A Few Words on the Marvel Heroic Role Playing game

There is a lot to say about this great game and the company that produced it, and I can only speak to a fraction of it at the moment.  However, I wanted to get some thoughts down before I get to actually play the game (which will happen at the previously mentioned Taste of Marvel at the wonderful Labyrinth Games) and then give some more impressions after I get to experience it in play.

So, I am actually buying the hard copy book from Labyrinth and picking it up at the event this weekend.  However, since I prepaid, I received a prompt and efficient e-mailed link and coupon code for a free download of the PDF so that I could start looking at the game last week.  MWP was prompt and the download on Drive ThruRPG was easy.  This is the second game I have bought from MWP (I pre-ordered Leverage for a friend), and this interaction confirms my initial impression, that they do good work and are very competent with their customer care.

I have not read the game itself cover to cover yet.  As is my usual, I have done a combination of flipping through, looking things up (good index and TOC) and then started slowly moving the bookmark (so to speak with a PDF) through the volume.

Everything that I have seen so far impresses me. 

First, they have a foreward by Jeff Grubb who helped bring us the original Marvel Super Heroes game from TSR.  It is a nice piece, and it is classy to have him, in effect, hand the torch to the new game.  Despite many criticisms I have written here about the old MSH game, I have a great fondness for and terrific memories of playing it.  From the first pages, I get the feeling that MHRP will similarly gain a solid place in my RPG repetoir.

The look of the book is great.  The layout is clean and clear.  The art is well selected from a back catelogue probably hundreds of thousands of images in the Marvel library.  But the selected art fits with the themes of the sections they adorn and are not just randomly assigned.  The feel is very professional, very comfortable and it communicates well as the system is described bit by bit.  Right up front they have a breakdown of what things make up a character and a summary of what they mean, using Captain America's sheet as an example.  Then you can dive into the details of the rules immediately following.

Of course, before digesting all the nitty gritty of the rules, the first thing to do is to flip to the back and check out the official stats for the included heroes!

There are 23 super heroes fully statted out and ready to play in the "Mini Event" included in the book.  They include a good representative group from Mavel's popular teams: all of the Fantasitc Four, important members of the Avengers and X-Men, and of course a number of popular "unaffiliated" (at least before the Avengers Disassembled story arc) heroes like Spiderman and Daredevil.  I have no complaints about the initial group of heroes, though I do have some observations.

The group is very representative of the marvel Universe and should satisfy most Marvel fans as a first round of official stats. 

What is disatisfying for me, which is not the game's fault, is the lack of representativeness of the Marvel Universe. 

In this group of heroes, we have 8 women heroes and 15 men.  Marvel suffers from a lack of solid and interesting female heroes, and has never developed any female hero iconic as DC has in Wonder Woman (and even if she is constantly treated as a distant third behind Batman and Superman, no matter what DC does, it has been unable to not have her in that big three).  Here we have Armor, Black Widow, Emma Frost, Invisible Woman, Ms. Marvel, Shadowcat, Spider-Woman and Storm.  These are all solid heroes, but given the almost 2 to 1 ratio of male heroes to female, I hope that somehow the game can overcome the inherent gender issues in the Marvel Universe to get girls and women to the gaming table with the game.  Because I like it a lot.

Looking through the vector of race/ethnicity, there is a starker contrast.  19 of the heroes are white/caucasian background, with other racial/ethnic groups represented by two black Africans, an African American and an Asian (Japanese) character. 

Gaming should know no boundaries, and imagination should admit everyone.  Marvel, along with mainstream comics everywhere, has definitely got some major gaps in how representative its heroes are.  While Marvel has established an imaginary world where there are 9000 significant characters, many from all over the world and from all kinds of backgrounds, the most popular, the most promoted, and the most famous tend to be white and tend to be guys.  This game is not going to fix the industry.  However, going into the game and making the Marvel Universe your own to game in, one has to understand that the way things play out in character selection for the write-ups is pretty reflective of the Official Universe. 

The nice thing about it is that, if you don't like it, in the game, you can change it.

Hopefully, MWP can find some way to tap into those players who maybe don't see themselves in the "top tier" of Marvel heroes and nonetheless get them interested in the game.  With luck, that may bring in some more readers who may be able to exert some market forces for change in the official universe to balance out its cast.

