Marvel Multiverse RPG (Part 2)

It is always clobbering time somewhere

The first part of the critic can be found here.

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Lhuzie

Marvel Multiverse RPG has its own system, the confusingly called d616 system. No, you don't roll a 616 sided dice. You don't even use any dice other than regular dice. For some reason, they annotate rolling three regular dice as d616 rather than how everyone else does it. The reason? Literally, branding. The 1 in one of the dice has “Marvel” written on it and counts as a Marvel die that gets you Marvel results.

During action rolls, you need to beat a difficulty by rolling three dice, adding results and your attribute. With attributes between -3 and +9 and a possible range of outcomes of 3-18, this is a system with pretty predictable outcomes and the occasional “swingness” comparable to single-die systems with smaller numbers. This is a trend across the system, not exclusive to d616 and action rolls: an obsession with creating bigger numbers for bigger number sake, when you get nothing else and would be served better with a more natural presentation. For example, you have to convert rank to get a baseline difficulty and because of this, modifiers have to be on increments of two. But adjusting the numbers now would result in the same probability of outcomes and using rank directly as difficulty.

And again, the bigger numbers do not add any nuance to the system. It all comes from Fantastic results, which are at the mercy of the Marvel die or rerolls. One in each six action rolls, the Marvel die comes Marvel. So your success has a nice bonus or a failure is not as bad. No degrees of success that need the big numbies. If you have a result that can happen 0.15% of the time, you succeed no matter the difficulty. Advantages and disadvantages allow and force reroll, which while not adding degrees of effect, it adds swingness that the system math otherwise has no interested in.

You really get little from the dice rolls considering all the big numbies and the required procedure, with Marvel dice and rerolls back and forth on relatively straightforward dice rolls. So, despite being central, the action roll of d616 is not really an engine. No, all these steps, on their own, do not make the game happen.

Karma is what drives games to happen. It is gained by being a hero as the game defines it, and not only can be used to buff and debufff rolls, it is also one of the very few ways to recover health tracks. Getting Karma is the one push forward from the inside of the system.

Brad

Lu sums this up perfectly, but I want to go on a brief tangent. I may have made a critical error in my reading of this game, but for 90% of powers as presented I could not figure out how to use powers to save someone from a risky situation, no saving people from falling off of bridges or pulling someone away from a burning building.

Lhuzie

Well Brad, it defines hero as someone that does not call the cops and instead takes the matters on their own hands. So I guess it is just as interested in saving people and dispensing violence as the cops their superheroes are replacing.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Brad

I would recommend using existing characters in one of the many existing adventures. My table made sure to have the files open and easily accessible for reference and while this may have not given me the perfect understanding of things like advancement, it was enlightening enough for us.

Lhuzie

I’m with Brad on this one. There is really nothing to it other than rolling d616. You always rolling d616 and interpreting it through your sheet. So just pick a bunch of sheets and roll d616 at each other. You will get the experience the game wants you to have without much commitment.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Lhuzie

Using Hasbro’s TTRPG attributes for superheroes renamed to make the brand name does very little to support super heroic play. There is a reason Mutants and Masterminds has changed to make that work in its favor. Marvel Multiverse RPG does not make the six attributes work on service of its own goals. Cutting them out of mechanics may have made the system more elegant, in fact —- after all, too much of is carried by Marvel dice and rerolls.

Using Karma to heal has a pretty feels bad design to it, because it requires a dice roll on top of karma expenditure which you can fail. Considering the dice roll defining how much health track it recovers is based on the dice rolls, a low die roll already punishes by reducing health recovered —- it feels bad to double punish it by making possible to spend karma to recover no health track at all.

You can Help yourself for a reroll in the next action, but you don't lose it by the beginning of your next turn —- you can keep it until the end of the next round. So, you can actually Help yourself, as confusing as that may seem.

A lot of special attacks and abilities are, counterintuitively, done as reactions. It is easy to overlooked them when not associated to a power.

Spending actions to Grab will frustrate, as they can be avoided on reaction and action. Despite being a possibility, it is better to grab and pin people with powers that also do something else.

The game has the mistake of writing falling damage rules, with the usual suspect consequences: having absurd falling damage, which far outdoes any other sources of damage. Certainly something that cannot be an issue when everyone is superpowered.

Speaking of damage, damage is a nightmare. It is done multiplying your Marvel die results times your rank and adding a relevant stat. But also doubled when you get a Marvel on the Marvel die. This once again pushes number into big numbers to eat at bigger numbers of health which have to have a multiplier of 30 to accommodate that the hulk is as likely to deal 8 damage of the time or 56 damage — so, the Hulk could succeed at punching a door and failing to put their fist through it. Such complicated damage calculation, when there is already unnecessary complication to actions, does little to justify itself.

Stun has no defense and causes you to skip actions, allowing for stunlocks in a TTRPG. Truly, it feels like the last twenty years passed this game by.

Brad 

Stunlocking someone is a powerful technique. I had an Iron Fist at my table who used that to allow them to pin down and stomp the end of encounter. I recommend letting people who spend karma to regain health tracks just gain half.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Lhuzie

The attitude to GMing, house rules and rule zero are pretty good to think about.

The bloated system, with so many extra steps on all sides of the equation, can be an interesting exercise in how to make your own design more legends. For example, how the feel of dice rolls could be replicated with a single dice roll, which also sets damage, and you get rerolls on an advantage or forced to reroll them on disadvantage and succeed matching the rank of what you face.

Brad

I think you should use this game as an example to really drill down on what your game is about. If you are playing brutal mercenaries, your game should allow you to rip off innocent people and brutally cut down your enemies, in a superhero game it should be clear how to use your powers to fight dastardly villains or rescue civilians in danger. You never know how easy it could be to design a whole game and realize that you are missing something like that.

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