Knowing your Lim f(x) = L

Wow, MSPaint really has changed. I usually just use pencile tool in photoshop but I thought for today I'd really do it in that. Terribad mspaint aside I've had some amusing GMing the other day.

I run a very silly game in Mutants and Masterminds 2nd edition. Ran it starting at PL 6 and it's about PL8 now. It runs on the premise of any bad yet funny idea I can throw at a party of "Adventures guild" members that take contracts and do stuff. Nothing too deep but I usually have thinly veiled refrences the players can laugh at while they roll virutal dice. That aside I'll get to the meat of all this.

Knowing your limits. And a GM's limits is the groups fun. A GM can do anything they want as long as the players stay at the table and take it. It doesn't mean that they should. Personally I try to have different parts in my sessions, I don't quite like having entire sessions be consistent of one thing. Often I want the situation to always be on the change, they do something something new gets to be chewed on by them. Doing this hopefully keeps it fun and allows them to fill up most of the session with in character talk instead of me dictating what is going on.

This latest bad idea didn't quite have that. As I have possibly 3 members who occasionally look here I won't get into deeper reasons but effectively they had ideas about this entire situation which made the plans for the session seem a little short. So I threw a wrinkle in it, a minor boss fight that could prove entertaining and possibly scare them through some of the dirty tricks I threw on it. Nothing too major though but outcomes of the fight would have extended this session in interesting ways. As the image shows, that fight didn't take long (and they did strip both of them and time them up so they could check to see what was causing some of the complications). I did have ideas on the spot how to extend the fight and make it seem like a boss fight. But with some thought didn't take them. Time was almost up and while I did plan this to be a drag out fight I thought actually dragging it out would not accomplish much. I do lean more towards lengthening plot fights through villain points

While knowing this it always seems a cop out to let players just smash and grab something that I designed to put up a bit of a challenge to them. Overall it did accomplish what I wanted though, it gave some more conflict and added a complication to what seemed to be a mission that was involving "go here talk to them, make a decision and come back" with how they went about things. One fault was I had one of the duo be a lower PL than the main guy as it seemed to make sense, another was some misunderstanding on just how effective some of the players effects were. Other than that I did get to show off a few of the tricks though not all of them which makes it feel like a waste. Though it is food for thought on better design later.