Superheroism and D&D

 I am certain there is some sort of superhero-based TTRPG out there. But I have been watching a ton of video essays on YouTube analyzing the MCU (don't judge me) and on top of that, I find myself eagerly dreaming of some hypothetical future campaign in which I will play an Armorer Artificer and try, somehow, to not just make it feel like Iron Man, whom the subclass is about 90% based on.

I've been thinking a lot about DM'ing from a sort of theoretical and philosophical point of view. My Ravnica game is ongoing, and while there are a lot of things that I'm looking forward to getting to in that campaign (the player characters all have latent planeswalker sparks, so come level 13-15ish we're going to start hitting other MTG planes) I have also been thinking about how I want to build my next campaign.

While the crux of that plan is to try to build the villains and obstacles of the campaign around what the players write into their backstories, I've also been giving some thought to other ways campaigns could work.

Today, I had probably my most ambitious idea, which is not just a campaign but also a kind of hack into the game itself.

Let me back up and talk about how I got here:

One philosophical thing I believe I've written about on this blog is the notion of scaling. Generally speaking, the game runs smoothest when the challenges you face are scaled to the players' abilities. You don't have them fight a Lich at level 2, and you don't have them fight Displacer Beasts at level 17.

But there's also something that feels almost dishonest about that. Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is an open-world RPG that shares a lot of its aesthetic with D&D. Its predecessor, Morrowind, had the following problem: the open world meant that there wasn't a ton of direction given to the players, and there were certainly no physical barriers, which meant that a new character could easily accidentally wander into areas they weren't suited for and just die. This also meant that if you wanted to play though and built your character's power, you did have to stick to particular routes through the game.

Oblivion, however, introduced the idea of level scaling: basically, as you got more powerful, the things you encountered in the world got more powerful. But this had two nasty consequences. The first was the absurd - those bandits on the road, pushed to crime out of desperation, were now armed with glowing, magical weapons that they could probably sell for enough money to live out the rest of their days in comfort. The other, bigger problem was that leveling up - becoming more powerful - actually made you relatively weaker to the rest of the world unless you had built your character extremely carefully.

The power treadmill makes you feel like you're stuck in place if you're never given a chance to feel that power.

How does this get to superheroes? I'm getting there.

It varies from setting to setting, but I think the general premise of D&D is, or at least should be, that adventurers are exceptional. While a 1st-level Fighter isn't actually much stronger than a "blank" stat block that just has the attack action, the lore of what it means to be a "Fighter" in a D&D world is that you have exceptional skill and training. While the class name is weirdly simplistic and could arguably be applied to any of the classes (World of Warcraft's rough equivalent is the Warrior, which I think is a far better class name) in a D&D world, a garrison of soldiers will feel a wave of relief when the top brass send in a Fighter to lead their charge.

It's a bit of a disconnect - after all, all a level 1 Fighter can do that a standard NPC with decent armor and weapon proficiencies can't is take a moment each short rest to take a deep breath and recover some of their hit points. On the other hand, you could imagine that taking a spear to the gut that would at least knock out the average soldier and just walk it off would make you a legendary hero before you get into the numbers inflation of D&D.

Consider two different scenarios: one, the party is visiting a city to talk with some quest NPCs, maybe spend some of their earned gold, and do some downtime activities. In that case, as a DM, you'd probably be happy to let the guards they encounter simply use the "Guard" stat.

In the other scenario, the party is trying to sneak into the city of a foreign power hostile to their homeland, hoping to recover some stolen magic item or fight the monster the evil emperor has in the dungeon beneath his palace. In that case, as a DM, you'd be tempted to make the guards of this city all elite veterans with high passive perceptions to spot any intruders.

But you probably shouldn't. The guard stat block is meant to represent your rank-and-file individual hired to patrol the streets and deal with petty thieves. And that's who would be patrolling the streets of that city.

Essentially, there should be a scarcity of power in order for that power to feel significant.

And that's where we get to superheroes.

See, if your cities are guarded entirely by beefy, 150 HP, plate-armored killing machines with 20 strength and three attacks per round, then why the hell would the kingdom actually be worried about giants or dragons or any of that stuff?

The player characters might need to work at it a bit - they might need to level up and learn their abilities better - but by being a member of one of the various character classes, they contain that potential for up to 20 levels of progression, and that makes them exceptional even early on... but especially once they're a bit farther along.

