If you were reading Dragon magazine in the mid-1980s, advertisements for TSR's Marvel Super Heroes like this one were ubiquitous. The company worked very hard to get the word out about their new RPG and rightfully so. Though I was never (and still am not) much of a superhero guy, Jeff Grubb's design is so clever that I always had a blast playing MSH. That's no surprise: aside from (obviously) Dungeons & Dragons, Marvel Super Heroes is the only truly influential game TSR ever published and its impact on the hobby outlasted the game itself.
" is the only truly influential game TSR ever published"
ReplyDeleteProvacative!
Id say Dungeon! as a rules light Dungeon Crawler influenced that genre.
Tell me more.
DeleteOoh! Great point! "Refereeless Blackmoor" would be an oxymoron were it not for David Megarry's invention, and I think this innovation alone in Dungeon! made RPG video games from EAMON to Diablo possible.
DeleteI mean Arneson used Table T from Strategos to resolve combat, too, but the game relied on adjudication at the end of the day. Dungeon! was the first one to implement it as a mechanical automatic resolution.
Im not a board game expert, but as a kid I cant remember another board game like Dungeon! that had diffrent rules based on what playing piece you chose.
DeleteTo me it was the first exposure to the concept outside of RPGs of diffrent victory conditions and rules based on that.
"[MSH] is the only [other] truly influential game TSR ever published" I don't disagree, but would love to hear you unpack that.
ReplyDeleteThis might be worth a longer post, but my basic is simply that MSH is the only other TSR RPG whose design – the Action Chart specifically – was hugely influential on subsequent games.
DeleteI'd argue that Dungeon's adaptation of Table T for refereeless play is a design innovation, even though it completely relies on what was being reffed in Blackmoor, BUT I don't know if that means the entire design of the game is influential, because, yes, in most other aspects it is a nicely dressed up board game.
DeleteDo you think the Karma system ended up influencing other metacurrencies (FATE points, advantage/disadvantage, ect) or do you think game designers were more influenced by comedy rpgs of the time like Toon or Ghostbuster?
DeleteAll excellent questions. My guess is that MSH probably had an outsized influence simply due to the strength of its IP. The game itself might not have been ultimate origin of many design ideas, but so many people played it that it popularized and widely disseminated these ideas.
DeleteIn other aspects, though, of course FASERIP alone is massively influential, and then the fact that Marvel Superheroes (coming from a kid who had a mail subscription to Hulk comics from the time he was three!) the RPG was dead solid perfect in its "play the comics" execution, both backwards and forwards: you could play Spiderman's origin story from the old days OR gather everyone for a mass Secret Wars battle royale OR catch the Scourge of the Underworld (or be victimized by him!) OR fight the Mutant Massacre...or do them all in about 4 sessions, if you really wanted to. It was the ultimate "Do EXACTLY what YOU want game," and I don't think for that purpose it has been surpassed.
ReplyDelete...FASERIP is sorely missed and a travesty left orphaned without a modern successor; while its mechanics are entirely different, i'm giving the new cypher system 2.0 a shot to see whether it might suit a similar role at my table...
DeleteHuge FASERIP/MSH fan...to this day I still find enjoyment is rolling characters via Ultimate Powers and then trying to cobble together a hero/villain with a plausible vision from the results. I always liked the characters and the system (with the exception of the VERY slow progression)...in fact played a brief PbP of the MSH last year!
ReplyDeleteHowever...do I recall correctly that Pacesetter's Chill had a similar resolution mechanic? They were of like age...
Yes, the Pacesetter games did have a similar mechanic and was released the same year. Pacesetter was staffed by ex-TSR employees, so I'm not sure what this means. Perhaps I should ask Jeff Grubb about this at Gamehole Con ...
DeleteI agree. MSH was probably the most fun RPG to play we had as a group. The comics could be daft and unsophisticated and that meant the gameplay could be too. That suited us because most of the time we played various Battle Royale "What if?" tag teams of heroes and villains. Spidey and Doc Strange were the two heroes I played the most.
ReplyDeleteJim Hodges---
ReplyDeleteHere's an admission....when my younger brother and I got this game shortly after its release, we found it way too complicated. As in we couldn't wrap our minds around it so we abandoned it. It was probably just us and not the game, but I will say we diverged into many different RPGs together and never had that problem.
I share the general high opinion of MSH. It definitely captured the feel of its source material. I never played the Advanced version -- can anyone comment?
ReplyDeleteI'd like to comment on the advertisement itself, which I think must have been designed by the same people who made the ad for TSR's Adventures of Indiana Jones. Both ads have a distinctive "tactile" quality that I like. There was a particular school of print advertising in the 70s and 80s that showed the relevant product in a setting, surrounded by props. I've always had a fondness for these kinds of ads, which seem to have fallen out of favor in the 90s.
Jeff Grubb wrote them both, so Advanced is just as readable with a lot of fun flavor. Ironically, I actually think the Advanced set would have been easier for players new to comic books or new to RPGs, as their are more details and fewer judgment calls.
DeleteMy group of players were seasoned enough that the original rules gave us everything we needed/wanted, but I did get the Advanced Rules and played them - to almost no noticable difference! This was because some of Grubbs additional advice and greater table detail were not needed, and because a few of the extra attributes were simply not enough of a refinement to the existing ones to make it useful. Again, this was because we had already house-ruled the tables and rules to be more adjudicatory than the original rules sketched, and we knew what were doing.
The real reason to get advanced was to get the manual for more Marvel characters, the new map and new cardboard stands ups of guys. I don't think it came with a module, but I bet you we only ever played 2 or 3 of them, and instead played our comic books or our custom wrestling game. I don't think I ever looked at the rulebook again, but the pages for the heroes was dogeared.
The MSH system was also used in the third edition of Gamma World, one of the first RPGs I ever played, and the system was very conducive to the GW feel. I tried fourth edition GW later but felt that version of the system was detrimental compared to 3E.
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