Last time I went on a ramble about my history with the Mutants & Masterminds system and how I still have never really played it.
So, I can't speak to how good of a game it is, but it is a fun toybox.
I spent many an hour just creating characters and playing with the features of the system. I would read up on house rule and debates over the efficacy of certain parts of the system. I was eager to pick the whole thing apart.
M&M was the system that started my habit of creating a custom character sheet in excel as a way to understand the system.
Lets face it, the complexity of the M&M character creation rules almost necessitates the used of a spreadsheet program.
One thing I learned in doing all this work, is that no one I knew would go to this much trouble to play a game. It also seemed to be that the default character sheet presented too much info to let a casual player function at the table. This was also the birth of my trend to make a second simplified "at table" character sheet to go along with the one used for character builds.
The end result was a sheet that just listed the "Things you can do" and what you needed to roll to make them happen. Most player's will not be able to make heads nor tales of how a power is constructed.
These days I have the system beaten into shape as a 2.5 edition. I use the familiar d20 based ability scores, and combat values, but have reduced the skills down the the typical dozen you seen in current RPGs. I also used the simplified power construction of 3e. I think it looks pretty good:
The upshot of the system is that most of the house ruling is on the character creation side, so it does not bog down players and GMs once the action gets started.
Which is good since, designing and running a non-dungeon based game is tricky (see my discussion on Star Wars RPGs), further complicated when heroes can fly across the country in the blink of an eye.
Next time should be less rambling, and more about the actual process of creating a M&M games scenario.
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