Monsters, Challenge Ratings, and Encounter Balance in RPGs

 

It's a quirk of the modern RPG scene that there is so much concern over "Balance". It really falls into two areas - 1) Character Balance and 2) Encounter Balance. It's almost an obsession in some corners of the internet and while bouncing back and forth between various Supers RPG and running a D&D style campaign I thought it was worth discussing here. We did Characters yesterday so let's talk about Encounters.

Thinking back to the beginning early D&D didn't really care about encounter balance - the most we saw there was making sure a given dungeon level had monsters that matched that level which meant that it should be appropriate for characters of that level. Other early RPGs really didn't address much beyond this either. Runequest, Gamma World, Traveller, and Star Trek were all pretty light here. The idea mostly was "well, here is the setting, here are some potential opposing forces, drop your characters in and see what happens." There was also an assumption that your players knew to run when things got too hot and that might even require some extra effort like throwing out rations to distract pursuing monsters or having the chief engineer make some warp drive engineering roles to push the ship above it's normal maximum.

Later we get to D&D 3E and we first start to see encounter balance as a concept introducing challenge rating and encounter level as part of the game. I don't think this is a bad idea but I think it's doomed to  disappointment much of the time as one tries to codify a certain mix of hostile capabilities versus a generic player character power level. 

This is from the 3.5 DMG. Find the encounter level you want on the lefthand side, then decide how many creatures you want in the encounter moving to the right and it will show the CR you need to aim for to create a balanced encounter. Theoretically anyway.  

This is the Troll statblock from the 3.5 MM. Now trolls aren't particularly complex most of the time - though in this edition you could give them class levels and that could get weird fast. The only complication here is their regeneration - it's ignored by Fire and Acid. This version was a little more complicated but later editions have it so that taking any fire damage in a round shuts off the Trolls regeneration for that round - period. So if your party has a bunch of fire or acid type attacks then the troll's regen effectively does not exist. Challenge rating is affected by special defenses so the reason this guy is a "5" is at least partly because of that. Maybe if you ignore his regen he should only be a "4", maybe even a "3" which immediately wrecks the math, especially if you have a group of them. Considering in later editions wizards get fire bolt as a standard attack power, clerics get sacred flame, and flaming oil isn't hard to come by you can imagine this is not a particularly difficult thing to overcome. It's come up a lot in my current campaign and so I discount the rating for trolls a bit as they are effectively just like an ogre for the most part. Even one character landing a fire attack that round means all of the other characters normal attacks "stick" - just like any other monster. This is the kind of thing you have to do as a DM to keep these numbers relevant. 

I mean, he shouldn't be happy about this ...

This also ignores things like terrain, light conditions, weather, etc. There's a big difference between encountering something in a set of 10' wide corridors vs. out in the open country.

So taking these kinds of systems on faith is a mistake - if you really care about this stuff. I'd say 4E D&D did the best job with its math but even then I had to eyeball a fair amount of things. I did love the process of determining what kind of area this was, what kinds of encounters would be present, using the numbers to build an encounter and then tuning it up for my party - it was a great way to organize setting up a ruined city waiting to be plundered. 

Ultimate balance ...

But once you go outside of the D&D-O-Sphere there just isn't much like this approach. For point based systems (mostly supers for me) you could use the points but mostly you just use the power caps (active point limits/power levels) as a guideline. There's no larger framework though for calculating numbers for multiple opponents vs. party size. A few examples:

•    Looking at some superhero games there just isn't much math. 
• Icons is great talking about creating adventures and campaigns but doesn't burn any pages discussing encounter math.
• The Sentinel Comics RPG covers a lot of this as well and does talk about timing and challenges - the Green-Yellow-Red thing is important here - but it doesn't get into "enemy math" either.
• The M&M main book doesn't talk about numbers at all - it discusses encounters as part of an adventure or how they fit into a villainous plot. The Gamemaster Guide though, actually has a few paragraphs on balancing encounters and actually does mention power levels - every 2 PL increase means they are roughly twice as powerful so a PL12 villain is a good fight for two PL10 heroes. That's as far as the math goes.
• The Marvel Multiversal game is one of the newer entries and while it does have a page and a half on balancing encounters the only number advice in the entire section is to put your players up against opponents of the same tier - of which there are six. 
• Beyond strict superhero games entries like Savage Worlds have no real encounter guidelines. The only notes are that some creatures are wild cards but the game doesn't stick ratings on it's monsters beyond that.
• Star Wars!
• FFG Star Wars mentions that when using multiple opponents they should be a die or 2 lower on their abilities. That's about it.
• d20 Star Wars, Saga Edition specifically here assigns a challenge level number to every monster/npc entry in the game and this is used to determine both encounter balance and XP awards. Not terribly surprising with it being heavily 3E/4E based.
• d6 Star Wars - 2E Revised and Expanded in this case - has no time for encounter balance. The designing adventures section talks about pacing, different types of encounters, and "making it Star Wars" but does not put any numbers on opponents or award XP based on that kind of things. 
• The Trinity Continuum system has no encounter guidelines either. There are levels of threat as in minor-major-colossal, etc. and there are caps on their dice pools for each given level but there is no corresponding link to what level of character experience is an even match for that. There is a fair amount of material about adventure or story design but it's largely math-free.

