superhero game- flavor text - input please

double post

If you get a chance please comment on my superhero game mechanics forum post with any ideas or things I have overlooked

You're spot on there Grim.

I find that with so many already established properties and games based on them. Having a superhero game without your traditional superheroes is kind of a gamble. Most people are already immersed into characters like Spiderman and The Hulk and are generally buying these particular games to immerse themselves more into this comic world.

I'm trying to distance myself a little bit from the conventional comic book feel. I love comics and have been reading them forever, so going into this theme I knew that everything in it would have to support the theme.

right now the idea is that:
you play as a government agent assembling your very own super hero team. providing them with housing and dispatching them to solve the crimes and hinder the other teams (everyone's competing for that government funding). There are heroes, antiheroes and reformed villains in the deck. You use the resources you've been given to purchase different housing for the heroes. Different rooms will give you different bonuses as well as attract certain heroes. Then you will use your team to resolve the crimes in the cities eventually leading up to the big showdown that's meant to take multiple players using their Supers in unison to defeat.

I think an interesting idea that I have for the environment and crimes is that there are 27 crimes available, 18 civilians and 9 henchmen with the big bad villains at the bottom. Whenever you draw a crime, you will continue to keep drawing till you see the back of another crime card, all the civilians and henchmen are the ones in danger of the crime. Beating a crime won't earn you points but it will earn you single use items like spells that you can use to sabotage other players or get your own supers a bonus (lets say you defeat alien invasion, so now you have an alien gun that only heroes with Tech tendencies can use and it gives them a 2/0, or you just defeated bomb voyage and now you have a bomb you can use to blow up an opponents room) The points come from the civilians you save, like regular citizens, the mayor will give you a bonus to something if you save him, if the chief of police isn't saved there will be 2 active crimes at a time, a police officer will give you a bonus towards that crime, and the henchmen you may draw will give the crime a greater chance of winning. (one of the rooms changes the goal in that if you defeat 5 henchmen you can have that as a win condition)

I think this is a very interesting take on an environment deck, I think it could do wonders for immersion. It's just not let's keep this crime from happening. It's, that buildings on fire and the Mayor of the City is in it!

the idea is that on this planet, the government decided that Super powered people acting independently from a higher authority was too risky. So to allow superpowered people to still put their gifts to good use, they were asked to register within the government and act like super spec-ops teams that could deal with the rogue former hero/villains that still wanted to act independently of a governing authority.

the idea is that you're the branch manager for a new super hero team, and you have to take your "roster" from the registered super people. (kinda like The Incredibles, or The Civil War storyline in the Marvel U) And you're tasked with stopping the crime wave at the designated point, eventually coming down to the final showdown against the mastermind causing all this trouble.

I think the mechanics of this game will allow for solo play. Also, different crimes will tell you how many heroes you can send in.

ideally, looking to the future. We can add more heroes, crisis' and rooms. The original boxed game, is hopefully going to have 2 crisis, 9 heroes, 9 villains, 6 rogues, and 21 rooms.

i plan on introducing a nemesis mechanic on the first expansion of the rules that does not allow characters who were formerly nemesis to be in the same team at all.

Also, with this certain theme, i like the idea that eventually you could have villains from the game become heroes in the future expansions.