HeapThaumaturgist
First Post
Well, I've had the M&M rules for two weeks, have read them, lurked on the M&M boards, have a 2nd Printing with the errata included, have examined the few "problem powers" that have been bandied about on that board, etc etc... I figured I was pretty much ready to try my hand at the system.
Last night I ran a One Shot for my group to "test drive" it. We've been playing a Blood And Vigilance supers game (pulp/noir low on "powers", high on Larger Than Life) and thought we'd give Four-Color a run. As I knew the rules and whatnot I imagined it would be fun, fast, and entertaining.
M&M exploded in my face.
We used mostly the archetypes from the book, with my wife running a Shapeshifter/Mimic flawed to Humans-only (sort of a Mystique power/face theif) named "Cosmopolitan". The archetypes used were the Elemental, the Battlesuit, and the Powerhouse.
I ran The Heist, which is a free mini-adventure on the M&M site featuring two PL 10 baddies, Rant and Rave, who have Sonic and Illusion powers, respectively.
One immediate problem we ran into was that, 9 times out of 10, the Powerhouse (Minotaur) could do anything the others could do ... and do it better. We changed out Minotaur's Super-Strength Extra: Protection for Extra: Amazing-Save DMG. This was to see how both types of defense worked, with Battlesuit having Armor ("Protection") and Elemental having Force Field ("Protection"). (Cyclone and Inferno, respectively)
As we quickly found out, Minotaur was effectively immune to Mooks, as he could only fail his DMG save 5-10% of the time. This was good and fine and fair, he even failed once and took a hit. Cyclone and Inferno were ACTUALLY immune to mook damage. HOWEVER, when it came down to it, we found that armor created a "Bubble" syndrome for Cyc and Inferno ... I used Point Blank Shot with Rant on Inferno (Making the damage bonus +11) and his +2 "real" damage save vs. DC 16 meant he was likely to fail by some amount 70% of the time. First strike he rolled poorly and was Disabled.
Because this was a trial run, we decided to mitigate that Disabled out with a Hero Point to merely Stunned and move on, thinking it was a fluke. Next Rant used a Villian Point to add Penetrating Attack to his Sonic Blast to hit Cyclone (who was a little beyond PBS range). Cyclone failed his DMG save miserably and was Disabled. We all raised our eyebrows and figured it was a fluke as well, mitigated the Disabled to Stunned. It was noted that Minotaur, while rolling DMG saves every time he was successfully struck, COULD NOT become disabled from one strike. Cyclone and Inferno, while being "immune" to alot of damage were both more likely to bungle their DMG saves if any "Extras" came up ... Penetrating Attack, PBS, etc.
We figured this was an interesting aspect of Protection and kept playing. Cyclone and Inferno made a note to keep out of PBS range and watch for those Penetrating actions. Cosmopolitan, during all this, made himself a copy of Minotaur and set about destroying Rant and Rave in hand-to-hand and thrown tables. Rant and Rave burned a VP to collapse the building and we took a breather for a bit of Role Playing as the team flexed their Super Strength lifting capacities and Inferno buzzed around rescuing innocent bystanders. Generally a few minutes to enjoy ourselves in Four Color Supers Land.
I had built a few more villians to extend the adventure, building a couple Bricks and a PL 13 Sorceror. The bricks were high DMG save behemoths like Minotaur, a bit weaker on the attacks.
The team immediately got into it, with Cosmo borrowing Inferno's template for a while. They pinged away at the Brick for a total of 10 rounds before they could bring him down, as the lummox just sucked up hit after hit at +10 DMG. Finally, at 6 successful "Hits" and 18+ successfull attacks one Brick fell. Inferno and Cosmo were rather disgusted that so far Inferno had been, officially, Disabled after one successful hit and, designed for damage, still took 10 rounds of pounding away to bring down the beast with Rapid Shot. If it were a trade-off, he said, doing DAMAGE at range while being vulnerable to getting knocked down, it would have been one thing. Against an equal PL Brick, though, he couldn't do anything. Inferno's player felt distinctly that the only possible way to be effective was to, in essence, play Minotaur. High damage save, High strength-damage, bash and suck up rolls and toss the occassional car.
It's during the 15 rounds of sustained fire that I introduced the Sorceror. I had built a PL 13 NPC to see how badly even 3 PL higher could turn a combat, or if a team of PL 10s could handle him.
