My experience of playing superhero games has been limited to two one-shots, and by coincidence, both of them involved playing supervillains called in to save the world, Suicide Squad style.
Necessary Evil (Savage Worlds)
when the GM described the setting to me, I was instantly smitten. Due to an enormous miscalculation, every superhero in the world has been killed by an alien invasion, and the only people left with the superpowers needed to take on the aliens are supervillains.
And it makes complete sense. Supervillains aren't exactly the kind of people to quietly sit down and behave themselves when a powerful authority tells them to. The PCs are one of a number of independent cells recruited by Doctor Destruction, the world's greatest villain, who resents the aliens taking over the world because that's his job, dammit.
The GM helped me with my character, since I'd never done a superhero game before. With his help, I came up with Ice Queen. She was a beauty pageant contestant, aiming to become the next Miss World. To raise her public profile she went hiking in the Himalayas, where she fell down a crevasse and was presumed dead. However, she survived, and was nursed back to health by Buddhist monks. When she left and returned to America she discovered that they'd held the contest without her, at which point she tracked down the winner at a show, froze everyone solid with her new ice powers, and stole the beauty queen's crown, which she has worn ever since.
(I would like to clarify that this was all years before Frozen came out.)
Teamed up with a particularly disgusting rubbish-themed villain who once buried the whole of Los Angeles in trash, a walking liability called Captain Collateral and another villain who's name sadly escapes me, we set out to start the fight against the alien menace.
It should be obvious that I adore this setting. It's a fun variation on superheroes, and the character options have been well thought out to cater to villains rather than just reproducing standard superhero stuff (for example, one of the disadvantages you can take is 'gloating'.)
Adventures are more along the espionage/sabotage line than conventional superheroics, which works well for a team of dodgy types with their own agendas all wanting to cause trouble.
Where I felt it fell down slightly was with the Savage Worlds system. It took a lot of my character creation points to get the ranged ice powers I wanted, and then I rarely actually managed to do anything with them as I kept failing the attack rolls necessary to actually use them.
I would absolutely play in this setting again, but unless you're already a Savage Worlds enthusiast, I don't think there's enough in the book itself to justify buying ite. I had fun in the game, but never quite felt properly supervillainous.
Excision (Groundhoggoth)
Once again going to the other end of the scale, Excision is the most rules-light system I've ever played, involving no dice and no character sheet - just a set of index cards with your powers on.
In simple terms, you play a card and succeed. To get a card back, you have to fail. (There's more to it, but not that much more.) It's incredibly simple, but results in pretty cinematic stuff where the players are powerful when they need to be but are looking for opportunities for an entertaining failure to get some cards back.
As far as I can tell, this system was created for doing secret agents type games, but as Necessary Evil demonstrates, espionage type missions work well with the 'supervillains save the world' concept.
My contribution to our little suicide squad was Acid, whose superpower was the ability to secrete large amounts of acid through her skin. Her drawback was constant heartburn from the small amounts of acid she couldn't stop secreting. She was one of those characters who reveals themselves as you play. She was terrible, I realised as she prepared to torture our antagonist, but she hadn't always been that way. It was the inhumane conditions required to imprison her for her relatively minor crimes that had turned her into what she was.
I enjoyed this game so much that I wrote up the session afterwards. Read it here.
This game was firmly at the grimdark end of the scale (with Necessary Evil sitting more at the four colour heroes end) but I suppose there's no reason it couldn't have been colourful if we'd wanted to play it that way.
While some guidance on powers might be useful, the absolutely flexibility resulted in everyone being able to play the villain they wanted, and no dice meant no feeling like a rubbish villain. We succeeded when we needed to. When we failed, we failed spectacularly.
Conclusion
While Necessary Evil benefited from a more guided approach to character creation, actually playing the game was more enjoyable in Excision.
I don't know what else you could play this style of game in. Excision works if everyone's down with a storytelling approach but some groups want more crunch. I'm not sure a conventional superheroes game would be an ideal choice, as while supervillains are superficially similar, they really don't work the same way. I wonder what else is out there?
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