Mutants and Masterminds

[Tadanori Oyama]

DC Heroes hit the street at GenCon but the underlying game, Mutants and Masterminds, isn't going to have the new edition out until December.

Don't buy it yet! Wait until Ross links to it so he can get a nickle.

So, who's looking to upgrade to Third Edition Mutants and Masterminds and more importantly, will Tom buy it?

[Mckma]

It would be interesting to see what changes they make.  A reworking of character creation might be nice, though it's not too complicated, it could just get a touch more accessible...

[Tadanori Oyama]

It's pretty fucking different, if what they did in DC Heroes is an indication of the 3rd edition system.

I looked through the book at the shop and it has iconic hero/villain stats. Superman has a strength of 18 and an Agility of 4. So either Superman is a moderate weight lifter who has frequent spaz attacks or they changed the way attributes work.

[Mckma]

I looked through the book at the shop and it has iconic hero/villain stats. Superman has a strength of 18 and an Agility of 4. So either Superman is a moderate weight lifter who has frequent spaz attacks or they changed the way attributes work.

This might be nice and work out well in the sense that numbers aren't so inflated.  It could definitely help gauge things better (like maybe 1-5ish are normal, and everything above that is super), rather than the old system where to like 22 was "normal"...

[Tadanori Oyama]

I'm hoping. Everything looks alot more compact, which is pretty awesome.

[Flawless P]

It's pretty fucking different, if what they did in DC Heroes is an indication of the 3rd edition system.

I looked through the book at the shop and it has iconic hero/villain stats. Superman has a strength of 18 and an Agility of 4. So either Superman is a moderate weight lifter who has frequent spaz attacks or they changed the way attributes work.

They did, from what I can tell from the PDF Quick start rules I found.
Abilities score checks are made with your ability score, hence an 18 is at a +18.

Its all explained far better here

Every trait in DC Adventures—abilities, skills, powers, and
so forth—has an associated rank, a value telling you how
strong (or weak) that trait is. Ranks run from –5 (very weak)
all the way up to 20 (incredibly strong) or more, with an
average of 0. Superboy’s Strength, for example, is rank
15, far above the greatest Strength of an ordinary human
(around rank 5). The Kid’s Intellect, on the other hand, is
rank 1; above average, but it doesn’t break the bank.

[Mckma]

They did, from what I can tell from the PDF Quick start rules I found.
Abilities score checks are made with your ability score, hence an 18 is at a +18.

This makes sense, though you can't necessarily have an easy penalty then (unless you can have a negative ability score I guess)...

[Tadanori Oyama]

Solomon Grundy has a -2 in his Intellegence. I think much like 2nd Edition you start with all +0s (in 2nd that meant all 10s) and can take penalities to gain more points.

[Charlie72]

Solomon Grundy has a -2 in his Intellegence. I think much like 2nd Edition you start with all +0s (in 2nd that meant all 10s) and can take penalities to gain more points.

So will he spend thohe points on getting pants too.

[Tadanori Oyama]

Solomon Grundy has a -2 in his Intellegence. I think much like 2nd Edition you start with all +0s (in 2nd that meant all 10s) and can take penalities to gain more points.

So will he spend thohe points on getting pants too.

He did. Brainiac is also in the base book and (if memory serves) he did not.

[Charlie72]

Solomon Grundy has a -2 in his Intellegence. I think much like 2nd Edition you start with all +0s (in 2nd that meant all 10s) and can take penalities to gain more points.

So will he spend thohe points on getting pants too.

He did. Brainiac is also in the base book and (if memory serves) he did not.

Well, does Brainiac still have is mind games, which are deadly?

[Joven]

Brainiac: All I WANT ARE PANTS, A SIMPLE PAIR OF PANTS!!!!
Solomon Grundy: ...Solomon Grundy want pants too!

[Seejo Crux]

They made a couple changes in DC Adventures, most of which I love. The change I like most is that powers like Stun, Nauseate, etc. are all part of something called Affliction now. The modifiers you can put on Affliction make it so that you can create custom statuses (including ones that emulate effects like Toad from Final Fantasy), and you can make status effects behave more like damage (in that as you pummel on the guy with the effect, they can take progressively worse effects, as one would when taking damage through failed Toughness saves).

The Measurement Charts are nice too. I like being able to look up "1 hour" in the time column, get a rank from it, add my Flight power's rank to that, and then use the result to read "5000 miles" in the distance column to determine flight speed.

I still wish that Mutants and Masterminds (or DC Adventures for that matter) had options to make PL 4-6 games more worthwhile. I always had this fantasy of adapting GURPS to M&M by treating 1 point in M&M as 5 points in GURPS. Maybe someday I will pursue that conversion process again.

Anyway, DC Adventures is nice. I recommend it for anyone into superheroes and Green Ronin's work. Even if the Atomic Think Tank forums has plenty of stats for DC's titular heroes that use the basic system and work very well.

[mathey]

Yeah, DC Adventures/MM3 is pretty keen. I'd have to actually play it before I could vouch for it addressing all of the issues I had with the previous editions of the game, but if you're curious about superhero roleplaying systems I'd recommend giving it a look.