Mr. P's Tabletop Corner : Mooks

[mrpaladin]

I am planning on running a Mutants and Mastermind campaign in a few weeks. (My first ever GM debut, might I add) I plan on having about 4-5 PC's starting at Power Level 9. Since I'm pretty sure none of them read this journal, I wish to throw out a question to all those who have GM Experience, especially Mutants and Masterminds experience. I am

Comments

M&M and zombies.

[outlawblade]

M&M - meh. The problem is that they took the thing that is broken about the d20 game, the saving throws, and they threw out the thing that works, the hit points, and they swapped the two.

Let me explain.

As a *group* mechanic, hit points are stellar. They naturally give the opponent a single pool of survival into which all the PCs can contribute to the defeat of the creature. It's a nice, simple mechanic that let's every one contribute at least somewhat to the defeat. Even those who are not combat monsters can throw in their d6 of damage.

The thing that breaks d20 are the abilities that defeat opponents and PCs based on a single die throw like, say, saving throws. The later editions did a lot to tone down those effects, and only semi-successfully. Once casters get higher level it still often falls to "save or die" type situations where monster stats create more and more contrivances to avoid this somewhat anti-climatic event. Spell penetration, auto dispels, there is only so much you can do in a system where a 1 always fails. Worse, when you stat the creatures to avoid this somewhat boring fate you are eliminating some of the PCs most powerful effects.

I won't even go into the suck of being a PC and missing a save round one of a climatic battle where you can't get a dispel or where the PCs don't have a cure.

So what does M&M do? Let's take out the simple system that works for groups and replace it with the problematic, all or nothing saving throw system. Get hit, roll a 1, out of the fight with nothing you can do.

But it's worse than that. Ultimately as top players increase their damage the villains increase their damage rolls to keep up, completely leaving the non-power games characters bouncing off everything. Instead of feeling lame because they only did half the damage of the top combat characters, now they spend most of their attacks just bouncing off the villains doing absolutely nothing.

I tried to use the hit point variant but I found the pain of converting everything just wasn't worth it.

It's too bad because the flavor, writing, art, and power system was better than Silver Age Sentinels.

I couldn't stomache Champions either. Three letter acronyms give me a rash.

I ended up writing an entire superhero game from scratch.

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