The Marvel Multiverse game feels out of step with modern tabletop RPGs
Why do we enjoy superhero stories? This question kept nagging me while I read through an early preview of the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game. Is it an aspirational fondness? Do we study their fictional lives so that we might better model our own on their exploits? Or is it instead a devotional kind of admiration for a more perfect humanity? The new playtest document spends more than 120 pages scaffolding rules and minutiae for a system that ultimately feels like a third option: Reading comics in order to choose the best action figures for a display case. Its heroes feel posed, sterile and unmoving, while the game itself leans a bit too far into gimmicks and fan service.
This new game, written by New York Times best-selling author Matt Forbeck, who also designed the system alongside Mike Caps and John Nee, promises full access to the Marvel Comics universe. It’s far from the first attempt. The granddaddy of RPGs, TSR, began the tradition with 1984’s Marvel Super Heroes and followed it up with Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game in 1998. Marvel took matters back into its own hands by directly publishing Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game in 2003, while Margaret Weis Productions managed to license Marvel Heroic Roleplaying in 2012.
Marvel Multiverse RPG’s predecessors took different tacks when translating the high-action and often pulpy nature of comic stories to the tabletop — in one case using a deck of cards instead of dice – but none managed to capture a long-running audience. Despite Marvel’s near chokehold on popular culture, Forbeck and his team have not been guaranteed success. The current RPG scene boasts plenty of systems facilitating caped crusaders —Masks: A New Generation or Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying
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