I hope those are mostly minions ...

The one thing that many of these systems do is provide a two to three-tiered framework for opposition with normal opponents, minions or mooks, and then maybe some kind of master level opponent that is stronger than normal and possibly designed to take on multiple PC's. Mooks, almost universally, are designed as massed opponents that drop out of a fight with a single hit.  That can give a different flavor to a combat encounter and saves the GM a lot of work. Bosses tend to get extra actions or some kind of fate points to help them mitigate bad rolls or to guarantee success. Saving the complexity for the medium to boss level encounters helps a lot in running a game while letting the players feel like they are accomplishing something. 

Not a minion!

So this emphasis on encounter balance and the numbers associated with tracking and measuring that is pretty much a D&D thing. Other games don't worry about it much if at all. The only game that definitely has one on this list is the version of Star Wars published by the D&D people. Why don't more RPG's use this kind of approach? I will close with a paragraph from the M&M 3E Deluxe Gamemaster's Guide that I think sums up my feelings on it really well:

Character Balance in RPGs

 

It's a quirk of the modern RPG scene that there is so much concern over "Balance". It really falls into two areas - 1) Character Balance and 2) Encounter Balance. It's almost an obsession in some corners of the internet and while bouncing back and forth between various Supers RPG and running a D&D style campaign I thought it was worth discussing here so let's do Characters today and Encounters tomorrow.

Character Balance shows up in a couple of places and in a couple of ways.

First up I see a ton of discussion around this with D&D 5E-style games. Playtest classes for upcoming expansions, new classes for new games like Tales of the Valiant ... as soon as something comes out there will be immediate numerical breakdowns of damage per round and similar CharOp metrics at different levels and given certain feat or weapon choices and honestly these days it's just tiresome most of the time. It's not as important as you might think.

 This kind of thing mainly got going during D&D 3E and became it's own mini-industry for some people while completely ignoring the RP part of the RPG. This became especially evident in mid to late 3E when "experts" were recommending ridiculous combinations of classes and prestige classes as the "optimal" choice that were never going to happen in any real game with an actual DM trying run even a semi-coherent campaign. They were only even slightly likely to be achievable via one of the Adventurer's League type games where there was no central DM and no need to play out how your human fighter/cleric/ranger managed to join and train with the elves' arcane archers. You still see a degree of this even now with some of the multiclassing recommendations that get posted as the optimal build for today's games. Again, what DM is going to just let that happen in an ongoing campaign?

It also tends to ignore the non-combat abilities of a character and class and that's a huge miss in my opinion - it's not just about combat! We do other things too! At least 5E made some effort to categorize three areas of the game with combat, exploration, and socialization within the rules. Whether they succeeded is something people like to debate but they at least put it in the book and hopefully 5.5 is doing an even better job. If you are playing in an ongoing campaign, with a steady group of other players, in a setting that is supposed to be a "real" fantasy world with some internal logic, then DPR and other number-crunched metrics are one of the least important things to worry about. Because once in the game who cares which character does more damage by a few points here or there? Why does that matter? You're not competing with the rest of the internet and you aren't really competing with your own party members - you're supposed to be on the same side most of the time when a fight breaks out. Are you happy with what your character can do in a fight? Are you happy with what they can do outside of a fight? If so then you probably made a good choice - regardless of what the various forums, Discord channels, and social media groups say. 

Point-based games are kind of built around this concept - the points are mainly for the PCs. The DM doesn't have to use them at all. If all  the PCs are using the same points totals then they are all equal on some level within the game system. That said this type of game, even more than D&D style games, need DM supervision to reign in extreme character choices. Things like active point limits in Hero and power level limits in M&M help, but there are still ways to break things - with the great freedom that point-based games give you comes the need to work within the framework of the specific campaign. Not everything needs to be optimized. Not everything needs to be a variable power pool or a multipower or put in an array. With this type of game if one character does more damage than another that should be the result of deliberate choices on the part of those players and there is nothing wrong with that. 

