Savage Barbarian: Archetype Rework

"All the gods, they cannot sever us. If I were dead and you were still fighting for life, I'd come back from the darkness. Back from the pit of Hell to fight at your side."



I never do this. I hate doing this. You know I can't stand armchair game balancing and lazy "experts" coming up with endless house rules.

But.

The Savage Barbarian archetype genuinely pisses me off. At low levels you're massively under the AC values of a non-archetyped Barbarian or even a regular party, but at higher levels you're six or more points over. It makes no sense, and the strange, scaling design of this archetype feels either slapped together lazily or worse, broken because of "conservative design" nonsense rules. I can very easily imagine an internal rule floating around of "No alternate stats to AC".

On one hand you'd say "Stat to AC" is abusable. You'd just take Monk and Barbarian together somehow and add two stats to AC. On the other hand, I can already do worse with the rules as written. I just need to build a former monk, or one with the Aasimar trait Enlightened Warrior to get around the Barbarian alignment restriction. One level of monk and nineteen levels of Barbarian later, and I'm adding Dex, Wisdom, and a whopping eight more points to my AC before we talk about armor bonuses. No, my version's actually going to be less abusable because I'm not fucking stupid.

Please keep in mind this is not a new Archetype and shouldn't be used concurrently with the original Savage Barbarian. It is also designed with Unchained Barbarian in mind, which doesn't raise his CON value when he rages. If you're using this with the old Barbarian, you want to include a note that his AC doesn't go up with the bonus from rage. Also note that Naked Courage would replace Trap Sense, as Danger Sense is an intended parallel to that ability.

That's probably enough Ado.

Savage Barbarian

Natural Toughness: At 1st level, the savage barbarian adds his CON bonus to his AC when unarmored and unencumbered. These bonuses apply to AC even against touch attacks or when the Barbarian is flat-footed. He loses this bonus when he is immobilized or helpless, when he wears any armor, or when he carries a medium or heavy load. This ability is not compatible with a monk's AC bonus or similar abilities.

The Savage Barbarian is not proficient with any armor. He remains proficient with shields.

This ability alters the Savage Barbarian's proficiencies and replaces Damage Reduction.


Naked Courage: At 3rd level, the Savage Barbarian gains a +1 dodge bonus to AC and a +1 morale bonus on saving throws against fear when wearing no armor. Shields are allowed. This bonus increases by +1 for every six levels after 3rd, to a maximum of +3 at level 19.

This ability replaces Danger Sense.


Rage Powers: The following rage powers complement the Savage Barbarian Archetype: Guarded Stance, Flesh Wound, Superstition, Internal Fortitude, and Reflexive Dodge.



So there we have it. Here's my standard list of justifications. First is that losing their damage reduction is pretty big, so it's okay that Naked Courage is a little better than you'd expect out of a "trap sense replacer" ability. Adding a stat to AC instead of a flat scaling value of natural armor means we "front load" some of the AC bonus, enough that the Barbarian doesn't feel like he's gimped vs. the guys in armor. The standard Savage Barbarian ruins character fantasy by having the Barbarian needing to wear armor until his abilities scale up enough to take it off.

CON to AC will potentially scale better than the original version. A Barbarian who starts with an 18 and a CON bonus race will end a game with a CON of 36 if he works toward it. That's a CON of 20, 5 points from leveling, 5 points from a stat book or wishes, and 6 from a CON item. That's a total of +13 to AC vs. the +5 they get from the original version.

But so can Monk, and nobody complains. It's not that Unchained Monk sucks or is low damage, either. It's not mitigated by their weapon problems. No, it works out because a maximum potential isn't the only thing that matters when you're trying to balance something. They're only going to have so many stat points, and so much money. Even in my stat-heavy game proposals, they're still making a lot of tight decisions on where to put things. They're probably going to make a choice between a STR and a CON race, something Monk doesn't even need to do: There are plenty of races that give DEX/WIS and even a few that give STR/WIS.

It'll probably work out just like Monk does is my point, seeing as how it's modeled on Monk. Someone who centers their build around CON and AC will be giving up expertise somewhere else. Potential watch-points is their ability to use a shield, which the monk can't do.

The Worst Supplement Ever Made

"I made a very solemn vow about firearms. But for you, I'm making a once-in-a-lifetime exception.

