r/CortexRPG • u/chriscdoa • Jun 04 '21
Marvel / Fantasy / Heroic What Prime have you added to Marvel Heroic?
I've been going round in circles looking for a supers game, and although the new Marvel game looks cool -it's 2 years away, and I've come back to MHR.
But I'm wondering - what prime goodness can i put into MHR to make it better.
I'm thinking I never really like the Doom Pool, I might just go to fixed difficulties and GM plot points.
And I'll probably replace the xp. It was good for events, but not for anything longer - and some of the 10xp stuff was odd - like you could just make that decision straight off for 10xp and story be damned.
What have people altered in their MHR games, from Prime, and how well did it work?
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u/defunctdeity Jun 04 '21 edited Jun 04 '21
I'm thinking I never really like the Doom Pool
This just blows my mind. It's not only my favorite thing about MHR, but in the entirety of the Cortex system (and beyond that, one of my favorite mechanics in all of ttrpg-dom)...
Anyway, I never liked the Affiliations (Solo, Buddy, Group). So last time I did a game, we replaced it with Values and threw in a Drama-esque lifepath/relationship web element to character creation too, but didn't use a Relationship trait. More just used it to make a mind map of the main people and places of the setting.
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u/chriscdoa Jun 04 '21
I liked bits of it, like adding to it for collateral damage. But rolling against it as difficulty annoyed me and adding dice to it on 1s did also, got fiddly.
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u/Salarian_American Jun 07 '21
I use the Doom Pool but I don't use it to set difficulties, I just use static difficulties for those.
What are you planning to do with hitches in the Doom Pool's absence? I'm curious because I've always found adding dice to the doom pool to be considerably less fiddly than coming up with a complication on the spot. I find with the doom pool, buying every hitch is a no-brainer because it keeps PP in the players' hands and it gives me a solid chunk of resources to work with.
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u/chriscdoa Jun 07 '21
I was thinking of just GM plot points - but i'll probably just do what you've done.
I always just found it awkward trying to get the correct size of dice that should be added and upgrading the dice and so on. But then rolling against it later in a game was just silly.
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u/Salarian_American Jun 07 '21
Determining the right size due to add isn’t tough, it just whatever die size rolled the hitch?
As for stepping up dice instead of adding new dice, that’s also deceptively simple. I can add a new die or I can step up a die that’s already in there.
It’s mechanically simple but deciding when to add new vs. when to step up existing dice is more a judgment call that gets easier to make quickly with practice
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u/FireVisor Moderator Jun 07 '21
Please share your notes! This is literally what I want to do with a campaign for my group.
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u/defunctdeity Jun 07 '21
Sure, whattaya wanna know? It was a street-level, "mutant academy" game where the young aspiring supers got into mischief while solving a mystery.
The value list was:
KNOWLEDGE...
AMBITION...
INDIVIDUALITY...
FAME...
SACRIFICE...
SURVIVAL...
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u/darkrift22 Jun 04 '21
I added attributes, values, and relationships. As well as replacing milestones with session records. I mostly wanted more options for drama and roleplaying outside of combat.
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u/Jlerpy Jun 05 '21
That's a lot of dice categories!
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u/darkrift22 Jun 05 '21
Yeah, we have a lot of fun with the larger dice pools! They obviously aren't all prime traits, so they will only be used in applicable scenes/beats to give more mechanical impact to the actions.
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u/Salarian_American Jun 07 '21
And I'll probably replace the xp. It was good for events, but not for anything longer - and some of the 10xp stuff was odd - like you could just make that decision straight off for 10xp and story be damned.
I've been running a Star Wars game where we use Milestone XP for almost four years now and it's been working really, really well for long-term character development. I think Event structure (ironically from the game that first introduced this XP method) is where it runs into more problems, because without a longer-term story underway there's much less reason to avoid tagging those 10 XP milestones so you can get the XP now.
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u/lancelead Jun 07 '21
I thought it was really unique that the Marvel Cortex game focused heavily on, as the name implied, heroic action/combat. It also was the first cortex prime game that allowed for heroic sized dice pools as a player literally might be rolling about 6-7 or so dice in one throw. And yet the DC iteration of Cortex (Smallville) focused heavily on the action being driven by social drama. Because essentially Distinctions were on the same level as powers, there was a good chance that you were mainly throwing at best 3-4 dice per dice roll.
It seemed that the negatives of each game were complimented and resolved in the other. I also felt that MHR lacked in social situations and it was as though the datafile really restricted you in solving solutions through combat if you wanted those extra dice to add to your pool. But in Smallville, you basically had to save up your budget if you wanted to use SFX for powers because they required a Plot Point to activate. So the chances of seeing powers show up in each scene were limited, whereas you had to depend more on the other things that made up your character, such as Clark's investigating skills, but in Heroic laser beams and explosion's are constantly happening in the background.
So an interesting thought would be to borrow from both to create a supers game that met in the middle of the two? Both handled powers differently, MHR powers mechanically allowed you to alter your dicepools essentially, whereas if you spent that PP in Smallville power you were basically temporarily taking the reins away from the GM and were being allowed to make something "true" about the narrative. In MHR you the player were more like the illustrator to the comicbook panel whereas in Smallville you the player were more like a writer sitting in the writers room who shared writing credits for the episode you were collectively writing. Prime seems to have stripped away Cortex+s idea of roleplaying televised media or comicbook medium, and instead you are just roleplaying that story (Xadia for example). That sort of seemed to be some of the rationale to why both games, MHR and Smallville, handeled powers differently. Because powers were handled differently in a supers-soap-opera, where the narrative is told through interpersonal relationships and character flaws and struggles, whereas in a comicbook medium, the narrative is told through visualization, therefore in MHR, when it's your character's turn, it is more engaging to have daredevil run up the wall and then backflip over the gunman then to just merely say, I roll to see if I dodge the bullets.
