Discussing MMOs: Lord of the Rings Online

Lord of the Rings Online is the first MMO I played after it became free-to-play. It is, of course, based on the Lord of the Rings property, and takes place, chronologically, just before or around the time when the Fellowship of the Ring is formed in Rivendell. The company, sadly, only has access to the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit; it cannot make use of material from the Silmarillion or other Tolkien works. Predictably, players play characters in Middle-Earth, and unlike WoW or WAR, there is only one side. You can choose to play as a human, elf, dwarf, or hobbit, and different classes are open to each race; humans can play as 8 of the 9 available classes, while hobbits only have access to 4. The graphics of the game are slightly better than those of WoW in that they are not as cartoonish, but they aren't high-quality like DCUO or WAR.

I only played Lord of the Rings Online (or LOTRO) for a little while, but in the time I did play, I learned quite a bit. Despite being a game basd in a well-known world, LOTRO has a lot to offer, even to veteran MMO players. For one, there is a long, epic storyline that progresses through the game; it progresses parallel to, but outside of, normal area quests, and is generally relatively difficult - though I hear that it can become easier with multiple players progressing on it at once. This gives the game a coherent storyline, even as you move between quest areas that are often unrelated.

Health is handled differently in LOTRO; characters don't have hit points or health points, but morale. Some creatures - particularly direct servants of Sauron, like Ringwraiths or powerful undead - will lower your morale simply by being near your character, so seeing this effect is a telltale sign that there is a difficult fight or area ahead. I found this to be an interesting mechanic, because it made some fights that would have otherwise been easy into harrowing affairs, though fun. I don't know that I'd recommend it for other games - it works in LOTRO because of the creeping fear and sense of terror inspired by true evil - but it works to make the game feel more immersive and thematic.

Like the superhero MMOS I played, LOTRO has a loose, easy method for creating your character's look; the armor you appear to be wearing is not necessarily the armor your character has equipped, and you can store a number of armor pieces in a sort of closet, allowing you much greater freedom in how your character looks. This allowed me, as a player, to make my human Guardian look like the warrior from Rohan I pictured him as, rather than someone who armored himself by picking random pieces of armor in the dark. This is really a feature that all MMOs ought to embrace.

Once you reach a certain level, you can buy a house for your character; houses reside in instanced neighborhoods, each with dozens of houses, and they vary in appearance depending on where you buy them - a human house looks different from a dwarven abode. In your character's house, not only can you decorate it according to your whim, but you can also use it as a way of displaying trophies you have won from quests or difficult monsters. Other characters can come visit you, and you can likewise visit them, to relax or roleplay in a quiet environment - and to show off, of course.

One thing I never tried, though I would have liked to, was LOTRO's music system; each character can learn, at the very least, how to play a lute, and the Minstrel class can play every instrument, and each instrument can be played with in-game macros covering several octaves. With sufficient organization, this can lead to some cool in-game musical performances by other players, and there are scheduled musical festivals - the most well-known of these being 'Weatherstock', essentially Woodstock on Weathertop mountain. It has no mechanical effect on the game, but is a fun way to bring the community together for something besides in-game monster hunting and such.

Being set in Middle-Earth, there is an enormous amount of territory to cover, and most of it will be familiar to fans - you can visit Bree, the Prancing Pony, the Shire, Weathertop, and the first expansion opened up the Mines of Moria. After the Moria expansion came other packs that expanded Mirkwood and Isengard, and an expansion coming in October of 2012 should open up Rohan. I never got a chance to see Moria in-game, as it is quite the dangerous place and I never got to a level capable of handling it, but I imagine it would have been a sight to see. LOTRO definitely fulfilled my need for exploration; I doubt I explored even a third of what the game had to offer.

As a free-to-play game, I have to say I never really noticed any real focus on getting me to buy from the game store; there were a number of items available in the store that appealed to me - a variety of character outfits, new mounts, and even some useful items - but none of them looked like they were so necessary that I would need to spend money to get them. Indeed, by performing some deeds in the game, you can earn points for use in the game's store, meaning that if you work hard enough you might never need to spend money on the game. From what I can tell, the game is still going strong; Wikipedia notes that LOTRO is said to be the third most popular MMO, with Turbine, the company that runs the game, citing its free-to-play model as a large part of the reason. LOTRO is one of the games I would like to return to, if I knew anyone else who was likely to play, because even in such a  detailed world, it gets a bit boring doing everything alone. That was, in fact, the reason why I stopped playing - I just felt too lonely. And so I stopped for a time, but there was more on the horizon.