If this stuff matters in your group it can be discussed in the good old session zero - "I really want to play a tank this time" or "I want to play a sneaky DPS guy" - I think most people get what this means now. My group still discusses classes and races (if applicable) when we start a new game and possible roles within the group if it's a less-structured game like Savage Worlds but it's done in a very open way and we don't really have anyone that thinks there can be only one of a type or class within the party or that wants to compare DPR numbers. They will find combos and they will absolutely break classes but it's not a competitive thing because they don't care who is the "best" most of the time. That said the cleric and the paladin in my current game trying to top each other's armor class has been pretty entertaining. 

Then of course there are games that absolutely do not care about balance between different classes or character types. Old school D&D doesn't care much at all, certainly not math-wise. Traveller doesn't care - one character might have 4 levels of "Bureaucracy" and "Pistol-0" if they're lucky while another may have Combat Rifleman - 5 and Cutlass - 3. Both are viable because combat isn't the only thing in the game - personal combat is only one of several options for combat - and it's a big universe with a lot of things to do. Getting your guns onto that  planet with law level 9 is going to take some Bureaucracy skill - probably some Bribery skill as well.

Really any game where random rolls are a major feature of character creation has an inherent lack of concern for character balance. If I end up with an 18 strength and you end up with an 8 we are headed in different directions with D&D combat. D&D, Traveller, Villains & Vigilantes, Cyberpunk, Gamma World, Runequest - all of these have random character generation, many beyond just determining ability scores, and yet we played them all, sometimes for years, and no one argued about this.

The game most openly, brazenly even,  unconcerned with balanced characters in my opinion is original recipe Rifts. Random stat generation then your race/class choice dictates everything else and on no level are they balanced. In a game where you could play a Glitter Boy, a more general robot or power armor pilot, a juicer, a wizard, or a dragon hatchling I have seen people choose to play the Rogue Scientist - sort of a post-apocalyptic Indiana Jones who's signature feature is that they get a lot of skills. No special combat abilities, no extra luck, no magic, no power armor, and the same standard equipment options everyone else gets. 

People make choices in these games, even when given obviously more powerful options, to play the things they want to play, the things that call out to them. My take on the "truth" of character balance is that as much as it's a feature of online discussion and debate it really doesn't matter all that much in actual play in an ongoing campaign. Sure, people will optimize or power game some things sometimes but they tend to do it with character types they are already interested in beyond whatever the numbers say. The prospect of living with the same character for months or years brings perspective that goes beyond the numbers.

Mutants & Masterminds 4th Edition Playtest - Combat Discussion

 

Initial discussion in the previous post.

OK let's look at some of these new combat interactions. First up the general Degree of Success chart:

A critical hit here (Nat 20) adds one degree of success
A critical miss (Nat 1) adds a degree of failure

• Hits and misses are determined using a d20 + your relevant attack bonus vs. a DC of 10 + your Defense score. As long as you get a success - meet or exceed the target DC - you have scored a hit on the target and now you need to check for damage.
• An extra success here adds 5 to the Effect rank
• An extra failure here, if it somehow still hits, gives the target a +5 on their Resistance check
  
  
• Damage is handled by rolling the d20 + your toughness rank vs a target of 10+ damage rank. That's a change from the 15 + damage of 3E. Then Degrees of Success enter the fray:
• Success (two or more degrees): If the target has Hardened, Impervious, or Impenetrable resistance against the attack and this degree of success, they receive no damage conditions. Otherwise, this is the same as one degree of success.
• Success (one degree): The target receives the Hit condition. For each Hit condition, apply a –1 penalty to the character’s further resistance checks against Damage.
  
• Failure (one degree): The target receives a Hit condition, and the Dazed condition. If the target already has the Dazed condition, it becomes Stunned instead.
  Compared to 3E this adds Dazed - in 3E this was just a -1 to future Toughness checks
• Failure (two degrees): The target receives a Hit condition, the Stunned condition, plus the Staggered condition.
  In 3E this was just Dazed & a -1
• Failure (three degrees): The target receives the Hit and Staggered conditions, plus the Incapacitated condition. If an Incapacitated character fails a Damage resistance check, their condition becomes Dying. If a Dying character fails a Damage resistance check by any degree, they are Dead.
  In 3E this was just Staggered and a -1, and an additional Staggered result went to Incapacitated which could then go to Dying and then to Dead in the same way.
  
