Review of Villains and Vigilantes

[Mike]

Republished with the permission of Animalball Games Partners. Originally published in April, 2004.

I bought my very first roleplaying game way back in 1980. It was the D&D Basic red box set. For a couple years, I spent a ton of money on all the D&D versions out there. And then in 1982, something magical happened: I bought Star Frontiers. You can imagine my shock and joy at discovering that there were all sorts of non-D&D games out there. I mean, sure, I had suspected as much from the Gamma World and Boot Hill conversions in the back of the DMG, but I’d never actually held one in my hands, much less played one. It was pretty amazing.

Which brings me to Villains & Vigilantes. Written by Jeff Dee and Jack Herman, with the art done primarily by Jeff Dee himself, and published by Fantasy Games Unlimited, V&V was only 47 pages long. The boxed set version came with a 20 page starting adventure included. It was that V&V boxed set that become my third RPG ever back in 1983. I remember exactly why I bought it, too: because it was superheroes. What other reason did a kid need? I learned later about Champions and other superhero games, but V&V was the first I ever saw. There was no way I was going to walk out of the Dragon’s Lair without that set in my hands.

And it was glorious. Suddenly, it was gaming in the modern era; gaming with supers. Unfortunately, the first rule of character creation was: Play Yourself. That’s right, your superhero was supposed to be YOU. You had to stat yourself and then add on an alter-ego and nifty powers, etc. Cool idea on paper, I suppose, but Kyle (my primary player) was only 10. And 10 year old superheroes just plain suck. Don’t believe me? Then let me loan you the first 19 issues of Power Pack. That’s right—I own them. I’m not ashamed.

But we got past that, and finally decided to ignore the “play yourself” rule. And we ran right into the next roadblock: We couldn’t play the X-Men. V&V came with a very cool list of possible powers, and they were all very detailed, but there was no flexibility in it. It was easy to roll up some powers on the random character generation tables, and you could mix-and-match some pretty kick-ass superfreaks. But if you had a specific vision—a particular hero to create—well, there wasn’t much to do about it. I’d tell a new player that it was a superhero game, and the first response was always, “Wow! That’s awesome! Can I be Cloak?” or some other equally obscure hero. And my answer was always, “Well, no… not exactly. But if you’re willing to switch the powers a little, you can make a wicked Human Torch. Uh… is that close enough?”

So virtually every character required customizing the rules and powers and writing up your own stuff. It’s not bad work if you can get it, but to have to do it for EVERY character… Seems a bit much.

As for actual game play? Eh. The authors were obviously trapped in the AD&D paradigm, and too many things were needlessly complicated. If I remember correctly, action resolution was a basic d20 roll, but then there was a big complicated Chart-O’-Modifiers to tell you what adjustment to use when applying a Water attack to an Electrical defense or when Earth met Fire or when Harry met Sally (a +4, actually). It was very reminiscent of that freaky weapons table in AD&D with each weapon’s modifiers vs. every type of armor. It was just as easy to ignore, too. And if that wasn’t bad enough, there was a secondary Chart-O’-Modifiers in the back of the book (next to character advancement) detailing your bonuses and penalties for attacking characters of higher or lower level than yourself.

Duh… what? That’s right: character advancement was based on experience points and levels. There were no skills and no power or stat advancement, so the levels were all you had. And what did you get for being a 5th level Badger Boy? Nothing except the higher attack bonus against the puny 2nd level villains. There was maybe a bit about gaining new powers after a certain point, but I don’t really remember. We never played one campaign that long.

In fact, now that I think about it, I can’t remember one single adventure or mission that we ran. I remember a couple of cool heroes (Duracell Man was my favorite), but none of the actual game play was significant enough to be retained in my long term memory. Heck, I don’t think we even ever played the free adventure that came with the boxed set. What did we do with this thing?

On the other hand, the art was pretty cool. One of the authors, Jeff Dee, did all the art, it is was pretty good; very distinctive. At some point, I also picked up the V&V Most Wanted Vol 1, and I remember Dee’s art being very eye-catching—I especially loved the villain Samhain, basically Jason from the Friday the 13th movies. And we all know how much fun HE can be.

But for me, the true magic of V&V was learning to customize the rules. In retrospect, the real selling point for me was that the game was so limited and inflexible that I had no choice but to improve as a player and a GM in my attempts to compensate. Not a bad way to invest twelve dollars. Sure the game sucked, but I found that with a little bit of creativity, almost anything can become playable. It was V&V’s very limitations that helped me, as a 13 year old GM, to start learning how to make shit up as I go along.

If you’re interested in checking out V&V for yourself, the thing was officially listed as still in print as late as 2001, and you can pick up the core book for only $8. Holy crap. Who woulda guessed? Jeff Dee has since created “Living Legends” which is billed as the “sequel” to V&V. Yeah, okay. It’s available for free at the official Legends/V&V website, and its last updates were in 1999. Tell you what though—skip the core book. If you want to get your money’s worth out of V&V, just buy the villain books. Fantasy Games Unlimited is offering the V&V supplements for six or eight bucks a pop. Buy the Most Wanted (1, 2, and 3) or the Opponents Unlimited or DNAgents Sourcebook. All of these are basically books of very detailed characters, with rich histories and descriptions, perfect for cannibalizing for some more enjoyable superhero game.

By the way, the running theme for V&V info on the web seems to be grossly outdated sites. There’s a bunch of stuff out there, but I can’t find a thing that’s been updated more recently than four years ago. Huh.

Patric Rogers at the website Morpheus Unbound says, “Villains & Vigilantes is the brain child of Jeff Dee and Jack Herman. They released the industry altering Revised Villains & Vigilantes game in 1982 and it has been a standard to which all other superhero games are measured ever since.” Ha! There’s so much I wanted to say about that one statement, but… HA! “Industry altering.” Or even better, “a standard to which all other…” That’s pretty grandiose. Very cool stories and characters. Crappy game.

[Mike]

I'm not terribly proud of that article. I mentioned V&V in another thread this morning and it got me to wondering if I still had this around. I did. On reading it twelve years later, it's pretty mean. Accurate for the most part... but mean. I don't like it. What's worse is that at Animalball, we were all about self-promotion (for no money). So when we put this article up, we posted about it in the usual places, but also, we sought out Villains & Vigilantes message boards and communities to let them know. In retrospect, that means I went and sought out people for who this game was so beloved, that they were still playing it and forming communities around it 15 years after it went out of print... and then shitting on them.

"Hey, you guys still play this? Wow. That's awesome! Come look at this article where I tell you how your game really sucks."

I should find a way to make amends.