I am not saying the rules were difficult, just different. Allow me put that into context. For those of you familiar with video games and table-top games you'll recognize a staple of the industry is the concept of Hit Points. The gauge of how much punishment your character can take before you're voted off the island until you can bribe the dice gods with a bigger bag of funions and microbrew, or in the case of video games, that benchmark between soldiering on and jumping to the menu screen and hitting the load button. Well MHR doesn't have that. On it's own, that's not a big deal. What it does have is a damage tract. Again, this is not a totally new concept. What I took me until I was playing it to grasp is how to use the six damage tracts and how they all interact. Yeah, six damage tracts. Strangely enough after a play-through, it makes sense.
The other half of this rule-set that was a tad bit of a challenge to wrap my brain around was the concept of assets and complications. This is a wonderful system of creating little +1 and -1's that the player can pass around the table. These bonus don't stick around for very long. Once you get come to grips with this mechanic, it's flips the game on its head by changing the focus of the game from "Hit it with an ax" to "Let's make it hard for the villain." Fold in the previously mentioned six damage tracts and this makes changes the scene from a roleplaying hack and slash to a true co-operative storytelling extravaganza.
My brothers and I played the adventure that was printed in the book: Breakout (read New Avengers 1-6) with some home made Avengers. We didn't survive (even though I [the Watcher] thought I was going easy on them). The system uses dice instead of pluses and really invests players to create, alter and modify. My brothers learned the hard way that, just like in the comic books, it pays off to work together to put the villain down instead of have each individual drill away at different sides of the mountain.
The game was fun and entertaining, when one brother's imitation Kal'el was grounded by a pack of raptors (the watcher gave him a complication die), another brother's imitation Hal Jordan used his powers to catch him and fling him back at the prehistoric knee bitter and finally knock him out (the lantern gave the last son a couple of asset dice) leaving the last brother to wail away on his own (he hadn't learned to work together as quickly as the others)
Every story has two sides and this yarn is not the exception. Within the Cortex system there is a growth system in place (experience), characters do grow. Handing out experience is subjective. That is to say the players get to determine which actions garner a reward before you start the adventure. Instead of gaining XP because you beat Magneto into submission, you can get XP for returning an escaped inmate back into S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, or convincing the emo powerhouse to fight on your side. Additionally, players can be rewarded with a massive one time use of a handful of asset dice under the guise of maybe finding Wade Wilson's phone number in your back pocket. It's not conventional and because of that it could backfire really easily. The Experience system is called "Milestones." Milestone are supposed to be emotional, and personalized points in a character's life that means something to him or her, as well as elements of the adventure that will end up paying off. They come in three levels: 1, 3, and 10 XP and you get to have two sets. The greatest can only pay off once per adventure. The 3 XP can only pay off once per scene, and the 1 XP pays off when ever it happens. When the greater milestone pays out, you have to create a new one for your next adventure. Not too shabby, if you have a really good grip on your character. For "Breakout" there were three milestones offered to the players: Liberate the Sentry, Round up the fugitives, and S.H.I.E.L.D. super-agent. One of my brothers' opted to use 'Round up the fugitives' for one of his milestones, which worked out great until act two where they all hitched a ride on a quinjet to the savage lands which made the objectives of that particular milestone obsolete. At the end of the session, that brother had earned a the least amount of experience, while the brother that caught on to how it worked earned triple the amount of the others.
In closing, this game is not for newcomers, and it's not for people who don't know what roleplaying is outside of Dungeons and Dragons. If you and your friends are into creative problem solving, weaving outstanding and outlandish stories that beg to be told and retold around a flagon of mead then this might just be a game you can sink your teeth into . I however, loved it and can't wait to play again.
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