Marvel Superheroes RPG (FASERIP) Retrospective

[Archangel]

Ran about 7 or 8 sessions back in early summer. Derailed by a couple of player departures but I've decided their first series got cancelled and we're gonna soft reboot straight into Volume 2. Its ok. I pitched the game as sort of blue collar schlubs in the vein of Great Lakes Avengers or Formerly Known as the Justice League. They all loved the idea, then proceeded to roll characters as distant from that concept as humanly possible.

It's a great system with a few rough spots that really bugged me as a kid but nowadays find easy to gloss over. It helps that I internalized most of it back in the 80's.

I ditched karma for advancement in favor of just handing out a small number of rank points (I call them Excelsiors!) per session and cut power stunt attempts down to 5. Its worked well so far and no game I run is in danger of lasting long enough for overly fast advancement to become a problem anyway.

We hoarded karma when I'd play as a kid. It works a lot better if you're generous with it and encourage frequent spending for sure.

I'm using the advanced set. Great thread, Tristram.

 

[TristramEvans]

Combat!

Note that here we are only on page 10 of the Battle Book, but we already have pretty much the entire system besides combat laid out. The succinctness of rules presentation is incredibly enviable here.

First the concept of rounds is re-introduced, with the important conceit that a round is conceived of like a single panel in a comic - whatever a Hero can do in one comic panel, they can do in a round - the only firm rule is that a character can only make one attack per round.

Combat is resolved in the following sequence - the Judge decides what the villains are doing, and the players announce their intentions. Then the Judge and one of the players both roll a D10, and the side that wins acts first. Initiative isn't defined any more strictly than that, so the players can act in whatever order the prefer, or all their actions can be assumed to take place simultaneously. There is an optional rule for Initiative wherein the characters with the highest Intuition on either side of the combat compare their cores, and if one is higher, that side receives a +1 bonus to the roll.

When attacking the Attribute rolled is based on the type of attack the character is attempting:

Fighting is used for close combat
Agility is used for ranged combat
Strength is used for wrestling/grappling a foe
and Endurance is used for charging (essentially using your entire body as a weapon)

What this does is very simply allow a Hero to tailor their combat style to play to their strengths, forces them to employ a variety of tactics depending on what they are trying to accomplish, and allow a huge variety of character concepts/superhero types to still be viable in combat.

The process for resolving an attack is essentially the same as for any FEAT roll, but with one further wrinkle - each colour result is associated with a particular effect. These are noted on the Battle Effects table:



So while a successful attack on an opponent may result in a Hit, inflicting Damage much the same as your standard RPG, you could also potentially Stun, Slam, or even Kill your opponent with a single blow. That's right,, it is possible to one-shot kill an opponent based on the type of attack you are making, meaning the system has the potential to be deadly. While at first this might seem contradictory for a Bronze Age superhero RPG, what it does is cleverly reinforce the conceits of the genre by presenting the player character with moral choices, even in (or especially) during combat. Instead of saying: "superheroes can't use deadly weapons or guns", it instead presents the consequences of those choices and leaves it up to the player to choose to act like a superhero.

Note that inflicting Slam or Stun effects both require that the attacker's Strength equal or exceed that of the defender (it doesn't matter how well she rolls, Aunt May is never going to Slam The Hulk - except for that one time she was a herald of Galactus...). Heroes who possess the Martial Arts Talent, however, can bypass this restriction. Moreover, defender has a chance to avoid the effect of a Slam or Stun by making an Endurance FEAT, as indicated by the Slam? and Stun? columns on the Combat Effects Table.

I won't go through all the Effects possible, one can see that special results cover a variety of actions from Grappling to Snatching (catching), but one important combat action a player can employ is Dodging. Dodging is the only active defense option in the Basic set, with a Hero's passive defense represented by their Health. In the original rules, a character can announce they are Dodging instead of attacking that round, and any time during that round an attack of any type is attempted against the character, they make an Agility FEAT, with the color result potentially reducing the effectiveness of the attack by a number of column shifts. This would be greatly revised in the Advanced Rules, which I'll discuss when we get there.

