I followed MHR (that's the recent one for those of you who can't seem to keep them apart) leading up to its release and bought a PDF shortly after. I've played in one game and ran another. At that point, I decided it wasn't for me, even though I liked many parts of it.
What I liked-
- silva actually said it right, it's got indie sensibilities that are actually in the right place; Milestones are actually a good idea, even if their implementation on a case-by-case basis was iffy, and the way you make a dicepool, reflecting many different facets of your character's physical and emotional state, your environment, etc., drives the comic-book soap opera drama home in a way that no other system really could.
- Sort of as a function of the above, the game encourages role-playing; you're on the lookout for a character hook in the narrative you can exploit for XP, and the dicepool mechanics often remind you to weave a taunt or a wisecrack into your action, or to otherwise do your action in a way that's reflective of personality, not strategy. The characters' personalities thus are evident every single action, which makes for an awesome experience in a supers game.
What I didn't like-
- The Doom Pool, aka the DM's resource mechanic. That's right, the DM doesn't have free reign during an encounter to, say, bring in another squad of goons. He'd have to expend dice from the DP to do so. Even to end an encounter early (as in, it's patently clear who's winning, let's just skip the mopping-up phase) requires a significant "purchase" out of the DP. The encounters themselves can be built however you want, but once it's running, you're locked into whatever you can buy with your DP.
- Easily, easily exploitable. There are SFX that are clear winners. It's too easy to counter-attack. There's a very real temptation to allow anything to be used for anything, which is too "indie" for my tastes.
- Lack of chargen. As has been described above.
- You activate your own weaknesses. You can gain a bennie when you declare that you run out of ammo, for instance, or whatever your power set's set weakness is. This is a matter of taste, but I find it a little too dissociative for me. I like to think and make decisions approximately the same way my character would, not as the author of my character's book would.
- The mechanics are totally and completely unpredictable. Yes, rolling more, bigger dice helps, but you just can't figure out by how much. Especially because the opposition is just as variable. There's just no sense of what a small result is or what a large result is, there's nothing objective whatsoever in this game, everything is rolled against another dicepool. It makes for a game you just can't think very much about. It means that Black Widow has a chance to lift that car, and Hulk has a chance to fail to do so. They're unlikely, and if it happens you can point to the emotional or other contextual inputs and describe the improbable success/failure through drama, I get that, but again, it makes it hard for me to approximate my character's ability to judge what I can do. Every decision I make is heavily influenced by the meta-game (how big is the DP right now? Can I afford to shut down a power set to get a bonus?). This is a matter of taste, but playing this game helped me realize just how much I like to be in the head of my character and dislike this other stuff.
Those are the major things that I can remember. It's a flavorful, punchy, beer-and-pretzels game with a lot of spunk. But, like most indie faire, it's mechanics are more flavorful than functional, and the hard rules interactions fall apart when stressed very much at all.
Re: Pregens
Yeah, the pregens are all totally imbalanced, which is true of most supers games, because as we all know, the only reason Batman can play on the same team as Superman is author fiat.
Re: Cap's Milestone
This isn't really that offensive to me. It doesn't encourage you to play as Robin, it encourages you to play as "the rookie" archetype for a session or two, as if your character is being introduced to the team. Many A-list heroes have been in that situation for a brief period. It's a great archetype, and has absolutely nothing to do with screen time. MHR does this, it encourages you to flex authorial muscles, make big splashes of dramatic personalities, etc., and IMO, that's one of its redeeming qualities, not one of its faults.
