[Mutants & Masterminds] Weapons And Armor vs. Supers

[mmu1]

I'm thinking of running my first M&M game, and the way mundane weapons and armor are handled is sort of bugging me.

The first issue is that the decision to not allow bonuses to defense or damage save from armor and powers to stack is completely artificial and arbitrary - I can see its importance from a game balance standpoint, but it still doesn't sit well with me.

The second is that mundane armor and weapons are actually quite strong when compared to superpowers - a rifle with a power rating of +7 or a kevlar vest with a rating of +5 are nothing to sneeze at. It's clearly not as if a Rank 10 super with a damage save of +12 is so tough that he doesn't need to worry about a bullet. This ties in with the first problem, because if the weapons and armor weren't as effective, supers would have no motivation to use them, and there'd be no need for clunky and arbitrary no-stacking rules. If they were weaker, a super might still choose to wear armor - why not, after all, at least it won't tear as easily as spandex - but it would be a minor issue at best.

I was thinking of several ways of dealing with this:

1. Simply make the power of mundane armor and weapons lower across the board - after all, I only really care how they affect the superhero PCs, not what impact they have on the NPC minions who are meant to die after a single blow anyway.

2. Declare that - for example - an attack made against a superhero PC with a mundane weapon with a power lower than the power level of the character does stun rather than lethal damage. Supers can still be hurt and disabled by a hail of gunfire - potentially - but they won't be killed and will recuperate quickly. Seems like it would work well, unless I wanted to go for a gritty feel.

3. Increase the power level of the game enough that those mundane weapons - which top out at about +7 power - won't really be a threat to the characters. The problem here is that this tends to change the feel of the campaign greatly, since in addition to making the heroes more durable, it suddenly lets them lift aircraft carriers, fly at the speed of light, and do various other things that don't necessarily fit the feel of every supers campaign.

Frankly, though, I'm not sure whether any of them would work well, and I'm not completely happy with any of them as a long-term solution.

So I was wondering - has anyone here had similar problems, and if so, how did you deal with them? Those of you that started your games at a level higher than 10 - what do you feel were the key ways the feel of the game changed, if any, and in what ways did it stay the same? Are there any common house rules around (like the 3 skill points / 1 power point rule I've seen often) out there that address these issues?

 

[billd91]

Why not sit back a while and see how things play out before tinkering? I don't necessarily see the problem here. Guns in the rulebook might range up to +7, but certainly not all of them are at that level. Just have the mooks pick some lower powered rifles or smaller caliber pistols rather than that tricked out FN-FAL or whatever that +7 is supposed to represent. You control the power level of the NPC gear, after all.
And if someone wants to kit one up higher than that, that should be the prerogative of being a higher powered character.

If you wanted to consider making guns less lethal, don't do it by changing the damage rule. Instead, come up with a new type of device, based on the protection power but being a little weaker (think of it as flaw). It could merely convert the damage ranks from lethal to stun rather than reduce them. And there you go, the combat is potentially less lethal and characters can be made to pay for the protection (likely as protective costumes/body suits that spread the attack's energy over a larger area, leaving substantial bruising, but not lethal).

I have to say that in my experience (running a PL 8-9 game), this hasn't been much of a problem. My players did learn to fear attacking ninja when running low on hero points though. Fortunately, the ninja group didn't want the PCs dead since at least one of them had been sufficiently respectful to their traditional sensibilities.

 

[takyris]

I haven't run into any trouble with weapons and armor the way that they are. Most of the time, the armor only means that the villainous mook only has a nearly impossible save instead of a totally impossible save, and the weaponry actually does a good job of letting players feel their spent points. A +7 ray gun or powered rifle separates the super-Con folks from the Protection folks pretty quickly, and it makes the folks with max'd out Protection feel like they got something, as they sit calmly and ignore the blasts while their friends duck for cover or do that cool "leaving footprint-cracks in the concrete from the force of the incoming blasts" thing.

