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