I have now played my first game...

[Profit]

...and it was absolutely the wonderful, chaotic mess I thought it would be.

The system is an absolute gem, uncut, mind you, but a gem nevertheless. I've never seen its like.

The session was filled with "how do you...?" and "eh, it's probably black ops/agility" or "hmm... that's highly unclear" as two players tried their best to break someone out from the Raft in the middle of an alien invasion. (What action for simple movement? Speed? (one stone gets you *a block* of movement?!) What action for simple perception? And how do you deal with a simple spotting roll? Are there no "pull" actions at all?)

Just like I thought when reading the rules, the game quickly grinds to a halt once everyone has exhausted their energy reserve, and actors have a hard time dealing any damage because of defensive modifiers.

[Manah]

Simple movement is the Speed ability, yeah. As for Perception, it's oddly enough supposed to be covered by Intelligence, which I don't agree with all that much. I think there should be more 'Mental' Abilities than just Intelligence, such as Perception, which I intend to make up as house rules eventually.

And yeah, Energy running out in an instant leaving everybody exhausted is a major issue in the vanilla rules, and most people seem to use house rules allowing for higher Max Energy and Regeneration per panel, myself included. Otherwise the only character types who seem to get enough energy to do anything without exhausting themselves in a single panel are either supergeniuses using the Intelligence-based energy alternative rule, or bricks with high Durability who have healing factors. Everyone else can barely act for more than 1 panel, lol.

Glad you had fun experimenting with it. As you say, it's very much an uncut gem. When I first played it, it felt unplayable, but with house rules, it's become one of my two favorite systems ever.

[Profit]

Stuff that we had to rule at once:

-no stacking (of e.g. defence modifiers, in our case force field and toughness)
-you pay for weapons like other modifiers (unclear how one actually does it)

Off the top of my head, stuff that I would add if I made a stab at a house version:

-a plot currency ("drama points" or "fate points") for certain powers,
-a better selection of attributes,
-a rework of the energy system,
-a clearer set of "skill actions" (perception, technology, etc), that can be combined into "occupation" actions (Black Ops, etc),
-merging many superpower actions (do we need both "charge object" and "force blast"? Perhaps not),
-unified rules for boost/hinder/attack/defend/restrain,
-the players allocate hidden and the GM openly - after all, the GM needs to keep track of more actors(!)
-"Backgrounds" such as "status" "lair" "resources" "contacts" and the like. Could potentially be handled as a set of modifiers.

[Manah]

I tend to see 'Fireworks' as more appropriate as an option to Force Blast, though I personally feel like Charged Objects is just poorly made and lacks options (for example, not all charged objects explode in Marvel; Gambit used his power on his staff to make it hit harder when he attacked/parried with it). I feel like it has potential to be an action on its own, it's just not developed enough.

Stone allocation being open or hidden, I don't assign to any game system, it mostly depends on the GM and the players themselves, lol. There's many reasons for either and they may not always suit all. But great if it works for you.

And yeah, definitely agreed on the backgrounds modifiers idea. We have a similar House Rules Modifier called 'Resources' which kinda works for some of those things, but it's linked to Wealth, which is not always appropriate (you could potentially be penniless but still be the childhood friend of your local senator, for instance).

At any rate, here's to hoping the game'll keep entertaining you well in the future, be it playing it or fixing it, lol.

[roxolid]

Nice to see the old game get some love!

I'm of the opinion these days that RPGs *need* a random element, be it dice, cards whatever. I'll always have a soft spot for MURPG and feel it is better than most people (away from this board) will credit even if it needed a 2nd edition to fix the issues listed so far.

One of the things I have played around with (and started writing down) was rolling 1D6 per Ability point and using energy as karma allowing you to roll extra dice and pick which ones to use.

Example:

Spider-man (5 Str) tries to hold up a cable car full of people (Difficulty 5 + Complication)

Player rolls 5D6 and spends 5 Energy to roll a further 5D6, picking the best five dice and discarding the others.

The GM rolls 5D6 for the Cable car and because of the Complication, rolls 5D6 again. They then pick the highest result of the two and discard the lower 5D6 total. This is the difficulty.

Sometimes the Difficulty is fixed at 3 per die.

Exceed the GM total to succeed, get an 'extra success' for every full 6 points over the target number.

Example:

Spider-man gets a great total and from his 'best of 10D6' picks out a total of 24. The GM rolls two lots of 5D6 for the Difficulty and they are both pretty miserable at 11 and 13. GM picks the 13 and the player compares their total of 24 vs 13. Success! There is also an extra success because 6+ points more than the target number so the Gm rules that not only does Spidey hold the Cable Car up, he manages to hoist the cable car up, muscles straining, onto a bridge where the grateful people can spill out... They cheer as our weary hero swings off into the distance!

Modifiers are fixed (no dice to roll for them) values of 4 per point so Wolverine hits with his claws (3) and does 3x4=+12 damage. When he hits a Sentinel he rolls 4D6 from STR 4 (plus any spent on energy to roll extra dice to pick from) and adds +12 from his Claws. This is probably not going to do much more than scratch a Sentinels hide but he has armour penetration! His claws effectively count double for penetrating armour. If a Sentinel has toughness 5, for example, the claws initially drop this from 5 to 2 (armour penetration). Then apply Wolverines 4D6 STR + 12 from claws. Chances are he'll make more than a dent in the Sentinel even with its remaining 2 Toughness (which reduces damage by 2x4=8 points). For every full 6 points of damage that gets through, he inflicts 1 DUR damage. Any remainder is noted and the next hit stacks with that.

This is just an example of what could be done using the Base MURPG game as a starting point and adding some simple rules on dice rolling. Personally I think this is a better game than the latest Marvel Multiverse RPG which is, to me, another missed opportunity and probably in need of a few fixes itself.