The Problem with Superpowers

In 2001, the superhero RPG market was trapped between a masterpiece and a graveyard.

Champions—the HERO System—had been the gold standard since 1981. It could model anything: cosmic entities, street-level vigilantes, time-traveling psychics with power armor. The math worked. The problem was that the math required a degree in accounting. Champions had earned its nickname: “the calculus of RPGs.”

Everything else was dead. Marvel FASERIP was out of print. Mayfair’s DC Heroes was gone. West End Games’ DC Universe had flatlined. The only superhero RPG with active shelf space demanded that players bring graph paper and a calculator to character creation.

Meanwhile, the d20 System was flooding the market. Wizards of the Coast had opened the gates with the Open Gaming License, and hundreds of publishers were pouring through—almost all of them producing D&D-compatible fantasy supplements. The d20 framework was everywhere. But it was built for dungeon crawling: classes, levels, hit points, experience grinding. Nobody had figured out how to make it fly.

Steve Kenson did.

The d20 Deconstruction

What Kenson did with Mutants & Masterminds in 2002 was structural demolition with surgical precision. He kept the core d20 resolution mechanic—roll a twenty-sided die, add a modifier, beat a target number—because millions of players already knew it. Then he stripped out everything else.

Classes: gone. Levels: gone. Hit points: gone. Experience point grinding: gone.

In their place: a point-buy construction system where every power, every ability, every skill was purchased from a unified currency. A character wasn’t defined by their class template. They were defined by their effects.

This sounds straightforward in retrospect. In 2002, it was meaningful. The d20 System was barely a year old as a public framework. Most publishers treated it as gospel—add a prestige class here, a feat chain there, publish it as a supplement. Kenson treated it as raw material. He kept the chassis and replaced the engine.

The origin story matters. While co-writing Silver Age Sentinels for Guardians of Order, Kenson created a setting called Freedom City that the publisher rejected. Chris Pramas of Green Ronin told him he’d publish it—if Kenson designed a d20-based superhero game to go with it. That exchange produced Mutants & Masterminds.

The Toughness Save

Kenson’s most structurally significant innovation was replacing hit points with a single saving throw.

In D&D, combat is attrition. You have a pool of hit points. Enemies reduce that pool. When it empties, you fall. In superhero fiction, that’s wrong. Superman doesn’t slowly wear down over 200 punches. He’s either unaffected or he’s staggered by a single devastating blow.

The Toughness Save models this. When your character is struck, you roll d20 plus your Toughness modifier against a DC set by the attack’s damage. Success means no effect—the blow bounces off. Failure produces named conditions based on the degree of failure: Bruised, Dazed, Staggered, Incapacitated. Each Bruise makes subsequent saves harder, creating an escalating spiral that matches how comic book fights actually feel.

Prior art exists. West End Games’ Star Wars used wound levels. Fudge used a damage ladder. But Kenson’s implementation integrated this into d20’s high-frequency rolling without lookup charts—a clean synthesis within the most popular mechanical framework on Earth.

The innovation’s limitation is also its signature: the d20’s flat probability distribution creates swinginess. A bad roll can drop a hero in one hit. Critics have noted this for twenty years. The system works because the genre tolerates it—dramatic reversals are what superheroes are about—but the math is genuinely swingy.

The Power Level Cap

The second structural innovation was more subtle and arguably more original.

In any point-buy system, the dominant strategy is optimization. Players concentrate resources into a single devastating capability while ignoring everything else. Champions addressed this with Active Point limits. GURPS addressed it with disadvantage caps and GM adjudication.

Kenson’s solution was the Power Level cap with forced trade-offs. At Power Level 10, your Attack Bonus plus Damage Rank can’t exceed 20. Your Defense plus Toughness can’t exceed 20. You can trade within those limits—a “glass cannon” with +15 to hit but only Damage 5, or a “brick” dealing Damage 15 but hitting only on +5—but the mathematical ceiling holds.

This creates genuine tactical differentiation without breaking the system. The speedy martial artist and the invulnerable tank operate at the same power tier but play completely differently. The trade-off is the choice. The cap is the balance.

No predecessor did this in quite this way. It’s the most architecturally elegant thing Kenson built.

The Toolkit and the License

M&M’s first edition won the ENnie Gold for Best d20 Game in 2003. The second edition swept the 2006 ENnies—Gold for Best Game and Best d20/OGL Product. By the mid-2000s, M&M had displaced Champions as the default superhero RPG recommendation across forums, game stores, and convention halls.

The validation that mattered most came in 2010, when DC Comics chose M&M 3rd Edition as the engine for their official RPG. DC didn’t commission a new system. They chose the one Kenson had already built.

Green Ronin established the Superlink and Super-Powered by M&M licensing programs, enabling third-party publishers to produce compatible products. More than fifty products from a dozen publishers. Misfit Studios built 350-page supplements. Vigilance Press ran a full villain series. The ecosystem was real.

True20 Adventure Roleplaying (2006) extracted M&M’s innovations into a genre-neutral framework. Three roles instead of dozens of classes, the Toughness Save damage system, narrative advancement. Other publishers used True20 as a base for their own games: Paradigm Concepts created Tales of the Caliphate Nights, Reality Blurs built Agents of Oblivion, Big Finger Games designed Mecha vs. Kaiju. True20 products were still appearing as late as 2023.

