Tell Me About M&M

[The Green Adam]

I'm going to play devil's advocate. I played Mutants and Masterminds and I really enjoyed it for all the reasons listed here. But I'm going to present the things I disliked, just so we get both sides of the coin.

1) Bruises and Injured levels never really feel like damage, and particularly with resilient bad guys, there can be a sense of blasting away and achieving very little.

While this is somewhat true, its also very comic book like. Knock down drag out fights with two super strong invulnerable guys are going to be similar to their comic counterparts - lots of smashing through walls and tossing cars but no one really getting hurt. That is until someone figures out the villains weakness or a way to hit'em with more then he can take. A superbeing fight is never really over until someone throws a bus.

Also, I personally like injury levels way more then hit points. I kinda despise hit points. A guy with a hundred hit points always acts the same at 3 as he did at 93. With levels you don't have the arbitrary, 'you took 16 points'. You are told flat out, 'dude, you are wounded'. I can handle losing points. Being wounded sounds painful.

AD

 

[Admiral Caine]

Another devil's advocate comment:

The game does expect the GM to actually GM it, and be familiar wth the rules. That is, in the aspiration to inclusive to any style of gameplay- the rules will allow you to put some really game breaking power concepts together. There are powers that look fine on paper but will shred plots.

I'm not condemning that. Its done for a reason. To give the GM and the Players all of the tools, and not withold anything just because its hard to adjudicate or run a balanced game with.

But you should be aware of that. You should plan on deciding what character concepts are going to work best for your game, because the system isn't going to do that for you (I'm looking at you, Time Travel, Mind Reading, and Transformation). Some GMs can adjudicate those certain powers, while others struggle with them.

Steve Kenson will be the first to admit, you can't be a passive GM, because you can come up with some broken and/or abusive combinations of powers. Its not bad writing, but the expecatation is that the GM set the boundries.

M&M gives you all the tools, even the ones that are tricky to use.

I'd also suggest getting the Ultimate Powers book. Not only does it have a lot of additional powers, but all of the Powers in the Core Book are rewritten for clarity, and it has more examples of everything, including how to set up arrays and fine tune powers to get the precise look and feel you want. Its not really a splat book in any sense of the word.. I consider it a mammoth replacement for the entire Chapter 5 (on Powers) of the Core Book. I'd consider it more useful than even the Masterminds (GM's) Manual.

Then again, there is nothing wrong with the Chapter 5 Core book either. Its just a testament that you can literally devote the page count of entire book to Powers, which they did, creating the finest supplement in the entire line as a result.

 

[diaglo]

M&Ms are small colored candy the size of buttons. They come in packs with different flavors. Traditionally, there were only two options; milk chocolate covered in the colorful shell, and then a chocolate-covered peanut with a colored shell. Although there now exists several flavors, such as peanut butter, dark chocolate, and chocolate covered almonds.

they also had some true or untrue rumors about them concerning the dyes they used. so they stopped making the red ones for a time. and the green ones were supposed to be an aphrodiasic.

 

[Treebore]

M&M is definitely a breakable game. How can it not be when you can create characters like Galactus? So a GM definitely needs to keep their eyes open to such things.

 

[Dragonbait]

I'm going to agree with everything that's been said, both the positive (example: great system, diverse powers, easy) and negative (example: GM needs to know the rules).

2) Everyone needs to have the max level in any given power to be really competitive. If the PCs have a maxed out blaster, you need to give your villain a really high defense that corresponds with it or they go down very quickly.

I second this part, especially after using the many premade NPCs to fight the PCs in my game. The only characters that could compete with them were those that had maxed out their attack/defense. I would almost say that maybe it should be a rule, otherwise the character will be dropped within one to two hits, or never hit anything other than a thug.

One of my players never caught on to the need of maxing out his attack and defense. By the time the group hit level 16, he would always be hit if attacked and was often knocked out within the first few rounds of the fight.

 

[Greg K]

I have been playing M&M for a year and unmaxed damage has not been a problem in my game. Then again, I almost never max the villain's defenses either.

 

[Storminator]

I have been playing M&M for a year and unmaxed damage has not been a problem in my game. Then again, I almost never max the villain's defenses either.

