I wrapped up a supers game last night. We played with Savage Worlds and its Supers companion. It’s all very solid and playable, but I made a bunch of mistakes that really impacted the quality of the game.
These mistakes are all centered around how I handled the creation of player characters.
Scaling is a huge problem with supers games. This means, that as a GM, you kind of have to micromanage character generation. You want everyone to be roughly in the same place. It’s difficult to create workable adversaries when you have characters who vary wildly in the amount of damage they can take/dish out.
This leads into the second mistake and its one I’ve made before. A lot of supers games, especially those with point buy character generation offer a variety of tiers ranging from street level to cosmic.
It’s always best, in my opinion, to start at the lowest level with your first game and then ramp things up with your next campaign if you feel like it will work for you.
Another thing to consider when selecting a power level is the number of players. The more players, the lower you want to go with the power level. In the case of this game I had a lot of players (six) and went with Power Level Three which was supposed to be roughly Avengers level. That might be the case with three of four players, but when you get six, they are way past that. Couple this with a wide variance in damage potential and durability and it’s a recipe for disaster.
This brings us to another issue- which is the number of players.
After giving it a lot of thought, I think that supers is best with one to three players. I could go as high as four, but they’d need to be tied together in such a way as to share most of their NPCs like the Fantastic Four or X-Men. Alternatively, you could have a strong leader like Batman or Superman, but still no more than four.
As a GM I’d probably have the most fun with one or two. There’s no other way to do Batman, Superman or Spider-Man type adventures, imo. The supporting casts alone will make it impossible.
The longest and best supers game I’ve ever run was a two year long game with two players. It was great.
I agree supers games work better with a smaller number (compared to maybe D&D) of players. I also think understanding/buy-in of the genre is important. People who aren't into or don't get superheroes tend not to create superheroes that feel like comics characters. Depending on the campaign, that might or might not matter, but I tend to want my games to have a vibe of the source material.
ReplyDeleteI agree getting the mood right really is important. I may even do pre gens the next time I run one and let the players make their own characters later once they have a feel for the setting.
DeleteI have more thoughts on this topic and will find the time to add. I will say I can go to four characters, but four PCs can mop the floor with their opponents when they figure out some team strategies so beef up your villains. I had a roster of players pass through the campaign and that was kind of comic-booky too.
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