#RPGaDay Post 21

I ran across the idea for this blogfest at The Other Side and decided to participate because it seemed like a good way to back into the groove on posting since work has been keeping all of us so busy lately.   At least a few of these topics have been covered in previous posts but here it goes...

Favorite Licensed RPG

I was initially having problems coming up with a good licensed game for this post.  I had Iron Crown's M.E.R.P. years ago but I always felt like something was "off" about gaming in Middle Earth with those rules.  I also owned the FASA Doctor Who game but I never was able to get a game up and going.  I enjoyed reading through both of those games for the information and in the case of M.E.R.P. the cover artwork for many of the products was amazing.  Ultimately, neither one of those products served as a way to have further adventures in the same universes as their respective source materials.  

I believe we tinkered with some other licensed games throughout the years.  DC Heroes was one such game and it deserves a lot of credit for rules that enabled play with characters from both ends of the power spectrum.  You could literally have low-end guys like Robin and high-end guys like Superman in play without using a bunch of special rules or exceptions for it all to make sense; it actually all worked together.  Although DC provided access to a great number of iconic supers characters, I never was a fan of a substantial amount of their other characters.  In my youth I always felt that DC tended towards the goofy while Marvel provided a tone closer to my tastes.  I make no claims that either of these comic companies is "better" but that one matched my tastes better, that's all.  Believe me, Marvel has plenty of goofy to offer in their books while DC has plenty on the other end of the spectrum as well.

We never found a licensed game that clicked with us until we ran across the old Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game from TSR. All of us were big fans of the supers genre and had played V&V, Champions, Superworld, DC Heroes, and just about every other supers game available at the time.  It started with one of us getting the original boxed set and then each one of us bought our own copy shortly after that because we were captivated by the game. We really enjoyed adding our characters into the mix with the established Marvel characters.  We would continuously play for several years until the Advanced Set came out with even more options.  I remember converting our old V&V characters over to play under the Marvel rules.  The game system was easy to use and did allow for a wide spectrum of power levels to play together.  We liked the game so much I remember using it to power a GI Joe campaign and a Transformers campaign as well.  I kept those books until they actually fell apart from heavy use.  I hear that there is a clone game, 4 Colors, available so I might just have to check it out.