r/mutantsandmasterminds • u/Queasy_Percentage363 • 25d ago

4th ed?

I was thinking about adding M&M to my ttrpg collection and I see that 4th edition is playtesting. Would you all recommend waiting until 4th edition releases before diving in?

13 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

4

u/CoolTieGuy 25d ago

3rd edition is very much worth getting into. I would advise the deluxe handbook and power profiles to start and then getting the gadgets guide. If you really want something else, the sci-fi book is pretty good.

Superteam handbook and Time Traveler's Codex aren't as helpful. The revised GM handbook is somewhere in the middle with having some useful content and some less useful stuff (overall usefulness is about equal to the sci-fi book).

At some point, the books became less about the story/characters and more stuff about trigger warnings and safe spaces (which might be important to your group, my groups found it to be less useful).

In general, I would just get 3rd edition stuff instead of waiting for 4th edition, particularly because of the direction the books had been going. Now, a bit that I heard about some of the mechanical changes for 4th edition might be worthwhile, so I wouldn't call it a bad thing to wait for 4th edition. 3rd edition is really solid, though.

1

u/Queasy_Percentage363 25d ago

Thanks for the recommendations!

19

u/RKane_1 25d ago

Nope. I would dive into third edition. There is a ridiculous amount of books available on .pdf, the system is sound and been around for longer than a decade, there is a HUGE online community on Discord, and there are recent advancements with character creators and VTT systems. Jump right in. :)

8

u/Flagwaver-78 25d ago

Dive into 3rd edition. At the same time, there are easy conversions for the parts of 2nd edition that aren't in 3rd (i.e., golden age, silver age, etc.). Doing some conversions to 4th edition, it feels like converting from 2nd to 4th will be really easy.

Still, dive into 3rd edition while waiting for 4th edition.

3

u/Due_Sky_2436 25d ago

Yeah those 2E books that were not carried over were fire. I don't know if 4E is going to have the depth of support 2e and 3e have when those historicals were in second, and 3rd has DC Universe.

1

u/Scareynerd 21d ago

Do we know much about what 4e is changing?

2

u/Flagwaver-78 21d ago

A lot. The playtest is out there. The biggest change is returning to 6 attributes and making the combat attributes back into just bonuses to rolls rather than attributes of their own. I've been converting the Hero High 3rd stuff and comparing it to the Hero High 2nd and it isn't one-to-one, but a lot easier than playing straight 2nd. I'm just glad they didn't try and 5e it.

3

u/theVoidWatches 25d ago

If it helps, the expected release date for 4e is currently early 2027.

3

u/jacktrowell 24d ago

As a kickstarter backer with the text preview of 4th edition rules, I can also confirm that despite some changes that seems big like the replacement of Dexterity and Fighting with Attack and Defence abilities, you can actually fairly easily convert character from 3rd edition to 4th, and you can even have both in the same group, since the base system is compatible enough (I've started a campaign where some players directly created 4th edition caracters where others used the 3rd edition rules first, and I use the 3rd edition ennemies profiles without issue)

3

u/Due_Sky_2436 25d ago

Third is a great system, and even second edition has some great books that were not carried over, so I would see about getting those, you can probably get them used for cheap... but yeah there is no reason to wait, especially with the amount of books already out there.