It’s no secret by now that over the past year or so, I have become a very enthusiastic Mutants & Masterminds 3e player. Two things made me willing to try the system. The first is that I was invited into an existing campaign with all my best gaming friends. But there’s another reason. Champions was the first RPG I played in college, and one of those campaigns still provides some of my best gaming memories.
I decided quickly that I liked point-buy character generation better than I liked the rolled stats/level-based methods of every other game I had played.* There were a lot of reasons. I could have (most) everything I wanted for my PC right now, rather than having to wait to get that Paladin’s horse of my dreams or scribe that cool Fireball into my spellbook. There weren’t any minimum stat scores (or race restrictions) barring me from playing my favorite PC class. I was almost as big on backstories then as now, and those Disadvantages I needed to take to pay for those cool superpowers gave me all kinds of ideas for backstories. Yes, the math could get quite tedious. But no more so than what I have to do for an M&M character.
But what really made the game a favorite is what makes just about any other great: the GM’s setting and his skill at running. I played, along with my now-husband, from about 1987 to 1994 in a single campaign the GM, Khaat, called “Wild Cards” in a nod to George R. R. Martin’s series of novels, although I don’t recall a lot of similarities between the settings, except that both had superbeings and the PCs’ team was called “Wild Cards.” Khaat’s world had been around quite a while before I joined, with at least one earlier campaign. I wish I could recall more of the setting background today. The only detail I recall of the origin of superpowers, was that a semi-omnipotent NPC similar to the protagonist of Ursula leGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven was involved.
But I do recall that Khaat was one helluva devious GM who could make anything come alive. He didn’t need ideas for ways to create problems for the team. But I gave him a lot of such ideas. I loved–and stiil do–delving deep into the backstory of my PCs and finding out who their friends and relatives are, not to mention who their enemies are. And if I didn’t have any ideas about something, Khaat was only too happy to come up with an answer–which would soon figure in one of our Sunday afternoon sessions. Perhaps this explains why my fellow-players were always yelling at me to, “Please don’t ask the GM that! Or anything else!” They felt their PCs had enough Super-Problems and Super-Crises to keep them busy without dealing with the fallout from, say, the budding romance between my teenaged PC and a young man with mind-control powers trying to leave his job–as a PSI operative. True story!
There’s another thing that makes this campaign a favorite to this day, though. Khaat and many of the players were our friends, not just gaming buddies. GM Khaat and several of them were at our wedding. Khaat’s girlfriend (later wife), who played the Wild Cards’ no nonsense leader, was close enough to me to be my maid of honor. I am so glad that I have found another group, even though it took years, where I have had the good fortune to find one or two other equally close friends.
Neither I nor my husband has had an opportunity to play Champions since the passing of our dear friend. But both of us are still playing RPGs, including, in my case, the superhero genre. And I’ve been smiling at all the memories as I write this piece. I’ve even told a few stories from that campaign to one of my fellow M&M players. He enjoyed them and thinks Cardinal, my favorite PC (of the three I played). was “Kewl!” Good times and great friends, that’s the best tribute one can give to any RPG, regardless of genre.
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*Yes, back when I started playing, in the Cenozoic Era of RPGs, you rolled your ability scores in order and you darn tootin’ well liked it! If you were lucky you got one of them ultra-liberal softie GMs who allowed newfangled methods like “roll 6 stat sets and pick one” or “4d6/drop the lowest” to generate your single set.
Linda Whitson
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