An odd idea for an anti-super hero game.

[Trekkin]

I've had an idea for a comedic deconstruction of the superhero gaming genre that could, at least in theory, avert some of the usual problems people have with it. I wrote a blurb for it below, spoilered for length:

The year is 2750. Superheroes fly forth from their gleaming Halls of Justice and Fortresses of Righteousness to save the citizenry from the twisted schemes of supervillains plotting to overtake the world. A dozen times a day, evil robot zombie armies are destroyed, apocalyptic spells are nullified, and the most powerful magic and technology known to humanity are wielded in defense of its highest traditions.

Fewer than one person in ten thousand knows how to read.

The cities surrounding the Halls and Fortresses and Lairs are crumbling ruins, littered with the rusting hulks of nonsense "doomsday devices" and battered into rubble by centuries of superpowered fisticuffs. A dwindling human remnant, starving and half-dead of blunt force trauma, searches desperately for farmland that will not be destroyed by an orbital laser cannon or windblown into dust by a passing super-speedster before the crops can grow. To live without superpowers is to live under a dozen separate nanny states' global surveillance networks, just waiting for someone to throw a punch so they might dispatch several spandex-clad lunatics to dispense energetic and frequently lethal justice.

Some enterprising citizens have tried to catch the attention of these marvellous beings before they fly off, to explain to them that dysentery is slowly killing them by the score. At which point the supers will confer and decide to begin searching for this murderous fiend at once, lest he escape their laser beams and mega-martial arts and all the other ways they have to punch their problems in the face. He may be hiding at the abandoned warehouse; to the invisible jet, fellows!

And, beneath the brightly colored boots of a thousand mad godlings, the common folk are trampled just a bit harder.

There may yet be hope: a new(ish) breed of heroes, rising from the ashes after careful long-range planning has brought together the resources to educate them in the advanced sciences of their long-dead ancestors. They must move cautiously and in disguise, of course, to avoid the invariably lethal attentions of real supers. But, when more chronic danger strikes, the likes of The Administrator, Logistics Lass, Routine Active Maintenanceperson, and Captain Antibiotics will step into the ruined wreckage of phone booths and quickly become: mild-mannered, perfectly mundane but highly competent professionals!

They're fragile. They're mortal. And they just might figure out how fertilizer works in time to save us all.
That's it, then; a faux-superhero game that's really more of a post-apocalyptic survival/governance game where the superheroes, reality warpers all, are what is being survived. Ideally there'd be a number of groups of survivors with various resources and it'd be down to the PCs to convince them to cooperate and then to guide their efforts, with forays into old libraries for textbooks/desperate sallies to retrieve rare or difficult-to-fabricate parts and so forth, broken up by bickering over who gets how many potatoes, kingdom-building, and occasionally lying to lunatics with with laser vision about how you're totally on your way to go atomize someone with a goatee and a silly name, honest -- because even Silver Age comic books can look like horror stories from the point of view of the collateral damage, especially when the superheroes are visibly disconnected from any semblance of reality.

So what do you think? Would it be fun? Where would you want plots to go with it?

[TheCountAlucard]

And this is… comedic, you say?

Kinda misses the mark for me, I'll admit.

[Anonymouswizard]

I can see this easily being run as either comedic or horrific. Maybe also fun to play, although I'd probably not be the kind to enjoy it at it's maximum (I'd much rather be shooting my laser gun at per armoured mercenaries), but there's some good ideas in there.

Question: how powerful are these supers meant to be? 'as strong and tough as ten men' supers or 'Superman forgot to stay in shape' supers would lead to wildly different developments, with the further being a 'build an army to take down the supers', while the latter (which I assume you're going for) leads more towards 'escaping the supers' (I hope you can grow cross via artificial light).

I have to say that this is essentially going in exactly the opposite direction to the list game I was in, which took 'comic book superheroes' and ran with it, my first character caused friction due to collateral damage (and was retired because he was slipping into one of my untrustworthy characters), skyscrapers could be built in days, and other weirdness. There was even a gigantic portrait on the side of a skyscraper that nobody noticed due to a very inconvenient mutant power. There's plans for a follow-up campaign if we're all in the same country again, I already know my character.

So very realistic, the only thing you have to do is work out where all this energy is coming from. If you want to, the campaign will work without it.

[Dappershire]

Interesting....boring. But interesting.