  Some significant changes here: From 3E the target number has dropped by 5, but the table has bumped everything up a notch for starters. Then we add in Hits being cumulative so even resisting the damage to a degree means they are still piling up. I like this as it puts more of a clock on the combat. 3E had a similar condition but it was only applied on a failure. Now with it applying to at least some successful saves it will accumulate that much faster. It also adds a benefit to doing really well on a Toughness check as you avoid this cumulative penalty. Players tend to be disappointed when they roll really well and there is no additional benefit to it so this feeds right into the drama of each roll. 
  
  (Also, this is starting to look like Savage Worlds' system a bit - "Hit", or "Hit and a Raise to add damage", failing the save by more causes a worse effect, etc. Lot of parallels there.)

Let's talk about Conditions real quick. Beyond "Hits" the damage table can make you:

• Dazed - One standard action, no reactions, still get free actions. 
• Stunned - No actions at all and Dodge rank is halved. I'm wondering if this is correct or if it's supposed to affect Defense scores as well? In 3E it was just the "no actions" part so I don't know. 
• Staggered - Dazed and Hindered (that means half movement speed)
• Incapacitated - Stunned, Unaware, Defenseless, and usually Prone. This is the KO you're looking for in a fight.
• Dying - Incapacitated and making death saves ala D&D 5E. 

Characters might be Resistant to a particular attack - that means they cut the effect ranks in half before making the roll. Immunity means you make no roll at all - so you won't be accumulating hits from those attacks. Susceptible means you have a penalty to resistance checks of half the incoming effect rank. Weakness is that plus your best result is one degree of failure on the check.

With the basics out of the way, let's say our Battlesuit faces off against their evil twin - how does that go?

• Evil Battlesuit flies up and blasts Justice Battlesuit:
•  Evil shoots with a d20+8 (Their Attack of 8 is the modifier here) against a Defense Class of 18 (the target's Defense of 8 + the basic 10). Needing an 18, an average roll will get them a 10-11 and so they hit!
• To resist damage Justice will be rolling a d20 + 12 (their Toughness) with a target of 22 (base 10 + 12 for the Rank 12 Force Beams). Another average 10-11 roll here will match that target for a success and while it is Hardened it is Rank 11 while the force beams are Rank 12 so no extra roll and Justice will take a Hit even with the success. 

This could go on for a while but at least those -1's will be piling up until someone gets lucky.

Let's say Justice has been rendered Vulnerable by some other attack or event. The Vulnerable condition reduces Defense by half so he would be a DC14 to hit - you just need an slightly better average roll of 11 + 8 (Attack Bonus) = 19 which is 5 over and so an added success on an attack check which increases the Blast Effect by 5.

Now the resistance target will be 27 (base 10 + 12 + 5) and an average roll for Justice will give us 11 + 12 (Toughness) = 23. That's a failure so he will be Hit + Dazed.

Clearly Vulnerable is a good thing to have on your side and outside of any powers it comes up when one is Surprised: "A surprised character is Stunned and Vulnerable, caught off-guard and unable to act. Surprised normally only lasts for one round." So there's one way to set things up in your favor.

It looks to me like combat could go on a bit but with those Hits stacking up on most attacks it should go quicker than 3E's combat. I do wonder about the effect of numbers now, both with a team of PC's attacking a single villain and with a group of mooks ganging up on one PC, and will that make for a significant impact in a fight.

Final point for today: One of the long time debates in 3E is over Defense versus Toughness. Many players thought Toughness was just better, as far as game effectiveness in 3E, and while that's not everything it did come up fairly frequently. Here's why: 

• Toughness is not reduced by Vulnerable or Defenseless Conditions
• Toughness is not ignored by Perception or Area Effects
• Toughness increase is 1/2 the PP cost of Dodge/Parry increase 

Most of these are still true. The only exception is that while an overall Defense is still 2 pts to Protection's 1 pt, you could raise either ranged or close defense for 1 pt per level. Despite this list remaining true I feel like the other adjustments to the way damage works alongside the Defensive Roll update should help balance this out. Against area effect attacks the 4E version of Evasion gives a +5 to avoid with 1 rank and "no damage on a success" with 2 ranks so there's another way to mitigate that. 

