Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition

[pawsplay]

You just can't mechanically balance non-combat aspects of the game without sucking the life out of the genre.

Nonsense.

 

[jmucchiello]

"Now that we have the disk, where should we hide it?"
"I know! I'll run to Anchorage, Alaska, and put it in a safety deposit box. Then I'll run to Paris, France as a distraction."

It's great, Golden Age stuff. And WAY over-the-top for a PL 10 campaign, in which the other PCs might be a poor man's Batman and a blaster not notably more deadly than a guy with a machinegun.

I thought the poor man's batman level was PL 5. PL 10 should be fresh new heroes who will have Spiderman show up in issue #3. (I don't know the DC equivalent cliche but any new Marvel comic will have a Spiderman crossover around issue 3.)

 

[pawsplay]

I thought the poor man's batman level was PL 5.

I ran a game in which one player was the Costumed Adventurer. Poor man's Batman (even with feats, heh). She had trouble with three thugs with SMGs.

 

[coyote6]

I ran a game in which one player was the Costumed Adventurer. Poor man's Batman (even with feats, heh). She had trouble with three thugs with SMGs.

What kind of thugs were they? Were the GM's dice on fire? Must not have been the standard archetypes from the book -- those PL 2-3 minion thugs are no match for the costumed adventurer.

(Power Attack for 5, take 10 on the attack roll, hits a 17 Defense for +10 damage with the boomerang. Takes a natural 20 to not be KO'd.)

Did you know [...]

Sadly, I did. But then, I think I asked some of those questions at one point or another.

 

[pawsplay]

What kind of thugs were they? Were the GM's dice on fire? Must not have been the standard archetypes from the book -- those PL 2-3 minion thugs are no match for the costumed adventurer.

Regular Thugs (PL 2) with submachine guns instead of pistols. It requires a good roll to hit the Costumed Adventurer, but after being under fire for three rounds, the Costumed Adventurer got winged. Still, you know the job is dangerous when you take it. What stings is that the Costumed Adventurer has no car. Meanwhile, the Speedster is having crepes in Paris.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Regular Thugs (PL 2) with submachine guns instead of pistols. It requires a good roll to hit the Costumed Adventurer, but after being under fire for three rounds, the Costumed Adventurer got winged.

This had to have been a very inexperienced player, or the unluckiest player ever. "Under fire for three rounds"? The Costumed Adventurer can Take 10 on Stealth for a 24, has Sneak Attack ("Surprise Attack" is a typo), hits the PL 2 Thug on anything higher than a 3 (using Power Attack 5), knocks him out if the save is 12 or less (stuns on anything but a natural 20), can spend a Hero Point to Split Attack and possibly take out more than one in a round, and never mind things like Startle and disarming.

What stings is that the Costumed Adventurer has no car. Meanwhile, the Speedster is having crepes in Paris.

Were they radioactive crepes, trying to take over the world? If not, so what? Does the Speedster get tired of his teammates sending him for take-out?

I really don't get the problem.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I can foresee the speed (or flight/teleport) being problems... in fact I watched a game tank for that reason, but it can be worked around (I had a pc in one of my games have super speed 16 or 17 and it went fine).

The problem I have (well is mostly my players) is the everyone is superman feel of it. We had a mystic hero (Immortal sorcerer from the 600 ad area who was all sorts of spell and magic item things), a power suit hero ( suit was mostly alien tech gave in the above super speed), a item hero (given the amulat of chronos that had a bunch of funky powers), and a mecha hero (25ft tall robot armor)

all of them had def scores of 9-11 (speedster had 11, mecha had 9, both others 10) and toughness saves of 9-11 (speedster had 9, mecha had 11, both others had 10)

it took a while (like 3 sessions) but the mecha piolt finaly flipped, he was incased in 5 tons of metal, how was he just as vunrable as the others... I used the JLA arguement on him
[sblock=jla arument]
flash, batman, and superman all get spread by gun fire... bat man jumps and evades, and his cevlar absorbs a few glancing blows, superman stands there and looks funny at the gunman as the bullets bounce off, flassh catches the bullets then hands them back tot he gun man... end result is the same, it is just how you get there that is diffrent.
[/sblock]
but he finaly had to walk out on the game becuse he coudn't feel his character...

 

[pawsplay]

Under fire for three rounds"? The Costumed Adventurer can Take 10 on Stealth for a 24, has Sneak Attack ("Surprise Attack" is a typo), hits the PL 2 Thug on anything higher than a 3 (using Power Attack 5), knocks him out if the save is 12 or less (stuns on anything but a natural 20), can spend a Hero Point to Split Attack and possibly take out more than one in a round, and never mind things like Startle and disarming.

Three thugs, three rounds. That's actually pretty efficient for the given stats, considering that a stun doesn't take a thug out of the fight.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I can see where you're coming from here, Paws. It's a problem in almost all roleplaying games, that the magic guys are just better than the non-magic guys. I've noticed it in such diverse games as Amber and D&D. It's the case in Champions as well as M&M, where spending your points on lots of skills, talents or feats, bases, vehicles and a variety of stats is nothing like as effective as buying a multipower or alternate power array that includes all the damn useful powers such as teleport, mind reading, intangibility, healing, etc. Batman ends up built on the same point total as Dr Strange but he's much less powerful in game terms.

Genre appropriate? No. In comics although teams feature heroes with a wide array of power, each character gets roughly equal 'screen time'. This works in fiction because the writer has so much power, but game systems have really struggled with this, because the rules are too 'real world' simulationist rather than comics simulationist.

From an article on the upcoming superhero game ICONS:

Your starting (or base level) Determination is based on how many powers you have. More powers equals less starting Determination. Know why Caped Crusaders and Star-Spangled Patriots are viable heroes? They’ve got more Determination than everyone else…

 

[kaomera]

There's a very delicate balance between letting the characters that ought to be able to do cool stuff do it, and keeping everything balanced. IME this is far more significant in supers games, and they require a lot of, um, "correct play" for lack of anything approaching good terminology...

The speedster can run to Paris and back (quite possibly over water and through walls) because that's what is expected (or was expected by the designers at least, in an attempt to predict what players would expect) of the character archetype. The "problem" with M&M (and other systems do this too) is that while such imbalances are allowed or even encouraged outside of combat, in combat play-balance takes over. Personally I like the way M&M handles speedsters much better than some other games I've played. They actually feel like speedsters...

And that's the other end of the "problem": everyone has pretty equal capabilities once the fists start flying, mechanically speaking. They may do their stuff a bit differently, but the goal is that they all do equally well. If the players embrace the differences that are there, it can make for a really great game. But if they don't (can't or won't, doesn't really matter) then the whole thing is just going to come crashing down. That's one of the pitfalls of M&M and supers games in general: some players get their shtick done for them by the rules, and others have to rely on flavor and description...

I ran a game in which one player was the Costumed Adventurer. Poor man's Batman (even with feats, heh). She had trouble with three thugs with SMGs.

In my experience this just shouldn't be so. I did read up a bunch on the M&M forums and pointed out a lot of little "tricks" to the players, but I didn't feel like it was anything more than what we where doing with D&D at the time. But the PCs really weren't challenged in combat by anything that was more than 2 PL below them.