Doug McCrae
Legend
I've been running M&M for half-a-dozen sessions now. I run it quite differently than has been recommended by most posters, I don't give out a lot of hero points and I've only once used GM Fiat, to declare that a bad guy had escaped when the pursuit was becoming tedious and only involved half the PCs.
This means that the initial battle in each adventure is usually with lesser bad guys than the BBEG, often monsters or robots working for him. If the PCs are losing a fight they have always managed to escape as one has a global teleport and another has superspeed, this may well not be the case for most groups. The team inventor then builds a gadget to beat the BBEG and so far they have always won on the second try, which is actually quite comic booky, but has never been decided by me beforehand. I've been using fairly powerful opposition as the players are good power gamers and tacticians, better than me.
My game-universe went through all the ages of comics and a lot of the old stuff - like villains with all the powers of a hero team, apes, super-pets and cold ray guns - is still kicking around but treated in a fairly serious fashion. For example Zeno the Super-Gorilla, who has all the powers of the 1960s New York Five (a group of radioactive teenagers) is, or was until his powers returned, a bitter drunk who could only find employment in an entertainment industry he despised.
M&M is a complex, detailed system, which seems to me a bit at odds with a slam-bang, freewheeling, light-hearted approach. Marvel SAGA is more that type of system imo. Sure, you can use anything for anything but I'm considering what direction the systems encourage.
Also comics these days are pretty f---ing dark. You've got the Authority, Marvel Ultimate universe, the death of Captain America, Identity Crisis and Dark Reign where the villains take over is the big event from Marvel this year.
There's such a diversity of tone over the history of comics that this is something you should consider discussing with your players. Do they expect Adam West Batman, movie X-Men or Watchmen?
One of my players asked me what the tone of the game would be beforehand and I said it would be basically serious but not super-dark. However I think it's ended up a little darker than I portrayed it, a bit more like the Authority, as the bad guys have mostly been using lethal attacks.
This means that the initial battle in each adventure is usually with lesser bad guys than the BBEG, often monsters or robots working for him. If the PCs are losing a fight they have always managed to escape as one has a global teleport and another has superspeed, this may well not be the case for most groups. The team inventor then builds a gadget to beat the BBEG and so far they have always won on the second try, which is actually quite comic booky, but has never been decided by me beforehand. I've been using fairly powerful opposition as the players are good power gamers and tacticians, better than me.
My game-universe went through all the ages of comics and a lot of the old stuff - like villains with all the powers of a hero team, apes, super-pets and cold ray guns - is still kicking around but treated in a fairly serious fashion. For example Zeno the Super-Gorilla, who has all the powers of the 1960s New York Five (a group of radioactive teenagers) is, or was until his powers returned, a bitter drunk who could only find employment in an entertainment industry he despised.
M&M is a complex, detailed system, which seems to me a bit at odds with a slam-bang, freewheeling, light-hearted approach. Marvel SAGA is more that type of system imo. Sure, you can use anything for anything but I'm considering what direction the systems encourage.
Also comics these days are pretty f---ing dark. You've got the Authority, Marvel Ultimate universe, the death of Captain America, Identity Crisis and Dark Reign where the villains take over is the big event from Marvel this year.
There's such a diversity of tone over the history of comics that this is something you should consider discussing with your players. Do they expect Adam West Batman, movie X-Men or Watchmen?
One of my players asked me what the tone of the game would be beforehand and I said it would be basically serious but not super-dark. However I think it's ended up a little darker than I portrayed it, a bit more like the Authority, as the bad guys have mostly been using lethal attacks.
Last edited:
