I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time on Kickstarter as of late.  It has become an incubator for new games and allows creators and fans another avenue for connecting.  It has become the first place I check when I am looking for a new game to buy or for something unique to support.  It was during one of my recent perusals that I discovered the 10th Anniversary edition of Mutants & Masterminds.

Mutants & Masterminds is a super hero role playing game which is currently on a third edition.  The system is fairly simple to master as it is a heavily modified version of D20.  Actions are resolved with a single roll of a D20.  You take the result of the die roll and add it to your skill, power, or attribute and compare it to the defense value  or difficulty level.  If your value is higher you succeed with and increase in degrees of success for every 5 points you are above the required number.  It is an easily mastered system and uses a point buy system for character creation to maintain balance among the players at the table.  It has a large list of skills, talents, feats, and powers that allows players to create almost any character from comics that they would like to play as well whatever their fevered imaginations can conjure.  The only character I have not been able to create has been a variant of Jamie Madrox, but this is because duplicators are easily over powered in role playing games.

There are several reasons that I was attracted to this project.  First and foremost is my love of the super hero genre.  I began reading comics at an early age and the X-Men and Dr Strange have occupied a large portion of my imagination since that point and the ability to take on those roles in gaming is very powerful for me.  On top of this love of super heroes, I am a big fan of hardback copies of my game books.   I saw that the book would be hardback and I was filled with happiness.  The current version of the game is a trade paperback.  I love the book but I have an abiding need for my game books to be hardback.  When I play a game I tend to be one of the few that has the book which leads to it getting passed around a lot.  My OCD kicks in while this occurs and is much more manageable when the book is a hardback.  I know that may sound odd, but it is what it is.  It was the price point that was the final deciding point for me.  For this project, the $60 backer tier is where you get a physical copy of this book as well as the pdf  and a pdf of the gamemaster’s guide.  This is within the range of what I normally spend on a game book and the addition of the gamemaster’s guide is a nice little extra that I appreciate.  With the stretch goals that Green Ronin has set up, I look forward to the book getting better as the Kickstarter winds down.

If you are a fan of super hero roleplaying, I recommend checking out this Kickstarter.  The book itself will be gorgeous.  The price point for the physical copy is reasonable, and Green Ronin has an excellent track record for getting out books so the worry of backing the project and not getting anything is minimal.