Tag Archives: Research

Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 4

Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 if you missed them. Anyways, this week’s post is going to be a lot shorter than usual.

After finishing 90% of an entry on Prowlers & Paragons I discovered Sean Patrick Fannon, co-author of the “Ultimate Edition”, has an extensive history of sexual harassment. The original version of the game that Fannon did not work on is still available on DriveThruRPG, but I cannot personally comment on its quality.

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Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 2

Here’s a link to Part ,1 in case you missed it. I originally was going to just go straight into talking about the games, but I decided I’d quickly talk about some of my favorite superhero comics here. I’m doing this partially so that you, as a reader, can know what I care about in superhero comics, what I would want to see emulated in a game . . . but it’s mostly so I can create a cool visual motif for this article. You can skip this if you don’t care.

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Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 1

About two months ago I wrote a piece here on rules-lite superhero games. In the piece I talked about a bunch of games, and at the end I made a list of the games that I found most essential.

I recommend reading these Revisited articles first and then circling back to my original piece, because everything I say here supersedes my opinions from the original piece. The important thing to note is that I didn’t actually read the rulebooks for almost all of the games I discussed; I read forums posts and reviews, listened to podcasts, read product descriptions, and studied other sources to get some kind of rough idea about each game.

In this four part series I’m going to go deeper and take a closer look at the handful of games that I said I most wanted to play last time, which is to say I’m going to read the rulebooks and make further observations about the games. I’m also going to look at a small handful of games that I didn’t mention last time, and look at the rulebooks for most of those as well.

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A Survey of Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs

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.

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