Starting a new M&M campaign...

[Dannyalcatraz]

OMF(uzzy)G!

Go make your peace with whatever deity you hold dear! The apocalypse is nigh!

The 2 guys I thought would be sitting out- the one who only plays D&D and the one who never plays Sci-Fi- are making PCs for my upcoming game!

I'm going to have a HUGE group (7+) to run!

Quick question- what is a good PL for a solo villain vs 7 PL7 PCs?

2 more NPCs (roughed out)

Hal "He" Egglesworth- the rotund librarian (at Cavorite Academy) who is essentially a human Helium baloon.

Skills: Languages, Knowledge, Stealth
Feats: Instant Up, Eidetic Memory
Powers: Flight 4 (Permanent), Protection (Blunt only)


Miss Dawn Aster aka Morningstar- a young lady whose body became infused with cavorite due to an industrial accident.

Powers: Density Increase (Permanent), Gravity Control (Decrease Only) Enhanced Strength, Super Strength, Protection/Toughness? (Impervious)

 

[The_Warlock]

I would say you have struck a chord with them by providing enough fantasy in your semi-sci-fi.

I highly recommend fitting tiny parodies of Star Wars characters in as supporting cast - but not too obviously. I once had an old geezer who had a dinghy (slightly magically enhanced) in an underground river port who helped some of the PCs escape an attempted capture by the local mind flayer enclave.

Afterwards, one of them realized that I had almost verbatim used Han Solo's lines from the Cantina/Spaceport/Escape from Tatooine sequence of the original Star Wars, but in a reedy, Pete Puma voice.

I don't have a functional enough knowledge of M&M PLs to say about your needed power creep for a large group. But my gut reaction from multiple D20 systems is, if you have a double-wide group you need twice to three times as many primary villains of the appropriate level, or hordes of destructable minions, otherwise PC Focused Fire will simply win.

 

[coyote6]

Quick question- what is a good PL for a solo villain vs 7 PL7 PCs?

Ouch, that'll be harsh. On the Atomic Think Tank, Elric has posted some ideas for rough sort-of "encounter level" mechanism that might give you some idea. Unfortunately, I can't get to ATT at the moment, and don't remember the thread(s). I will try to look later this weekend, or maybe Elric will pop by.

Some things to keep in mind, in the meantime: If you set the villain's PL high enough that it can survive a couple of rounds against PCs working together, you run the risk of the bad guy being too frustratingly powerful on offense ("uh, he hits you -- roll a 20 or be Staggered"). OTOH, having to possibly make up to seven saves a round means there's a very good chance of a bad die roll, so you do want his defensive capabilities to be at least a bit buffed.

I like to have the big bad solo villains Toughness-shifted -- that way PCs can hit (and avoid the "whiff factor" frustration), and maybe wear down his Toughness, while he can better take a couple of combined attacks.

Of course, if the players pick up on the possibilities from combining attacks & aid another, they may be capable of surprising levels of beatdown, especially with seven of 'em (that's +12 damage if they were all able to hit on a combined attack!). So you don't want to shift too much, and you do want his defensive PL fairly high. Say, if he's PL11, maybe Def +9, Tough +13.

You may also want the villain's offensive capabilities to not be maxed out, PL-wise, in order to avoid one-shotting people too easily. At the same time, the fact that he only gets one action per round vs. the PCs' 7 will make it hard on him. D&D4e's solo monsters, IIRC, tend to have special ways to attack more times than normal monsters, for much the same reasons.

You might want to consider ways to do similar things -- e.g,. selective targeted area attacks, colored as appropriate (maybe using two weapons [or more, with a Dr. Octopus-style villain], punching-and-kicking a la Spider-Man, autofire weapons, whatever), so he can whack a few people. Or even do the evil, not-recommended-by-the-rules thing, and give him some kind of attack that uses a move or free action; that way he can pummel a couple-three folks every round. You probably don't want to have him hit everybody every round; you run the risk him stunning the whole group every round, which wouldn't be terribly fun.

So, I might go PL11-12 defensively, leaning towards Toughness, and PL9 or so offensively, with some mix of selective targeted area attacks (if they make sense), regular attacks, and maybe a couple of smaller (say, rank 7) attacks as free or move actions.