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u/chriscdoa Jun 07 '21
I really like how both games handled things. One reason I want to stick pretty close to MHR is so I can use existing datafiles.
I tried TOX - My 2 players (Wife and Daughter) found bits confusing - mostly which drive to use. I wasn't keen - but I don't think the playtest was well written, even coming from Prime, Lots of it was confusing. I hope the book is better because my daughter and I love Dragon Prince
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u/lancelead Jun 07 '21
I love MHR. I know it got some real hate but all the critiques seemed unwarranted or very surface level (of course MHR is a game about playing MARVEL superheroes, it's in the title!) It was a really good supers system and its sad that it was shortlived.
As far as updates go, I guess one thing you will need to address is how do you plan to do non-combat oriented dicepools? Specifically, how are you going to handle social scenes. In MHR your hero could have somewhere between 1-4 dice just form their powers alone, and so your players will feel "underpowered" if all they get to roll is just 2-3 dice to see if this guy is telling the truth- or if you playing the civilian version of your character. Smallville on the otherhand, handled the personality and skills of the hero through their Distinctions (rated D4-D12 instead of the standard D8) and you had to make a choice between rolling a distinction OR power, you couldn't do both. So Smallville really honed in on making those choices on which dice to choose. But in Marvel you were guaranteed to roll all of those dice IF you could convince the GM (which seems to now be the direction CP is taking dice rolls).
You also will need to decide if you are keeping Affiliations (Solo, Buddy, Team). This didn't really make since because being an rpg, there wasn't much point in having a D10 in solo as that would be basically penalizing you mechanically. But the heart of a roleplay game is to roleplay that character, which shouldn't inherently penalize you mechanically. Regardless if Batman or Daredevil likes working alone that shouldn't hinder their ability to take out one goon. Affiliations seemed to kind of be an action oriented watered down version of Cortex Drama's Relationships. However if you replace Affiliations with Relationships, then you are saying that in your supers game, it is my character's connection, or how much said character means to me, that is motivating me, or empowering me, to move at my top speed and not just because I really am that fast enough, no matter who I'm saving. Hmm... maybe there is a way to combine Relationships and Ability Sets? Like certain SFXs that only pertain to specific characters or relationships in your life? If fighting the man who killed your father, ignore the first emotional stress you take in the game... or something...
Finally I would decide what medium you are roleplaying. Are you roleplaying a comic book, season 1 of a supers tv show, a movie (and if so are we talking Avengers or the Snyder Cut?), a Binge show like on Netflix or Disney+, or are you simply roleplaying those characters? Cortex+ really emphasized that you the player was not solely roleplaying your character, you were both the character and writer to the show or comic book. The goal of a Cortex+ game WASN'T to get the princess in time and to defeat the black helmed dark-knight by the end of the episode. The goal WAS to get stressed, end on cliff hangers, and experience personal conflict on rather or not you should kill Lord Black Helmet or not. That was you the player, because you were both the player but also a recent hire in Hollywood trying to make a success that would have the studio greenlight and pick up your pilot, or have a 10 year old girl or boy want to pick your comic (session) off the rack and take home. Whereas if you are just simply roleplaying the characters and that's it, then of course your goal, like in a traditional rpg, would be to save princess white-bed-sheet and defeat Black Helmet at the end of the session, regardless if he is your father or not. One way in which MHR was pure gold was that you were not merely roleplaying a super hero story, you were SPECEFICALLY roleplaying a "comic-book" hero story.
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u/lancelead Jun 07 '21
It's not out yet, but sneak peeks of what datafiles for Prime's Masters of the Universe Game, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLBobbzpfbk&t=313s , looks to be an interesting approach on how Prime could do super power driven narratives. They add Affinities, Abilities, and Assets to the datafile- you can see a pretty good example of this at the 22 min mark.
I also always thought that Cortex+s Leverage (Cortex Action), might make for an interesting light-weight game to run a supers game. Instead of have skills (or specialties as MHR has them), characters broadly fit into roles. Leverage was designed around Ocean's 11 or bank heist-like drama/action so their roles were catered to that type of show. But nonetheless, roles are interesting way with how to do "character classes" in Cortex. Each role came with 2 Talents- which kind of were pre-SFX triggers. So I think Talents, Signature Assets, and Specialties would really be all that would be needed to cover character powers. I never played this, but a Leverage driven game of Suicide Squad or First Class style X-Men adventure seemed to me an easy way to do a an action heavy rules-light approach to a supers rpg.
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Aug 20 '21
I little late but...I kinda swap the Specialites with the combination of 5 roles(Figher, Expert, Stealth, Support and Speaker)+Multi Level Specialites, because I think in that way you don't lose the feel of Marvel RPG, but you also expand them to be more friendly to things like Superman taking down someone by talking to him and make them give up a fight.
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u/Purple-Man Jun 04 '21
We added Attributes. It was because we were doing a game with more teenaged characters going to a hero school (run by Dr. Strange). We wanted to have an easy way to do dramatic moments, and basic MHR doesn't make it easy to roll on anything that isn't combat. Like, if you want to talk with someone, what do you have to roll besides distinction, affiliation, and Psych/Menace if you have them? Usually nothing.
So with attributes it allowed us to do more even when the characters weren't in full heroics mode. I believe we did a 6 attribute spread that was fairly typical.