Playing canon characters versus home-made

[Johnny Awesome]

I'm only planning to Watcher a group of 1-4 players in Marvel events with Marvel characters. I want to do as little work as possible in preparation and the stock game suits me just fine.

[Spatula]

I agree with what some of the others have said; the game doesn't favor one or the other. Once you have a datafile in hand, it plays the same either way. Now, creating a datafile is easier if you have a solid concept to work off of (whether it's a canon character or an idea in your head), but that's not really unique to MHR.

[Crion]

Are you really going to run for 9 players in each session? Cause, man! My hat's off to you if so. Five's my limit.

Heh, yeah. Been running for a group that size (same group, too) for over twenty years now. Hollow Earth Expedition, Shadowrun, D&D, Star Wars (D6), Dresden Files, Star Trek (Fate), Masterbook System, Mutants & Masterminds...we've played a ton of different games and MHRP is next!

I honestly miss groups like that. My hat is off to you for keeping a consistent group size for so long!


Back on topic, though: I ran a game last weekend with pregenerated character (Colossus, The Thing, Thor, and Black Widow), and everyone had a blast. Afterward, that group mentioned that they want to swap our regular game over to Marvel, and make their own characters within the Marvel Universe.

It seems it really depends on the group, and with the books that are on the block, I can see that it will be easy to tell a story of new/original characters working within those events, playing on certain sides and whatnot.

It's like playing any other franchise in an RPG: do you stick with the canon characters and re-tell the tales, or get a different view of the event (or a new event) through fresh eyes? My last longer franchise game was Star Wars d20 in college, and my party participated in the Battle of Hoth. Even though they were not canon characters, they liked the different viewpoint and not knowing exactly what would happen or how to act within the set confines of the character.


Just my two cents/ramble.

--Crion

[Duck Call Lass]

My Tuesday night group in southern California is a mix of player-created characters, existing Marvel characters, and randomly generated characters.

It works out much like those comics that have several "big name" heroes and a few random hangers-on or characters created just for the series. The old "Force Works" series is a good example of such a team.

[Drudenfusz]

I am planing in starting in a few weeks with my campaign (we currently play another game... Star Wars with GURPS). My players creating their own characters (none of them liked the idea of playing a signature marvel hero), but they will be the Young Avengers (even though iron lad might be a villian then and some of the original Young Avengers will not make it into my game). I am not going with the normal Marvel setting (Earth-616), but change many details (ignoring most events I didn't liked, like most of the spider-man clone wars saga of the 90s). So I call my setting Earth-MHR614 and maybe I will post more about my changes a future thread somewhere here (still working on the timeline though).

[gebeji]

We'll have two games going, essentially a conversion of our old MSH campaign, starring Captain America and Nomad in one corner and homemade characters (DarKnight and Angstrom) in the other.

I have found that making a new datafile can be somewhat difficult as it requires you to condense the hero/villain abilities into SFX and background into milestones. The many fan-created datafiles, and the random creator, do help out a lot.

Our universe is not following exactly the Marvel one, and some other heroes/villains are also imported if they fit the story or are interesting to meet/have around.

[Dunlaing]

I'm in two FTF campaigns with overlapping groups. In the one game I Watch, the players play original heroes in a "realtime" Marvel Universe, so most of the canon characters are old now. The one where I'm a player is an X-oriented game with canon characters in our own pick-and-choose continuity. What we haven't done is mix rolling-continuity canon heroes in their prime with original heroes. Duck Call Lass and others have done that, though.


Bill

[Dunlaing]

; now I'm gonna play some DC-events (at least one as watcher and one as batman)...

For DC games, the Watcher role should be called "Monitor."

[Duck Call Lass]

; now I'm gonna play some DC-events (at least one as watcher and one as batman)...

For DC games, the Watcher role should be called "Monitor."

That's what I'm using in my Legion Academy PBP game, set in the DCU.

[clackey]

We just made some characters for a non-Marvel super hero setting. The PCs are all just ordinary people, but just erupt with super powers.

It was a little hard in the specialty department, because they were all just normal people. They didn't have one die in specialties. I offered up a Novice D6 for them as well, but even then they didn't really suit them.

Perhaps letting them come up with their own specialties would work. Expert Janitorial Engineering?