Defenseless is just bad for everyone, and Vulnerable is still mainly bad for Defense-shifted characters. The other consideration is that Vulnerable is still a first degree condition for the Affliction power so it's not too hard to land on someone. I'd say until I see a problem in-game that it's just something you need to be aware of.

That's all for now but I do want to try out some more combat examples. Look for that down the road a bit. Please feel free to check my math and thinking here too and let me know if you see something off.

Mutants & Masterminds 4th Edition Playtest - First Impressions

 

Alright I've read it. I haven't tried to run it yet or make a new character, I just compared some old ones and looked at possible changes but I need to dig in a little more and have some of my players update their old characters too, just to give it a workout. My short take is: it's an evolution, not a revolution.

It's more like 3E in my opinion than 3E was to 2E. I was thinking the loss of the Fighting and Dexterity stats was an indicator of larger changes but I don't feel like it turned out that way. There are a lot of smaller changes and adjustments and tweaks but the basic structure of the game and of characters is very similar. 

4th Edition Battlesuit Archetype

3rd Edition Battlesuit Archetype

Comparing the two you can see that it works pretty much the same way - both provide enhanced Protection , flight via boot jets, life support, radio comms, a sensor suite, some combat computer enhancements, and then a two-power array to throw power into either blaster beams or enhanced strength. Many of the point costs are quite similar and many of the ability scores are the same (and if you're wondering the number after the slash is the "out of the suit" number). The game is still a d20 + modifiers vs a target DC or a contest of rolls so the basic framework of the game is the same as well. You still have power levels and there are still limits related to it like Defense & Toughness needing to add up to PLx2. 

Now there are some differences:

•  Right up front Fighting and Dexterity have been shifted over into a different set of stats: Attack and Defense. Instead of a built-in split between Melee and Ranged capabilities here the default is now that you have one number for both. You can certainly split those up through various means to have a lower default and then a bonus on either Ranged or Melee or unarmed or a specific weapon type to have more of a focus for your character, but you don't have to. I actually do like this change as it will be simpler for someone new to see and I think it's just a clearer label overall. Who knew you could have a superhero game with one Offensive Combat Value and one Defensive Combat Value? 
• The defensive numbers are rearranged a bit. Toughness is still your damage save, and Fortitude/Dodge/Will are now strictly your other "saves". Parry goes away as you just use your Defense for your to-be-hit target now.
• Advantages have changed in many places too. 
• There are more types of advantages and each type can have some limitations or conditions. For example Heroic is a new class of Advantage and characters are limited to half Power Level in ranks of these - because they are more powerful.
• In 3E there was a set of combat maneuvers one could do - Accurate Attack to trade damage down to increase attack bonus, All-Out Attack to trade Defense for an attack bonus, its opposite Defensive Attack to trade hit bonus for improved defense, etc. - and these gave a +/-2, but if you took the related Advantage gave a +/-5.
  In 4E these maneuvers now just grant a straight-up +/-5, no Advantage needed, so these moves will be more consequential. Note that this is "up to +/-5", not automatically the maximum bonus. So the maneuvers are better and the Advantages related to them are gone.
• Defensive Roll is better now as it still adds +1 Toughness per rank but also gives the "no effects with a 2+ degrees of success" like Hardened (see below). You lose that extra when Vulnerable or Defenseless but keep the Toughness - unlike 3E. You do lose all of it when Stunned though so it's not a perfect replacement for pure Toughness which makes sense.
• Finally let's talk about Improvised Effect. This is a new one that is really the gateway to the variable power effects so many players love and so many GM's hate. The description is innocent enough: You can use a technical skill to prepare and use Improvised Effects. Now it's tied to one skill like Technology or Magic but you can take it more than once to cover more skills. This is a Heroic advantage so it is limited by PL but this is your gadget pool or magic crafting ability right here. Looking it over again I don't believe it requires any additional power points, like a pool, but it does calculate the points required and that does affect the skill roll needed to create and use the effect, plus they are only good for one scene, so this might be OK after all. That said, it's potentially a lot of flexibility for a highly skilled character for all of one point.
  