I'd give it a shot as-is and see how it plays. Then, if you want, modify it by lowering weapons and armor across the board. That seems to be the easiest way to do it -- or just make your PCs at a higher PL. If you want almost any PC to be able to ignore almost any non-super-powered incoming attack, you probably want them at a slightly higher PL.

 

[mmu1]

Hmm... Let me give you an example of what I have a problem with. (assuming I understand how things work, if I'm wrong, I'd appreciate a correction)

A very strong (but not super-strong - let's say Str 16, there plenty of thugs around like that thanks to prison weight rooms) minion picks up a battle-axe and the power of his attack is +9, despite the fact that he's a PL 1 character. A superhero with 16 Str and 10 levels of super-strength picks up the axe, and... he's still got an attack power of +13, just as if he didn't even pick up a weapon.

Now, I'm not arguing that this guy will be serious threat to a PL 10 super (unless the character gets careless and lets him get in a really lucky shot), but the way power seems to drain out of weapons as soon as a superpowered character picks them up drives me up the wall - mainly because I'll have players giving me funny looks when they happen to pick up a huge weapon, or get in a position to hit an enemy with a car, and I tell them that their damage is capped by their power level - but hey, it's really cool to hit someone with a car...

 

[takyris]

Ah. Well, the problem here I'd have is that you've built an unbalanced PL1 mook. While mooks can have equipment beyond their point totals, you've given him high Strength, which most mooks don't have -- if you check in the book, mooks usually have, what, 13 or so for their high stats? And is the battle-axe a +6 Weapon? I don't have the book with me at the moment, so I don't know.

Technically, if I wanted to, I could give a mook a Weapon +20 and Armor +20, because they aren't restricted by point values with their weapons -- but that wouldn't be balanced either.

And technically, if I wanted to, I could build a mook with no skills and put 10 points into Strength, 10 points into Constitution, Power Attack and All-Out Attack, and then give him Disturbing as a 10-point weakness -- and I'd still be 1 point under my PL1 15. But that's not in the spirit of the game.

That said, if the problem you have is that Superman isn't any better off in a fight by picking up a crowbar, there are a couple notes.

1) Remember that M&M is all about flavor-text. A guy with Super-Strength +10 is probably swinging streetlights at people with every other attack, and only then after he's run out of cars to pick up by their axles and clap together like a pair of cymbals on the bad guy. That should just be assumed as part of the attack. If the players aren't happy because the Hulk doesn't benefit from brass knuckles, they might be missing the point of the game.

2) The rule is in there for balance purposes. It's there so that a guy with Super-Strength 5 and a Weapon +5 stands toe-to-toe with a guy with Super-Strength 10. The weapon guy can't lift heavy stuff, and is in trouble if his weapon is knocked away (both of which should become important now and then, since Super-Str 10 guy paid more points for his stuff), but in an ordinary fight, they are meant to be equal, primarily because in the comic books, they ARE equal that way.

3) Super-strength and weapons already gets a huge advantage -- the ability to throw improvised things and do Super-Strength damage with them. That stuff is nasty.

4) The bonuses don't scale linearly in flavor in M&M. An increase of +1 to +2 isn't much -- it's going from a dagger to a shortsword -- but when you go from +13 to +14, that's more like the difference between (for example) a battleship's main gun and a high-powered (but probably not nuclear yet) missile -- you don't want to get hit by either, but if you look at two craters, you can easily tell which was caused by the main gun and which was caused by the missile. So yes, if you strapped a dagger onto the point of a nuclear warhead, it would do more damage than a nuclear warhead all by itself, but it wouldn't be enough of an increase to merit a full +1.

5) Weapons can serve other beneficial purposes rather than just doing more damage. They can disarm or strike an opponent protected by an energy shield, for example.

Above all, though, the most important idea is the first one. It's flavor, and that's both why you should already have large improvised weapons in there as part of the flavor of the attacks, and why players shouldn't be asking why their max'd-out-strength guy doesn't get even more damage by using a dagger as well. Superman doesn't use a crowbar in the comics. The Thing doesn't go after people with broken bottles. The Hulk doesn't put on brass knuckles. If the character concept that the players had included using weapons, then they shouldn't max out their strength.

