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View Full Version : Searching for common ground - meaning of "superhero game"



Quertus
2017-08-18, 07:43 AM
I hate railroading. Some people railroad. These are opposed views, with no real common ground.

But when people say that they don't want their games to turn superhero / don't want a superhero feel in their games / whatever, I'm not sure exactly what they mean.

More to the point, I'm not sure if it's directly and completely an opposed PoV to a stance I hold. I like characters to grow and improve. I like things that one were great challenges, like walking or eating solid food, to be challenges that the character outgrows until they are trivialized by their new capabilities.

Are these opposed views, or is there common ground where you aren't a "superhero", yet still have clearly surpassed the challenge of writing "Hello World"?

Martin Greywolf
2017-08-18, 08:24 AM
Superhero game may not be such a great term - there are superheroes who are less... well, super. Take Rorsach from Watchmen, for example.

What you're describing sound more like games where the PCs become genuinely superhuman, but even then, there's a lot of room for detail.

What I'd say superhero feel to a game means is that the PCs are powerful enough that the general population isn't capable of threatening them any more, short of hiring someone just as powerful. A possible caveat to this may or may not be that the general population is fairly close in abilities to real world humans.

Tracking food and water, well, it depends on the genre, in standard kinda-medieval world, it's not really an issue, if you're playing a survival-oriented game, then it very much is.

Another possible way of looking at this is saying that a character is superpowered when he/she no longer has any problems in common with the general population - this is much more of a problme because we can't really relate to them. Many shonen manga ran into this problem, so let's take Naruto as an example.

At the start, you have ninjas with some magic thrown into the mix, but getting punched in the face hurts and is still a common tactic. You see a character bleed or get bruised from it, and since we all were punched at some point, we can feel the pain. Towards the end, we have neon-covered humanoids landing not so much punches as nuclear grade explosions, and the relatableness is nowhere to be found.

In a way, the answer to your question is that while surpassing challenges is all fine, avoiding superpowered feel in your games is all about when to STOP the advancement, or at the very least, make the advancement go laterally rather than forwards. An example of this is FATE's skill columns, it takes 1+current level skill points to advance a skill by one step (for ever one of your skills, there must be at least one skill of (skill level -1)), and you have to take a new skill and advance a bunch of the old ones - that slows down your power progression quite a bit.

Getting that in class and level systems is a bit troublesome, but e.g. E6 does it pretty well.

Cluedrew
2017-08-18, 08:44 AM
When I think "superheroes", at least in terms of mechanical feel, I think about extremely focused abilities. One trick if you will, that they may be able to apply creatively but it is still one trick. As a simple example is in someone with super-strength could very well have terrible endurance. But if you trained to the point of super-strength, running out of breath immediately feels less natural. Which does mean it has almost nothing to do with power level, so may not be the issue you are thinking about.

Pex
2017-08-18, 08:56 AM
"Superhero games" is a term used by people who don't like that PCs are powerful. They're not wrong to not like the power, but they should recognize that's their personal taste and not blame a game system that utilizes PCs being powerful. The game is not wrong to have powerful PCs.

RazorChain
2017-08-18, 09:08 AM
I hate railroading. Some people railroad. These are opposed views, with no real common ground.

But when people say that they don't want their games to turn superhero / don't want a superhero feel in their games / whatever, I'm not sure exactly what they mean.

More to the point, I'm not sure if it's directly and completely an opposed PoV to a stance I hold. I like characters to grow and improve. I like things that one were great challenges, like walking or eating solid food, to be challenges that the character outgrows until they are trivialized by their new capabilities.

Are these opposed views, or is there common ground where you aren't a "superhero", yet still have clearly surpassed the challenge of writing "Hello World"?

Marting Greywolf gave a great explanation

As I mentioned this in the Win Button thread I'll explain a little better.

You can play a swordmaster who's one of the best in the world but you still cant bathe in lava or fall down 200' and just pick yourself up, dusti off and walk away. Your character may have started as a novice swordsman but now he can face down 20 foes if he has better ground and can't be surrounded.

You can play a mage that develops his abilties and becomes a archmage without him getting a wish spell that let's him emulate all spells in the campaign. An archmage doesn't necessarily get the ability to Fly, Teleport, Disintegrate, Turn Invisible, Telekinesis, Mind Read & Control, Scry, Blast, Throw up forcewalls, Buff, Summon Angels, Divine all asnwers and myriad of other things. You see if you made a supehero in a superhero game with all those powers then the Game Master would probably veto that character.

