Comic Book Resources has the list of Top 10 superhero role-playing games, as compiled by columnist Timothy Callahan.
Here are his picks for Numbers 10 to 6: http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=47270
And here are the selections for Numbers 5 to 1: http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=47407
Despite being a 30-plus year player of tabletop role-playing games, I haven't actually played many of these since my gaming groups have almost exclusively by been Dungeons & Dragons players.
However, I have owned and read through the rulebooks of several of these systems.
THE LIST
- Marvel Superheroes Role-Playing Game
- Necessary Evil
- Underground
- DC Heroes
- Champions
- Mutants & Masterminds
- Marvel Heroic Roleplaying
- Wild Talents
- Aberrant
- Villains & Vigilantes
From that group, I have actually played Marvel Superheroes RPG. I have owned the rulebooks for DC Heroes, Champions, Mutants & Masterminds and Villains & Vigilantes.
I haven't heard of Necessary Evil, Underground and Wild Talents.
I found Champions, often considered the best game from people I talk to, needlessly complicated.
Mutants & Masterminds looked like a ton of fun to play, but character generation took FOREVER. There were just so many options it split your head open!
Marvel Superheroes was fun and light. We played it a few times as a break from D&D.
Overall, the hardest thing for players in my group was that they weren't too familiar with what a superhero should do. They were used to the D&D tropes of getting a mission, killing everything in sight (and on site) and taking all the stuff that survived the assault.
Replies
Put me down as Champions as my all-time favorite (RPG not just superhero). I started playing it in elementary school so I never found overly complicated. No more so than THAC0 from D&D or what I remember from GURPS. It was the game that actually had us using the Pythagorean theorem.
What I loved about it, was that powers were only limited by your imagination. It was easier to create Superman or Cyclops in Champions than it was in their respective RPGs. You decided on what your characters weaknesses were. Randomness can be fun, but it can make a character a chore to play when say he can't run more than 20 feet without getting winded.
The Hero System that sprung out of Champions also made it easier to play in any kind of setting you wanted.
I played both the Marvel and DC games, but after Champions it was hard to get any of my friends interested in playing those. I played V&V just once or twice.
I think the strength of practically every superhero RPG is that you could mix and match heroes and villains from any company and any medium.
If you want to pit the War of the Worlds tripods against Deathlok, Martian Manhunter and the Badger, then you could do it. The glory of all of the ones I ever looked at is there was this sliding scale that let high-powered characters such as Superman mingle with street-savvy heroes like the Spirit.
Of course, not all of them did it well, and some of them would lop power-levels off at both ends (Aberrant) , but that was the general idea -- bringing everyone together. I guess it's the general idea of any RPG, tabletop or computer based.
Honestly, that was one thing I never had much interest in. I was much more into creating my own characters, I had a more emotional connection to them. Give me Mr. E or Eraser over The Flash or Spider-man. That was the prevailing thought for our group as well, now that I think about it. The last campaign we ran one of the rules was original characters only. There were homage characters obviously. Quiver was Hawkeye, and Spectrum was Martian Manhunter as two examples. Also, there were 2-3 in our group who either never read or barely read any comic books at all, so they didn't care about recreating and playing Batman.
We had a great, massive shared universe going on. Every player was also a GM, we just picked cities we wanted to run. If anyone from that group wanted to restart that campaign tomorrow I would be ready and willing. I still have all of my characters.