The important things with the little quests in Pirates of Drinax are
You never know who you’ll need a favour from. Doing a job for an Aslan noble may save your hide when you desperately need an Aslan ally.
It gives you enough funds to engage in trading. Our run was nicknamed “Plutonium traders of Drinax” as we made far more money from buying and selling radioactive materials than from piracy. Piracy is dangerous and ship repairs are expensive. Also, our crew only had just enough skill to pull it off. Our space pirate character had learned vast amounts of Advocate and Broker from his career, so had presumably spent over a decade fencing stolen goods rather than actually pirating any ships.
The Superhero version of Outgunned is definitely out. I bought the PDF and have read it, but I have not played or run it. It has the same bones as what Roger described. The designers explicitly state that it emulates superhero movies (MCU, et al) rather than superhero comics.
Characters have a Role (basic power set) and Trope (personality/outlook). Each provides Attribute points, Skill points, and Feats.
The one thing that I would have to wrap my head around is that the supervillains are quite abstracted and it requires a lot of narrative lifting to distinguish between, say Loki, Ultron, and Thanos.
It’s more of the tone without any lore. But it’s clear they definitely modeled the powers and gear on the MCU. For example, the list of gadgets includes Duramantium Shield (Captain America), Mighty Weapon (Thor), Portal Ring (Doctor Strange), Re-sizers (Antman), Spiderweb (Spider-Man), Stinger (Black Widow), and a couple of DCU items like Utility Belt and Whip of Truth.
I’ve played Outgunned Adventure (the pulp Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider version). But the GM is running it more like bog standard Cthulhu so we’ve only had derring-do, traps and fighty stuff in 2 of the 5 sessions.
Reading through Outgunned Superheroes again, a sidebar says:
Outgunned Superheroes is designed for short to medium length Campaigns that usually
span no more than 8 Sessions, as such, the advancement curve is pretty fast and steep.
This pretty much admits that it will get samey so they amped up the advancement curve to make it more interesting and that campaigns will be short to minimize saminess.
It’s also noteworthy that characters start with 2 of their 4 attributes maxed out and they have 40 of the 60 possible skill points. They cap advancements at 3 which is 6 skill points, so there’s really not much left to improve.
With the modern action version too, I’m definitely getting a feeling that what they call a campaign is what I call a long adventure, the narrative equivalent of a single film. And there might be a sequel, but if there is it won’t necessarily have all the same characters in it. As you say, the range of power in which characters are playable is quite narrow. (Especially with the third act bonuses.)
Perhaps this is influenced by how Superhero movies advance stakes/threat in a quick and formulaically quantitative form?
Like Act1 is stopping muggers from hurting a scientist, Act2 is stopping the big bad’s special forces team from killing the scientist, but in doing so the entire city is momentarily endangered, Act3 is stopping the big bad from destroying Planck’s Constant after he abused the scientist’s work at an underground rave for young models during an eclipse
They are very explicit that they are emulating superhero movies rather than superhero comics.
They are optimized for one-shots and short campaigns. Rather than a typical D&D campaign where it can take years before the characters max out, they are speedrunning the process and wrapping everything up in under 10 sessions. I respect that from a design perspective–they know what they are and lean into it.
This does seem to be a bit of a thing - both King of Dungeons and Fighter Wizard Elf push hard to the 10-12 session campaigns idea.
I’m aware I’m barely getting warmed up at that point (which is why both of my Blades campaigns have hit 50+ sessions, even though the system basically breaks around then.)
Interesting, thanks. Certainly I find myself enjoying the setup for a campaign more than the campaign itself sometimes, and I’ve said before (on this very podcast I think) that I’d like to borrow the telenovela model—in effect a single book or TV season with a defined end point, and if there’s a sequel it’s more like a film sequel with maybe some different cast members rather than the assumption that everyone will carry on as before.
What this comes down to for me is that as in boardgame design a game can be either too long or too short. If it’s too short the players are eager for more; if it’s too long they’re tired and weary. So too short is the way to err.
One of my favourite TV shows was Leverage, and one of the reasons was John Rogers (the main show runner) had a blog called Kung Fu Monkeys where he went through the making of each episode in a lot of detail.
On there, he said explicitly that each season of Leverage was specifically written to an end - no cliffhanger - because
a) TV funding being what it was, each end of season might easily be the last show
b) because it was more satisfying writing to an arc and an end goal.
Which is a very long way of saying ‘I agree’.
There’s a really good interview with Jonathan Tweet on the What Would The Smart Party Do? podcast here: Spotify where he discusses Fighter Wizard Elf and the push towards shorter, more tightly driven campaigns which I found really interesting.
Given that after 35 years of gaming I’ve only recently actually finished a campaign deliberately, rather than just have it peter out because of lack of interest, time pressure on players, etc it’s a model that I’m looking at a lot.
Similarly, a TV show gets cancelled either too early (everyone enthuses about it for years afterwards) or too late (and people recommend not watching the last seasons).
I don’t have an ending set for my current D&D campaign. We’ve had ~34 sessions since October 2024 and they’re at 7th level.
I already have a list of 10 other campaigns of various genres I’d like to run, but I’ve already determined they’ll only be 6-12 sessions. Shorter campaigns gives opportunity to play more different games.