The Black Campbell

I’ve been playing with the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game for the past few days, cobbling together characters to see how I can stretch the system. It does very, very well on higher powered supers, not so well on the street-level types (but they’re still doable.)

Here’s an ooooold character from my first supers game I played in (before I was into comics.) It’s the Beauty & the Beast sort of brooding outsider trying to do good. Lion-like in appearance: big, scary, but very smart. Think the Beast from X-Men.

ASLAN (aka Henri LeCeour)

Solo d10, Buddy d6, Team d8

Distinctions: Beast Behind the Man, Rugged Individualist, Smartest Man in the Room

Power Sets: Beast in the Dark — Superhuman Reflexes d10, Superhuman Durability d10, Enhanced Strength d8, Enhanced Stamina d8; SFX – Claws & Fangs: +d6 to attack pool, -1 step on high die, but +1 step for effect die; SFX – Spiteful: Like Second Wind, physical stress swapped to doom pool for a +1 step on an action; SFX – Berserk: Borrow doom pool die for a +1 step on action, and return the doom pool die next round; Limit – Porphyry: Shut down Stamina for 1PP. Must recover in transition; Limit – Fearsome Appearance: No PP used in social tests. 1PP when he operates through his front man.

Specialties: Acrobatic Expert, Combat Expert, Covert Master, Medical Master, Menace Expert, Science Expert

Milestones: For Science!, Modern Day Cyrano (1XP When he allows someone to take responsibility for an action, 3XP to place himself in a situation where he must work openly with others; 10XP anytime he is openly exposed for his works.

I took a few minutes last night to try and bang out a characters using the new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game from Margaret Weis Productions. (Review here.) Normally, the weakest portion of a supers game, I find, is character creation — to keep game balance players usually have a certain number of points based off of the grandness of the campaign envisioned to work with. You never have quite enough points, or you have to sacrifice concept for more weaknesses or limitations than you might like, and this is understandable in the traditional campaign context where you start out as new heroes…but superheroes tend to pop into existence ready made and ready to hammer bad guys. they’re not on some Campbellian path of the hero.

Now MHR is a bit free form on character creation. There’s plenty of powers, special effects for the same, and a few limitations (that are, of course, marvel-centric like “mutant”), and you have several dozen templates to work from if you want to craft your hero. So I decided to go for a character that was one of an old gaming buddies who was so well liked he’s made an appearance in some variant or other as an NPC in nearly every super or modern game I’ve run. This is as close to the original character (once he had matured to his concept) as I’ve ever gotten.

Jedediah Callahan

Affiliations: Solo d6, Buddy d8, Team d10

Distinctions: Mysterious Origin, Gonzo Inventor, Wealthy Arms Dealer

Power Sets: Unified Organism (Godlike Stamina d12 SFX, Healing: 1PP to clear physical stress, reduce physical trauma -1; SFX, Regeneration: 1PP to regenerate destroyed limbs.) Experimental Weapons (Weapon d8 SFX: Area Attack, SFX: Ricochet, Limitation: Gear, Limitation: May use 1PP to trade in an SFX for another more appropriate one to the weapon. Must roll vs. doom pool as if recovering Gear.)

Specialities: Business Expert, Combat Expert, Science Expert, Tech Master

Milestones: Callahan Industries, Bleeding Edge Tech

History: Jed Callahan hails from Houston Texas. He’s a shortish, scruffy, and colorful fellow with a love of tings that go bang. His father was an aerospace engineer who made a small fortune off of patents and worked at NASA. All his life, Jed has been a tough bugger — he bounces back from injuries incredibly quickly, but with his first major injury — from a car accident that left his 1980 Camaro a twisty, almost unrecognizable ump of metal, his ability to heal has gone into high gear. (He told the police he had been lucky and gotten away with a scratch…he didn’t mention the severed limb that has sintered itself back on.)

He left college early and founded Callahan Firearms, quickly building the company into a respectable arms company, before expanding into military hardware. He earned his BS in his spare time, but has been considered an amateur by the rest of the arms engineering establishment.

He quietly sought out medical specialists that could figure out why he heal so quickly and learned that he is a “unified organism” — all the cells in his body act in concert with each other, reconfiguring themselves as needed. His DNA is definitely not human…but what is he? His father held the key to this knowledge, but has gone missing.

Personality: Jed is a free-wheeling, happy fellow who drinks and smokes far too much…or would if his body couldn’t handle the toxins. He likes fast vehicles, things that go bang (the bigger the better), and other than an unreasonable fear of heights, loves to push the boundaries of what he can do. At heart, however, he’s a south Texas boy, no matter what his DNA might say.

