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chuckroComic-book superhero roleplaying! This volume has complete rules for character creation and playing the game in a low-priced black-and-white paperback edition.
I didn’t realize that M&M was a d20 game! This actually makes it much easier to get a grasp on and gives me higher hopes for it working in play. I don’t run or play a lot of superhero RPGs, partially because most systems aren’t very good. (Wild Talents was decent for a couple of sessions at a time. Palladium Heroes is too loaded down with clunky mechanics, Champions irritates me with its inflexibility, the old DC and Marvel licensed games were unfun number-crunching exercises.) Between this set and the D20 version of Silver Age Sentinels, I suspect something workable—if breakable—can emerge. The powers list is nicely comprehensive and looks delightfully flexible—I was having a hard time coming up with a comic character I couldn’t create.
Upon reflection, I think this bare-bones version of the core book was pretty much all I needed for a superhero RPG rulebook: The rules. I’ve been reading superhero comics since I learned to read; whatever their variant of the classic superhero world-building fluff is, I’m sure I’ve heard it before. Though I may see if there’s a GM’s guide; there are only a small fraction of comic stories that translate well to being played as an RPG, and they’re rarely the iconic ones.
They use a different approach to health than most d20 games: You make “toughness saves” against damage dealt, and there are only a few levels of injury that failing those saves can inflict. It saves tracking HP, though the healing rules are probably more complicated than necessary. I need to playtest this, but I think it will work much better for the genre than things like an “SDC” pool or straight hit points.
They also note that non-lethal damage is the standard for the setting (which makes sense—heroes in comics rarely attack to kill, and the classic wacky villains would rather put you in a deathtrap and gloat). There’s also a lot of emphasis on the various forms of disabling attacks as specific powers: Entangling, dazzling or otherwise disabling are very effect attacks when the goal is to knock out your opponent and when you see a lot of equal-number/equal-power team battles. If you want your powers to have those effects, you need to buy them as part of the set.
But the best adaptation to d20 to make this work for comic heroes is definitely Hero Points, which basically function as a cross between Willpower in World of Darkness (use them to recover quickly, succeed on something important or avoid mishap) and “make the game run more cinematically” points (you can spend them for clues or to “adjust” a vague scene to allow you to do something cool; and you collect them both for acting heroically and for having bad things happen to your hero). You can also use them to “push” one of your powers to do something that you normally don’t have the skills for, which is brilliant. My biggest complaint about Champions is how strict the power rules are, especially since half of the comic plots are solved by the hero figuring out how to use his powers in a clever new way.
Overall: I have high hopes for M&M; I have an interesting idea for a round-robin game, though I may make up character sheets for the JLA/Young Justice/the Avenger/the cast of Heroes to run a one-shot and test things out, first. Or, heh--the original pitch for "The Secret History of All-American Comics" could be perfect…
I didn’t realize that M&M was a d20 game! This actually makes it much easier to get a grasp on and gives me higher hopes for it working in play. I don’t run or play a lot of superhero RPGs, partially because most systems aren’t very good. (Wild Talents was decent for a couple of sessions at a time. Palladium Heroes is too loaded down with clunky mechanics, Champions irritates me with its inflexibility, the old DC and Marvel licensed games were unfun number-crunching exercises.) Between this set and the D20 version of Silver Age Sentinels, I suspect something workable—if breakable—can emerge. The powers list is nicely comprehensive and looks delightfully flexible—I was having a hard time coming up with a comic character I couldn’t create.
Upon reflection, I think this bare-bones version of the core book was pretty much all I needed for a superhero RPG rulebook: The rules. I’ve been reading superhero comics since I learned to read; whatever their variant of the classic superhero world-building fluff is, I’m sure I’ve heard it before. Though I may see if there’s a GM’s guide; there are only a small fraction of comic stories that translate well to being played as an RPG, and they’re rarely the iconic ones.
They use a different approach to health than most d20 games: You make “toughness saves” against damage dealt, and there are only a few levels of injury that failing those saves can inflict. It saves tracking HP, though the healing rules are probably more complicated than necessary. I need to playtest this, but I think it will work much better for the genre than things like an “SDC” pool or straight hit points.
They also note that non-lethal damage is the standard for the setting (which makes sense—heroes in comics rarely attack to kill, and the classic wacky villains would rather put you in a deathtrap and gloat). There’s also a lot of emphasis on the various forms of disabling attacks as specific powers: Entangling, dazzling or otherwise disabling are very effect attacks when the goal is to knock out your opponent and when you see a lot of equal-number/equal-power team battles. If you want your powers to have those effects, you need to buy them as part of the set.
But the best adaptation to d20 to make this work for comic heroes is definitely Hero Points, which basically function as a cross between Willpower in World of Darkness (use them to recover quickly, succeed on something important or avoid mishap) and “make the game run more cinematically” points (you can spend them for clues or to “adjust” a vague scene to allow you to do something cool; and you collect them both for acting heroically and for having bad things happen to your hero). You can also use them to “push” one of your powers to do something that you normally don’t have the skills for, which is brilliant. My biggest complaint about Champions is how strict the power rules are, especially since half of the comic plots are solved by the hero figuring out how to use his powers in a clever new way.
Overall: I have high hopes for M&M; I have an interesting idea for a round-robin game, though I may make up character sheets for the JLA/Young Justice/the Avenger/the cast of Heroes to run a one-shot and test things out, first. Or, heh--the original pitch for "The Secret History of All-American Comics" could be perfect…
