Valiant Worlds for Mutants & Masterminds
When the DC Adventures RPG premiered with what would be the Third Edition of the Mutants & Masterminds game system, it was the only version of that edition available. The stand-alone Third Edition Hero’s Handbook wouldn’t come along until the following year. But with the Valiant Adventures RPG, using a modified version of the M&M system funding on Kickstarter now, long-time players of the Third Edition may ask themselves “Can I just use Worlds of Valiant as an M&M setting sourcebook? Do I really need the new rulebook, if all I want is the Valiant setting and characters?”
The simple answer is: You don’t need the Valiant Adventures Hero’s Handbook to get use out of the Worlds of Valiant as a setting sourcebook for your Third Edition M&M rulebook(s). Worlds will contain the bulk of the information on Valiant characters and their different corners of the universe. While Valiant does make some minor adjustments to the Third Edition rules to better suit the setting, the material in Worlds will still be quite usable. The notable areas of “translation” are:
Skills: Valiant breaks a few M&M skills into smaller sub-skills; Technology into Computers, Electronics, and Mechanics, for example, or Vehicles into Driving and Piloting. Still, the names of the skills are quite self-explanatory, and you can use them as-given in the Valiant write-ups, or translate them back to their M&M equivalents on-the-fly quite easily.
Advantages: The largest number of new character traits in Valiant Adventures are advantages, many of them based on the rules options introduced there. If a Valiant character write-up has an advantage not in the Third Edition Mutants & Masterminds Hero’s Handbook, you can just ignore it, but getting and using those advantages (in Valiant or in your regular M&M game) is one good reason to pick up the Valiant Hero’s Handbook.
Powers: A few powers—notably Healing and Regeneration—are a bit different in Valiant, to go with the adjustments to Damage and Damage Resistance to suit the Valiant Universe setting. That said, their Ranks remain essentially the same, and you can easily convert them to their M&M equivalents, if you want. We’re also looking at presenting powers in Valiant write-ups a bit differently, with more prose explanations of what a character’s powers are along with the game-system notation of their Effects. This is more a change in presentation than mechanics, however, so it doesn’t really affect the write-ups’ usability—if anything, we hope it increases it!
The other things about character stats: Abilities, Ranks, Defenses, and so forth are all the same in Valiant as in M&M Third Edition, as you can easily see by taking a look at the characters in the Valiant Adventures Quickstart. We’ll also be showing off some sample Valiant heroes soon so you can get a sense for what the Worlds book will offer and how useful it will be to you. Take a look and … Stay Valiant!