Next up: Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Discussing MMOs: Warhammer Online

Warhammer Online, for those of you who don't know, is based on the enormously popular (well, among wargamers) miniatures wargame, Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Warhammer was the loose foundation for the original Warcraft games, thought the two have since diverged significantly. Much like Warcraft, it is set in a fantasy world, with elves, dwarves, orcs, and the like. Also, like WoW, there are two factions: the Armies of Order (humans, high elves, and dwarves) and the Armies of Chaos (Chaos, orcs & goblins, and dark elves). Character creation was a lot like WoW, except that each race had its own classes, and other races couldn't take them; each race's classes were based on units from the miniatures game, and generally pretty thematic, though they lost points in the minds of some by having three classes allow only male characters, while there was only one female-only class. The graphics for Warhammer Online were somewhat less cartoonish than those of WoW, which was nice, and made the differences between the two easier to see.

One of the primary draws of Warhammer Online was their PvP system, also known as Realm versus Realm; you could have armies of each faction made up of players from several servers, which meant that battles could be quite large and bloody. This was a big deal at the time, though since Warhammer Online didn't perform as well as hoped, servers dropped fairly quickly in number, meaning that the populations in RvR battles dropped as well. Because of the draw of  PvP play in Warhammer Online (or WAR), even I gave it a shot, and I found it kind of cool, especially since the holders of a battlefield in a given area actually had some effect on the rest of that area. I never got to play in the high-end RvR battlefields, but the lower-level stuff was crazy and vicious, but fun.

Another of the things that WAR used that I found pretty innovative were the idea of public quests. Public quests were, as the name implies, public; certain places in zones would have a quest, or series of quests, start every so often, and the quest could be carried out and worked on by anyone nearby, meaning that things got done much faster if others in the area helped - in fact, some, or even most, public quests were impossible without other players working together, even if they weren't grouped together. This encouraged players on the same side as you to be sociable, even if they didn't know you, because you might be the difference between finishing a public quest or failing. From what I remember, the rewars were quite nice, as well, and scaled depending on how successful you were.

WAR, much like WoW, took to heart the idea that a game world should be large and have plenty of places to explore; there were 31 zones, 10 each for High Elves/Dark Elves and Humans/Chaos and 11 for Dwarves/Orcs & goblins. 3 of those 31 were high-level contested zones, which changed depending on which side held them at the time. Chaos and the Humans each had a capital city for their respective sides, which could also be attacked and conquered. There was a great deal to see, and as I never reached the level cap, I never saw all of it; I probably saw only about half.

I think, though, WAR was crippled by the fact that it was released only a few weeks prior to the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for WoW; people tried WAR for a couple weeks, and then returned to WoW, causing the game's population to drop vastly: according to Wikipedia, from 800,000 subscribers around launch down to 300,000 only 3 months later. As WAR stayed with a subscription model, instead of becoming free-to-play like many other MMOs, they continued to lose customers and money, causing them to shrink even more; as of December of 2011, they had only 3 remaining servers worldwide. It's sad, because the game had some good ideas, and the PvP was more enjoyable than that of WoW (at least for me), but I guess the market couldn't handle two big subscription-based MMOs.

Next up: Lord of the Rings Online.

Discussing MMOs: DC Universe Online

I was apparently still interested in superhero MMOs after Champions Online, and so my next foray into the world of MMOs was DC Universe Online. As the name implies, it takes place in the world of DC Comics, and so many of the prominent NPCs are recognizable to may people: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Lex Luthor, the Joker, and so on. As in Champions Online, creating a character and costume is a large part of the process of starting the game; you have a wide variety of costume options when the game begins, and can unlock more during play. Since the look of a superhero character is so important, the ability to have a costume that you, as player, like from character creation onwards is nice, and it helps with immersion into the character. The characters in DC Universe Online looked more realistic than those from Champions Online, and even had different options to choose from at character creation to change body language, from Comical to Serious. The power sets in the game could have been expanded, though; one of the most iconic power sets, that of Green Lantern, wasn't added until the first expansion pack, even though there were Green Lanterns you could interact with and do missions for in the game.