As it is the rules make creation of heroes or statting up of your favorite (but as yet not officially released) hero fairly easy.

I'll have to talk about that tomorrow, as I am out of time to write today.

Into the Marvel Universe pt 3

Missed out on wrting yesterday, but will try to regain ground today.

So, continuing on with my thoughts and hopes from the planned release of Margaret Weis Productions new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Basic Game I wanted to start by contrasting what I think and hope we'll see from the new game with the classic, but not perfect, TSR Marvel Super Heroes game (MSH).  One of the issues with MSH was a certain inflexibility in the resolution mechanic.  There was a universal chart and various abilities and powers were rated at fixed levels (good, amazing, unearthly, etc.) , and things had a fairly binary correspondence.  Breaking down a door required strenght, dealing with attacking ninjas required fighting.  There was not a lot of room to innovate and mix things up with the rules as written.  So, if you had an armored hero who wanted to break a door down by charging or flying through the door as a self propelled battering ram, it was not really clear how to adjudicate a rating for that.  The rules would tend to force a GM to either say "you can't do that" or to make up something arbitrarily.  Now all games have such limitations at some point.  Somewhere, the "physics" created by the rule system break down.

However, with a game inspired by the amazing and crazy things that can happen in the pages of a comic book, the farther off you can push that rigidity, the better.  This is one of the reasons I am quite pleased at the prospect of the Cortex+ system driving the new Marvel system.  From what I have seen of the impementation in Leverage, the manner in which creative description and flexible ability and skill categories can work together make for a powerful and fun system that has much fewer "you can't do that" moments, and many more pick up your dice and see how it turns out moments.  That is exciting to me, and I am really happy to get a test run of the game at my favorite game spot next month (Labyrinth Games in Washington, D.C.).

Now, I can still see some downsides.

First, the Marvel Universe, as much as it has produced stories and characters I have enjoyed, it comes freighted with a lot of crappy baggage.  One of many not great things from Marvel is their many mediocre at best "events."  The new RPG is going to have at its heart, a whole variety of the past events to sell additional products that expand the basic game and the defined universe (read lots of hero and villain descriptions and advice about running various places and aspects of the mainstream Marvel Universe).  I don't begrudge Margaret Weiss Productions this organizational structure, but I think it showcases the bland filler of the Marvel Universe along side its more positive aspects.  This is not to say that every event has been a failure artiistically as far as story (I'm not even competent to speak commercially), but as I have tried to go through back issues and from time to time follow through one event or another (and Civil War was the last one I seriously looked at (with disappointment)), I can't say that I love any of the big cross overs (and this goes back all the way to the Secret Wars craziness that perhaps began it all).

So, there is that which may weigh against buying much into the line of products.

Also, there is just a lot to dislike in the Marvel Universe.  Obviously, both big publishers have always had trouble in balancing their portrayal of women and minorities in the pages of their books.  While not bereft of success from time to time, on the whole, the comics of the Marvel Universe are targeted at the white, middle class, heterosexual, male reader who expects female heroes, when they get seen, to be seen as wish fulfillment fantasies first and their story, personality and intellect, if shown at all, are all secondary at best.  This is not a view I want to subscribe to or to have prevelant at my gaming table (on those rare occiasions I get to game).  So, in taking the mainstream Marvel Universe as the default field of play, I get stuck with a narrower world than I would like, and a lot of work to make it over into an image that I feel more comfortable in (and having my players, most likely including my children, play their stories).

And there are number of other things that have been woven into the Marvel Universe that just violate my worldview.  People in the Marvel Universe are really much worse and more banally evil than you find in the "real" world, for all its flaws and tragedies.  This comes out most strongly in the Mutant Menace trope of most X-Men/Mutant etc. books.  Its like regular people, at least if they are in an X-Men book (not necessarily a Spiderman or Fantastic 4 book mind you), have the super prejudice power.  It only activates normally if you are in an X-book, and then beyond all history, evolving social understanding, or ability for information to be spread and people being able to rise above their context, you always seem to have just a mob of "mutie haters."  It is absolutely incoherent and frustratingly so.  I mean, I know this is a super hero comic, so with flying people and blue people and telepathy and all, the threshold of the willing suspension of disbelief is pretty high.  Still, emotionally, most of these stories fail because there is not enough truth to them.  People are prejudiced and they do hate, and it has and will continue to lead to suffering, injustice and even genocide, but it seems like there is truth (in an emotional sense) to how it gets portrayed in the Marvel Universe.  The feelings come and go depending on what book you are in, and the story of prejudice just falls on its face because it almost never is told the way things really happen.  There are a number of other examples of things woven in to the fabric of the Marvel Universe that just grate against me, but ifyou are going to get Spiderman, Captain America, Kitty Pryde, et al, all the rest comes with it.

