Grognardia, which is the best blog about role-playing games I've ever found, has a reminiscence about the Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing Game. I had completely forgotten about the existence of this game, which is surprising, since it's all I did one summer when I was 12. I only had one other friend, and we played this game obsessively together.

The weird thing is: Apparently, it was a really good role-playing game.

The genius behind Marvel Super Heroes is its universal results table, an extremely elegant way both to present and to adjudicate any action a character might attempt in the game. Although a character's seven attributes (Fighting, Agility, Strength, Endurance, Reason, Intuition, and Psyche) did have a numerical value associated with them, that value played minimal role in the game mechanically. Instead, it was an attribute's adjective — Good, Incredible, Amazing, etc. — that was more important, since each one was associated with a column on the results table. The greater a character's attributes, the more likely a chance of success in any action governed by it.

If you ever played (and entirely forgot about) this game, this post, and the huge comment thread of reminiscences that follows the post, will really take you back.