[RPG]: Mutants and Masterminds 2nd Edition, reviewed by Cthulthoth (5/5)

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/11/11737.phtml

Jacob X.'s Summary:

Can the 2nd edition of the World's Greatest Superhero RPG live up to, even overcome, its roots? Spoiler: Yes, and yes.

Go to the full review for more information.

[Simple Man]

Originally Posted by Jacob X

Like superheroes? Like d20/OGL? Got 40 bucks open and a longing for a good RPG? Make this yours. You won't regret it.

Hate the cover art? Wish gamebooks had silver pages? Got an extra 20 bucks? Buy the Deluxe Edition. You'll be glad you did.

Nice review

[WillyPete]

Originally Posted by Zirk

Hate the cover art? Wish gamebooks had silver pages? Got an extra 20 bucks? Buy the Deluxe Edition. You'll be glad you did.

Nice review

Actually, I liked the Cover Art, hate Silver Pages, and don't have an extra 20 bucks, so I don't think I will...

On a more serious note, I do have some serious problems with the game...
In some ways it's an improvement, but in a lot of ways, what they did made the game extraordinarily incompatible with First editon, for very little gain...
Getting rid of Powers as an Extra makes it a lot harder to do (pardon the use of Champions terminology) 'Elemental Control' characters (Iceman, Silver Surfer, many others), while the 'Alternate Power' concept makes it a lot easier to make some very 'odd' Green Arrow types ("Now, where did I put that Power Cosmic Arrow?" "I think it's rigth next to your Hellfire Arrow, Ollie!"}

There's a lot of other changes in here, that the reviewer didn't mention, as well...
Some are good, others less so, some are just strange...
One that I'm very disappointed in is the idea that your 'Mystique' type characters (used to be Shapechange, now it's 'Morph') can no longer duplicate the DNA of whoever they're imitating...

I wasn't impressed by the old Gadgets rules, but I'm not real impressed by the replacement, either... Some work on that might be appreciated. Does make me glad that I never bought Gimmick's Guide to Gadgets, though!

Finally, some of what they did is not only a little strange, or slightly unbablanced, but utterly insane! The old 'Minions' rules were a bit of a pain, especially for a highly-charaismatic character...
Not enough Minions to do a proper Villain Agency, but WAY too many for the GM to keep track of, especially since they were of many different levels...
But the new 'Minions'? Did anybody stop and take a look at these numbers before they went to press?
Do you really want your Player Characters to flood the streets of your Campaign City with 1000 Minions at a time? Or, worse yet, create 1000 'Heroic' (Non-Minion) Duplicates in a single round?

I still think that Second Edition is the Second-best Shperhero RPG out there (right behind first edition), and the rules are a lot clearer, and less ambiguous than in first...
but it is not an unqualified improvement!

[WillyPete]

Whew! Okay, sorry, should ahve checked first... The Price is a misprint, it's $31.49 at the RPG Mall!

[Atom Man]

Nice review!

I'd have to agree on virtually every point.

WillyPete is right in that it takes a little longer to whip up "theme" related characters, and in some ways, I miss the powers as extras approach in 1e, but anyone who has struggled with more complicated builds knows what a mess 1e could be when you started trying to incorporate things like partial extras, or partial flaws, or extras on extras, and trying to keep durations consistent.

I'm not too worried about the multiple minions problem. As noted, GMs are advised to restrict this power, which is mainly for villain builds anyway. And if you really wanted tons of minions, you could get them in 1st edition anyway.

Lots of other problems were fixed, or at least mitigated: the ramming rule, multiple attacks, skill costs, etc.

2e is a tremendous improvement in almost every aspect.

[Strange Visitor]

Originally Posted by Atom Man

Nice review!

I'd have to agree on virtually every point.

WillyPete is right in that it takes a little longer to whip up "theme" related characters, and in some ways, I miss the powers as extras approach in 1e, but anyone who has struggled with more complicated builds knows what a mess 1e could be when you started trying to incorporate things like partial extras, or partial flaws, or extras on extras, and trying to keep durations consistent.

And you were completely out of luck if you wanted to apply a flaw to a 1/rank power, or wanted to apply a flaw to _part_ of a set of powers extraed off each other. And that's over and above the fact it just excessively failed to support characters who _couldn't_ rationally extra-off powers off each other for any reason (Hero ECs have some of the same issue, but usually such types have other savings areas ECs can't take full advantage of).

Lots of other problems were fixed, or at least mitigated: the ramming rule, multiple attacks, skill costs, etc.

2e is a tremendous improvement in almost every aspect.

I entirely agree.

[efindel]

Mechanically, the second edition is an improvement over the first... but I really, really wish the art was more like the first edition.

The artwork in the first edition was the first thing I noticed about it, and what made me really have to get it. I already had Champions, DC Heroes, three different Marvel systems, GURPS Supers, and Villains & Vigilantes -- I wasn't looking for another super game. But the art... the art looked like something lifted right out of a comic, even down to the narration and speech balloons. And what's more, it looked and read like it came from a good comic!

Protonik orbiting above the earth, reflecting on his responsibilities, looking down on everything -- that was wonderful. And it was appropriate to the material, placed right next to the Life Support information. The guy on his cell phone, talking about how his work was shut down because of supers battling again -- that was priceless. And the one with the battlesuit guy building his suit, thinking about how he's going to take back the streets -- that just screams "comic book origin story".

There's nothing in the second edition that matches any of those pieces, for me. Too much of the art in the second edition has no captioning, no speech balloons, or has odd captioning that doesn't look like what you'd actually see in comics. It feels like something made for a gaming book -- good gaming book art, to be sure, but it lacks the "ripped from a comic" feel that made me pick up the first edition when I first saw it.

On a related note, I wish they'd kept the "iconic" characters from the first edition -- I don't see any good reason to replace them (well, maybe some, but not all of them), and the use of the "iconic" characters throughout the first edition's core book also helped give it a comic feel -- it had continuing characters, rather than a bunch of one-shot bits.

Ah, well... it's good art. But to me, it just doesn't reach the standard that the first edition did.

[WillyPete]

Atom Man, thanks, but I guess I didn't make my point very clearly...
It's not so much that it just takes more time to do a character of this sort in Second edition... That doesn't bother me!
On the other hand, trying to convert such a character from 1st to 2nd edition... THAT is a nightmare!
As to the Minions problem, I'm always rather leery of statements that essentialy mean, "Of course the rules are hideously broken, for no good reason, but that's what the GM is for!"...
Second edition was supposed to have recieved extensive playtesting!
If you've playtested the heck out of this thing, and you've found that something is badly broken (and I can't imagine that no playtester hapened to notice this!), why don't you fix it, before the game goes to print? Why force the GM to make arbitrary rulings just to cover for your mistake?

efindel, I see your point...
Stylistically, I liked the art in 2nd edition a LOT better, but the captions, and the things like Gimmick sweating over a level of Tetris on her Game Boy, while absent-mindedly defusing a bomb, are sorely missed!

I don't really care about backwards compatability.

What I do care about is More Fun. And M&M2 delivers that, in spades.

[WillyPete]

Well, everybody has their own tastes, and preferences...
I never said that anyone 'had to' care about backwards compatibility, only that it would be a serious issue for those who did!
As to the 'More Fun' issue, I think 1st edition had a strong edge, there, and I don't see anything that Second Edition did that was an improvement in that regard.