In many ways, the superhero genre is a great match for tabletop RPGs - the average superhero story has a modern day setting players will be familiar with, a straightforward "hero vs. crook" premise, and meaningful questions about the responsible use of power. In game form, these stories let players debut their own superhero characters and see how they fare, which gives them wide appeal. At the same time, many superhero RPGs tend to be very "crunchy," simulating the use and clash of superpowers with complicated rules. Tabletop gamers who want to run quick "one-shot" RPG sessions on short notice should check out the following superhero tabletop RPGs, games systems with more intuitive, narrative rules players can use to tell rip-roaring superhero stories in the style of The Avengers or The Defenders on short notice.
Not long after Dungeons & Dragons pioneered the concept of tabletop roleplaying games, designers took the premise of D&D and applied it to the telling of superhero stories straight out of Marvel and DC comic books. Nowadays, RPG systems like Mutants & Masterminds, Trinity Continuum, and Spectaculars offer players tactically intricate gameplay rules for the telling of stories on the scale of Justice League or The Avengers, while narrative RPG systems like Masks: A New Generation are optimized for superheroes tales on a smaller, humbler scale - Teen Titans or Mystery Men, for instance.
Ideally, a superhero tabletop RPG should let you play almost any kind of superhero with almost any kind of superpower - flying bricks like Superman or Thor, nimble gadgeteers like Batman, animal-themed teens like Spider-Man's Peter Parker and Miles Morales, etc. This leads to a major design challenge: how do you implement every possible superpower in a game system while making sure "Superman" style PCs don't outshine the "Spider-Man" style PCs? Most superhero tabletop games deal with this problem by including long, intricate lists of carefully superpowers and talents. These RPGs, in contrast, bypass the issues of "superpower balance" in favor of mechanics focusing on the hero's journey and personal struggles.
The First Knight - Superhero Cinematic Universe TTRPG, a 10-page roleplaying game on itch.io, approaches the superhero genre with an interesting twist: Players of this superhero RPG tell a story about a the first superhero to appear in a world, a medieval knight who fights with his faithful companions against an evil force with an artifact of power and a plan that'll doom the world. The playbooks for The First Knight, inspired by prep-light Lady Blackbird tabletop RPG, embody archetypes such as superheroes, rivals, secret agents, scholars, and bards; their medieval fantasy tones can easily be updated into modern day tropes (The Bard playbook, for instance, can be a journalist, blogger, or even V-Tuber).
Anyone Can Wear the Mask, an itch.io-hosted superhero RPG hack of the fantasy RPG Beyond the Rift, is a storytelling game for 1 to 3 players; the first player portrays the Hero, the second portrays the Villain, and the third portrays the City (and inhabitants) that the Hero and Villain fight over. The gameplay of Anyone Can Wear the Mask revolves around generating plots by drawing playing cards from a deck, then rolling dice to see how well the Hero fares against the Villain. The core theme of Anyone Can Wear the Mask is battered, stubborn optimism - heroes exist, and the battles they fight (even if they don't always end well) are still worth fighting.
Hit The Streets: Defend The Block is a gritty, blue-collar superhero RPG about costumed crimefighters who can't fly and aren't rich – heroes who use their powers to protect their community and do good for their neighbors while also trying to juggle the myriad challenges of everyday life (a la superhero stories such as Spiderman or The Defenders). The character creation rules for Hit The Streets: Defend The Block are also very streamlined and stripped-down, letting players come up with a cool superhero character concept and translate it into a character sheet on short notice, making it one of the better superhero RPGs for getting up and running quickly.
Source: itch.io – Anyone Can Wear the Mask, itch.io – The First Knight
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