Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game Designer Talks Balancing a Universe of Superheroes, Crunchy Mechanics, and More

The Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game is set to launch its extensive public playtest later this week. Last year, Marvel surprised the gaming community by announcing plans to develop its own tabletop roleplaying game, that would allow players to either play as one of Marvel’s many superheroes or create their own character to face off against a legion of Marvel villains. Instead of licensing the rights to an established tabletop roleplaying game company, Marvel instead hired veteran RPG designer Matt Forbeck to build a new game engine crafted specifically for the Marvel Universe. Forbeck is a veteran game developer, having worked on previous Marvel tabletop roleplaying games in addition to a long list of credits of design work for both licensed tabletop roleplaying games and original worlds. Forbeck also wrote revised versions of the venerable Marvel Encyclopedia, a tome containing detailed descriptions of hundreds of Marvel characters. 

Instead of releasing the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game straight away, Marvel announced they would release a 108-page playtest to give fans and players a chance to provide feedback about the draft rules ahead of the game’s official release in 2023. ComicBook.com had the chance to speak with Forbeck about both the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game and his expectations for the playtest earlier this month.

ComicBook.com: So, were you given any guidelines for Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game? When you were first approached about designing the game, did they tell you they wanted a new role-playing game or did they have any more in-depth instructions?

Matt Forbeck: Well, the guy who approached me originally was John Nee who I had worked with on WildStorms: The Expandable Superhero Collectible Card Game, back when he was the president or the vice president of Wildstorms, which was Jim Lee’s division at Image Comics. He said, “Look, I really want to do a role playing game.” And we started talking about basic things like, do we want to try to adapt the d20 system? Do we want to use Powered by the Apocalypse? Do we want to do something of our own?

We looked at a lot of different things. When we looked at our long term plans for the game, we decided we probably wanted to have our own system, something we control and can do things with whatever properties happen to come up. Also, if we were going to use somebody else’s system, we wanted something that was going to be tailored particularly for superheroes and the kind of properties that we work with in Marvel, as opposed to taking something and making it generic and then branching it out from there. And I think that coming up with our own system was probably the best alternative for that. We wanted a game system that covered everybody from Aunt May to Galactus.

And so, because of that, we wanted something that was going to be tailored to vastly different levels of power. And we wanted to come up with a game that we thought would fit that best.

So, how did you settle on the d616 system? Did you decide you wanted something that used 6-1-6 first? How did you decide on the 3d6 as opposed to something like a d20 or a different general game mechanic?

Forbeck: As you play this game, you’ll see it’s got similarities and ranges to other popular games, so we could have easily gone with a d20 or a percentile die or anything like that. Those are fairly easy to understand and play with, but they also tend to be really swingy, right. You’re just as likely to get a failure as you are to get a success and your options for getting your middling results, which is what your expected result is, tends to be a little bit more challenging for folks. So we wanted something with more of a bell curve to the die than a flat curve. So that’s the reason we went with a 3d6 system. 

Then we came up with the idea that one of the dice should be a Marvel die that allows for fantastic things to happen. So one in six times you’ll get something incredible will happen. So it’s not happening every time, but it’s more common than getting a critical hit in Dungeons & Dragons, which happens one in 20 times, depending on what kind of range you have for critical hits for your character.

We also came up with this idea for Edges and Troubles, which allow you to affect those dice rolls and then to kind of engineer through gameplay those fantastic things happening, whether you’re using an edge because you role played something incredibly like, okay, I’m sneaking up on him in the dark with a new moon. And everything’s, there’s a rock show going on so he can’t hear me. So you get edges from certain circumstances.

But we also wanted to be able to use Karma, which is actually a take from the original Marvel Heroes Roleplaying Game. So, if you’re a superhero and you’re doing super-heroic things, or you’re doing things that entertain the table or the Narrator, you can then use those things that you’ve been doing to fudge the dice in your favor.

So let’s talk about the Ranks in this game. You mentioned earlier that Marvel Multiverse covers everyone from Aunt May to Galactus, and that’s demonstrated by a character’s Rank. When I first looked at Ranks, I thought they were a stand-in for character levels. But then I realized it’s a little bit different, because it really represents power levels and ranges of power levels. How difficult was it to try to jam in such a range of powers into one game system? Because it’s impressive, but also seems quite intimidating.

