I ran the first two scenarios from the new Invincible RPG box set with all the bells and whistles (counters, maps, etc.) that it comes with. My gang is a bunch of teenagers who are used to Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) and this was a big change for them to have maps, miniatures and powerful characters with a bunch of stuff they can do. Most of them had seen the show, but a few had not. While not a review of the whole game, I’m going to compare this to Champions and of course FASERIP.
NOTE: this has SPOILERS (but not for the whole adventure).
The Mauler Twin fight
This is a fight in a warehouse with the Mauler Twins. There’s lots of stuff that can (and should) explode, and some bystanders that can get squished too. This went pretty fast but there was complaining about just how much stuff the characters had on their sheet (again these guys play DCC exclusively) with both the powers and talents, it’s a lot but they got the hang of it. Atom Eve was considered underpowered until the player realized that he could create three levels of armor and then started doing tricks with her matter control power. Bulletproof took out the gun turrets and one of the Maulers very quickly (the Charge move/attack that uses a strength roll rather than fighting is pretty great) with some good rolls even though the Maulers have health of 17. He did get dropped by the last Mauler’s energy weapon and suffered the bashed up injury effect (so needed a few days to heal up). The other effects from their weapons (stunning and taking stress), I didn’t use much as there wasn’t a lot of time before they were beaten down (2 vs 4 heroes will do that).
Social scene
Between each battle there is a the chance for characters to get in a social scene with their team mates or others, this is acted out but has the mechanical effect of removing stress from characters between fights. Stress is gained from many things, but mostly from ‘pushing’ (rerolling) skill checks. A big combat will burn a LOT of stress.
This I assumed would be the most awkward as these guys were teenagers, but it turned out likely far better than with your normal ultra-cynical adult players. The prompt cards worked great and the only issue is that the two guys that had not seen the show were a bit out of the loop (they had Robot and Bulletproof, so not complicated social interactions). In a normal game without the prompt cards, these guys would likely struggle to come up with anything, so those helped. If you are running a game with custom characters or heroes from the back of the book, I would make a bunch of potential ‘prompts’ for your game before you go into a session.
Machine Head fight
This is a big one that requires a ton of work for the GM. The players run one hero each, the GM has to run five at the same level of complexity as the player’s one character! This is very dangerous ground as it gets into why Exalted is such a bad game and impossible to run for any GM, and why 13th Age, which abstracts creature powers which trigger based on the attack roll, is so much easier (and the players don’t know the difference anyway). That said, because the enemies and their powers aren’t super complex in Invincible, this was manageable even with all 5 villains, easier than Champions and a bit easier than FASERIP. Most powers just do one thing in combat and don’t spiral off into sub-powers. With this many combatants, it’s also OK to not play optimally as the GM, but do the best you can. For sure you will forget a Power effect or Talent here and there though. Especially GMs first time with this system/game: read all the enemies before hand a few times.
The fight went as follows, Magneattack locked down Robot (because he’s made of metal) and started using him as a battering ram against the other heroes, most of which were tied up by Tether Tyrant. KillCannon just blasted away from a distance at anyone that didn’t have the ability to dodge (ie, used both their full and quick action for the turn). The magma villain was using his ability to slugfest (plus his emanation power of hot lava) from a zone away. We had to call it before we finished the fight, but it looked like it could have gone either way IF Titan continued to fight for the Machine Head side (which he wouldn’t have). These were a bunch of villains with interesting powers, but WAY lower health than the Mauler Twins, so the players were trying to queue up Bulletproof so he could do a charge move and knock the crap out of them one by one. Atom Eve was able to throw the piano and sofas around to get extra dice. I let her use the ‘trap’ special effect even though it was a ranged attack (trap is usually reserved for slugfest only).
My main question as a GM is when to PUSH rolls as the Villains (ie, Reroll their attack). A good roll will put the fight in a totally different spot, and a great roll will destroy players/enemies. Vs the Maulers, Bulletproof rolled five 6’s and mopped the floor with one of the Maulers and smashed him into the other one. If the villains get a great roll, you can kiss one of the characters goodbye for that fight, which I’m assuming is by design.
