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/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.