Forbeck: It is, it’s a hell of a challenge, right? Just to have a rule system that can feature these different characters and also make it relatively realistic. We’re talking about comic books here, so it doesn’t need a physics engines, but Aunt May has no chance at hurting Galactus so it’s not like a game where anything can happen.

Here, we’re trying to replicate the genre of Marvel comics that has been established over decades and a Rank 5 character like Daredevil is going to have a hard time hurting somebody like Thor who’s a Rank 20 character. 

It was a big challenge to do that. One of the big questions we had was “How do you then have characters like Spider-Man and Thor be on the same team of Avengers?” And that’s going to be something we’re going to tackle more in a narrative focus as far as teaching people how to design encounters. There’s a recent issue of Avengers where Captain America gives out orders and he tells Thor and Iron Man to fight some villains in the sky while the rest of the team rescues people here on the ground. And that’s exactly the kind of things you want to be able to do as a team of players with characters that are working at different ranks, right? You want to have something that everybody feels useful for doing, that’s important for them to do, but they each have their own role and they can work on them simultaneously while keeping the game fun for everybody. And that is a big challenge, but I think we managed to pull it off.

Again, we’re going to be relying on Narrators to do a lot of the heavy lifting for this. But that’s one of the great things about tabletop role playing games, right? They’re not video games, they’re not movies, they’re not anything else. They’re their own unique art form. And you’re relying on that person who knows their players better than anybody else to develop that kind of entertainment with them or to create it with them. Because it’s really a collaborative thing. The narrator is not in charge and just, “Hey, I’m putting out a show.” It’s something you involve all the players with at a hopefully fairly equal level.

So another interesting part of the game is the number of power options players can choose from. In the preview that was released earlier this month, everyone noticed that Spider-Man has a list of like 15 different powers. Every character is going to have that to some extent. Obviously, as you get more ranks, you get more powers. So how many powers are you going to see in the core game? Because, obviously, there’s a lot of variety in different Marvel characters. 

Forbeck: We’re going to try cram as much into it as we can. We’re looking at 300 and some pages for the actual rulebook. And we’re going to try and cram in as much as we can, but we also have to cram in a lot of characters. We’re still in the process of developing the full list of powers. For the playtest, we wanted to make sure that every character you see on the cover of the book is actually in the game. That meant we needed to have power sets for all those characters. 

We’re still in the early stages of developing the full powers, though. We didn’t want to get too far along before we had playtest feedback. I mean the whole point of doing the playtest is get feedback. And if we get too far along with this, then we start thinking, well, we can’t take that feedback because we’ve done so much work. So we want to be able to be flexible and take that feedback as honestly as we can and with as open a mind as we can.

But it is going to be a challenge to put all those powers in. Everytime we add a new character to the game, I have to see if we can give them already developed powers or if have to redesign everything from scratch. And then I have to see if that affects other powers that are similar to them. But fortunately, this is a play test that we’re doing here so we’re learning as we go along and we can afford to be fairly flexible about it at the moment. You know, talk to me this time next year, I’ll be pulling out my hair, trying to make everything collapse together nicely.

Were there any specific sets of abilities that you really had trouble converting into the rule set for this?

Forbeck: You know, not really.  Although part of the powers that we tackled that gave us a little bit more of a headache, I think, were the martial arts and the gun play powers. For one, because those are not central Marvel powers in a lot of ways. I mean, obviously Shang-Chi is a master of martial arts, and the Punisher uses his guns, but you don’t see a lot of Marvel characters using these kind of things.

Guns and martial arts tend to be very broad. There’s lots of different venues you can choose within them and there’s different avenues you can walk them in. At one point, my editor asked if we should just nix the gun stuff entirely, but I pointed out that a lot of the villains use guns and weaponry. So we need to tackle that. Plus we have characters like Rocket Raccoon, who is famous for coming up with really wild weaponry and then using it in different, interesting ways. 

But because those categories are so broad, it was more of a challenge than the Spider-Powers. When you have a group of Spider-characters, we don’t have to worry about Spider-Man, but we still have to figure out how to make Spider-Gwen or Ghost-Spider and Miles Morales and Spider-Woman and all these other characters. But there’s been a lot of myth building over the last 10 or 15 years that gives us something to work with, whereas with guns and on our combat essentially, it becomes a bit more of a challenge to try to delineate all of those.

