"Why I don't dig Super Heroes as a genre" Topic

I was at Cold Wars this weekend and was invited to join a super heroes game. Nice looking game but I explained i didn't really care for the genre, thanks anyway. The GM was incredulous and pointed out all the cool characters he had in his game.

Which is exactly why I don't like super heroes as a genre. When your average home city has more super heroes, mutants, extra-terrestrials, super villains, evil corporations and shadowy organizations plotting who knows what, they're not "super" any more.

Look at Batman. Do any normal people live in Gotham? Why? because metropolis is worse? Seriously, how the hell does a business afford the insurance? Do you need a rider for super-villain plots in case your Starbucks franchise is vaporized by Bane, the Joker, Rhas Al Ghul, The Riddler, Mr. Freeze, the Scarecrow, Anarky……

I like the old Batman where it was Bats and Joker and regular old clever and interesting bad guys (Crime Circus, Red Hood). Sherlock Holmes runs over a thousand pages of small type with exactly one (!) super villain.

Dont ask…. The truce could dissapoint you.

But i asked once a gamer from russia, a alumni of the kiev military institut why he does not like to play super heros. He said every russian comrade is human and a hero. ….

I think it has something to do with the right of been individualistic…???
Anyway the prefix "super" does not say anything about effiency. Right?
Real heros have no enemies left after one adventure and can retire.
:)))

Greetings and have fun

This thought hit me while watching Buffy, as the evil creatures kept getting more powerful so did Buffy.

Its like a law of (Meta)Physics: Good and Evil must balance.

Think of it like: water seeking its own level; hot flows toward cold and high pressure flows towards low pressure until an equilibrium is reached.

So as a super hero gets/is more powerful the villains become more powerful or at least multiply in number. As the number of super heroes increases so do the number of villains.

So to follow your examples: As Bats gained more powers/gadgets so the number and powers of the villains increased.

Tim

The work of Kurt Busiek might interest you. He created the awesome Astro City, a comic where the superheroes are viewed through the eyes of ordinary people. It keeps the supers super and extraordinary but also shows the ordinary people to be just as much heroes because they risk their lives without any powers.

I haven't wargamed superheroes as a genre, but I've run the Champions role playing games for more than two decades now and having a convincing world populated by ordinary people who are still characters interacting with the super characters makes for a better game.

The only time I played in a super-hero oriented RPG, we all kept our tongues firmly implanted in our cheeks. Then again, a lot of the campaigns that group played were like that. Anyway, I imagine I would enjoy a super-hero game to a degree inversely proportional to how seriously it was taken.

Doug

I feel exactly the same, Mark.
When EVERYBODY is Special, nobody is.

It was one of the themes that Aaron Williams was examining in PS238. Granted, it was supposed to be a spoof of superhero comics, but one of the characters was #84 — basically, the 84th hero with the same basic combination of powers as Superman — and her sub-plot was all about coping with being super but not-so-special.

I created a super heroic world with a RPG game called Golden Heroes (GW produced when GW did proper games)

I was playing it till very recently, and my world had lots of characters with powers… but my secret was that most had useless power combos, very poor control, or literally died the first time the power manifested (flaming body without flame resistance for example…)

The government wanted to imprison most supers, and super prisons were created, underground, underwater, in space, depending on what powers needed to be neutralised. Villains were not imprisoned when captured if they had serious crimes (really – rendition to camp X but they never arrived, no escaping from prison for this criminal commisioner Gordon!)

Of course, an even bigger bad eventually comes along, and all of humanity needs every super to fight to survive, so old enemies are conscripted to face off as foot soldiers against the ultimate foe.

Some manage to survive and escape, some of the Players heroes even manage to accidentally kill one or two bystanders, and have to go on the run from the government as well.

You only have to throw a few curveballs to the standard story to keep it interesting.

My USP was that everyone on board all the aeroplanes above the surface of the planet, vanished with the aeroplane at precisely the same moment across the globe, spent a week (nowhere) and then reappeared one week later at exactly the same position with superpowers. (also all the children had vanished from the plane..and had not been returned..)

One PC, on landing being interviewed by a government type was asked where he had been for the last week said Benidorm, because they did not know that they were a week late.

