Mutants & Masterminds vs Night's Black Agents
Compare Mutants & Masterminds and Night's Black Agents side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Mutants & Masterminds | Night's Black Agents | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Modern, Superhero | Horror, Modern |
| Play Style | Superhero, Heroic, Crunchy, Character Building, Combat-Heavy, Tactical, Cinematic | Investigation, Espionage, Character-Driven, Gritty |
| Core Mechanic | Roll d20 + modifier against a Difficulty Class. Heroes are built from a Power Points budget capped by a series Power Level (usually 10), which limits paired trait totals — attack bonus + effect rank, dodge + toughness — to twice the level. Damage is resisted with Toughness checks that escalate conditions (bruised, staggered, incapacitated) instead of tracking hit points. Hero Points let players reroll, edit scenes, or recover from conditions; complications coming into play earn them back. | GUMSHOE engine. Investigative abilities auto-succeed — if you have the skill and there's a clue, you find it. General abilities (combat, athletics) roll 1d6 + spent points vs. difficulty 4. Point pools refresh between sessions, creating resource-management tension. Four play modes (Burn, Dust, Mirror, Stakes) tune mechanics to your preferred espionage tone. |
| Dice | d20 | d6 |
| Complexity | High | Medium |
| Accessibility | High | Medium |
| Runnability | High | High |
| License | OGL | GUMSHOE SRD (CC BY 3.0 / OGL) |
| Cost | $$ | $$ |
| Publisher | Green Ronin Publishing | Pelgrane Press |
| Year | 2013 | 2012 |
| Best For | Groups who want unlimited freedom to design any superhero concept — from masked vigilante to cosmic powerhouse — with a flexible point-buy build system and tactical combat that emphasizes power-level balance. | Groups who want spy-thriller action fused with supernatural horror — burned agents unraveling a vampire conspiracy through investigation, chases, and tradecraft. |
| Highlights | Modular power-construction system builds any superpower from effects, modifiers, and flaws; Power Level caps enforce balance even when individual traits vary widely; Hero Points reward roleplaying complications with mechanical benefits; conditions track damage progression instead of using a hit point pool | Investigation never stalls — clues flow automatically, Conspyramid campaign structure is a well-designed GM tool, four tonal modes let you dial in the spy genre you want, highly modular vampire creation system, works stripped of vampires for pure espionage |
| Considerations | Character creation requires significant rules mastery to navigate the point-buy power construction; resolving an attack involves multiple checks per action — attack roll, Toughness resistance, condition tracking; Power Level caps can frustrate players who want to push paired-trait limits like attack and effect rank | NPC combat math can feel unbalanced against PCs, multiple point pools to track can bottleneck play, narrow genre focus limits reuse, requires significant GM prep for conspiracy networks |