My slowly growing collection of Heroclix figures has once again lead me to check out the Marvel Super Heroes RPG. I mean, where else can you play with a bunch of Marvel characters and also have most of them with stats – at least for the mid-80’s when the books for the game were coming out.
Unfortunately I’ve discovered the dark secret about how these stats were generated and how we lost national wheatcakes icon, May Parker.
The game is based on the FASERIP stats system and for heroes it is pretty straightforward. FASERIP stands for Fighting, Agility, Strength, Endurance, Reason, Intellect and Psyche. Throughout the book they have comparison guides for the characters- where they stand, that way you can get a handle on it.
Fighting has Aunt May and Professor X in the Feeble range. It makes sense, they can’t really fight well in combat – at least not regularly. But then Aunt May doesn’t show up in Agility like Professor X does and I realize something must have happened to her.
She ends up showing up around Strength again with Professor X in the Strength category, but they don’t show her face. And they’ve tossed her into strength and told her to lift 50 lbs? What kind of monster is behind this book? Is this Secret Wars 3? And then they send her to Endurance and we see her face. She is resigned to her fate here. She understands that things can get no better. I mean it says she has to stay out of drafts. And at first, I thought it meant like – the army! But you go down to Typical with J Jonah Jameson and it’s like “Able to tolerate New York City in August”? Was this because it was the 80’s when there was more crime? Were there higher crime rates in August? And I guess August was more windy. So when it says she needs to stay out of drafts it means that she will get blown away. She’s got to rest 2 rounds. But at least this is the physical aspect. Once this is done she should be fine.
Except that she doesn’t show up again. Not for Reason, Intuition or Psyche. She just vanished from the charts. No explanation. I mean you’d think she’d at least be there for poor Intuition but she’s not and I can only assume the worst. I can only imagine the Beyonder’s evaluation robots that scouted the earth killed her.
Goodbye Aunt May. We barely knew ye. Killed by TSR.
