Luke Cage Punched a T-Rex: A Marvel Heroic Breakout Session

Luke Cage punched a Tyrannosaurus rex in the head.

We recently got a group together for a session of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, running through the opening portions of Civil War: Breakout. The players took on Shadowcat, Nightcrawler, Psylocke, Star-Lord, and Luke Cage, which immediately gave us exactly the sort of wonderfully strange superhero team that Marvel Heroic handles so well.

Nobody sat down and tried to build the perfect tactical group. There wasn’t a carefully constructed team composition. It was just a collection of Marvel heroes who happened to be standing in the same place when everything started going catastrophically wrong.

Breakout remains one of my favorite ways to introduce people to Marvel Heroic. The premise is simple: The Raft, the maximum-security prison for superhuman criminals, suffers a massive breakout. Suddenly dozens of villains are loose, the prison is falling apart around the heroes, and every hallway presents another disaster. You don’t need fifteen pages of setup. The alarms start screaming. The cells open.

Go.

Our heroes quickly found themselves dealing with a particularly unpleasant pairing: Graviton and Hydro-Man. That combination turned out to be fantastic. Graviton is already the sort of villain who makes the battlefield itself hostile. Gravity shifts. Characters get thrown around. Movement becomes dangerous. Getting close to him becomes its own challenge. Then add Hydro-Man. Now the area is flooding, water is everywhere. Gravity is doing terrible things. People are flying through the air while other people are being slammed into walls, floors, ceilings, and whatever else happens to be nearby.

Shadowcat, Nightcrawler, Psylocke, and Star-Lord were trying to somehow bring the situation under control while the Raft continued collapsing around them.

Luke Cage had become separated from everyone else. Specifically, he was trapped in an elevator. With Living Laser.

There are certain superhero matchups that immediately make sense. Captain America fighting Crossbones. Spider-Man fighting Green Goblin. Wolverine fighting Sabretooth. Luke Cage fighting a man made out of light while trapped inside an elevator isn’t one of those. Which is precisely why it was so good.

While the rest of the group was dealing with a giant supervillain battle, Luke was essentially starring in his own completely different comic book.

It became this wonderfully confined little fight where Luke’s usual solution of “hit the problem very hard” was somewhat complicated by the fact that the problem was currently light itself.

And meanwhile, elsewhere in the prison, Graviton was throwing superheroes around like toys. One of my favorite things about Marvel Heroic is how naturally the game handles that kind of comic-book cutting between scenes. One moment you’re watching Nightcrawler teleport around a collapsing prison complex.

The next panel: Luke Cage is standing in a broken elevator yelling at lightning.

Eventually, the adventure carried the heroes away from the Raft and into the Savage Land. And the moment dinosaurs become involved in a superhero game, there are really only so many possible outcomes. Someone is going to fight one. I don’t make the rules.

Luke Cage encountered a Tyrannosaurus rex. The T-Rex charged. There were probably several sensible ways to handle the situation.

Run.

Distract it.

Find cover.

Coordinate with the other heroes.

Use the environment.

Luke Cage chose another option.

He punched it.

Right in the head.

And this is where Marvel Heroic becomes Marvel Heroic. In a more simulation-focused game, this might have turned into a conversation about exactly how strong a T-Rex is, how much damage a human fist could reasonably inflict upon one, or whether punching several tons of prehistoric predator is remotely advisable.

Marvel Heroic doesn’t particularly care. The question isn’t: “Could a person punch a Tyrannosaurus rex?” The question is: “Could Luke Cage punch a Tyrannosaurus rex?”

And the answer is obviously yes.

So the dice came out. Distinctions. Affiliation. Whatever advantages Luke had accumulated in the scene. A big handful of dice hit the table because Luke Cage had decided that somewhere in the Savage Land there was a dinosaur that needed to get punched.

Coming back to Marvel Heroic always reminds me why I fell in love with the system in the first place. It understands genre. A lot of superhero games spend considerable effort trying to answer questions like, “Exactly how many tons can this character lift?”

Marvel Heroic asks something different: What makes this character awesome in this scene?

Shadowcat gets to be Shadowcat. Nightcrawler gets to teleport through impossible situations. Psylocke gets to bring psychic knives to a supervillain fight. Star-Lord gets to be the extremely capable space adventurer standing next to several mutants and wondering how this became his afternoon. And Luke Cage gets to punch a dinosaur.

The mechanics aren’t trying to determine whether these things are realistic. They’re trying to determine whether they’re dramatic, whether they’re difficult, and what happens next. When someone at the table says something outrageous, the system’s instinct isn’t to stop them. It’s to ask them to build a dice pool.

I couldn’t tell you every single roll from the session. I couldn’t tell you exactly what order everyone acted in. I couldn’t reconstruct every complication or every point of stress that appeared during the game.

But I remember Graviton and Hydro-Man turning the Raft into complete chaos. I remember Luke Cage stuck in an elevator with Living Laser while everyone else was fighting somewhere else. And I absolutely remember Luke Cage punching a Tyrannosaurus rex in the face.

That’s what I want from a superhero RPG.

Years ago, when we were working on Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, the goal was always to make games feel like Marvel comics rather than simulations of superheroes. Sessions like this remind me how well that idea still works. Sometimes you’re fighting one of the most powerful gravity manipulators on Earth. And sometimes you’re standing in a prehistoric jungle staring at a Tyrannosaurus rex.

When that happens, there’s really only one question left to ask: Are you going to punch it?