For my two cents...it is mostly less-finicky than Hero, which I played for, literally, decades. It is not as open as (say) Truth & Justice. More sophisticated than BASH, less D&D than Four-Color, more traditional than Capes, far less concerned with "realism" than GURPS. That's naming the systems I've looked at. (I could never get my head around character construction in Wild Talents.)
What I want in a superhero game is usually a point-buy system (but ask me after I finish reading ICONS) with enough detail to build exactly the powers I want but loose enough to emulate comic books. To me, "emulate comic boos" means a certain amount of enforced soap opera, relatively few skills, flexible combat, creating exactly the power you want, and not sweating every detail. For instance, there's a thing in M&M where you can pay a hero point to just have a power for the duration of the combat. That goes a long way toward emulating the comic book aspect of "In issue 372, RoachMan did this, though he never did it again, so we have to include that power." It's a nice feature if Superman and Batman can be on the same team without one overshadowing the other.
I think that M&M stole liberally in a good way from the DC Heroes game (which is about neck and neck with it for me). The second edition got rid of a lot of D&D cruft the first edition had, and the third edition will probably get rid of more. (As far as mechanics go, if you played D&D 3.x and had that accumulated knowledge, you could easily apply it to M&M 1st edition, not so much to 2nd edition, and third edition looks like it might be a mostly-different game with some underlying similarities.)
M&M is not simple in its details: I keep running across things that I can't intuit (especially what does and does not go past player caps, for instance, and there was a question about Knockback on Monday night), but most things are obvious.
MSH failed for me at the time it came out because you could only play the licensed heroes, or use random character generation. (Peter Parker might not have picked his powers, but Stan Lee did.) However, I was playing mostly Hero at the time and that certainly colored my opinions. If I looked at it today, I might have a different opinion.
By the way--Villains & Vigilantes now belongs to the creators and has just been re-released. I never played V&V, so I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Thanks! That's a really interesting breakdown. And fascinating news about V&V. I worked in a game store in Toronto in the early 80s, and when they cleared out their whole stock of V&V, I made sure to get one of everything, so I've got all the adventures and the main book.
I really like M&M, myself, and that's saying something, as I'd never gotten into Champions because of its pverly complex point-building system (or so it seemed to me).
For my two cents...it is mostly less-finicky than Hero, which I played for, literally, decades. It is not as open as (say) Truth & Justice. More sophisticated than BASH, less D&D than Four-Color, more traditional than Capes, far less concerned with "realism" than GURPS. That's naming the systems I've looked at. (I could never get my head around character construction in Wild Talents.)
What I want in a superhero game is usually a point-buy system (but ask me after I finish reading ICONS) with enough detail to build exactly the powers I want but loose enough to emulate comic books. To me, "emulate comic boos" means a certain amount of enforced soap opera, relatively few skills, flexible combat, creating exactly the power you want, and not sweating every detail. For instance, there's a thing in M&M where you can pay a hero point to just have a power for the duration of the combat. That goes a long way toward emulating the comic book aspect of "In issue 372, RoachMan did this, though he never did it again, so we have to include that power." It's a nice feature if Superman and Batman can be on the same team without one overshadowing the other.
I think that M&M stole liberally in a good way from the DC Heroes game (which is about neck and neck with it for me). The second edition got rid of a lot of D&D cruft the first edition had, and the third edition will probably get rid of more. (As far as mechanics go, if you played D&D 3.x and had that accumulated knowledge, you could easily apply it to M&M 1st edition, not so much to 2nd edition, and third edition looks like it might be a mostly-different game with some underlying similarities.)
M&M is not simple in its details: I keep running across things that I can't intuit (especially what does and does not go past player caps, for instance, and there was a question about Knockback on Monday night), but most things are obvious.
MSH failed for me at the time it came out because you could only play the licensed heroes, or use random character generation. (Peter Parker might not have picked his powers, but Stan Lee did.) However, I was playing mostly Hero at the time and that certainly colored my opinions. If I looked at it today, I might have a different opinion.
By the way--Villains & Vigilantes now belongs to the creators and has just been re-released. I never played V&V, so I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
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I really like M&M, myself, and that's saying something, as I'd never gotten into Champions because of its pverly complex point-building system (or so it seemed to me).
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