While I didn't take advantage of this, in DC Universe Online (or DCUO), you can choose to play as either a hero or a villain. As a hero, you will have a big-name mentor; for character with tech-based abilities or normal human skills, your mentor is Batman; for people with superhuman abilities, Superman is your mentor; and for people whose abilities are magical in nature, Wonder Woman mentors you. Conversely, on the villain side, Joker takes the position of Batman, Lex Luthor takes Superman's mentor spot, and Circe takes Wonder Woman's role. This means that you will almost certainly run into players of the opposing allegiance during regular play, though unless you play on a PvP server, fighting amongst yourselves is optional.

One of the more enjoyable things about DCUO is that virtually every NPC, and especially the named ones which most people would be familiar, has a voice actor, some of them recognizable - Adam Baldwin for Superman, for instance, or, for fans of the Batman animated series, Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark Hamill as the Joker. By making these characters have actual voices, as opposed to simple text boxes, I felt like I was actually a part of the world.

DCUO was also one of the few MMOs that was not just PC-based; you could also play it on the Playstation 3, meaning that at least some console gamers were a part of the player base. This also meant that the setup for powers and abilities was relatively simple and easy to use, as it had to be something that was viable on both the PC and while using a Playstation controller. I wish this was embraced by more MMOs, as I have a number of friends who seem to play games exclusively on consoles, and this would allow me to play with those friends as well as those who prefer to play games on their PCs.

Sadly, to an even greater degree than Champions Online, DCUO had very little room for exploration. There were really only three zones: Metropolis, Gotham City, and Central City. While each city was very large, the feel never really changed very much between areas of a city. Gotham felt very different than Metropolis, but one section of Metropolis was very similar to the next, even if one was being invaded by aliens and another attacked by super-powered terrorists. The only forays out of the three cities happened in tightly controlled instances, and so there was never a feeling that, if you went to, say, the moon, that you were there for anything other than a single short mission with a few other players. Each allegiance had their own 'base' area - heroes had the Watchtower, while villains had the Hall of Doom - but these were really very basic areas that were mostly for show and making character changes. Consequently, as there was little to explore in DCUO, even though I enjoyed the world and the characters, I became bored with my surroundings relatively quickly, and so only played for about two months. Then I went on MMO hiatus again.

Next up" Warhammer Online.

Discussing MMOs: Champions Online

After WoW, I took a break - most of a year. The next MMO I played in was Champions Online, in large part because I had been hearing good things about it and I am a big fan of superhero-type things. Champions Online (or CO) is based in a setting created in a tabletop RPG - the Champions game. So most of the signature heroes are unfamiliar to mainstream comic readers; even I had little idea of who or what the named character were. CO's graphical style is very comic-oriented; the characters look like they just leapt off of the pages of a comic book, which was an interesting change after playing WoW. Now, while CO is currently free-to-play, and has only a limited amount of set archetypes that free-to-play users can use when creating characters, when I joined character creation was still very customizable.

One of the biggest things I noticed about CO was that you basically designed your character's look (for a large part of the game) in character creation. Costume, body armor, body shape, even whether your character looked human, animalistic, or alien, you determined all this stuff in creation. There was no big worry with having to find the right dropped equipment to clothe your character so that you didn't look like a jester, as happened in WoW; you could add or change your character's costume later, as some options for clothing only became available through play, but for the most part, the way your character looked in creation was how you wanted it to look and how it would stay. I am a big fan of things like this in MMOs; part of what I want in a character is to look cool and thematic, not like I just assembled my outfit by picking up random things out of a Goodwill container. You could even change some really small, and yet important, details - you could have energy blasts come from your head instead of your hands, or you could change the color or look of your projectile attacks; you could make a character that looked like a gorilla walk and run like a gorilla rather than a regular human. All of these little details made it feel like you had a great deal of control over your character, and that the game was empowering you to do what you wanted.

