Some things have been coming up recently but I have finally gotten some things started with a friend that we have had planed for a while. He'll be running a 2nd edition Mutants and Masterminds game soon themed around Puella Magi Madoka Magica anime that had come out recently. To do this he's been messing with some systems in it to better fit the thematic ideas.
Basic idea is a constant need for energy to power the attacks, defenses, healing and all that so we looked into the energy system from the mastermind manual splat book. It gives a pool based on constitution of energy points to use and everything that isn't straight up hitting someone with your fist has some power points invested in it to come up with a number of these energy points to fuel it. The one twist was to not allow energy points to regenerate naturally To not ruin his plans I made up a character and a boss to see where the chips fall and it was very interesting.
First off friend was willing to do this to see how it is from the GM side of the Mutants and masterminds screen. He's been in three games so far from the players side one of which I run, so seeing how it works from behind the all concealing and powerful DM screen was a new experience. The second part was to see how much this energy system will work for game along with some other homebrew ideas to work around low energy points.
So for this I made the Maiden of despair via a quicker tarot card method I shown earlier. The fluffy results was this.
Hunched over a form that roughly looks like a long black haired women who is crying. Her form is made of monochrome pictures, diary, and letters about a man she loved yet kept a distance from. The man eventually moved onto a women whom he found attractive and actually shown interest in being his lover. This rough exterior is easily torn away by talking about the situation. Doing so reveals a shriveled child like figure inside who desperately tells itself everything is fine as it tries to patch up the holes others leave when trying to reveal her faults. She is at her worst when she conflicts with her self seeing herself at fault and tries to tear away her own memories and throw them at those around her to make sense of while she pastes up up extras to fix the holes.
Twisted and fitting for the game ideals. Made a character ins a similar method only with less ideas behind it, more focused on a power set which went very weird. From the looks of it the way she worked was going to be very energy efficient. All her powers were ones that boosted up her ability to deal damage and take damage with a few rule bendy ways to add an extra effect to them. The Not witch made was meant to take on groups so it would be an intersting fight.
Cut to it and we found out even with her energy point approach she blew through the energy point restoring the witches provided without actually wounding the thing. between a combination of missing and damage saves the character was solely on the losing end. The abilities I set up as part of her fluff were very effective against a melee combatant due to throwing her out of melee range on a failure again the trip effect. I originally was making a blaster magic user before realizing the monster didn't have a single way to deal with range so I switched to melee, and did that back fire.
So the first play test ended with retreat, 4 wounds, and 30 energy points of 120 expended. So the thought expenditure of energy was vastly underestimated especially if this would be a character who was running very energy light. The drops were estimated to only recover 20 energy points per boss defeated. He said he learned a lot .I feel I made a mismatch that may not be the best to learn from but we'll see. I'll probably try again later with some learned in character strategy but I plan on making a few more scenarios for him to work with. Either way he gets experience and possibly more foes/allies for in game use.
Showing posts with label mutants and masterminds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mutants and masterminds. Show all posts
Friday, August 19, 2011
Friday, August 12, 2011
Minion mash
Well it seems yesterdays listing of things to work out didn't come to pass today at least, spent about five hours wandering around town. Took care of some things though none of ti really panned out but was a lot of walking. So instead of progress I'll talk about some game running problems. The problem being, lots and lots of monsters.
Lots of games have you fighting hordes of monsters. RPGs are notorious for things you dispatch in one round and just keep appearing through the game due to random encounters. FPS and action games love hordes as it can present a legitimate challenge in a game where you are overpowered to everything and your downfall can come from overconfidence or other things. RTS use this with some factions as their main method of winning as they can overwhelm you with inferior troops. Usually this is fun, in table top games it's a little differnt.
Running games usually means all the little boring things such as tallying up dice is done by humans and not in microseconds by the machine, it also has some verbal asking of players to do things, and them joking around and other things. This means what in any other game of it's genera that would take maybe five to ten minutes takes roughly a half hour of real time. Online this is even worse, I believe this was mentioned it sometime ago but my tired legs and sore feet are preventing me from moving my mouse around to dig that up, how I'm not sure. Seeing a three round combat session take forty minutes is not uncommon for me between 5 people. I suspect youtube, image galleries, and the lower typing speed of some players has something to do from it as seeing the same text for two minutes gets them to think "well I'll just look here and check back occasionally". While a player I don't usually mind but as a DM I feel like I'm failing in keeping them interested especially when this is just a minor inconvenience fight that could go bad if mistakes are made.
