Here's a review after reading most of the book...
Safety Tools & Spirit of the Game. I absolutely love that the book has this so front and center. It's in the opening chapter after the typical "what is an RPG?" section.
Art. Most of the art is good. Some pieces are a bit cartoony for my tastes. Which is weird because I like most superhero cartoons more than the live-action stuff. But some of the art is just off to me. They have the whole Marvel backlog to choose from...and that's what they choose? There is a lot of it. Full-page art. Two-page spreads.
The Dice. The dice are fine but pointlessly weird. I get the whole Marvel 616 marketing gimmick aspect of it, but it's still weird to deal with. The "Marvel die" goes from 1-6 like a normal d6, but the 1 isn't a 1, it's a 6+. You have to add that missing 5 in yourself unless you use a dedicated Marvel die roller. Whenever that 1/6+ comes up that's a Fantastic result. Something good happens. Roll your dice, add them up, and add in your relevant stat. If your total meets or beats the target number, you succeed. Otherwise you fail.
Note any face of a d6 comes up 1/6 of the time, aka 16.67% of the time. So that Fantastic result will come up more than 3x more often than a natural 20 in D&D. That's a lot. If you hit with a Fantastic result in combat...that's double damage and some other effect, like knockback. So you will really want to have the knockback rules down or taped on the inside of your referee's screen.
If you roll the magic marketing number, 616, then that's...I kid you not...the Ultimate Fantastic Roll. You auto succeed and ignore any trouble (aka disadvantage). That is only going to happen 0.46% of the time according to anydice.
Abilities & Defenses. The familiar six stats are here if a bit different. Instead of a 3-18 score, you only have a lower static score that's added to your rolls. But, in a cool twist, you have defenses for all your stats, which are simply the stat +10. Good idea that has popped up a few places before. But it's neat, it works, and it's not a pain to remember. If you happen to lose part of your character sheet for some reason.
Combat. The combat chapter is about 17-pages long. Most of it will be familiar to 5E players. Action, reaction, move, double move, free actions, etc. It touches on various ways to play, theater of the mind, grid, VTT, etc. One thing that really bugs me about superhero RPGs is that they tend to lock doing superheroic things behind feats, classes, powers, etc. It's weird to me. MMRPG does to some degree, but three of the biggest, most important actions a superhero can take are available for everyone to perform right out of the gate. Those three are: interpose, ram, and skulk.
Interpose is that incredibly heroic thing where a nearby ally is about to get hit and you put your body between your ally and the attack. You take the hit for your ally. That's very heroic and is a simple reaction. You just do it. No roll. No feat. Simply a "nope, I'll take that hit." And I love that. That's interpose done right.
Ram is your typical charge across the field and slam into someone or fly across the sky and body check someone. MMRPG, again, has that just out there for everyone to do.
Skulk is a slightly less heroic move, you duck behind a character and let them take the hit instead of you. The opposite of an interpose. But, importantly, this also represents the hero taunting one baddie into attacking the hero...only to move out of the way at the last moment so one baddie actually hits another baddie. It's a classic comic book superhero move. And there it is. Out in the open for everyone to do, without a feat or prerequisite in sight. First house rule I'd make is to let this apply to inanimate objects as well. Getting the baddies so mad they fire blindly at the hero only for the hero to be standing in front of the evil Kirby dot machine and dodge out of the way at the last moment is a staple of the genre.
Damage. One of my two big complaints about this game is the way damage is handled. When you make an attack you roll 3d6. That special Marvel die is used for a lot of things, including damage. When you hit, you look at the Marvel die, then manipulate that with addition, subtraction, multiplication, then some more addition, and possibly some more multiplication. No, that's not an exaggeration.
From the book:
"Example: She-Hulk is Rank 4, so her damage multiplier is 4. Her power Mighty 4 adds +4 to that for close attacks, which gives her a damage multiplier of 8. To that, she adds her Melee score, so when she hits with a close attack, she does (dMarvel x 8) +5 points of damage."
Armor and damage reduction is a fairly common thing for supers to have. Here it's handled as a modifier to that multiplier.
From the book:
"Example: Spider-Man (Miles Morales) punches Iron Man (Tony Stark) and hits. Spider-Man's Melee damage is (dMarvel x 4) +3. Iron Man's armor gives him Sturdy 2, which reduces the damage multiplier by 2, so the damage that gets through from a successful punch is (dMarvel x 2) +3 instead."
And remember, if you hit with a Fantastic success, that's double damage. Which you do at the end.
So that's going to be a lot of math being done on the fly. Maybe print out some times tables and tape them to the inside of your referee's screen. 2-6 x 2-10 should do it.
Knockback. Surprisingly, knockback is handled simply and smoothly. As your strong characters inflict knockback about 1/6th of their successful hits, you'll want the knockback rules taped to your referee's screen. They're simple but you'll be referencing them a lot. A lot of superhero RPGs handle knockback rather badly or make it more complicated than necessary, so it's nice to see it handled well here. Yes, this is one of my measures of a superhero RPG.
Powers. Well, there's no getting around it. It's a superhero game. There has to be powers. It's one of the main ways to judge a superhero RPG. And I gotta say, it's my other big complaint about MMRPG. Powers are basically feats and feat chains or feat trees. Prerequisites abound. Each feat is a small, discrete section of power. There are 50-some pages of powers. Which sounds good. Until you see that the powers are things like "Accuracy 1: +1 to Agility damage multiplier and +1 to non-combat Agility checks" or "Clobber: On a Fantastic success, knock target prone."
Powers that let you do cool things have a listed Focus cost and action type. Neither is listed on the regular character profiles. So when using a pre-gen from the book you'll have to look up what exactly all their powers do. Some are named similarly enough that you'll just have to write down what the differences are until you memorize them. Elemental Barrage, Blast, and Burst. Elemental Barrier, Prison, and Protection.
Power Stunts. There's also no power stunt mechanics that I can see. Something of a letdown as that's always one of the most fun things to do at the table in a superhero game. Come up with weird and unusual ways to use powers. Super shenanigans.
Profiles. There are something like 130 pre-generated characters in the book. That's fantastic. Each on their own page with...most of what you need to play them right there. Again, a lot of the powers are not defined on the sheet and will have to be looked up.
Narrator Section. The other big thing about superhero RPGs is the referee advice. A lot of games live or die by the advice section. The version here is...okay. There's a lot of advice on how to handle problems that arise, like say telepathy or mind control or finding a group. But the advice on actually running the game? Not much. What is there is good. Things like don't railroad the players is there. But it's rather thin.
Conclusion. This is a decent superhero RPG. It's more complicated than it needs to be and the powers are handled poorly, I think. I would never want to make a character for this because of how powers are handled. Just way too fiddly. I wouldn't mind running this because I could fudge a lot of what the powers do. But I don't think I'd want to play this. Which is too bad because I love Marvel superheroes.