Mark, did you grow up readings Comics and if so did you enjoy them?

Thanks,

John

Second the recs for reading PS238 (which is free online) and Astro City (which is worth every penny). You might also take a look at White Wolf's old Aberrant game and its stablemate prequel Adventure and sequel Trinity. Those RPGs tackle the issue of how the real world would be impacted by increasingly-powerful supers in the modern day, and Trinity shows the far-future aftermath of the eventual supers-normals war.

There's also Godlike and Wild Talents. The former RPG is WW2 supers, with large numbers of relatively weak and vulnerable "talents" manifesting powers during the war and getting killed in droves. The latter is the same setting in the 60s, with fewer but much more powerful talents starting to radically destabilize society.

> When EVERYBODY is Special, nobody is.

Your both stealing from "The Incredibles". (I suspect knowingly).

Only one I like is Superman, but lets be realistic – the instant anyone found out about Kyrptonite the government would give every cop in the world bullets coated with the stuff.

The X-men is somewhat interesting since the world around the supers does try to work them into their normal lives.

I always loved the Damage Control comics. Its about a group of ordinary folks who worked for an insurance company who had to clean up after the Supers blew up the town…
link

The game could be fun if you are into it. For me, if it was classic 80's, i'd be in. If its more modern "civil war" one, forget it.

Forget Gotham, why does anyone in the Marvel Universe live and work in Manhattan? Justabout every Marvel character lives there, hero or villain, and just about every nefarious plot of the latter is focused there.

Garth Ennis' The Boys is another comic with a contra-superheroes theme.

Everybody quote after me: "The willing suspension of disbelief."

Either you're willing to suspend your disbelief in the premise and elements of a genre, and have fun playing it, or you aren't.

WSoD is required for the following genres:
Fantasy
Pulp
Steampunk
Victorian Science Fiction
Science Fiction
Space Opera
Pirates
Dungeon crawls
D&D and similar "adventurer-based" RPGs
Post-Apocalypse
Zombies
Horror
Lovecraftian Horror
Aliens/UFOs
Gangsters
Westerns
Moderns or Near Future conflicts among nations that aren't currently in conflict and unlikely to enter conflict (particularly WW3 scenarios).

And for that matter, any a-historical battle between even historical opponents, and of course any battle involving historical opponents whom nevertheless we only have incomplete data about. (Heck, there's still a great deal of debate over how the Roman maniple system worked in battle— so you have to "suspend disbelief" when playing Romans, too!)

If we all insisted on absolute, logical realism in every genre we played, we wouldn't play very many genres. Heck, we probably wouldn't play at all.

Sometimes you just have to embrace the silliness and have a good time.

Strangely, I've never been much into superhero comics or movies (I DID like Plastic Man and Alan Moore's take on Marvelman/Miracleman).
However I do like superhero games… I loved the City of Heroes MMPORPG… and RPGs like Godlike, Wild Talents, The Whispering Vault (AKA 'Clive Barker's Superfriends'), Aberrant… and Supersystem is a great little skirmish game.

Maybe I just like the genre better when it's in the hands of players, who can properly twist it, mock it and recalibrate it to something that's easier to swallow. Whereas the comics and movies often feel like soap operas to me.

Being a superhero in the real world is probably just as much a pain as it would be in the comics.

Imagine somebody woke up one morning with super-strength, flight and invulnerability. They decided to use their powers for good so they fly around, looking for problems to fix. Of course the chance to actually be around when a bank robbery or crime is occurring is pretty low. Without super-senses our hero is probably going to sit by the TV and the internet and scour it for news of a disaster or crime report. But even then they might get there too late to stop it.

Even with super-power's you're unlikely to save the world in time. With most disasters you're probably going to arrive late and serve as a glorified bulldozer and rescue helicopter.

And then there is the matter of public scrutiny and the government. Some people will stop at nothing to find out who you really are. Governments will either try to control you or have you banned from entering their airspace or even consider you a potential menace and shoot on sight. Before you know it, you're causing diplomatic incidents.

Next there is the price of failure. Lawsuits are just waiting to happen and sooner or later somebody will try to drag you to court.

