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After some consideration, I’ve got to peg Marvel Super-Heroes as the pivot point from old-school superhero RPGs. Although Marvel’s game system is, in many regards, the pinnacle of achievement in superhero RPG design, other aspects of the game shifted it away from what had come before and towards what would be in the future: the licensed setting, with a greater focus on a pre-existing setting (rather than an implicit or assumed setting), greater genre enforcement (via Karma, whereas before there was no such mechanic) but, most of all, the presumption that the game, rather than the players, would provide the “heroes” of its adventures, namely the Marvel Comics characters.
Sure, there was a nod to character creation, but it’s telling that it was in the Appendix of the game, rather than right up front: the default assumption was that you would play Spider-Man and his amazing friends (so to speak), and the adventures were all written that way: for a group of pre-generated, pre-existing characters that were provided for you.
Since then, there’s been a tendency, if not an expectation, in superhero game/setting design (as the two have become strongly linked) to provide pre-existing or “signature” heroes. The Champions—in all their various Hero System and Fuzion incarnations—are a good example, as is the Guard in Silver Age Sentinels, the Justice Foundation in San Angelo, and my own Freedom League in Freedom City. Even in Champions: New Millennium, where part of the high concept is a comic-crossover style “crisis” has killed off most of the world’s superheroes, there is still an existing sample hero team!
In some regards, if I had it to do over again, I’d have ended the Freedom City timeline shortly after the Terminus Invasion and killed off all of the setting’s major heroes, leaving only the mysterious Dr. Metropolis, Foreshadow, and a handful of Claremont Academy kids, with the rest as big, gaping holes for the player characters to fill. I still would have provided background and game stats for a lot of the characters, but I’d have left it up to the GM whether or not to have any of them survive or just use them as inspiration or legacies for a new generation of heroes. I’d have turned all their secret lairs and orbiting satellites and skyscraper headquarters and whatnot into mausoleums and museums, gathering dust and waiting for new heroes to arise and take up the mantle, and I’d have villains having a field day, with a city and world crying out for heroes. (That and I might have had a “new” Freedom League actually made up of bad guys prentending to be new heroes, ala Kurt Busiek’s brilliant Thunderbolts run.)
That’s a key complaint about many pre-fab settings: they’re too tightly woven together, so complete in and of themselves there’s not a lot of room to insert new characters who are truly important and capable of great deeds. In the worst-case examples, the settings and their meta-plots become entirely about the creator(s) pet character(s), with the players (and their characters) as little more than bystanders, watching “history” unfold around them. Part of the problem is for an RPG setting to continue as a published setting (with follow-up books, etc.) this is necessary, to a degree, otherwise the setting has no continuity, no story to it. The problem is, the story in an RPG isn’t about the setting, it’s about the heroes.
Sure, there was a nod to character creation, but it’s telling that it was in the Appendix of the game, rather than right up front: the default assumption was that you would play Spider-Man and his amazing friends (so to speak), and the adventures were all written that way: for a group of pre-generated, pre-existing characters that were provided for you.
Since then, there’s been a tendency, if not an expectation, in superhero game/setting design (as the two have become strongly linked) to provide pre-existing or “signature” heroes. The Champions—in all their various Hero System and Fuzion incarnations—are a good example, as is the Guard in Silver Age Sentinels, the Justice Foundation in San Angelo, and my own Freedom League in Freedom City. Even in Champions: New Millennium, where part of the high concept is a comic-crossover style “crisis” has killed off most of the world’s superheroes, there is still an existing sample hero team!
In some regards, if I had it to do over again, I’d have ended the Freedom City timeline shortly after the Terminus Invasion and killed off all of the setting’s major heroes, leaving only the mysterious Dr. Metropolis, Foreshadow, and a handful of Claremont Academy kids, with the rest as big, gaping holes for the player characters to fill. I still would have provided background and game stats for a lot of the characters, but I’d have left it up to the GM whether or not to have any of them survive or just use them as inspiration or legacies for a new generation of heroes. I’d have turned all their secret lairs and orbiting satellites and skyscraper headquarters and whatnot into mausoleums and museums, gathering dust and waiting for new heroes to arise and take up the mantle, and I’d have villains having a field day, with a city and world crying out for heroes. (That and I might have had a “new” Freedom League actually made up of bad guys prentending to be new heroes, ala Kurt Busiek’s brilliant Thunderbolts run.)
That’s a key complaint about many pre-fab settings: they’re too tightly woven together, so complete in and of themselves there’s not a lot of room to insert new characters who are truly important and capable of great deeds. In the worst-case examples, the settings and their meta-plots become entirely about the creator(s) pet character(s), with the players (and their characters) as little more than bystanders, watching “history” unfold around them. Part of the problem is for an RPG setting to continue as a published setting (with follow-up books, etc.) this is necessary, to a degree, otherwise the setting has no continuity, no story to it. The problem is, the story in an RPG isn’t about the setting, it’s about the heroes.
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