Villains and vigilantes has its good and bad points. My favorite thing about the setting is the character creation system. As a player I find that almost everyone has their own unique powers so everyone is doing something beneficial, and as a GM it takes little time to roll up a new npc that is unique and will actually stand out.

The system is a little confusing, asking you to roll low instead of high like most rpgs, and if you want a character that uses hand to hand damage you may as well forget about it since hand to hand is by far the hardest thing to hit with.

The mechanics of the system are not the best, but I have yet to find a better random character creation system that can be done so quickly.

V&V was written by Jack Herman and Jeff Dee. Jeff Dee got his start on D&D doing some of the classic module art and book art for the 1st edition game. So the game has some obvious D&D roots.

V&V was unique at the time (and still somewhat) in that in the game you play yourself. You work out with the other players what your strength, endurance, intelligence and the rest are and then you roll randomly on a table of super powers. It's a very interesting and fun concept that we completely ignored. Back in the day we liked playing a "multi-verse" so our V&V characters were our D&D characters in a supers universe. The stats were the mostly the same and both games had levels. Plus it gave us excuses to have strengths of 50 or more (human max is 18). I remember it being a very good time.

As typical of many old school games there are lots of random rolls, charts and a fair amount of math involved. I went back recently to make a character and was thrilled to see that there are Excel character sheets. The math isn't hard really, but Excel is still faster. Though such things have been around for a long time even with the older edition.

Powers are list by type. So Power Blast is just a blast of some sort of power. It could be Superman's heat vision, Iron Man's repulsors, or even Zatanna's magical blast. What is interesting is the combat matrix of powers vs. defenses and how they interact. Again, the D&D DNA is here since it reminds me of the Psionic Powers Attacks vs Defenses in 1st Ed AD&D.

There is a V&V campaign world as well. It is loosely defined in the core books, but much greater detail is given in the supplements. It is also one of the few Supers games I can recall where the characters were working for the government at some level.

There are a couple of great sections on Being a Superhero and Gamemastering that work great with any supers RPG.

IF you like old school RPGs and want to get into a supers game that feels like those, then this is a great choice. The price is low (under 10 bucks at the time of this review) and there are plenty of places on the web that support either version of the game with materials, character write-ups and community. FGU has a large number of supplements here as well. More than enough to keep you playing for years.

It's a fun system to play. I thought Mutants and Masterminds was good but this one seems have a certain comic book feel to it.

The products ive gotten here are great I have no complaints its great that there is a place where I can get the old Rpg's that I started role playing with I will definitely shopping here quite a bit. V&V is one of my favorites Unlike palladiums Hero's unlimited that didnt have a combat system I found out later on that you had to buy other books to get the combat system .But for me V&V is the best because it was the original.

If you are looking for an old school game, this an an excellent one to start with. I found V&V a good read, and I always enjoyed the artwork, but I honestly never really found it to be much of a playable game.

Back in the (very) early 80's, several of us had gotten tired of playing nothing but “that Fantasy RPG.” My roommate was big into comic books, and found a copy of V&V, so we thought we would try it out with our gaming group. First, we did a little play-testing, to make sure we understood the rules and such. We quickly realized that it needed a bit of a rewrite to be a good playable system. My memory is a bit fuzzy now, but I know our greatest dislike, by far, was character generation.

First, the character is based on the player. Your stat's are the characters stats. In general, most people think they are better than they really are, compared to others impressions. This can lead to conflict and opinions better kept to oneself. This is an unnecessary complication when you simply want to escape the real world and have some fun. Next, you use random rolls for your characters powers. Anyone who is a fan of comic superheroes knows that most characters have a set of cohesive powers based on a theme or shtick. Random rolls result in characters that have random powers, which are hard to pull together in any kind of theme, and sometimes end conflict with each other, or are downright silly. Same goes for Skills and Weaknesses, though kudos for including Weaknesses ... something especially good in a superhero game.

Bottom line, if you like playing a character based on you, after throwing a bunch of dice, hoping to get lucky with them, then playing the random conglomerate you come up with, this game is for you. That’s not sarcasm … I know people who like the throwing the dice and playing what they get. If you prefer to escape the real world and play a character that makes sense (tongue in cheek, as this IS a superhero game), then V&V is a pretty weak game system.

As for the rest of the rules, they left little impression on me, other than being no better or worse than other games at the time. Before we could rewrite it to our satisfaction and bring in the whole gaming group, one of the guys found a copy of Champions, and that's the game we fell in love with, and played superheroes with for many years.

Still, I always enjoyed FGU’s V&V material, and collected almost all of the adventures (missing one) ... most of which can be found in PDF form here. They are very much worth checking out even if you prefer a different rules system.

In conclusion, if you are into old school games, this is still one you will want. Note: this is a scan, but you can search for or copy text.

Villains and Vigilantes brings back great memories for me. It was the first superhero game I ever played and that set me on a course for the rest of my life. It's quant and has a nice list of power descriptions, but by todays standards it has a lot of features that are just too cumbersome. (I still have nightmares about calculating a new character's Hit Points) don't try it without a calculator.

A good game and a pretty good scan too. Now, if my old print version from the early 80s completely breaks down, I've got a backup.

This one is a classic. Old school style super heroes with randomly generated powers rule!

This one is a classic. Old school style super heroes with randomly generated powers rule!

Villains and Vigilantes is an oldie of course but once upon a time it was one of the big superhero systems. It does some interestingly unfashionable things that modern systems don't. The semi-random character generation is something a lot of gamers would reject out of hand but it was my experience as a GM that the random roll system really opened my mind to character possibilities I would never have otherwise thought of. It made great inspiration for my villain making. Apart from that, the combat system, while once again an old fashioned one relying on the full polyhedral range of dice is straightforward, unambiguous, and well designed to accomodate the varying power levels produced by the dice driven character generation process. However, V&V's mechanics are very combat oriented and neglect things like detective work. Still, for me, the character generation alone was worth the five bucks and the basics are covered.

Still a classic d20 hero game, although it could use a diceless revision

Take a walk down memory lane! This game reminds me of everything that drew me into gaming (old school style) in the first place. While it's not perfect in the way it presents its materials and rules and makes you have to go searching without a handy summary page available, it does make up for this in its imaginative way in presenting a supers setting. It was the 1980s, and its fun to see how the games today still need to give kudos for the ones who first blazed the trails...like V&V. Even with its flaws, this game system is still much better for me than some of the ones sold today. Somehow the innocence of the comics I read as a kid remains in V&V. Not to say that other games can't capture that, but it's nice to find a game where the innocence is part of the allure of the system!

Simply The best SHRPG ever Trully balnced despite all its 80's math

Classic game with heavy combat rules. Like the fact that it is "real world" setting with you as the focal point. Twist on Player Character-based gaming.