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RE: Some thoughts about the combat system in the tabletop RPG "Marvel Heroic Roleplaying"
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I played a few sessions of this when it was fresh on the market. I despised it. I felt like we gave our character sheets and dice too much power to drive the narrative. And like it would have been stupid to do anything else. I don't remember all the flaws I thought the game had, but it was distinctly unfun for me. (Some members of my group liked it.)
I never got a chance to see how the game plays from the GM’s chair, but my sense of the game is that the fun isn’t in determining where you go, but how you get there. A lot of my fun derived from expressing “my take” on the characters. In the game where I played Doctor Strange, the other player was playing Iron Man/Tony Stark, so it was fun for me to come up with the affectation of always referring to him as Anthony, to give a sense of weird formalism to my character’s personality. It was also fun for me, when I was trying to deliver the final knockout blow to the villain of the series who had (in Doctor Strange’s opinion) been meddling with magical stuff that was beyond him, to use my Telepathy power as the basis for the attack by showing him all the frightening magical stuff that Doctor Strange had dealt with over the years, sort of making his arrogance the basis of the attack: you think you can face things that only I can face? I think that seeing the world through the filter of the mechanical incentives helped get me in the mind space to get something like that into the game when I otherwise might not have.
Oh, that reminds me, I'm put off by the game not really facilitating custom characters. That seems super weird. But I'm not exactly sure why. In theory a game that presents pre-gens as the only option is fine. I don't have a problem with Lady Blackbird, for instance.
I was skeptical of the no-chargen thing before I actually experienced the game, but I think a shared baseline understanding of the characters is an important part of the experience and using "established" characters really works for that. Conceptually, I think it makes the "my take on the character" thing read like signal rather than noise.