Another option -- go full-PL on offense, but make sure he has Split Attack on every attack, and has Power Attack, and use the combination on every attack. So, Attack +11, Damage +11, power attack for 4, and split the damage amongst two or three targets. That's a little less evil than move or free action attacks.

 

[ValhallaGH]

I'm going to have a HUGE group (7+) to run!

Whew! I ran a 9 man table once (a Deadlands game). You have my deepest sympathies.

Quick question- what is a good PL for a solo villain vs 7 PL7 PCs?

Immediate reaction: Don't use solo villains against teams that large. That's like one guy taking on all the Avengers or the X-Men.

Second reaction: PL Cheatery.
No, I'm serious. Stop laughing.

Ahem... my first advise is to have the villain scheme to separate the team, taking them on in smaller bunches. When he does have to take them on all at the same time, use tactics that split them up (the classic is to endanger bystanders, but there's a lot of options).
Second, I'd advise you to give them a "Solo package" that consists of a number of luck feats (one for each PC present is a good rule of thumb). This will give him some staying power without giving your players a lot of hero points from excessive GM fiat. If I need to say it, this is for when he fights the whole team, not when he's going to the corner store or mugging old ladies.
Third, coyote6's suggestion of hitting a higher PL defensively than he does offensively is a good one. This makes him tough without making him deadly, allowing you and your players to get a long, satisfying battle without the pressure of PC death at every attack. (The only drawback is if your players start looking for "I win" buttons, ramping up offenses that are adequate to the level of stupid-good. This can usually be fixed by discussion with the players.)
For most PL 7 groups, a defense of +8 or +9 is enough to be difficult to hit (+5 to +7 if he likes to take it on the chin) and backing it up with a lot of toughness should work fine. Another trick is to have a lot of Impervious, forcing teamwork since few single characters can actually harm him. A nasty trick (and one you shouldn't tell your players about, lest they be tempted to use it) is Immunity (all damage) Limited to half effect. Regeneration can be an equally obnoxious "you can't stop me!" route, though don't let him recover from the 'defeated' condition of Unconscious.
Fourth, defensively a PL 11 to 12 will let him survive everything except "one team punch". That 13 to 16 toughness makes him nigh invulnerable, but even so not much can survive 19 damage, and if someone crits while everyone else connects, you're looking at 24 damage. That's a threat to PL 18 world destroyers.
Fifth, if the players are getting frustrated due to the villain's toughness and your good dice rolling, don't be afraid to give them a break, including damage that the monster didn't take. If they critted, and are working for it, and you're simply rolling 19s and 20s, give the villain a bruise anyway. It will make them feel better ("See, we can hurt him"), and it will make it easier for them to actually hurt him. And that makes the whole thing a lot more fun.

There's probably other advice I could give, but I'm run dry at the moment. Good luck.

 

[Herobizkit]

Two solutions:

a) A Gestalt villain. The villain is actually a composite of 4-5 other villains that "buddy" with one another. When X villain is in close proximity to Y villain, their individual powers increase slightly and perhaps they even learn a shared power between them. Now do this for a team of 5 villains.

b) a Composite villain. The villain has the power (stolen from GURPS) to pull a number of self-copies from the near future. The weakness is that any 'earlier' duplicates that are killed automatically make the 'later' duplicates disappear.

Example? Joe Awesome uses his power and 3 copies arrive from the near future, milliseconds apart in the space-time continuum. If the last copy in the sequence is killed, no harm done and it vanishes. If the first copy is killed, however, all the other copies vanish along with the first one.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Well, there is Legion, who is a highly trained mercenary who happens to have one super power- Duplication.

 

[ValhallaGH]

Well, there is Legion, who is a highly trained mercenary who happens to have one super power- Duplication.

I ran a guy like that as a PC once (he was a doctor, not a mercenary, but he was an amazing fighter). The Squad (there were 11 of him) single-handedly (so to speak) took down an iron-skinned Russian that could pitch oil drilling rigs at you and a cosmic radiation-based Russian superman, when the two of them ambushed him.

A duplicator with Teamwork 2 and enough copies to actually focus on the enemy can out-grapple just about anyone (three assistants averaging 24 provides a +15 to the grapple). Or out-whatever in any category a "normal" man can compete in. For example, four duplicates using Combined Attack gets Base Damage +6, enough to harm most targets.
As long as they can reach their foe, they can be terrifyingly effective. And fun.