The combat chapter finishes off with a number of special cases - hitting multiple opponents, pulling punches, body armour, etc, we get a short list of standard weapons, and then everything is capped off (no pun intended - well maybe a little intended...) with an illustration of the combat system in play told through comic panels and text:

 

[Majestic]

Just want to say that I'm greatly enjoying this entire thread. I never got a chance to play this back in the day (TBH, the adjectives kind of turned me off to the game back then), but this year a friend ran a session for us (it had gradually moved into my 'RPG bucket list') and it was a lot of fun.

 

[TristramEvans]

The Battle Book clocks in at a succinct 20 pages including front and back covers, covering all the basics of action resolution in the system. The Campaign Book then expands on these concepts and provides details on vehicles, inventing and gadgeteering, magic, etc.

Before we get to that, however, I want to take a moment and talk about Body Armour in the FASERIP, a major bone of contention in many critiques of the system throughout the years.

When a combatant successfully attacks an opponent they inflict a number of points of Damage equal to either the attacker's Strength, the Damage Rating of the weapon they are wielding, or the Rank of the Power employed. In other words, Damage in the system is essentially "static" (barring the rules for pulling punches), as opposed to a separate damage roll in games like D&D.

Likewise, Body Armour is a static Rank that reduces Damage by a set amount. Armour is less effective against Energy-based attacks, receiving a -4 column shift penalty*, but otherwise, if an attacker's Strength or Damage output is equal to or lower than the Armour Rank, then there's no way for the attacker to inflict Damage on the defender.

Some folks seem to see this as a bug with the system, that with good enough rolls that they should be able to pound their way through any obstacle. I've never exactly been sure where this idea comes from, but I assume is a holdover from the traditional set up of D&D combat.

Many FASERIP clones/revamps have thus presented "fixes" for this issue - doubling damage on certain colour results and the like. I would like to suggest alternatively that this is a feature of the system, rather than a bug, and something that should be embraced for it's effect on play.

First off, I've written before on the forum regarding my opinion on what makes for a good Superhero RPG adventure:

I'm of the opinion, as a longtime supers GM, that part of what makes that genre work best, insofar as gaming, is to put players in situations where they have to make tough moral choices. Sometimes that means the choice between meeting personal obligations to friends and family vs foiling a villain (Spider-man), sometimes it means dealing with social issues that you simply can't punch into submission, like bigotry and racism (X-Men).

One of the many reasons I am so fond of the FASERIP system is that many moral choices are baked into the system. The system assumptions of a moralistic universe, but the players choose how to engage with that.

But I want to extend that concept further and say that a large part of effectively GMing is presenting players with obstacles in general, and allowing them the opportunity to come up with creative solutions. And in this case that mean not every problem needs to be solved through punching it hard enough to get it to go away, like a videogame. Players inhabit a dynamic world where one solution doesn't fit every problem. And to that end I want to point towards what is widely regarded as one of the best Spider-man stories of all time: "Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut!", a two-issue arc during Roger Stern's legendary run.



Roger Stern's run on Spider-man was characterized by pitting the web-slinger against a variety of villains unlike those he'd ever faced before. In fact, the only one of Spidey's classic rogue gallery to make an appearance was The Vulture. Generally, Stern preferred to keep Spidey's battles dynamic by either introducing new villains, such as The Hobgoblin, or bringing in villains from other Marvel series.

In issue 229, Spidey is contacted by the enigmatic psychic Madame Web, who received a premonition of a plot by Black Tom Cassidy to kidnap her and force her to use her psychic powers to help him defeat the X-Man. To this end. Black Tom sent his long-time ally, The Juggernaut, to New York.

