In the last two installments of this series, we looked at bespoke superhero systems in Marvel Super Heroes and Champions 4th edition. Today I’m cracking open the Mutants & Masterminds Pocket Player’s Guide by Steve Kenson from 2006, which means we are solidly into the OGL era of popular RPGs. I am going into this quite skeptical of whether this kind of system can handle the demands of the superhero genre, but I’ve been surprised before and M&M is quite a popular game. So let’s see what Mutants & Masterminds has to offer!
Mutants & Masterminds opens with a promise that is pretty common in RPG marketing material, and it’s something that really gets under my skin; “Anything adventure you can imagine is possible.” In its “What Is A Roleplaying Game?” section, M&M states:
“Your imagination is the only thing limiting the sorts of adventures you can have, since you and your friends create the world, the characters, and the adventures. It’s like writing your own comic book, with your characters as the heroes! All of the action takes place in your imagination, and the story can go on for as long as you want, with one exciting adventure after another.”
Mutants & Masterminds Pocket Player’s Guide, pg. 5
The adage that “the only limit is your imagination” has always bothered me in a game like this because, like… isn’t that what all the rules are? In a game like this, the rules exist basically to put limits on your character. To be clear, I don’t think this is a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s the literal entire point of RPGs as a medium. I play games to tell a shared story with other people using a shared framework. Telling collaborative stories is a very difficult and specific process – I did it for years in theatre. It’s messy and it requires a ton of communication and trust and work. Playing a game, no matter how rules-light, helps to bridge that gap and keep everyone at least marginally pointed in the same direction.
Again, I don’t think the fact that rules are limits is a bad thing. But at least be honest about it. Both Champions and Marvel Super Heroes describe themselves as being about roleplaying rather than telling a story. The Champions “What Is Roleplaying?” section puts all the emphasis on reacting to the world in-character, playing as your character in the story. Marvel Super Heroes goes a step further by having you actually play as established characters. But Mutants & Masterminds promises that the story is only limited by your imagination. Of course, this is backed up by “Rule Number One: Do whatever is the most fun for your game!” (M&M, pg. 7) I’m not trying to wade into system matters discourse, but this excuse also bugs me. It always makes me immediately feel like the game doesn’t have enough faith in itself.
This is made even worse by the fact that M&M actually has a mechanic by which both players and GM can break the rules – it’s just gated behind an in-game currency. Every character in Mutants & Masterminds starts each session with a Hero Point. These can be used to get bonuses on rolls, shrug off harm, etc, but their most powerful use is the catch-all “inspiration.”
“Once per game session, you can spend a hero point to get a sudden inspiration in the form of a hunt, clue, or bit of help from the GM. It might be a way out of the villain’s fiendish deathtrap, a vital clue for solving a mystery, or an idea about the villain’s weakness. It’s up to the GM exactly how much help the players get from inspiration.
Gamemasters may even wish to expand the “inspiration” facet of hero points to allow players greater control over the environment of the game, effectively allowing them to “edit” a scene to grant their heroes an advantage. For example, a hero is fighting a villain with plant-based powers in a scientific lab. The player deduces the villain may be vulnerable to defoliants, so she asks the GM if there are any chemicals in the lab she can throw together to create a defoliant. The Gamemaster requires to [sic] player to spend a hero point and says the right chemicals are close at hand.
How much players are allowed to edit circumstances is up to the individual Gamemaster, but generally hero points should not be allowed to change any event that has already occurred or any detail already explained in-game. For example, players cannot “edit” away damage or the effects of powers (hero points already allow this to a limited degree). The GM may also veto uses of editing that ruin the adventure or make things too easy on the players/ Inspiration is intended to give the players more input into the story and allow their heroes chances to succeed, but it shouldn’t be used as a replacement for planning and cleverness, just a way to enhance them.”
