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The 1989 Batman is on TV tonight, and I started wondering about it as a roleplaying session.
TL;DR: Not very good except as designed: for a single hero.
But let's try and figure it out anyway.
Structurally, it revolves around several people, but alas, for roleplaying we are primarily concerned about the scenes with the player(s). That makes it much shorter.
I missed the beginning of the movie (forgive me) and came in just after Joker kills Grissom. Still, let's try to piece it together. Some of this is from memory, so forgive me if it's not right.
- I missed the beginning but we get to have a sequence where the player gets to test out the system by beating up a mook.
- The next time that Batman shows up is at Ace Chemicals, where we get a fight sequence. Jack Napier then dies and Joker gets created.
Then Batman disappears from the story for quite a long time as we follow Jack Napier, Alexander Knox, and Vicki Vale. Now, that might be a good opportunity if you have some kind of a plot in mind, but it's got to be player-centric.
- Eventually we get to Bruce observing the Joker kill the mob boss. There's the seed of a good problem there: how do the players keep wanton murder from happening at the courthouse?
- The Smilex poison situation is a fine puzzle, but it could be resolved with a pyramid test as they try to find out the combinations of products.
- The encounter in the museum, rescuing Vicki Vale and the subsequent chase, relies heavily on Batman being outnumbered. Might not be true for a group of heroes.
- The encounter with the Joker in Vale's apartment is inconclusive, and is primarily a roleplaying event, with the realization of who Jack Napier is; don't know offhand how you'd make that sort of thing personal without knowing the heroes.
- Then there's the poison gas from the parade balloons. Batman just happens to have the equipment to deal with it (he blew a determination point or his Gadgets applies to the bat-thing as well), but a lot of people still die. (Bats gets lots of leeway because he is apparently the first person to dress up in a costume and fight crime.)
- And then the sequence in the church bell tower. Again, that's really a fight that's mano a mano, so it doesn't translate for a group of heroes.
That's not a bad number of encounters for an evening's adventure, so let's spitball for a moment.
We kinda want the villain created in the adventure. You could do a Fantastic Four or Challengers of the Unknown thing here, and have a group created.
Let's go over those encounters again, but try and make them really broad descriptions. Maybe we can pull enough out that they'd be good for a group.
- Announcement that the heroes are there, and minion encounter.
- Big fight that's really to trigger the creation of the villains.
- The puzzle as the villains unleash some kind of crime.
- The heroes and the bad guys meet in order to rescue someone who is the object of the villains' attentions (OotVA).
- There's some encounter involving the OotVA which lets the heroes connect the villains to something personal.
- The villains launch their Big Scheme and the heroes deal with it.
- Final boss fight.
Okay, that's actually not a bad structure. Of course, putting flesh on that skeleton is the tough part.
I think we really need to hold to the idea that these are the first heroes, or the first in decades. That way, we have a reason that the heroes don't immediately march to the local branch of Heroes Anonymous and demand to be let in.
The heroes can be of any type, but they got their powers at the same event: the event triggered the mutation (for Birthright), transformed, caused the need for training, and so on.
The group of villains would heavily depend on what your player characters are. For our purposes we'll make all of the villains some kind of Transformed. And a chemical plant is not a bad place for the accident, so we'll keep that.
We could combine the first two, actually: the big Ace Chemical fight is mostly against minions anyway.
