Playing Marvel via Google Hangouts

I was invited to play Marvel Heroic Roleplaying by my friend Mark, from the Dice Monkey blog and the Marvel-centric Plot Points blog.  The game was run on Google+ hangouts, and since I had never played Marvel before I jumped at the chance. I have a lot of friends who have been a part of the design team, so it’s a game I’ve wanted to try for a long time. Because superheroes. 🙂

I have to say that with all honesty, I need to play the game a few more times to really get it.  I’m not very familiar with the rules, and seeing how every other player was experienced, I didn’t want to slow down the game too much by stopping to ask questions. If you’ve never played Marvel, the game uses a dice pool system to resolve actions.  I’m not going to try to attempt to explain the game here, because I’d do a poor job.  I still haven’t exactly gotten it.  But if you come from a D&D mindset like me, this is a pretty interesting way of looking at the game:

In D&D, my character sheet says I can do X.  In Marvel, I want to do X, so how can I get there using my character sheet?

Another issue I had was that the game is set in Marvel’s cosmic universe, and I have very little knowledge of that whole side of Marvel, but Wikipedia can take care of that. Anyway, the point if this post is to show you guys a video of the game in action, captured by Mark as he was running it. Also, there is a REALLY, REALLY great dice roller extension available for Hangouts called DiceStream, made for the Marvel rpg.  It made the game easy to play online, so if you are considering an online game, go get this extension.  Google Hangouts is a real game changer for online roleplaying by the way… I need to get a post going about that. I’m running a SW EotE game using it and I love it…

So here’s the video.  I’m the bearded dude with a confused look on his face.  Many thanks to Mark for running the game, and go check out his websites.  🙂