Resources: Jed is the CEO and majority holder in Callahan Industries, which makes all manner of dangerous small arms for militaries around he world. His company also does modifications for vehicles, uparmoring and arming and the like. He has access to a fair fortune (low millions) and anything that CI has in the works. He’s got friends all over, and loads of government and military connections.

So in essence — Jed is a combo of Wolverine and Tony Stark, with a bit of John Caprenter’s The Thing thrown in. His original concept was that, no matter what was done to him, he always survived. He’s not super-strong or even super-smart — his strength is that he keeps plugging away, even when badly outclassed, and

I wasn’t going to buy the new Marvel RPG — I’ve made no secret I’m not a fan of the FATE-ification of Cortex, although I think Leverage does a good job of emulating the series’ “best at what they do” characters and is pretty sleek as a set of mechanics. Not a bad system, but it’s not Cortex. Smallville was a hot fucking mess from the crappy character creation/group dynamics matrix stuff through to the point seeming to be playing people in the writers’ room for a soap opera based on a superhero character. Some like it, and more power to you — I consider it the best example of a totally-unplayable RPG since Space Opera.

So I was understandably a bit trepidatious about buying the new game. But since we’re looking for a system to do a supers campaign, and all of them have some serious issues — the latest Mutants & Masterminds is pretty decent, but like most supers games (looking at you Champions,) you need a week and a Cray supercomputer to calculate up a character. The old DC Heroes was my initial choice, but their gadgeting rules were a nightmare. The old, old Mavel game from the ’80s was disastrous all around; far too abstract for my taste. Icons is a nice lightweight system but not really good for anything other than street-level supers…and I can run that sort of game in the old James Bond system pretty easily.

Enter Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. First off, presentation: I bought the pdf version, so I can’t speak to the quality of the book, but based off of the electronic copy, it’s damned pretty — a full color, high quality version of the game book, along with a player and GM (called the Watcher for MHR)…and you’ll need it the first few times. And a character sheet. The file for Marvel is far superior to the other Cortex PLus stuff — there’s not a lot of lag time on page turns on the iPad 2, unlike the previous Cortex Plus core books.

Onto the substance. First the bad — the base mechanic is nightmarish to describe; it’s, at base, pretty simple, but describing it is a pain in the ass. I’ll try (again, this is my third pass) to distill it: you have a dice pool based on whether you work Solo, witha Buddy, or in a Team. Add your die in a power set and/or a Distinction (a description of your character’s motivations, etc.) Take the two highest dice as your result to hit a target number based on the opposing dice pool of the bad guy (or the “doom pool” for non-character incidents.) Except it’s more complex — there’s all sorts of dice you can get from special effects on your powers, or borrowing from the doom pool with plot points, or or or… Out of the dice left over you have an effects dice — how much damage you do. Damage here is like the Fate stress — physical, mental, or emotional and rated from d4 to d12. More than that and you take Trauma — longer-term injuries that stick with you between action scenes. It’s easier to track than it sounds.

The complexity of the dice mechanic not withstanding, the game is not as unplayable as it will first read. If you cut out a lot of these options, and for the beginner I think you should ignore some of this, the system gets very manageable. The authors should have included some kind of stripped rules set for people just coming into the role playing game, or even people who don’t have a lot of time to reread the rules the half dozen times it took to get it down. Once played a few times, I think it would be easier, it just has too high a learning curve right off the bat.

The good: character creation is superb. No points. No balancing. What do you want to play? Give them the right skills, power sets (with a limitation or two to make it interesting), and go. It will require a bit of restraint from the munchkins in the party, but I think it’s pretty much the only way to do superheroes. One of the benefits here is that there are only four real levels of “strength” for a power: normals have a d6 (or lower…you’re not playing these guys), there’s the enhanced folks with d8 — the street level heroes; superhuman at d10, godlike at d12. You can reskin powers listed with new names, distinctions add characterization (as do Milestones — goals that earn you experience points), and there’s a couple dozen Marvel Universe characters to get a good idea of how to build that character you want. Gadgets are handled like powers, except you can take ’em away.

Simple, straightforward…only the extensive list of plot pont fired options causes it to be overly complex for the beginner.

So with that in mind, I think I can recommend it. I wanted to hate it when I bought it; I wanted to like it after a read through, but am still on the fence over the base mechanic…and after Smallville, that’s a move in the positive direction.

Style: 5 out of 5 — it’s beautiful, and the method of producing examples of how to play interspersed in the text (including dice graphic examples) really helps. Substance 4 out of 5: it’s a well thought out game system, it just needs a “simple” version for those just getting into the hobby or who have little experience with RPGs. For the $12.99 on Drive Thru RPG, it’s definitely worth it.