 

[Elric]

Ouch, that'll be harsh. On the Atomic Think Tank, Elric has posted some ideas for rough sort-of "encounter level" mechanism that might give you some idea. Unfortunately, I can't get to ATT at the moment, and don't remember the thread(s). I will try to look later this weekend, or maybe Elric will pop by.

7 PCs will make a solo villain very difficult to run. For the villain to last any significant length of time, he probably needs to be PL 12 on defense. Edit: let me note that you don't want to give such a villain full Impervious on his Toughness save, which could make him almost impossible for a typical level 7 PC to hurt with Toughness-save attacks. coyote6 has the right idea on offense; the villain can take advantage of the fact that he's by himself by using Area Attack powers that will hit a number of PCs at once, and you'd want these to be at lower than the villain's PL 12 on defense.

Even straight up single-target PL 12 attacks aren't that threatening to 7 PCs if the PCs have hero points. For example, my handy Matlab combat calculator shows that if the villain has +8 attack/16 damage, it takes him 4.66 attacks on average to knock unconscious a PC who has 1 HP used to reroll Toughness saves of Staggered or worse (3.01 rounds to KO a PC with no HP).

By comparison, it takes an average of 63 attacks for +7 attack/7 damage PCs to KO a +12 defense/+12 Toughness defender who uses GM Fiat to get the benefits of a hero point reroll 4 times to reroll Toughness saves of Staggered or worse, not counting the benefits of attacking a stunned (it goes down to about 50 attacks if the attackers can take advantage of each others' stuns and would go down further if they have Power Attack to use on the villain when he's stunned). So the PCs drop the villain in about 7 rounds and even if the villain focuses on a single PC (which isn't necessarily in keeping with the genre), chances are he can't KO more than one of them in that time (especially when you consider that a stunned condition causes him to lose a round of actions). They'll overwhelm him with numbers before he can even the odds with KOs.

See this thread, which was an attempt to work out a system along these lines. However, such "encounter rating" systems are particularly suspect in M&M because PL isn't a great predictor of raw combat ability. Paragon's thread on the limits of PL is a great exploration of the issues that can arise.

Here are the essential parts. Note that a key supposition here is that an NPC of a given PL is essentially just as strong as a PC of that PL (another basic assumption is that +2 Power Levels is about a doubling of power). Also, the power of minions can vary greatly with how spread out they are combined with the area attack/Takedown Attack capability of the party.

Over the past few day, I've been tinkering with a set of guidelines for designing encounters for GMs to use. M&M's flexibility is a huge advantage in many ways, but it can make tweaking encounters more difficult, as it becomes more of a "feel" than a science.

To that end, I've put together these guidelines for approximating how many enemies you need to challenge a group of PCs at vary levels of difficulty, and how powerful you need to make those NPCs. I'd love some feedback.

Step 1: How Dangerous?
Encounters are rated by how dangerous they are, or how difficult it will be for the players to overcome them:

TABLE 1: ENCOUNTER DANGER RANK
Danger Rank: Description
0: No Danger; there is almost no possible way that the PCs could suffer injury, much less defeat

: Minimal Danger; the PCs have almost no chance of being defeated

: Modest Danger; the PCs stand to suffer some injuries if they're not careful

: Significant Danger; the PCs are likely to win the fight, but it will require smart play to come out on top

: Serious Danger; the PCs are going up against a real threat and could just as easily win as they could lose, and will need to play smart to win

: Severe Danger; The PCs are going to be outmatched and without very clever gameplay and teamwork, they're more likely than not going to lose

: Overwhelming Danger; the PCs are very likely to lose the encounter, and only tremendous luck or playing at the top of their game can see them through

Step 2: Challenge Rank
Next, you need to figure out just how many NPCs to challenge your party with (and just how powerful to make them). Depending on how challenging you wish to make the encounter (see Step 1), you can have more or fewer NPCs of higher or lower power level. To determine this, you need to determine the total Challenge Rank for the encounter:

Encounter Challenge Rank = Danger Rank x Number of Party Members

So if a group of four PCs is going to face an encounter of Serious Danger (

), then the encounter will have a total Challenge Rank of 16.