(And I'm a firm believer in not maxing out unless absolutely appropriate. I'd much rather my players play PL10 people who have Super-Con 5 and Protection 5 instead of simple Protection 10, unless "Truly indestructible guy" is what they are after. I'd rather they go for Super-Strength 5 or 6 and a weapon, unless they want to be a powerhouse who doesn't use a longsword because he's picking up SUVs to use instead. I'd rather they take Energy Blast 6 and other stuff instead of Energy Blast 10 unless they want their role in the team to be "Guy with most powerful energy blast.")

 

[WayneLigon]

A very strong (but not super-strong - let's say Str 16, there plenty of thugs around like that thanks to prison weight rooms) minion picks up a battle-axe and the power of his attack is +9, despite the fact that he's a PL 1 character. A superhero with 16 Str and 10 levels of super-strength picks up the axe, and... he's still got an attack power of +13, just as if he didn't even pick up a weapon.

A weapon you pay points for is limited according to the stacking rules; a weapon you pick up and use or appropriate from an enemy is not. However, weapon hardness does limit the amount of superstrength you can use with the weapon - usually +5 for a wood weapon like a staff and +10 for a metal weapon like a sword. If the hero above picks up a battle axe and uses it, he's at +19 damage. If he wants to keep using it and pays points for it for some reason (assuming he's PL10), then it would indeed be effectively useless for him from a damage standpoint though he could use it as a justification for buying the Lethal damage extra to his superstrength.

Generally, heroes who are not built as weapons users don't use them; they have no need for it because their own powers are better than any weapon.

It's clearly not as if a Rank 10 super with a damage save of +12 is so tough that he doesn't need to worry about a bullet.

Depends on the nature of his protection. If he has 10 ranks in Protection, then no hand-held human weapon can harm him at all; anything below a +10 damage rank (and most guns are +5 to +7) can't harm him at all unless the shooter has Surprise Strike along with a couple other feats or something like that. If he has Force Feild +10, then he still has to roll, since FF adds to the damage save.

 

[mmu1]

Ah. Well, the problem here I'd have is that you've built an unbalanced PL1 mook. While mooks can have equipment beyond their point totals, you've given him high Strength, which most mooks don't have -- if you check in the book, mooks usually have, what, 13 or so for their high stats? And is the battle-axe a +6 Weapon? I don't have the book with me at the moment, so I don't know.

Why is he unbalanced? He just has 3 more points in one of his stats than an ordinary mook, and a perfectly legitimate weapon right out of the equipment list. He could have Str 14 and my point would still stand...

And I strongly disagree with the idea that the difference between a +13 and +14 is any different than between +1 and +2 when it comes to combat - it's enough to look at the numbers to see that's not the case, the scaling of damage power is completely linear. (unlike that of lifting strength or superspeed) Neither is +13 really anywhere near a battleship's gun in power - a super not much tougher than a normal human, with Con 14, the Toughness feat and no powers that mitigate damage has a 35% chance of merely being disabled rather than killed after such a hit. That's not exactly what you'd expect from a hit equivalent to the explosion of hundreds of pounds of TNT at point blank range...

Don't get me wrong - I can hand-wave the discepancies, and everyone can probably have a good enough time playing the game, but I'd still like to find a fix rather than pretend they're not there...

 

[mmu1]

A weapon you pay points for is limited according to the stacking rules; a weapon you pick up and use or appropriate from an enemy is not. However, weapon hardness does limit the amount of superstrength you can use with the weapon - usually +5 for a wood weapon like a staff and +10 for a metal weapon like a sword. If the hero above picks up a battle axe and uses it, he's at +19 damage. If he wants to keep using it and pays points for it for some reason (assuming he's PL10), then it would indeed be effectively useless for him from a damage standpoint though he could use it as a justification for buying the Lethal damage extra to his superstrength.

