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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 7648483" data-attributes="member: 8158">Thanks for the post. You've convinced me. I just bought a copy off of Amazon. Hope it's everything it's been cracked up to be.I adored Mutants & Masterminds for a while, but it wound up falling into the same trap as the superhero games that came before it. It has a really great character generation system, but no interesting or dynamic gameplay. At a demo at DragonCon, me and a friend playtested the new DC version using Martian Manhunter and Green Lantern. Imagine that combination of abilities. It should give rise to an endless array of tactics. Instead, we just basically zeroed in on the heaviest-hitting power we had and used it pretty much every turn. Even when describing what we're trying to do to the GM, he's just pointing out that it's more-or-less putting different window-dressing on the same general power (Move Object, for instance). And if you try to do anything too out there, then just spend a Hero point and the DM fiats the result. So, I came to realize that M&M is basically just Golden Axe distilled into an RPG. You hammer the ATTACK button repeatedly, and if you ever feel really squeezed, you can hit the MAGIC button (i.e. spend a Hero point). Eventually someone flubs a soak roll and they go down. And that's all there is too it. Maybe I'm just too much of a right-brained type, but that seems to lack depth. One of the basic presumptions in M&M, Champions, TSR Marvel, and pretty much every other game I've played is that every character must have some kind of strong persistent, passive defense. The end result is that low-powered attacks simply pancake uselessly. If all you do in one of these games is hammer away, then it's dumb to bother having a small hammer. Play Hulk, not Daredevil.If you look at an old Avengers comic book--say, fighting Graviton or Magneto or Count Nefaria--you'll find that the lower-power characters are able to contribute against a powerhouse villain, even if it's just the wasp zapping the villain in his eyes to blind him for a second, or Cap getting a villain to waste time and energy zapping his shield. That distracts the villain, put him off-guard, and lets the heavyweight heroes get in a solid hit.What I'm taking from Stacie is that this version of Marvel Supers actually gets it. Superhero games aren't all about character design. Fingers crossed.</blockquote>

Verification