Step 3: How Many NPCs? How Strong?
The total Challenge Rank of an encounter can be distributed in any way you like among the enemies the PCs will face. You can divide the Challenge Ranks to many NPCs, or only a few. Depending on how many ranks you assign each enemy, it will change what Power Level that NPC is.

TABLE 2: NPC POWER LEVEL
NPC's Challenge Rank: NPC's Power Level
Challenge Rank 1: Party's PL -4 or lower
Challenge Rank 2: Party's PL -2 or -3
Challenge Rank 3: Party's PL -1
Challenge Rank 4: Party's PL
Challenge Rank 5-6: Party's PL + 1
Challenge Rank 7-9: Party's PL + 2
Challenge Rank 10-13: Party's PL + 3
Challenge Rank 14-20: Party's PL + 4
Challenge Rank 21+: Party's PL + 5

So long as the total Challenge Ranks of all of the enemies put together are equal to the Danger Rank x the number of PCs in the party, you'll still have an appropriate encounter for that Danger Rank. A Challenge Rank 16 encounter for a party of four PL 10 PCs could consist of four PL 10 enemies, or two PL 12 enemies, or one PL 14 enemy, or two PL 10 enemies and one PL 12 enemy, or eight PL 7 enemies, or just about any other combination you can imagine.

Simplifying
A helpful aid for this stage, especially if you're trying it for the first time, is to put a stack of poker chips or pennies in front of you for each enemy's Challenge rank. As you add or subtract enemies, or increase or decrease their power level, you can track it easily with the tokens.

Another thing to keep in mind is how capable the PCs are of taking down large numbers of minions in a single round. If the characters have access to a large number of area attack powers or feats like Takedown Attack, you may want to add additional minions depending on how potent those area attacks are.

Minions follow slightly different rules, because of their frailties, and are usually fielded in greater numbers. Minions are measured in minions per challenge rank rather than in challenge rank per minion.

Party PL-8= 16 minions for 1 challenge rank
Party PL-7= 12 minions for 1 challenge rank
Party PL-6= 8 minions for 1 challenge rank
Party PL-5= 6 minions for 1 Challenge Rank
Party PL-4= 4 minions for 1 challenge rank
Party PL-3= 3 minions for 1 challenge rank
Party PL-2= 2 minions for 1 challenge rank
Party PL-1 to Party PL= 1 minion for 1 challenge rank

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I finally got my Atomic Think Tank account re-enabled. I've started a thread over there to broaden the brainstorming pool. Its mainly about the first adventure.

The Atomic Think Tank :: View topic - The 1912 Campaign

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Man...the first 3 adventure story arc went awesomely!

Count Cradula, monarch of Ursylvania, came to the Academy, supposedly to make notes for making a similar academy in his own Eastern European nation, and got the full 5 ribbon tour of the school.

When he took his leave, his Zeppelin was struck by rocket fire. He survived the crash only to be attacked by agents of Moritatus Aeturnus, a secret society who feel that immortals- good or evil- cause human society to stagnate, and thus must be eradicated. The students (the party) took these mooks down in quick order, rescuing the Count.

While he waited for his second Zeppelin to arrive, the students uncovered that the attack was a setup for the Count's "Master Plan"- the theft of The Self-Breaking Machine by agents inserted into the Academy's grounds under the guise of workers repairing the rocket damage to the school's infrastructure.

In the final encounter, the Count's Zeppelin launched huge smoke bombs onto the campus, while the Count himself cast an illusion that everyone in a huge radius would look like the same repair worker. Hilarity ensued because the one person right next to the Count- a guy capable of doing Boosts, Drains and Nullifications (yes, he's a M:tG Blue Deck personified)- was unaffected, so all he noticed was that the Count was chanting...and did nothing. Subsequent spells summoned his Demon Warriors, though.

Just about the time the Fit was going to hit the Shan, "Blue Deck" managed to hit the Count with a full-on Nullify...and the Count rolled a "1." Everything went "poof"...including the Demons and the Force Field that had been keeping the Powerhouse from tagging the Count. And the TK specialist rolled a similar "1" when trying to catch the Count as he was launched off of his rooftop perch.

There were smiles all around.

Now I need to come up with an encore!