Running a supers game soon and as I start to build the world I want to get some player feedback...

Running a supers game soon and as I start to build the world I want to get some player feedback. What questions would you suggest I ask them about the sort of supers game they want to play in?

The biggest question is overall tone, as that will color everything else. Set a sliding scale between "silly" and "gritty."

...

...

...

the fuck is this

A little mythos to the setting will also help guide the nature of world generation. Where did powers come from? How common are powers?

What super hero comics/movies/cartoons do you like?

Who is your favorite hero/team?

Does this look infected to you?

Sometimes the mix and match works fairly well. I once played in a GURPS game with superheros and this was the roster:

>Silver age grab bag of powers chick (healer, absorbed radiation, flew, etc)
>Invisible woman thief (could have been a cast member on the show Heroes. As believable as an invisible woman gets)
>Gritty teen with entropic powers that are slowly killing him. Basically shot bolts of anti-existence while also slowly beginning to not exist himself. Kinda downer.
>And then there was me, a Kamen Rider esque transforming hero whose armor built up strength the more of a punishment it took.

The game had so much charm just due to how hilariously mismatched we all were.

The thief kinda just wanted to get ahead and steal stuff, the silver age grab bag was a total goody two shoes and totally oblivious to the thief.

Then there was me and the kid, the two who straight up killed people who were a certain amount of evil. He was gloomy, I was up beat, and when alien lizards started to fuck with our town we just gave each other a thumbs up and tore apart anyone who was fucking with us.

>And then there was me, a Kamen Rider esque transforming hero
Kylen?

Not OP. but I was thinking of running a game of M&M where supers started popping up around the world after the Trinity Test dropped the first atomic bomb. Then the Japanese begin pushing the Allies back away from their main islands, the Germans begin pushing the occupying Soviets out of Germany and inspire the masses to take up arms once again, the Soviets send theirs in with their regular troops as a sort of heavy shock troops to clear the way both West to German and East to Japan.
The Allies are panicking since victory was so close, but now it seems farther than ever. So they form a coalition named SPEAR or Superhero Pacification, Espionage, Assault and Recon to take on the enemy supers. The party plays a small tactical squad of supers working for them.

Is there a middle ground between silly and gritty?

We had an M&M team like that. One guy was basically our amnesiac mysterious past badass tea-drinking Wolverine (very different set of powers though), and the rest of the group spent a lot of the time taking the wind out of his edgy sails.

The player actually did this on purpose because he thought it was kinda funny to play Captain Edgelord and have him deflated by the much more practical and idealistic heroes every time he was about to be EXTREEEEME.

>Is there a middle ground between silly and gritty?
Quite a bit.
Justice League and Justice Society and Avengers (usually) is on that range; the threats that deal with are very real but still wild and fantastical, and they aren't afraid to once in awhile poke holes in how nuts everything gets.

Who?

Sounds like fun, but before you hate on the edgelord for this one you should know that we all basically took the piss out of each other.

>The silver aged hero got shit for being a goody two shoes and having random ass powers
>The thief got shit for not really being all that super. Also got dragged into all sorts of heroism she wanted no part of
>Gritlord was constantly being told to cheer up or I'd punch him.
>People were always giving me shit for being very much in the wrong setting.

Really was a fun game.

Guy in a supers group that loved GURPS supers and Kamen Rider.

Ahh. Not me, but I like the cut of his jib.

Ooh one more of this rarified beastie for my collection.

Cops? Friends or foes?

Why?

Everything else can be extrapolated.

>Is there a middle ground between silly and gritty?
The middle ground is "normal," a.k.a. maximum kitchen sink, where you can get away with a lot of stuff.

You may want to ask them what power level of supers they want to be. Unless everyone's ok with one guy being moon knight, another being the juggernaut and the last guy being doctor strange

...

Silly vs Gritty
Street level vs Global level vs Cosmic level

>Captain Edgelord

Moderate between silly and gritty.
Heroes can be silly and freaky. The are a beacon of hope and justice and etcetera if they wish to be, and they can succeed at it.
Although the world itself is more realistic.
If you rant about cardboard for five minutes and then knock a guy through skyscraper, you'll still be committing negligent mass manslaughter. (I'm not a dick GM, I'll warn you if you try.)
Protecting bystanders from super-combat fallout is always a priority. (I recommend everybody have at least some sort of a power that is useful to that end.)

On the flipside, the prisons aren't cardboard. You're not going to be facing the same guy every week if you play your cards right. Although the villains often have escape strategy prepared, you may counter it if you figure how.

Oh forgot part two
>Street level vs Global level vs Cosmic level
City level. You're not some regular joes, but you aren't upturning continents yet.

Just ask them to write down their favourite things about the superhero genre, and what their favourite superhero movie/comic is and why.

Big open ended questions some times make players realize something they hadn't before because they never tried putting it into words, and you avoid zoomed in, detailed questions that launch players into rants about specif powers or their ideal donut steel character.

I've been wanting to run a supes game in a schlocky, B-movie setting for a while now.

>strange satellite passes through the sky one night
>affects people differently based on how much they were exposed to its light (from heightening senses, awakening "talents" to outright mutation)
>quiet suburb torn apart by delinquents

Think Troma producing Diamond is Unbreakable, directed by Nicholas Ray

I don't have a system in mind yet though. I was leaning towards M&M but I've heard the Hero System is more flexible

Rolled 2, 1 = 3 (2d6)

testing

Rolled 1, 6 = 7 (2d6)

again

Rolled 5, 6 + 99 = 110 (2d6 + 99)

yet again

Bump

Hero system is a much more interesting system to play but you NEED the Hero Designer program they made to make characters in any sort of speed or if you are making loads of NPCS.

Damn, kinda steep. Sounds very useful though. I have no idea when I'll ever get around to really working on this campaign, I only started my first D&D campaign last month.

HERO is f*ck awesome and the only system I run. But yes, you need to do some work in advance. Basic goons are no problems, but others you might try a modular approach - certain block for stats, skills and powers and then you can just pick and mix when you need a quick NPC. Early Champions had this approach for NPCs but even theirs were too long winded. You can wing it though once you know the system and what does and does not break.

But in HERO you can do anything!
...given a bit of time.

And no, only basic maths is required, so don't listen to people who say "complex maths, degrees, etc".
I've never used HERO designer but it does speed things up a lot.

HERO is a little bit easier in terms of being the deep end of RP (like GURPS) and that Hero Designer stuff is floating around the internet somewhere. M&M is fine it just can be like DnD were the mechanics (read combat) gets a bit stale.

>power girl with normal boobs
Improved

It's not so much about the maths as which thing has priority over that and can be applied to the other and so on. It can get complicated fast and fiddling with things to get an efficient Elemental Control...

High power (Justice League cartoon), medium power (Avengers films), or low power (Spider-Man/Daredevil)? On a regular basis, do their superheroes save the world, save the city, or save a grandmother? Though if there's a team of them, they'd probably save a team of grandmothers from a team of muggers.

Are there other superheroes in the world? How many? Or is it just the PCs? How ordinary are superpowers?

On a scale of 1/10, how many tentacles should you be molested by per session?

Where do you live that a abject lack of breasts is "normal"?

How would you handle a haunted NPC?
>a petty crook kills a cop
>racked with guilt, he goes on the lam
>he's compelled to hide out at a hotel that overlooks a certain home
>it's the cop's house
>the cop's ghost wills the crook to turn on his criminal associates and the man becomes a vigilante like the Shadow

I'm thinking the ghost functions in a similar way to a symbiote

All of those you listed are average power. High-powered is when you begin to approach cosmic-tier. Low-powered is most of the Watchmen.

You guys are working out of different scales.
I'll help: 's high/medium/low are in a strictly terrestrial context.

Bump

Depends on the context. On the scale of Mickey Rooney to Yukio Mishima, how Japanese are your PCs?

Ask which age of comics they want to emulate. Is it going to be Captain America beats up ordinary Nazis and Superman beats up ordinary bank robbers or planetary-level super v super shit?

In loli-land (aka Unteralterbach)

Be tentacle-monster yourself and try to hit on female superheroes. Tentacles are ded killy if used for battle, I guess

...

As other folks have said set the tone.

Also make sure you vet their characters before you play. I have had to DM a game of 4 different flavors of "Dark, troubled Loners" and it sucked shit.

Depending on how long supers have been around talk about historical events with you players. Were super soldiers there a D-Day? Who killed Kennedy? How do other cuntries feel about their supers, etc?

It's probably a trap version. There's a handful of them floating around interwebs.