Personally, I use imagination to escape my dreary average life. I know you prolly want to escape the responsibility of being an Intergalactic Constable in spandex, with some nice pleasant dystopia; but if I wanted to teach kids to read, turn rot into fuel, and bake a bread, let it mold, then turn it into HP, i'd, well, just do it.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

https://youtu.be/U01xasUtlvw

Could be fun - if you have adventures that are taken from the stable of survival horror stories, but in that funny backdrop...

Or hunting for half-forgotten technology could be dungeon delve, overcoming or bypassing over-elaborate death traps.
You could have marauding bands of out-of-work henchfolk (their evil leader has been dragged off to Escapable Asylum again).


I wouldn't expect a game like this to last more than a few sessions though. Unless you ended up with some emergent gameplay aspect, it might get stale.

[CharonsHelper]

As strange as this sounds to say about a superhero RPG - it's just too unrealistic.

Now - if they weren't ACTUALLY heroes at all (not failing horribly - but no real attempt) at all, and just used that as a sort of North Korea style propaganda where "We love you SuperXXX... please don't kill us". That might sort of work.

Actually - I think there was an anime like that - where an immortal villain took the personas of the heroes who had kept him down, and used them to keep down the populace for centuries - though it was a riff on old school mecha anime rather than of superheroes. (I can't remember the name - and it wasn't all that good. It also couldn't decide whether or not it was a comedy or horrible things were actually happening. But the premise was interesting.)

[Cluedrew]

I think it misses part of the point. Which is that "super" doesn't just apply to their abilities but to their personalities, and the ability to do good, as well. Even realizing that it will not work out in every case the superheroes will have been normal people at some point and they are not utterly stupid, so they can see the damage and the lack of food.

I'm also not so sure you can make "do not attract attention" a primary mechanic. I play a game where not attracting the attention of "the mountain stands up" sized creatures is a large part of the game. And honestly it never happens. Maybe you could make it doable, but there is the still the tension of, no one wants it to happen now, but it really has to happen eventually. Narrative and game flow demand it.

[NRSASD]

Personally, I like it. A lot. But I've never been a fan of the classic Superhero genre, so that might explain why.

As AnonymousWizard asked, just how Super are these Superheroes? Are they ridiculously powerful mortals or godlings? Should our PCs be trying to hunt them or just outrun them?

If the superheroes can be killed, running a high mortality XCOM style game could be a ton of fun. Dungeon delving for ancient superweapons, researching the long forgotten weaknesses, and luring our spandex clad overlords into desperate traps all have the makings of a great campaign.

On the other hand, trying to find the last functioning rocket to escape this insanity also makes a compelling story. Not just rediscovering the technology or gathering the survivors to launch humanity's last grasp at the stars, but overcoming the engineering challenges needed to build an interstellar colony ship. Without the facilities or education, we may have to resort to conning our destructively well-meaning yet insanely brilliant tormentors into designing our ship for us without them figuring it out and insisting on accompanying us ("For our own protection") to the stars.

However, just trying to improve the quality of life of the public is going to be a hard sell for a game. Excellent material for a satirical novel, but it's going to be hard making public sanitation or responsible agriculture fun.

If you want to take a look at a very dark setting where there are no superheroes, only supervillains, take a look at the computer game Tyranny's archons. The end result is about the same.

[Trekkin]

I think it misses part of the point. Which is that "super" doesn't just apply to their abilities but to their personalities, and the ability to do good, as well. Even realizing that it will not work out in every case the superheroes will have been normal people at some point and they are not utterly stupid, so they can see the damage and the lack of food.

I'm also not so sure you can make "do not attract attention" a primary mechanic. I play a game where not attracting the attention of "the mountain stands up" sized creatures is a large part of the game. And honestly it never happens. Maybe you could make it doable, but there is the still the tension of, no one wants it to happen now, but it really has to happen eventually. Narrative and game flow demand it.

This does assume that the superheroic mindset is slightly affected by whatever phlebotinium started superpowers proliferating, to the point where they're semi-consciously blind to the problems they're causing. After all, they're superheroes, brave vanquishers of injustice and punchers of evil faces; if the little people want more food and less infant mortality, why, they're more than capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and making it happen. All thanks, of course, to the safety and freedom the superheroes provide. You're welcome, citizens!