It gets even more cruel if you have powers such as healing. If you could heal any wound and disease the queue would stretch around the planet and back and you wouldn't have any free time left. So you would pick only those who "deserve it" or just keep your gift a secret and work a little miracle left and right denying others your gift …

The up side is that you don't have to worry about super villains, but picking fights with dictators and drug lords will probably end in bloodshed, you might be invincible, but their henchmen will just execute innocents, chances are you'd be too late to save all of them, the old blood on your hands problem.

And even if there are super villains they are unlikely to make the same kind of mistakes comic book villains do and find a way to kill you quickly and efficiently or at least disable you, unless you are part of a team or have a sidekick, chances are a villain could bushwhack you out of the game.

Superheroics in the real world could turn ugly very quickly …

Forget Gotham, why does anyone in the Marvel Universe live and work in Manhattan?

Because everyone at Marvel itself lives and works in NYC and is therefore isolated from the rest of the world.

That said, Marvel noticed. There was supposedly a reason why that showed up in a Galactus story.

Patrick R pretty well summed up why superhero comics require a vast suspension of disbelief before you can properly enjoy 'em! No matter how "realistic" they strive to be.

It was probably the same way for the ancient Greeks and their mythological stories. The comic books of their day.

I would think (and there's probably been a comic book based on this by now) that anyone who had actual super-abilities would be inclined to keep it all a very, very tight secret and never allow any public displays. Or take advantage of it a la Spider-Man's early strips, try to turn the powers into a career, but put on an act that it was actually just show biz.

As for super-healing, perhaps the Touched by an Angel series showed how this might be dealt with in the real world.

Now someone like a Batman, not super-powered but effectively with super abilities, that's almost as fantastical as a Superman. Maybe even more so, because a real life Batman would never have the luck or endurance necessary to survive (at least Superman is invulnerable when he's on the job, barring magic or Kryptonite, so the real world wouldn't hold much menace, plus that secret identity thing would be truly helpful to a guy like that).
Even a character as down-to-earth and gritty as Rorschach (sort of a real world Batman type; no powers save a drive for vengeance and martial arts skills) could probably not survive long in modern America, with all its accessible weaponry, surveillance, and anti-vigilante laws.

The new Ultimate Spiderman tv series had an episode called "Damage Control" based on the comic. It was a hoot.

BTW this is a rather silly thread about a silly gaming genre that I love. I play Heroclix.

The appeal of superhero gaming (admittedly I've only played RPGs for this genre) is designing a character based around a concept and then getting them to do superheroic stuff in the game: Using flagpoles as asymetrical bars, manhole covers as frisbees, swooping to rescue civillians before they get hit.

I grew up with superheroes, knew superheroes, superheroes were friends of mine. . .and you sir. . .

As a kid, my favorites were the A to Z reference books giving bios, stats and power descriptions of every super. Family histories, team histories, alien overlords, androids, monsters, mutants – a living, breathing world! Page after page of wondrous creativity! I could almost believe these beings actually existed. . .somewhere.

Even looked at mathematically, a few thousand super powered beings among a population of six billion+ seems pretty special. And comic writers have set stories/characters all around the world/cosmos, not just Gotham and Manhattan!

I would think (and there's probably been a comic book based on this by now) that anyone who had actual super-abilities would be inclined to keep it all a very, very tight secret and never allow any public displays.

Quite the opposite. The sensible thing to do would be to go to the government and offer them your services in whatever capacity your powers best qualify you for. In exchange, they provide security for you and you friends and family, and support you so you can concentrate on using your (presumably unique) powers to the fullest. Tinfoil hat brigade rants aside, the government is not your enemy in most countries. If you truly despise your country, just go find one you admire enough to want to work for before "coming out" with your powers. Even a modestly powerful super would be a national treasure – and if the government doesn't want you, there's bound to be some other large, well-funded group that can provide similar support.

Trying to conceal your powers by never using them is a waste – although it might make an interesting ironic piece to have (say) a small community where most people have powers, are concealing them, and don't know the neighbors are in the same boat. One big accident or disaster (a tornado, or a train derailment perhaps) and some folks are bound to blow their cover, producing a snowball effect of closet supers revealing themselves. Be particularly amusing if one of the would-be rescuers winds up having to be saved by a "victim" whose secret powers dwarf their own.