Traveller, not necessarily Superhero:2044 (released in 1977).

Early superhero RPGs were like early superhero comics: The stories were simple fights between good and evil, heroes and villains. The games were concerned with what your powers were, and exactly how powerful they were (Although Superhero:2044 is somewhat consigned to the dustbin of RPG history at this point, it was a point-buy game much like its successor Champions). There were exceptions, though, and games focusing on the story of superheroes were also cropping up as early as the 70s. Consider Villains and Vigilantes. There are plenty of elements of Villains and Vigilantes which were par for the course in the 70s; one criticism of the game (leveled at many games of the time) was that the rules were simply too similar to D&D, to the point of genre confusion (sound familiar?). However, Villains and Vigilantes went about character creation in a fascinating way which emulated an important part of Silver Age superhero stories: the origin story. Villains and Vigilantes characters started as a version of the player, who then gained superpowers through random rolls. This sort of approach to character creation (although without the ‘play yourself’ angle) was also employed by Palladium’s Heroes Unlimited, and both games maintained cult followings into the 21st century.

The real push towards a superhero narrative, though, followed the push towards narrative in the rest of the hobby, which means that it really got going in the early 90s. In 1993 Mayfair Games released Underground, a game inspired more by the comics of the 80s than the 60s and 70s. Later in the decade, White Wolf picked up the baton. Aberrant was released in 1999, and like the rest of White Wolf’s catalog, depended on a unique setting (the Trinity Continuum as it’s known now) to serve as a backdrop for stories of super-powered individuals.

In the d20 era the superhero genre exploded, but most of the extra space afforded the genre allowed for more old-school ‘build your hero’ type games to flourish. Mutants and Masterminds succeeded alongside the fifth edition of Champions, Godlike competed with Aberrant, and Cartoon Action Hour offered something a little different (possibly coming a little too early to really capitalize on 80s cartoon nostalgia).

In the 2010s there were several titles that aimed for emulating the superhero story as opposed to the superhero character, in part driven by the indie renaissance that began around that time. PbtA saw Worlds in Peril and Masks, the latter often elevated as one of the key titles in the PbtA wheelhouse. There was also Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. Built off of the Cortex system, Marvel Heroic both aimed its mechanics at superhero narratives but also aimed to align heroes in terms of their contribution to the story, realigning the focus on balance as seen in earlier games. Marvel Heroic had high production value, was well reviewed, and it was fun; I’ve played it. It was also cancelled almost as quickly as it was released, showing once and for all that there can’t really be a good Marvel RPG.

There will never be a good Marvel RPG

This may seem like a contradiction in terms; not only did I just say that Marvel Heroic Roleplaying could arguably be good, but in the past I’ve argued that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are inherently difficult descriptors for something as input-dependent as RPGs. So why do I now turn about face and declare there will never be a good Marvel RPG? I did just argue that Marvel Heroic Roleplaying was, broadly, a good game. Its cancellation proved there was one group it wasn’t good enough for, though, and that was its licensor Marvel. When it comes to games based on such a lucrative but aggressively controlled license as Marvel’s or DC’s, there essentially can’t be a game that will both be good for the licensor and good for players.

Marvel and DC should be contextualized here as companies that tried to trademark the word ‘superhero’. As much as there are bigger, more litigious companies, the comic book publishers have a long history of fighting to protect their IP through multiple avenues, including lawyers and storylines. Whether or not you think it’s done well, these companies are aggressively controlling which comics get released, how storylines come about and interact, and whether and how much print storylines interact with cinematic universes or vice versa. This poses two nearly intractable challenges for licensed RPGs. First, RPGs are and have always been ‘original character’ breeding grounds. Players write their own characters which they then play. A licensed RPG won’t necessarily exclude rules for creating original characters, but those characters will be de-emphasized versus canon characters or, possibly worse, only be constructed from the power sets included for canon characters. This also tends to disincentivize licensed superhero RPGs from giving away the keys to the setting, which in turn pushes the mechanics towards easily modular conflicts like big fights. Even Marvel Heroic had this problem to a degree.

The second issue is the actual reason Marvel Heroic was cancelled. Licensors demand a degree of control over the licenses they give out, and in a world of superhero movies, video games, and toy lines, the modest sales figures of a tabletop RPG are unlikely to encourage further support. Licensees have the rug pulled out from under them in multiple ways, only the most blunt of which is straight-up cancellation. And of course, as soon as the license is terminated all unsold copies must be destroyed, which would be a financial disaster for all but the most well-heeled game publishers.

As such, we get two kinds of licensed superhero RPGs. Games like Marvel Heroic, which are designed well and make for interesting campaigns but will never sell well enough to be good for the licensor. Besides that, we get games like Marvel Multiverse, which cannot and will not be anything more than a superhero combat simulator (and based on the reviews, not even a particularly well-executed one). And, as much as superhero games get the short end of the stick in terms of licensing, the genre is so heavily based on history and known characters that, more than virtually any other genre, licensed games drive superhero RPGs and drive their demand.

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Superheroes sit in one corner of speculative fiction, groaning under the weight of nearly a century of built-up tropes which are still mainstays of modern comics. These tropes tie together a huge variety of underlying genres into a very different package; with the Avengers as an example you have science fiction, fantasy, mythology, and even a bit of horror all being used to develop more heroes for the roster. Still, though, superheroes are their own thing, and that means that there should be room for the genre within RPGs. It’s complicated, though. Marvel and DC own our conceptions of superheroes, even if they didn’t manage to trademark ‘superhero’. The Millennium City of Champions and the Halcyon City of Masks are more DC and Marvel with serial numbers filed off than a truly original approach to the genre, and within those games there are more than nods to all that came before. I do think there’s room for something truly new, though. We’ve begun to see more deconstructions of the superhero genre in movies and TV, and the MCU is so exhausting that a new superhero property would almost require a dash of creativity to really get out there. I don’t know what that would look like; I don’t think making an RPG for The Boys is really going to be what gives superhero games a shot in the arm. Still, when you look at the superhero genre and how badly it wants a solid RPG, you have to agree that it’s at least worth trying. What is the right balance between the ‘build-your-hero’ point buy nerdfest and the superhero story deconstruction of games like Masks? I don’t know, but I’d bet that finding it would lead you to a pretty great superhero RPG.

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