Krolik said:
I guess I'm not seeing the problem considering you can immediately spend a Hero Point and shake off a stunned result. If you're not taking actions it's because you're rolling poorly and/or you're not using your Hero Points to your advantage, IMO. You have a 50% chance of taking a bruise or no damage. You have a 50% chance of being stunned or worse. It really just depends on which way the linear die flops.
Yes, as I wrote earlier, you can spend a Hero Point, but Hero Points are relatively rare commodities and not something you just spend anytime you're attacked. It's my opinion that having to spend a rare commodity (my current character went into his last major battle with two Hero Points) every other time he's hit if he wants to act. And if I'm the GM, that's not an option that I even have.
Let's put it into Champions terms: Nighthawk, someone I'd consider around PL 8, has an 18 pd. If he gets hit by the average 12d6 punch he can do he will take 42 stun. 42-18=24. He has a con of 20. Guess what? He's stunned. A 10d6 energy attack will stun him if the damage roll is 2 stun over average. So in Champions you have a Nighthawk who will stun himself with each hit and knock himself out after 2 hits. In M&M if you a Nighthawk who has a 50% chance of being stunned or worse and a 50% chance of taking no or minimal damage. In general I'd say Nighthawk has a better chance of surviving a fight with his "evil self" in M&M then in Champions.
Here I'd say that your experience with Champions is lacking and that Nighthawk is a terrible example of a Hero System character. I suppose it's only fair considering how bad the Costumed Adventurer is in M&M. Nighthawk has lower than average defenses, and should have a correspondingly higher DCV to go along with that...but he doesn't. In M&M terms he's made a trade off lowering his toughness, but really hasn't improved his defense. The bell curve should be helping out Nighthawk avoid getting hit to begin with. Beyond that, the turn sequence in HERO also gives more flexibility: a character with a high speed can lose actions defending himself and still get in an attack now and then, which is something that you don't have in M&M.
Even beyond that, getting stunned in Hero is not necessarily the same problem as it is in M&M. If Nighthawk gets stunned and he has a higher speed than his opponent he can recover and then take a more defensive action to stay in the fight. In M&M if you're stunned by someone with a higher Initiative than you...you're out of luck.
I would liken the damage system in M&M to using only killing attacks in Hero: very random, very all or nothing. You can fix some of the my issues with M&M's damage save by switching to 3D6, but I still just flat out don't like the all or nothing aspect to it, and find that it doesn't match up at all with my idea of how a comic book battle actually runs.
Just for the record: until the election comes in 2008, my gaming tastes are not a universal rule of law in the US
so I'm aware that we're pretty much talking personal taste. What I'm trying to explain to potential players and GMs for M&M is that this is an issue...you might like it, you might not. The True20/M&M damage system is very different than most other games, and that is a design decision that some people like and some don't.
Now frankly, if it were just me, I'd chalk it up to my own peculiarities, but the other players in my group tend to more or less agree, mostly from a standpoint that they find a lot of the combats we've been in to be a lot less fun this way than in some other systems.
The ultimate reality of it is that our GM in the current M&M game is new to GMing, and I don't know if he could get his head around running HERO at this point. He runs a VERY good M&M game, but I think if you asked him, he'd say that the system is giving him problems getting the results out of it that he expects.
And that's the bottom line (or something like that...)
--Steve