Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Teflon Billy" data-source="post: 2533919" data-attributes="member: 264">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: ComplicationsComplications 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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":eek:" title="Eek!    :eek:"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":eek:" />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 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />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.</blockquote>

Verification