Their exceptional power - and it's exceptional because of its rarity - means that their actions become important in the larger landscape of the world. You know... like a superhero.

The classic form of the superhero story is that of the crime-fighter. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man - the early comics tended to have them stop bank robberies and such. It's really not unlike how a low-level D&D group will cut their teeth fighting goblins (usually bandits) or... bandits, or kobolds (again, usually bandits.) With Batman, the individual gangs and bank-robbers aren't any better-equipped than the police, but the police are overwhelmed by the amount of crime and internal corruption stymying their efforts to do their jobs.

So, Batman, whose exceptional skills both as a martial artist and with all of the unusual gadgets at his command, can more efficiently and easily (and safely) fight crime. As a single person, he can supplement the overloaded law enforcement of Gotham.

But that's just how it starts. Indeed, the Joker in The Dark Knight more or less states his motivation as a desire to up the stakes - with Batman putting your old-fashioned criminals behind bars, he wants to become (and create) villains who can prove a match for Batman. And thus, the mundane system that was having difficulty managing things in normal times is now utterly unprepared when something truly, again, exceptionally powerful emerges as a threat - the superhero is needed all the more, because now Batman isn't just sharing the weight of responsibility - he becomes the only one who can bear it.

And there are the parallels: if you commit to your NPCs retaining ordinary stat blocks, your players will soon become their only hopes. If a full-on Vampire arrives in a city and wants to take it over, the Noble who rules the city ain't going to stand a chance. They need the party: the superheroes.

Ok, this has been just a conversation about the parallels between superhero fiction and D&D. But let's now get into the sort of hack I'd present.

I think that the existing six ability scores are pretty good and nearly universal for use in TTRPGs. My, perhaps controversial, suggestion is that the character classes also need not change (this also simplifies things given the amount of rules complexity written into the classes and their many subclasses.)

However, the superhero genre (which is admittedly a meta-genre that can encompass many things) does have different aesthetics than D&D. Perhaps most obviously, there is the fact that D&D's system of character race is drawn very much from Tolkien. Meanwhile, in the superhero genre, the majority of superheroes are human (with many notable exceptions, including the OG superhero himself, Superman.)

Superheroes thrive on uniqueness, even though there is a lot of conceptual overlap between existing superheroes. Part of their exceptionalism is that they tend to have some kind of exceptional origin. Rather than using "race" as a thing, I'd replace this with "origin." Origin would refer specifically to the origin of their powers. For instance, Tony Stark/Iron Man would have an Origin of "Super-Science," because his powers are derived from his genius as an engineer, allowing him to build his suits. But lest you think that that would just mean "Artificer," another "Super-Science" Origin character would be Bruce Banner/The Hulk. His character class would most certainly be Barbarian, given that it is his rage that transforms him and empowers his abilities, but the origin of that power is still scientific experimentation. Thor, on the other hand, might also be a Barbarian (Storm Herald) (though I'll confess that it's a bit hard for me to figure out just what he is - Eldritch Knight Fighter? Storm Sorcerer? Tempest Cleric? Enhancement Shaman?) but his Origin would be something like "Mythic Heritage," tying his powers to a divine, supernatural source, because, you know, he's a god.

Origin would come with some suite of minor features, like race does. It might also come with some skill proficiencies (though some races already do).

Backgrounds would likely be more or less functionally the same - it's easy enough to create new backgrounds to fit a modern superhero setting. Again, for instance, you could give Iron Man the "corporate executive" background while Bruce Banner has the "academic" background (so... Sage?).

The other tweak I might play around with is weapons. Superheroes are really into punching things, for one, so I might revise the rules for unarmed strikes or maybe give certain classes reasonably powerful unarmed strikes inherently. Also, given that superheroes that use weapons tend to have pretty iconic ones, I might focus on, rather than replacing weapons with cool new ones, have a system by which a weapon gets upgraded over the course of the campaign. (Alternatively, have the player start with a very powerful weapon - another thing that makes them exceptional.)

Unless you have players who are into solo-campaigns, you're probably going to have to have the team do an Avengers/JLA/X-Men team-up from the get-go, but the existence of such groups (the Fantastic Four, the Guardians of the Galaxy...) means it's not hard to have it stick to the genre that way.