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Author Topic: Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?  (Read 2977 times)

jgants

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Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?
« on: November 10, 2011, 10:58:24 AM »
One of the posts in another thread mentioned how M&M was over-rated because it didn't work very well for supers.  That reminded me that M&M 3e came out some time this year and I realized I hadn't heard anything about it.

I can find a lot of posts talking about M&M 3e before it came out on various forums, but I don't really see much after it came out.  There's not even a review of it on TBP as far as I can tell.

Was it that bad / bland?  Did 3 editions in such a small timeframe just turn people off?

I found 2e to be an overcomplicated mess (especially once Ultimate Power came out), but was curious if 3e actually fixed anything or if it kept making the same mistakes.
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Caesar Slaad

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Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?
« Reply #1 on: November 10, 2011, 12:01:59 PM »
I don't think it's bad/bland, but then my tastes run to systems a bit heavier than BASH and ICONS for supers. (That said, I'd still prefer something lighter than m&m)

They did some good things and some bad things by me:
Good:
1) Most powers that have powerful consequences now have tiered effects by default, which is an improvement over the persistent all-or-nothing approach that was in place previously.
2) they split some attributes (like splitting strength into two attributes covering fighting and brute strength ) making the system more flexible for representing a variety of concepts.

Bad:
They renamed a bunch of conditions. While the departing from d20 with the attributes made sense o me, this just causes confusion with no real benefit.
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Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?
« Reply #2 on: November 10, 2011, 12:26:32 PM »
I've only played it once, but it felt less like a supers game and more like...something else that happened to have super powers.

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Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?
« Reply #3 on: November 10, 2011, 01:04:36 PM »
I ran a 2nd edition M&M game and whilst the rules were good to read in theory, practise the game was too cumbersome. Being D20 based meant it had a lot of baggage and whilst the system works well for fantasy, it struggled with fast-paced supers game.

I didnt like the way that the hero's powers either worked or didn't, I felt that the rules didn't reflect the 'always on' nature of the comic books.

Where the game did work was in low-powered dark hero games, as the slower paced suited the crunchy MM2 system better.

As for 3rd edition, it came and went as far as I'm concerned, sorry.
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« Reply #4 on: November 10, 2011, 01:09:51 PM »
I ran an M&M2e campaign for a while, using pregens from Instant Superheroes 1; my players had a blast, but I think it was despite the system. There was too much crunch there for that group.

I was invited to join a friend's game, but didn't have the free time to commit.
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Aos

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Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?
« Reply #5 on: November 10, 2011, 01:31:48 PM »
When i first decided to get back into gaming after a long hiatus I ordered a bunch of games from Amazon, M&M 2e among them. A lot of positive buzz surrounded the game, but I never manged to get through character generation. Supers is a favorite genre of ours, so we went back to V&V and then gave Bash a shot, but now we've settled on Icons, which has given us just about the best supers experience ever. Too bad the art blows. What I want is a copy of ICONS with a combination of the art from V&V and M&M.
« Last Edit: November 10, 2011, 02:24:13 PM by Aos »
You are posting in a troll thread.

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Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?
« Reply #6 on: November 10, 2011, 01:32:33 PM »
I grabbed the DC Adventures book, which I enjoyed reading, found the mechanics difficult to follow, and realized I'd still prefer old FASERIP for a simpler Superhero mechanic (in fact, it's become the new groups de facto pick-up game, if everyone can't make D&D), or HERO/Champions for a more complicated one.

But to be fair, since I hit 30 a few years ago, I've found my willingness to learn new rules has sharply declined. YMMV.
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daniel_ream

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Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?
« Reply #7 on: November 10, 2011, 02:04:51 PM »
Ah.  One of my favourite rant topics.

I'm going to stay away from a litany of the mechanical flaws in M&M in favour of why I think 3E stumbled out of the gate with its fan base.

To start, by the time DCA came along, the general perception among the fans was that GR had abandoned the game line. Promised new supplements were not coming out, the staff were absent from the forums, stuff wasn't getting posted on their web site, and long-standing rules FAQs weren't getting answered.  We now know that GR was feverishly working on DC Adventures and simply didn't have time for any of that (or perceived that they did not) but the PR damage had already been done.

