Hero System Vs. Mutants & Masterminds. Which is the better super-hero game?

[ValhallaGH]

They just didn't care for it. I thought things were going fine then it was universal walkout time.

Yowch! Those situations always sting the most, and I've seen them hurt friendships. I'm glad you guys are still on decent terms with each other.

Good luck getting a game you all enjoy. And good luck finding a second table to try out your (coming) new toys with. If we end up near each other for any length of time, I'm game.

 

[Quantum]

How else would you put a cost to them?


I wouldn't have saves and attacks bought at all. I really like the Monte Cook option in his d20 CoC which allows a player to choose their saves as either an attack option in which the saves are slightly lower but they have more powerful attacks, or a defense option, where the opposite occurs.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

So you're automatically given your saves in proportion to your attack? Does that mean there are separate attack values for different save types?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Yowch! Those situations always sting the most, and I've seen them hurt friendships. I'm glad you guys are still on decent terms with each other.

Good luck getting a game you all enjoy. And good luck finding a second table to try out your (coming) new toys with. If we end up near each other for any length of time, I'm game.

Fortunately, nothing happened that made me take it personally. It was almost all about them not liking M&M and/or supers gaming.

It was my first time back behind the screen in almost 2 years after being burned out as a GM- well, specifically as a D&D DM. And even though I was really stoked about the campaign, I was amazed that I had any kind of positive response at all. Several in that group is FRPG only, and a few are D&DE only. But a few years ago, the guys were all playing City of Heroes, so someone commented that it would be cool to run a Supers RPG campaign, and I offered to run one.

*cue sound of crickets chirping*

After that, I thought I'd never get these guys to play a non-D&D game at all. So when I offered to run that M&M campaign, I was stunned to find that 2 of the first volunteers to play were the D&D only guys. But eventually, frustration with the system and the yearning for a return to sword-slinging won out.

Which I'm perfectly fine with- as I've said elsewhere, I've got hundreds of PC concepts waiting to be played...

 

[Stacie GmrGrl]

I vote Hero System, for the reason that the game system clicks with me where M&M just.... doesn't. There's just something about the game that I just don't like, and I have no idea why or what that is. I've played in a couple of M&M games and one was really a blast, and yet it was like playing AD&D 2e for me, there were just some things about the game that I did not grasp, and if I don't grasp a game after a few sessions, I just give it up.

Hero System, I understood that game when I first cracked the book, first with the BBB edition, then Fred, and will be getting 6e soon, hopefully, if only to have it. It's an easy game for me to understand, but I guess I can say I understand the internal logic of the game, and for M&M its just beyond me.

And I do like rolling a scatter explosion of dice and counting numbers

 

[Erpegis]

Personally, I think that HERO is counter-intuitive, slow, and there is too much point-juggling. I think that M&M is too derivative, some d20 solution are transferred without any consideration, and there is too much point-juggling.

If I had my choice in superhero RPG, I'd lean towards Savage Worlds.

M&M is, when you include the wonderful Freedom City setting, and the great, really useful sourcebooks, the best superhero RPG I've seen. Sadly, it's too math-heavy to simulate the comicbook feel.

 

[pawsplay]

Have I just stepped into Bizarro-World for this thread?

HERO may have many fine qualities, but intuitiveness and elegance isn't on the list. If you've been playing it for a decade or so, it's easy to take everything you've learned by rote for granted and retroactively say it's all so very simple, so obvious, so logical. But for someone coming fresh and doing an apples-to-apples comparison, HERO is about as ponderous as it gets.

I remember the first time I saw Hero. I thumbed through a copy of the Champions books in a mall bookstore. I said to myself, "My god, that's so simple? Why hasn't anyone done this before?" Of course, what I did not realize was that someone had; Champions had been around for quite some time. Compared to DC Heroes, it was the height of intuitive and elegant. Now, once the honeymoon was over, I discovered a few twists and complications, and discovered Hero involved some maths from time to time. Still, it is a very easy to understand game. Hero System is incredibly elegant and intuitive. The fact that it uses fractions does not change that. We are talking middle school math. Hero is probably my number one system for teaching someone the system, making a character, and running a game all in one sitting with few hitches. Character creation is usually longer than in M&M, but it doesn't have to be. Character creation in M&M does not have to be fast; there are things to fiddle with, if you choose to. Sure, Hero involves a more work than some games, including M&M, but not much more. Probably the hardest thing in the game is the Speed Chart, and if you don't like that, you can declare that everyone has SPD 3.

As for END, it's a great part of the system. Endurance allows characters to push their limits, and it allows a wide variety of power constructs, everything from "extra pushing" to tiring explosive attacks. It also stops people from doing stupid, repetitive things. If you don't want that much detail, stripping END is an official optional rule and requires essentially no modification to the system whatsoever; you just don't use it, or anything that refers to it. Alternatively, if you, personally, don't want to deal with it, you just buy down the END costs of your powers.

 

[Quantum]

So you're automatically given your saves in proportion to your attack? Does that mean there are separate attack values for different save types?

I have no clue what that means.

 

[Thondor]

Personaly I like the simple superhero's game that I have designed. (And ran an alphs playtest of a couple times at cons). 'Course it rely's on a certain amount of player confidence in the DM's judgement, and a kind of freeform/brainstorming approach to character creation. But I don't think my Ottawa Group has ever had more fun, and havn't had a problem making every kind of character imaginable*.

*Some have had to be powered down.

If someone's interested I'd be willing to share for some feedback.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

I have no clue what that means.

You said that in CoC you can alter your saves based on something to do with attack and defense. I was confused on that part. I assumed it meant that you could lower your attack to increase your save values. But in d20 you normally only have one attack value. This would mean that when you decrease or increase your saves they all change by the same amount. I was wondering if CoC had different attack values for each kind of saving-throw-inducing attack so that you could modify the level of each save individually.

Perhaps you could just explain the entire process you were talking about in greater detail?