Mutants and Masterminds Second Edition

[Teflon Billy]

It has been called "the best, most exciting superhero RPG in years." It sets "new standards in design and presentation." It has won awards that include the Pen & Paper Fan Award for Best RPG, the ENWorld Award for Best d20 RPG, and the prestigious EN World Peer Award for 2003. Now the World's Greatest Superhero Roleplaying Game is even better!

Mutants & Masterminds, Second Edition, is all the best of the award-winning RPG, with new updates, refinements, and expansions to make it the most complete, detailed, and fun version of superhero gaming yet! In this 256-page hardcover with stunning new cover art by Ramón Pérez, you'll find a complete game. Based on the popular Open Game License, Mutants & Masterminds has everything you need to create your own superheroes and villains. It offers more than a dozen ready-made superhero archetypes and even more ready-to-use supervillain archetypes, so you can start playing right away! Included are two introductory adventures, one providing an introduction to the award-winning Freedom City campaign setting.

 

[Teflon Billy]

I’ll be the first to say that this product was not likely to be a very hard sell for me. I played the first Edition of Mutants and Masterminds a lot, and mean a lot. I was an early adopter of what I thought was a fine, well-supported system with a lot of style.

Which is not to say that M&M Classic didn’t have its issues—it most certainly did—its character creation, for example, was billed as being simplicity itself; but with trickier concepts it could become almost unusable. The use of stat blocks in the published materials made published characters so difficult to use that it often made more sense to just re-make them yourself…except then it often became clear that the point totals in the book were incorrect.

Its saving grace was the game’s actual play. It was one of the few games that played quickly and excitingly enough to properly model superhero comics, and this it did with élan. Added to the astonishingly good supplementary material which quickly followed it to market (I’m looking at you Crooks and Freedom City, take a bow) it fast became our superhero RPG of choice…we could hammer out the character generation inconsistencies on our own.

So here we have a second edition, and with the exception of a couple of small burps, it’s pretty much everything I hoped it would be. You’ll notice that the following review is almost all positives. That’s no accident. This new edition has cleaned up everything that was muddy before from odd terminologies (Power Stunts—which were nothing of the sort in the old edition—are now much more intuitively named Power Feats, which is exactly what they are: Feats attached to powers), to character generation strangeness (For instance, it was never clear in the old edition how to figure the cost of attaching Extras and Flaws to Powers bought as Power Stunts of other Powers….if that sentence seems a bit arcane to you, it was (and is) to me as well).

The old, easily abused, 10 pt. Weaknesses (now called Drawbacks) have been ably fixed by not only allowing them to be taken in ranks lower than 10 pts, but separating them from a separate class of disadvantage: Complications

Complications give you extra Hero Points when they come up in play. The difference is well-noted. Drawbacks are Mechanical disadvantages to your character, while complications are Roleplaying disadvantages.

Kryptonite? Drawback.

Lois Lane? Complication.

Simple. Intuitive. Easy-as-pie. This is a good example of how most of the ruleset has been updated.

Like the elimination of “Super” ability scores. In the old edition, Normal Human stats were capped at 20, and were purchased at a reduced cost from the stats available as superpowers, though they provided bonuses at an identical rate. The “Super” ability scores were purchased at a variable point cost, and provided bonuses that differed from the normal stats The normal stats could exceed the campaigns PL, but the super stats could not, though they did stack with them, and could have Extras, Flaws, Power Stunts etc purchased on them at a…

This is getting complicated to explain.

Anyway, now, in the lean, streamlined bee-yoo-tee-ful new edition, there are simply… Ability Scores.

One cost, one bonus, “human” maximum is defined as being 25, but this has no mechanical in-game effect. It is—again—smooth, simplified and intuitive.

The Power Feat Alternate Power was a long time coming as well. They had [something like this in the old edition, but it involved buying another power from the same class (Attack, Alteration, Movement etc) as a Power Stunt of an existing power, and then only being able to use one or the other.

Now, we’ve got roughly the same thing only—you guessed it—simplified, clarified and tidied up.

