Starting a new M&M campaign...

[Dannyalcatraz]

Quick but multifaceted question...

Is there any way for a speedster PC to get multiple attacks besides the Rapid Strike (or whatever it is called) ability? Its good in that you get a hit against all targets within a certain radius, but apparently, you only make 1 attack roll to determine your success or failure on all targets.

I thought Autofire might be better, but some at the table have interpreted it to mean that it just gives bonuses, not additional attack rolls.

 

[ValhallaGH]

Surge via Extra Effort.

Generally, characters are limited to one attack roll per round. This is a balance thing, and goes back to that "being too generous to super-speed characters" pitfall that I mentioned.
Autofire on an attack would allow a character to "pile multiple attacks on one target", i.e. one attack with extra damage from a good autofire roll.

Characters can get multiple attacks in a round (Move action Strike or Blast; or even Free Action versions) but that can get unbalanced very, very quickly.

Good luck and it sounds like quite the success.

 

[ValhallaGH]

Woops. Sorry for the double post, lousy connection.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Surge via Extra Effort.

<snip>

Characters can get multiple attacks in a round (Move action Strike or Blast; or even Free Action versions) but that can get unbalanced very, very quickly.

Thanks!

Autofire on an attack would allow a character to "pile multiple attacks on one target", i.e. one attack with extra damage from a good autofire roll.

Then what, exactly, does Autofire do? Just add a bonus to the attack?

If so, then a Speedster who takes that rapid attack with Autofire should vastly increase his ability to land blows on multiple targets.

 

[ValhallaGH]

Then what, exactly, does Autofire do? Just add a bonus to the attack?

Autofire, does a couple of things.

• It allows you to strafe the attack along a number of squares that are adjacent to each other, potentially hitting everyone in the area.
• It allows you to provide suppressive fire within your autofire range (for melee attacks, this is a bit odd but it can be very useful).
• It allows you to pour a ton of damage onto a single target. For every interval (usually +2, can be +1) your attack roll exceeds the target's defense, you get to add another point of damage, up to the maximum autofire bonus (usually half base damage or +5 whichever is lower, can be base damage or +10).

Autofire doesn't affect, positively or negatively, a character's ability to hit. It doesn't provide extra chances to hit. When it does allow you to hit multiple targets, you make a single roll and compare the result against every target. All it does is make the damage bonus variable or let you strafe an area. Which is more than powerful enough.

Good luck.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Autofire, does a couple of things.

• It allows you to strafe the attack along a number of squares that are adjacent to each other, potentially hitting everyone in the area.
• It allows you to provide suppressive fire within your autofire range (for melee attacks, this is a bit odd but it can be very useful).
• It allows you to pour a ton of damage onto a single target. For every interval (usually +2, can be +1) your attack roll exceeds the target's defense, you get to add another point of damage, up to the maximum autofire bonus (usually half base damage or +5 whichever is lower, can be base damage or +10).

OK...

When it does allow you to hit multiple targets, you make a single roll and compare the result against every target. All it does is make the damage bonus variable or let you strafe an area. Which is more than powerful enough.

Hmmm...its not really about power, but flavor and a perception of oddity, especially in the case of a Super Speedster. A few of the players- myself included- find it an odd mechanic to have the attacker make that single roll against his foes. It's kind of swingy, for instance- a single bad roll against essentially interchangeable foes (minions, higher-level agents, NPCs created by Duplication, etc.) means he misses all of them. We find it odd since someone who is capable of dodging bullets would notice that he missed and perhaps alter his approach, at least on subsequent targets.

Even with a machine-gunner, you get odd results, though. A RW attacker with an Autofire weapon spraying a single target rarely hits them with EVERY shot in a burst, even if he's an excellent shot. But apparently, a good M&M marksman is really going to nail that single target with his burst of gunfire.

Much to mull over...

