Coming Online

I mentioned before I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and Solasta recently. This has gotten me into finally looking at the official 5E Dungeons and Dragons rules (just in time for the new revised rules to come out naturally).  My local group also recently started a new campaign using Genesys. Making characters and thinking of class combos is a fun exercise for a gamer.

One thing I’ve been running into lately while looking at different systems is how often you need to wait for a build to “come online”. You have a vision of a character and what they are capable of doing. You study the classes and skills and come up with a build that will allow you to do said thing. It’s satisfying to solve the puzzle. More times than not, however, you don’t get to play the game using this combo for very long. Often, especially in D&D, the combo requires you to get to a moderately high level in order to come together.

By that point, you’ve been playing your character for a long time. Either your vision no long fits who your character is or the campaign is about ready to wrap up. Or, worse, you’ve waited so long to do “the thing”, and now that you can, it’s rather underwhelming.

While feeling this sense of dissatisfaction with the whole character building concept, I happened to stumble across Marvel’s Multiverse RPG. I remembering seeing it announced a few years ago but it fell off my radar, so it felt like an entirely new game coming into existence precisely to resolve this problem I was having. Unlike most RPG’s, this one does not focus heavily on leveling up and it’s designed around having characters who can do a vast array of marvelous things.

Instead of having levels, characters have a rank, 1-6. This rank describes their relative power level. A Rank 1 character is your SHIELD Agent while Rank 6 is Hulk. Your rank will determine what kind of setting and game you’re playing in. When you start a game, you can play at a fixed rank right from the start, or grow into it, but even growing into it isn’t supposed to be very long term thing. Most heroes have a bit of a training montage and then can do all the super things they can do.

I’m sure there are other games out there that work similarly. The Star Trek RPG doesn’t really have levels and characters mostly just start with their skills in place. The story is the focus of these games more than it is about steadily improving your characters skills. Now, I haven’t had a chance to play a game with this system, so it might suck to use, but I am eager to give it a try.