Now, I’ll admit that my first thought here was that making DC comics Ultra Boy would be a trivial (and cost-effective) job, but the sheer utility of the Altermate Power feat is best illustrated by a quote from EN World’s own Kevin “Piratecat” Kulp, and it goes a little something like this…

[bq]…For me, one of the big "oh, of course!" moments was when I realized how easy and efficient it was to build alternate powers now. Superman's heat vision/X-ray vision/telescopic vision/microscopic vision is now much easier, and much more cost-effective, to model… [/bq]

Amen Brother. Same with any “Variable Special Effect” attack (like Space Ghost’s armbands) Fire, Ice, Sonic whatever…if you can only use one at a time, you can calculate the cost and buy them very easily now.

Need both hands to use your Clinging Power? Buy your Energy blast as an Alternate power on that then.

Good stuff.

I had the opportunity to talk with the author (Steve Kenson) at the ENnie awards, and mentioned that I had thumbed through the new edition briefly and liked what I saw, but was worried that the semi-screwy Device rules from 1st Edition hadn’t been fixed. My concern (and it is one of my constant bitches about first edition M&M) was that the M&M device rules didn’t model the variety of devices as well as HERO system’s Focus rules.

He mentioned that they were still being worked on, and we had a brief conversation regarding the “granularity” of the two systems, and how if you started implementing a more granular series of mechanics like HERO system uses, you began to lose a lot of what we both liked about M&M…its simplicity of play etc. (I then invited him to come with my friends and I to a strip club, but that is another—more embarrassing— story).

I do find it odd, however, that throughout that entire conversation, Steve didn’t think to mention THAT HE HAD FIXED THE DEVICE RULES.

I mean honestly! I know he was probably giddy with joy at Green Ronin’s powerhouse showing at the awards, but neglecting to mention in the course of a five minute conversation that the problem we are discussing has been solved seems peculiar. I mean he didn’t seem to be drinking or anything

But…solved it is. When I tried to house-rule the first edition Device Flaw, I kept running up against the fact that with M&M’s core minimum 1pp/lvl rule, the payoffs for “higher level” (meaning “More obvious” or “easier to take away”) Devices was just too rich, while anything less didn’t differentiate between, say an innocuous ring which let you fly and Magical Flaming Robotic Wings which let you fly.

Anyway, it is elegantly fixed, with a minimum of math, minimal fuss and about a single paragraph of text.

It stands as a testament to why I leave this kind of thing to the professionals for the most part.

Now, the new Feats presented are for the most part really, really cool. Very genre-appropriate (Set-up allows you to Feint for the benefit of your teammates), very “certain character” appropriate (I can’t imagine any Batman-inspired character from this point forward neglecting to take Fearsome Presence) or just plain repairs on examples in the earlier edition (Sneak Attack is a damnsight more reasonable than Surprise Strike was). But there are a few issues here that will likely see houseruling in our game.

The first criticism comes from my buddy Theo, who now gets to share the same kind of “Teflon Billy Review-Based Quote Fame” that only Piratecat, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman currently enjoy. Take it away Theo…


[bq]…I think 1pp each (or per rank) is too cheap for some feats - like 2pp for Evasion at rank 2, which is cheaper, and arguably better, than buying up your Reflex Save. I can either buy up my Reflex save at 1pp/lvl , or for 1pp buy up my chance of getting half damage (or for 2pp I can have 100% chance of half damage, and a shot at zero) At these prices even the Hulk will be choosing to Evade tank shells!

Though less so than the last edition, I think 2E suffers a bit from the fact that the Author seems as if he doesn't usually play with Power Gamers.

His regular players will look at a terrific feat like Evasion and think, "Well, that's just not appropriate for my character." And I definitely think that a GM should look at a character sheet and call a player out when something doesn't make sense, but I don't think it should necessarily be a requirement that the game is only balanced with GM intervention.

I love the game, I love this edition…but my game will still need some house-rules.[/bq]

Well said. I take a look and see the Feat Defensive roll and wonder why anyone would choose to pay the same cost as the power Protection (1pp/rank) for a Feat that is best described as a lesser form of the Protection power. I see no upside here outside of a small bonus to reflex saves vs. Area Effects (which seems more than balanced by the fact that a roll is necessary, unlike Protection).

In a similar vein, given that the new Hero Point rules start each play with a single, precious Hero Point (which are used for all manner of plot and mechanics alteration), the feat Luck seems unbelievably cheap, handing out Hero Points as it does at 1pp Each.

But anyway, back to the goodness.