He destroyed, utterly, the entire team. Nothing but Minotaur's giant strength could penetrate his 13 point Force Field. With Flight, he could get out of reach easily. Minotaur's weakness was found in Mental Blast which, it turns out, totally crippled everyone else in the party. Each round I could whip off a 7 point Mental Blast and knock out a PC. I switched to Energy Blast and, at +13, burst the Protection "Bubble" on Cyclone and Inferno and rendered them both Disabled again. Minotaur took a few hits, but kept on coming. Inferno and Cyclone had nothing to add to the combat, anyway, as their +10 attacks had no hope of breaking the force field without Penetrating Attack. Even then, the Sorc's moderate Evasion-based Damage Save kept him making those DC 12 saves 70% of the time.
In the end, three of the four players at the table were actually ANGRY at the game. Minotaur's player was happy, and he was the one person most reluctant to play the game in the first place! Inferno and Cyclone felt, really, useless for anything other than taking out mooks, which Minotaur could do BETTER with Shockwave and thrown tables. The only character better than Minotaur, perhaps, was the Mimic, who spent most of the game as ... Little-Minotaur. Because none of the chosen Archetypes was a mentalist, the Sorc was able to decimate the entire party with one power.
Granted, alot of these problems were based on the challenges faced, but one truism seemed to hold constant for everyone: Why would you NOT spend AT LEAST 10 points on Amazing Save: Damage? (As a GM I know the answer is "Flavor") For the PCs it was just horribly obvious that, unless you maxed out that Damage Save, you were little more than a nuisance waiting to be destroyed. Cyclone's player, during the post-game discussion, spent his time pouring through the book to show me how "I Would Have Made The Character!" Which involved taking a Con of 20 and Flaw: Parapalegic to max his damage save and "totally get those 10 points, since I'm useless out of the suit anyway, why not be MORE useless for a free 10 points?" Totally defeating the purpose of the game, but I understood his frustration, really. In addition, why WOULDN'T somebody take 10 points and get Amazing Save: Will (where he was going to put the "free" 10 points). The best way to get around that sick DMG save is to hit them with the Mental Blast on Will, so take the Will save. Con 20 (which everybody would want) keeps the Fort save up and having a bad Ref save means you'll be taking full Damage saves from Area Attacks ... which you can easily soak with the giant Damage Save.
Without houserulling skills at 1:2 (which I'd do), nobody wants to "Waste" power points on skills. Skills become worse than useless, they become a liablilty. You end up basing everything off your Super Ability ... the science geek takes Super Int instead of skills because Skills are useless and Super Int pumps all of the Int skills ... so what if only Int skills are usefull, then, you can take wasted points from skills and put them into Amazing Save: Damage, add Device flaw and call it Life Support Super Gadget. As a power-house, why waste points on Skills when you can use them to take Amulet Of Mind Protection, or some other Amazing Save: Will item to keep from getting SLAUGHTERED by mental attacks?
What it came down to for everybody, I think, was too much All Or None. You either had a good Damage save, or you got Disabled after one successful hit. You had a good Mental save, or you got tatered by the first Mental Blast. At PL 10, which is +10, the D20 mechanic seems to start breaking down. You either HAVE the +10 or the +10 destroys you ... which, honestly, makes Sorcery the most useful power in the game. Stunt Mental Blast and Snare into your attack spells and boom ... a different shot every round, a different foe reduced to uselessness. HP/VP Area Attack into it for the occassional Speedster and you can destroy a party of heroes or villians in four rounds by playing upon the necessary weaknesses in their make-up. There's no "so-so" Will save. No "So-So" Damage save ... you make it or you get creamed. Unless you +5 EVERYTHING, but none of the Archetypes chosen seemed to go with that approach so none of the players got to see it in action.
In the end, I still really like the M&M system, but the All Or None style of the mechanics REALLY turned off my entire group, to the extent that I don't know if I'm ever going to get a chance to use the book again. I guess I really buggered the goat, but this was my first time running the system too and I REALLY didn't expect it to be so clear-cut. I thought characters would have weaknesses and strengths, but those tended to be DEVESTATING strengths and DEVESTATING weaknesses in actual play. There just don't seem to be enough variables to keep play interesting ... if you Middle Ground everything, you become useless to hit Max Save Guy and still get murdered by Max Attack Guy while Sorceror Guy has both ends of the spectrum and blows EVERYBODY away.
