I had the opportunity to play Mutants and Masterminds, the self proclaimed “Worlds’ Greatest Superhero RPG” this past weekend.  To be honest I bought the book purely on the reviews I have read on RPG.net, nearly all of which were perfect or near perfect scores.  That said I would like to offer my review of M&M since my experiences with the game was somewhat different than those I have read about.  Be warned that I will be bluntly honest with my opinions, as I have been in my other reviews - no kowtowing here.

What $33.95 buys now-a-days

“The Capitolobotomimizer”

After reading the many 5/5 reviews for Mutants and Masterminds I decided to run down to the local comic store and pick it up.  When I first picked up the book I had to ask the comic store owner if this was the core book or just a supplement for it. It simply felt small for all encompassing game book, little larger than a hardback graphic novel.  Worse was the $33.95 price tag which is rather hefty for a book under 200 pages.  I realize this is becoming a trend rather than an exception, and the price would not have bothered me if the book were another 100 pages.  As it is I felt this price for such a small manual was a bit steep. While forking over the dough for the book I was kidding with the owner of the store about creating a character named Capitolobotomimizer, The Fair Price Negotiator.  I suppose I shouldn’t complain though – Mutants and Masterminds seems like a bargain compared to the $110 pamphlet that is required material for one of my graduate courses.

First Impressions

“This sucker had better be worth my $33.95”

When taking a look at the book however the first thing that hits you is the exceptional artwork.  Since the comic medium is based quite a bit on art work it is natural that a comic RPG follow this trend and I am glad M&M took it seriously.  All art is full color with many large pieces covering a half or a full page.  The art is professional quality and sets a mood for the game, as my friend who GMed it says ‘four color supers’.  Meaning that the artwork and mood the game delivers is golden or silver age comics rather than the gritty anti-hero and complex nuisances of most of the modern comics. 

The game states it can play any type of super heroes game but the content heavily suggests more traditional super heroes.  The adventure material, villains and flavor text also pulls the game in this direction, although I can’t speak for any of the supplements.  The game mechanics themselves are surprisingly lethal for a supers game, so it could easily create a grittier atmosphere if the GM wishes.

Character Creation

“Impudent talking metal box of Wendy’s! Beowulf does not need your spicy chicken combo with a diet coke! He will slay his own meal and roast its flesh upon the fires of his own creation!  So sayeth I, Beowulf, Lord of the Celts, the slayer of vermin and finder of provisions.”

Our adventure was a one-shot so our characters were not planned for a long term campaign. In retrospect our band of five heroes came from five different genres entirely so I highly recommend having the players create characters together so you are all on the same page. My character was ‘Ten Angry Rabbits, Intergalactic Ninja’ wrought from a well known ninja concept.  Our group had a thiefy type with incorporeal powers, ‘Mouser’.  A wizard type named ‘Arcanum’. A technologist who controls nano-machines named ‘Giest’, and finally ‘Beowulf’, a very large Celtic man with a spear.  These concepts are quite varied and a good test for M&M.  Mutants and Masterminds did a good job making each type easy to create.  We did not come across any insurmountable problems where a character concept would have to be changed to fit the game – definitely a good start.

Mutants and Masterminds is d20 in a pure form.  You only use the 20 sided dice through out the entire game.  I honestly thought this would be limiting but it seemed to work well for the game.  I expect d20 games in general to eventually abandon the other dice as well, they seem unnecessary since this game practically has the same rules as all other d20 games.  Character creation is point-buy system, very much like GURPS, and it lacks any randomness - even if you want some.  I prefer randomness to some extent so I furled my brow when I saw there were no charts or tables to roll from if you so chose.  Most other supers RPGs I have played had some tables to roll (if you want) and this can occasionally end up with some decidedly interesting character concepts that you would not have otherwise even considered.  Randomness to me offers pleasant surprises to role-play with, particularly when dealing with character creation. I suppose this is just a person peeve however.

Mutants and Masterminds has no classes and instead relies feats, skills, attributes and powers to define your character.  All of these are bought with the point buy points depending on what level of power you want your game to be at.  This ranges from 1 to 20 with the recommended being 10.  Most of the example characters were power level 10 and they covered a good array of direction for possible PC builds or just some ideas.

Abilities and Skills

Ten Angry Rabbits turns to Arcanium and tips his hat with one hand, “Like the cowboy hat on or off?”

“Off.”

“. . . Too bad.”