One of the biggest worries about the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game is that the game mechanics look too crunchy. Because they see those modifiers with a +26, it reminds them of the d20 system, specifically D&D 3.5E. So what is your response to people who think the game mechanics are too crunchy, especially as RPGs have trended more towards streamlined, narratively-focused games?

Forbeck: Well, obviously I don’t think the game mechanics are too cruncy. On the other hand, I also know that I am not the main demographic, right. I’m a 53-year old man who’s been playing these games for 40 years and I’ve been professionally designing them for 30 years which means that my take is very different than your standard Marvel fan. So in that sense, yes, I can say that some people are going to look at it and say, whoa, no.

However, I’ve tried doing rules-light stuff before, I did a game called Brave New World back in 1999, which was a superhero role playing game for a company I co-founded called Pinnacle Entertainment Group. And we did a very rules-light template-based game there thinking this was the right way to break into the market. And it turns out that maybe somebody like Marvel would be able to leverage that, but a company like us at the time couldn’t. The trouble is that market itself likes crunch. We’ve seen what’s popular and because the market has proven to us that they like crunch, we’re going to try that. We’re going to try something where if you’re a Dungeons & Dragons player and you like Marvel, going over to this game is going to feel more natural. We want players to feel comfortable making that switch.

I don’t think Marvel Multiverse is actually any crunchier than Dungeons & Dragons. And actually we strove to try to make it as accessible as we possibly can. The Playtest Rulebook is clearly not aimed at what we think our final market is going to be. It’s aimed at cutting-edge players who are already playing Dungeons & Dragons or other games. No one is going to give the Playtest Rulebook to their kids for Christmas. Hopefully, they’ll give them the full game when it comes out next year.

All that said, you do not need to know calculus, you don’t need a physics degree. All that kind of stuff is fairly simple in here.When I was a kid, I played DC Heroes, which uses a logarithmic scale. If you understand logs, it’s fantastic and elegant, but trying to teach people that so they can run a game is a big challenge. And we didn’t want to get into any of that.

When people were distressed at the modifiers, I wondered if they had ever experienced the FASERIP system from the first Marvel roleplaying game? Have you ever seen the charts that you had to use? This is a lot simpler than that.

Forbeck: The most we ask you to do is double digit math, adding and subtracting. And a lot of the times, you have the number right in front of you, just add whatever you get on your d616 roll and you’re done.

I also like how your check system is based on rank with a default DC, which I thought that was a really neat solution to all that.

Forbeck: Exactly, and again, that’s going to be up to the narrator to set the actual DC a lot of the time right? But if you look and say, well, why should Storm have to worry about this at this point? Well, don’t roll the dice for things that the character is going to automatically suceed at. You only roll the dice when there’s a question about whether the character can succeed in something, that’s generally my rule of thumb.

So, my last question is, what sort of feedback are you looking from players? Is there any particular aspects of the game that you’re really interested to see how players respond to?

Forbeck: I’m interested in a couple different things. Mostly, we’re looking at the combat system because it’s such an integral part of the game, but I also want to see how people enjoy the character creation system because I do think that’s going to be a huge part of it. A few of the Marvel games in the past didn’t really allow character creation or didn’t encourage it. And that’s one of our bedrocks. We’re going to be able to take this and say, try to make your own characters, see how they match up.

The funny part is that the created characters, because they’re going to be tailored to the game system, are going to wind up more powerful than some of the traditional Marvel characters who are created narratively and are not built for a rule system. We try to make the rule system fit the narration but then people come in can then exploit anything you can find and make it even better.

So, I want people to try to break the rules. Break them, bend them over your knee, do terrible things to them and then tell me why they broke and how they broke. And then we’ll take that feedback and try to reinforce the system and make it as good and as intuitive as it possibly can be. Part of that is going to be the player saying, “I didn’t get this.” And if enough people say, “I didn’t get this part,” that means I need to do a better job explaining it to you more.

In the main rulebook, we’re going to have lots of examples, but feedback will help us figure out where we need to try to over-explain things right? Because, you do need to over-explain things, especially when you’re teaching somebody how to play.

The Playtest Handbook for Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game comes out on April 20th.