Customer Reviews

Mutants & Masterminds (Superheroes RPG)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Like most RPGers, probably, I got started in this wonderful, odd little hobby with D&D. I played it through junior-high and high school, but eventually, after playing lots of other games with simpler, more streamlined rule systems that made it easier to "role-play" instead of "roll-play," I left D&D behind. For nearly 20 years I played other games, but when I heard the hype about d20, my interest was piqued. Since the books were so cheap, I gave them a try, and they looked very good at first, but when I joined a group to play, I found that things were as bogged-down in myriad minute rules as ever. Things would be fine until we had to fight something, then everything came to a screeching halt as we spent the next half hour simulating thirty seconds of combat with dozens of dice rolls. And these days, I just don't have the time or patience to study a set of game books as if they were a textbook.

Recently, I was looking for a rule system to use in a fantasy campaign, but with a very different flavor--imagine my surprise when the one I chose turned out to be d20! In Mutants & Masterminds, all the non-essentials have been tossed out, and the game is much improved by it. And while it is a supers game, with a little tinkering, superpowers can easily become magic.

"A 1-year-old child" gave the game 1 star--interestingly, all the things he complained about were things I liked. In addition, he had little reason to complain, as for every rule he complained about, there was a box nearby with an alternate rule for people who didn't like M&M's new rule. For example, I'm going to use good old-fashioned hit points for now. Though perfect for a superhero game, the M&M damage system is too comic-book-style for my campaign.

All in all, it's the first d20 game that is as good as some of the better games out there.

I've tried Marvel's FASERIP system, Palladium, Champions, GURPS, d20 as D&D, Modern, Star Wars, Cthulu, and M&M remains my favourite system to deal with superpowers.

Why?

Flexibility, and simplicity. Make the power you want. The book gives you a bunch of common powers, and you can easily add and subtract to get what you want. Want to personalize your energy blast? Is it pure force? Fire? A handful of ball-bearings? Whatever you want.

Want to use your powers in an unusual or clever way? You don't have to buy a whole new power. Hero Points and Extra Effort are simple game mechanics that allow you to play smart, or give 110% in those critical moments!

No hit points. Damage, from being hit by a granny with an umbrella, to getting a battleship dropped on your head, is the same system, using the same number of dice, just one. Combat don't take longer at higher levels. The collateral damage just increases ;).

Visuals. The book is beautiful with great art throughout. It give an excellent comic book feeling.

Options. The base rules make it pretty hard to kill someone accidentally. Don't agree with that? The plethora of sidebar options give you choices in lethality, power restrictions, even put hit points back in, if you want.

Support. The supplemants aren't necessary, but they are all good. The Annual gives a wealth of campaign and rule options. Freedom City is an excellent city sourcebook with heroes, villains, and important and interesting people and places. Crooks! contains a wealth of insane, diabolical, greedy, or just plain miscevous opponents for your players. And the forums are a great place to ask questions, put out ideas, and generally get a bunch of friendly useful feedback. We want to help you!

One important warning to players and GM's: CONCEPT. Don't try to squeeze the most damage and defense out of every last point. That leads to less fun. Make heroes. Don't make wacking machines.

My gaming circle, some nine people, started with one copy of this book. Within two years, over half had their own copy, and I own two! We've had three M&M campaigns since the book came out, and they've never fizzled. They ended, and people had a good time along the way.

M&M. Less math. More fun.

As a professional adventure game designer and reviewer, and a long-time fan of superhero roleplaying, I've been waiting for a game to come along which featured full implementation of the concepts in the d20 System engine while still engaging superhero play in a fair and balanced way. Steve Kenson has done a marvelous job of that in Mutants & Masterminds, bringing the best of the Open Source rules, losing the worst, and adding new rules that are at once rational, playable, simple and fun. The book design by Super Unicorn is easy on the eye and enhanced by art provided by a dozen current comic book professionals. The book feels small and intimate for all of its 288 pages, and the value received is exceptional, certainly better than those heavyweight core books from Wizards of the Coast. If you love superhero gaming, or if you love D&D but are thinking of a change and yet don't want to learn a whole new game... BUY THIS BOOK.

I've been having a blast with this game system, and I'm going to go over a few reasons why I think you might also.

