Goto [ Index ]

Overview

This review details the latest rpg to simulate the Marvel Comics universe. This time up, we are treated to the Marvel Universe Role Playing Game (MURPG hereafter), developed by Q.E.D. Games, and published by Marvel Comics.

Physical Description

MURPG is a 128 glossy page hardback retailing for $24.99. The front cover sports a picture of Spiderman swinging towards the viewer; the back cover has a picture of Wolverine with his foot planted on the face of a downed Sentinel. The entire book is done in full color with glossy pages. There is copious artwork, presumably drawn from the extensive Marvel archives. Much of it therefore is very good (if one likes this kind of thing, which presumably one must if one is buying this book). Twenty-five dollars for a hardback, core rulebook in full color is almost miraculous in today’s rpg economy.

Contents Overview

The book has four main divisions: an Introduction, followed by the Roleplaying Section, which is followed by the Gamemaster Section, and is concluded with an appendix. Calling these divisions chapters would be somewhat misleading, as the sections bleed into one another with very little in the way of visual separation.

The Introduction covers pages 1 to 6. It begins with an introduction to the book, followed by a What is Roleplaying section. Next, we are told “how Marvel is different from other roleplaying games”. Three styles of play are then briefly covered – “Power and Responsibility”, “Clobberin’ Time” and “Brawling”. The two former styles can be summarized as character-driven roleplay and hack-n-slash, respectively. The text reasonably recommends a mixture of the two styles when playing the game, but presents both equally without favor. The latter mode of play is novel to the Marvel system – it uses MURPG as a two player fighting engine without requiring a Gamemaster. After the modes of play comes an “Example of Play”, and finishing off the introduction, there is a listing of key terms used in the game.

The Roleplaying Section covers pages 7 to 95. It covers the rules of the Action Resolution Mechanic, MURPG’s novel diceless mechanic (more on this below), contains a list of 42 Marvel Heroes, rules for creating your own characters, and an overview of the Marvel universe.

Character creation is point based. Each player receives 40 white stones to spend among the characters Abilities, Actions and Modifiers. Powers are provided laundry-list style, but there are Advantages and Disadvantages which can be applied to them to customize them a little. (Although I disagree with the propriety of some of these. The disadvantage “Can’t be improved” for example seems open to all kinds of abuse, in addition to being largely irrelevant for a short lived campaign). Furthermore, characters can take Challenges which give them more stones for character creation. While I like the idea of each character having one mandatory Challenge, I am in general opposed to open-ended mechanisms like this, which in my experience are easily abused. But I suppose such a mechanic was unavoidable, given the precedents set by most other superhero roleplaying games.

The Gamemaster Section covers pages 96 to 123. It contains extensive advice on gamemastering, much of it specific to the Marvel universe and MURPG. Included here is general GM advice, additional advice on arbitrating ARS, a section on players and their characters, creating your own adventures, and concludes with a short introductory adventure entitled “We Live Here Too”.

The three appendices are a laundry list of Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment. Finally, there is included one thick-paper Character Action Display at the end of the book. The CAD is folded in half and perforated for removal. A CAD suitable for printing can be found in pdf form from the MURPG official website, linked below.

Action Resolution System Overview

The Action Resolution System, or ARS for short (sure to arouse much snickering for our friends across the pond), is the diceless resolution mechanic used in the MURPG. The basics work as follows: The entire game is played in Panels. Each panel, each character gets a number of red “power” stones, which they can assign to their various Abilities and Actions. After all stones are assigned for each character in the Panel, actions are resolved by comparing assigned red stones of power against a Resistance determined by the GM or opposing Action. If the Resistance is overcome, the action succeeds, otherwise, it fails.

Every character has five Abilities, the equivalent of characteristics or attributes in other games. These are Intelligence, Strength, Agility, Speed and Durability. Human average for each is “1”, except for Intelligence, which averages “2”, and ranges up to 10 for superheroes. Durability is an especially important Ability, as it not only provides for taking actions that require stamina, but it also provides your character with their white stones of health, and red stones of power. For this reason, Durability costs three times as much as the other Abilities during character creation.

Whereas other games consider skills, talents and super powers as separate kinds of things, MURPG treats them all as the same kind of thing; they are all Actions. Some example Actions are Astral Travel, Business Skills, Webslinging, Ninja or Vehicle Operations.

During character creation, there is no real difference between purchasing Abilities and Actions. They all use the same Cost table. They are all rated on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest possible. The cost table is not entirely linear. A rating of 3, for example, costs 1 white creation stone, and a rating of 10 costs 15 white creation stones.

