My categorisation divides character aspects into character-based (what they look like, how they talk etc), storyworld-based (the settings, rules, history and so on), behavioural (how the characters interact with each other within the storyworld) and authorial (who creates them). Interestingly, for me at least, the various areas covered do align quite well with the work I'm doing on my PhD. I know it's called a "rulebook" but this seems like a lot of rules! There's a map of Battleworld itself, then rules on how you move around, how buildings work, how events occur and how characters can act. However, there are then sixteen closely typed pages of RULES telling you exactly what you can and cannot do, in a game divided into days with each day divided into four "shifts", which makes it sound like work rather than fun. Not all the tales of the SECRET WARS have been told," it days. It sounds very interesting to begin with, offering the players the chance to create their own stories - "You can branch out on your own. It's at this point that I get a bit lost, as the actual game instructions are bewilderingly complicated. Whichever of these figures are used, they're all meant to go onto a map somehow, which is then used to plot the characters' progress through the game. In both cases Doom has his arms raised in anger, with all his usual character signifiers in place, although for some reason his gun holster is on his left hip rather than his usual right on the cut-out version. This is an adaptation of "Secret Wars", so of course Doctor Doom is featured in both. The first is a set of miniature figureines showing the heroes and villains in action, while the second is a similar, presumably much-cheaper, set of cardboard cut-out versions. The figures are pretty easy for me to get my head around. There are five items all together in this look at TSR's "Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars Special Campaign Adventure" - three hefty tomes of rules and two sets of figures. Since then I've known several people who love these games, and tell me it's a free-flowing communal improvisation, expressing imagination wherever it takes you, and I'm sure it is, but I must say that reading through some of the material today takes me right back to that lunchtime. It was all incredibly pernickety and annoying, and I think that all of us gathered around that school desk were put off it for life.
My memories of it consist of a lengthy, very complicated, explanation of the rules, approximately two throws of the dice, a lot more explanation of what we'd done wrong, and then we were all dead. It was a rainy lunch-time in my second year of senior school (so I would have been about 12) and someone had brought in a copy of Dungeons And Dragons. Today we're looking at one of Doom's adventures into non-comics media, and it's an area I know very little about - role-playing games! When he's appeared in cartoons, or radio shows or computer games I've had at least some experience of how those all work, but I have had precisely one direct experience of role-playing games, and it wasn't a very good one. The Marvel Superheroes Role-Playing Game
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