Abilities are bought with points as I mentioned above and they make up the physical and mental characteristics of your characters.  Abilities start at 10 and cost 1 to raise, thus they are quite easy to place at a respectable level.  The abilities themselves are the same as in Dungeons and Dragons and are very familiar to almost all role-players.  Abilities effect most rolls made in the game and directly affect your skills so they are fairly important.  Abilities can be raised to 20 normally, but you can buy powers that dramatically increase their effect on the game – Super Strength for example.  Every point of a ‘super’ ability essentially doubles the effectiveness.

Skills are purchased in the same way and most of the skills replicate their Dungeons and Dragons counterpart with a few modern additions.  Skills simply cost 1 per point and since abilities modify skills in the first place, it seems natural that ability scores would be a better buy.  Skills in general seem to be rarely used in the game on a whole, at least in our session.  This is simply because powers replicate them or your ability scores can get so ridiculously high that there is little point to invest in skills other than for role-playing incentives. 

My character had a particularly large amount of skills (ninja after all) but they were disappointingly useless in the game.  Why bother to make a tumble roll to avoid a truck when you have super speed and can run up walls?  Why use Gather Information when you have ESP/Telepathy?  Why use Intimidate when you can shoot a power level 10 ray of death down someone’s shorts?  I suspect these types of situations are common place rather than exceptions.  I suppose it would be like playing a Dungeons & Dragons game with an entire party of mid to high level Wizards – skills start to feel insignificant very quickly.

Feats

“Sorry Giest, Lecherousness isn’t a feat, but good news! There are rules to create it.”

There are two types of feats, normal feats and super-feats. The general feats offer the same thing they did in Dungeons and Dragons, a special ability of sorts to customize your character.  They also allow you to build a character without any super powers all at (ala Batman).  Most Supers RPGs have a very hard time managing that but Mutants and Masterminds does a decent job of making such character concepts viable and playable.  The feats to enhance save throws are particularly important since combat is resolved purely on save throws.  More about that when I talk about combat below.

Most of the feats are used for combat in one form or another.  Many of the names are familiar to D&D players with a few exceptions such as Sidekick.  The super-feats are more interesting and more powerful.  They seem to be powers of their own, or perhaps powers that they found that were not quite suited to the structured system for powers that M&M uses.  Some examples of these feats are Immunities (pressure, suffocation, etc), Mental Link, Radio Hearing, and so forth.  The list is quite small but they do list a paragraph on creating new super-feats.  They probably could have expanded a comprehensive list of new feats quite a bit given some more space.

Powers

“Sorry man, but ‘flipping out’ is not a power.  Mach One Punch with rapid-shot throwing stars is pretty close though.”

Powers are the meat of the game and M&M does it’s best to offer a wide array of customizable powers.  Powers are purchased with the point buy method and are capped depending on your power level.  The bulk of character points will most likely be spent of powers as they are by far the useful and interesting things in the game.  Powers can be purchased with extras and power stunts (which increase the cost) or flaws (which decrease the cost).   Each power rank is essentially double the previous level; a level 11 is twice as powerful as power level 10, very much the same as the AP system DC Superheroes used long ago.  Power stunts are various tricks you can perform with your power as a one time cost, power extras are added function that your powers has that increases the cost per rank and flaws are a negative quality from your power that lowers the cost per rank.

For example, if you have Invisibility you can choose a power stunt that will allow it to work against infrared, radar and so forth.  As an Extra you could choose for your invisibility to affect others and for a flaw your invisibility would only work for intelligent creatures (not robots, cameras, etc).  Power Stunts and Extras can be muddled somewhat, but on a whole the system is versatile enough to create exactly the power that you want while having the system remains relatively simple.  Personally I thought the power system itself was a very elegant manner to handle powers.

The powers list itself is rather short and I feel they easily could have doubled it and the number of Extras, Stunts and Flaws that you can use with your powers.  They include a basic guide to creating more powers which is unfortunately mandatory to use, or at least consider, simply because they did not allot more space for additional powers and features.  Even for our one-shot we ended up creating powers (nanotechnology and machine control).

Characteristics and Hero Points

 “The power of the guitar compels you!  The power of the guitar compels you!”, Ten Angry Rabbits chanted when the loan officer asked why his bank should loan the Super’s money.

Characteristics are the details of your character such as his name, origin, motivations, other personality quirks and the role-playing aspects of your character.  Characters also have save throws (very important), move, carrying capacity and hero points.  In particular the Save Throws are quite important since combat is resolved by save throws rather than a hit point system. Other capabilities are your characters movement and strength capacity.  Both can get quite high if your super powers augment these.  A character with power level 10 super strength can effectively lift 100 tons. Not bad for a 3000 year old Celtic legend like Beowulf.

