coyote6
Adventurer
FWIW, I picked M&M -- shock! Champions was my game of choice for most of a decade, but I eventually got tired of some of its conventions, and moved on to GURPS as the go-to system (not for the same sort of superhero games as I ran in Champions, though! The GURPS supers stuff I did was much grittier, and not nearly as long-lasting as the Champions campaigns). Nowadays, M&M is definitely my superhero game of choice.
I think I'm paraphrasing someone (Bill Stoddard?), but I think Hero/Champions does an excellent job of simulating superpowers, but not such a great job of emulating comic books. Champions fights don't really feel like comic book fights to me; M&M gets much closer, for me.
One not yet mentioned reason that multiple attacks on one target in M&M is bad is essentially because of the way the damage mechanics work -- the target makes a save on a single d20, which can be wildly swingy. Hero points (or GM fiat to mimic said) offset that swinginess; if you get multiple attacks per round, the extra attacks bypass hero points (you can only spend one HP to reroll, remember). Once an attack stuns the opponent, all the rest are much more likely to succeed, and force even more Toughness saves.
Having multiple attacks becomes the ticket to combat effectiveness, and combat risks degenerating into an initiative check (whoever goes first will tend to win, thanks to multiple attacks). (See also: Shadowrun, 1e & 2e.
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You could maybe deal with that by accounting for the extra attacks in PL calculations -- i.e., the more attacks you have, the lower damage they have to be. But that would be hard to do right. Combined with the fact that multiple attacks slow down play, and it seems cleaner to do things the way M&M does them now.
BTW, you can use autofire to attack multiple people in M&M -- IIRC, it works like Autofire used to work in Hero (it's been a long time since I looked at Hero Autofire, though), and I would certainly let a speedster combine Move-by Action and an Autofire Strike to strafe a bunch of people. A Targeted Area Strike would be more effective, though.
I think I'm paraphrasing someone (Bill Stoddard?), but I think Hero/Champions does an excellent job of simulating superpowers, but not such a great job of emulating comic books. Champions fights don't really feel like comic book fights to me; M&M gets much closer, for me.
One not yet mentioned reason that multiple attacks on one target in M&M is bad is essentially because of the way the damage mechanics work -- the target makes a save on a single d20, which can be wildly swingy. Hero points (or GM fiat to mimic said) offset that swinginess; if you get multiple attacks per round, the extra attacks bypass hero points (you can only spend one HP to reroll, remember). Once an attack stuns the opponent, all the rest are much more likely to succeed, and force even more Toughness saves.
Having multiple attacks becomes the ticket to combat effectiveness, and combat risks degenerating into an initiative check (whoever goes first will tend to win, thanks to multiple attacks). (See also: Shadowrun, 1e & 2e.
)You could maybe deal with that by accounting for the extra attacks in PL calculations -- i.e., the more attacks you have, the lower damage they have to be. But that would be hard to do right. Combined with the fact that multiple attacks slow down play, and it seems cleaner to do things the way M&M does them now.
BTW, you can use autofire to attack multiple people in M&M -- IIRC, it works like Autofire used to work in Hero (it's been a long time since I looked at Hero Autofire, though), and I would certainly let a speedster combine Move-by Action and an Autofire Strike to strafe a bunch of people. A Targeted Area Strike would be more effective, though.
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Its great to have many options on how to model a superheroic effect...you're almost always guaranteed to be able to find a way to exactly model the effect the peculiar way in which you think it should work for that PC.
