What we learned from tonight's M&M

[james_davis_nicoll]

The GM is busy so we got together to play with the rules. What we really learned is that we need an M&M guru to question.

Anyone got thoughts on what "save for half damage" means in M&M, which has no hit-points?

Oh, and it turns out the mentalist can mentally grabble either the entire population of the Eastern Seaboard at once or everyone in North America, I forget which. Selectively, too. This kind of puts Ben's motto of "never stop fighting until you've done at least a million dollars damage" into perspective. Although in the test combat we did, the characters did manage to stop a robbery that would have netted tens of thousands of dollars with only major structural damage to the bank.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Oh, and on an average rush on an average human, Ben can push them back 500,000 feet. This seems excessive.

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

94.6 miles? I'd call that excessively awesome!

What do they use instead of hit points?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Several kinds of damage related conditions, ranging from a minor bruise that just gives you a -1 to most rolls all the way to being out cold or dead. The kind of damage condition you are stuck with depends on how badly you blew the toughness roll. You can get a lot of bruises and yes, they add.

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

That sounds interesting.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The effect is that both people either get nickle-and-dimed as to-hits and saves become increasingly crappy - imagine the duel at the end of Robin and Marion - and then one good shot takes someone down. At least for bricks. For the nimbles, there are lots of misses until one lucky shot reveals just how crappy any given martial artist's toughness is.

If a character has impervious - which Ben does - and enough immunity to ignore criticals - which Ben does not (yet) - minions probably can't touch a brick. In fact, we were on our way up the usual ladder of miniony escalation (punch the brick to no effect, shoot the brick to no effect, toss the empty pistol in the hope that it will count as a feint and give the minion time to flee) when Ashton crushed their minds. Minions go down on the first bruise.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Having thought about this, I think round one of most battles should involve Aston hiding behind something solid and doing the mass selective brain crush thing on every minion with a mind.

Of course this only encourages the GM to toss more robots at us.

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

In the PbP adventure I'm running, I had baby chickens inside the robots, which looked like alien creatures. The mentalist knocked out the baby chickens and read their minds ("these creatures are hungry!") but didn't figure out that the chickens weren't running the robots until the robots exploded.

The chickens were unharmed.

And the robots had meanwhile telemetered the information to the Bad Guy describing what powers the heroes had and could use, so the giant Android Duplicate has the right abilities. (I kept a list of powers used during the combat and the ranks.)

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

Immunity to criticals is (I think) a 2-point power. (Mind, that only means that critical attacks don't get the +5, not that critical attacks do no damage. So sayeth the designer over on Atomic Think Tank.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Still worth the two points.

[rwpikul.livejournal.com]

OK, that tops what one of my players could do with his Ninjas & Superspies/Heroes Unlimited character. His 'open hand push' at first level did a one mile[1] knockback, but no damage.


[1] It was 1' per point of Chi, which would typically mean something on the order of 30-50'. He was a pre-revision Ancient Master who had focused on martial arts that maxed out Chi multipliers.