Mutants and Masterminds, Ascendant, DC Heroes- TableTop RolePlaying Games where supposedly you can be a superhero, engage in capeshit. The pages of comic books or stories of video games, movies, or television are no longer your boundaries. Now Batman can do whatever it is you imagine he can do. This is something close to original sin.
The idea of the Superhero TTRPG is I think a natural consequence of being a Capeshit enthusiast, a DChud or Marvelcuck, and thinking to yourself that the thing you do in DnD is basically fight bad guys and have a story develop- why couldn’t that work for Batman?
I will tell you why. The medieval fantasy adventure roleplaying game we understand to be the blueprint of pretty much all games in and around the sphere of DnD has some essential considerations that violate Batman.
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The adventurer finds new or rediscovers old places and plunders them of loot, often in the process he dispatches the evil denizens therein who have we can infer gathered this loot.
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The adventurer’s while they may differ in class and common abilities, have a more or less cohesive central methodology by which they will accomplish the task of dungeon delving, and a common understanding about the roles each member must play in that task.
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The world at large is ripe for expansion in parallel with the adventurers ability to expand, until such point as the adventurer reaches a level of power whereby a new echelon of play is necessitated and the concerns of the adventurer and their party shift from gathering gold and magic items to ideological, political, or spiritual concerns which might otherwise not materially benefit them to prosecute as quests.
#1: The Batman (who I will use as a nearly ubiquitous example where I mean all Superheroes) is not discovering new places, and he does not ever materially gain from his circumstance as a Crimefighter. We can perhaps say your idea is that the CapeShit TTRPG (CS-TTRPG) should be about heroes for hire- maybe so, but I’d argue you aren’t reading Luke Cage very well, and you don’t understand the point of stories like that. Lets continue exploring.
#2: The Batman while he is alot like Nightwing or The Question is not at all operationally similar to Superman, and they share almost no common tactics or methods, and share an even looser philosophical understanding of their individual missions as Crimefighters. Even when they work together, it is best said that the tier of threat and the type of adventure they are on Must cross characters over from each others mythos in order to provide a relevant and believable challenge for both parties.
#3: The world is finite, the Universe may be infinite, but this is a Crimefighting game, and not Star Trek. Batman does not, should not “level up” past a certain point. His mission, area of responsibility, and ability to fight crime are intentionally limited in order to rationalize the circumstance in which his struggles take place, and to bind the reader more closely to the picture of the fictional parallel world in which the Batman operates. Similarly, there are nearly no circumstances whereby the Batman can or will be compelled to material benefit from his crusade, and anything he gathers in his efforts is done so that it is never again used on the innocent by the cowardly and superstitious.
So we can see that there are essential challenges with the premise of the CS-TTRPG, but having isolated those challenges we can start to ask ourself about the type of game we think is actually appropriate for a CS-TTRPG- must it actually be a TTRPG?
I abhor card games, skirmish war games, standing across a table from a fat guy, having said fat guy gloat to you about whatever retarded shit they have imagined could stop you from physically throttling that person in real life over their temporary unearned glee about winning a tabletop game. So I think to myself, I want to play a game of imagination, I want to play a game of imagination where I can be successful throttling an Evil fat guy, but what I don’t want to do is to fall into one of the classic traps that other CS-TTRPG’s fall into when trying to achieve this experience.
Games about Superheroes fall into an immediate and deadly poisonous trap- the trap of Super-Powers. How do you balance Super-powers, Super-powered people, the threat they indicate, the method players will employ them, and how are they communicated inside the math integral to the games “combat”. I can say I have never been satisfied by a TTRPG depiction of Superhero powers. I can say the great Alexander Macris has a system in Ascendant that I would call airtight, but he doesn’t have a system that I actually want to spend time playing. Maybe I’m just filtered, if so then so be it, we are on to different things here. My basic thought is that the idea of balancing powers in a game like this is sort of a nonsense idea. Without acquiescing to minging about the fiction we can say that Superman is about as strong and hitting about as hard as he needs to be when they are writing a Superman story. Anyone who has watched more than three episodes of Justice League Unlimited can tell you that you can apparently defeat Superman with your garden variety villain laser up until the series finale when he tanks the Omega beams, the pain nexus, and knocks Darkseid through half of Metropolis after 50 episodes of not quite hitting Solomon Grundy hard enough. But that is what it is, my idea is that to build a CS-TTRPG we must have an intentionally iterative process. Looking to build on sturdy foundation in order to indoctrinate in the player base a pointed understanding of the perspective and argument of the game, we must start with the ground work, we have to start, Allah forgive me for using these terms, with “Street-Level” hero work.
The “Street-Level” hero we understand as the sort of “grunt fantasy” of Capeshit. Kick Ass is probably the first example that comes to mind, followed by Punisher MAX, and then Adi Shankars Power Rangers short. This game is about becoming the Batman. This game is about primarily creating an original experience in the vein of what we understand as Crimefighting fiction endemic to the early 50s and 40s, OG purple glove Batman shit. Which incidentally I am a huge fan of. To me, there are a few things we have to have considered and rendered from the clay in order to say we have done our due diligence.
First, the hero. We have to know how he works, what he does, what his mission parameters are.
Second, the villains, how they work, what they do, and what their mission parameters are.
Third, the environment, how it works, how it affects the heroes and villains, and what it contains that is relevant to the experience of being the hero.
Fundamentally, the game has to be about being a HERO. This is not DnD, there is no choice for you about what you think your character thinks about a thing going on. You are free to prosecute your crime fighting campaign as you please, to kill or spare he or she who crosses your dark shadow. But fundamentally you are not a villain, you cannot do the things that villains can do, and your job is to fight the bad guys- which brings us to the second major point:
The game is about winning the war on crime. The game has a circumstance we can call a victory. Like ACKS or DnD, this might be really difficult, time consuming, and dangerous to arrive to, but there is such a thing as a victory condition for a campaign. You win when you rid the city of crime. We are not operating on the real life condition of revolving door repeat offenders for minor violent crime and theft, for the purposes of our game we are out to Beat organized crime out of the city, and you CAN do this if you are diligent, lack risk averse tendencies, and have a cool car.
I think the most contentious thing I have personally ordained as part of this experiment is that I think the second great trap of CS-TTRPG after powers is fighting. I am not interested in super power battle chess. There are enough games that are that, DnD 5E is that, I am not after that. The combat in a game that is about simulating and creating a story that follows a crimefighter does not need to be granular, we can understand that the crimefighter engages groups of bad guys at a time until he gets to a bad guy that is more powerful than normals and he has to fight that guy mano y mano. So for the most part I have omitted serious granularity in combat, and am uninterested in the things that would ordinarily develop that as a discrete part of the game that takes up your time.
The final real point to bring up in the design philosophy of such a game is the consideration of all the minor things that make up the aesthetic blanket of the costumed crime fighter. A Batmobile, detective and fighting gadgets, a sidekick- all these things are considered.
Attached below is the working copy of VIGILANTES, I am not a specialist in game design, I am not particularly good at math, I just really like Batman. This is not a finished product being advertised for sale nor is it something I am confident you can even sit down and play, but for those inclined I invite you cordially to look at it and earnestly tell me what you think. Maybe I have made a drastic error in arbitrarily assigning a value somewhere, maybe there is a category for a thing you are confused by because it is either redundant or retarded. Maybe you read it and the very idea of it makes you so mad you have to send me hate mail, maybe we fall in love. Whatever the circumstance I bear my works to thee and ask that you review them and respond with your thoughts.