1. No Hit Points
Hit Points have long been a sort of thorn in my side. I never could figure out what they represented. Why can Cure Light Wounds bring a first level mage back from the brink of death, but barely mends a paper cut on a high level fighter? Not a problem in M&M. Whenever you are damaged, you make a save. Fail, and your saves get a litte harder to make next time. Fail by a lot and you might be stunned or knocked out. Sounds harsh, but it isn't when you take into account point number 2

2. Hero Points
Randomness, doesn't it suck? You're all set up to do something cool, and here pops that 1. Now that's not so big a problem. Hero points let you control that die to a degree by allowing you to reroll any result you don't like. It also guarantees you at least an avarage result. If that isn't cool enough for you, you can use Hero Points for other things as well. Increasing your powers' effects, giving them new effects for a short while, reviving from knock out status, recover from stun...

3. Flexable character creation
Luck won't bamboozle you here, either. Everything is point driven, and everything is an option. Believe me, no matter how many points you get, you'll wish you had more. The game sets only what limits it must to preserve game balance. If there aren't enough options for you, there is a fairly decent power creation system explained.

4. Professional Help
No, I don't need a psychiatrist. What I mean here is that the mutants and masterminds website has a forum where you can ask the author to clear up your rule questions. He answers whatever is posted about once or twice a week. It's not like having him in a bottle at the gaming table, but it's better than I ever got from anyplace else.

5. Ease of Play.
For this game, all you gotta bring is one d20, a pencil, and your character sheet. Buy a copy of this book if you can't borrow one from time to time, but you won't need it often. For GMs, there's the "mook" rule to make your life easier. All those little minions hanging around the bad guy don't have HP. One hit and they're gone, freeing you up to concentrate on your real villans instead of keeping 15 HP totals straight. Quick and easy rules for battle keeps tension high, and keeps a single battle from eating up all your role play time. It's much easier to role play when your roll play goes smoothly and quickly. If rough and tumble is your game, hey, just fight more stuff in a night. ^^

5. Variety
We've built 12 characters out of our imaginations, and no two of them play the same. Fighters are fighters, clerics are clerics, mages are mages. Your role is decided when you picked which of those you wanted to be. In M&M, You're free to do what you want more often without rules getting in your way.

In closing, I know some people are put off by this system because it is different, but I think it deserves a chance to stand on its own as something new and exciting. Some people may never warm up to the changes, and that's just fine, but it would be worth your while to at least give this a try.

Forget Hero, forget GURPS Supers, heck, forget Silver Age Sentinels: Mutants and Masterminds is THE superhero RPG to get. Not only does it use the innovative d20 system, but since it doesn't have the d20 logo on it (which would place further restrictions on what they can or can't publish), it's d20 done right! All of the familiar game mechanics are there, along with excellent character creation, letting you create any hero or superhero you can possibly think of! But don't take it from me; get the book and find out for yourself why it's the best d20-based superhero RPG out there.

Green Ronin Publishing has done something remarkable with this game. The book just looks fantastic, and Mutants & Masterminds manages to use the d20 rules to create a genuine comic book feel. The lack of classes and hit points may seem strange at first, but it opens the game to almost limitless superhero combinations. And if you don't like the rules that are provided, the book is literally filled with tips and optional rules to tailor the game to the gamemaster's specific tastes. Think attacking should be a skill? A power? It can be done, and M&M tells you how.

It's hard to find a Superhero RPG that is flexible yet streamlined. Mutants & Masterminds really pulls it off. A single d20 is the only die you need to play the game from start to finish. The writing is often very clever and appropriate to the genre. It was especially refreshing (I myself being an experienced gamemaster) to see them deliver constant reminders that the key to the game is enjoying yourself. The rules are simplistic and versatile enough to let the players' imaginations run wild while allowing the gamemaster to deliver some good, old-fashioned, four-color fun.

Mutants and Masterminds is a game which applies the d20 system to the superhero genre. In creating M&M the publishers have taken the system and improved it by eliminating the antiquated elements which were keeping the d20 system in the dark ages. That's right, M&M has no stifeling character classes, no meaningless alignments and, best of all, NO HIT POINTS! That fact alone makes it worth at least 4 stars in my opinion.