Characters (and NPC supers) are allotted Hero Points, which can affect dice rolls, improve defense, eliminate certain conditions, and a host of other activities.  Hero points can effect just about anything in the game and although it may not guarantee success it usually helps.  Hero points are replenished each adventure and the number is usually based on one half of your power level (power 10 is 5 hero points).  Hero points are meant to reflect the extra effort and heroic luck the Hero Point system occasionally succeeds. 

Personally I am not a fan of Hero Points (Fate Points, Action Points, whatever you want to call them) since players (and villains) can rely on them a bit too much.  An example would be a character can jump off of a 300 foot cliff knowing he will be disabled, and he can simply use a Hero Point to automatically change his condition to unconscious – waking up unharmed a few hours later.  Of course that is an extreme, but players can do silly things when they know that they have a safety net of sorts to get around the normal rules of the game.  Some say this is in flavor of the game, and I agree, but the effects should come at a further cost or not guarantee success for some actions. 

At worst Hero Points are used with degenerate characters (or villains) to make them practically invincible.  This is because the bulk of combat revolves around you getting an abnormally high roll and your opponent getting an abnormally low roll.  With hero points, you can simple re-roll and change the outcome of that (rare) occurrence thus making a tedious war of Hero Points.  This may not sounds like too bad of a problem, but when I talk about combat below you will have a better idea of what I mean.

Save Throws

“What about nanobots? I really want to be resistant to nanobots!”

Combat is primarily resolved by attacks being tested against your defense score and the damage against the respective save throw.  Save throws include those in D&D; Reflex, Fortitude, Will and the new inclusion of Damage.  Hit points are omitted and you’re Damage save is reserved for what condition you are in after an attack.  Any kind of protection or modifier that affects your Damage save will be used quite a bit - as much as hit points are used in D&D. This makes the Damage save very powerful and potentially abusive since a great deal of things can stack to increase your damage save.  This includes constitution, super constitution, protection, armor, and feats.

Other attacks can affect your other save throws, such as mental attacks effecting Will but these are for the most part rare for the majority of combat.  In our session we did not use any save throws except Damage and Reflex.  After looking through the book I would think Will and Fortitude tests would be a rarity.  This also makes attacks that rely on Will saves for example; very powerful since Will is generally an afterthought to most characters.

Weaknesses and Devices

“Hmm, we need money.  Arcanium can teleport anywhere right?  How much are Mars rocks worth now a days anyhow?”

Weaknesses are an option to give your character more build points in return for a flaw or weakness in your character.  I think every Supers RPG has something like weaknesses and everyone of them is more comprehensive than the one presented in Mutants and Masterminds.  They offer a grand total of nine weaknesses including berserker, disabled, disturbing, naïve and so forth.  Obviously this section was the on the business end of the editors scissors when they decided to cut the book down to under 200 pages.  This section could have easily been 9 pages instead of barely over one page (counting artwork).

Once again they offer a section to create your own weaknesses since they obviously gave so few options you would have to create your own.  What is becoming standard in this book is a mandatory section where GMs and Players can create their own Weaknesses, Powers, Feats, or what have you.   They seem to bring particular attention to this because they blatantly made each section as small as possible while keeping minimal functionally.  I don’t always expect a comprehensive list, but compared to other game systems M&M does a minimal job for yet another important concept in the game.  

Mutants and Masterminds designate 13 pages to devices, which is quite an investment for such a short manual.  The devices range from mundane guns, armor and vehicles to equipment that essentially mimics powers or feats.  This is a much needed section since a good deal of your role-playing session will be dealing with guys with guns, destroying vehicles and so forth.  Again they probably could have expanded a good deal on this section but it is not as blatantly lacking as most of the others.

Combat

“He evaded the attack again! Screw it man, everyone - JUMP RAVE!”

Combat in Mutants and Masterminds is simple enough that only a little material is needed for a clean and concise explanation.  A few things were missing such as an explained version of evasion in combat, the effects of some of the powers at range and a few other tidbits.  Many odd situations can occur in a super’s game so it takes a certain amount of creativity to adjudicate it.  Luckily with d20 a GM can just have you roll, add on the ability adjustment and you will have some kind of result to work with.

Combat is resolved in a simple turn based system revolving around the 20 sided dice.  Attack rolls are opposed to a defenders Defense score.  An attack will be based on the power level and this opposed to a defenders Damage Save.  The difference of the spread indicates the effect the damage has on the combatant. 

Attacks can either be Stun attacks or Lethal attacks which affects the outcome of the attack.  Even with a lethal attack you can not outright kill someone, but you can disable them placing them near death (and they can die soon after).  Stun attacks are less severe limited to bruising, stunning and unconscious.  The lethal scheme is a bit odd since disabled is a greater effect than unconscious, but when you are disabled you are conscious and can effectively act to some extent.  Also you can spend a Hero Point to move one condition better, so you can go from disabled (and awake) to unconscious (knocked out), which is supposed to be a better condition.  Just an odd event that occurred in our game.