A gun and a bullet, Darkseid.

it was your idea."



Okay so right off the bat, it's probably not the worst supplement ever made. The new World of Darkness's second phase had a lot of truly objectionable crap in it that I'm not going to read. That aside? Yeah, I'm surprised too. I'm surprised my first subject under "Bad supplements" isn't a 3.0 D&D book. It sure had a lot of crap thanks to the OGL and the rush of people trying to get in on that.

It's at least still a D20 book we're talking about. Mutants and Mastermind's supplements are mostly play and GMing advice and the like, since you have a limited amount of new things you can reasonably put into a M&M supplement. More on that later. I'm gonna take a little bit of time to explain some core concepts to you as they come up, since it's gonna be abundantly clear that the creators of Mecha and Manga didn't really understand those. Y'know. The rules. So with only a little further adieu, let's start complaining.

Oh, and I'm gonna end up using the word weaboo a lot. Don't take it personally. I just think it's funny.


Chapter One is a basic intro called Worlds of Manga.

Not much to say here, honestly. This is a necessary chapter in the book, and they explain basic genres and manga conventions well enough. However. I sincerely feel sorry for anyone who needs this chapter. I mean, 90% of people are going to buy this book because they want to play an anime inspired game and they still get PTSD flashbacks from trying to play BESM D20. So anyone who's really reading this section out of necessity is probably being pressed into playing an anime/manga inspired game by their weaboo friends. They have no idea what's coming and I sincerely hope their gaming experience doesn't look as much like the Sakura-Con Commercial as I think it will.

And in our first spurt of faint praise, the author manages to explain harem animes without letting on how creepy they are. That's not easy.


Chapter Two is the meat of the character information...but not all of it. You'll come across that major irritation later. Starting off is templates. I know this isn't the only book that gives these, but I'm not a fan. These are okay as simple inspirations for your character and what you might want to buy, but lord help you if your GM wants to enforce this and you end up taking a lot of traits you didn't want.

You already fucked up. The race hardly started. The dude fired the starting gun and you fell right the fuck over.

Lemme explain. The entire point of Mutants and Masterminds is that you buy what you want and you build the "fluff" of your character around that. You can be a classic tights-wearing dude like Superman or a weird looking freak like Bizarro and have virtually the same statistics. You can build Solomon Grundy, The Hulk, or Killer Croc and only have less than 10 out of 150 points different between any two of them. The idea that you need to buy certain traits to "be" something is ludicrous in this system.

And then there's the Archetypes. First off, they're all different power levels, meaning the writer doesn't understand what Archetypes are used for. They're included in a game partly for inspiration, but also for guidance. Inexperience gamers can take a ready-made character and make it their own just by changing a few points. Showing a final product and letting someone pick it apart is a valuable teaching tool. The vast majority of games in M&M will start at Power Level 10, the default suggested in the core. Every Archetype here that's under or over that number would require work the player may not be able or willing to do to use them. That hamstrings the primary reason you put archetypes in your game.

The Child Assassin is first. Her toughness/defense and attack bonus are poor for her power level, and that's a very negative thing to me. The core Archetypes are all well built in this regard, and have numbers befitting their power level. You don't have to build like this, but I'd say it's expected of most characters in Mutants and Masterminds. It's not expensive to make sure you have one good save and toughness/defense at your current cap. You can express differences via trade-offs between those two numbers. You of course have the option of...just not buying up this stuff properly. I just don't know why you would. Like I said, it's not expensive. I'm also not sure this is such an anime staple as to definitely include it.

Next is Circumstantial Idiot.

Lemme explain you a thing about Shinji Ikari. Neon Genesis Evangelion is a brutal deconstruction of anime conventions. Shinji is a pathetic, cowering loser who, no, does not shape up to become awesome and win in the end. He's placed into a situation far above him by an uncaring, abusive parent and all of that is the point. Whether it's even his fault that he's a complete failure is, I guess up to interpretation. I haven't seen the anime. I just know Shinji exists to express that putting kids into the situations most Anime put them into would be severe abuse in the real world, and that's one of the points Anno was making.