This often makes me question the making of such things. Usually I go with it though with less monsters than I'd see fitting as this keeps the hack and slash slough from continuing too long. Another thing is not only do my players have to roll, I have to roll for the monsters while the players have to do checks. Having 6 monsters who make attacks and target different players who may cause rolls from them and so on is a bit of a headache and extends the length of battle quite significantly.
Mutants and Masterminds system does have a solution to minion swarms that are still threats but aren't quite grinds. It's damage system is based on a saving roll and failing that by enough can incapacitate a player, foes generally run on the same rule. While it seems horribly swinging it's mitigated by hero points and the fact that you can't be taken out in one hit. Minions work slightly different, they make their saves so they can get by unscathed but on any failure they take the worst condition. Beyond that they can dish out damage like any other character allowing them to be a real threat without the unfairness of them facing double their numbers that are roughly as hard hitting as them.
The rolling for the mobs attack I've written a page from my book on. I've come up with two solutions that I employ regularly. One I have "auto pass assistance" for the mobs, each one in range adds +1 to the attack roll of one monster. Assistance is an action that tests a monsters attack against DC 10 so it passes 55% of the time with no attack bonus, most have attack bonus so quickly this is just auto passed. Using the idea allows for a better chance to hit with less rolling, though it's safer for players as they have less chances to just flat out fail a save roll. For minor encounters it works for me. The other one is to use the books combined attack with monsters. For each one that "hits" the target there is an increase in the difficulty of the save that must be passed. It reduces rolls for players while allowing me to at least pretend each monster maters more, and does increase the threat level substantually from a group based beat down. The problem is that it starts to enter one shot territory. By rules and probability if they were equal level threats 6 monsters attacking would cause there to always be some sort of wound and about a 50% chance (with large room for error due to me not actually taking out scratch paper for this) of defeat if they all succeed on hiting. Players could hero point to avoid this but that seems slightly too punishing if it's just a bump in the road to your main encounter.
It's a thing I struggle with in designing encounters. Thematically it is great but in practice it could just be seen as filler or a time sink. At least with the last batch I've been making the taking out of the mass of zombies be laughably gory which has something for it.
Lots of games have you fighting hordes of monsters. RPGs are notorious for things you dispatch in one round and just keep appearing through the game due to random encounters. FPS and action games love hordes as it can present a legitimate challenge in a game where you are overpowered to everything and your downfall can come from overconfidence or other things. RTS use this with some factions as their main method of winning as they can overwhelm you with inferior troops. Usually this is fun, in table top games it's a little differnt.
Running games usually means all the little boring things such as tallying up dice is done by humans and not in microseconds by the machine, it also has some verbal asking of players to do things, and them joking around and other things. This means what in any other game of it's genera that would take maybe five to ten minutes takes roughly a half hour of real time. Online this is even worse, I believe this was mentioned it sometime ago but my tired legs and sore feet are preventing me from moving my mouse around to dig that up, how I'm not sure. Seeing a three round combat session take forty minutes is not uncommon for me between 5 people. I suspect youtube, image galleries, and the lower typing speed of some players has something to do from it as seeing the same text for two minutes gets them to think "well I'll just look here and check back occasionally". While a player I don't usually mind but as a DM I feel like I'm failing in keeping them interested especially when this is just a minor inconvenience fight that could go bad if mistakes are made.
This often makes me question the making of such things. Usually I go with it though with less monsters than I'd see fitting as this keeps the hack and slash slough from continuing too long. Another thing is not only do my players have to roll, I have to roll for the monsters while the players have to do checks. Having 6 monsters who make attacks and target different players who may cause rolls from them and so on is a bit of a headache and extends the length of battle quite significantly.
Mutants and Masterminds system does have a solution to minion swarms that are still threats but aren't quite grinds. It's damage system is based on a saving roll and failing that by enough can incapacitate a player, foes generally run on the same rule. While it seems horribly swinging it's mitigated by hero points and the fact that you can't be taken out in one hit. Minions work slightly different, they make their saves so they can get by unscathed but on any failure they take the worst condition. Beyond that they can dish out damage like any other character allowing them to be a real threat without the unfairness of them facing double their numbers that are roughly as hard hitting as them.