The Powers section has increased substantially (including 1st edition’s glaring omission: Summon). And most importantly, the rule allowing you to buy other powers as Extras of existing powers is, thankfully, gone.

It was, at its core, never anything more in the minds of most players than a point-shaving power grab. And it’s “balancing factor” (that a Drain or Nullify against one power Drained or Nullified them all) was virtually a non-issue to those of us who don’t really use Drains and Nullify’s with any regularity (We’ve always felt that in a game about superpowers, turning it in to a game about not having superpowers was a bit of a fun-killer).

Good riddance “powers-as-extras”, if we see you again it will be too soon.

I just realized that Slick is gone. That’s odd.

M&M art director Hal Mangold continues to deliver the goods, as the production values are still right up there in a product line that defined the idea of high production values in RPGs for me. There is a new set of “Iconic” characters, who lack the names and logos that their predecessors had.

In their defense, none are as lame (with the requisite IMO) as Twist or as dull as Lady Hex in appearance. In fact the illustration of the “unnamed lady sorceress” can only be called a quantum leap forward in illustration. The martial artist looks clumsily drawn though, a giant step backward from the excellent Pugilist illustration of 1st edition, and though I always quite like Protonik in the old edition, I think the new picture of the Paragon iconic is an improvement, largely due to the angle it is “shot” from.

Ahh yes, “Paragon”. They apparently chose to do away with the iconic designation “Original”, which I think is all for the best as, when I first read it, all I could think of was “A Superman clone? That’s not very ‘original’.” Which I know doesn’t show my intellect in the best light, but there you are.


That is what the new edition brings to the table first and foremost: Clarity.

And it was something sorely needed. Character creation is now a breeze. As an exercise I went through and tried remaking some of my old characters. On average, they took about 10 minutes each.

I love this new edition and expect to see a lot of use from it. Kudos to all involved in its production.

 

[MancerBear]

Green Ronin's Mutants & Masterminds 2e

I haven't done a game review in quite some time, but I've been so impressed with Mutants & Masterminds 2e that I had to put pen to paper, so to speak.

I was involved in the playtesting of the first edition of Mutants & Masterminds, and thought at the time that it was the best supers game around, even with its flaws. I was a little disappointed that I didn't become involved int eh playtest of the 2nd edition. What I am glad to see though, is that some of the suggestions that didn't make it into the first edition, certainly made it into the second edition.

Physically the book is quite impressive; a 251 page hardcover with cover art by Ramon Perez. The interior design is also excellent, with chapters having individually coloured margins for easy identification, and an overall high standard of art. Some art is reprinted from the first edition, but that doesn't detract from the overall presentation.
One of the things I really like about this edition are the little boxes scattered throughout the book entitled 'Under the Hood' which gives an insight into the reason why certain decisions had been made, as well as designer notes and tips.

The book is divided into the usual chapters which I'll detail below.

The introduction provides the standard information regarding what a role playing game is and what you need to play, as well as a description of the basic core mechanics of M&M. This is very elegantly explained and leaves no room for doubt. This is followed by an example of gameplay, and finished with a list of important terms.

Chapter 1 provides the basics of character creation with a step by step description of the steps taken. It is then followed up by 13 character archetypes that can used in play immediately with minor personalising touches. Power points and power levels are explained and the chapter concludes with two examples of hero creation. There are one or two places where the creation examples are a little unclear, but all in all it's very good.
Chapter 2 details abilities, the generation technique, and benchmarks. A new addition to this edition is the ability to raise your ability scores above 20. In the first edition, any ability score above 20 needed to be purchased using Super Attributes, each of which had different point costs according to their versatility. Ability points are now all the same price. Another major change has been the removal of Strength and Dexterity bonuses affecting your chances to hit and avoid an attack. A great move in my book as it brings into line the cost of Strength and Dexterity with the other abilities.

Chapter 3 details skills. The skills list has been seriously cut back, with some skills disappearing, and others being folded into one skill. I like this a lot, but what I like more is the fact that each point you spend on skills gives you 4 ranks worth. This is a fantastic change from the first edition; as far as I was concerned; skills were never as effective as powers and should not have been given a similar point cost. Once again, skill benchmarks are listed, giving you a good idea of what how many ranks in a particular skill mean. Each skill is adequately explained, with lots of examples on how they are used in play.

