This entry is a bit of an essay, some musing that are percolating in my backbrain as I work on other things (like racing to finally finish the Deadworld system manuscript), but it isn't something that I wanted to forget about. So, we have this.
If you find things interesting, please comment.
This is sort of about comic books, a little about pulps, and something about role-playing games as well. Once upon a time, comic book characters were islands in the streams of the larger universes of their companies. Over in their book, The Challengers of the Unknown were the greatest heroes on Earth (despite sharing an Earth with Superman) because they were the stars of their own books. Most comic books, not the mention the pulps that proceeded them, followed this model because the idea was that the main character(s) should be the hero of their own story and not have to have the day saved by a guest star swooping in during the final act.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't a bad way to tell a story. I whole-heartedly condone it. Then Marvel Comics came along and they pushed forth the idea that each and every one of these characters shared the same city, or the same larger world or universe, and what happened in one story touched what happened in the others. This isn't a bad way to tell a story either, and it works great if you want to sell all of your company's books to as many as possible, rather than just selling a corner or two. Two perfectly valid and yet opposing methods for telling your stories.
If your hero, no matter how cool or potent he may be, has to share a world with Superman or Thor there is a good chance that they'll end up becoming a second banana in their own book. This means a balancing act in your storytelling, figuring out a method to make your hero the best without it looking silly in the face of the competition in the larger setting. Some pull it off, some don't.
This also becomes a challenge in a role-playing campaign where your characters are set against a backdrop of a larger existing world. Licensed RPGs come to mind, like the old Marvel Super-Heroes RPG from the golden years of TSR, but big, giant settings with big, giant characters also can be troublesome here. Settings for D&D, Dragonlance and The Forgotten Realms, also fit into here. How does your character stand out when they have such big characters to have to compete against for screen time? The opposite extreme is to make the characters the only heroes of the setting. I did that in a super-hero campaign using the old Marvel game back in college. "'Where are the Avengers?' 'Out of town.' 'What about the Fantastic Four?' 'Negative Zone, probably.' 'Who's left?' 'You guys have to deal with this.'"
The problem is, while it puts a bandage onto the situation, it doesn't actually solve anything and in some places it can strain the credibility and suspension of disbelief for some of the players involved (not to mention the game master). In our case it wasn't always a problem because we ran a humorous game that, at times, thrived on inconsistencies. Could we have come up with a better way to handle it? Maybe. Maybe we could have.
The reason that I'm bringing this up is because my Danger! Patrol setting is popping up in the back of my head again. It'll probably be my next task. The thing is that I want a rich, full world that has got a lot of heroic people to it but they can't overshadow the Danger! Patrol, a group of people who put on jump suits and take on big menaces using just their fists and what they have in their heads to fight them. This can lead to problems if you postulate a Superman or a Thor in the setting.
Right now, I have been thinking along the lines of keeping the setting at a "pulp level" of power. Yeah, there's a history of people pulling on costumes and doing the "right thing" for the greater world, but no super-powered individuals have risen up. Or, if they have, those powers aren't Earth-shattering. The people might be faster, stronger, tougher but they aren't hugely powered. Most heroes in this world are content with keeping the status quo on a larger scale and working at keeping their own corners of the world clean, one fight at a time.
Again, a valid approach. You get the macro and the micro in some semblance of balance and more importantly you don't have to worry about the players in a home campaign being overwhelmed by the off-screen stars of the world. If you keep everyone at roughly the same "level," you don't have to worry immediately about the cool stuff being done by characters besides those being used by the players. And that is what is the most important, the player characters not doing the important things.
This is one of the things that you have to take into consideration when designing a game or a setting for role-playing. One of many, obviously.
Oh, and a part of my thinking for what might or might not go into Danger! Patrol has been the fact that I've been reading Ed Brubaker's great Incognito comic.