The rolling for the mobs attack I've written a page from my book on. I've come up with two solutions that I employ regularly. One I have "auto pass assistance" for the mobs, each one in range adds +1 to the attack roll of one monster. Assistance is an action that tests a monsters attack against DC 10 so it passes 55% of the time with no attack bonus, most have attack bonus so quickly this is just auto passed. Using the idea allows for a better chance to hit with less rolling, though it's safer for players as they have less chances to just flat out fail a save roll. For minor encounters it works for me. The other one is to use the books combined attack with monsters. For each one that "hits" the target there is an increase in the difficulty of the save that must be passed. It reduces rolls for players while allowing me to at least pretend each monster maters more, and does increase the threat level substantually from a group based beat down. The problem is that it starts to enter one shot territory. By rules and probability if they were equal level threats 6 monsters attacking would cause there to always be some sort of wound and about a 50% chance (with large room for error due to me not actually taking out scratch paper for this) of defeat if they all succeed on hiting. Players could hero point to avoid this but that seems slightly too punishing if it's just a bump in the road to your main encounter.
It's a thing I struggle with in designing encounters. Thematically it is great but in practice it could just be seen as filler or a time sink. At least with the last batch I've been making the taking out of the mass of zombies be laughably gory which has something for it.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Blast from the DM past
Now for something a little less boring. Between resume shuffles, working on some aspects of combat project, and doing minor DM things I've been digging through my DM notes and folders to find some of my most earliest Mutants and Masterminds workings for my current game. So I think I'll share some laughable things with you.
First off this was made with very very sketchy knowledge of Mutants and Masterminds 2nd edition. So much so that I overlooked a few things. To start with Mutants and Masterminds 2nd editon was green ronin taking the OGL for D&D 3.5 and thoroughly gutting it and replacing its innards and limbs with modular cybernetic running off an arcane magic generator that was brought to life by cosmic rays to make a point buy Super hero game. All the basic ideas are in there to a degree along with the "Toughness" save system. So the six stats everyone loves is still there, with some attack bonus, and the gutted armor class system renamed defense. The game is point buy with "power levels"(which will be refereed to as PL) which works like regular levels to a degree. How easily a character can hit another character, damage them, or otherwise effect them is caped by these things. I won't get into it too much but it's actually an interesting balance system in a game that relies on the DM keeping it from being horribly broken due to it trying to replicate super heroes.
There is attributes, saves, skills, and feats. All the fun stuff D&D has come to gained in 3.5, on top of that is powers and the power structure which would take a while to explain. Effectivly Attributes get modifiers that are applied all over the place, mostly saves and skills. 2nd edition divorced most of attributes from combat things beyond strength modifier damage. Other than that mostly functions the same.
So anyways with that onto the things I did. These were some proto ideas from my Fantasy Mutants and Masterminds game. The thought was that if I need something quick I'd pull out one of these classes and add up some numbers on the fly and be good. I went a different direction but will talk a bit more on that.
So without further delay the "fighter" template.
General fighter
Attributes
(1:1) +1 bonus per 2 above 10
STR 12(+1) 2 points
DEX 12(+1) 2 points
CON 12(+1) 2 points
WIS 10
INT 10
CHR 10
-6 overall
Combat modifiers
(2:1)
ATK +0
DEF +1 2 points
-2 in section,-8 overall
SAVES
(1:1)
Ref +0
Fort +1 1 point
Will +0
-1 in section,-9 overall
Feats
(1:1)
Attack Focus(melee or ranged) 1 rank
Equipment 1 rank (upgrade in armor and weapon)
Takedown attack
-3 in section ,-12 overall
Skills
(1:4)
-0 in section, -12 overall
Powers
(Rank*Cost)
Device 1 rank 3 points
base 4 points a rank
Flaw Easy to lose -1 point a rank
-3 in section, -15 overall.
So to what this all means. First this idea follows that "each PL is 15 points so if I fill up 15 points I can slap them together to make foe NPC!" idea. It works and it doesn't. While this does stack up well there were some things I missed. First not a skill rank in sight, while this isn't too horrible sometimes players like to try something that isn't beat them over the head until they stop trying to impede their movement. It's rare but it happens and that's where skills come in, I generally run NPCs under a system of "Excellent","Proficient", and "not trained" as per a twist on the 2nd edition Masterminds manual splat. Instead of paying 1 point for 4 ranks of some skills it's 2 points for max ranks in a skill and 1 point for half of max ranks, no points means it's relying on attribute bonus only. Not the worst thing.