An Archmage might have a specialty like elementalist or mind control but not be good at everything. That Archmage might still be shot in the back and die.

It's the level of progression that is the problem in for example D&D. You start off murdering giant rats in the inn's cellars than suddenly your battling the gods, dethroning them to take their place.

I'm running a Gurps campaign where the PC's started with 220 points, making competent adventurers. Now 25-30 sessions later they are 300 points. Vastly better but still have the same problems as the general populace. The power scale is smaller, that Lich they killed was just an undead mage with lot's of spells and tricks. The group could have killed that Lich from the start with great planning and tactics and whole lot of luck but it would have been a hell of a lot harder.

Once for the fun of it I made a multi class fighter/sorcerer, dressed him up in yellow and red armor, then I would fly around blasting spells at my foes. His name was of course Anthony

ngilop
2017-08-18, 09:11 AM
"Superhero games" is a term used by people who don't like that PCs are powerful. They're not wrong to not like the power, but they should recognize that's their personal taste and not blame a game system that utilizes PCs being powerful. The game is not wrong to have powerful PCs.

I have always seen the term "superhero games" referred to on Champions and Marvel super hero RPG and other comic book related superhero games.

Pex
2017-08-18, 11:05 AM
I have always seen the term "superhero games" referred to on Champions and Marvel super hero RPG and other comic book related superhero games.

That's being literal, which is not the point of the thread. It's not about playing a superhero like Flash or Captain America.

jitzul
2017-08-18, 11:06 AM
Is this a generational thing? Form my time lurking in the forums it seems like the crowd that hates the zero to demi god, level out of your problems systems are mostly people who have been playing since the 1970s-80s. I for one love level up type systems where high level= not paying attention to things that where problems 10 levels earlier, but im also a young adult who has just now started playing tabletop rpgs who has spent a large part of my life playing crpgs. I guess playing crpgs has conditioned me to think that stuff like walking form point a to b and fighting rando wolves while desperately ration food, while trying to also beat environmental challenges = low level unfun shenanigans.

I'm kinda in agreement with pex somewhat in that it seems like a taste thing. Some people like playing in down to earth game of thrones type worlds where no matter how far the pc gets in life they are still human and bound by what people could and could not do in the real world. They can still be challenged by traveling to the kingdom over or by a locked door to a secret vault. They still die from some peasant with dagger. Some people also like games where pc's can outgrow the shackles of humanity and fight a ancient red dragon in the middle of a volcano while slinging reality altering spells and shrugging off claws to the chest.

Telok
2017-08-18, 01:52 PM
Apparently I'm weird or something. I use the term to denote superhero games, Champions, Mutants & Masterminds, etc.

Cealocanth
2017-08-18, 05:22 PM
Apparently I'm weird or something. I use the term to denote superhero games, Champions, Mutants & Masterminds, etc.

I do the same. When I say "superhero game", I usually mean that at least one of the player characters will be named "_______ Man" and most will be wearing spandex.

But as far as power level goes, in Savage Worlds (the system I'm most familiar with - I can't make generalizations for 5e or Pathfinder, sorry) Someone who's mediocre at something will have a d12 in their stat, someone who's bad at something will have a d8 in that stat, and someone who's good at something will have a d12+4 or higher in that stat. A 12 Toughness would be considered low for the game, and 6 Armor on a suit of armor is considered light armor. An average shot will deal 4d10 damage, and you can easily throw literal tanks at your PCs without them being really threatened.

In SW, an average stat for a normal game is d6, an average shot for damage is 2d6, and an average Toughness is 2d6.
d4 in a stat is sub-par, and d8 or d10 in a stat is considered good.

But I imagine people are probably using this term to denote the atmosphere of the game. If the players are running around as basically gods on Earth, and monsters that could easily destroy entire cities are balanced forces against them, then it's probably what most would call a superhero game.

RazorChain
2017-08-18, 06:40 PM
"Superhero games" is a term used by people who don't like that PCs are powerful. They're not wrong to not like the power, but they should recognize that's their personal taste and not blame a game system that utilizes PCs being powerful. The game is not wrong to have powerful PCs.

You are right, the game is not wrong, it's mostly a matter of taste. In this regard I prefer games with small power curve, though I have fond memories of D&D but our campaigns would rarely progress beyond level 12 or 13.

rs2excelsior
2017-08-18, 07:45 PM
Agreed with Martin Greywolf's description, I think that's mostly spot-on.

