M&M: How does a villain get a word in edge-wise?

[pallandrome]

A fight with a supervillain is dull. A fight with the supervillain while the building if falling down, mooks are swarming your position, and your lady-love is trapped under rubble? That is PRICELESS. The mooks, trapped girl, and falling building won't neccissarily be large impediments to the PL, but it WILL create the tension just about every GM wants. It will also generally give you the time you need to get off a short speech about the futility of the Hero's actions/life/goodness/love of puppies/whatever.

 

[billd91]

I'm also still not sold on the idea of GM fiat... I don't care if it is in the rules, it still feels like cheating to me.

Fundamentally, as the interface through which everything happens and the definers of game reality, GM's can't really cheat. They can run poor, needlessly adversarial games that frustrate players, but they cannot cheat.

 

[DonTadow]

Another thing to think about is keeping the players busy so that they can't all team up on one villain. I like to have some mooks, or have the villain launch an attack against a nearby school bus or building. That way, someone has to go save the kids, or put out the fire, and the big baddy can fight a hero one to one, or one to two.

Quoted for emphasis.

This is the best way to make sure all your pcs don't gang up on a villian. Fighting Dr. Frost, have a bunch of his henchmen about with flame throwers about to melt the newly ice cubed victims. Send an arrant blast into a building. Take a media helicopter out of the sky.

 

[Dragonblade]

I have never been a big fan of GM fiat myself. I prefer to somewhat relax the PL limits and let players go to town with twinking their PCs. Then I'll throw them a really tough hard core villain who is not only as twinked as them but 1 to 5 PLs higher.

Then I don't use any GM fiat; they have to overcome the villain using intelligence and teamwork. Win or lose, they will feel like they accomplished it all on their own through a combination of luck and tactics.

The problem I ran into is the M&M rules are little too random with the Toughness Saves. I don't want either villains or heroes going down with a single bad roll. So I went back to using a HP system simply because I feel like I have more fine control over exactly how I think the combat should unfold.