The variety of powers you could choose with your character were also pretty astounding. There are six general power sets - Energy Projector, Technology, Martial Arts, Mentalist, Brick, and Mystic - and each power set has a number of power groupings within it - Technology, for instance, contains Archery, Gadgeteering, Munitions, and Power Armor. you could mix and match between any of these power sets, though some power sets were seen as 'optimal' for purposes of PvP play, or grouping for instances, but other than that, you were free to choose any powers you wanted. Not only could you have a wide variety of powers, though, but each character got to choose their own method of speedy traveling. Where in WoW you had mounts, which would increase in speed as you leveled your character, in CO you got travel powers. You could fly, travel at superspeed, make giant leaps, swing around (not unlike Spiderman), teleport, and travel in a number of other ways. All of these added up to essentially the same thing, but was just one more point of customization that helped make your character unique.

The third big innovation I found in CO was the Nemesis system. All good superheros need a villain - Superman has Lex Luthor, Captain America has the Red Skull, Batman has the Joker. In CO, you got the chance to give your character a nemesis, too. Once your character had advanced enough, you were given the choice to create your character's nemesis - you chose his powers, who his minions were, what the nemesis looked like, and why they were your character's nemesis. You would then eventually go through a series of encounters with your nemesis, popping up at random through gameplay, eventually ending up with you sending your nemesis to jail - at which point you could create a new nemesis, or choose to keep re-using the old one. Again, this made it feel like you had some real control over your own story, and even if the greater world never saw it, you knew that even if you changed nothing else int he game world, your nemesis could be jailed - and stay there. Well, until his inevitable prison break, of course.

The big problem I had with CO was just that, at release, there was simply not a huge amount of content to play through. The developers packed a huge amount of material into the few areas they did have on release - Millenium City, which unlike the cities in WoW, was gigantic and had a ton of content to do, the Canadian Wilderness, the Desert, Monster Island, and the underwater area of Lemuria - but compared to the amount of explorable areas in WoW, it fell quite short. Exploration, as I noted in my entry for WoW, is one of the things I really like to do in MMOs, and so the paucity of explorable areas really bummed me out. It also meant that there was a very clear progression of areas, and there wasn't really any way around that; from Millenium City, you went to the Canadian Wilderness, then to the Desert, then to Monster Island, then on to Lemuria. I hear they eventually added other areas, but that was after I had stopped playing, sadly. It also didn't help that, while I had friends and acquaintances who played WoW, I knew virtually nobody in CO; not having anyone to banter with really hindered my enjoyment of the game. After a few months of play - far short of the years I played WoW - I dropped out of Champions Online.

Next up: DC Universe Online.

Discussing MMOs: World of Warcraft

I don't have a lot of tabletop gaming going on, but I am active in online gaming with MMOs, so I thought I might talk a bit about those. Now, I have no background in computers, and I've never developed a game; I've got an MA (hopefully soon a PhD) in English. I like good stories, and I like to be able to be involved and see change occur in a persistent gaming world. I also like to play games online with friends, and so I feel drawn to MMOs as an easy way to keep in touch and play games with friends that I otherwise don't see very often. I've played a number of MMOs, and there are a lot of things, both good and bad, I have seen in each; I thought it might be interesting to talk about those.

World of Warcraft is up first because, even 7+ years after release, it is still the leader of the MMO market. It has something like 9 million subscribers, even after such a long time on the market, and is set to release its fourth expansion later this year. I started playing World of Warcraft (or WoW) the day after it was released, in large part because I had been so fond of the Warcraft series of strategy games that had preceded it. The world of WoW is a familiar one to anyone even moderately familiar with fantasy; there are two player factions, the Alliance (made up of, originally, Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, and Night Elves) and the Horde (consisting of Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, and Undead). They are in a state of constant low-grade war over the lands of the world of Azeroth, and being a fantays land, it fits many of the tropes of traditional fantasy - dwarves live in a city in a mountain; night elves live in a tree city; orcs are savage, yet also somewhat noble, barbarians. Wizards wear robes, paladins fight evil, and both sides are trying to keep their place in the world.

