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- Mutants And Masterminds Character Creation
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Mutants and Masterminds & Silver Age Sentinels: Green Ronin & Guardians of Order: 5/5: 05/02/14. Silver Age Sentinels d20 Stingy Gamer Edition (2003) Guardians of Order: 3/4: 07/19/02. READ REVIEWS. Browse RPG Reviews by Publisher. Browse RPG Reviews by Setting. Mutants & Masterminds 3e: System Guide for New Players SAY REBOOT ENOUGH AND IT SOUNDS WEIRD This began as a quick reference document for players in my upcoming Mutants & Masterminds campaign.
8 TIPS FOR NEW MUTANTS AND MASTERMINDS GM
8 TIPS FOR NEW MUTANTS AND MASTERMINDS GM
Mutants And Masterminds Character Creation
SET YOUR PARADIGM EARLY
When I first started GMing M&M, the year 1st ed. came out I made a whole heap of mistakes: The biggest of which was thinking that everyone was on the same page when I said “super hero game.”
Super-heroes as a genre as so diverse that as a GM you have to make sure everyone is on the same page & the only way to do that is to set your paradigm early. Set your tone of your campaign: I like to consider this to be the “Moore Scale”, ranging from silver age sillyness with Supreme, through Grimdark Watchmen, hitting every point in between the two extremes.
Set the expectations for you campaign at this point to, including the range of your game (city based, continent based, intergalactic based), the
One can even go so far as to supply players with a potential “suggested reading list” of comics.
SYSTEM MASTERY DOES NOT EQUAL GAME MASTERY
So you’ve sat up nights, straining your eyes under the flickering candles as you read through the rule book… You are using candles because they cut off your power, because you stopped going to work, so you could master this systems completely.
Chances are good, that at some point, even having mastered every nuance of the rules, you are eventually going to run up against something that doesn’t work as well in game as it does in a comic book.
I like to refer to these as “lost in translation” moments.
Fight the urge to try and make them work. The issue invariably isn’t that it doesn’t work mechanically; the issue is usually that it doesn’t work in practice. Something that seems really cool in a comic book just becomes a drag when you try to use it in an actual game.
This happens a lot when players break rule 1, usually with the excuse of “well I saw it in a comic book.”
Say for example that one of your players creates “Fred: Slayer of Chipmunks”. Freds powers work only on chipmunks. Mechanically this works, in terms of game play, it does not… Unless your game is about killing chipmunks (an having heard them sing, I wouldn’t blame you if it was).
Be strong, learn to say no. This task is made easier if you’ve followed “Rule 7”.
DON’T CREATE MORE THEN YOU NEED This is one of the biggest stressors with Super Hero games in general. GM’s freak out over the idea of having to build a huge amount of canon, but luckily I’m here to tell you “it aint so, Joe.”
Early on I tried to detail every nuance of my campaign world, but quickly became overwhelmed by its size & had huge continuity errors. But I’m here to tell you, that there is a better way. After my first campaign fizzled, I took it as a learning experience and decided to pitch something new.
This something new was eventually called “Tower City.” The idea was to take everything I learnt from the previous game & to build a new campaign setting for future games. An so I did: An I did it by NOT building.
I knew exactly what kind of universe I wanted & as it turned out, that was enough. I wanted a universe that had an age of secret masked mystery men in the age of pulp, heroes coming out of hiding in the golden age to fight the Nazis, those heroes retiring after the war & before Mac Carthisism (who really did become the Judas of his generation, even though historically it turns out he was right), started to come back in the 1970’s for the bronze age, were less common during the iron age as things got more serious & then bounced back in a new era a handful of years ago.
My world has a Justice League of America, it has a Global Guardians, it has an Alpha Flight & during World War 2 it had a Justice Society: Yet none of it has been detailed. My players know all of this & they have been encouraged to fill in some of the blanks with permission in my shared universe.
So if a player is a legacy of a golden age character, that golden age character may well have been in my version of the Justice Society & if I ever run a game in the golden age, someone may decide to play that character, or I may make him an NPC contact. The fact that my Justice Society has no name & none of my players knows anything about it outside of its existence turns out to not be an issue. So far generalisations & the hand waving of player knowledge versus character knowledge has been sufficient & haven’t affected plot.
So my advice would be don’t create more then is necessary, otherwise you’ll just trip your self up on continuity, without any of your players caring for it, as it wasn’t “shared continuity,” like actually having gamed through it is.
Don’t write yourself into a corner before you even start.
