Mutants & Masterminds?

[Voneth]

I'm not "cheap"..I've got no problem dropping $40 for a hardcover book but.....Ahh well..I don't expect anyone to understand...

LOL! I am the other way. There was only one hardback I popped $40 for, Farscape, which was still a thick book, with color photos and was even paying for its franchise fee. Yet, I didn't think Judge Dredd was worth that much of an investment (It IS a nice looking book and seems to have good crunchy bits, don't get me wrong.)

Despite the quality, I even cringed at getting Spycraft at $35, but eventually I got their SA book and thus eventually gave them $70.

As far as d20 Modern, which looks solid, I thought about it this way. In most of my games, I like to feature or give players access to funky powers. And while I admire WotC's completeness on the modern genre in the book, you only get 4 advance supernatural classes (which kinda smarts when you know that psionics HAS to have 4 more coming and yet got even less powers than magic.) And they only offered HALF the spells/powers. My impression was that you would HAVE to get one of their campaign books if you were serious about getting into a game that offered funky powers to players. And on a personal note, psionics is getting their own setting, but the rules still enforces psionics to be a second tier system that is outclassed by magic. Kinda like getting a Dodge Viper with a Kia Rio engine.

Compared to M&M?
Let get back to why I got into 3e in the first place when I hadn’t run a DND game in over 10 years. WotC gave me a flexible game that let me run a fantasy game my way (mostly) instead of their way, unlike what TSR did. : )

What I really liked about M&M was that it had several sidebars of rules that took the game back to it’s DND roots AND even further out in left field from what M&M was doing. You hate the Damage Save system? The longest sidebar is on how to bring back hit points (and it was rather complete compared to what others would offer.) On the other hand, you think the BAB is a contrived mechanic, you have another sidebar where you have Melee, Unarmed and Ranged Attack skills and then you have a game that uses only the skill and saves system of d20 (the real heart of the engine.)

Even without the side bars, you can either keep Defense and the DR mechanic in their superpowers, or you can just use AC instead. The point base system ensures that as long as everyone in the group uses the same method, it will balance out.

Customize powers? Yeah that was sweet. Customize the game? Yeah, that’s what M&M really lets you do. It’s hard to believe, but you as much for your 32 bucks on M&M as you do for $40 of other games.

 

[bolen]

I got it yesterday. I have not really look it over throughly. it looks great however. I think It may be the best super hero game I have seen.

I like the idea that it ONLY uses a d20.

The power creation reminds me of Godlike. I wonder if the designers were influenced by that book?

 

[Shard O'Glase]

It rocks.

And for those who are leery about the daamge save 2 things.

1. As was mentioned there is a big side bar on turning it back into a HP system.

2. The damage save is flat out amazing, and I'm thinking of turning every ssytem I have into it.


It is absurdly well worth the money. It looks great.(I prefer it to SAS but its a close call) the rules are great, including a fantastic power creation system for the few powers that you can't seem to come up with using the existing ones. It only uses the D20 which yah steals some fun from the buck O dice eat my 15d6 empowered freball thing, but streamlines the game so much it is well worth it. I think this is my best purchase of the year.

 

[Voneth]

It rocks.
2. The damage save is flat out amazing, and I'm thinking of turning every ssytem I have into it.

I have also fiddled with the idea of porting over MNM's Damage Save mechanic with the assumption that if one wanted to bring this mechanic into d20 (especialy those d20 rule versions that already have a Defense score- such as most of WotC's stuff), I would guess that you could use your class' Fort Save as the basis for a Damage Save for the class.

Some people would want to add an additonal bonus on the Damage Save based on the hit dice of a class. Based on the idea that an average die roll is half the max +.5, I'd make this suggestion:

d4=-1
d6=0
d8=+1
d10=+2

In this case, a base Fort Save of less than 0 = 0, until the base save levels up to cancel the negatives, then follow the pattern established by the extra 0s.

Of course this isn't playtested, nor have I actualy compared Fort Saves to Hit Dice to see if this is needed, but this is where I would start.

 

[Bug]

bringing damage save to other d20 games

regarding the prospect of bringing the damage save to other d20 games (like D&D or Spycraft). i read about someone in another forum who used Fortitude for the save and determined the damage bonus of a weapon or attack by taking 40% of the max damage for that attack.

so a short bow (1d6) would be +2. a flintlock pistol (1d10) would be +4, etc, etc.

he said it worked for him, YMMV.

 

[Phaedyme]

Believe me folks I understand about the rpicing..been through this issue before a million times. Yep I'm sure it's worth it in the end. But it still bugs me. Doesn't mean I think M&M sucks..far from it. I wan't the thing..it just bothers me about the price.

I realize how much price per page and whatnot from some other D20 manufacturers is pretty poor..except... I don't buy that stuff. I generally buy modules (from Necromancer and Kenzer who some of the highest page counts for price in the industry), or I buy hardcovers from the same...again, barring the intial KoK campaign book, the page count's are high for the product price....it's not color...but 300 B&W pages for $30 vs 192 color for $32 is a better value..utility-wise).

It's funny.. I had this same issue come up in another GR thread...for BotR...I want to make it clear I have nothing against GR..nor am I picking on them..it's just come down to 2 products from them, that I felt were overpriced compared to the competition.

Interestingly, despite the relatively low page count, Mutants & Masterminds has more actual text than many books with more pages. Just look at that text - there must be 750-800 words per page going on there.

 

[Drew]

Hey, just read my sig.

 

[Utrecht]

The power creation reminds me of Godlike. I wonder if the designers were influenced by that book?

Actually, this reminded me of Champions - heck it seems like there is a one to one correlation of powers to what Champions has (I don't have M&M yet - was looking at it at a friends house)

In fact, I commented on the fact that it appears that Green Ronin did in 200 pages what took Champions 500......

As been said before, I will have this book!!!!!

 

[Voneth]

Well, I ran my 5th level M&M Farscape game with the hit points and varible damage weapon rules. A week before that, I ran the adventure in the book with the Damage Save system and 10th level PCs.

In the Farscape game, I had them make 5th level characters. I forgot to tell them that Super Constitution and Damage Save adds hit points (However, before Farscape's errata came out, non-combat characters had double digit hit points anyway.) And I couldn't find the one line about what Healing does for Hit Points (I found it after the game.)


Overall as a GM, I like running NPC with the DS system, the math was easier to keep track of. If one could make an NPC index card (I love the way the M&M templates look and I'd love to have some blanks like that). Though I was surprised that the superheroes went down after only 3 or 4 hits. This is probably because no one used their Hero Points to get rid of the stun damage (when Hero Points gets rid of 5 stun hits, you are tempted to hold off until you have 6 stun hits to use them). And once you are unconscious with no nearby back up, Hero Points only revive you enough to be slammed down again. On the result of the match?
One PC down and only one NPC was still standing.

With the hit points system and characters at 5th level the combat didn't last much longer because the heavy weapons stats in the d20 Farscape book are pretty big (3d8 and such) and NPCs still went down went down pretty quickly and I see I need to do some more testing to fine tune the NPCs to be a challenge. The players ended up using their Hero Points more for skill checks than for combat.

Everyone had a lot of fun in both games, though those who played both games offered up no opinions. I am trying to touch base with them this week to solicit some answers. One fellow answered back that he still hasn't got his head around DS yet, but he thinks he would perfer it over hit points, especially at high levels.

 

[Valdier]

I have created and update my own news site at www.valdier.com for RPG's, currently it has a heavy focus on Mutants and Masterminds.