RPG a Day 2015 Challenge – Day 19

Third entry on favorites week for #RPGaDay2015! This time around it’s supers…

Day 19 – Favorite supers RPG

champions

For the longest time my answer would be Champions. I loved the idea of being able to make whatever character you wanted! I read the books and made hundreds of characters, and could never get anyone to play. Such was my burden! But the story has a happy ending, read on…

Just like sci-fi yesterday, superhero games are a category of RPGs to which people bring varied expectations. Despite the long history of superheroes and the icons and tropes that come with them, ask two people what makes a good supers story and you’ll rarely get them to agree. Some love classic golden age heroes, where good guys are good and the bad guys worse, everybody has over the top powers and the existence of superheroes has little real effect on the real world. Others like gritty street level heroes, low powered, very realistic, and everything in between, angst ridden mutants, comedic sidekicks, alternate history, you name it!

I grew up on classic DC and Marvel, collected them for the longest time, and worked at a comic book store after High School and through College, so I’ve been close to comics all my life. Before the big two publishers in the USA I also read  a lot of comics in Spanish, there were a lot of different heroes and character, such as Kaliman or Aguila Solitaria, so my tastes and sensibilities were an odd mix.

For a long time I tried to run a successful super campaign, and while there were some good runs with the Marvel FASERIP system (mostly a Daredevil solo campaign I ran for a friend) a couple of Heroes Unlimited campaigns, It wasn’t unlit recently that I ran my definitive (so far!) superhero campaign.

IconsAssembled_450_1024x1024

When I began posting on this blog I had just discovered Icons and wrote a lot about the system, including some character write ups. I wanted to use that system, but not all my players were keen on the idea. I had participated as a player in a Mutants & Masterminds 2nd edition campaign son when DC Adventures, using the Mutants & Masterminds 3rd edition rules, I set on that system and what was meant to be a seven month campaign, became an almost two year-long game. I posted about the experience here in the blog in case you want to check it out.

dc-adventures-rpg

Mutants & Masterminds had the flexibility of character creating just like Champions did, but the system, while far from simple, was definitely easier to grasp and run than the Hero System, So Mutants & Masterminds is my current favorite supers game, with Icons a close second for shorter or lighter games. And like a pointed out in a previous post, bit games by Steve Kenson, the supers game guru!

So what’s your favorite supers game? Let us know in the comments. See you all tomorrow for my horror pick…