Preparing the players

Motivations: What does this hero want to do? Do you, as Judge, find that interesting, let alone suitably heroic? Does that goal match (or at least avoid conflict with) those of other PCs in the campaign?

Power level: Assess the character's abilities, powers, and talents. Are the attacks far more powerful, or less powerful, than other PCs' attacks? Is the character invulnerable to your villains' attacks, or will the character get blown away by the first punch? In the comics, heroes of widely differing power levels work together without a problem; think of Thor and Captain America in the Avengers. But that is because comic writers give every hero careful attention and adjust the story to let them all show off. You can't control your PCs the way the writer controls heroes in the comic books. If your Mega OCC player decides to hog the limelight and wipe out every bad guy in sight, the Vigilante OCC player just has to sit back and watch. Work hard to ensure that all the PCs have about the same power level.

Stepping on other characters: Every character should have a power, skill, or "flavor" unique to the team. Don't bring in another character who can do the same thing, only better. The first player will feel useless. Also, watch out for the hero who can do virtually anything, the real jack-of-all-trades. Every well- designed character has weaknesses and lacks, as well as strengths; this makes the character interesting, because overcoming those weaknesses is heroic. Make sure your players understand that.

Psychological profile: Is this hero not to be too blunt-crazy? Can the other PCs trust the hero? Is the hero going to kill somebody, or go berserk, or just fail to get along with teammates? If so, have the player rethink this character. You won't regret it.

Preparing villains

Major villains: Every super-hero campaign needs one of these, a villain who creates mind-shattering schemes and drives your heroes to their greatest exertions. Choose this villain with care, and with an eye toward getting PCs to build really personal grudges against him or her. Perhaps the villain is connected with the origins of one of the team members or directly opposes the heroes' goals. Pick a villain that the PCs' powers uniquely qualify them to face. If they can't stop him (or her or it), nobody can. For instance, if your PCs are magicians, choose a magical villain like Tyrannus. If the PCs are experts in robotics, choose a machine intellect that wants to exterminate humanity. Et cetera. Naturally, the villain should be powerful enough to push around an individual PC with ease, and give a good fight against the entire group. You should also keep a couple of lesser villains on hand for variety's sake. Sometimes you can turn a minor villain into a major force just by looking at the character in a new way. 

Villain groups: If one villain is bad news, six will be even worse. The villain group lets you showcase bad guys who, individually, wouldn't stand a chance against your PCs. If he didn't have backup bad guys, any self-respecting hero could squash him in a round. A well-designed villain group operates as an efficient team, with code signals and pre-rehearsed tactics that should catch your PCs off guard. For example, at a leader's signal, the team's strongest member could grab a non-flying PC, throw the hero high into the air, and all of the villains with ranged attacks could simultaneously fire on the helpless hero. If your PCs don't practice teamwork, a well-oiled group of villains can easily take them out, even when the individual villains are far less powerful than individual PCs. But after one or two of these humiliating defeats, players will get the idea and begin developing their own team tactics. Bravo! The weakness of any villain group, of course, is the clash of gigantic bad guy egos. Play this up over the course of the campaign. If the heroes take advantage of it, they can manoeuvre the villain group into smashing itself more effectively than the heroes ever could. These groups are hard to design well. Fortunately, you need only one or two really sharp villain groups as a campaign gets rolling.

Organizations: What would the old SHIELD stories have been without HYDRA and AIM? 

In the campaign, bad- guy organizations serve two good purposes:

1. They employ lots of normal-level agents for the heroes to beat up on. A combat between a hero and a slew of ordinary people proceeds much differently from a standard slugfest between super types. 

2. Organizations create high-tech equipment, which provides interesting story ideas. "Our Global Encephalizer Satellite will turn Earth's entire population into helpless slaves!"

You should design or adapt two or three organizations as the campaign begins, each with its own style, goals, and scale. "Scale" means the dimension of its operations. For example, the Maggia wants to make money through crime; but HYDRA wanted to conquer the world! These differing scales mean the organizations fulfill different roles in scenarios.

Alien races: This is really a subgroup of "Organizations." Are your PCs the types who could handle an invasion from space, the sea, or Subterranea? Aliens can be slightly tougher than ordinary agents, and they use even more exotic technology than HYDRA. 

Nuisances: Finally there are the bozo villains. No campaign is complete without the occasional would- be hotshot, the mischievous sprite, and the idiot musclemen. Players exuberantly trash these punks. They provide laughs, relief from grim world-endangering plots, and a chance for the players to feel really superior to lowlife scum. Don't overdo it, but keep one or two of these clowns waiting in the wings when you need a break between serious adventures.

Preparing NPCs

1. NPCs should not be better than PCs at their chosen pursuits, unless there is a very good reason. Players like to feel that their characters are experts, indispensable to the situation at hand. If you bring in an NPC who can do what they do, but better, the players will wonder why they bothered to show up at all. And next session, they won't make the same mistake again! These heroes' abilities have been established so well that your players can hardly grouse that their characters aren't as good as these hero NPCs. What's more, you have the power to keep these titans out of the campaign, so your heroes don't have to feel upstaged. But other NPCs, the lesser lights should not be superior to the PCs. Think carefully before you give an NPC Ultimate Skill in anything the PCs can do.

2. The NPCs in a hero's life should have some role in the campaign besides their relationship to the hero. In the comics, many heroes have friends, loved ones, or relatives who occasionally figure in adventures usually as hostages, victims, or targets. These "dependents" are often a part of your PC heroes' lives, too. They serve a valuable plot function: By endangering the dependent, you can get the heroes emotionally involved in your adventure, just like in the comics. But here is where comics and games part ways. A hero in a comic is emotionally attached to the dependent and has a stake in the NPC's fate. This emotional attachment is much rarer in a role-playing situation. Players just don't relate to you, the Judge, as they would to an aunt or husband. The dependent's plot function becomes nakedly obvious.  What is the solution? Give the dependent a legitimate function in the campaign. Make the NPC genuinely useful to the heroes, perhaps as a doctor, detective, scholar, or regularly visited source of information. Then when something happens to endanger the NPC, the players' alarm will be genuine, not just role-playing. The NPC should be able to do something the heroes can't or aren't interested in doing. Good jobs to give an NPC include Daily Bugle reporter, FBI agent or government liaison, financial advisor, stoolie, and vehicle pilot. But make sure the NPC isn't better than the players

Campaign Problems