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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2010291" data-attributes="member: 18387">By John Grigsby, Staff Reviewer d20 Magazine Rack Sizing Up the Target Mutants & Masterminds is a super-hero role-playing campaign setting from Super Unicorn and Green Ronin Publications. It’s designed by Steve Kenson and illustrated by an incredible array of talent too long to list here. It retails for $32.95, which seems pricey for such a thin book, but trust me, you’ll get your money’s worth! First Blood I’ve had this book sitting on my review list for almost three weeks. I don’t normally like to let a review product sit that long, but I have to be honest. I was a little jealous. Like most American boys my age, I cut my teeth on comic books. I thrilled to the adventures of Superman™, Spider-Man™, and Hyperguy (not ™). Over the course of 21 years, I must have spent well over $50,000 on stapled collections of colored paper, most of which doesn’t survive to this day. In 1983, already an avid role-player, I was introduced to Villains & Vigilantes, a super-hero role-playing game (I daresay the first superhero role-playing game, but I may be wrong about that) produced by Fantasy Games Unlimited. It wasn’t much in the way of role-playing, being more a set of rules for portraying super-powered individuals who fought equally-powerful villains, but in those days, that was all you really needed for a good super-hero RPG. Of course, when Wizards of the Coasts’ d20 system came out, all manner of people began jumping on the super-hero bandwagon. From the well-done freeware PDF Paragon (by D. Jon Mattson) to the handsomely-designed Four Color to Fantasy (from Natural 20 Press), it seemed that everybody had a good idea for handling super-heroes under the d20 system. While most of them were pretty good, I just didn’t feel that any quite captured what I was looking for, so I began designing my own. Then Mutants & Masterminds hit the stands. It’s good, real good. So there is my dilemma. How could I give an unbiased review to a product which was everything I had hoped that my own system would have been? So I let it sit. I read through the book a few dozen times. I playtested it by designing characters and putting them through the paces. I tried everything I could to break the system to justify a poor review, but in the long run, I was convinced of only one thing. They’ve got a hit on their hands. To begin with, Mutants & Masterminds does not use the traditional class and level system that d20 relies upon. In fact, it is not a d20 product. It doesn’t bill itself as such. It does, however, draw upon elements of the OGL and does have Open Gaming Content. It is also close enough to the d20 system to be easy to learn for anyone familiar with that line of products. Mutants & Masterminds does use a level system, but it’s so sleek that you’ll hardly notice it at all. The differences are slight, but significant. There are no classes, no alignments, no hit points, and no Attacks of Opportunity. Also, the game is designed so that you need only a 20-sided dice to play. That’s it. No six-siders, four-siders, eight-siders, 10-siders, 12-siders, or 100-sided dice. Elegant in its simplicity, yet so detailed that you will marvel at the system mechanics. Characters are designed using a point-buy system developed expressly for Mutants & Masterminds. Since this is designated as Product Identity, I can’t discuss it in-depth, except to say that those of you who have been looking for a replacement for the class-and-level system used by D&D need to seriously consider looking into this book. Everything from basic ability scores and Base Attack Bonus to skills and feats is bought through a system of Power Points. So what does this mean? Well, the ultimate in flexibility, basically. You can build absolutely any type of character you can imagine with this system, limited only by the number of points the GM allows you to use in creating the character. The only limits on the system are those the GM places. A selection of archetypes is provided, which serve both as character examples, and quick-start kits that a player can customize to create their own hero. These are great for those new to role-playing or for the harried GM who needs stats for a super-speedster NPC (for example) that has happened on the scene suddenly. What are super-heroes without super powers? Don’t worry, Mutants & Masterminds provides plenty of powers for you to play with. Over 100 are provided for you in the book and with the system of flaws, extras, and power stunts, that number rises considerably. Still not enough? Okay, how about an entire seven-and-a-half page section on designing your own powers? Follow these rules and you can be sure that the powers you create are balanced and ready to add to the campaign. Need a few extra Power Points? Select a weakness. Whether you’re just plain unlucky or you have a really bad allergy to radonite, there’s something in here that will apply to the character you have in mind. Ah, but what if you’re more the gadgeteer-type, constantly designing and redesigning your power armor and mega-beam blaster? No problem. There’s an entire chapter devoted to devices; whether it’s a robot helper or an armor-plated hover tank, you can design it and modify it through these rules. I mentioned that the system doesn’t use hit points. Instead, it utilizes a concept that I think is more suited to the super-hero genre. When you get hit, you make a damage saving throw. If you succeed, no problem. If you fail, the amount by which you fail the save determines what happens to you (from merely stunned to unconscious or disabled). Of course, there are rules for those of you who want a grittier experience (more lethality, ‘cause it’s really hard to kill someone in Mutants & Masterminds; after all, how often does someone die in the comics?) or for those who want to use a hit point system instead of the more abstract damage system introduced here. The book rounds out with some information on GMing a supers campaign, a sample adventure, and a small rogues’ gallery of villains to pit your heroes against. It is littered throughout with fantastic, full-color, comic-book-style artwork that is not only pleasing to the eye, but also chosen to illustrate certain concepts of the rules. The vast majority of the illustrations feature the character archetypes detailed at the beginning of the book. Critical Hits The big draw for Mutants & Masterminds is the flexibility of the Power Point system that is utilized for character creation and improvement. It permits players to build characters that are exactly they way they wish and to develop those characters without restrictions. This is the way that super-hero games should work! I am pleased to say that during my playtests, I was able to recreate every Villains & Vigilantes character from my old campaign perfectly! The selection of super-powers is broad enough that I found myself having to design no new powers during these recreations, even for some of the truly weird and abstract powers that we had developed over the years. Mutants & Masterminds handled the variety of abilities without a hitch, the system of flaws, extras, and power stunts insuring that I was able to faithfully reproduce every hero without having to bend the rules. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that most were balanced to one another as well. Critical Misses In the end, only one thing seemed to be missing from the system. There are no rules for handling alien or other non-human races. Aliens are a staple of the genre and I feel that this oversight warrants a mention here. It’s simple enough to fix, of course, but the point is that I shouldn’t have to fix it. Hopefully, a future supplement will provide templates for aliens that populate the Mutants & Masterminds campaign world. Coup de Grace As much as I hate to say it (for personal reasons), if you are a fan of super-hero roleplaying, this is the book that you must own! The artwork, from cover to cover, is eyecatching, the system is simple enough to fit the genre, yet familiar to anyone who has ever played any d20 System game, and the mechanics are free-flowing and elegant. Even if you don’t intend to use it for super-hero RPing, if you just hate the class-and-level system that is all the rage, this book will provide welcome relief. <sigh> I hate you, Super Unicorn and Green Ronin. I hate you for making this wonderful book. Blast your skill at producing quality RPG products! You’ve foiled my plans for dominating the super-hero RPG industry! Blast you for making me look forward to future supplements with eager anticipation!To see the graded evaluation of this product and to leave comments that the reviewer will respond to, go to The Critic's Corner at <a href="http://www.d20zines.com/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=index&catid=&topic=3" target="_blank">www.d20zines.com.</a></blockquote>

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