You're not supposed to like him, but many people the world over identified with him. I guess that's to be expected, since we're all pathetic losers thrust into a situation far above us at some point in our lives. His popularity eventually led to anime creators pulling the idea from NGE that people love pathetic losers and missing (or deliberately avoiding) all of the explanations and subtext. Characters like Tenshi Masaki and Keitaro Urashima get invented. Bland, lackluster idiots intended as viewer self inserts. Lifeless losers who coast through all of the important events of the show, winning handily without deserving it. Most of the time, they're the least interesting thing about the show.

Does that sound like something you want in your game? His near-useless build aside, do you really want someone explicitly trying to play a main character? Do you want someone playing a bland idiot in your game? Is it gonna enrich your game to have someone whose entire point is to just blunder into situations and get beat up? That shouldn't sound good, because it's a bad fucking idea. The "Circumstantial idiot" character ruins animes, it ruins mangas, and it'll ruin your game.

I'm glad we had that talk. Cool Sempai is next, and it's dumb too. She can make people love her and then also stun them. So, what. Is she going to be stunning people out of combat? For what purpose? Actually, if she can make people love her, what's she really even need that for? Is she going to be wildly gesturing every round in combat? Was this whole archetype put together as a joke without regard to if it's even really playable? You know the answer to that one.

The pointlessly included ESPer is next. Making a worse version of the Psionic from the core book sure did take up a whole page, though.

Exiled Deity is next. Mutants and Masterminds is such a cool fucking system that you can play something like this and it's okay. Of course, she's PL 15 so you'd have to all but create your own version of this character anyway. She'd take far too much editing down to actually use. And again, her numbers don't line up. It's fucking infuriating that these are poorly built on purpose when the core archetypes are not.

Exorcist is next. Shape up his attack, toughness and defense and you'd have a solid character. Not bad.

Future Warrior is okay too, but again it's pretty close to Gadgeteer and Costumed Adventurer, but this time I don't mind so much. It shows how you can bend those concepts and come up with something really different.

Idol is a good thing to include here. She's a "non combat" character, contrasted to the rest of the archetypes here which just happen to have shitty numbers. This is a concept absent from the core book and it's cool that they included it.

Magical Girl. The one-two punch of being very complicated and also poorly built! Bad archetypes piss me off in any game, but this is one that people are going to really be flocking to given how popular the genre is, and I'm sad that this isn't a better character for them.

Modern Sorcerer. Oh look, it's the Mystic but bad. Great!

Priest. Completely incomprehensible build. It'd go better if I could figure out what character this was supposed to be an homage to. The examples include Rei Hino from Sailor Moon and good old Miroku from Inuyasha. I dunno, this archetype doesn't fit either of those characters very well.

Student. Fuck you.

Techie. OH LOOK IT'S THE GADGETEER BUT WORSE ARE YOU ALL AS TIRED OF THIS AS I AM?

Troubleshooter. Is there some giant glut of assassin manga I just never knew about or is this a weird thing to include? Also, MARTIAL ARTIST, NEXT

Warrior. Is this some sort of commentary on how generic some characters in anime are? Am I being punked? The characters listed as examples are Guts from Berserk and Mugen from Samurai Champloo. I mean, the fact that Mugen was useless outside of a fight was kind of the point of the character...

Whew. Okay. I had more to say about these god-awful Archetypes than I thought. To the author's credit, they give examples for each archetype to help you along, and some of them are pretty deep cuts in terms of anime. Anime fans will probably appreciate that this book brings up some classics and hidden gems in addition to popular stuff.

Next comes some commentary on skills that I'm going to skip over. It's a lot of reiterating information already available in the core book, but I guess providing context for skills in an anime game is a better use of book space than those archetypes.

Feats. Oh boy. I'm not going to comment on every feat. Some of them are fine, and a few are even kind of good. This is where the the book starts to turn into a weird mess, though. It's where you start to wonder if the author has a solid grip on the game's rules or not. In general, he invents several feats that let you "bust" power level limits, particularly on skills.

Here's a super-quick explanation. In Mutants and Masterminds, your maximum allowed numbers are fairly important to building a character. Your maximum skill ranks is five plus the game's power level, the maximum save DC you can inflict is the power level itself, et cetera. What to buy and what to bump to this number is a core part of building your character. It means the game is less about what you're "inflicting" and more about how you get there. A stealthy character at power level ten who does absolutely everything they can to raise Stealth skill(Maximum dexterity and ranks) is going to have a +30. There's just no way to make that number any higher short of leveling up. Period. Where he can express more expertise is instead in the powers he takes(Concealment, Obscure, Insubstantial, et cetera) or the small list of stealthy feats.