I have played most of the superhero games which have been published, including the Marvel and DC games, Villians and Vigillantes, Underground and Champions. The streamlined but playable rules of M&M beat all of them. The rules for powers are highly customizable, allowing players to design the character they want to play. In addition, the rules for gadgets, skills and feats can make a character who doesn't have powers (like, The Punisher from the comics) fun and worth playing. The fact that "supernormals" don't have muich of a chnace was one of my biggest gripes against some other systems, and a big point in M&M's favor for me.

Overall M&M gets my highest recommendations.

Simplicity. Its what makes the d20 system so user-friendly and adaptable and the super-simplified Mutants and Masterminds system is what I find appealing about Green Ronin's handling of the super-hero/comic book genre. Super heros don't have hit points, they don't min-max for the wickedest weapon damage dice, they don't have a rule for everything. I'm not knocking d20, I really like it and I really like the rich, detailed characters you can create with it, I just prefer a more simplistic approach to superheros. M&M is a quick, fun game where the emphasis is on action rather than rules and that is so much more reflective of the comicbook world than regular d20 and certainly better suited to simple "4-color" comics than GURPS, etc.

The plethora of powers and the open-endedness of the system makes it possible to create whatever you want and still allow for limitations that make characters balanced in comparison to other characters and villians. The lack of classes makes the possibility of characters with diverse talents feasable (like a character that can heal others with their touch and release damaging blasts of holy fire, etc.).

This book is only one star away from being outstanding because of a lack of editing. When you buy this book you'll need to go to the M&M website and download the errata that goes with the book.

Overall, this is a great system if you're looking for comicbook style roleplay, combat-lite, and versatility. If you want to figure out how many dice of damage Wolverine could do, pick something else.

This book is one of Green Ronin's crowning achievements, no doubt about it. The system is one of the easiest and streamlined d20 games that I have ever played, and teaching my new players the ropes was a cinch.

One of the reviewers below expressed his biased opinion about both the damage save system and the use of a single d20. M&M's strength is that it is both simplistic and in-depth at the same time. The game's damage save system does an excellent job of simulating the sometimes day-long combats and one-hit-KO knockouts found in comics. (Note to previous reviewers: If you don't like save system, go use the Hit Point variant in the book or buy some ranks in Amazing Save (Damage)/Armor/Protection!)

The combats in the game are fast paced, with minimal dice rolling due to the single d20. But possibly the thing I like about the book is the power system. Characters are rated in "Power Levels", with the starting level being 10, to represent the average skill of a new superhero.

You have 15 "power points" each level to purchase skills, feats, BAB, defense, and super-powers with. The dozens upon dozens of super-powers that the game presents can be customized to such an extent that it's not even funny. If have a power concept that you don't find in the book, there is an entire section in the book dedicated to creating new powers.

The main site is www.mutantsandmasterminds.com, complete with free adventures and an intensely dedicated fanbase that scours the forums. Other supplements to the Mutants and Masterminds Core Rulebook include Freedom City (which has been hailed as one of the best supers' RPG supplements of all time), Nocturnals: A Midnight Companion (which chronicles Dan Brereton's Nocturnals's comic series, highly recommended), Crooks! (Full of fleshed out criminals from the Meta-4 campaign setting), and the upcoming Annual #1, full of more variant rules and help for settings set in the far future and in WWII.

I would whole heartedly recommend this book to anyone who wants to try a unique spin on the Supers' RPG genre or who just wants a decent gaming system (ignore the naysayers!).

M&M has very high production values and a slick system (that while taking some departures from strict-D20 mechanics) still manages to retain enough elements that those familiar with other D20 games (i.e. DND) will be able to get up and running with the system quickly. The rules capture the heroic flavor of four-color superhero combat well, and combat manages not to get bogged down although there are lots of tactical options for players who enjoy that sort of thing. The powers and character creation are well balanced, the system is varied and and flexible enough to allow you to develop literally any type of hero. The Power Level system scales well for a variety of game types, from lower level "gritty" supers to higher-level four color save-the-world type games. The sample material and included character archetypes offer a good mix of of beginning campaign material, certainly adequate as a jumping off point for new M&M GMs. One criticism I have is that the sections on equipment and vehicles are very skimpy, and because of the different rules for combat damage, you cannot easily use equipment from books like D20 Modern without some conversion. Hopefully this lack will be addressed in upcoming supplements. At the very least, the book does provide a generic system for modeling any peice of equipment or vehicle desired; but more examples would be nice.