So, of course you can, under your own steam, create a completely different reality, as in the already mentioned World War G post by Fred Hicks.  Or, you could chose a slightly different flavor of Marvel by trying to use the Marvel related settings in other media, such as The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes animated show, or any of the Marvel super hero movies (Spiderman (1+2 but NOT 3) Iron Man (1+2), Captain America or Thor pretty good, first and second X-Men movie and X-Men first class also pretty good; Daredevil, Elektra, any of the Punisher, Ghost Rider or Hulk movies from bad to very, very bad), but I'm not sure where that really gets you.  Also, there is the "Ultimate" universe, which has some promise.  Unlike the old "New Universe" where Marvel tried to generate a whole new set of heroes in a new version of a super heroic universe (which did not last long), Ultimate, really starting with the well done early issues of Ultimate Spiderman, tried to remake the Marvel Universe by shifting, tweaking and reimagining its heroes.  They seem to have done a pretty good job with Spiderman.  But I tried to read the Ultimate X-Men books, and, for me, it was if they took all the dumbest plots from the last forty years of X-Men and found ways to make them DUMBER.  So, your mileage may vary.

In the end, there has to be a way to make a corner of the universe your own and have your players' front a center.  But deciding what to take and what to leave, especially when it gets all interconnected, can be a task, and I am not sure how I might take that on.

Wrote myself through another lunch, so, here's to blogging, unfounded opinions, and forceful statements without analysis.

Thanks for reading.

The shadow of the past

So, before this blog becomes merely a vehicle for me to trumpet each issue of the Punisher as it comes out (next issue on Wednesday, Feb 1!), I want to do a bit more on my genealogical revelations of late.

I have been working off and on, rather obsessively, on learning about all I can of my family history since the Fall. I have been blessed with receiving a great deal of help from people who have worked on this before me and continue to work it, like my wife, my dad, and my wife's parents. Also, I stand on the shoulders of generations before me who have collected information before they passed on, notably my great uncle and my grandmother. I have been aided too by incredibly generous distant relatives I never knew I had who have seen my work on Ancestry.com or whose work I have come across. The generosity of distant kin continues stagger me as I peel back the layers.

So, there is a lot of information that I have found or organized (lots more of "organization" of previous work than original work, actually). Making sense of it and coming to terms with it is a longer and harder process.

One of the things that solidly hits me is my ancestors' involvement in slavery.

Given the times and places where some of my ancestors ended up on the North American continent, contact with slavery as an institution was inevitable. I am far from being able to catalog the entire extent, but I have seen enough to know that not only did my relatives have contact; they were extremely enmeshed in it. The record is stark with wills, property documents, and even news items such as one ancestor serving as High Sheriff and working to capture runaways. It is a difficult realization that generations of African Americans began and lived their American story enslaved to members of my family. Further, from general information that is known about the practice of slavery in the U.S., it seems likely that some of the descendents of slaves are also descendents of my family, whether they have the family name or not. This is a hidden genealogy, and I don't know even how I might access it.

And I don't know how such possible truth might be received. Race in America is still an issue. Perhaps it is not THE issue as it was in my parents' generation and before, but it continues to be a very strong question about identity, justice, truth, history, fairness and honesty in our society. Somewhere out there, I think I must have distant relatives whose story I would like to know, but whose lives I may not even be able to fathom. It is something I think should be explored by me, on the list of many genealogical projects I want to take on. I just don't know where I will find the resources (time, patience, and perhaps courage).

But, I guess I am laying down a marker here to say I am putting it on the "to do" list.

My family, and all the historic, genetic, and cultural streams that run into it, deserves study, and revelation and truth. I may not get far, but then I have gotten farther than I ever imagined. Branches of the family helped at every stage o this country and have lived the goods and evils of our history. I want my children and their children to have as many stories as I can find to know where they come from, and learn the lessons from our past.

I think that is one way I can make the issues of our nation live and breath.

Because we are connected.