However, during actual play, players will find themselves relying mostly on their Actions to accomplish things; while Abilities can be used to do things, there is usually a penalty for not having an appropriate Action. The rating of the Action determines two things. First, it determines if you can even attempt a task. Every task has a Difficulty assigned by the GamesMaster with help from the handy Difficulty and Resistance (D&R) Table, found on pages 80 to 81 of the book.

If your rating is not at least equal to the Difficulty, than you can’t attempt the task. Well, you could attempt it, but you would automatically fail. But you haven’t actually accomplished anything yet; so far, we just know that you can do it.

Along with the Difficulty, every task is also assigned a Resistance. Most frequently, Resistance equals Difficulty, but not always. Some hard-to-learn but non-intensive tasks, such as flying a high tech jet, have a higher Difficulty than Resistance, and some tasks which either take a long time to accomplish or require the cooperation of many individuals, such as the operation of a Shi’ar starship, have a much higher Resistance than Difficulty.

If the red stones actually put into the Action (and you can never put more red stones into an Action than its rating) match or exceed the Resistance, the action was accomplished successfully.

(As an Advantage for most abilities, you can purchase “Add <Ability>”, which adds an Ability of your choice to the Action’s rating both in terms of overcoming Difficulty and in number of red stones that can be assigned to that Action.)

For example, let’s say Wolverine needs to leap over a fence for some reason. The fence is 10 feet high. Wolvie puts four red stones into his Strength Ability this panel. The GM looks at the D&R table and sees the D&R for jumping 10’ is 2. The Situational Modifiers chart on page 104 tells the GM to add 1 to 3 stones of Resistance if the character is using an Ability instead of an Action. The GM decides to add 2 stones to Resistance, making the Action Difficulty 2 and Resistance 4. Wolverine has a high enough Strength rating to accomplish the task, and fortunately has put enough stones in it to leap over that annoying fence.

There are a few other salient details to ARS that need explaining. The first is that the entire game is played in a sequence of Panels. Each panel, characters assign stones to accomplish tasks. At the beginning of each panel, each character regenerates a number of red power stones equal to their current health standing, up to their maximum power rating. Opposed actions happen just as described above, but use another character’s red stones in some Action as Resistance. Attacks in combat happen just like that; compare the red stones in the offensive Action to the defender’s red stones in some defensive action (typically the special Action Defense. Defense is special because it does not have a rating; you may place stones into the Defense action from any other Action you have. The Action you use to power your Defense score flavors the Defense.)

Each character’s Durability indicates how many white stones of health they receive. Any attack that gets through does one white stone of damage per three red stones (or fraction thereof) that get through. A special twist of ARS is that characters never die unless they want to – whenever the red stones that get through are greater than the character’s current white stones of health, the character may simply choose to be knocked out instead of taking any stones of damage. For example, Rogue has a Durability of 4 and currently 8 stones in Defense (which she gets for free from her Toughness Modifier). A raging Hulk smashes her with 13 stones in Close Combat. 5 red stones get through her Defense. This would normally cause Rogue to loose 2 white stones as damage. However, Rogue’s player may choose to have Rogue be knocked out instead of taking any white stones of damage. Since the knock out lasts as many Panels as twice the red stones of damage, Rogue would be knocked out for ten Panels if her player chose that option.

There is a long list of Situation Modifiers that the GM can apply to Actions in order to make life harder or easier on the characters. Finally, in addition to Abilities and Actions, characters can have Modifiers, which are essentially powers or other special abilities that have a fixed effect, and never take stones to use. For example, Wolverine’s claws are a Modifier that give him a free +3 red stones in Close Combat each panel.

Opinions and Impressions

Several things struck me about this game. One of the very last things to occur to me is how brilliant this game is, even with all of its subjective flaws. What flaws are those? Allow me to enumerate.

First, the book is badly organized. Breaks betweens sections are almost invisible. But that pales next to the fact that important rules are broken up between sections in the book. For example, learning to use ARS requires reading pages 7 to 14, then pages 79 to 85, and also pages 102 to 107. This is information that should really all be in one place for ease of reference.

This scattering of information is exacerbated by the complete and utter lack of an index.

But the scattering of information would be only a minor nuisance were it not for the vague and handwavey way many of the rules are written. It has been commented that one cannot play MURPG without having to come up with a large number of house rules and interpretations. This is my opinion as well. MURPG tries very hard to be a rules-light game; however, it occasionally mistakes vagueness for being rules-light. Moreover, many of the sections do not read like a rules-light game. There are extensive rules for magic, power armor, and hey, a very special rule for catching people who are falling! In the space of a single page, the rules vary from deep (to catch a falling person requires 1 stone in Speed per 10’ of distance to the spot of impact, and then 1 stone in Strength per 10’ of fall to cushion the fall…) to handwaving: just use Webslinging to break the fall! (with no further guidelines.)

