Mastermind’s Manual Design Journal: The Power Is Yours!

No single game system suits everyone’s needs and interests, and Mutants & Masterminds is no exception. As you read and play M&M you may find some rules or game systems work better for you and your group than others do. You might wish to modify or add to the rules given in the core rulebook, adjusting them to better suit your preferred style of play. By all means, please do! One of the advantages of roleplaying games is that the rules are not fixed, and you can change them to suit you and your players.

With the goal of modifying and fine-tuning the M&M rules in mind, the Mastermind’s Manual presents a wide range of rules options and variants for your consideration, and we’ll be previewing some of them here in Super-Vision over the next several weeks.

In general terms, an option is an additional rule, usually providing more detail and depth at the cost of some additional complexity, dice rolling, or bookkeeping (or all of the above). A variant is a way of handling certain aspects differently from the standard rules, which may suit alternate campaigns or styles of play. Options work in conjunction with the core rules given in the M&M rulebook, while variants change them in different ways.

Not all of the options and variants in the Mastermind’s Manual are meant to work together. Indeed, some of them are mutually exclusive! Still, the book provides a wide range of options for customizing the game and making M&M into your vision for the World’s Greatest Superhero RPG!

Chapter 1: The Basics

The first chapter of the Mastermind’s Manual deals with the fundamentals of the system, namely the roll of a twenty-sided die, plus modifiers, against a Difficulty Class. Options in this chapter include things like stunt bonuses on die rolls, using different dice (including 3d6, 2d10, and 3d20), using playing cards in place of dice, and the following option for hero points, among others:

Card-based Hero Points

Another option using playing cards is for replacing the standard hero points in M&M. Instead of tracking hero points with counters or marks on a character sheet, use a deck of cards. Each player is dealt one card for each hero point the character has at the start of the game and earns a new card each time the character earns a hero point.

Players may "spend" cards from their hands for any of the hero point benefits given in M&M, with the following changes:

• Numbered Cards: If used to improve a roll, don’t re-roll the die. Instead, add 10 to the face value of the card and treat that as your roll.
• Jack: If used for a heroic feat, the emulated feat lasts two rounds rather than one.
• Queen: If used to recover, you can make two recovery checks rather than one, gaining the benefits of both.
• King: If used to dodge, a king doubles your entire defense bonus for the round rather than just your dodge bonus.
• Ace: If used for an instant counter, your power check is rolled like an improve roll use of hero points: add +10 if the roll is 10 or less.
• Joker: Can duplicate the effect of any other card, or you can discard it and draw two new cards.

Spent cards go into a discard pile. When there are no more cards left to draw from the deck, shuffle the discard pile and start again.

Trading Cards

If using card-based hero points, you may wish to allow players to trade cards between them under certain circumstances. Generally, card trading should be limited to situations where one character provides aid to another, in some way justifying the trade-off of cards. Encourage players to come up with in-game explanations for how their characters are helping each other. For example, one character might call out a warning to another, providing a reason for that player to trade a king card (allowing the other player to double the character’s defense bonus) in exchange for a lower-value card.