Gods Among Men
My gaming group is returning to the d20 edition of Mutants and Masterminds for our next campaign, and once again we aren’t using the system for its intended purpose of creating superheroes, although we are getting closer—we’re creating gods and fairies and similar figures of Neil Gaiman-esque fiction walking the streets of New York City, carrying on intricate vendettas and power plays just barely out of sight of the ignorant masses. Those few who become privy to our machinations either go mad or are destroyed outright.
We therefore have considerably more freedom to push the envelope of character abilities than we currently enjoy in a space opera campaign. That’s good. Space opera is populated by people who are more-or-less normal; we therefore use only a fraction of the superpowers available in M&M for stray futuristic abilities like cybernetic eyes and an alien’s immunity to certain poisons. (This was Dave’s reason for selecting M&M in the first place: he wanted some way to simulate alien and high-tech abilities. Greg is going with M&M because it’s familiar.) This leads to certain problems, most of them tied to the question of: What you do with all those character points if you aren’t spending them on superpowers?
Well, you buy skills. A lot of skills. Mundane skills are cheap, because superpowers are at a premium for superheroes, while mundane actions like car repair and debate are usually of secondary concern. My own character, being one of the least augmented with advanced technology, combines the business acumen of J. P. Morgan with the piloting skills of Manfred Richtofen, along with sufficient expertise to make a comfortable living as an engineer, natural scientist, dancer, or PR manager, or all at once. Oh, and enough unarmed combat feats to take down a squad of soldiers bare-handed.
We had a lot of points to spend, and, like I said, skills are cheap.
The problem only deepened with regular injections of experience points; already pushing the limits of plausibility with my skills and feats, I find myself turning at last to the powers list, trying to find something that A, makes sense in the setting, and B, won’t offend my character’s sense of identity—surgical transformation into an 8’ tall robot, for example. And all too many of those superpowers merely involve blasting holes in things.
Gods walking among mortals suffer far fewer limitations in this regard, but there are still problems. M&M has a boatload of combat-oriented superpowers, which is only appropriate. Superheroes, especially old-school superheroes, fight. Sometimes they do other things, but mostly they settle things with an epic battle. Any superhero RPG should have a huge variety of attacks and defenses—energy blasts, choking clouds, entangling webs, invisibility, fists that can crush tanks, force fields that can withstand those fists, et cetera, et cetera. Unfortunately for us, Gaiman-esque gods hardly fight at all, and when they do, it’s in the abstract, undoing one another by speaking a name, or reducing their importance in mortal minds. Energy blasts and entangling webs have their place, but all the spectacular methods of comic book destruction at once? Not so much.
Accumulated experience will cause problems with gods, too, albeit of a very different kind: our characters are going to change rapidly. Judging by what I’ve seen from the space opera campaign, within the space of a month or two (game time), experience points will add perhaps another 50% to those we spent on our initial character designs, which raises awkward questions. If experience makes you strong, why aren’t you much, much stronger than this? If you’ve been around since Neolithic times, or 1800 at the latest, why have you learned more and expanded your powers more in the past two months than in all those centuries? Were the gods sitting mutely, weaving baskets and twiddling their thumbs? I blame adaptation to d20 for this more than I blame M&M’s design philosophy. I’ve complained at length before how class-and-level systems drive PCs from anonymous, powerless schmuck to Savior of the Universe in about a year—less if you start out higher than 1st level. But the problem remains, nonetheless.
Rapidly developing new powers, or more sophisticated uses of their existing powers, is entirely appropriate for superheroes. Superman didn’t start out with x-ray vision, heat vision, super-cooling breath, time travel, hypnotic subsonic voice, robot duplicates, or a lot of his other canonical abilities. In the very beginning, he didn’t even fly; he just jumped really far. (“Able to leap tall buildings…”) He accumulated fantastic new powers, not entirely congruent with his original concept of super-strength and invulnerability, over time. The Uncanny X-Men developed new powers and tactics in the battle room and in the field. Rapid advancement is also appropriate if you’re telling a story akin to The Hobbit, or Star Wars. But it’s not appropriate to every story, or every genre. And when all you really have to spend xp on is superpowers, you quickly end up with a big ol’ pile of superpowers. Setting aside the insidious way that a list of explicit choices, be it skills or attributes or superpowers, tends to channel character design into someone else’s preconceived notion of what a character should do, or be able to do, even players who deliberately set out to work creatively soon find they have no choice but to fall in line. It isn’t that they can’t make something outwardly similar to what they envision, or tell interesting stories with it, just that they can’t make what they actually envision and tell the story they intend to tell with it.
Choice of system matters, despite the claims of certain gamers. If you use a superhero system, you’ll end up with a superhero. If you use a class-and-level system, you’ll end up with a character with a story arc about gaining levels. If you use a system geared toward combat, you’ll end up with a lot of combat abilities. If you use a system geared toward a lot of posturing and social manipulation, you’ll end up with a character who postures and manipulates society. Systems with large attribute bonuses create omnicompetents; systems with small attribute bonuses create characters pigeon-holed into their skill sets. Even very liberal, freeform systems like Over the Edge or FUDGE can drive players in certain directions, which may not be the direction you want to go. Choose wisely.