 I'm solidly 50/50 on the idea of feats that can overcome these limits. On one hand, M&M has a lot of "conditional" feats that you end up not taking. They aren't that much cheaper than just buying a non-conditional source so it feels like a waste to take them, especially if it's a bonus to damage, attack, defense or toughness. So sometimes busting limits, especially with a non-ranked feat, seems okay. Nice, even. But on the other hand...they start to look downright required, since they're the ONLY way to get a higher bonus at some point. I wouldn't blame anyone who thought the idea of going above the game's limits was too big a can of worms to allow.


Attack Flurry. I'm mentioning this because it's basically just Autofire, the extra, expressed as a feat. This kind of thing is unnecessary, but okay. It gets people thinking outside of the box, which is where the fun really starts with M&M.

Distracting Looks. This is one of many things in this book where I'm just plainly not sure how the fuck it's intended to work. The save DC only scales up to the game's PL, but nothing else is limited. There are three effects, two of which are listed concurrently for no reason, and it's unclear how you pick what happens. It just says "Whatever applies". Do they all apply? Does the user pick? Do you pick when you buy it? Do you have to buy a different version of Distracting Looks for the other two? These effects also all scale with ranks above the game's Power Level, meaning you can easily inflict something like -20 to will saves or -50 to interaction check DCs with you.  It's not even that expensive. Is this penalty intended to take numbers negative? You know, you don't auto-succeed on a 20 in this system, so this feat and something that inflicts a DC 21 will save may as well be a no-save power even if this power isn't intended to cause negative numbers. In addition to its awful vagueness, you now have to think about the sexuality of every NPC they're able to interact with, which I promise you will leave you feeling like a creep. Especially if you end up rolling randomly.

Kawaii. Why does the penalty inflicted by Distracting Looks scale but this doesn't? Just because it's attack rolls? I'd say Will Saves are pretty fucking important and I can build someone so fucking smoking hot that they inflict a hundred point penalty to them. What about this power made someone have a temporary moment of clarity when they were designing?

Slap Silly. Listen, I know there's a weird problem with grapple in M&M, but this was probably not the best way to balance it out. This is damn close to an "Everyone takes this" power. There's also a reference to renaming the feat. I know they're just joking, but no. This is a massive pet peeve of mine. Do NOT rename things you take. Not your skills, not your feats, no. Unless you're trying on purpose to be a headache.

And before I continue, I just want to point out that this book does stop every once in a while to crack a joke. It keeps the anime feel up while reading and it's one of the few things it did right.

Well Known. This is a ranked, unrestricted bonus to diplomacy. The DC for taking someone from hostile to friendly is only a 35. In fact, the strict "attitude shift" version of diplomacy here is showing its age, but Well Known being a massive oversight isn't helping. Between this and Distracting Looks it's really cheap to create a character who instantly solves every conflict with anyone who could possibly be attracted to them or knows who they are. This is genuinely the kind of thing that shouldn't have made it past the editing phase, let alone playtesting.

Playtesting? Who am I kidding? This wasn't playtested. Only two playtesters are listed, and that's plain-ass not enough to actually playtest a product unless the writing staff helped and mysteriously wasn't credited.


Powers are next. The section starts off by saying that Manga heroes are particularly apt to gain 1 point powers as feats instead. No. No, first of all that makes no sense, and second of all, mucking with terminology is needlessly confusing. This is already a system that confuses a lot of people and you're not fucking helping. Having powers listed on your sheet doesn't necessarily mean your character has "Powers" and this is already a huge hurdle for some people to understand. "Powers" is just a category of abilities, and characters who are normal people can still have them. Of course, with some of them you'd obviously be stretching what you mean by normal.

This is also where most of M&M's supplements fail a little bit, so I promise I'm trying to be kind. The thing is, you can't actually add new powers. Everything is intended to be built via the "building blocks" of the base powers in the core books. It's how the game is intended to function. All you can really do in a "powers" section is provide examples of how to put powers together in new ways. That's what Mecha and Manga tries to do, and...falls really flat at. Once again, I'm not discussing everything listed. Some are just okay. None are great, honestly.