Second, 3E was split across two products: DC Adventures and M&M 3E.  mechanically they're identical and textually almost so, although 3E has the errata from DCA included in it.  This wasn't a PR problem, but it did mean that a lot of people held off buying the DCA book, which was only available in hardcover and had a lot of DC fluff and character builds many didn't want.  So the fan excitement was spread across far too many months of a split product release cycle.

Last, the inevitable edition war.  Amusingly, the big complaint here was that 3E wasn't enough of a change from 2E.  3E has a couple of really nice new ideas, and the rest is essentially house rules taken almost directly from the 2E Mastermind's Manual.  The superpower system was made even more abstract and streamlined, and much of the detail that Ultimate Power added was removed.  This led to an explosion in the "how do I build this superpower" questions, and the answers - even from the freelancers who worked on the DC character books - are contradictory and often counter-intuitive.  Combat has been made simpler and faster, but at the cost of detail, and the game is now explicitly four-colour.  Without house rules you can't seriously injure or kill someone.

Because so much of GR's effort was and is going into the DC books, there's still very little support coming out beyond those books, except for the usual Monster Manuals^G^Gsupervillain roster books.

All combined, the general problem with M&M is that a large chunk of their fan base looked at the new edition and said "yeah, there's nothing here that makes me want to invalidate my existing investment in 2E, and I can backport the two or three things that are worth having."
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jgants

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Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?
« Reply #8 on: November 10, 2011, 02:36:47 PM »
Quote from: Aos;488959
When i first decided to get back into gaming after a long hiatus I ordered a bunch of games from Amazon, MM 2e among them. A lot of positive buzz surrounded the game, but I never manged to get through character generation.


Character creation killed the game for me, too.  Much like GURPS, it seemed like there were way too many different ways to try and model the same power, and they all had widely different totals.  Added to that was that the game didn't do a great job of giving you an idea what numbers should be to represent various levels of power.  Thus, I went back to FASERIP.

Quote from: Novastar;488960
I grabbed the DC Adventures book, which I enjoyed reading, found the mechanics difficult to follow, and realized I'd still prefer old FASERIP for a simpler Superhero mechanic (in fact, it's become the new groups de facto pick-up game, if everyone can't make D&D), or HERO/Champions for a more complicated one.

But to be fair, since I hit 30 a few years ago, I've found my willingness to learn new rules has sharply declined. YMMV.


Mine has as well, but M&M seemed close enough to d20 that I thought it wouldn't be an issue.  But the character generation ended up being too much of a mess for me.

Quote from: daniel_ream;488971
Ah.  One of my favourite rant topics.

I'm going to stay away from a litany of the mechanical flaws in M&M in favour of why I think 3E stumbled out of the gate with its fan base.

To start, by the time DCA came along, the general perception among the fans was that GR had abandoned the game line. Promised new supplements were not coming out, the staff were absent from the forums, stuff wasn't getting posted on their web site, and long-standing rules FAQs weren't getting answered.  We now know that GR was feverishly working on DC Adventures and simply didn't have time for any of that (or perceived that they did not) but the PR damage had already been done.

Second, 3E was split across two products: DC Adventures and M&M 3E.  mechanically they're identical and textually almost so, although 3E has the errata from DCA included in it.  This wasn't a PR problem, but it did mean that a lot of people held off buying the DCA book, which was only available in hardcover and had a lot of DC fluff and character builds many didn't want.  So the fan excitement was spread across far too many months of a split product release cycle.

Last, the inevitable edition war.  Amusingly, the big complaint here was that 3E wasn't enough of a change from 2E.  3E has a couple of really nice new ideas, and the rest is essentially house rules taken almost directly from the 2E Mastermind's Manual.  The superpower system was made even more abstract and streamlined, and much of the detail that Ultimate Power added was removed.  This led to an explosion in the "how do I build this superpower" questions, and the answers - even from the freelancers who worked on the DC character books - are contradictory and often counter-intuitive.  Combat has been made simpler and faster, but at the cost of detail, and the game is now explicitly four-colour.  Without house rules you can't seriously injure or kill someone.

Because so much of GR's effort was and is going into the DC books, there's still very little support coming out beyond those books, except for the usual Monster Manuals^G^Gsupervillain roster books.

