Games - Marvel Super Heroes

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	Games - Marvel Super Heroes

The Marvel Super Heroes (MSH) RPG is a role playing game set in the Marvel Universe, first published by TSR under license from Marvel Comics in 1984. In 1986, TSR published an expanded edition, entitled the Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Game. Both editions were written by Jeff Grubb, and both use essentially the same game system.

The basic game was designed to let players assume the roles of superheroes from Marvel Comics, such as Spider-Man, the Hulk, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and many others. The simplest version, found in the 16-page "Battle Book" of the Basic Set, contains a bare-bones combat system sufficient to resolve comic book style superheroic fights.

Game System

Almost all game mechanics are resolved by rolling percentile dice and comparing the results against a single table (the colorful "Universal Results Table"). Different tasks are resolved by reference to different attributes. All characters have seven basic attributes: Fighting, Agility, Strength, Endurance, Reason, Intuition, and Psyche. Fighting, naturally, is the attribute used to resolve hand-to-hand combat, whereas Reason is used to resolve (say) building a gadget or figuring out a puzzle.

Attribute scores for the vast majority of characters range from 1 to 100, where normal human ability is 6, and peak (non-superheroic) human ability is 30. However, the designers minimize use of the numerical figures, instead preferring colorful adjectives in the Marvel Comics tradition, such as "Incredible" (scores from 36-45) and "Amazing" (46-62). A "Typical" (5-7) attribute has a 50% base chance for success at most tasks relating to that attribute. So, e.g., a character with "Typical" fighting skill has a base 50% of connecting with a punch. As an attribute increases, the chance of success increases, roughly by 5% per 10 points. Thus a character with an "Amazing" (50) attribute has a 75% chance of success at tasks relating to that attribute.

Many situational factors can affect these base chances: e.g., the target of a punch might attempt to dodge, in which case, if the dodger makes a successful roll against his or her Agility, the attacker's chance of hitting is decreased by 10-30%. Additionally, the higher the roll, the greater the success: a roll 30% higher than the minimum needed for success usually yields a special, beneficial result. For example, a roll of 81% for our Typical puncher results in not merely a punch, but a "Slam" which can knock down the opponent. Such special successes were referred to as Yellow or Red results, reflecting the colors used on the game's Universal Results Table.

Additional rules in the "Campaign Book" of the Basic Set, and the subsequent Advanced Set, used the same game mechanic to resolve non-violent tasks. For example, if a superhero needs to figure out how to operate a piece of alien technology, the hero would have to succeed at a Reason roll, where the chance of success is modified by the complexity of the device.

The basic system also allowed players to increase their chances of success at most tasks by expending points of Karma, a pool of points initially determined as the sum of a character's three mental attributes (Reason, Intuition, and Psyche). For example, a player who wanted to make sure he would hit a villain in a critical situation could spend however many Karma points were necessary to raise the dice roll to the desired result. Additional Karma points were distributed by the referee at the end of game sessions, typically as rewards for accomplishing heroic goals, such as defeating villains, saving innocents, and foiling crimes. Likewise, Karma could be lost for unheroic actions such as fleeing from a villain, or failing to stop a crime: in fact, in a notable departure from many RPGs (but strongly in keeping with the genre), all Karma was lost if a hero killed someone or allowed someone to die.

In the Advanced Game, Karma points could also be spent to permanently increase character attributes and powers (albeit at a steep cost, typically 100 Karma points to increase an attribute by 1 point). The Karma system thus united two RPG mechanics -- "Action" or "Hero" points (which allow players to control random outcomes), and character advancement (e.g., "experience points") -- in one system. Though this system could frustrate both referees and players (the former because a player willing and able to spend Karma could effectively overcome any challenge at least once; the latter because advancement was glacially slow compared with most other RPGs), it had the virtue of emulating two central features of super-hero comics, namely, that heroes almost always win, even in highly improbable circumstances, and that heroes' power levels remain mostly static.

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Games - Marvel Super Heroes

Game System

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