Battle Form. This is either boost or alternate form and I can't for the life of me figure out how they arrived at this points value, especially for "second stage". Unlike the examples in Ultimate Power, they don't say how anything is built. The addition of this power impacts the elegance of the system by adding a muddy, weird power which may or may not be "worth it" to buy over powers that do a similar thing.

Combo Finish. And Combos in general. Honestly, I'm all for adding complexity when that added complexity can make something feel different or special, but I don't understand what Combo does that can't be done by a simple "Limited" flaw. Your GM might not agree, but I think "Must be used after a certain other power" fits squarely into the definition of Limited. Otherwise, this system feels like a lot of bloat that brings fuzzy decision making into a game whose core appeal is all of your choices being valid ones.

(Martial Arts) Stance. This is just an example of the "Container" power structure, and it'd have been real nice if the book said that so a reader could go "Oh, so that's how these work" or "So an alternate form doesn't have to be something like Johnny Storm. Neat!". It'd have been a teaching moment that the creators of this book apparently don't care to put in their product.

Maybe that's a real petty thing to include but, like I said before, this is already a game that confuses a lot of people. It's confusing even despite fairly elegant design and explanation in Ultimate Power particularly. No, the authors don't have some obligation to be helpful, but I really wish they had been.

Shadow Clone. This is a power which has no point to buying additional ranks to it. I have no idea how you fucked that up. It's based on Duplication, which requires you to buy ranks to build your duplicates with more power points, but...Shadow clones can't do anything. It's also something like illusion, and illusion scales based on the will save to disbelieve, and the area of the illusion. Shadow Clone doesn't have those either.  It just...doesn't scale with ranks. In addition to that, the clones can Interpose despite not being able to affect the physical world, meaning this is one of the cheapest defensive powers in the game if your gm is an idiot and lets you take it.

Substitution. This is better in every way than Deflect while being massively cheaper. It's an insanely bad idea to design something like this, not just for being so close to deflect, but also for being cheaper than it by at least 3 points per rank since its action is "reaction" out of the box. One of the core ideas behind Mutants and Masterminds is that there's no "hard decision" on what to take. You find the thing that does what you want, and you build it from there. A building block that looks kind of like Deflect, with a cost you can't justify inside the core rule set, is an awful idea.

Conductor. You know, I think the reason this extra doesn't exist in the core book is that you can just pick "Air" as the medium connecting you and the victim and avoid any implied limitation in most circumstances. But, if I'm being honest? This is hardly the only abusable extra so I guess it's fine. So long as your GM keeps an eye out for people trying to be "clever".

Next they have a section on complications and drawbacks. It's fine. It's just repeating things from the core book, but it's fine. It's from an anime or manga point of view, at least. Some of their sample complications are really, really likely to lead to trouble, like "Obnoxious" and "Secrets" but I'd be lying if I said obnoxious characters and toxic secret-keeping didn't exist before this book.

The author forgets to put the value of the drawbacks at the end and puts them within the explanation paragraph, which is such a failure of basic structure that I'll give him the commemorative White Wolf Book Design Award for it. The drawbacks themselves are okay, except for "Part of Body". Applying a power to only a portion of your body raises too many questions. Mutants and Masterminds doesn't have a rule for Called Shots, so this drawback brings up a lot of fuzzy situations on-the-fly interpretations. One of the system's staple flaws "Limited" applies if a power is unusable roughly half the time, like only being concealed at night. Imagine how often having an impervious head is going to come up in a game that has no called shots. Far less than 50% of the time, and since it's a drawback, you're getting even fewer points back than Limited. Alternatively, it may hardly matter at all depending on how it's designed by the player, like "Only my eyes can shoot the laser beams". You want to watch out for drawbacks that will never come up, as well as ones that will come up far too often.

The end of this chapter and the beginning of the next is more advice on character building, world building, and tone. Great. I still don't know who really needs this advice, but it's good stuff to include in your supplement.

Then comes the meat of the Mecha section. I'm not gonna pick this apart. It's okay, so long as you take it as an optional rule. There are certainly worse ways to run a Mecha Anime game. I don't know if I'd use these rules in a mixed game, though, especially since powersuiters are going to be prevalent in M&M and this brings up some weird mathy stuff when compared to buying their suit as a device. You want to avoid that. Otherwise, this is a pretty good, meaty system for mecha that would be just what a game needs for a decent anime feeling.