PITCH YOUR BEST VILLAINS, NEVER PITCH NARRATIVE JOBBERS
Nothing kills players interest in villains as much as “narrative jobbers”. But what is a narrative jobber? A narrative jobber is a term that cropped up at my table via some media savvy players, when they noticed that many superhero adventures possessed villains whose only reason to exist in story was to fight the heroes and lose: A trend that extends to officially published works for every super hero game system, without fail.
A narrative jobber gets nothing out of this except an arse-kicking. An frankly it has a tendency to weaken your games internal verisimilitude.
As a GM one of your greatest responsibilities is to make your villains interesting: Create a solid villain & the plot will follow. In fact the plots of many adventures should be derived from the motivations of ones villain/s.
This was something I did poorly when I first started, but over time I developed a litmus test that has held strong through three editions. When you are writing your plot & you get to your villain, ask two questions
a. What is this villain getting out of this? b. If I replaced this villain with another villain, would it impact my plot in any way?
If your villain is getting nothing out of this course of action, or if you can replace the villain with another villain & not change the plot in any way, chances are good that you need to potentially scrap what you’ve got & go back to the drawing board.
Sometimes your encounter is recoverable, but it usually includes a pretty extensive villain or encounter overhaul & sometimes sadly the plot is just not recoverable.
TACTICAL MAPS ARE YOUR FRIEND
Now this one is disputed between two separate parties the pro tac-map crowd & the anti-tac maps crowd: Personally I hold that tactical maps while not essential for Mutants and Masterminds are certainly helpful.
Now some people state that due to the huge speed variables, tactical maps are not useful: Where as I hold that this argument is moot, as the GM controls the speed of battle. If the villain is standing beside a death trap, with a couple of civilians as hostages, it doesn’t matter that you can break the speed barrier in sneakers, you still have to end up back near the villain to be at all effective.
The use of a tactical map in MnM isn’t to determine speed, its to determine where you end up in relation to other battlefield features; civilians, villains, walls, buildings, minions, etc.
Personally I’ve found that map-less games I’ve been in have a tendency to degenerate into Dragonball Z fights, where all the terrain is absent of recognisable features & you fly over the same island, over and over again.
On reflection, I’ve found including a tactical map encourages players to use terrain in interesting ways & reminds the GM that he can also use the terrain to there advantage.
PLOT BASED VERSUS CHARACTER BASED STORY-TELLING. Now as can be expected many of us are comic book fans & many of us even though we are loathe to admit it, love the soap opera drama of comics. For you people I have bad news: Mutants and Masterminds is not made for out the box character based story-telling (it cannot be done in a satisfying way).
You can do it eventually, but it does require laying the ground work early, by getting your players on board. Get them to develop there background identities beyond “Secret ID: Clark Kent. Has like friends, a family & a job an stuff.”
As a GM encourage the use of these backgrounds, by adding them to the set up of plot & giving generously with Hero Points when you do. Eventually players will start doing it themselves, at which point continue to give hero points to encourage them.
Communicate with your players at the character creation level & determine a potential motivation, or drive outside of being a hero & try to integrate it into your plot, dangling like a carrot & potentially allowing some great character moments, when your hero must decide between getting the thing he really wants & saving the day.
Eventually you’ll end up with a level of character based story telling, but even then the lions share will likely still be plot based.
WRITE UP A PLAYER / GM MANIFESTO
To make sure that everyone is on the same page & there can be no lapses in memory, everything we’ve discussed should be typed up & made available to players before you even start.
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As time goes on, you may develop all sorts of things specific to your players or experiences that make it to your list, that I would never think of. Heck you may eventually have a player section in your manifesto like I did… For a while I had a section marked “THINGS MY PLAYERS ARE NO LONGER ALLOWED TO DO,” as I noticed common design patterns. I’m sure we’ve all seen this in other games: There is always that one guy in D&D that always players fighters, or elven maidens.
For a while there, my manifesto had “[Female player name redacted]: You can’t play anymore buxom alien princess, with no understanding of human nudity taboo’s.”
Mutants And Masterminds Character Sheet
I know what you are thinking; “Oh Matthew, why would you ban such a thing. Said buxom alien princess are obviously well rounded characters, whose unique view on life brings a breath of fresh air to our stagnate puritanical culture… Also: boobies.”
However after the third such character, I needed to knock players out of there rut.
Of course your Manifesto will be different. Add what you personally find necessary. The only things to keep in mind are “what do I as the GM want out of this game & what information do I need to give to my players to achieve it.
HAVE FUN
Most of all have fun. It’s a game, once all the serious design work is done, its time to get down and have fun playing the game. Ham it up a little, laugh manically, let your villains monologue, speak in the third person, or even speak in rhyming Iambic Pentameter.
Golden Age
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