Chapter 4 is where all the fun begins, with Feats. The Feats list from the first edition was fantastic, but there was some confusion between a normal feat and a super feat. Now, feats are just that, something that anyone can have. To make matters more interesting, their cost has been reduced to 1 power point, and some feats can have more than one rank, making the feat more effective; all excellent additions to the game. Each feat is detailed and seems to be quite well balanced as a whole. Feats have been broken up into 4 broad categories; combat, fortune, general, and skill feats.

Chapter 5 brings us to the section on powers. A whopping 61 pages of them! All the usual suspects from first addition are here, as well as new ones that Steve has released periodically. My favourite has to be Anatomical Separation. I was disappointed, though, to see the demise of the Gadgets power, which I still feel has a place in the rules. Many of the problems plaguing powers have been rectified, descriptions simplified, and an overall streamlining has been put into place. Gone is the option of having powers as an extra to another power, which was just a point rorting system as far as I'm concerned. Now we have Alternate Powers, where you can use one, but not the other. Very elegant I feel, though it still suffers a little bit in the areas of trying to make some alternate powers fit, but that's just an individual problem, I'm sure. The powers section concludes with a section on Power Feats, Extras, and Flaws, all of which are used to individualise and further define your powers.

Chapter 6 provides a lot of help advice on rounding out your characters details, such as name, appearance, origin, etc. This chapter really does provide a lot of support in this area, as well as giving the mechanics for both Drawbacks, and Complications. Drawbacks replace the Weaknesses from first edition, and have been further refined so that they no longer provide a flat 10 point bonus, which led to players taking the least disadvantageous weakness and claiming the full 10 points for it. Now, Drawbacks can be refined by frequency and intensity, giving you bonus points according to your selection. Complications are the little problems that affect your character throughout his career, such as secret identities, love interests, etc. These don't give any bonus points, but they do give extra hero points when they are introduced into the adventure by the game master. This is one addition I truly love. Couple this with the change that a PC no longer gains his full allotment of Hero Points at the start of an adventure, but has to earn them through setbacks in the adventure, really opens up the story potentials for both the players and the game master.

Chapter 7 details devices and equipment. Devices are the sorts of toys supers like to play with, where equipment is the sort of stuff that anyone with the right amount of money can purchase. This leads me to the Wealth option in the game. Just like in the first edition, Wealth is an optional ability that the game master can choose to ignore in his campaign, but if the gm does use it, Wealth becomes important in the creation of Devices. The chapter also details a list of common equipment, headquarters, vehicles, and constructs. As a side note, Headquarters now cost a team of heroes points, which in the old system was free.

Chapter 8 explains combat in full detail. This is a fairly self explanatory chapter, and apart from a few typos causing confusion, is very easy to follow. Actions are explained in detail, as is each combat move. Combat is quite similar to most open game license products, with some slight changes to the names of various manoeuvres. Damage is explained in quite some detail, and hasn't changed from the first edition of requiring a Save to resist damage. For me, this was the crucial aspect of the game, truly making combat and damage far more comic-booky. Add to that the streamlined knockback rules and I'm a happy puppy.

Chapter 9 is where all the Game Mastering advice begins. This chapter deals with handling players, how to adjudicate off the cuff, saying no, and more importantly, saying yes to players, and adventure creation and design. Fairly straight forward advice, but always useful to reread every now and again.

Chapter 10 brings us to world-building. This chapter is chock full of advice for designing and running your own campaigns and worlds, with a concise history of the various comic book eras, and suggestions on how to create the same feel in your campaign. It includes everything from character origins, to organisations and laws, providing information and examples.

Chapter 11 gives advice on creating villains, as well as provideing archetypes for 14 different villain models that can be plucked right out of the book and set against your players with minimum fuss. This is followed by a list of normal NPCs, animals and monsters. This resource was largely missing from the previous edition, and is a welcome addition for me.
Finally, the book is rounded out with not one but two adventures. The first one, "The Heist" is an adventure that has been previously available at the Mutants & Masterminds website. I was a little disappointed with this, as I was hoping for two completely new adventures. The second adventure though, is completely new as far as I'm aware, and provides a lot of action for players to learn the basic aspects of the game.

I read this book from cover to cover the moment I received it, and feel that overall it is a fantastic addition to the superhero roleplaying genre. I congratulate both Steve Kenson, the creator, and the playtesters, on a job really well done here. They have taken a supers game that was already great, and turned it into something truly fantastic. Apart form the normal printing typo hiccups, the book is excellent, easy to follow, and truly a pleasure to read.