Martial Arts section. More world-building advice. Listen, I don't want to disparage including stuff like this or anything, but...this is included without any thought to who bought this book. I mean, presumably you know stuff about Manga and Anime if you bought the book, right? If you didn't, there's a good chance you wouldn't bother. So who exactly is this for? This is best included in terms of fitting anime conventions into a game...which the book does some of. The rest is just...re-explaining things that the reader probably already knows. I still keep thinking about that one poor motherfucker who was near-forced into playing an Anime game with his weaboo friends who has no idea what the fuck it is beyond "I saw Dragon Ball Z a few times on Toonami."

Speaking of DBZ, there's a little rule for calculating "Chi Level", which is PP spent on ability scores, plus PP spent on powers, divided by 5. This is the one major compliment I'm giving to this book, so listen closely. This is a great little rule because it subverts "Power Level" in DBZ in a big way. What I mean is, in Mutants and Masterminds, spending the lion's share of your points in powers, even offensive ones, doesn't mean you're more likely to win a fight. Therefore, someone with a low "Chi Level" still might be a major threat. Judging by what he said in this section, I'm going to assume the author meant to do this. So that's your one point so far.

There's a section here that basically suggests to describe your character's attacks or powers as certain video game effects. Anything that gets the creative juices flowing is great, but you should probably know that this is a bit of a crutch. And definitely verbally describe the effect, absolutely don't do something like saying "She does a kick and it looks exactly like Chun-Li's Spinning Bird Kick." You can be better than that.

Then comes a big, confusing section on equipment weapons. It's fine to add some more equipment to the game, but...man. Man, this could have been put together better. Each weapon has a core type, which the individual weapons then modify with some sort of effect. But, the table of weapons comes first and the stats of the "type" come later. I...do not get why this is put together like this, other than maybe someone had a mini-stroke during the layout meeting. I feel like I'm reading House of Leaves, I keep having to flip back and forth. Otherwise, this is just your standard giant list of Asian weapons that the weaboos go crazy for. It's okay. I'm tired of this because I play a lot of different PNP games, and not everyone does. Especially in M&M, weapon lists like this will probably inspire someone.

Next is an honor and reputation system. I don't know about you but I'm fucking tired of gameified honor outside of systems which revolve around it like L5R. Unlike the Mecha rules, these feel really pointless. The Reputation system is particularly thin and may as well not exist. It provides nothing to the system that a simple rank of the "benefit" feat wouldn't.

The section on "Martial Arts Stances" gives Drunken Boxing a penalty to checks to be knocked down, but also Instant Up and Prone Fighting. it's also yet another product supporting the fallacy that a drunken boxer is necessarily drunk when fighting. To be fair...it's a fallacy repeated even by drunken masters, so I guess I'll give you that one. Otherwise, these are almost exactly like the "templates" above and you can repeat my comments on those. It's true that dealing with an asshole in your gaming group is a greater problem than anything a book could do, but giving that asshole a reason to be pedantic definitely isn't helping.

There's also a section of feats and even archetypes this deep in the book. If only there was a place to put those things that would be more appropriate. Bullet Time is a hilariously bad idea for a feat, requiring more than one rank to provide a benefit and giving you extra actions whenever you action surge with a hero point. At least it says you can still only take one extra attack or this might be the worst thing in the book.

Honestly, while the Mecha section had feats too, I didn't go into them because they were primarily relevant to the Mecha rules, which I called an optional rule set. These, however, would be useful to a wide range of games, and some of them are even pretty fun and unique. The fact that they're back here in the ass end of the book is a crime. There are a few feats that reference Chi level, but...there's references to the Reputation system in the feat section and they didn't see a problem with that!

And then there's a bunch of powers, most of which should just be in the powers section, because not all of them are directly relevant to the Chi optional rule. This is also where I start to really gnash my teeth over the author not including how he built any of these powers under the core rules. Flash Step is a great idea, but...it's just a few ranks of teleport. Just say it, explain that's how you built the power.

People buy LEGOs for the sets, of course. They want to make a pirate ship, or a Millenium Falcon, or a house or something. They also buy LEGOs for the pieces and the infinite creativity to make whatever they want. A lot of the time they do one right after the other. You know what really helps? Showing the steps of how you make the original item in the set. That way it gets the creative juices flowing, shows them tricks they may not have thought of, and gives them something to base their own creation off of.

