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Question: Hey Dungeon Monkey!  I’m currently trying my hand at running a superheroes game and I’m running into a bit of a problem, the players in my campaign are doing well and having fun, but I am running into problems making plots and villains that can challenge them without turning to “over-powered monster of the week” themed adventures.  Granted a lot can happen in a large city but it quickly begins to feel unrealistic when you have super-criminals appearing every week or their new and even more horrible creations.  Do you have any suggestions for ways to make a campaign that can challenge super-powered players without becoming a challenge of who can come up with a more horridly broken creation, the players or me?

Answer: Honestly from my own experience and from reading comic books I can safely say that as a Game Master (GM) you are facing probably one of the hardest challenges plot and story wise that you can face in running any role playing game.  If you actually take a page from comic book traditions you will notice that, in the interest of telling a compelling story, many comic books will modify the powers a superhero has, modify their background, create new villains that change the ground rules to force the superhero to confront new challenges never before seen, and sometimes even reboot their worlds to simply escape a point in a story when the superhero has become so powerful that it has become difficult for the writers to challenge the character.  As a GM you rarely have the luxury of being able to flip your player’s characters powers on and off at whim or modify them to allow you to run a compelling story, players are often highly territorial about their characters and will become quite unhappy if you begin to modify their creations on them.  However as a GM you should not despair because no matter how terribly overpowered your players superheroes are, no matter how badly they maul your super villains, no matter how challenging it is to make a plot they cannot simply overpower, you can create stories that challenge your players.  A few ideas that, although hackneyed, can get you through in a pinch:

Evil versions – a staple of comic books and movies throughout time, simply take your players superheroes and make evil versions of them, exactly the same in every respect except alignment. With this method you have two means of approach, first you can go with the classic “villain versions” in which the players doppelgangers politely wear differently hued, often contrasting, outfits to mark themselves out as the evil versions of your heroes.  This prevents mistaken identity and allows the players superheroes to maintain their good reputations in the public eye, except perhaps among the colorblind.  To offset this it is often recommended to make the doppelgangers slightly better then the player character versions of themselves and then allow the players to discover a weakness or disabling factor in their evil twins that allows them to level the playing field.  The other version of this standard troupe is to have the players evil twins actually appear identical to them, be sure to have many hijinks ensue as the evil versions are mistaken for the heroic versions.  Of course it should end with a classic unmasking/revealing of the situation.  Be sure to have a reason that these evil twins suddenly appeared, preferably a reason that can be instructed of the error of its ways in a future adventure through the fists of justice.

Insubstantial – hit the superheroes with some sort of amazing wonder weapon that immediately drops them to nearly dead, their physical forms are in a coma and the players must play themselves as insubstantial, with their powers temporarily limited to that realm, to find a way to get their bodies functional again and also deal with problems “on the other side.”  If you have a player who can already blink between the two states that is fine, allow him or her to do so and add an element of real world activities this player needs to complete.  If the player can bring others with them between the two states, flip that power off for the adventure.  If the player whines and points to the rules simply inform them that this is not “precisely the same as what the power outlines and is a unique situation.”  If the players still rebel allow them to reappear in physical form but now they have bodies in a coma and new identical bodies.  If the players refuse to deal with this, run the evil twins adventure outlined above.

Mundane Tasks – remember comic books are story driven and often skip vast chunks of regular time and duties for heroes, but ever superhero does “patrols” in which they look around for crime and bad things to thwart.  Your key goal as a GM is to occasionally run an entire adventure dealing with just mundane crime, the players will beat it up without trouble but you still get to make them jump through the hoops.  Add challenges that cannot be solved with “fists of justice” solutions to twist it up a bit on the players.  Imagine the players having to rescue a valuable lion that has escaped from the zoo, they can beat it up but if they harm it the zoo will be damaged because the lion is delicate.  Another classic is to have the lion play a “cat up a tree” scenario, with claws.  This will also prevent the “super villain of the week” feel because these occasional “days in the life of” moments will set a normal feel to the campaign and make the super criminals more apparent.  They also give you fodder for sources for future super villains, remember, a common criminal thwarted today and humiliated can tomorrow be the new Doctor Seltzer, sprayer of carbonation of doom!

- Dungeon Monkey

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