kera | Design Drabbles: Your Own Personal Batman

Actually nvm this feels like a perfect place for ttrpg design thoughts that are too long to post on masto.

Here goes: Designing Superhero TTRPGs is hard.

It’s not entirely their fault, it’s just that they’re forever the second-best at what they do. Cut any tabletop game of significant depth and complexity focused around a party of characters and their distinctive combat abilities, and a supers game bleeds.

The distinctive innate ‘heroic abilities’ of a D&D 5e class makes every level 1 character a street level superhero, but it goes deeper and permeates the more genre-focused indie sphere of the tabletop landscape.

Do you want to play as the brooding investigator solving mysteries? You’ve got Gumshoe and Call of Cthulhu and Brindlewood Bay. Do you want to play a power and responsibility kind of Marvel hero in the Daredevil or Spider-Man mold (or, like, a good Batman story) stalking the rooftops, balancing their public and private lives and forever at the risk of losing themselves and becoming just as bad as the monsters they fight? Vampire: The Masquerade will never admit it, but that’s your game. Do you want to play in a bitter AU story where you can explore different sides of beloved characters? There’s nothing stopping you from putting Wolverine in Apocalypse World and calling it a day.

This leaves the honest-to-god superhero games about doing daring superheroics in a difficult spot, because they need to focus on what makes superhero comics innately their own: a sort of four-colour action that has only ever existed in the minds of comic book fans, flipping through old issues without context or consequence, of bright colors and faded pages and out of context panels posted on social media or forums to try and prove that, yes, Squirrel Girl beat up Thanos one time or whatever.

Superhero comics have built up their own visual and narrative language, but ultimately: they’re at their best when they're drawing from other mediums. So what you kind of have to focus on is emulating the specific melodrama and character relations, I think. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying got it; a Cortex-flavored system evoking the Bendis era of Superheroes-Talking-In-Kitchens that existed long enough to adapt Civil War, the biggest and action-figure-smashiest of Mark Millar’s sordid big-two career, but it was killed before its time and only focuses on that specifically 2008 era so hard that its a difficult sell now if you weren't there and don't particularly want to play, like, Phyla-Vell as written by Abnett/Lanning when they still spoke to each other.

Or. Like. Bucky-Cap. God, remember Bucky-Cap?