I certainly do not see an issue with there being too many of a certain type of character from a story or background perspective. It provides a more interesting story setting where it is not obvious that a superhero will save the day and not everyone will superpowers will be the ultimate good or evil character.

It’s kinda like saying a novel is different from a movie. Yes, an interactive multiplayer game isn’t a comic book, but they can share some elements.

In the case of any RPG there’s a line where it’s reasonable to compare to the source material (or reality) and a line where well, you’ve moved into a different media. The question is not so much whether they’ve emulated the media it came from, but whether they’ve adapted well to the media they’re in.

It’s a particularly relevant issue in superheroic settings where ‘team players’ are less well-received and have less history, but I don’t think it’s a solved problem.

Wasn’t this the argument against online worlds in the first place? The theory went that in a multiplayer game, each player cannot be the main protagonist as they are in single-player games. I think that’s been substantially debunked by now. There’s plenty of room for everyone to be the hero.

I submit that there can be worlds populated primarily bu super heroes, but even still I doubt those stories would be as engaging to me as those where heroes (and villains) are the minority.

Take the Justice League TV show. Seven primary heroes, and with Unlimited they had so many that there were superpowered living props in the background and people bickering over which super-stretchy guy they needed. Even settings you’d expect to have a single superhero focus tend toward this. The 1990′s Starman, an excellent post-Dark Age series, spends the first three comic books on talking about the importance of a single man to fill an empty legacy. By the second part of the series, we’ve got three people with the ‘starman’ moniker, the antivillan Shade, a reincarnated cowboy, an entire prison full of comparatively superpowered beings, a half-dozen retired supers, eight dead supers that won’t stop jawing off, it goes on and on.

Heck, the early City of Heroes comic book managed to keep the concept working very well, and that’s despite going out of their way to avoid the rare Surviving Eight megaheroes for the earlier run and having relatively every-man characters.

What makes superheroes cool is them being exciting and interesting. It doesn’t matter how many flying bricks there already are in the setting if you can make your new one meaningful, and it does matter how special your powers are when your character is just another boring Mary Sue.