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The main rule book is a hard-backed and measures in at 19cm x 28 cm (7.5" x 11") and a rather measly 128 pages. The front cover features Spider-Man and the back Wolverine with a recently trashed Sentinel, both are in the style from the new Ultimate range of Marvel comics.
The presentation of the book is, unsurprisingly, excellent. The pages are all glossy and full colour, featuring art work taken from Marvel extensive range of comics, all of which are of very high quality with the one exception of a very pixilated picture of Doctor Strange on page 94. For the most part the English is clear and the typos are few and far between.
The book begins with the typical "What are Roleplaying games" introduction. This includes with a short example of play, which makes little sense until you have read about the system mechanics. This is followed by a Glossary of terms which is fairly comprehensive and should be read in full as the game used a lot of non-standard terms. Next is a 3-page description of the system mechanics which doesn't really impart enough information for a full understanding of the rest of the book, which is done in 8 pages (much) later on. It would have really helped the first time reading if the system had been sufficiently explained at the start.
Skipping ahead to page 79 to cover ARS (Action Resolution System), as the authors should have done, we find a simple, elegant resource based approach. ARS is diceless and instead uses 'stones' representing both your health (white stones) and the amount of 'effort' (red stones) you have, either in reserve or are currently putting into a specific task. All characters have an Energy Reserve of red stones which each turn they can allocate to Actions, such as fighting, running, inventing etc. They are not obliged to use all their stones and they regenerate them at a rate depending on their current health. When performing an opposed Action the competitor who has allocated the most stones wins, the maximum that they can allocate is limited by their Abilities, Action Number, Modifiers and situation (see below).
A character is defined by their Abilities, Actions, Modifiers and Equipment. There are 5 Abilities; Intelligence, Strength, Agility, Speed and the oh-so-important Durability. Each of these typically range from one to ten but can go higher. The human maximum is three and human average is one, with the exception of Intelligence in which the maximum is eight and average two, I guess we are weak but bright. For the most part Abilities are used to assist Actions (see below). Speed is also used to refine running speed. Durability, however, is immensely important, as it defines both the number of white stones (health) a character gets and the size of their Energy Reserve. As it quite rightly states in the MURPG FAQ; Durability is king!
There are two types of Actions, Normal Actions which everyone can do such as running, talking and so forth and the Actions they put in the Action Boxed on their
Modifiers are skills and powers that do not have directly used, instead the assist with other actions; Toughness increases your Defence in combat, effectively granting 'free' red stones, or Healing Factor aiding recovery of white stones. For the most part equipment has a similar effect; weapons aiding attacking and armour aiding in defence, although they can provide additional Actions and Ability increases. Situational Modifiers exist to allow the GM to alter difficulty levels.
To aid the GM the book features an extremely useful Difficulty and Resistance Chart. Difficulty representing how difficult the task is, and resistance the amount of effort required. It also defines the meaning of the various Abilities numbers.
Combat is resolved by the characters allocating red stones to which ever combat Action they are going to use, and then moving some of these to their defence, where defence is used as the difficulty of being injured in combat. Where the defence stones come gives a 'flavour' of how a character is defending themselves, it has no direct effect on game mechanics. If an attack is successful the number of stones that the Defence what exceeded by represents the amount of damage done.
What is a very nice touch is the characterful naming of certain facets of the system, such as each characters Action(s) takes place in a Panel, and all the characters completing their panels is called a Page. Similarly Adventures are segmented into Issues, and experience is gained as Lines of Experience, which describes a notable achievement and goes towards both Increasing Action Numbers and adding Action Specialities. This goes a long way bringing a comic-book feel to the game.
Character creation is a simple affair of purchasing abilities and points. Once point I liked was the fact that while Power Armoured characters are paid for in the same manner as super-powered characters, experience is not used to develop their armour provided abilities; they have to be Invented using the invention rules.
For the most part this is a very clean, simple and playable system, however it is not without flaws. The lack of distinction between physical armour and ability to dodge of defining Defence8 means that, for example, even an unenraged Hulk would have little trouble hitting the super-agile Spider-Man simply due to his massive strength. The book does state that the GM should add Situational Modifiers in such situations, but this is such a common occurrence is should be part of ARS and not require the GM to perpetually add modifiers to patch the hole.
The range of supplied Actions and Modifiers seem chosen to match current Marvel characters, and not to provide a usable selection of powers and skills to create new characters, this also results in some odd powers which seem totally redundant. Unstoppable seem to exist only for the Juggernaut, wouldn't a high Strength and Durability suffice? Animal Senses for Wolverine and Radar Senses for Daredevil, which both do effectively the same thing, especially when there is also a Sonar Sense available. The same applies to Healing Factor and Accelerated Healing Factor, why not have the same power at different levels? There are many more examples of these.
The descriptions of Specializations and how to use them in Actions are very underdeveloped. In a number of the Actions some possible Specializations are proposed, but in many cases the effect they have is not detailed. For instance you can specialize in any number of different forms of close-combat, but the closest to describing their effect was "when fighting Ninja a character would be better off with a Martial Arts specialization than just Boxing", and then suggest using Situational Modifiers accordingly, once again asking the GM to patch up the system. Due to this complete lack of coverage Specializations as a whole are very frustrating to use.
Now to my personal Bugbear, the example character profiles. They provide 42 full character profiles, covering most of the popular heroes and villain in the Marvel comics. Given that this is published by Marvel themselves, I had hoped that we would have some accurate profiles. Instead we are supplied with profiles which are, while for the most part reasonably accurate, in places glaringly erroneous. Q.E.D. claim that many of the figures came from Marvel themselves, but whoever came up with them needed to their research better. For example take Captain America who as a result of the Super Soldier Serum is physically the perfect human being; perpetually as strong, fast, agile and tough as it is possible for a human to be. So why does he have super-human Strength, Agility and Durability? The same goes for Daredevil's agility; he is well trained not super-human! As for Wolverine's profile; wow! These high Abilities may well be to off set them from the many other characters's peak human Abilities (such as Black Cat's physical perfection, how they figure she is twice as strong as Cyclops I don't know) but then either the abilities are too high in general, or the maximum human limit needs to be reset. Many of the relative Action Numbers also seem to be erroneous, such as why in the field of close-combat is the Punisher as skilled as Captain America, especially when the in the comics Punisher gets consistently pummeled in fisticuffs by Daredevil who has a much lower Action Number in Close-Combat?
Style: 4 (Meaty)
This is a lovely looking book with some fantastic art by some of the top comic-book artists. The presentation is impeccable and the quality of the binding and paper is excellent. It is a delight to read, at least the second time round once you know how the ARS system works. So I give it four, if they had put the ARS section nearer the start it would have been a five.
Substance: 2 (Sparse)
It is a mere 128 pages in size, while this is partly due to the simple system which needs only a few pages to cover, it is also due to the few pages they devote to background, the one adventure the provide was okay, but no ideas for plot lines for other adventures are provided. Admittedly these would be largely redundant for the Marvel comics fans who are the ones most likely to buy this, it still would have been nice. While they did provide profiles for over 40 characters many I think were fundamentally flawed and need to be revised, maybe in supplements, we can hope.
The system, while elegant, is severely underdeveloped in many areas, notably specializations and combat. There is absolutely no guide on how Specializations should be used beyond getting the GM to jury rig it. The examples for combat don't tie up with the rules and they don't hold up in simple situations (see above), again requiring the GM to 'frig it'. It simply needs more work. I reluctantly (I so wanted it to be great) give it a two.