As a WoW player, I played an Alliance character almost exclusively, so that is most of what I saw in the game; I also tended to avoid too much PvP, as it didn't really interest me. As an MMO player, I am interested in three things - exploring the world that is available to me; learning and playing a part in the story of the world; and advancing my own character (of which a large part was being able to clothe my character in armor and weapons I thought looked good). From the very first day in WoW, I had a blast with exploration; I slowly worked my way through the world, taking quests when I saw them, following storylines, and being able to see all the amazing sights that the game's developers had included. There are two main continents in basic WoW; the continent of the eastern Kingdoms consisted, at launch, of 23 zones, while the continents of Kalimdor had 18. This is, frankly, a massive amount of content; even considering that 6 of those zones were essentially for totally new players, it still left 35 zones to travel in, and that doesn't even count the faction cities - of which there were 3 per faction. Amount of content for exploration is one of the areas I feel that World of Warcraft really has yet to be exceeded. And the content was beautiful and thematic; from the idyllic forests of Westfall to the rocky, desolate Badlands, from the rolling plains of Mulgore to the ancient ruins of Azshara, each zone had a distinct feel to it. Sometimes the change between zones was a bit shocking - traveling from the oppressively dark, terrifying forest of Duskwood in to the lush jungles of Stranglethorn Vale was a bit jarring, but each area was its own place.

The story of WoW was, of necessity, often somewhat static. Since there were players in both factions, it was hard to have one clearly triumph over the other and still keep the players who were on the losing side, so there were other threats that had to emerge to keep the two sides in an uneasy cold war-type standoff. Humans contended with their own rebels and malcontents, while dwarves and gnomes dealt with the results of experiments gone wrong and the actions of the ancestors; orcs tried to carve out a place for themselves in a continent previously inhabited mostly by night elves, while the Undead of the Horde had to face their darker cousins in the Scourge. Most zones had quests that followed a theme or story, though at first this was somewhat disjointed; it wasn't until the Cataclysm expansion that almost every zone had its own coherent line of quests. Many of the important, world-changing events happened only in instances, whether for a single group or for a larger raid, and this was where I started having trouble. Once I had explored the world of Azeroth, I wanted to know who I was fighting, and why, and then I wanted to defeat them. The greatest opponents, though, were only faced in raids - foes like the great dragon Onyxia, or the lord of fire elementals, Ragnaros. For someone who was more interested in exploration than spending hours repeating boss fights in order to learn how to kill them, it was difficult to get into a raid and see how the story of Onyxia or Ragnaros played out. I was, and still mostly am, a 'casual' player; even though I can devote a large amount of time to playing games like WoW, I don't enjoy having to set aside 4-5 hours of time in a block to throw my character at the same fights time and time again - I wasn't going through those raids for the items that each boss dropped when killed (though some of it was nice), but rather to find out how the story played out. That's a personal problem, but it was the start of my disillusionment with WoW.

Advancing my character became a problem that extended from that. Once a character in WoW hit the level cap, there wasn't a lot to do on one's own; to get better gear, or find out the big parts of the story, you had to join groups, which often meant guilds. And while I enjoy being social in MMOs, I prefer to socialize with a smaller group of people I know, rather than dozens or hundreds at a time, in a guild where I may not know every member. I shied away from what were known as PUGs (or pick-up groups, groups that came together just for a single instance and often didn't know each other) because I found that, for the most part, it was hard to trust players I didn't know to either play seriously or to understand that I was not a perfect player. While I had my own story that I kept to myself about my main character (a human paladin named Helliyas), I found that most players had no interest in the game's story, or in telling their own story; they just wanted cool items with bigger numbers, or to kill the biggest number of opposing players, and those were things I had little interest in (the only items I was interested in were ones that I thought looked cool). While I did eventually manage to find groups of players that shared many of the same interests, the necessity of raiding in order to find out the best parts of the story still bothered me.

WoW, being the big dog of MMOs, is often pointed out as the originators of something called the Holy Trinity (no relation to Christian concepts): groups were made up of three characters types, a tank, a healer, and damage dealers. I hear that Everquest did this before WoW, and it may have been done before that; Everquest and WoW were certainly not the first players in the MMO market. Even in the granddaddy of RPGs, the original Dungeons & Dragons, there were originally only three classes - the Fighting Man, the Magic-User, and the Cleric (with the Thief coming later), and these classes vaguely fit the Holy Trinity at work in WoW grouping. It works in WoW, but I think that it has become one of those concepts that newer MMOs see and can't seem to think their way out of. WoW is only culpable in this because they are such a large market presence that other games seem to feel the need to copy at least some part of their gameplay in order to get off the ground.