I don't use the term "superhero game," but I see it applied a lot to high-level D&D. The issue is that, at higher levels, low-level characters are simply no longer a threat. Sure, it's fine for things that were challenging to become no longer so, but when literal armies are basically no longer of any concern, there's an issue with the game (in my opinion, of course--there's nothing inherently wrong with that kind of setting but it's not a kind that I particularly like). It changes a lot of the "real world" assumptions, which begins to radically alter the game world from the real world. When armies and castles are no longer an issue for high level wizards, the king must rely on a wizard of his own rather than his keep and his royal guard. I usually try and make level 5 roughly the epitome of human athleticism and skill, but as the party levels up that either has to change or you've got a party that can ignore many of the things that in the real world would be significant threats. It radically upsets the balance of power from the real world default. Which, again, is perfectly fine if you like that kind of game--but I prefer something where the PCs are simply exceptional but within human limits.

So I'd define "Superhero" games (in the sense the OP means, rather than literal Mutants & Masterminds type game) as having two characteristics:

1) The PCs are physically past human limits; they are capable of things that cannot reasonably be expected of mere mortals

2) The PCs can safely ignore "mundane" threats; i.e. only enemies at about the same power level are even worthy of consideration as a threat

Now, some of this is a bit of a stretch in a setting where magic is real and not particularly uncommon for the PCs, true. But even a wizard can be stabbed in the back and die under "real world" assumptions. A 15th level wizard in 3.P with 40-60 hitpoints that can safely ignore being hit in the face with an orc's greataxe (a problem with all high-level D&D characters, imo) and casually destroy armies pretty severely breaks with real-world assumptions.

And yes, I do believe there can be a middle ground, where PCs can continue getting better but do not get to become literally superhuman. I'd like to try out E6/P6 rules just for that purpose, if I were still around my old D&D group regularly.

Telok
2017-08-18, 10:22 PM
And yes, I do believe there can be a middle ground, where PCs can continue getting better but do not get to become literally superhuman. I'd like to try out E6/P6 rules just for that purpose, if I were still around my old D&D group regularly.

Well probably stopping the unbounded number inflation of the last three d&d editions might help. Capping humanoid hit dice at 10 and keeping constitution bonuses reigned in helps. 10d4+20 or 30 (ad&d) is a big difference from 20d6+40 to 80 (5e). Then you can stop messing around with damage multipliers and six to eight attack roll routines.

Mechalich
2017-08-18, 11:43 PM
A superhero setting is, broadly, any setting where there is a powered class and an unpowered class. One of the clearest examples of this divide is Harry Potter, which has wizards and muggles.

This can be further subdivided into settings where power is gated by genetic lottery or whether it is theoretically open to everyone. D&D, interestingly, is actually the latter. Anyone can study to be a wizard or cleric.

Superhero settings become problematic when the supers are sufficiently powerful that the unpowered masses are totally ineffectual in dealing with the supers in the aggregate. Having an elite class of empowered beings is fine if they are constrained by the masses. The classic gaming example is Vampire: the Masquerade which posits exactly this scenario. The vampires are superhuman beings, but they aren't superhuman enough to take on humans in numbers and they also aren't sufficiently powerful to necessarily overcome military technology even one on one (in the oWoD a Main Battle Tank liquidates all but the most powerful vampires without much difficulty).

This is very different from something like DC, where Superman is very much capable of annihilating the entire human race if he wakes up one morning and decides to get his genocide on. As a result, in the DC universe, the only people who matter at all are the upper tier supers (basically the Justice League, their enemies, and the like). Everyone else is irrelevant and fills a supporting role at best. That's not necessarily a problem. It's perfectly okay to run a DC universe game, it's just that everyone in the party needs to be playing as members of the justice league, or the players and the GM need to have explicitly agreed that they are playing bit parts within a larger universe they won't be able to change. That's perfectly okay, you can get a lot of character drama out of such setups, but it needs to be clear.

This leads to a problem that D&D, and most other settings that attempt to bridge the gap, have. In most editions, to varying degrees, the power differential between the elite - meaning high level spellcasters and certain spellcasting monsters - and the masses - meaning everyone else - is sufficiently vast that you could stack them all up and they would all be crushed, very much Connecticut Yankee style. As a result the only people that matter in the setting at all are that tiny group of high-level spellcasters, but the game - outside of Dark Sun which almost gets there - absolutely refuses to acknowledge and recognize this. The simple reality is that to someone capable of casting 8th or 9th level spells, anyone who can't put up at least 6th level spells is a bug to be stepped upon.

