Whatever Happened to the CoH RPG?

Was randomly looking around the web, and stumbled across (no, not with stumble upon) this: http://www.cityofheroesrpg.com/

What ever happened to this? Their last news update was nearly 5 years ago, and it says the game will be out soon. Did NCSoft/Cryptic and them have a falling out? With Super Hero RPGs seeming as popular as ever, it seems like CoH could make some money with it too. Especially if it was already almost finished.

Anyone know what happened?

It's dead. IIRC they made zero progress on it. You can still download the preview if you like.

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You can always make a CoH character in an RPG that isn't in the can. There's several superhero tabletop games out there. Champions, Mutants and Masterminds, [shamelessplug]Legacy Crossing[/shamelessplug]...

It died six years before its inception with the death of all collectible card games that weren't Magic: The Gathering or YuGiOh.

It didn't even get to be stillborn; it was aborted.

The company that was working on it had issues and dropped it to concentrate on other things IIRC, and it withered and died.

I run a semi-regular "Silver Age Sentinels" game myself.

Too bad Guardians of Order went under, I liked a lot of their games.

Used to play BESM Tri-stat myself. Did they ever do a Silver Age Sentinels D20 version? BESM D20 wasn't great :/

I actually remember playing the CoH Pen and Paper RPG years ago at Gen Con or Origins (thinking back now, I think it was Origins). I remember it being a pretty fun system, but it definitely was a beta.

I played it at Origins also. It was alright, but I found it hard to get into.

I also played it at Origins way back when. It was a fun little romp, though our group wasn't entirely playing the real thing. The GM had us ignoring endurance entirely, for example.

I've also fussed around with the quickplay kit, and what they actually had there was rather...lacking. Even really basic explanations of what certain numbers/listings/stuff was were missing, to my dismay. And while the core D10 ruleset was actually pretty nice, I didn't like how they got into the same finicky minutiae that other RPGs get into - things like X points of strength = able to lift Y pounds of weight.

But it is quite timely that there's some interest in City of Heroes PnP RPG stuff. And that's all I'll say for now.

I regularly steal power ideas from CoX for my homebrew RPGs, does that count

It's remarkably easy to write up City of Heroes powers in Hero System. I'm not too surprised; I suspect the original powers design in the concept stages were first modeled in Hero System before they tried to figure out how to make it into an MMORPG.

There's only ever been two games in my thirty years of tabletopping that have ever gotten superheroes right, and I'm afraid Champions isn't one of them for me.

The first is the venerable Marvel Super Heroes from the now-defunct TSR (now Wizards of the Coast). One chart that handles everything in the game, and it handles every power level from Aunt May to the Beyonder. All percentile based and it scales beautifully. For pure super-heroey stuff, this is your game.

The second is White Wolf's Aberrant game, which has no connection to the World of Darkness, allows you to put huge amounts of customisation into your powers, and runs off a success-based system. And any game that has advanced rules where you can eventually going around making whole galaxies and lifeforms is pretty cool... Be warned, though...this is a R-rated game with everything that implies. But I've seen DC and Marvel heroes converted over with ease. Give it a look.


S.