Jeff shares his thoughts about the core rulebook for the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game from Marvel. The RPG allows players to take on the roles of their favorite heroes – or create their own – to embark on tales based on their favorite comic books from the House of Ideas. The 320 page hardcover carries an MSRP of $59.99 or grab the PDF for $19.99 at DriveThruRPG.
Learn more at https://www.marvel.com
The Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game Core Rulebook in PDF at DriveThruRPG – https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/535688/marvel-multiverse-rpg-core-rule-book?affiliate_id=345498
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Opening music “Emerald Overture” by Sascha Ende
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/12028-emerald-overture
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
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Has there been an updated print run of the core book with errata fixes? I have the pdf with the fixes but am waiting to buy the physical until it is updated. Thanks!
Great review! 2+ years into the game, Marvel continues to do a great job of listening to the community and incorporating their feedback. They share new rules or potential rule changes on their website for public play-testing before every hardcover release. It’s nice to see!
I had a chance to run this twice at conventions and I have very mixed feelings on the game. The core dice rolling mechanic and how attributes work is very simple and smooth. Everything else is quite a mess though. As you mentioned in the video, powers are quite specific and also formulaic. Most boil down to "make an attack at half damage to add this effect, or full damage on a fantastic success." Instead of being creative, my players would just select the best power for the situation. It felt very much like playing a video game. I also have huge issues with powers, traits and tags. It seems completely arbitrary which one is which. Why are tactics and melee weapons powers? Why is magic separated into 3 kinds? Why is there teleport object, teleport other, and teleport together? Traits and tags also seem arbitrary. Being Abrasive is a trait that gives trouble on Ego checks when persuading someone to help, but Auditory Issues like full deafness is a tag with no mechanical effect? Its frustratingly subjective.
The original Marvel RPG was way better. A reprint or revamp of that system would have been better.
Solid review, Jeff.
Matt Forbeck (with a good amount of work coming from his son Marty) have, I feel, made an excellent new supers game from–as you said–a very rough and messy playtest document.
Nostalgia means I still love the old TSR MSHRPG, but this one is lots of fun, and nowhere near as complex as some detractors have been saying. I'm glad you called out the merits of the GM narrative section. I too think this is very good.
It'll be fascinating to see how it goes toe-to-toe with Free League's new 'Invincible' supers hack of their Year Zero mechanics (with their own callbacks to FASERIP).
Bought this on Black Friday. Haven't played it yet.
I love the level of quality of your reviews, especially the music you choose for your intros. Thank you so much for the work you put into them.
Props to Jeff for saying "ultimate, fantastic success" with a straight face. There's no way I could.
As a Marvel fan, I am very happy with this game and the expansions. They have not been cheap with the ammount of Characters and Villains.
As you mentioned, the game is designed for you to actually play a pregenerated Super-Hero and in a One Shot style of game. If there is a Campaign, you are expected to change Characters instead of improving them.
All of that is fine for me, but I can see it can be quite niche.
Cheers!
Ah the multiverse – for when you don't know what story you want to tell or want a world where consequence doesn't matter. Dead? NO! Here's an alternate you. Dinosaurs v Apes? Yes! Earth v23 Robot brains rule the universe? Yes! Earth v4506 Fairies are real? Yes! Earth v862 Earth destroyed?
Yes!NO! Fixed via the time travel devices of Earth v4532.Yawn.
The ago old question, “what superhero power would you want?” Hah, fun.
The thing that put me off was that a lot of the character stats were wrong. Dr Doom is supposed to be one of the smartest people in the marvel universe, but his stats didn't reflect it.
System is quite convoluted as well. The TSR marvel system from the 80s and 90s was better.
I love partial success, I try to apply it to most TTRPG I play (even with D&D)
some parts of this seem unnecessary convoluted just to shoehorn in the marvel 616 mechanic.
I feel like refusing to publish a pdf for the first two years of the system really killed this one before it could even start.
Interesting
Fun and simple system.