The degree to which this mindset and its requisite delusions are a product of the superpower proliferation event, rather than human nature, is one tunable parameter to brighten or darken the setting. Personally, I wouldn't say it would take much of a nudge to get people to ignore problems to which they are themselves immune and people with whom they have very little in common, or to selectively pay attention only to those issues they have the tools to decisively solve to wide acclaim.

But if it makes the setting work better to have the super virus or green rocks from space or whatever also cause them to hallucinate a world where everything is fine, and that all the plaintive cries that would indicate otherwise are clearly the product of some villain's mind control ray, that works too.

As to power level, I was assuming they all warp reality enough to make their gadgetry and so forth work through sheer force of will (a la 40k's Orks), which implies significant power. Trapping one should be the result of very careful planning; or, in other words, they should be powerful enough that misleading them is far more practical than outright stopping them.

That said, running this as "Tucker's Kobolds play X-COM:Terror From the Deep against an army of Haruhi Suzumiyas" has a certain appeal as well.

And I would agree that a pure focus on building things might get stale; it may just be my group that enjoys cooperative city-building to the point where adventures have stopped in favor of it. It wouldn't take much work to tweak the balance away from "organizing the expansion of the underground hydroponic facilities" toward "construct an elaborate plan to distract/trap the superheroes while we steal the last sprinkler system in the city" and get more dungeon-delving goodness that way.

[Knaight]

I'd play it - the pitch was just about perfect to catch my attention, there's still enough adventuring type stuff to prevent the mundanity from getting excessive, and the setting is ripe for black comedy.

[NRSASD]

My biggest concern from a story arc point of view is that trying to build an enclave of humanity amidst these superhero shenanigans is futile in the extreme. If the supervillians aren't crushing you beneath their ridiculous-yet-classy iron heels, you get obliterated by your "saviors". Any pocket of civilization is going to draw villains seeking subjects by the hundreds and an equal number of heroes to fight them. In short, getting people back on the right track is going to be much harder than just rebuilding the infrastructure. You have to either eliminate, escape, or hide from the insanity that infests the world.

I love the concept of superheroes as delusional, it really adds to the whole comedy vibe. Another thing: perhaps the superheroes don't die of old age. They've been fighting crime and multidimensional evil for hundreds of years, but just haven't noticed. All of the superheroes have ancient, funny sounding names and wear uniforms that represent organizations long gone.

Comicbook logic should impose itself on reality whenever/wherever the heroes are present, like in Redshirts by John Scalia or in ShoggySeldom's excellent All Guardsmen (http://www.theallguardsmenparty.com/spy.html).

[Knaight]

My biggest concern from a story arc point of view is that trying to build an enclave of humanity amidst these superhero shenanigans is futile in the extreme. If the supervillians aren't crushing you beneath their ridiculous-yet-classy iron heels, you get obliterated by your "saviors". Any pocket of civilization is going to draw villains seeking subjects by the hundreds and an equal number of heroes to fight them. In short, getting people back on the right track is going to be much harder than just rebuilding the infrastructure. You have to either eliminate, escape, or hide from the insanity that infests the world.

True - this campaign structure lends itself really well to quixotic quests of futility and failure, where the characters find their end in death and misery. If anything that increases my interest in playing it, but a lot of players aren't really on board with that.

[Gravitron5000]

This does assume that the superheroic mindset is slightly affected by whatever phlebotinium started superpowers proliferating, to the point where they're semi-consciously blind to the problems they're causing. After all, they're superheroes, brave vanquishers of injustice and punchers of evil faces; if the little people want more food and less infant mortality, why, they're more than capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and making it happen. All thanks, of course, to the safety and freedom the superheroes provide. You're welcome, citizens!

The degree to which this mindset and its requisite delusions are a product of the superpower proliferation event, rather than human nature, is one tunable parameter to brighten or darken the setting. Personally, I wouldn't say it would take much of a nudge to get people to ignore problems to which they are themselves immune and people with whom they have very little in common, or to selectively pay attention only to those issues they have the tools to decisively solve to wide acclaim.

But if it makes the setting work better to have the super virus or green rocks from space or whatever also cause them to hallucinate a world where everything is fine, and that all the plaintive cries that would indicate otherwise are clearly the product of some villain's mind control ray, that works too.