 

[coyote6]

You could let him roll separately against each target. I don't think that will break the game; the positives (one bad roll doesn't miss everyone) should balance the negatives (you are extremely unlikely to critically hit everyone). I think the primary reason you roll once is that it's faster; if your area includes 20 targets, rolling twenty times can take a while ("27 on flame guy. 14 on the ice queen. 20 on one minion. 22 on the minion closest to the bomb. Who's left? Oh yeah, 15 on the other minion. Wait, I can take 10 on attack rolls against minions, can't I? Dammit!" Or maybe that's just my groups. )

What does, IMO, break the game is allowing multiple attacks per round that force multiple saves per round on a single target. A single d20 roll can be very swingy, and you can only reroll once per round, making multple attacks per round way powerful.

 

[ValhallaGH]

Even with a machine-gunner, you get odd results, though.

Not really. A well-aimed burst of fire will generally hit with two to five bullets (six to eight round bursts is ideal for most machine guns). A M&M machine gun does +5 damage base (maybe +6 if you're talking about a heavy machine gun), so when it hits full-on (i.e. exceeds defense by six or more, which is a heck of a good shot) it does +8 damage. Given the damage progressions, that +3 sounds like hitting with five to eight bullets from your ten round burst.
A less-amazing roll may still exceed defense by two or three, granting a +1 damage, representing a hit with two rounds from the burst. Not amazing marksmanship, but likely to be fatal-ish.

Still, if you and yours aren't cool with how the mechanic is set up, feel free to try different things. You can have a separate roll for each target; you could have a separate roll for each point of (potential) damage bonus from the autofire, on a single target (i.e. if the autofire bonus caps at +4 then roll to hit five times, with every hit after the first piling on 1 more damage); you could do something else entirely (here I'm thinking of the Innocent Bystander rules for Original Deadlands and how that combined with suppressive fire). The point of the game is to have fun playing super-people, not to be tied down by the rules of the game.

Good luck.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Not really. A well-aimed burst of fire will generally hit with two to five bullets (six to eight round bursts is ideal for most machine guns).

Actually, that is precisely the oddity I'm talking about. A RW marksman's burst is getting 1/4 to 5/6ths hits on a single target, but a M&M PC autofiring gets feast or famine when doing the same. Over enough game rounds, it probably simulates the proper amount of damage, but it breaks the damage up in these binary, all-or-nothing clusters of hits & misses.

IOW, our complaint isn't about the actual damage done, but the oddball way in which that damage is batched. That one roll just doesn't feel right.

Fortunately, a toolbox system like M&M, HERO, or GURPS is all about flexibility, and there are often many ways of skinning the proverbial cat. Someone suggested that, absent a HERO or GURPS style Autofire that actually gives multiple attack rolls, an M&M PC could use Duplicate as an alternate of super speed: the PC is moving so fast that he is in many places at once.

This could very well satisfy a lot of the mechanical and flavor yearnings our players have.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Just an update:

So far so good- the party encountered and beat Dr. Moreau's lab assistant, the orangutan known as Zeus. At this stage, he was just a superintelligent ape who was stealing things to build his first Tesla suit, courtesy the assist of other lab animals Moreau had enhanced, including a spider monkey who could go invisible. He was released to the custody of Dr. Moreau after his defeat.

This will not end well.

After this, I'm trying to figure out whether they're going to be on the Titanic's maiden voyage; taking a trip to Venus or Mars; or investigating mysterious attacks involving a projectiles dropped from a great height.

The latter scenario is based in part on the Moon Roach story arc of the Cerberus comic book. In the campaign, the villain has read and been swayed by Karl Marx' Communist Manifesto. A former worker in a Cavorite factory, she became infused with the anti-grav metal due to an industrial accident, and was fired. While working in a soup kitchen, her love of Marxist theory and the stories of the poor turned her into a communist vigilante. Now, she takes to the skies at night, dropping huge stone hammers and sickles on banks and churches and other institutions she (and Marx) feel shackle the poor. Each hammer or sickle is inscribed "Unorthodox Economic Revenge!"