The static nature of WoW didn't always bug me, but after I had explored everywhere and done nearly everything (at one point, there were literally fewer than ten Alliance quests that I had not done, in a quest with hundreds or thousands), I wanted things to change. I wanted what I was doing to have some effect on the world around me; if I killed all the rebels, I wanted an area to stay clear, or if I saved an NPC, I wanted them to stay saved, and maybe say thank you when I saw them after that. Because even Blizzard can't devote that much time to changing the game world, though, I began to feel like my character, who was as powerful (or moreso) than most NPCs, was basically invisible; enemies I killed reappeared moments later for other players to kill, while NPCs I saved were back in danger again in a minute or so. My character's deeds were rarely acknowledged, and on the off chance they were, it wasn't for long. There was almost nothing I could do to change the world, which made all my time feel somewhat wasted. This is one of my big sticking points; at some point in almost every MMO, I begin to feel like nothing I have done has mattered. It's part of why I play tabletop RPGs, because in a game like that, when we save someone, they stay saved, and kingdoms remain toppled. MMO worlds are persistent, yes, but they are static by necessity, rather than changing with the actions of players. I wish this could change, and WoW, even with this, still has more content to play through than almost every other MMO out there, but barring massive changes in game development, an adaptive, persistent MMO world is beyond our reach.

Next up: Champions Online.

Road to Civil War

This is, again, an idea that's been going through my head recently. With the most current MArvel RPG out, and the new Even book covering the Civil War event just out his past week, I've been reading through that with interest; I found the original comic even to be very uneven, but the idea behind it was an interesting one, and I think it would be a cool thing to play out on the Marvel universe. So, on that topic, here's my pitch.

The world has, for the past several years, been a strange and dangerous place. First there was the freak series of catastrophes that resulted in the Avengers disbanding; then came 9/11, showing us how even unpowered criminals can ruin lives. The world's greatest secret agent, Nick Fury, was forced into retirement when his secret acts resulted in a costly attack on Manhattan, and the world's mutant population - growing into the millions - disappeared almost overnight, leaving only around 200 mutants to try and pick up the pieces.

Things came to a head when a freak lightning and electrical storm - believed by some to be caused by frequent foe of Spiderman, Electro - cut power to the super-powered prison that is the Raft, freeing over 200 imprisoned vigilantes, alien beings, and criminal supervillains. Only a chance assortment of heroes - who have come to be called the New Avengers - managed to keep a terrible event from becoming far, far worse. Even with their help, most of the criminals still managed to escape.

These events, and others like them, have caused the United States Congress to begin looking into an idea that has been put forth a number of times before, but none with serious chance of success - the Super-Human Registration Act, or SHRA. This act will require all super-powered beings living and acting within the borders of the United States to register their real identity with the federal government, secret or not. They will also make themselves available as assistance in matters concerning the hunting and capturing of supervillains and similar criminals. Essentially, all registered super-powered people will work for the government - and all others will be fugitives, hunted down by those who might otherwise have been friends.

Where before such acts have had little chance of passing - even the Mutant Rights Act, put forth to supervise the ability of dangerous mutants to move within society, failed, and mutants have far less popular and public support. But tensions have been building in the nation, and there is a real chance that this act could pass - and being an unregistered person with superpowers, even if they go unused, could become a criminal act.

Whether you choose to portray established Marvel heroes, or create your own, you and your companions, along with many others, have been summoned to testify before Congress on this matter. Just one more major event involving superpowered destruction could make this act a reality, and create a rift in the superhuman community. Friend could fight friend, and teams could be split in two. This is your chance to play a character as a major player in the Civil War event, one that may be greatly different from that of the comics - Captain America may side with the pro-Registration heroes, or Reed Richards might choose to stand with his wife rather than his cold, hard equations. So choose a character, and prepare to walk the road to Civil War.

Make Mine Marvel (Heroic Roleplaying)!

I think my favorite current RPG has got to be the new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game by Margaret Weis Productions. This may be because it came out so close to the Avengers movie, and I'm still on an awesome movie high, but I've always had a soft spot for superhero games. Many, many years ago, I used to have the old Marvel FASERIP RPG, and spent a lot of afternoons and evenings in the basement of a friend's house creating characters (and occasionally actually using them). I have a pretty large comic collection, which trends towards Marvel over DC (especially recently, since the reboot). So I like to think I know a fair bit about superheroes and villains, even if I haven't had a chance to see the system in action.

