VRDraggon wrote:Mainly, from my experience no one seems to want to play a real super hero styled and themed game these days.
No one seems to do the secret identity thing anymore.
No one seems interested in saving the day, protecting people, and truth justice stuff. Instead its all dark anti hero stuff.
Any attempt to do a super hero game seems to turn into a cartoon lampoon of super heroic stuff. It ends up being more The Tick and less Batman, Superman, X-men, Fantastic Four, Spiderman and so many other more serious super hero ways of running it. Sure there will be some silliness but not to the point is turns cartoony.
The simple answer is structure and context. Going from the real world where everyone is out for themselves and anyone who's trying to help people are likely up to something and oppressing others while they are at it, to trying to be wholesome and good is tough. Modern comics reflect this and they themselves have lost their way. As characters in our most beloved comics don't age, the changes they make to reflect the times they live in, to stay relevant, they become snarky and cynic or mentally damaged. But you can get around this. It just takes some work.
In our longest running heroes game, we played a group of (starting) teenagers. The game started at a boarding school for the children of the one percent. We were wealthy, so being generous was easy. We could afford not only our own elevated standards of living, but we could afford to buy (or build in my case) our own gear. That level of separation allowed the basics of being a hero to flourish.
My character was Analytical Genius working on something like the original Iron-man armor (inspired by the Iron-knight suit from the Iron-man feature cartoon movie from a few years before the movies. One of the first character's introduced was my grandfather. He was a war hero from the second world war. He was endearing, earnest, and the kind of guy who you wanted to be like. You wanted to impress him. He stole Hitler's car, rescued a couple of Jewish scientist working on the German atomic bomb, then tried (and got caught) to sell it back to Hitler's staff to as a new touring car. He knew Portia Kellington (Britannia, or aunt Portia as I called her). Already I have a heroic legacy to live up to. And a tough one.
Another character was the son of the Senator from California (So Cali), Senator Smith. The good senator (a mutant) had mutant children. The character had to make sure that his actions reflected well on his father, even with a concealed identity, if he did good things, then father's public support for mutants went over well. So he had a personal investment.
That's the investment. We formed the Los Angles Ark Angels. We make things better, standing up for those who can't stand for themselves.
Next, set up an outlet for the cynic stories. These trends and emotions are going to come up. So set up a place for them. We had SECTOR West coast. Sub-director Morien Wilson discovered our identities. We did work for her, she kept our secrets. It worked out well. Sure we did difficult things, but it was usually to bad people and we'd wiggle out of our orders by twisting them allowing us to feel smug and self important. We did these insane things. Catching a (superhuman) terrorist on a rooftop party fifteen stories up, hanging from a helicopter modified to be silent, dragging him into the sky, and then escaping the Dubai private security airservice while they shot at us.
In these ways, the GM setup the how we avoid the dark street hero stuff, and once we got into it, it just became how we played. When the 80s game took off, we already had our characters lined up, with morals we were comfortable with and reflected a fun game that didn't have the street justice BS.