Marvel Super Heroes First Impression
In our D&D crew, we have quite a few comic fans. It was only a matter of time before we gave Marvel’s tabletop RPG a play through. I missed the first week, but that was simply character creation for the other PS’s, so I didn’t miss any important game play or storyline material. Chris (our Marvel GM), ran me quickly through the process before our last session.
First surprise – there are absolutely zero character classes in this game. You are free to completely create the type of superhero you want to play. You establish the concept, and your GM then helps you to select the appropriate skills, traits, and equipment to fashion your character into reality. It’s amazingly intuitive, and leave tons of room for creativity. It also helps to establish a varied crew of PCs. Ours runs the gamut from robots to human wrecking balls.
A little more after the jump. POW!
After character creation, we jumped into our first test battle. Surprise the second – there are 0 dice in this game. That’s right, no d20′s. d10′s or d-anythings. Instead all combat and skills checks are calculated using “stones”. I’ll avoid getting to in depth, but essentially your character has a pool of “stones” drawn from your energy that is determined by base stats. These stones can be used to perform attacks, defense, and basically any action in the game. It’s a process that relies far more on strategy than luck, a nice change from D&D.
We didn’t get to play for an extremely long period of time, and thus the rules are still a bit hazy in our minds. Things got confusing at times, and there are some rules that will need clarification, but that is to be expected. It was no more difficult than learning D&D or any other P&P battle system.
It was a nice first experience, and I can say the game play is unique and a big change from the standard rolling dice RPG. Look forward to much more in depth impression next week.
javi says:
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September 11th, 2008 at 10:33 am