Mutants & Masterminds

Hey all,

just poking my head in to see if I can gauge why Mutants & Masterminds (and by extension, all superhero tabletop games) seems to be unpopular. Throughout high school and college, the best campaigns me and my friends ever had were almost all superhero games. But now it seems like they have hardly any presence, despite the genre becoming more and more popular in various forms of media.

Just curious to hear people's thoughts.

Thanks!

I've had people tell me that superheroes games simply don't work. An argument that I heard in support of that assertion is that a comic book will have one writer taking the plot in one direction, hence why the adventure works, while an RPG will have multiple writers (the players) all wanting to do their own things. I can sort of get the point. My best guess to circumvent that particular problem would be to have a social contract with your players so you can get along on the type of campaigns you want to run...

I think I get what you're saying, but that's mystifying to me. I can almost see that point if a GM tried to run a supers game the same way as a D&D game. But that's also true of other systems, like Shadowrun. And Shadowrun works fine when approached in its own way.

Also, by that logic a D&D game shouldn't work either since a fantasy novel typically has only one writer.

This can't really be the reason it's an unpopular tabletop genre, can it?

I like supers games but my old game group didn't because they felt restrictive to the genre. Building a good supers system is hard by the nature of what a superhero is, which is why I think the successful systems are the ones who treat it less like superheros and more like people with powers (a semantic but important difference) or treat them as sidekicks/B/c-listers.

I can never remember the name of it, but one of my favorite supers systems was this WW2 based game where all dice rolls were D10s, you had a power width (num of dice) and you did better based on doubles and effects like hitting certain numbers. The game was just soldiers who had abilities, and it worked well.

That would be Godsend, based on the O.R.E. system.

Unless I'm missing something—which I might be, the only system I heard about prior to about a year ago was D&D—but using Google-fu I found this Godlike. It seems to be a better fit for what Keleth explained.

I love the genre, but in my face-to-face group I am the only superhero fan. I tried to run a Marvel Heroic game on here when I first became a member, but it kind of imploded.

I have every edition of Mutants & Masterminds, but I have never had the chance to try it.

Ah yes, Godlike. I misremembered the name...

I don't know that I think supers games are unpopular, but compared to fantasy they represent a minuscule section of the table top hobby. Even sci fi is less popular than fantasy. That being said, there are definitely a couple of supers games I would love to try out. (M&M and Venture City)

The Total Party Thrill podcast just did an episode about this topic yesterday. They referred to it as "The Superhero Problem." Give it a listen, let me know what you think :)

I know Masks recently came out and has had some success. Champions and Hero were fairly popular in their day, not nearly as much as D&D, Pathfinder or White Wolf, but not many were.

I've never had an opportunity to play any of them so I can't really speak to the original question.

I wouldn't mind trying it though :)

There are several people in this thread expressing an interest in playing a supers game. I feel like this should happen now. Shall we make it happen? I'm up for it and own M&M 3rd Edition. Anyone else?

Aye

Might be tempting, but I remember I completely got rid of my M&M3rd pdfs thinking I'd never play since none of my friends are into superheroes RPGs... XD

Sure, would love to try it out.