((That and if we ever played I'd immediately have to house-rule out M&Ms flaw system. Egad. After B&Vs, that "free" 10 points looks sort of silly.))
--fje
Last night I ran a One Shot for my group to "test drive" it. We've been playing a Blood And Vigilance supers game (pulp/noir low on "powers", high on Larger Than Life) and thought we'd give Four-Color a run. As I knew the rules and whatnot I imagined it would be fun, fast, and entertaining.
M&M exploded in my face.
We used mostly the archetypes from the book, with my wife running a Shapeshifter/Mimic flawed to Humans-only (sort of a Mystique power/face theif) named "Cosmopolitan". The archetypes used were the Elemental, the Battlesuit, and the Powerhouse.
I ran The Heist, which is a free mini-adventure on the M&M site featuring two PL 10 baddies, Rant and Rave, who have Sonic and Illusion powers, respectively.
One immediate problem we ran into was that, 9 times out of 10, the Powerhouse (Minotaur) could do anything the others could do ... and do it better. We changed out Minotaur's Super-Strength Extra: Protection for Extra: Amazing-Save DMG. This was to see how both types of defense worked, with Battlesuit having Armor ("Protection") and Elemental having Force Field ("Protection"). (Cyclone and Inferno, respectively)
As we quickly found out, Minotaur was effectively immune to Mooks, as he could only fail his DMG save 5-10% of the time. This was good and fine and fair, he even failed once and took a hit. Cyclone and Inferno were ACTUALLY immune to mook damage. HOWEVER, when it came down to it, we found that armor created a "Bubble" syndrome for Cyc and Inferno ... I used Point Blank Shot with Rant on Inferno (Making the damage bonus +11) and his +2 "real" damage save vs. DC 16 meant he was likely to fail by some amount 70% of the time. First strike he rolled poorly and was Disabled.
Because this was a trial run, we decided to mitigate that Disabled out with a Hero Point to merely Stunned and move on, thinking it was a fluke. Next Rant used a Villian Point to add Penetrating Attack to his Sonic Blast to hit Cyclone (who was a little beyond PBS range). Cyclone failed his DMG save miserably and was Disabled. We all raised our eyebrows and figured it was a fluke as well, mitigated the Disabled to Stunned. It was noted that Minotaur, while rolling DMG saves every time he was successfully struck, COULD NOT become disabled from one strike. Cyclone and Inferno, while being "immune" to alot of damage were both more likely to bungle their DMG saves if any "Extras" came up ... Penetrating Attack, PBS, etc.
We figured this was an interesting aspect of Protection and kept playing. Cyclone and Inferno made a note to keep out of PBS range and watch for those Penetrating actions. Cosmopolitan, during all this, made himself a copy of Minotaur and set about destroying Rant and Rave in hand-to-hand and thrown tables. Rant and Rave burned a VP to collapse the building and we took a breather for a bit of Role Playing as the team flexed their Super Strength lifting capacities and Inferno buzzed around rescuing innocent bystanders. Generally a few minutes to enjoy ourselves in Four Color Supers Land.
I had built a few more villians to extend the adventure, building a couple Bricks and a PL 13 Sorceror. The bricks were high DMG save behemoths like Minotaur, a bit weaker on the attacks.
The team immediately got into it, with Cosmo borrowing Inferno's template for a while. They pinged away at the Brick for a total of 10 rounds before they could bring him down, as the lummox just sucked up hit after hit at +10 DMG. Finally, at 6 successful "Hits" and 18+ successfull attacks one Brick fell. Inferno and Cosmo were rather disgusted that so far Inferno had been, officially, Disabled after one successful hit and, designed for damage, still took 10 rounds of pounding away to bring down the beast with Rapid Shot. If it were a trade-off, he said, doing DAMAGE at range while being vulnerable to getting knocked down, it would have been one thing. Against an equal PL Brick, though, he couldn't do anything. Inferno's player felt distinctly that the only possible way to be effective was to, in essence, play Minotaur. High damage save, High strength-damage, bash and suck up rolls and toss the occassional car.
It's during the 15 rounds of sustained fire that I introduced the Sorceror. I had built a PL 13 NPC to see how badly even 3 PL higher could turn a combat, or if a team of PL 10s could handle him.
