.but I can't help feeling like I need a spreadsheet for character creation, and that dampens a ton of my enthusiasm. The book is pretty. The other books out there for it look sweet. But my brain is slowly frying trying to leap from Marvel SAGA to Mutants & Masterminds and the buying up of attack bonuses and the calculating the costs of power ranks + extras - flaws x rank + power feats including, but not limited to, when I'm trying to buy a pair of devices.

Jan 9, 2006 - Mutagen! Is the first product from Arknight Software. It's intended as a computer aid to creation of M&M Characters. The software can be found.

I am not trying to bash the game, I swear.because I read the actual plays and sample combats and it seems like a very bitchin' system, but I am having some fundamental disconnect somewhere. I think it just depends on how complex a character you build. If you have a straight forward character: he flies, shoots laser beams and has a forcefield plus has some super attributes, it's easy.

If you decide that your character has a whole bunch of powers but make them a bunch of alternate powers of one big power (say you don't plan on ever needing your super leaping, super strength, flight and superspeed all at once) in order to conserve power points, then yes it can involve some serious point accounting. All in all I like Mutants and Masterminds a lot because you can really make any sort of hero, especially with the book Ultimate Powers and the power level mechanic is cool too.

Other games that may be more your cup of tea: (TSR) is avalable free and is fast and simple; not very balanced, though. There's a mass of free supplements there that should take care of a GM's needs for decades. Sometimes referred to as FASERIP because of the 7 base attributes it relies on (Fighting, Agility, Strength, Endurance, Reason, Intuition, Psyche.) (Atomic Sock Monkey Press) is a very flexible, dynamic system that allows even beginning characters to be what the players hope for, and lets the GM create NPCs on the fly effortlessly. Very good with most players, but not for people who like very specific rules (e.g., a power level of X means you can teleport exactly Y distance, and no more.). I got it and it is a pretty book, great for superheroism. Dosch hdri snow wallpaper. The sections on running the game are great for inspiring mood, settings and tone.

The system is crunchy, though; Not quite D&D crunchy (It's amazing how much simpler it gets if you take AOO out), but it has a high level of prep time. You just can't sit down and run it on the fly unless you're a d20 genius. Also, if your players aren't used to the intrincances of d20, building characters can get tricky. Many of my players didn't get that PL 10 roughly equals 10 level characters, so if they bought powers at PL 3 to save points, they were virtually ineffectual against their PL 10 antagonists.

Saves can go ignored. Tactical combat trips them up a bit. When I play next again, I'll have them stick closely to the templates presented in the book, as they are reasonable representations of the archetypes in the genre, and mechanically sound. That way they can get the hang of the system and then build their own supers. Why were you crunching stats?