Ro The Connoisseur

Go to a game store

Navigate to the dungeons and dragons section

Turn your head approximately five degrees either to the left or to the right

There was a world war 2 game that kinda worked, name escapes me, but the thing about that one is that it was esentially more a game about being a ww2 dnd adventurer rather than a superhero

City of mists is the one id argue works the most but only when played as a weird noir type thing rather than a proper superhero game

My conclusion is that the problems with superhores as a genere just get magnified when applied to an rpg

Power disonance between characters, this can be solved by making the game more "narrative" for lack of a better shorthand. Masks does this, but i think this in turn makes something to be lost from the genere as power/utility gaps often can drive interesting situations

The "why dont they do this?" Problem, it hard for a lot of players not to act outside of the very narrow behaviour that makes up supers fiction, this fucks up the tone and youre no longer playing the intended experience. I get the temptation of going all black summer on the game but its more than half of the games ive seen go to

Deflated stakes as it was pointed out in the notes, some supers game feel really foam swordy in the fights to preserve the inocence of the genere and that has its own issues

Established universes can be a bitch to run for supers because of how bloated they are

There was a world war 2 game that kinda worked, name escapes me, but the thing about that one is that it was esentially more a game about being a ww2 dnd adventurer rather than a superhero

City of mists is the one id argue works the most but only when played as a weird noir type thing rather than a proper superhero game

My conclusion is that the problems with superhores as a genere just get magnified when applied to an rpg

(With reference to this post here.)

There were a couple of major factors in play there.

First, a big chunk of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition's popularity had come about due to robust third-party support, published under the auspices of Open Game License (OGL). Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, however, was not licensed under the OGL, being subject to a much more restrictive license imaginatively titled the Game System License, or GSL. Hasbro reportedly refused to negotiate with existing third-party publishers to get them on board with the GSL, or to offer transition support of any kind; instead, they simply demanded an immediate halt to the publication of all 3E material, and attempted to bludgeon publishers into compliance by threatening to yank their trademark authorisations (i.e., the agreements which allowed them to put the "D&D compatible" logo on the covers of their books).

Predictably, this approach was not well received. The largest of 3E's third-party supporters, Paizo Publishing (now Paizo Inc.), elected to produce their own game which was statblock-compatible with 3E in order to provide a venue for other publishers to continue producing OGL material; many of their peers decided to gamble on Paizo's plan rather than play ball with Hasbro, and this is how we got Pathfinder. Hasbro's behaviour thus caused D&D's third-party support to crater nearly to zero with the publication of 4E and created D&D's largest competitor.

Second, 4E was badly behind the curve on digital availability. Shortly before 4E was scheduled to drop, the digital masters (i.e., the files provided to printers in order to manufacture the books) were leaked on file sharing networks. Hasbro responded by panicking and ordering an immediate and indefinite halt to e-book publication of D&D material (in spite of the fact that the leak had demonstrably originated from their print production arm rather than their e-publishing arm), even going so far as to refuse to honour pre-orders for 4E's now cancelled e-book version.

Combined with a series of mismanagement-induced delays which caused 4E's virtual tabletop tools to miss the game's publication date entirely, and a decision to paywall what few first-party resources did manage to hit their target behind a monthly subscription, this resulted in 4E being available exclusively in print for the first two full years of its lifespan, at a time when D&D's competitors – including the aforementioned Pathfinder – were literally giving their core rules away in digital form for free.

this kind of thing sounds like something that would kill d&d as a franchise entirely with how badly hasbro fumbled it, so i'm surprised to see 5e not only still kicking, but also still the primary force to the point that people will say "homebrew 5e" for anything. what's up with that?