V&V is an amazing game system. It lets you do anything, and place yourself in any genre of comic book from anywhere in the world. It is not perfect, and it is not as popular as most of us believe it should be, but it plays better than any other Comic RPG I have ever messed about with. I have played Cyborgs, Aliens, Time Travelers, and Mutants. I have battled street-level crooks, Magneto, terrorists, alien invaders, demons, zombies, large bugs, and even CHESS. I have learned that for most of us, we have to pretend to be someone else in order to truly be ourselves. I have even had the opportunity to live out a fantasy of my youth; to write for my favorite RPG and have my work published by FGU. I have had some wonderful, and very informative arguments with fellow creators, which is an absolutely essential part of any creative process (and for me, it's like tossing a pig in mud). All told, this game has been putting smiles on my face for three decades.

So what then what do I believe is the best part of this game? A table, surrounded by friends.  No internet. No computers at all (save for a pocket calculator). Just friends at a table. I can think of nothing better than that.

For me, when I think back on all of the superhero RPGs I have played, V&V was the most enjoyable.

For me, it's the open endedness of the system. You've got enough of a basic framework that you can pretty much do what you want. And V&V just had that "comic book" feel to it, something a lot of other super hero RPGs didn't/don't have.

Agreed, Majestic!

I so Agree

I am personally more familiar with Champions... I have played that far more often.  BUT.. that said... I find that V&V is much easier to run quickly as far as combat goes than Champions.  In Champions you need to keep track of Body, Endurance, Stun, resistant defenses, normal defenses Physical Defense, Energy Defense and damage reduction {if they have such} for all the npc's which makes running it a bear!  Yes, you could have a handy sheet for tracking that but it also has an added level of complication... that gets annoying to deal with in the factors that modify how those three resources are tracked {is it a resistant defense, is is only PD or ED.. does the target have Damage Reduction... what the recovery rate... etc.}.

The thing I like the most about V&V is there is hit points and Power to keep track of.. thats it!  No active limits no 1 end per 5 or is it 10 Active used.. no 25% damage reduction vs normal stun...}...just two numbers.  And if you want you can add more complication as needed... its easy to note ok this damage was absorbed by the armor ADR so it s against the armor the hit point damage is applied.  Fast, elegant, and simple.  Yeah you can get to be very fast as a player who is familiar with Champions to play.. but it does not cut down on the complication as the GM to run it keeping track of all those variables.  At least it seems so to me.

And as for those who say V&V can't be power gamed..well it not as easy as it is in Champions to do so {a boon in my opinion}... but you can still make phenomenally powerful characters in V&V with just a little tweaking here and there.

MUCH as I am a die-hard long time Champions Guru'-Fan.. I must say.. I'd rather run  V&V for its ease, flexibility and low-learning curve for new players.  It Really is a GREAT game system!

Coming to this discussion considerably late - and not really adding anything that hasn't been stated already to the mix - but yeah, the firstest and bestest superhero RPG that's yet crossed my path.  AlabasterKnight and Thunderbolt's comments strike closest to the nerve center for me; the lack of power gaming issues, and the straightforward dynamic of having to keep track of hit points and power - and that's it - drills in the maxim of simple equals better.

While I can't claim any real familiarity with Champions, aside from general name recognition, Thunderbolt's relating of the nightmarish chain of stats to be adjudicated each round assures me that this game would have been a one-hit wonder with my past and current group; years later, we'd be sitting around, shaking our heads when someone mentions, "Remember that Champions game we tried out...?"  And, of course, we had our three-game run-through with M&M 2e, which met its mostly unlamented end largely because of the hugely counterproductive damage/Toughness charts, and the drama-killing results with die rolls that indicated that The Evil Boss had been taken out on the first shot.

I'll be sticking with my slightly rough-eared copy of V&V 2.0, thank you very much, and looking forward to the release of 3.0 and what new twists and turns we can pull off.  Here's hoping that all of us will be able to witness and enjoy the continuation - in whatever form - of the most damn playable superhero game we can envision.

Read this over a bit earlier today; very pleased, as some others have mentioned, that development on 3.0 continues.

My personal contention, at this point, is that we need to start seeing some demo characters drawn up, put through the character-creation wringer and then dropped into duke-it-out-in-the-arena scraps with some established villains.  This is in addition to a couple of prospective non-conflictual scenarios examined so that we can see how the new system operates in both fighting and non-fighting contexts.

As per some discussion that was going on previously on that site, and which I made a couple of contributions to, I'm also very curious to see how the new armor/invulnerability rules play out.  These core tropes of superhero fiction were about the most difficult to translate into a superhero game dynamic, and I'd really like to see what the current state of consideration has them operating as.

Thank you for the response, Majestic.  Re Marvel Heroic Roleplaying; I'm unfamiliar, but is this the follow-up to the '80s Marvel Superheroes game?

On the powers thread for the MHG site, I suggested using the old MSH as a launching point for how Invulnerability, as a power, could perhaps work.  A character could have 10 points Invulnerability; any attack of 11 points damage would carry 1 point through, per hit.  I felt the Marvel system was the best merge point between the whole ablation/threshold argument that V&V 2.0 and M&M 2e stand as templates of.

Hopefully we'll get to see some action on MHG soon, with regard to further insights.

Display Name wrote on Jun 10^th, 2014 at 2:53am:


Thanks for linking this.  I haven't been checking out the forum since their hadn't been updates in... well forever.

Great to see discussions happening!

In our V&V game last weekend (at our annual Con), the GM hit us with what he called a "MATH ATTACK".  Basically, he handed us index cards that boosted each character's physical Basic Characteristics (STR, END, and AGL), which of course caused everyone to get out calculators and figure all of the downstream stats as well.