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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Longshadow" data-source="post: 2115026" data-attributes="member: 19626">World:  The central conceit of the Aberrant game is the question, "What if people with superhuman powers and abilities existed in the real world?"  Unlike many "comic-book" games, one of the tenets of this setting is that such people can't help but change the world around them by their very existence.  The world had to adapt.  Many of your standard tropes don't carry over in the real world when you apply human nature, and the writers make a point of addressing those situations.  For example, why put on some tacky costume and rob banks when you can hire out to some corporation and make a hell of a lot more money, not have to worry about the authorities looking for ways to beat on you, and get fame and pretty women as perks?  IOW, not many of your traditional supervillains -- though anti-social types, criminals who happen to have a few advantages and superpowered terrorists are still around.  I love many aspects of the setting.  Love. <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=":)" /> System:  S&S disappointed me mightily here, though YMMV.  The system tries to adapt the standard d20 system to superpowers.  There aren't many surprises on the basics here -- if you can play D&D, you can pick up how to work in this system without much difficulty.  Unfortunately, there are some consistency problems in how different powers work and interact, most of which come from trying to "add-on" the powers without sacrificing the familiarity the designers wanted players to have with the terminology and mechanics.  For example, Force Field adds to your AC instead of giving DR (even if your field can bounce tank rounds, you need to stay away from area-effect attacks) -- one of my many peeves, though some other people weren't bothered at all.  Don't get me started on Mega Strength, or Hit Point interaction with human tanks, or any number of other things -- you don't need my baggage and should look at those through the lens of your own judgement of cool vs uncool. :\ Stacks up against M&M:  Pales.  Period.  M&M is simply more internally and logically consistent from a mechanics viewpoint.  Further, it emulates better the power range shown both in the source material and earlier demonstrated by the d10 version of the system.  Aberrant d20 was designed to shoehorn with the range given in Adventure d20 and Trinity d20, which means that it watered down the playable field of powers if Aberrant was your game of choice among the three [it made many Trinity players quite happy, and even broaching this subject on the WW boards opens you up to immediate, serious, and very ugly flaming].  You want to stat any of the name characters in the setting, you had better be prepared to make up your own epic version of the rules, because what's given doesn't do that for you.  For example, to move the amount of mass he's talked about moving in the d10 version, the d20 Skew (a member of Team Tomorrow) needs to be about a 50th level character [and that's with a very conservative reading of his powers from d10 coupled with a very generous character build in d20].  That may work for some GMs and players, but if you're anything like me, it will just aggravate you.  I found that I can emulate the setting in M&M easily, with a more comfortable rules fit, without having to do much more than come up with rules for 'porting the "taint" concept over.  Than I sold my Aberrant d20 to a friend who's a d20 evangelist and didn't look back, as I have all of the d10 stuff for source material and already contributed to the cause by schlopping down my 30 odd bucks to WW in the first place. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /></blockquote>

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