Friday, February 22, 2019

Basic Heroes Handbook (Mutants and Masterminds 3rd Edition)


Hey Game fans, Zardoz here with a quick look at one of the coolest books I’ve picked up in recent memory.  Now this was supposed to go out shortly after Gen Con, but my diabetes and immune system had a pow wow and decided I was going to spend some time in the hospital so I couldn’t get around to it until now.  Today I’m going to give you my quick look at the Basic Hero’s Handbook for Mutants and Masterminds, Third Edition.  I’ll give you a quick explanation of the system and then we’ll get into what I think this book does for the game as a whole. 


First, Mutants and Masterminds uses a modified D20 system that’s had a lot of revision and tinkering done with it/to it.  It’s a fun system but it has some complexities that need explaining and this book does a very capable job of that without making the reader feel dumb.  The characters you can make in this setting have such a wide range of powers and abilities.  You can build any comic book character you can remember and still turn the system so that you can put your own twist on those existing characters. 

That range comes at the cost of the system being extraordinarily complex for building your own hero.  Between finding the basic building of how your power works, applying extras and flaws, and parsing out its descriptors, you can very easily lose track of what you are doing when designing a power.  The other thing that makes the system a little more complicated is that it uses a system of measurements as absolutes for determining what your character can do.  This takes a period of adjustment for someone completely new to the system to catch on to.

The Basic Heroes Handbook handles every single one of these concerns with an ease that honestly makes me wish that the Basic Heroes Handbook had been the first book released for the product line.  Character creation using this book uses a group of iconic hero types, expresses them in game terms, and gets you playing the game in as long as it takes you to decide your costume, your secret identity, and figure out what motivates your character.

The templates lay out a basic concept, like speedster, and then gives you three or four different expressions of that concept with powers and abilities that feel right for the character you are wanting to put together.  It keeps the game’s sophistication without getting bogged down in the granular details.  There are times I don’t want to worry about how many power points it takes to build a Superman-esque character and just want to play that kind of a character.  This book is like turn to page 22 and get down with your alien self.

This book does an exemplary job of laying out the system and helping players find the iconic hero or heroine they want to portray.  It also does a wonderful job of teaching you how to play the game.  This book is tailor made for the comic book fan who wants to try to play a super after spending a chunk of their life reading about them and that is a wonderful thing to be able to say.  For those of you wanting to learn how to run a game, don’t sleep on the GM chapter starting on page 88.  It’s very useful for everyone who wants to tell stories about Capes and Crusaders.

Now the one minor issue I have with the book is that it doesn’t include a point breakdown of the pre-generated characters for the folks who move on to the Deluxe Heroes Handbook but that is really a minor gripe.  For the self contained experience that the Basic Heroes Handbook is designed to provide, it certainly delivers.  We give it a 4.9 out of 5 stars.

Be sure to find it where you buy your finer classier games and you can always find it at the Green Ronin Publishing Store Here.  Happy Gaming until next time, Game Fans.



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