270

This is my 270th post. I should make it something special but I feel like writting NOW so that is what is going to happen. So after being depressed for about two weeks I am back and I haven't really written anything here, let alone anything signifigant. I just have been busy doing other things like reading, Dungeon Fighter, friends, and a suprising number of movies. I could do a media round up but I don't want to spend the rest of lunch doing that. Instead we are going to talk about Mutants and Masterminds.

M&M is a d20 game and I hate the d20 system. I find it to be a chore to run, annoying to play, and there is just something about it that seems to breed the wrong idea about roleplaying within players. I have no idea what. Mutants and Masterminds is no exception. In fact there will be some changes to the rules when I start running it again (twoish weeks from now). First of all is how AOE damages is handled cause it is retarded. The second is how damage is applied because it seems to be impossible to make damage stick once everyone discovers the regeneration power. What changes I am going to make? I don't know yet I will consult forums and what not. However, there will be changes mark my words.

So why run the game again? Well I did look into other game systems to handle super heroics, there is the hero system (NO!), Capes, Icons, even Arrberant which I could just nab the system from then scrap the setting. I like the white wolf system and it is easy to make shit up in it and not have everyone asking questions. However, I decided to stick with the good old M&M game system. As I think it has some wonderful pros

- It provides me with a new and interesting challenge
-The players are familiar with it
-it is infinitely scalable
-it is incredibly flexible allowing for any hero type or abilities in fact I can just make up whatever I wanted to and we could reverse engineer it later with 100% sucess.
-It is fun!
-Character advancement happens at a decent pace. To often in point build games I drizzle some points on the players to no real effect.

It does have some nasty cons though. Like the travel powers. Because of the nature of travel powers having a battle map is simply a moot point. Over the course of any given turn the players could be hundreds of miles away, on the moon, in an alternate dimension, microscopic, or giant sized. This means that any given combat map is largely irrelevant as there is no one map that can cover both ground and super movement. I could just make it so that travel powers are useless in combat. All I need is a blanket rule stating that all major travel powers need at least 15 seconds to warm up before taking off, which is three combat rounds. See that would work, but it would mean no planetary scale chase scenes and I want those back. They would of been fun had I been prepared for them, and I just wasn't.

That was the thing about running the game the first time. I just wasn't prepared for what my players could do. Keeping the setting set in the city would of worked just fine had I dropped the number of build points they spent by 100 then it would of been fine. They would of taken forever to out grow the city and my little gangs and stuff would be just fine. However, that wasn't the case and within a couple of game sessions they were bursting it at the seams. However, I got the city still and lots of stuff that can still be used from it. I got Tesla's grand daughter, and some of those gangs can be given a shot in the arm and they will still rule the streets of that city.

In general I will be much better prepared to tackle the challenges of the game system now that I have lived and learned through running it. I have a world I can run and I'll spend the next little bit building a rouges gallery that I can use willynilly and that will be awesome. And while I am very excited, that means that I won't be as prescent here. Sorry.