I feared combat would be overtly short and brisk, so much so that it diminished the excitement of it.  This was not the case however and I think the system does a decent job of replicating a slugfest from the comics.  Unless you are very familiar with the powers expect to be looking them up quite a bit as in almost every action someone will be using some power(s).  Minions (mooks) are always treated as unconscious on any successful attack, thus huge waves of minions can be downed with just about any type of low powered area effect.  This is good because it speeds up combat but bad because the minions can be a little too insignificant.  To the point that one attack from one PC can take all of them down with little effort.

One concern of mine was there was no delineation to most of the attack in the game.  Essentially a power level 10 cosmic bolt is exactly the same as a power level 10 lightning flare as it a power level 10 nanobot attack.  This seems a bit generic to me and I really had wished the game offered alternatives to damage saves such as energy, physical, fatigue and so forth. 

In some cases combat can be greatly protracted and the main reason of this is because of high Damage Saves and Hero Points.  If a character or villain has a high Damage save, it takes the union of a high success to hit them, a high success to damage them and low roll on the defenders part for it to have any effect.  This is where Hero points mess it up; a point can be spent to usually annul the attack thus restarting the process.  Damage saves are rolled so often and so vital to combat that it has an over-emphasis on the combat, so much so that it can push the game into frustration in dealing with folks with high Damage Saves.  My only advice would be to allow increases to the Damage save sparingly for both players and villains.

Our game had an example of this when dealing with Rant n’Rave, a pair of villains robbing a bank.  Our group more or less thwarted their plans but they were ridiculously hard to take down because they Evasion, enhanced Reflex saves, high dex mods, and decent pool of Villain points to use.  The villains were power level 10, as was our group but we were very much outclassed simply because those characters knew how to abuse the Damage save system.  Eventually I think our GM gave up and hand waved them as being captured rather than further draw out a tedious battle.  Note that Rant n’Rave are character provided by Green Ronin to use in starter M&M adventures.

He’s Dead Jim

Arcanium stared wide eyed at the puddle of goo at Giest’s feet, “JESUS CHRIST! What did you do to The Hyena!  And why are his remains arranging themselves into geometric shapes!”

I expected Mutants and Masterminds to avoid lethal combat for the most part but I surprised how often lethal rolls come up.  Guns after all are lethal as were about half of the attacks in our group (and this was unintentional by us or our GM).  The villain The Hyena was turned into pile of goop when a horde of nanobots from Giest attacked The Hyena turning him inside out.  A few unlucky rolls on his part and that was that.  Even a gun from a standard minion can be a real threat against an unprotected character, further emphasizing the need for a good Damage Save.  Our game slowly shifted from golden age save the day game to shear vigilantism after a few of these events.  I would recommend that GMs consider altering the rules somewhat to fit their campaign.  It could be that we used too many guns in the game and many of our powers were unintentionally lethal.

Game Masters Section and Adventure

“Atomic Brains need wuv too.”

The GMs sections offer a collection of advice for running Mutants and Masterminds with a collection of adventure, plot and villain creating tools.  Likely a supplement to M&M will eventually come out to expand on the minuscule job they do here, but it is adequate to get going so long as the GM has some creativity and time on his hands.  Sadly if GMs had plenty of creativity and time, they would probably make there own game/world and not pay $33.95 to get a pre-made one.

A short adventure is located at the end of the book.  I did not look at the adventure since someone may eventually run it for our group.  It looked to be about five pages which seem about right for a starting session.  After the adventure session is a list of villains, some of them quite powerful and all entertaining.  It’s hard not to love The Atomic Brain and I actually preferred the villain’s pages to most of the rest of the book.

Conclusion

“Why is it we always end up in jail at the end of each session?”

Mutants and Masterminds is no doubt an entertaining game despite the ridiculous skimping they applied to some section in the book.  There is no doubt in my mind this book should have been 300 pages to do the game justice.  Aside from this my main complaints would be over emphasis on the Damage Save and the generic feel of the attacks.  If they would have delineated the attack forms more and added the comparable save throws I think it would be more balanced and fair.

Luckily the customizable powers and the variety of characters that can be constructed lend to the role-playing.  In our game the most entertaining parts were simply doing mundane things as a super hero or using powers for the sheer thrill of using them.  Mutants and Masterminds uses the d20 system in a creative and easy to learn system, I hope future d20 products take notice.

Style: 4, Classy and Welldone.
Substance: 2, Sparse.
Total: 6/10