The worst thing was that I made things that violate PL and took non stacking feats along with this "fighter" is just as good with his fist than without. Not bad if you were going for that sort of thing but this was to be the classic he uses a weapon fighter. Strength bonus goes straight to your unarmed damage which is capped at your PL, with devices or certain equipment you can get weapons that add it to their damage as well, up to the PL. By having a +1 bonus per PL you end up Capped on strength based damage and any more is just pointless, should have it be 1 point a rank so it's at least half of the potential cap but that's not what I did.
The next bad thing is the saves. They're just horrible and way back then they seemed alright but really weren't. First thing is not an ounce of will save, which is fine for fighter minions I shouldn't care about but it seems like a vast oversight when I'm using this template for stronger than town guard things. The Fortitude save is completely non functioning past PL 3. The reason being that it takes the constitution bonus into account and the Saves (besides toughness) cap at PL+6. At PL 4 it'll have 8 fortitude when it should only have 7. This is a big oversight. having PL in reflex save is acceptable though.
Last bit of problems is in with the feats. Attack focus isn't bad, that or attack bonus which is just wasted points for a one range NPC. The first problem here is equipment. Equipment runs on what is effectively the power system only scaled down in cost and mundane for the most part. A lot of them are just given out in a list but you are encouraged to make other things for it. With this I was expecting all the points to be dropped into armor and such. With the oversight that con goes to "toughness" saves which is where armor would go, not only that it maxes it out. Jumping ahead you'll see the device entry is wher eI planed the weapon to go so buying weapons is pointless here. The only thing I can think of is a bunch of rope or other little useful trinkets that are only useful to PCs for the most part unless I want to play Tuckers Kobolds. Not a promising aspect as I'll be getting a lot of such items with every PL getting 5 points worth of them. After that there is the non ranked takedown feat, so every PL added woudl mean I have one point floating around that I would probalby ignore or take a random rleated feat in.
So all in all, this didn't quite accomplish what I wanted. Thanks to how I ran the games I ended up more often than not hand constructing the little obstacles in the players path until I got the hang of winging it. Winging it being I pick what saves the best, what attributes are high and low, what gimmick it has, and a few powers at the relative level for anything without a name. Which works pretty well and I know I could fit it all together without breaking the guideline of Power points per Power Level ideals I keep as a GM.
Well hopefully this was a bit more entertaining, it's a bit of a challenge to come up with something worthwhile on a near daily basis. Though it's probably a good thing for me. Anyways I might revise this idea in the future, if I'm really feeling like it maybe I could see if I could make a book of minions and mooks under Green Ronins OGL licence for Mutants and Masterminds. Either edition would work though I would think 3rd would be the one to work under, and that isn't quite my style.
First off this was made with very very sketchy knowledge of Mutants and Masterminds 2nd edition. So much so that I overlooked a few things. To start with Mutants and Masterminds 2nd editon was green ronin taking the OGL for D&D 3.5 and thoroughly gutting it and replacing its innards and limbs with modular cybernetic running off an arcane magic generator that was brought to life by cosmic rays to make a point buy Super hero game. All the basic ideas are in there to a degree along with the "Toughness" save system. So the six stats everyone loves is still there, with some attack bonus, and the gutted armor class system renamed defense. The game is point buy with "power levels"(which will be refereed to as PL) which works like regular levels to a degree. How easily a character can hit another character, damage them, or otherwise effect them is caped by these things. I won't get into it too much but it's actually an interesting balance system in a game that relies on the DM keeping it from being horribly broken due to it trying to replicate super heroes.
There is attributes, saves, skills, and feats. All the fun stuff D&D has come to gained in 3.5, on top of that is powers and the power structure which would take a while to explain. Effectivly Attributes get modifiers that are applied all over the place, mostly saves and skills. 2nd edition divorced most of attributes from combat things beyond strength modifier damage. Other than that mostly functions the same.
So anyways with that onto the things I did. These were some proto ideas from my Fantasy Mutants and Masterminds game. The thought was that if I need something quick I'd pull out one of these classes and add up some numbers on the fly and be good. I went a different direction but will talk a bit more on that.
