The RPG comes with its own inclusive scenario where you get a team of pre-made Avenger character sheets, and battle through Hydra goons. Now, I could have gone the easy route with this. Which brings us to The Marvel Multiverse Roleplaying Game and its accursed d616 system. I was able to cobble together a game set on Krakoa last year starring Eye-Boy, Cable and Sunfire with relatively little fuss. While there’s a lot of complicatedness to the system as a whole, simplicity is at the heart of it, which allows for a great deal of customization and general messing about. The Cypher System leans a lot more into numbers, giving everything – from an opponent to a wall to a complicated device – a level, the number you’d need to overcome it as an obstacle. The other game I’ve played and loved is Monte Cook Games’ Cypher System. The focus is more on building a satisfying superhero story, and all the complicated emotions that come with, and less about the nitty gritty statistics of who’d win in a fight. Masks is a relatively simple game that does a remarkable job of boiling down the narrative elements of superhero stories down to their basics. For many people, the gold standard is Magpie Games’ Masks: The Next Generation, a game I was fortunate to be able to run with a group of my friends for a number of years. It’s worth mentioning my background with superhero TTRPGs. I ran a custom game with the playtest with the ComicsXF staff to recreate 1963’s X-Men #1, so here’s all you need to know if you want to make the most out of Marvel’s newest TTRPG. That being said, there are a few things that can make this game worth your while, if you’re really willing to put in the effort. While it’s worth noting that this is just the playtest, and not the final version, it’s hard to see how they’d make the game better without a complete overhaul. If you’re a deft hand at them…well, you might just be better off homebrewing some Marvel superheroes into whatever system you’re most familiar with. If you’re new to tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), this system may not be for you. As far as I’m concerned, though, if you have a die face that’s sometimes a 6, and sometimes a 1, that’s bad game design, and that’s only the start of what makes this brand-centric RPG system such a mess. This is all part of the Marvel d616 ruleset, one that allows a player to feel like they’ve achieved the impossible when they roll a 6-1-6. Not five minutes into reading the rules for The Marvel Multiverse Roleplaying Game playtest did I learn that when you roll a 1 on the special Marvel die, it actually counts as a 6 - unless, that is, you roll a 1 on the other two dice as well.
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December 2022
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