Teflon Billy
Explorer
My group and I played Chris Aylott (of Dynasties and Demagogues semi-fame)’ s Mutants and Masterminds adventure A Matter of Family (AMoF) a couple of days ago and I have to say it’s a well-made, nicely written addition to a product line known for it’s quality.
First, the good bits.
The art is really nice; and when “really nice” means “good enough to hang with the usual Mutants and Masterminds Art”…you know that means pretty damn fine.
The plot is compelling—being something more than just a connected series of fights and obstacles for the PC’s to overcome. AMoF may be the first published Superhero Adventure I can recall that concentrated mostly on social interactions with non-super powered NPC’s rather than super combat after endless super combat.
Which is not to say there is any shortage of punch-ups; just that they don’t tend to move the plot along any more than simple conversation, detective work or interrogation.
The Villains provided in the adventure are a joy. There seems to be two schools of thought in the world today concerning character creation in Mutants and Masterminds. This first is Modeling: that is, creating the character’s stats based on a concept and sticking with that come hell of high water.
The second is Optimization, where the characters are made with an eye toward milking every mechanical advantage from them possible within the concept.
M&M products in general have a real problem thus far in that they tend to follow the “Modeling” school of character creation, whereas every player I know of (and most every player to come to the Green Ronin Forums) seems to lean more heavily toward “Optimization”.
This leaves us with such embarrassing situations as Freedom City’s premiere super team (The Freedom League) being trounced by groups of newly-made PC’s with childish ease. This desire to publish “modeled” rather than “optimized” NPC’s often leads to the inclusion of some characters of very dubious utility in published M&M material.
I am happy to say this is not the case in AMoF, the characters are interesting and well made (meaning, I guess, optimized), and come complete with instructions from their creator on clever tactics which will work with their power sets. Nice stuff indeed.
Now, the bad bits (or simply “not as good”, if you prefer…it is far from terrible).
Though the NPC Metahumans are well made and interesting, they are just plain too few in number. The combat challenges presented to a group of “3 to 5 PL10 characters” (as suggested by the author) are less than minimal.
We played with a group of four Power Level 10 PC’s who literally had no problem with the single attackers sent against them (who were, admittedly, there to be beaten and “siphon off” hero points from the characters before the final confrontation with the “Big Villain", though the PC’s spent not a single hero point to dispatch either of these characters).
M&M is simply not built so that a single Power Level 10 character will stand any kind of chance against 4 similarly powered characters.
Even the main villain, whose “Incorporeal” power is often a game breaker in combat, has “Unarmed Physical Attacks” as his vulnerability; meaning that your team’s “brick” (A Thor/Hulk/Collossus/The Thing analog…a very common character concept) is going to walk through him like he was tall grass; and this is the climactic battle
As mentioned above, the plot was interesting enough that they still had fun investigating things, interrogating people and just generally putting the pieces of the puzzle together, but were I to run it again, I would definitely add some more “fight” to the opposition.
So all told, I think this is a good product, and I look forward to more M&M products from Chris Aylott, he seems to have a nice grasp of the feel of “modern age” comics, to at least the degree that Freedom City’s Steve Kenson understands the Silver Age.
And that is pretty high praise.
First, the good bits.
The art is really nice; and when “really nice” means “good enough to hang with the usual Mutants and Masterminds Art”…you know that means pretty damn fine.
The plot is compelling—being something more than just a connected series of fights and obstacles for the PC’s to overcome. AMoF may be the first published Superhero Adventure I can recall that concentrated mostly on social interactions with non-super powered NPC’s rather than super combat after endless super combat.
Which is not to say there is any shortage of punch-ups; just that they don’t tend to move the plot along any more than simple conversation, detective work or interrogation.
The Villains provided in the adventure are a joy. There seems to be two schools of thought in the world today concerning character creation in Mutants and Masterminds. This first is Modeling: that is, creating the character’s stats based on a concept and sticking with that come hell of high water.
The second is Optimization, where the characters are made with an eye toward milking every mechanical advantage from them possible within the concept.
M&M products in general have a real problem thus far in that they tend to follow the “Modeling” school of character creation, whereas every player I know of (and most every player to come to the Green Ronin Forums) seems to lean more heavily toward “Optimization”.
This leaves us with such embarrassing situations as Freedom City’s premiere super team (The Freedom League) being trounced by groups of newly-made PC’s with childish ease. This desire to publish “modeled” rather than “optimized” NPC’s often leads to the inclusion of some characters of very dubious utility in published M&M material.
I am happy to say this is not the case in AMoF, the characters are interesting and well made (meaning, I guess, optimized), and come complete with instructions from their creator on clever tactics which will work with their power sets. Nice stuff indeed.
Now, the bad bits (or simply “not as good”, if you prefer…it is far from terrible).
Though the NPC Metahumans are well made and interesting, they are just plain too few in number. The combat challenges presented to a group of “3 to 5 PL10 characters” (as suggested by the author) are less than minimal.
We played with a group of four Power Level 10 PC’s who literally had no problem with the single attackers sent against them (who were, admittedly, there to be beaten and “siphon off” hero points from the characters before the final confrontation with the “Big Villain", though the PC’s spent not a single hero point to dispatch either of these characters).
M&M is simply not built so that a single Power Level 10 character will stand any kind of chance against 4 similarly powered characters.
Even the main villain, whose “Incorporeal” power is often a game breaker in combat, has “Unarmed Physical Attacks” as his vulnerability; meaning that your team’s “brick” (A Thor/Hulk/Collossus/The Thing analog…a very common character concept) is going to walk through him like he was tall grass; and this is the climactic battle
As mentioned above, the plot was interesting enough that they still had fun investigating things, interrogating people and just generally putting the pieces of the puzzle together, but were I to run it again, I would definitely add some more “fight” to the opposition.
So all told, I think this is a good product, and I look forward to more M&M products from Chris Aylott, he seems to have a nice grasp of the feel of “modern age” comics, to at least the degree that Freedom City’s Steve Kenson understands the Silver Age.
And that is pretty high praise.