Well true believers, I really only have one thing to say, as quoted by Steve Kenson himself, "Make mine Mutants & Masterminds” (2nd edition, of course).

 

[Sketchpad]

Mutants & Masterminds 2nd Edition

M&M 2nd Edition
A Review by Sketchpad

Wow. Those three letters sum up how I felt after reading Mutants and Masterminds, 2nd Edition by Green Ronin. I was a bit reluctant, being a fan of the 1st Edition, but I’m glad I picked this up. From its revised rules to its graphic design, the book is an incredible wealth of info and packed for fun.
Serving as both a player’s handbook and GM’s guide, the M&M 2e core rulebook begins with an overview of the system and the typical “What is a Roleplaying Game”. After this short chapter, the book kicks into overdrive, starting with character creation delving into typical heroic archetypes. Though not all covered, the heroic models in this book cover many of the staples of the comic-book/superhero genre and are beautifully rendered in a comic-book style. As the reader explores the rules, some of the new rules are easily apparent, as many point costs have changed, as well as the entire Power Level structure. While the old PLs seemed fairly restrictive, the new PLs open up many possibilities for the GM and player alike. There are now trade-offs available to increase some combat abilities and powers are no longer tethered to the PLs (rather their offensive capabilities are instead for balance issues).
When reviewing the skills and feats chapters, there are many old friends listed, but some new ones as well. In skills, we get many of the standard d20 skills, but also get additional ones like Investigate and Notice, which happens to be a combination of Listen and Spot. For feats, we get staples like Power Attack and Leadership, as well as newer feats like Ritualist and Equipment. All of the feats have been modified to fit M&M’s core d20 mechanic, some using Hero Points (like Leadership), while others are able to be taken in levels (like Favored Enemy).
The meat of the book seems to be in the Powers section. Everyone should be able to find one of their favorite powers in this list. Most of the genre staples are here: Energy Blast (now called Blast), Flame Control, Flight, Super-Strength … this book has them all and more! To my surprise, I even found such rarities as Hellfire Control and Summon among the list, two of my favorites from comics. Along with these powers, there is also a healthy amount of power feats, extras and flaws, with the former two taking on some revised roles. Of the abilities listed, I think I was most impressed with the Device power, which replaces the flaw of the same name in M&M 1e. Though similar to its predecessor, the Device power allows a discount on a pool of points to be used on a device, rather than discounting powers directly. This makes it easier in some ways to plan your characters gadgets during creation.
Along with the powers are new rules for gadgets and gadget creation. Fans of the old Marvel Super Heroes RPG (you know … the one with the d%?) will love some of the concepts in this chapter. The new rules make more sense in the creation process, as players must now make a few rolls to create objects, as well as using optional rules like Wealth for purchasing the equipment. Just want your character to start with equipment? That’s the beauty of the Equipment feat. Now, by taking said feat, a player can purchase standard equipment for their character at a discounted cost. Need a base with some robots? How about a team vehicle? They’re in the equipment section as well, all with updated rules. There are even some rules for characters that want to build magical artifacts or rituals that mimic powers.
Polishing off the character section are the standard rules for combat, damage and healing. With many examples, I’ve found that this newer edition seems a bit easier to understand than its predecessor. I’m looking forward to a 2nd edition GM screen, as many of the charts and information in this section could be really useful to have in front of me when I run a game.
The last third of the book is really intended for the GM’s use, as it contains a gob of information on GMing advice, world building and NPCs. Though they are more generic this time around, the villain archetypes are really well done … each nicely illustrated and full of options. There’s even a bestiary of animals, standard NPCs and monsters to help or hinder the heroes. I found this section had some of the best information for a GM wanting to run a superhero game. Great job!
Finally there’s the intrinsic design of the book. Let me just say that this book is gorgeous! If Hal Mangold doesn’t win an Ennie for this book at next year’s Gen Con, than no one should. For those not in the know, the entire book is full-color on glossy pages. Fans of Ramon Perez and Storn Cook will also be happy, as much of their work is also featured in this book.
Overall, this is a great product and I’m looking forward to their catalog of M&M products in the future. Keep up the great work Green Ronin!