So without further delay the "fighter" template.
General fighter
Attributes
(1:1) +1 bonus per 2 above 10
STR 12(+1) 2 points
DEX 12(+1) 2 points
CON 12(+1) 2 points
WIS 10
INT 10
CHR 10
-6 overall
Combat modifiers
(2:1)
ATK +0
DEF +1 2 points
-2 in section,-8 overall
SAVES
(1:1)
Ref +0
Fort +1 1 point
Will +0
-1 in section,-9 overall
Feats
(1:1)
Attack Focus(melee or ranged) 1 rank
Equipment 1 rank (upgrade in armor and weapon)
Takedown attack
-3 in section ,-12 overall
Skills
(1:4)
-0 in section, -12 overall
Powers
(Rank*Cost)
Device 1 rank 3 points
base 4 points a rank
Flaw Easy to lose -1 point a rank
-3 in section, -15 overall.
So to what this all means. First this idea follows that "each PL is 15 points so if I fill up 15 points I can slap them together to make foe NPC!" idea. It works and it doesn't. While this does stack up well there were some things I missed. First not a skill rank in sight, while this isn't too horrible sometimes players like to try something that isn't beat them over the head until they stop trying to impede their movement. It's rare but it happens and that's where skills come in, I generally run NPCs under a system of "Excellent","Proficient", and "not trained" as per a twist on the 2nd edition Masterminds manual splat. Instead of paying 1 point for 4 ranks of some skills it's 2 points for max ranks in a skill and 1 point for half of max ranks, no points means it's relying on attribute bonus only. Not the worst thing.
The worst thing was that I made things that violate PL and took non stacking feats along with this "fighter" is just as good with his fist than without. Not bad if you were going for that sort of thing but this was to be the classic he uses a weapon fighter. Strength bonus goes straight to your unarmed damage which is capped at your PL, with devices or certain equipment you can get weapons that add it to their damage as well, up to the PL. By having a +1 bonus per PL you end up Capped on strength based damage and any more is just pointless, should have it be 1 point a rank so it's at least half of the potential cap but that's not what I did.
The next bad thing is the saves. They're just horrible and way back then they seemed alright but really weren't. First thing is not an ounce of will save, which is fine for fighter minions I shouldn't care about but it seems like a vast oversight when I'm using this template for stronger than town guard things. The Fortitude save is completely non functioning past PL 3. The reason being that it takes the constitution bonus into account and the Saves (besides toughness) cap at PL+6. At PL 4 it'll have 8 fortitude when it should only have 7. This is a big oversight. having PL in reflex save is acceptable though.
Last bit of problems is in with the feats. Attack focus isn't bad, that or attack bonus which is just wasted points for a one range NPC. The first problem here is equipment. Equipment runs on what is effectively the power system only scaled down in cost and mundane for the most part. A lot of them are just given out in a list but you are encouraged to make other things for it. With this I was expecting all the points to be dropped into armor and such. With the oversight that con goes to "toughness" saves which is where armor would go, not only that it maxes it out. Jumping ahead you'll see the device entry is wher eI planed the weapon to go so buying weapons is pointless here. The only thing I can think of is a bunch of rope or other little useful trinkets that are only useful to PCs for the most part unless I want to play Tuckers Kobolds. Not a promising aspect as I'll be getting a lot of such items with every PL getting 5 points worth of them. After that there is the non ranked takedown feat, so every PL added woudl mean I have one point floating around that I would probalby ignore or take a random rleated feat in.
So all in all, this didn't quite accomplish what I wanted. Thanks to how I ran the games I ended up more often than not hand constructing the little obstacles in the players path until I got the hang of winging it. Winging it being I pick what saves the best, what attributes are high and low, what gimmick it has, and a few powers at the relative level for anything without a name. Which works pretty well and I know I could fit it all together without breaking the guideline of Power points per Power Level ideals I keep as a GM.
Well hopefully this was a bit more entertaining, it's a bit of a challenge to come up with something worthwhile on a near daily basis. Though it's probably a good thing for me. Anyways I might revise this idea in the future, if I'm really feeling like it maybe I could see if I could make a book of minions and mooks under Green Ronins OGL licence for Mutants and Masterminds. Either edition would work though I would think 3rd would be the one to work under, and that isn't quite my style.
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