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Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game

Started by Primarch, November 30, 2012, 12:36:48 PM

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Primarch

Any of you guys played this before? Came in a nice book with Spiderman on the front. I picked it up on an impulse at a local Con and read through it. I instantly fell in love with its approach to character creation. I got a group together, we went over the rules and then we tried it out. Somewhere along the way we realized as much fun as character creation was, the actual game is not so much fun. We tried making a few house rules to make it a bit more smooth.

You guys have any experience with it? Its would make for a good system to set up a Marvel game here on E, or any Superhero setting but unless I found a way to make the play rules better I'd almost just use character creation to form a guideline for characters and freeform it.


Chris Brady

Who makes it?  As in the publisher.  There are to my knowledge at least three licensed Marvel games, and I can't remember the actual names.
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Avis habilis

The new one from Margaret Weis, I assume. The character sheet reminds me of Cortex.

Chris Brady

It IS Cortex, a permutation of it.  I own both books for it so far, and have played in two mini campaigns/adventures.  Most 'traditional' style, but that's actually a strength of it.  You can be as loose or as tight as you want with it.  It's really that flexible.
My O&Os Peruse at your doom.

So I make a A&A thread but do I put it here?  No.  Of course not.

Also, I now come with Kung-Fu Blog action.  Here:  Where I talk about comics and all sorts of gaming

Primarch

I was actually talking about this one.
Although I think I might have played that one too, on here actually.

Chris Brady

My O&Os Peruse at your doom.

So I make a A&A thread but do I put it here?  No.  Of course not.

Also, I now come with Kung-Fu Blog action.  Here:  Where I talk about comics and all sorts of gaming

Sasquatch421

I've seen it, but never picked it up which is suprising since I love getting non D&D books as well. Come to think of it I haven't been able to find anymore of my DBZ pen and paper books as well...

tsc

I've got it, but I've found in the past that resource-allocation systems tend to be very slow to run online.  There's a lot more back-and-forth needed than in a system that relies on dice, in my experience.

It's a shame that it didn't do very well, though - I liked the idea a lot. 

Kunoichi

I've played it in a solo game here on E, though the game died after a while.  It was a pretty fun system, but one that was rather easy to break if you knew what you were doing.  Still, it certainly did have potential, and I'd love to have seen what a second edition of the game would have ended up like.

Chris Brady

I'm actually surprised I never heard of it.  I collect Super Hero games.  Save one.
My O&Os Peruse at your doom.

So I make a A&A thread but do I put it here?  No.  Of course not.

Also, I now come with Kung-Fu Blog action.  Here:  Where I talk about comics and all sorts of gaming

tsc

For that one, Marvel decided that instead of licensing their universe to an existing RPG company, they'd contract a company to develop an RPG for them, which they would then own the rights to.  The odd thing was that the company they contracted wasn't an RPG company.  The result was an interesting diceless system, using resource allocation for conflicts... but one that wasn't intensively playtested.

Marvel also kept the project pretty much under wraps until close to completion, and then sold the game directly through comic distributors.  It seems to have sold reasonably well for a non-D&D RPG - but Marvel had been anticipating that it would sell as well as D&D or their own top-tier comics.  It went through multiple print runs, but Marvel still killed it after less than a year, considering it a failure.  Only two of the four announced supplements were ever released.

Chris - which superhero game don't you collect?  Wondering because I also collect them!

Chris Brady

The one Superhero game I will never pick up, ever, is the Chimaera game system.

http://www.chimaerastudios.com/core_rule.htm

It is literally an unplayable mess.  The rules are so well buried that none I know who have bought it can find it.  The writing is also horrible as in illegible and confusing to read.  It's like Mr. Singley the 4th doesn't know how to use grammar.  The fact that he's the editor as well as the writer answers much.
My O&Os Peruse at your doom.

So I make a A&A thread but do I put it here?  No.  Of course not.

Also, I now come with Kung-Fu Blog action.  Here:  Where I talk about comics and all sorts of gaming

tsc

Ah - I'd seen that one online before, but never saw anything about it that sparked my interest any.  I don't worry about trying to have an exhaustive collection - mostly I collect RPGs that are interesting to me for some reason or other, and superhero ones often fit that bill.

My favorite is Capes, but you really need the right group for it, or it degenerates into pure silliness very quickly.  In the way of more traditional superhero systems, M&M3/DCA is my current fave - tried the new Marvel one, but the group I was running it with just didn't take to it.

LunarSage

The main issue I have with the stones Marvel system is that how tough you are directly determines how much 'energy' you have to power your superhuman abilities.  It makes it so that characters like Cyclops don't have anywhere close to the amount of energy to call on that their comic book counterparts do because their max energy is only three times their durability. 

Example:  Cyclops has a Durability of 3, which means he has 9 stones of energy.  His Optic Blast is 9 stones of damage, which costs 9 energy.  You do that and you're -completely- out of energy for just one blast.  That's it.  Next round, you have no more optic blast. 

Yet the Hulk gets 21 energy and doesn't even need it.

There's a rule where you can get twice your Intelligence in energy instead, but that still doesn't help guys like Cyclops who are neither super tough or super smart.

I much prefer the old TSR Classic Marvel game.

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tsc

Yeah - they would have done better to make energy an independent variable - possibly just an across-the-board setting for "power level" of the game/character.

Classic Marvel is my favorite of the Marvel games as well - at least, if you're talking the "Advanced Marvel Super-Heroes" version, rather than the first version.  It's also still available - http://www.classicmarvelforever.com/cms/ has the books under "Other Stuff", "Downloads".

(Actually, one of the things that I like about DCA is how they merged in some concepts from the old MSH game - having "Fighting" as an actual stat, for example, really fits well with how characters in comics generally are.)

Chris Brady

M&M 3e actually combines elements from the FASERIP and the old DC Heroes games.  I like it a lot.

With the new Cortex system Marvel game it's different because it tries to emulate comics rather than super heroes.  It's a good game, but it's best done by using the premade characters.
My O&Os Peruse at your doom.

So I make a A&A thread but do I put it here?  No.  Of course not.

Also, I now come with Kung-Fu Blog action.  Here:  Where I talk about comics and all sorts of gaming