Mutants & Masterminds Player’s Pocket Guide, pg. 130
Hero Points are awarded exclusively at the GM’s discretion. They can be given as the result of a spectacular failed roll (“the GM decides if a particular failure is significant or not”), in exchange for a hero’s complications causing them trouble (“The GM decides when a particular complication comes up, although you can offer suggestions”), as a reward for particularly heroic acts (“The GM decides if a particular act is suitably heroic”), for good roleplaying*, for pulling off a stunt that impresses everyone at the table, and, my personal favorite, if the GM just cheats in favor of the villains. The “Gamemaster Fiat” rule allows the GM to simply break the rules in favor of the villain. They can force everyone to fail their saves and get captured, they can allow the villain to miraculously escape, they can do literally anything they want even if it is against the rules, but the heroes get a Hero Point out of it. Unironically, I think this is really fun. I love that a game so thoroughly dressed up in the D&D trappings of balance and crunch has a passage that mechanizes the GM outright cheating. But it’s just a mechanized version of Rule Number One from earlier in the book! This game literally gives both the players and the GM methods by which they can circumvent the rules when they think it would benefit the story. So did we really need the extremely wishy-washy “do whatever works for you, lol” preface?
Each of the games we’ve looked at so far in this series has had a particular strategy for how to handle the unique demands of the superhero genre in a traditional RPG ruleset. Marvel Super Heroes leans heavily on the strategy of modeling established characters, frequently in pre-written scenarios (I just bought a copy of the 1984 adventure “The Breeder Bombs” by Jeff Grubb, I can’t wait to dig into that on this blog one day). Champions created a very universal system where gear and magic are all modeled in the same way, but did so with an almost obsessive emphasis on the GM strictly enforcing genre and balance. Mutants & Masterminds feels like a half-hearted attempt to staple the superhero genre to the established rules of D&D, and while I think there are some interesting ideas, it fails to gel in a way that actually works.
Unfortunately, this book is also really poorly copyedited. I found numerous typos and errors, even on a casual perusal. This is the slimmed down player’s guide, but there are still references to chapters from the full book that aren’t in this one. Nitpicking things like this isn’t really the purpose of this series, but it does just amplify the feeling that this game doesn’t have a lot of care put into it. The choices made aren’t very intentional, the systems don’t mesh well, and the actual product itself needed at least one more pass.
The hyper-specific and crunchy rules feel at odds with the mechanized narrative-forward rule-breaking allowed by the Hero Points system. I simply don’t know if I’ll be as invested in the fact that my character can descend through the air at a 45 degree angle at one quarter of my movement speed per rank of my Super-Movement power if I also know that I can spend a Hero Point to do whatever I want, or that the GM can do the same and counteract anything I do. The contrast between the rigidity of the general rules and the flexibility offered by these moments strikes me as extremely jarring. The two previous games stuck with their goal of simulating and systemizing the world to foster roleplaying, but this one clumsily tries to let you tell any story you can imagine while also being D&D 3.5. This game has the most friction between genre and mechanics of the three, and the execution feels clumsy at best. The superhero genre swoops in to be at odds with traditional RPG mechanics once again.
Like with Champions, I would like to acknowledge that Mutants & Masterminds has decades of publication history after this, and it very well may be that it has improved since 2006. But the purpose of this project is to track the development of superhero RPGs throughout the years, and I stand by saying that the game missed the mark at this point in its history.
Next time: We’re sticking with d20 systems, it’s 2013’s Man-Made Mythology: A Comic Book RPG
*This section simply says “award the player a Hero Point,” implying it’s directed at the GM. But this is the only point in this chapter that directly addresses the reader rather than referencing “the GM.” Also, this is the Player’s Pocket Guide, so it shouldn’t be addressing the GM at all. So we can either assume players can award each other Hero Points, but only for good roleplaying, or more likely that this is a sudden and unsuitable switch in perspective mid-chapter. Sorry, you can take the Declan out of the editor but you can’t take the editor out of the Declan.