I was under the impression stacking rules apply to all weapons - you simply don't need to pay for anything you happen to pick up.

 

[takyris]

Why is he unbalanced? He just has 3 more points in one of his stats than an ordinary mook, and a perfectly legitimate weapon right out of the equipment list. He could have Str 14 and my point would still stand...

In this game, 3 more points in one of his stats means that he's doing +2 more damage, which is a lot different from doing +2 more damage in a hit-points game. It's a legal build, but it's a legal build that makes your mook a lot more damaging. In D&D terms, he stopped being a goblin with a shortsword and became an orc with a greataxe with those 3 points.

And I strongly disagree with the idea that the difference between a +13 and +14 is any different than between +1 and +2 when it comes to combat - it's enough to look at the numbers to see that's not the case, the scaling of damage power is completely linear.

But the scaling of what the numbers mean is completely different. Just like Super-Strength +2 is only 1 higher than Super-Strength +1, but actually means that your lifting power doubles. It is the same. I'm not arguing that the difference between 13 and 14 is larger. I was an English major, but I did learn basic math at some point. I'm arguing that the difference between a longsword and a greatsword (+3 and +5) is not as big, flavorwise, as the difference between a tank gun (+10) and a battleship (+12), which in turn is not as large as the difference between a space cruiser (+14) and a space battleship (+16).

To make this clear: If your cosmic warrior, who could punch with the strength of a space cruiser's neutron cannon, picked up a dagger (+2), should he then be able to strike with the strength of an imperial dreadnaught's antimatter beam because of the piece of metal in his hands? Sure, for the guy with no powers, that piece of metal is a really big help, but for Captain Cosmic, even if the dagger isn't vaporized by the force of his punch, it really doesn't bring much to the party.

Neither is +13 really anywhere near a battleship's gun in power - a super not much tougher than a normal human, with Con 14, the Toughness feat and no powers that mitigate damage has a 35% chance of merely being disabled rather than killed after such a hit. That's not exactly what you'd expect from a hit equivalent to the explosion of hundreds of pounds of TNT at point blank range...

Page 117, under "Water Vehicles", Battleship is the last entry. It has, under "Features", the entry: Gun +12

And if a hero with Con 14 and Toughness (a net Damage save of +4) handles the DC 27 Damage Save and is only Disabled, then it means that he dove out of the way or under something (or that it blew up nearby and he was cushioned by something and got knocked clear of the blast by freak chance). If you say "No, he gets hit in the chest, and then he's just badly injured and not even unconscious," that's not the game mechanics screwing up. That's you using the wrong flavor text, no different from telling a fighter with 237 hit points that the axe hit for 7 points of damage was a direct full-on hit to his unarmored chest that nearly cut his arm off.

 

[mmu1]

But the scaling of what the numbers mean is completely different. Just like Super-Strength +2 is only 1 higher than Super-Strength +1, but actually means that your lifting power doubles. It is the same. I'm not arguing that the difference between 13 and 14 is larger. I was an English major, but I did learn basic math at some point. I'm arguing that the difference between a longsword and a greatsword (+3 and +5) is not as big, flavorwise, as the difference between a tank gun (+10) and a battleship (+12), which in turn is not as large as the difference between a space cruiser (+14) and a space battleship (+16).

If that's the official take on it, then it sounds to me like they tried to cover up a problem with the system with a lot of hand-waving and inappropriate fluff text. I'm sorry, but I guess I'm too much of a rationalist to buy the idea that a tank gun has a +10 damage bonus, when a very strong normal human can have a damage bonus of +10 when wielding a large axe. Tank rounds these days can punch through armor that is rated as equivalent to two or three feet of high-quality steel...

I don't think you can have a clearer example of the problem I was talking about, and trying to convince me it doesn't exist doesn't really help, because as I said, I understand the game-balance issues involved, but would like to come up with something that makes more sense and doesn't make every strong superhero run out and get a fire axe.