All combined, the general problem with M&M is that a large chunk of their fan base looked at the new edition and said "yeah, there's nothing here that makes me want to invalidate my existing investment in 2E, and I can backport the two or three things that are worth having."


Ah, see, this is the kind of detail I was looking for.  Explains a lot why I haven't heard much about it.

I found Green Ronin's website utterly unhelpful when looking for info about it.  I didn't really see any quickstart rules or previews, except for art previews.  Apparently they are really pushing the art angle on the game.

It sounds like it made some good changes but not the main one I was looking for (making character creation easier).  I'm also not sure I like the new "full four-color" design, as I prefer FASERIP for that type of gaming and thought the D20 style of M&M was better suited to something grittier.
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Tahmoh

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Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?
« Reply #9 on: November 10, 2011, 02:50:59 PM »
I suspect the massive wait between releases for the dc game and the fact that theres still a book missing for the main 3e game has also killed interest...it certainly put me off bothering with the system(dont make a promise about releases that you know you'll never get close to meeting is the lesson GR needs to learn from this).

Soylent Green

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Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?
« Reply #10 on: November 10, 2011, 02:55:49 PM »
Quote from: Aos;488959
What I want is a copy of ICONS with a combination of the art from V&V and M&M.


Then perhaps you should grab the French edition off ICONS when it comes out



Actually it's only the cover (and the language) that's different, the inside illustrations are the same.

Funny though because I really like the ICONS artwork. It's not technically brilliant but it's got personality and of course echoes the DCAU style. My screen saver is actually images from the various ICONS books and adventures.
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Aos

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Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?
« Reply #11 on: November 10, 2011, 03:15:15 PM »
Quote from: Soylent Green;488990
Funny though because I really like the ICONS artwork. It's not technically brilliant but it's got personality and of course echoes the DCAU style. My screen saver is actually images from the various ICONS books and adventures.

I like the pic on page 65 of the core book and some of the artist's later work that I've seen, but I don't have any of the adventures and such.  I've got the character folio, a ton of my own ideas and a copy of the Marvel encyclopedia if I come up short, so I just can't bring myself to pull the trigger on the Villainomicon.
« Last Edit: November 10, 2011, 08:17:00 PM by Aos »
You are posting in a troll thread.

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Silverlion

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Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?
« Reply #12 on: November 10, 2011, 05:27:02 PM »
1E: An elegant simple derivitve of d20 with flaws, but fixable ones.

2E:Some ex-Hero fans were involved in playtest and play balance shifted from "Power Levels" which were easy to eyeball, to "Point Totals." Elegance was lost in an attempt to reach the golden mean of play balance.

3E: Seems to have swung to somewhere in between. Yet fails to be as elegant as 1E, or as "Balanced" as 2E.


The fact is it was a lovely game spoiled by trying to make it everything to all users. A problem that's occurred time after time in multiple edition games. (BESM, D&D)

I recently picked up Nocturnal book (again) for 1E, and still have 1E books on my shelf. A lovely and playable game. Tweaking ground speed/ditching the D&D need for tracking is one simple rule that fixes significant issues with it.  Funny enough I was a proponent of 2E ditching the 1-18 D&D stats, and using the bonuses, which 3E adopted.


I play Icons, if someone runs it, or use my own H&S game these days though. I don't really care to waste writing/playing time on point balancing.
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daniel_ream

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Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?
« Reply #13 on: November 10, 2011, 07:41:10 PM »
That's an interesting evaluation, Silverlion.  My impression of the editions has always been that they were

1E: MSH (FASERIP era)
2E: DCH (Mayfair)
3E: Champions

layered on a d20 core.  The game has always struck me as not really being able to make up its mind what it wants to be, and instead of having a strong vision the designer's just cribbing from whatever superhero RPGs he happens to remember.
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Mutants & Masterminds - Whatever Happened There?
« Reply #14 on: November 10, 2011, 08:15:37 PM »
I really liked DCA at first until I realized I had absolutely no idea how to play it because the book was organized in the most obtuse manner, prioritizing the needs of character builders over actually figuring how to play those characters.

With a copy of Hero Lab I can still make a DCA character no problem and have a lot of fun doing it, but afterward if you asked me to play it, I'd be baffled as to the most basic mechanics.
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