What follows is a desperate attempt by Spider-man to do anything he can to stop The Juggernaut as he cuts a direct path across New York city, and ultimately failing as with all his powers he simply cannot injure or even slow down the armoured X-men villain. The Juggernaut succeeds in getting ahold of Madame Web, unknowingly ripping her from her life support system and killing her. Desperate now to at least avenge his elderly patron, Spidey finally concocts a plan to trap the immoveable giant - which I won't ruin in the offchance anyone reading this has yet to discover these issues.

The point is basically that Spider-man cannot simply punch his way past this obstacle - nor should he be able to. The Juggernaut's impact in the story would be deflated if, with a high enough dice roll, Spidey can simply crack his armour. It forces Spidey to come up with a creative solution to the problem, and likewise, not being able to fall back on simply chucking the dice, armour in MSH creates opportunities for players to come up with different solutions and tactics than they normally use. Which brings me to my second point...

Armour in MSH is special. Most superheroes (and supervillains) in the Marvel Universe (at least back in the Silver & Bronze Age) do not wear armour, they get by on skintight suits. For those characters who wear armour, more often than not it is one of their defining features - Iron Man, Black Knight, Doctor Doom, etc. It is, essentially a superpower.

Even flak jackets such as those worn by characters like The Punisher, or tactical police squads, only provide Good (10) protection, allowing them to counter the Damage from handguns (Typical), but vulnerable to even the lowest rank of superhuman strength. Judges should be keeping this in mind and not boosting all their A.I.M. thugs with Remarkable armour or the like.

Finally, it is also worth remembering that Body Armour, even when it manages to absorb all Damage from an attack, does not affect Combat Effects, meaning it's still possible to Slam or Stun an opponent in Armour*, which does align to how fights with heavily Armoured characters are normally presented in the comics (noting that a character must still posses Strength equal or greater than their opponent to inflict the Combat Effects).

* - The Advanced rules made several changes in the way Armour works, reducing the penalty vs Energy-based attacks to -2 rather than -4, and, even more significantly, in stating that an attack must cause at least one point of Damage in order for a Stun or Slam effect to take place. I'll be discussing these changes in more detail once we get to the Advanced Rulebook in this read-through, but suffice to say I don't ultimately find these changes for the better.

 

[TristramEvans]

The Campaign Book is the second half of the Marvel Super Heroes RPG Basic Set's rules presentation, and as the name implies...



It is an interesting approach to rules presentation that isn't quite the same as the more traditional division between "player's book" and "GM's guide", it's more - "here are the basic rules you need to know to play in an adventure," and "here are a bunch of optional and expanded rules for specific situations that may come up if you're playing more than a one-shot".

First up is one of my absolute favourite things regarding the MSH rules sets, and a aspect that was thankfully carried on in every subsequent edition of the game, The Power Rosters

Essentially these were done to cleverly solve an immediate issue with the Basic set - there was no way that they could include stats for every character in the Marvel Universe which, even by 1984, was expansive. The first Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe series debuted in 1982 and was 15 issues in length. So, the game needed a way to make it easy for Judges to model any characters that they or the players might wat to use, and the Power Rosters were a huge boon in that regard.

Each rank of each of the primary abilities is given a description in real world terms defining what level of capability or power it represents, along with a host of example characters



I wish more RPGs did something like this - let us know immediately what it means to have a "9" in Wisdom or "25" in Strength...

As a Judge, it makes assigning stats to NPCs simple and intuitive; as a player, it provides an instant translation of the system's language into a real-world understanding of their character's capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

 

[Majestic]

That is an excellent way of doing things.

Sometimes over the years those values change, of course. One from the chart above, for example, would be Ariel (Kitty Pryde). Soon after that list was published she began training with Wolverine and fighting ninjas. I would guess she would then move from Good to Excellent.

I'm not sure how advancement in the game system works, but I'm sure you'll get to that eventually.

FWIW, your recaps are a really enjoyable read for the typical RPG Supers fan. Clear and concise and very explanatory for how the system works, but also WHY it works the way it does.