Again, D&D is hardly unique here. Every pretty much every shounen anime ever made has the problem that the upper level characters should be able to ruthlessly crush the lowbies before the ever become an issue. Very few settings have ever come anywhere close to owning the implications of having overpowered god-entities walking amongst the mortals - in large part because played straight such worlds are brutal and grimdark to the extreme. Exalted was willing to hint at it at points - particularly with the Lunars - and people recoiled.

Darth Ultron
2017-08-19, 09:42 AM
I don't think the whole being more powerful then the whole world of mundanes really matters to a superhero game. Any game that has ''heroes'' by definition, has them better then all the normal folk. And that is kinda the point. Even just a game with ''just characters'' has to have them ''more then normal''. No one would play a ''normal game''; it would be like ''roll a 1d20 to start your car, DC 10''.

For a Superhero game I'd put:

1. Super Crazy Insane Power- It's not just powerful, it's not just all powerful, it's like silly five year old super duper powerful power times infinity plus one. This is easy to see in most Superheros: Superman, The Hulk and Thor; but also ones like Batman or Iron Man that can use 'magic money to invent and build anything.' The X-men are also a great example.

2. The Detachment from Common Sense and Reality. A superhero game makes no sense and is unreal. It's just random stuff tossed together for entertainment. The most obvious is why don't superheros just fix the world? Take like Batman or Spiderman, after say a year these demigods would have caught every criminal in the city, right? So why are not the cities crime free? Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark have a zillion zillion dollars and could fix tons and tons and tons and tons of problems with it.

3. Childlike. The superhero game is simple and uncomplicated and straight forward , like things made for kids. Even though the character's in the story might be adults, they will act like kids. This is why most villains want to ''take over the world'', as that is a typical five year old plan to power.

4. Black and White. The superhero game is black and white. The bad guy is bad and the good guy is good.

5. Rated G ish. This, naturally goes along with Childlike. The Hulk grows like 500%, but never losses his pants. Bad guys get punched and just ''fall down''. When aliens attack New York City in the middle of the day they do not harm or kill a single person in the whole city and do things like break through windows and shoot posters on a wall.

Though ''superhero'' is very broad so the above will not apply to everything...I'm just talking about the ''Common Classic Type''.

Beleriphon
2017-08-20, 04:03 PM
I don't think the whole being more powerful then the whole world of mundanes really matters to a superhero game. Any game that has ''heroes'' by definition, has them better then all the normal folk. And that is kinda the point. Even just a game with ''just characters'' has to have them ''more then normal''. No one would play a ''normal game''; it would be like ''roll a 1d20 to start your car, DC 10''.

For a Superhero game I'd put:

1. Super Crazy Insane Power- It's not just powerful, it's not just all powerful, it's like silly five year old super duper powerful power times infinity plus one. This is easy to see in most Superheros: Superman, The Hulk and Thor; but also ones like Batman or Iron Man that can use 'magic money to invent and build anything.' The X-men are also a great example.

True after a fashion.


2. The Detachment from Common Sense and Reality. A superhero game makes no sense and is unreal. It's just random stuff tossed together for entertainment. The most obvious is why don't superheros just fix the world? Take like Batman or Spiderman, after say a year these demigods would have caught every criminal in the city, right? So why are not the cities crime free? Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark have a zillion zillion dollars and could fix tons and tons and tons and tons of problems with it.

Classic trope. Reed Richards is useless after all.


3. Childlike. The superhero game is simple and uncomplicated and straight forward , like things made for kids. Even though the character's in the story might be adults, they will act like kids. This is why most villains want to ''take over the world'', as that is a typical five year old plan to power.

Unless you're Doctor Doom, when your plan actually worked. Sort of.


4. Black and White. The superhero game is black and white. The bad guy is bad and the good guy is good.

True-ish.


5. Rated G ish. This, naturally goes along with Childlike. The Hulk grows like 500%, but never losses his pants. Bad guys get punched and just ''fall down''. When aliens attack New York City in the middle of the day they do not harm or kill a single person in the whole city and do things like break through windows and shoot posters on a wall.

Though ''superhero'' is very broad so the above will not apply to everything...I'm just talking about the ''Common Classic Type''.

That last one hasn't really been true since about 1970. Sure, Batman doesn't kill people, but thugs don't just "fall down" when kicks them in the face. Since the late 70s or early 80s the rather brutal results of Batman and similarly human characters have been called out: life altering injuries and crippling pain. Other characters, Superman for example, tend operate in tiers they can hit things in or the stories focus less on what a character can do and more about why they do something. But again the genre doesn't generally shy away from showing what happens when Superman punches a building, or that people die the Skrulls attack New York. Sure its not all blood and guts, but it also isn't hidden.