System Review
I’ve played/run (mostly run) Champions, TMNT (Palladium), FASERIP and the weird dice Marvel game that came out in 2012 (Marvel Heroic Roleplaying).
Let’s compare this to Champions first. Running it as a GM, Invincible is way easier and cleaner than Champions. The powers are clean, the dice pools are small and the outcome of opposed rolls, powers and attacks are easy to manage in comparison. The level of heroes were were using were out of the fight quickly so it wasn’t just a constant sluggathon. Also the ability to use stunts and to use powers in odd ways rather than everything being tightly controlled was way better. I don’t want to rag on Champions to much as it was my first Superhero RPG and one that I had a lot of fun with as a kid but this was way better to run any day of the week. Making characters in Champions is fun, but once they hit the table, it’s not so great.
FASERIP
Invincible is a cleaned up, modernized version of Marvel’s FASERIP game by Jeff Grubb, with a dice pool instead of the big chart, where characters spend extra successes to do a variety of stunts rather than just one or two from a list (stun and slam were the FASERIP ones). Like FASERIP, Invincible uses Zones for movement (excellent) and abstracts flying levels (also excellent). There are a few things that are far superior to FASERIP and that is how slugfests work and how stunts work. The game has shaved off some of the edges that made FASERIP really great though as well.
Slugfests are when two characters are in the same zone and use their fighting (or sometimes strength) stat to duke it out. If a player has a quick action left for a block, it becomes an opposed roll. The character that wins the opposed roll can do some damage INCLUDING the defender on a counter-attack. This makes slugfests more interesting (even without stunts which I will get to below) and makes the fights thankfully faster. If you can’t block you are going to get hit (which some characters don’t care about much) and if you do block there’s a chance you can simply pummel your attacker. This is great.
Stunts are NON-POWER stunts tied to either slugfest attacks or ranged attacks. Stunting has been a boon and and issue to RPG’s since the 1990’s and many RPG’s have had trouble integrating them (especially Exalted), with the gold standard being Mythras with it’s special effects system that takes the Runequest combat system from good to the best there is. In Invincible, there is a whole list of them a bit like Mythras, but quite not as situational or exhaustive. The base stunts are very mechanically solid and there isn’t a lot of fluff here that players will never use. During the game there was a lot of double damage and stun used by players and enemies to try to bypass armor. No one had sharp weapons so the deadly strike special effect only accidentally came into play because I didn’t realize characters couldn’t use that without some sort of sharp weapon/power. That’s the only stunt I think is a little OP from the list.
There’s also the ability to come up with your own stunts based on the circumstances, which is critical to this type of game to move away completely from the tightly controlled (and very boring) combat of say 5th or 4th edition D&D. Yet it stays FAR away from the free-for-all story-driven nonsense of FATE or Masks, etc. where powers, effects and dice are all subservient to some player or GM description. Overall I feel like Stunts and how they are generated are a strong part of the game.
What is not in the Invincible game that is in FASERIP are Power Stunts. In FASERIP, Power Stunts are a way to increase your powers through risky, repeated non-standard use. For example, a hero with water-control based powers uses them to attack, but then decides to try a grapple with his water control as a power stunt. The character spends Karma and makes the roll, if it’s successful, the character gets to use their powers that way. Then they mark on their sheet that they have used a power like this and track it over time. If they do it 10 times, they GET that power effect permanently without a stunt. This is SLOW going but was a really interesting way to encourage players to use their powers in new and crazy ways. This is not in Invincible at all.
In Invincible, Karma is still in the game, but can’t be spent to help rolls, or do Power Stunts. It is experience and can be used to buy additional powers or effects on powers, but they aren’t tied to what the characters actually do in the game as much as in FASERIP. This was my only gripe so far with the system not being as open as FASERIP. Overall though, everything worked really well and I am looking forward to a LOT more content from Free League, especially that allows broadening out from just Invincible.
TLDR: If you like FASERIP, you will like Invincible.
