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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elric" data-source="post: 4392604" data-attributes="member: 1139">I find this to be one of the most challenging aspects of GMing M&M.  I think it's hard to get a line between the players feeling like you're "letting them win" and combats generally being suspense-less romps in favor of the heroes and ruthless GM playing including lots of use of Fiat that drags fights on and makes the players feel like their cool moves are never paying off (players can get caught without hero points, but GMs are less likely to get caught with Fiat unavailable).I've tried to sort of mentally categorize fights into "Villains meant and likely to lose.  Don't go all-out as GM" and "Boss-type fight.  It's a war out there!" but this is GMing table-top gaming, where it's much easier to run fights than online.  I think the medium is pushing us into the 'all boss fight, all the time' kind of setup that we have now.Edit- that said, we've hard some easier fights (the warehouse where we rescued the scientist, for example).  I think Shayuri that you felt particularly affronted by GM Fiat because you rarely had Viridian spending her HP.  It was almost exclusively on rerolling saves, but you could have easily surged in this last round of combat just now (had I been paying more attention to the fact that she had 2 HP, I probably would have suggested this OOC) and used two powers (spending an HP to buy off the fatigue).  This might have let you pin both Bunny and Bee or pin Bee and form a Create Objects shield, and so on.  Nitro has never ended any fight with more than 1 HP that I can remember- he gets them and then spends them.It's partly the size of our group, which necessitates tough enemies.  In this fight I'd imagine the villains weren't much higher PL than us on average (I doubt they averaged even PL 12) but some of them had nastier attack forms than any of us (Killer Bee!) and there were so many of them (Control Freak, his 3 guards, Efreet, Pharoah, Guardian, Leopard- to 7 of us due to Raylis's absence).Side note: Though I know what you're saying here, Nitro doesn't even have a Toughness/Defense tradeoff.  Viridian's Toughness save is 4 higher than his.  Nitro's just inexorable due to regeneration/not taking lethal physical damage and he has Ultimate Save to make saves in dramatic moments.  He's supposed to get knocked around like crazy as every wrestler should be.This game is definitely combat heavy, but we're not 'never using skill checks.'  From Nitro's bluffing the guard in the first encounter ("I'm here for Miss White- your Steroid Cream") to recently, we have been rolling out of combat skill checks.  A recent example (this last bit was particularly combat-heavy and RP-light, so let me go back one fight <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />)</blockquote>

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