MURPG may be a diceless game, but this does not mean it is a rules-light game. Unfortunately, however, the authors seem to want it both ways – they have lots of rules, for all kinds of situations. However, many of these rules are incompletely explained, and in fact, some are egregiously handwavey.

One flaw which I’ll touch on but won’t go into at any detail because I am not really a hardcore comics fan is that (according to what I’ve heard), the Marvel hero write-ups are confused as to whether they want to represent the characters from the comics or the movies. For example, they give Toad the long whip-lash tongue and slime he has in the first X-Men movie, but apparently never had in the comics. Meanwhile, Rogue has her invulnerability and flight powers from the comics, which she doesn’t have in the movies yet.

Another minor quibble is that the authors spend an inordinate amount of time praising themselves. Page 2 is nothing but a long self-congratulatory exposition wherein they tell me how great the game is going to be. Another point in case is that the introductory adventure describes itself as “especially fun”. Thanks, but I’ll make me own opinion as to how great the game is, and how fun an adventure is. Save this kind of hyperbole for the marketing wags.

Another annoyance I have with MURPG is that it provides no way to compare heroes to each other. The converted Marvel heroes are not given a creation stone equivalent, or number of Lines of Experience, or anything like that, which makes it very hard to balance characters against each other.

Finally, and this is something I can’t blame the authors for as it was probably a decision imposed on them from on high, the credits for the actual authors and developers of the book are only to be found in the furthermost reaches of the book after a great deal of searching (organization problems make them appear to be part of the included adventure.) Instead of actual credits on the inside front page, we get a list of names of people from Marvel Comics, such as the CEO and Marketing Executive. Excuse me, but these people had, in all likelihood, nothing to do with the development of the game. And I, as a gamer, have as much in common with them as I do with a nematode. It sickens me that the credit for the hard work of the authors, and it was obviously a labor of love despite its flaws, is preempted by the sickening greed and pomposity of those fat, lazy corporate executives.

Playtest Review

I got the usual suspects together and gave the included adventure a whirl. The X-Men, consisting of Wolverine, Cyclops, Rogue, Storm and Jean Grey went to investigate the source of a new mutagenic drug that’s apparently all the rage with the kids these days.

While we were only able to complete the first mission in the three hours allotted for play, we spent the entire mission in Panel time. From the first scene after Prof. X’s team briefing to the close of the mission, only five or six panels passed! This is one aspect I really liked, as it kept forcing the players to be proactive, and kept the focus on the action. While it slowed us down each panel having to allocate stones, this was made up for by the fact that each Panel was a varying length of time, and instead of focusing on how things were being done, we could focus on what was getting done. In the final tally, we probably got about as far along in the adventure as we would have in a normal, free-form narrative game.

Two of my five players disliked both the lack of randomness being stuck in panels the entire time. They did not seem to grock the system quickly, either. My other three players caught on quickly and enjoyed themselves. However, it soon seemed apparent that Wolverine’s high durability combined with his regenerative powers meant that he was the dominating actor in the game. He was regenerating seven stones a turn, whereas Cyclops and Storm were only generating 3 apiece. This lends some credence to complaints I’ve heard that high-Durability, regenerating characters “break” the game.

From the other side of the screen, while I liked the ARS system, I found having to control even a moderate number of NPCs (in this case, six gang members) to be a bit of a hassle. I was even prepared for the task with homemade NPC mini-sheets. Even so, I’m convinced that this is simply a matter of adjustment, and with time, handling even a team of supervillians and a dozen mooks at once would be no slower than in any other RPG.

My players found one major annoyance and one plot hole in the first mission of the prepackaged adventure. The annoyance was that because of the new drug, Jean Gray was simple disallowed from reading their minds. The text even says that she will “undergo an irresistible impulse to break contact.” That technique to undercut a telepath simply is unnecessarily heavy-handed.

The plot hole dealt with the mission objectives. The mission’s “Secondary Objective” is to cut the supply of the drug off at street level. My players wondered for so long how to do this that I just told that them what the book said for completing this objective: just put the dealers they know about out of commission. My players argued that there might be other dealers they didn’t know about, and that even if they got all of the current dealers arrested, more might simply show up to take their place.

Summary

My opinion is that this new Marvel game is a wonderful creation, filled with brilliant ideas such as Flashback Panels (give a brief explanation of a flashback your character has that is relevant to the current situation, and get a free stone), volitional knock-out rules, and blind bidding as a central mechanic.

It is, however, flawed in the current incarnation, primarily in the way the book is laid out, and the rules explained. It is in sore need of revision.

While it is unfortunate that the organization problems are going to drive some gamers away from the game, it is still an excellent buy for $25 bucks, one which I don’t regret for a moment.

Links

• Unofficial MURPG Yahoo Group.
• Official Marvel MURPG Page