MHRP, like the Smallville and Leverage RPGs before it, runs on the Cortex + system. This probably doesn't mean a whole lot to people who don't know those games, but it's a relatively elegant system. It uses dice from d4 up to d12, which can be a bit confusing at times, but the dice grades help to show a different in degrees of power. What the system seems to do very well, at least from my point of view, is emulate the action flow of comics. Characters are made up of a small set of factors; the most ubiquitous of these is Affiliation. There are three grades of Affiliation - Solo, Buddy, and Team. Each character has a d6, d8, or d10, and one of these goes into each grade. This tells you, and other players, how your character prefers to operate - Wolverine, who likes to do his own thing, might have his d10 in Solo, while Captain America, who is at his best leading a team, has his d10 in Team. Affiliation is probably the most-used factor in rolls, since each character is always doing something either alone or with others.

After Affiliation, each character has distinctions. These are defining characteristics of each hero (or villain). To use familiar characters, Iron Man has a distinction of Billionaire Playboy, while Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, has a distinction of Hotheaded Hero. Each character has three, and if they are made relevant in a scene, if that relevance is helpful to the character (Tony Stark needs to use his money), you roll a d8; if it proves a hindrance (Johnny's rash actions get him into trouble), you roll a d4 and gain a Plot Point - these can be used for a variety of things, like performing extraordinary actions with powers, or finding (or creating) resources.

Each character also has one or two power sets. Each power set consists of between one and six powers, at varying levels; to use Captain America again, he has two power sets, Super Soldier Program (covering his enhanced durability, stamina, reflexes and strength), and Vibranium-Alloy Shield (which has its own durability, and use as a weapon). Each of the individual powers in each set has a rating; some have listed special effects (like the shield's ability to ricochet), and each power set has a limit - which can be used to temporarily disable the set - or even just a single power within the set - in order to gain a Plot Point. The limit mimics the part of comics where a hero's abilities are lost for a short period of time to build tension - a villain catching Cap's shield, or someone dousing the Human Torch.

After powers, there are specialties. Each character has a number of skills; there's no set number, just whatever you think your character should have. You really only get ratings in specialties you excel at, though - there are only two skill levels, Expert and Master. Skills only come up when they might be relevant - Reed Richards being a Science Master doesn't help in an interrogation. Finally, there are milestones; they don't add to rolls, but they do help advance your character; each character has two (or more) milestones, and each has three conditions. Each condition, if met, gets your character experience, and they aren't necessarily met by fighting; Iron Man, for example, has a milestone called Demon in a Bottle; its first condition, which gains him 1 XP, is fulfilled if the character finds himself in a situation where he is expected to consume alcohol. The 3 XP condition is met when Iron Man lies to a fellow teammate about drinking or when he gives a teammate reason to think Iron Man has been drinking. The final condition - which closes the milestone out if it is hit - is worth 10 XP, and is met when Iron Man drinks himself into a stupor or checks into rehab. Each condition fo a milestone advances a character's story, if not a session's plot.

When in a situation that calls for a roll - say, a good old fight between heroes and villains - you rolls a series of dice. You always roll affiliation, and then, if they apply, you might roll a distinction, a power, a specialty, and maybe a stunt or resource (you can find out about these if you buy the game). Two of these dice are your roll, and a third is your effect die; the first two are added together to compare to whoever you're fighting, and the effect die is useful only for its die size - it tells you how much damage you do to your opponent (physical, mental, or emotional stress), among other things. Every 1 you roll is a die that can be used against you by the GM (or Watcher), but every die used against you in this way gets you a Plot Point.

If the description sounds a bit technical, I apologize; I haven't actually played the game, though I would love to, so my knowledge is purely on paper. From what I can see, though, the game seems to be very narrative-friendly. There are no exact details about exactly how much a super-strong character can lift, or what the IQ of Reed Richards is; the power levels are fairly flexible. And characters like Hawkeye can stick around on the same team as Thor, because while their powers might not be as earth-shattering, they are more likely to end up with Plot Points that can be used to shape the scene. The flow of the game seems to be true to the way an actual issue of a comic book would flow, and everyone can participate regardless of power level. It seems to solve the problem of power balance by finding other ways of making the less strictly powerful characters useful.

In any case, I am very interested in the game, especially with the Avengers movie fresh in my mind. Once it comes out on DVD, I'll be looking to watch Avengers, and the movies that lead up to it, in one giant marathon; maybe I'll be able to be playing this game as well.