Another explanation could be that is has been many generations since the supers have interacted on any meaningful level societaly with normal humans, with each generation of supers becoming more and more isolated within their fortresses of justice. Each generation creates more of a disconnect between the supers lifestyle and the reality of living in a landscape ravaged by the powers of destructive psychopaths, regardless of their good intent.

[Hopeless]

Why not have your supers living aboard an orbital habitat only descending to investigate why the world below isn't recovering whilst countering their villainous counterparts?
Their fights being the cause of the continuing suffering ultimately neither side refuse to admit fault not willing to leave the world and find a new home of their own?

So you ask each player to describe what happened to them before they reach first level?

Combine their stories and then let them discuss what they want to and then start your game with these errant god's strictly on the periphery until they're at least 10th level and prepared for their first meeting...

Are they heroes?
Are they villains?
What if they're neither?

How would that work?

[Trekkin]

I do like the idea of the supers being ageless, and getting worse/more powerful as they age. There could still be some flying around defending countries that haven't existed for half a millennium, returning every once in a while to the ruins of their nation's capital to recieve another batch of medals and make grandiose speeches to the grateful populace.
And, invariably, while they're pontificating in front of a field of sun-bleached bones in a language only they remember, their old nemesis will emerge to terrorize "them" anew. As is only to be expected; after all, a hero's work is never done.

Never.

This would also help explain the lack of meaningful contact between supers and normals, in concert with their isolation: not only are supers used to the lights and the plumbing and the servant robots "just working" in whatever way is dramatically convenient, most of them will have been supering for so long that everyone they half-remember from their old life -- and everyone who might have known their secret identity -- is long dead.
This also opens up the possibility of normal people getting swept up into the global mass hallucination by buying into it. It starts subtly, with serendipitous coincidences and lucky breaks and optimism. They see how silly they've been, mucking about in the rubbish when the solutions to their problems are just so simple and straightforward, if one only has the strength...and, all too soon, they're either dead or fastening their cape and taking the fight to the supervillains clearly causing all the evil in the world. Or to conquer it, either way. Meanwhile, the people they left behind are thinking "golly gee, that sure was keen...oh hey, a lucky penny!" And thus the cycle repeats.
That would actually be a nice mini-adventure: developing some kind of Voight-Kampff machine analogue to detect the early signs of Super Syndrome before the nascent super runs off to build a bat signal out of the community's entire stock of copper wire, and then convincing the other survivor groups that it works so they can distinguish the actual optimists from the early-stage superheroes and dare to hope again.


At any rate, actually making the idea of rebuilding civilization less patently futile could entail making the supers weaker (although I like Superman as a baseline), but I would argue they already have a glaring weakness in the form of their disconnect from reality. Playing along, albeit carefully (see above) could convince the heroes that a greater crisis looms on the far side of the Moon or that these chunks of painted styrofoam are actually rocks from their home planet capable of absorbing their powers.

So yes, stealth and subtlety are vital -- but when all else fails, bad set design and hammy acting will see us through. And if the bad set design hides an actual ambush, all the better.

[CharonsHelper]

(although I like Superman as a baseline),

You could just have kryptonite or its equivalent exist. It becomes the macguffin of the game.

As an alternate version - I remember an old comic (I think it was in a 1980 compilation I was given - so the tail end of Silver Age when they were starting to be a bit self-aware) which had The Justice League travel to another dimension where there was an equivalent to them. Only they didn't really exist. The other dimension's Justice League (or whatever) had all died saving the world a decade before - though much of it was still destroyed in the war. But their sidekick (think cheesier Jimmy Olsen) had gotten crazy powers from nuclear radiation or something - and he WANTED IT BACK THE WAY IT WAS. So he created fake versions of his heroes (sort of sentient - they eventually turned on him), illusions of the world not being broken, and forced all of the people of the city to play along with the cheesy crimes that the (again fake) villains were perpetrating solely so the heroes would have something to do.

[Cluedrew]

This does assume that the superheroic mindset is slightly affected by whatever phlebotinium started superpowers proliferating, to the point where they're semi-consciously blind to the problems they're causing.That makes a bit more sense, I mean ignoring the trend of heroes towards goodness, not all of them can really be that in denial. Especially the psychics and super-sense heroes.

I like the idea of the Super Syndrome, which brings madness and power. Actually one interesting twist (that I feel has been mentioned by I can't find it) might be there are no villains, just other heroes that are seen as villainous versions of themselves by other heroes. So you might get caught in a battle between the heroes of Justice United (aka Vial Tech) and the Quiet Hunters (aka the Vengeance Clan). You would need a lot of NPCs for that, maybe 1-on-1 would be better.

