Character Creation: Stuperpowers!

Hey I have a penny no I don't April Fools

The Game: Stuperpowers!
The Publisher: Evil Twin Comics
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one

I have something of a fraught relationship with humor games. I'm all for them in principle, but I have found that games that rely on the players to be funny are asking a lot. Most people aren't funny, and, sorry to say, most gamers think quoting something funny is inherently funny, when in fact it's usually kinda tedious (I mean, a well-placed quote can be funny as hell, but "well-placed" is the operative phrase here).

Anyway, there's also the problem that, as the saying goes, comedy is hard. Some games manage it, but I don't know about Stuperpowers! The premise - you're playing superheroes with dumb powers, a la Mystery Men - is solid enough, but I worry it's going to veer into gross-out humor, which isn't a form of humor I find especially compelling. 

I will say, though, that when I was thinking of games to do today in honor of the "holiday", the first one that jumped to my mind was Stuperpowers! I got it in a recent bundle and they must be doing something right because I remembered the game existed. So here we go. 

The opening fiction, aside from falling back on the lazy "no one reads the opening fiction" joke, jumps straight from a gravely-voiced hero making out with his greatest nemesis, which I appreciate. The GM in this game is the "Big Mac Daddy," and while that's gendered, it winds up putting this song in my head, so we'll call that a wash. 

Making characters is largely random and consists of rolling up which powers you have, choosing or rolling an Origin, and...that's basically it (I mean, name and description and that kind of stuff). Characters also have Turn-Ons and Turn-Offs, but not at chargen, because they show up as the "heroes" get more well-known. 

Well, it's meant to be quick, so let's do this! Three percentile rolls for powers gives me...Street Sign Power! Cause 70s Hairdos! (It's spelled "Haidoos" but I think I know what they mean.) And finally, Glow in the Dark!

I think all that is workable. Let's roll up an origin. Coming home on Xmas Eve my SUV rolled onto some far-future...well, I'm not rolling on the last table because "hippies" is a choice and that's too perfect. So! Let's put this together. 

Gerry Girard, very much a millennial and therefore unversed in the aesthetic of the 70s, was on his way home from an Xmas Eve party when a strange glow in the road distracted him. He jacked the wheel and rolled his SUV over onto a...gaggle? Cadre? Cloud? of time-traveling far-future hippies. The hippies were, of course, crushed, but like, nothing ever really dies, man, and they each gave Gerry a gift: The power to glow in the dark, the power to cause people's hair to fly free, and the power to take the words on, like, signs, and make them, like, really mean something. 

Gerry latched onto his most impressive ability - glowing in the dark - as his signature trait, and fashioned a fairly nondescript-looking costume that lights up with psychedelic colors and whorls when he glows. He hit the streets as the amazing Blacklight! (That name has caused some confusion, but Gerry is happy to explain that "blacklight" is just a term for a UV light, and has nothing to do with race or anything like that.) 

And that's it! I dunno, it's cute, but a lot of the powers are gross or stupid in a not-good way (I just happened to roll three that weren't), so I dunno if I'd run this. Also the PDF isn't indexed and there's no table of contents, so finding stuff is difficult. That's kind of a prosaic note to end this on. APRIL FOOL.