I need soap operas with my super heroes

With Stan Lee’s passing and my own love of gaming, I’ve found myself thinking about super hero games.

Now, it may be because I haven’t played Sentinels of the Multiverse (I have friends who swear by it and even cosplay about it) but I have not yet played a board game that captured the feel of a comic book/ super hero for me. Oh, I’ve had lots of fun with them but they haven’t  made me feel like I was living a super hero story.

Mind you, that’s because a key element of the genre for me is the soap opera, something that Stan Lee made a major part of comic books. (Seriously, the definition of Spider-Man is him worrying about the bills and Aunt May’s fiftieth operation while wrestling Doctor Octopus) The fights are all very well but they are only one layer of the chocolate cake.

Which is why my best super hero experiences in gaming have consistently been through role playing games. In particular (and appropriately, given that Stan Lee has put me on this train of thought), the old Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing Game. Good old FASERIP.

At the time, FASERIP seemed almost too simple to be a real RPG to us, seeing as how it really boiled down to one chart. Now, I have a much greater understanding of how that simplicity makes the system great. By not having to focus on rule mastery, we were able to focus more on story telling. Of course, we had to supply our own soap operas but we’d all read Chris Claremont’s X-Men so we were able to do that.

My old Marvel GM has recommended Masks to me for a super hero game that really explores story telling. I’ll have to look into that.

Let’s face it. Super Heroes are, at the end of day, about specific characters and their stories. And role playing games are great at that.

Almost New Year’s Eve gaming

For a while, I was in a Skype game of old school Marvel Superheroes. Time commitments made it too difficult for me to stay but I get invited when they have one-shots. And I managed to make a special, almost-the-end-of-the-year, game on December 30th.

The basic plot of the one-shot was that the UN was sending a group of heroes to an another dimension to retrieve the board of Mys-Tech, a bunch of evil wizards from the Warhead comic book (which I never read and knew nothing about)

While most of my time playing the old Marvel system was spent in homebrew campaigns, Dennis runs his game nominally in the Marvel universe. When he runs one-shots, he just lets us pick from an appropriate group of previously established Marvel characters. 

This time, he gave us a selection of Avengers, Alpha Flight members and other international heroes. Looking through the list, I immediately saw *the* choice: Devil Dinosaur! A later creation of Jack Kirby, Devil is a mutant Tyrannosaurus Rex who has bright red skin and the intelligence of a high school sophomore (to steal a line from Roger Zelazny) 

The rest of the team consisted of Skaar, son of the Hulk, Talisman and Havok (who was easily the least obscure character in the bunch, at least until Devil Dinosaur gets his own movie)

Short version of how things went: Talisman teleported the team right into the board room and we stomped on them until they were dead (Marvel has a pretty strict moral code but Devil Dinosaur is flexible about who people are), in traction or surrendered. Dennis figured the UN would send in overwhelming force and that’s pretty much what we were. The goal wasn’t a high drama, desperate fight but a total romp.

Devil Dinosaur was a great choice for a fun, slightly silly game. For spoken dialogue, I just said the word ‘roar’ while typing in chat Bertie Wooster-like comments ‘Dash it all, that’s dirty pool, old bean!’ And knowing that I had poor psyche and couldn’t handle any magic attacks on my mind, I jumped over the mooks to just literally stomp on the squishy mages. Proved to be a successful strategy.

Back in the Midwest, I used to spend New Year’s board gaming until I dropped. Small child doesn’t lend itself to that. However, playing this game felt like a tribute to that tradition.

Good times.

My old school roots in RPGs

While I know that it probably sounds like I am only interested in avant-garde role-playing games, the truth is that my basic grounding was very traditional games. The three games that really helped me get into role playing games were second edition Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, and the original Marvel Superheroes Role-Playing Game.

Of course, I had played role playing games before then, like first edition Dungeons and Dragons. However, those three games were the first really serious campaigns I was in and really made role playing games a serious hobby for me. Of course, the groups I played with get the real credit but the systems still help.

Dungeons and Dragons is the bedrock of role playing games. It's the game that got the industry started and I don't think role playing games would have inevitably, spontaneously come to life. They needed a spark and it turns out that a dragon is a pretty good spark.

I do know some gamers who actively dislike D&D. I think it's because D&D is the Man of role playing games and it's hip to hate the Man. And, as litigious as TSR would be, sometimes they really did act like the Man.

However, decades of development and changes and ideas has given Dungeons and Dragons one of the richest and most genuinely diverse contents out there. It has so much to offer. For a game that isn't designed to be a generic system that you can apply any theme to, it has a wealth of sandboxes to play in.

If I could only play one game for the rest of my life, it would be a tussle between Dungeons and Dragons and Go. Mind you, I'd argue I could play every edition and make a monk who plays Go and insist on playing Go, just in character.

I have to admit that reading the second edition of Call of Cthulhu's rules in middle school was my introduction to H. P. Lovecraft and I have been reading his works and the works he inspired. It's been a lifelong enjoyment and not a year goes by without me rereading some of his stories.

If you somehow don't know what Call of Cthulhu is about, it is a horror game inspired by the guy who helped define cosmic horror. You play relatively ordinary people trying to make it to the end without dying horribly or going insane.

Call of Cthulhu, particularly when it first came out, was really the role player.s role playing game. An investigator with a Bowie knife, a tommy guns and some dynamite will probably take out some deep ones. But against anything real monsters, let alone Great Old Ones, you will just die horribly. So you have to focus on playing the character, not fighting.

Back in the day, I was a little sheepish about playing Marvel Super Heroes, since it was such a simple system where one chart did most of the work. But I have had years of fun with it and even occasionally play it now.

And with such a simple system, it was easy to hack the system and play with the mechanics. (My primary GM didn't use the Marvel setting, just the rules, so we populated it with all of our own heroes and villains) I didn't really do that seriously until the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons but Marvel Super Heroes gave me a good start.

And, frankly, it was all such comic book silly fun :)

I've played and researched a lot of indie games in the last few years. But I really owe my grounding in the hobby and my love of the hobby to these old school games.