[Anonymouswizard]

I'm reminded in some ways of Steelheart (although not the later books), where supers arrive and it turns out they're all insane. So if you're lucky you have a superhero who makes worse a little bit like before, you generally have electricity and only occasionally have to deal with thought police. If you're unlucky nobody strong and interested enough in infrastructure appeared to win the title of 'not a king honest' and you essentially live in the setting Trekkin's essentially described. While there is an anti-supers group they have enough trouble taking down low level supers, let alone those on the level of Steelheart (who's superman with a bit less power and a lot less weaknesses).

[Doorhandle]

Wouldn't the superhumans be just as poorly off as the mundanes? I mean, If they could make food for themselves they would probably just send it downwards, right? Otherwise the setting would still run into the defining problem. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReedRichardsIsUseless)

I kinda like the idea they they're sent off to dispense iniciante justice in really tacky, faded and rotting costumes, and are so starving one of the few actual super-villains could bribe them away with food, all while still saying hyper-idealistic, if clueless comments.

"The path of justice cannot be stopped... but it can be swayed by potato salad. We'll get to you eventually, evildoer!"

The whole idea does sound a bit like One-Punch Man's setting, but taken to the logical conclusion: Most mortals live in fear of the next monster battle, massive, life-ruining collateral damage is the rule, and while the hero organisation means well, the s-class heros have ulterior motives, little concern for life, or are seriously screwed up: often all three.

[Bohandas]

https://youtu.be/U01xasUtlvw

It made me think of that too.

It also reminded me of the old computer game "Superhero League of Hoboken", where the main character's superpower was the ability to create organizational charts

[zeek0]

I thought this idea was hilarious, and I'd certainly play a game in this world. You wouldn't even need to necessarily clearly define the how of everything - it's a joke.

I think the problem can be implementation of campaign. I once played in multiple campaigns from a DM who *loved* city/infratructure building and setting discovery. We spent entire sessions doing diplomacy and skill checks so we could bring fertilizer to the ancient civilization, and discovering how the admittedly cool magic framework operated through scientific experiments. The problem is that I was playing a gunslinger army ranger, and kinda wanted to shoot something between revelations about the local fauna.

First, I wouldn't have much focus on the running of economy or infratructure. Yes, this is important. But let's send our heroes to pull the plug on the Economy AI, or to find the long-lost book about general relativity so that we can repair the geosurvey satellites.

Second, include diplomacy as ways to build civilization. This makes things seem less vacuumy.

I think you have a fun wit, and that is really why the game would be entertaining. Don't take the world seriously, and keep it absurd.

[TeChameleon]

You could just have kryptonite or its equivalent exist. It becomes the macguffin of the game.

As an alternate version - I remember an old comic (I think it was in a 1980 compilation I was given - so the tail end of Silver Age when they were starting to be a bit self-aware) which had The Justice League travel to another dimension where there was an equivalent to them. Only they didn't really exist. The other dimension's Justice League (or whatever) had all died saving the world a decade before - though much of it was still destroyed in the war. But their sidekick (think cheesier Jimmy Olsen) had gotten crazy powers from nuclear radiation or something - and he WANTED IT BACK THE WAY IT WAS. So he created fake versions of his heroes (sort of sentient - they eventually turned on him), illusions of the world not being broken, and forced all of the people of the city to play along with the cheesy crimes that the (again fake) villains were perpetrating solely so the heroes would have something to do.

Heh- that was actually a two-part episode from Justice League Animated- Legends (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34-t3m3L3ao).

Another option to go with for this idea would be to allow the early-onset supers to be playable- super enough to employ the reality-warping in their favour, but still sane enough to realize that there was more to life than punching the closest badguy in the face. SAN loss would be accompanied by a huge power boost, and an equally huge penalty on your next roll to stay grounded enough to finish building the irrigation system rather than hunting down the fiend!!!! that damaged it.

It might also help the game stay a bit on the comedic side of things, dunno- sounds like the concept could easily become really, really bleak.

[Mr Beer]

I like this setting idea, sounds cool and hilarious.

[Ashes]

Reminds me a bit of the comic The Boys by Garth Ennis. You could probably use that for inspiration.