Mulling About TSR’s MSH
Back in the day, one of our favorite games was TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes. It was a simple, flexible system that handled heroes and villains of various power levels, from street-level crime fighters like Moon Knight to galactic defenders like Silver Surfer. TSR published several adventures for use the game. Almost all of them were pretty sparse if not closer to horrible, but they featured a variety of comic book characters. Part of the fun of the game was collecting the stats for published characters.
In our games, we never ran published heroes. Instead, we made up our own heroes, who the GM-of-the-Week pitted against a combination of original characters along side Marvel’s plethora of supers. In one fight atop a Manhattan skyscraper, my character, tired of Captain America’s moralizing, grabbed the Star-Spangled Avenger and tossed him off the roof. Another character went to toe to toe with the Rhino in a bare-knuckle brawl that ended in a draw.
And it’s that last point that leads to what I think is the one big flaw in the system. A hero with an Excellent (20) Strength does 20 points of damage with a punch. It’s simple. No dice roll required. Did you hit? 20 points of damage. You might get a Slam or Stun result, but you might not, especially if your foe has too much Body Armor.
Which was the problem in the fight with the Rhino. My character (an early version of the Mighty Jethro) was a nigh invulnerable cello player. He was kind of strong and sort of handy in a fist fight, but he wasn’t superhuman in either regard. Jethro squared off against the Rhino. Jethro couldn’t hit hard enough to hurt Rhino, and Rhino couldn’t hit hard enough to hurt Jethro. There were some clever moves (such as impaling a fire extinguisher on Rhino’s horn to temporarily blind him), and Rhino knocked Jethro through more than one wall, but, when all was said and done, neither character had inflicted a single point of damage on the other.
To an extant, this fits the genre. In a fist fight, no matter how hard he tries, Daredevil isn’t going to put a scratch on the likes of, say, Annihilus. Some villains are just too tough for some heroes to face head-on. That’s why the Avengers have relative light-weights like Black Widow fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with folks like Thor and Iron Man. Those two deal with the major threats, leaving Black Widow free to mop the floor with mooks and put her espionage skills into play.
In MSH, a d100 roll determines success or failure. The higher the number the better. I’ve been mulling over a way to add some variety to MSH’s static damage (and defense) values without adding more dice or dice rolls to the game. Here’s my initial idea:
Roll the d100. Determine success. Subtract the one’s digit from the ten’s digit. The difference modifies the acting character’s static value.
For example, the Mighty Jethro has an Excellent (20) Strength. He swings and hits with an 84. 8 – 4 = 4, and so Jethro’s punch does 24 points of damage. He throws another punch, and gets a 59. Still a hit, let’s say, but 5 – 9 = -4, and so his punch does 16 points of damage. Then, on the third round, he really connects with a 100. 10 – 0 = 10, and his punch does 30 points of damage.
I think this is a pretty solid idea. I’m also toying with the idea that the color result on the FEAT table would further modify the value. A white would still be a failure. A green would be no modifier, whereas yellow would equal +X and red would equal +X+Y. I’m not sure what X and Y would equal. Probably +5 and +10, respectively, just to keep the math a bit easier to mentally calculate.
Thus, with that 100 dice roll, Jethro would score a red result with his punch, adding 20 points to his Strength damage. For that one punch, he’d hit as hard as Spider-Man does with an average result.