In that way maybe some games do take a superhero stance in so far as the games glossing over the particulars of violence and its results.

Darth Ultron
2017-08-20, 07:59 PM
That last one hasn't really been true since about 1970. Sure, Batman doesn't kill people, but thugs don't just "fall down" when kicks them in the face.

It has gotten worse since 1970. In the 70's and even through part of the 80's they kept things adult ish, but starting in the late 80's things took a huge dive towards kidz stuff.

Just to take a couple Avengers examples we get: Ms. Marvel gets raped and has a baby and everyone is like ''cool what will you name the baby?'' We get the little 8 year old immortal that on the cover is holding a gun to his head and does kill himself in the comic(but he is immortal so he comes back). And infamously Hank Pym, wife beater. Compare to modern day stories.

Even ''edge'' characters, like say Cable or Wolverine only ''one in a while'' do adult stuff...sort of. Mostly Cable shoots something dumb out of his gun like ''plasma stun safety force'' and Wolverine is infamous for the ''pop the claws out, make a joke, jump at the bad guy, put his claws back in, and punch the bad guy (or like coolz cut the bad guys gun).

And Batman, and all the rest do just punch or kick bad guys and they fall down with no injuries at all.



In that way maybe some games do take a superhero stance in so far as the games glossing over the particulars of violence and its results.

Martin Greywolf
2017-08-21, 01:46 AM
Systems that let you go from Joe Average to Lord Thy God aren't necessarily a bad thing in themselves - a matter of taste if you want to play through all of the levels to be sure, but not bad. Problem is, they are staggeringly difficult to actually pull off well, and DnD certainly doesn't.

For DnD 3.5, you run into several problems once you get past level 10 or so, if we assume there is no optimization craziness going on. One of the largest is that combat sort of stops being fun or engaging - that feeling of a lot riding on one roll is gone, you have enough HP and healing to take repeated blows and combat becomes a war of attrition. It's fun to do war of attrition for a change of pace, but not every encounter. There are also a lot of bonuses some of which do stack, some of them don't, some apply when flanked, some don't etc etc.

Even FATE struggles here - sure, you can say that Fight skill allows everyone cleave a mountain in half, but when yo want to go from a guy who can barely hold a sword to mountain-cleaver, where do you put the point of change? Is it a stunt? How about if you buy it in the middle of an arc, isn't that a bit too sudden of a change? I kind of have exactly this problem since I'm running a One Piece game in FATE and it's a bit of a bother - I'll most likely solve it by out of game agreement, which is a good solution, but a poor feature if you intend your system to be nobody to demigod (which in the interest of fairness, FATE isn't meant to do).

And lastly, if you do this, then all the logical problems of your mechanics will be thrown even more into focus by the power discrepancy between levels 1 and 20. As an example, HP work pretty well for low-level DnD 3.5 characters - the toughest dude can take two or three hits and that's it, but once you get past that, the problems with simulating health this way become apparent.

Grod_The_Giant
2017-08-21, 07:51 AM
What I'd say superhero feel to a game means is that the PCs are powerful enough that the general population isn't capable of threatening them any more, short of hiring someone just as powerful. A possible caveat to this may or may not be that the general population is fairly close in abilities to real world humans.
I very much agree with this, which I think is the key point-- that you hit a point where low level NPCs don't matter. Where the solution to "the artifact is stored in Fort Knox" is "walk into Fort Knox and beat everyone up." Or invisible-stealth your way through, or mind control, or whatever. Basically no number of "normal" people can provide an obstacle. Which means, by extension, that "normal" people start to become minor parts of the story; scenery, rather than challenges.

It's not, necessarily, bad. And depending on the system, there may or may not be ways around it (good mass combat rules, lots of magic/tech for "normal" dudes, 5e's bounded accuracy, etc). But if it happens, it means a substantial style shift, and it makes the GM's job somewhat harder.

Florian
2017-08-21, 08:15 AM
A large part of what makes a "superhero" is that he can only be challenged by another "super", everything else is trivial/backgound noise.

I think there´s a disconnect when characters can make the transition from "hero" (still part of the setting) to "superhero" (basically outside the setting now) and how the game should change and what happens if the characters are on a different "track" when that change occurs.

D&D 4E did a good job with its three tiers of play: Wilderness, Dungeon, Planes. This can at least handle the disconnect a bit.