He destroyed, utterly, the entire team. Nothing but Minotaur's giant strength could penetrate his 13 point Force Field. With Flight, he could get out of reach easily. Minotaur's weakness was found in Mental Blast which, it turns out, totally crippled everyone else in the party. Each round I could whip off a 7 point Mental Blast and knock out a PC. I switched to Energy Blast and, at +13, burst the Protection "Bubble" on Cyclone and Inferno and rendered them both Disabled again. Minotaur took a few hits, but kept on coming. Inferno and Cyclone had nothing to add to the combat, anyway, as their +10 attacks had no hope of breaking the force field without Penetrating Attack. Even then, the Sorc's moderate Evasion-based Damage Save kept him making those DC 12 saves 70% of the time.
In the end, three of the four players at the table were actually ANGRY at the game. Minotaur's player was happy, and he was the one person most reluctant to play the game in the first place! Inferno and Cyclone felt, really, useless for anything other than taking out mooks, which Minotaur could do BETTER with Shockwave and thrown tables. The only character better than Minotaur, perhaps, was the Mimic, who spent most of the game as ... Little-Minotaur. Because none of the chosen Archetypes was a mentalist, the Sorc was able to decimate the entire party with one power.
Granted, alot of these problems were based on the challenges faced, but one truism seemed to hold constant for everyone: Why would you NOT spend AT LEAST 10 points on Amazing Save: Damage? (As a GM I know the answer is "Flavor") For the PCs it was just horribly obvious that, unless you maxed out that Damage Save, you were little more than a nuisance waiting to be destroyed. Cyclone's player, during the post-game discussion, spent his time pouring through the book to show me how "I Would Have Made The Character!" Which involved taking a Con of 20 and Flaw: Parapalegic to max his damage save and "totally get those 10 points, since I'm useless out of the suit anyway, why not be MORE useless for a free 10 points?" Totally defeating the purpose of the game, but I understood his frustration, really. In addition, why WOULDN'T somebody take 10 points and get Amazing Save: Will (where he was going to put the "free" 10 points). The best way to get around that sick DMG save is to hit them with the Mental Blast on Will, so take the Will save. Con 20 (which everybody would want) keeps the Fort save up and having a bad Ref save means you'll be taking full Damage saves from Area Attacks ... which you can easily soak with the giant Damage Save.
Without houserulling skills at 1:2 (which I'd do), nobody wants to "Waste" power points on skills. Skills become worse than useless, they become a liablilty. You end up basing everything off your Super Ability ... the science geek takes Super Int instead of skills because Skills are useless and Super Int pumps all of the Int skills ... so what if only Int skills are usefull, then, you can take wasted points from skills and put them into Amazing Save: Damage, add Device flaw and call it Life Support Super Gadget. As a power-house, why waste points on Skills when you can use them to take Amulet Of Mind Protection, or some other Amazing Save: Will item to keep from getting SLAUGHTERED by mental attacks?
What it came down to for everybody, I think, was too much All Or None. You either had a good Damage save, or you got Disabled after one successful hit. You had a good Mental save, or you got tatered by the first Mental Blast. At PL 10, which is +10, the D20 mechanic seems to start breaking down. You either HAVE the +10 or the +10 destroys you ... which, honestly, makes Sorcery the most useful power in the game. Stunt Mental Blast and Snare into your attack spells and boom ... a different shot every round, a different foe reduced to uselessness. HP/VP Area Attack into it for the occassional Speedster and you can destroy a party of heroes or villians in four rounds by playing upon the necessary weaknesses in their make-up. There's no "so-so" Will save. No "So-So" Damage save ... you make it or you get creamed. Unless you +5 EVERYTHING, but none of the Archetypes chosen seemed to go with that approach so none of the players got to see it in action.
In the end, I still really like the M&M system, but the All Or None style of the mechanics REALLY turned off my entire group, to the extent that I don't know if I'm ever going to get a chance to use the book again. I guess I really buggered the goat, but this was my first time running the system too and I REALLY didn't expect it to be so clear-cut. I thought characters would have weaknesses and strengths, but those tended to be DEVESTATING strengths and DEVESTATING weaknesses in actual play. There just don't seem to be enough variables to keep play interesting ... if you Middle Ground everything, you become useless to hit Max Save Guy and still get murdered by Max Attack Guy while Sorceror Guy has both ends of the spectrum and blows EVERYBODY away.
((That and if we ever played I'd immediately have to house-rule out M&Ms flaw system. Egad. After B&Vs, that "free" 10 points looks sort of silly.))
--fje