The Other End of the Spectrum

In 2010, while finalizing M&M 3rd Edition—his most mechanically detailed system—Kenson simultaneously released Icons Superpowered Roleplaying. Nearly the opposite.

Icons uses random character generation. Players don’t build characters from a point budget; they roll them. The resolution system is player-facing—GMs don’t roll dice. The rules fit in a fraction of M&M’s page count. You can learn to play in minutes.

The key innovation is the Determination mechanic. Characters with fewer powers start with more Determination points, which can be spent for rerolls, narrative control, and power stunts. Batman starts with a fistful of Determination. Superman starts with almost none. The weaker character has more narrative agency. The system self-corrects.

Kenson has addressed this duality directly: M&M represents his “gear-head” side, the most complex design he’s likely to produce. Icons reflects his lighter side. Building both simultaneously reveals a designer who rejects the “one true system” philosophy—and who can work at both ends of the complexity spectrum with command.

The Thirty-Year Arc

Kenson entered the industry as a playtester for Shadowrun 2nd Edition on the GEnie network. Developer Tom Dowd liked his homebrewed mechanics and invited freelance contributions. By 1995, at age 26, Kenson was a full-time freelancer—working across FASA, West End Games, White Wolf, Last Unicorn Games, Steve Jackson Games, and others. He wrote nine novels, dozens of magazine articles, and supplements for nearly every major RPG publisher of the 1990s.

The breadth of that early work taught him to think inside other people’s systems. When he built his own, he knew which parts to keep and which to burn.

From M&M 1st Edition through 3rd, each revision shows deliberate refinement—tighter math, cleaner effects-based design, more elegant subsystems. His later work confirms the versatility: lead designer on Out of the Abyss and the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide for D&D 5th Edition, lead designer on The Expanse RPG, lead designer on Trinity Continuum: Aberrant for Onyx Path.

Kenson is also a notable figure for LGBTQ+ visibility in the hobby. He co-founded the “Queer as a Three-Sided Die” panels at Gen Con, and his early Shadowrun novels were among the first in the setting to feature gay male protagonists.

The Honest Assessment

The draft research positions Kenson as the most influential superhero RPG designer of the 21st century. The methodology doesn’t dispute that. What it does is separate influence within a niche from influence across the hobby—and that distinction matters.

Invention holds at 7. The Toughness Save, Power Level caps, and effects-based toolkit are meaningful innovations that shifted the superhero RPG conversation. But they weren’t adopted wholesale by other designers outside Kenson’s own product lines. The Toughness Save stayed within M&M and True20. The PL cap system hasn’t been replicated. The complication-driven hero point economy builds on prior art from Torg, James Bond 007, and FATE—which was developing independently. Innovation that’s noticed but not adopted is exactly what a 7 measures.

Architecture holds at 7. M&M is a well-built complex system that supports long campaigns—23 years of continuous publication, five printings of the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook, a DC Comics license. The third-party ecosystem is real: fifty-plus products from a dozen publishers. But the propagation is licensing-based, not organic. Publishers built supplements within his system; they didn’t extract his structural patterns for their own original designs. Quality is strong. Propagation is bounded. The dual test produces a 7.

Mastery holds at 7. The craft evolution from Shadowrun freelancer to M&M system architect to dual-track designer is visible. Three solo-designed game systems. Multiple ENnie Gold Awards. Identifiable design voice. But the refinement is within a bounded design space—his three solo systems share significant DNA, and the improvement across M&M editions, while real, is incremental rather than dramatic. Skilled professional at the top of his game. That’s a 7.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Kenson is a genre translator.

Other designers create systems from philosophical first principles—Gygax from wargaming, Jackson from simulation, Wujcik from narrative sovereignty. Kenson takes existing mechanical languages and rewires them to speak new genres. He took d20 and made it speak superhero. He took M&M and made it speak universal. He took FATE’s sensibility and made it speak pickup-game superhero in Icons. He took the AGE System and made it speak hard science fiction in The Expanse.

He doesn’t invent languages. He teaches them new dialects.

This is why his best work starts with someone else’s engine. M&M is d20 rewired. True20 is M&M extracted. Icons is FATE filtered through the superhero lens. The translation is the invention. And it explains the scoring profile: three 7s. Meaningful innovation, excellent construction, clear skill—all operating within frameworks originated by others. The translator’s paradox: the work is genuinely creative, but the originality lives in the adaptation, not the creation.

What Remains

The Toughness Save. The Power Level cap. Effects-based power construction. The Determination economy. Twenty-three years of continuous M&M publication. A DC Comics license earned, not inherited. The third-party ecosystem that proved superhero RPGs could sustain community infrastructure.

Kenson solved the problem nobody else could: how to make superheroes work in the most popular mechanical framework on Earth. He didn’t do it by inventing a new framework. He did it by listening to d20 carefully enough to hear what it could become.

The superhero RPG market before Kenson was Champions or nothing. After Kenson, it was Mutants & Masterminds—and everything else was measured against it.

That’s not a claim about the whole hobby. It’s a claim about one genre. And within that genre, no one else comes close.

Total: 25 points. Year: 2002.

Total: 25 points. Year: 2002.