teitan
Legend
Those are effects based design though as opposed to powers based design. Effects based allows for that because it is picking and choose bonuses, dice levels etc with selected modifiers to emulate the desired power. That's a benefit of effects based systems. The drawback is more complex character creation.
Marvel is a power based system where it would be impossible to publish a core book with every power imaginable, that being a drawback of this type of design but it allows for specific flavors to be kept intact in the power instead of a generic list of modifiers to emulate it. Character creation requires refluffing as character modeling the powers and talking things out with the GM to get what you want which can be a lot easier. Character creation is easier but lacks the granularity of effects based creation.
DC, built on Mutants & Masterminds, used a system that originally, in 1e, was a mish mash of effect and power based design and had a lot of holes in it for powers through it's 1st and 2nd editions.
The Marvel game has a lot more characters in the core rules, for example, than in the DC core rules. IT has well over 100 characters. The Cataclysm of Kang adds 32 more which is not too dissimilar from a M&M adventure or sourcebook that isn't a setting expansion. That is about 150 characters across two books. The only core book that has more than that is the DC Heroes boxed set from Mayfair with 250. GR did a great job with their 2 books but that wasn't available at release. In fact they released a book a year with the DCA book in 2010, the first H&V book in 2011, the second in 2012 and the DCU book in 2013. There were big delays from licensing. SO in that regard you are unfairly comparing Marvel to a complete game that took 4 years to get all its releases out.
The expansions for M&M often have a TON of new power builds in them and they did a full book in 2e and 3e of "powers" to bridge the gap between effects based and powers based design because there is a demand for it, so much so that they released the M&M Basic Heroes Handbook.
Icons was designed by Steve Kenson, who did M&M, to do a simpler game that was more akin to the old FASERIP system and it has its limitations with powers similarly. If you're going to compare Marvel Mulitverse to any other system it should be FASERIP, MEGS and Icons or M&M first edition. These systems have similar design goals and intentions while something like M&M 2e and 3e or Champions is vastly different.