Mutants and Masterminds is LEGOs. The archetypes and sample powers are the instructions. This book has no idea why they're there. It misses the elegance of the core system, so it does things like refusing to explain itself in its example powers and making wildly differing (and frankly awful) archetypes. I never thought I'd see a book with a fundamental misunderstanding of design this badly, and I've seen 3.X books that literally got the actual rules of the game wrong.

Anyway fuck me there's a section on Pokemon. They call it "Pets" of course. Probably to involve all the Digimon too.  Unlike the previous two sections I'm gonna dump on this one for being largely full of redundant or pointless rules. In M&M, you can easily have a pet using Summon, Minions or Sidekick. Complexity isn't going to enrich this game type and, unlike our other two genre sections, this one has game systems better suited to running a meaty Pokemon game that'd feel great and very close to genre. This section is generally pretty full of pointless complication but, I'm just gonna pick out some of the dumber shit.

The basic pet rules section states that a pet acts on the controller's initiative, plus or minus their own bonus. Furthermore, if the monster acts before the controller, it acts on instinct until you command them. I mean, do I have to explain this one? This is a system where you can just...infinitely buy your own initiative bonus up so it's not quite that bad, but this attempt to simplify just ends up complicating everything. It's potentially an incentive to make sure your pet has a bad initiative bonus.

Then comes the tricks and purposes system lifted directly from D&D. It's fine there but...I don't know, this whole section is clearly an attempt to do what the Mecha section did and provide something unique for a themed game, but I can't help but think this is really pointless and bloated. Maybe it's because it's just taking something the core game already does and making it more difficult. If we were running a core M&M superhero game and I wanted to play a guy with a cool dog, I wouldn't have to worry about any of this.

The next section is "Gamemastering Manga" and it starts off with advice for hero concepts.

I can't.

I just can't.

ANYWAY it goes through a lot of basic personality archetypes and a lot of the commentary I could make here is more general and not solely focused on this book, like "The Whiner" being a pretty toxic thing to play in a group, or "Tsundere" and any of the other "-dere" personality types being reductive and ultimately pretty harmful. That's not really the author's fault, people(read: Weaboos) would think it's weird if you went this whole book without mentioning them.

Then there's a section on gameifying relationships. First off, no. Second, if you must, there's way better games for this. MAID: The Role Playing Game, maybe. Otherwise, a lot of this is, once again, information I genuinely have no idea why it was included and advice for that maximum weaboo feel to your game. There's nothing in this "Gamemastering section" that feels like we're talking about gamemastering, it's just more blandly generic advice like the whole rest of the book. It's almost like listening to someone full-on ramble about Anime, then taking that mashed-up mess of a transscript and just placing chapter headings randomly.

There is yet another optional rule here, for streamlined "challenges". It's basically a rewrite of the whole game system and, honestly, I super don't recommend you do stuff like this. If you find yourself wanting to use things like this or D&D's E6, or you find yourself using more than a dozen house rules...you need to just start looking for a different system that fits what you really want better. At some point, you're starting to hammer a square peg into a round hole.

After that there's some antagonists, some NPCs, some setting suggestions, and my perennial favorite thing, Mass Combat Rules! Oh boy if there's one fucking thing M&M doesn't need it's this. If there's one fucking system that doesn't need rules for Mass Combat, it's this one.


I'm done. I could probably keep going, but I'm done. I didn't want this to be even longer and even more repetitious by dwelling on the problems with the later sections. Like I said, a lot of this is fine, but even the stuff in this book that's fine...leaves me wondering why it's even there. I mean, who's buying this book? Was it wise to assume the reader knows nothing about Japanese culture or Anime? Would it have improved this rambling mess of a book to tighten that aspect up? Probably not, I guess. As it is, though, the basic, general overview of Anime it gives leaves me repeating that word. Weaboo.

It's frustrating because there's virtually nothing to take away from this book. The advice is mostly redundant and rambling, the powers are mathematically upsetting, the feats are broken, and the archetypes would require so much reworking to use that they may as well not be archetypes at all.


Let's leave on a positive note, though. In the very beginning of the book, just underneath the design credits, they give explicit permission to print a copy of the electronic book for personal use. Some of the other supplements do say this as well, but even so. Good on you guys for being so clear about that.