The key is they need to be matched. An unmaxed offense (both stats) vs a maxed defense (both stats) is like you're a couple power levels lower. And a difference of 2 power levels is almost enough to be insignificant.

Matching power levels is the key to the game, really. And being ready for those truly broken combos.

PS

 

[Felon]

I love M&M. One thing that I'd really like to see officially fixed is the extended range table. With 10 being the default power level, it's bizarre that with 9 ranks you can cover a planet with your teleport or ESP. As a result, a lot of the characters pulled from the Instant Superheroes supplement--like the Mystic and the Psychic--patently outclass the comic book characters they're templated off of.

But otherwise, it's the best supers game I've ever seen. I've run a campaign set in the Marvel Universe. My sweetest dream come true would be to see Green Ronin get a license to publish statblocks for Marvel characters.

 

[Gort]

Not that I enjoy being the one dissenting voice, but I didn't find Mutants and Masterminds to be a very good game. You basically need an iron GM and very mature players or you'll end up with a lot of min-maxing in the character concepts. Certain powers (when I played, it was super-speed that seemed overpowered) are a lot better than other powers, and some powers work only if the GM allows them to.

Combat seemed very swingy - a hit could bounce off your Pecs of Steel, doing nothing at all, but the next one from the same guy put you out cold. I prefer hit-points, for all their stupidity - I like having a bit of plot protection, and feeling like I'm actually getting somewhere in a fight each time I hit. Every super-power just seems to boil down to, "The baddie does something. Make a saving throw", with different types of power requiring a different save.

I dislike mechanically homogenous attacks. I don't like that an energy beam, tank shell, dragon breath, or a million other attack types are all mechanically identical. I like that in D&D a guy with a sword is a bit different to a guy with an axe, who's a bit different from a guy with a polearm. I know there's attack descriptors like "maximum power" and all that, but it doesn't seem enough to differentiate when any power might have these descriptors regardless of its source.

Glad to see people enjoying it, but I didn't think it was the game for me.

 

[Felon]

Not that I enjoy being the one dissenting voice, but I didn't find Mutants and Masterminds to be a very good game. You basically need an iron GM and very mature players or you'll end up with a lot of min-maxing in the character concepts. Certain powers (when I played, it was super-speed that seemed overpowered) are a lot better than other powers, and some powers work only if the GM allows them to.

This is a fair criticism. If you go to the M&M forums and try to address the issue of abuse-prone powers, you get hammered with responses about GM fiat and being flamed for not ruling your players with an iron fist. M&M is designed with the notion that in a supers game, the GM ought to be the one to say "no, you can't have thsi" to a player.

And I like that to an extent. I wish powers and feats were priced a little more accurately according to their value, but the simple truth is, superheroes can do some pretty insane stuff. In Champions, some powers are priced so aggressively that they're simply unaffordable; nobody touches Transform for that reason.

As a side, Super-Speed is actually considered by M&M afficionados to be overpriced at 5 points a rank, as it simply an almagam of some other powers, including the fluffy "Quicknes" power.

Combat seemed very swingy - a hit could bounce off your Pecs of Steel, doing nothing at all, but the next one from the same guy put you out cold. I prefer hit-points, for all their stupidity - I like having a bit of plot protection, and feeling like I'm actually getting somewhere in a fight each time I hit. Every super-power just seems to boil down to, "The baddie does something. Make a saving throw", with different types of power requiring a different save.

Now I find this criticism less valid. M&M powers inflict damage or conditions, just like in D&D or any other game. The impervious extra takes the swingyness out of getting hit (basically, it's like taking 10 on the damage saving throw). But honestly, the swingyness makes M&M work to a degree that games like Champions doesn't. In Champions, everyone's attacks and defenses have a tendency to gravitate around a very homogeneous range. Nobody wants to be the martial artist who can't punch or blast his way out of a bank vault. Nobody wants to be the guy who isn't bulletproof, or the guy who's only using bullets himself. But I see those characters get played in M&M. It almost it brought a tear to this old gamer's eye to see a Punisher knock-off.