  

  

  Absolutely love this artwork

  
  
• For Powers the degree of change depends on the power. Some changed a great deal, some barely changed at all. You can see here that even the point costs are very similar for most of this character's powers. One significant change is with Protection and the options one can apply, so let's look at that one more closely:
• Protection itself is still a Permanent Defense so the default assumption is "armor" of some kind and it's +1 Toughness per rank. You can make it sustained instead if you want a more force-fieldy power, etc. But for Extras we now have Hardened, Impervious, and Impenetrable.
• Hardened: If the damage coming in is at or below your ranks of Hardened resistance then you roll two dice and take the highest - so basically our Battlesuit here in 4E has advantage on damage saves at rank 11 or less. I like that this is now an option. There is a second clause though: If you get two or more degrees of success on the save then you take no damage conditions including Hits, which is a new thing I will discuss below. I like this though -  something better than standard protection but not immune to a bunch of stuff.
• Impervious: This continues much like it did before where a character is just immune to incoming damage at or below their Impervious Protection rank. Note that last part - equal to or less than ... not half! Now it is capped at Power Level and it does cost 2 per rank instead of 1, but ridiculously resistant Bricks are certainly back! This one also has the "no effects with a 2+ degrees of success" like Hardened.
• Impenetrable: This is the same as Impervious but ignores Penetrating. Alright, let's look at that.
• There are several levels of defense in M&M. One of those is "Resistant" which means you take half of the damaging effect. "Fire Blast 10" is effectively "Fire Blast 5" to a Fire Resistant target.
• "Immune" means you are unaffected by attacks based on whatever you are immune to. If you are Immune to fire then "Fire Blast Whatever" means nothing to you.
• Except ... ranks of "Penetrating" ignore some of this. If our Battlesuit with Force Beams 12  shoots them at Dr. Impervious (Impervious Protection 15) he does nothing. If he upgrades to Force Beams 12 with 6 ranks of Penetrating and hits then Doc Impervious is going to be rolling to resist rank 6 damage - so a DC16 Toughness check. Penetrating doesn't add anything to your attack - it just ensures some of it gets through. Unless the target is Impenetrable  - then you are out of luck.
  
  You can add these modifiers on to your normal Toughness too -  you don't have to buy Protection to unlock them.
  
  Now you're not going to take all 3 of them on one character as they overlap. If our Battlesuit took Impervious 11 on their Protection then Hardness becomes redundant as it's giving you Advantage on a roll you're never going to make. Same with Impenetrable - it's the highest level of defense.
  
  Now you might take more than one to represent some kind of layered defense. Say, Protection 11 with Impervious for 6 ranks and then Hardened for 11 - that would mean you don't even have to roll against the smaller stuff, then you get Advantage up through the remaining ranks. I don't know that it's cost effective but it would still help against Penetrating attacks with the extra roll. Say you get hit with a Blast 5 (Penetrating 3). The Impervious 6 would normally stop it but Pen 3 means you have to roll against a DC13. Hardened would give you the extra d20 for that.
  
  By wording it would also give you the "2+ degrees of success = no damage conditions) as Penetrating specifically mentions negating only Resistance and Impervious but I'm not sure that's the intent.
  
  It's interesting. I suspect my Battlesuit player will be digging into all of this a lot.
  
  

  

  No not him ...

  
  
• Regeneration is one I've seen people complain about with 3E and in 4E it's a lot simpler. There is a table that lists what it does for each rank and I do really really like the clarity:
• Rank 1 is "Recover your least Severe Damage Condition every 10 rounds". 
• This improves by 1 round per rank until at Rank 10 you're dropping one every round, then it goes to multiple conditions removed per rank.
• Then at 15 you start recovering from being Dead in ever-decreasing increments of time up to Rank 20 where you recover from everything every turn. Nicely done Green Ronin! 
• Yes there is still a Variable Power, there are about two pages of discussion on it, and the described way of handling it is excellent. Unlike the Advantage this one is based on a pool of points. That said I will leave this one with the last sentence in the sidebar discussion for this power: In short, Variable is a “last resort” in power design, and the GM should treat it as such.

So lots of interesting changes without too much being drastically different. I do want to check on the Defense-is-inferior-to-Toughness debate as I'm still not sure about that one so let's work through a combat example tomorrow and see how it works now.

Supers on the Brain

 

All the M&M 4E talk sent me down a rabbit hole last week. Besides starting a re-read of the 3E rulebook and looking back through all of my other M&M books I started feeling the urge to check in on Champions, started poking around online and I ended up picking up the Hero Designer software and the Old School Enemies book that just came out which collects all of the entries from original Champions and Enemies I, II, & III and stats them up for 6th edition. This is just the kind of thing that lights the fires for sketching out a new campaign. I'm feeling pretty fired up about it right now. My players mostly haven't touched Champions since 4th edition so now I get to figure out whether it's smarter to go with 5E which is very close to 4th, or just go with the latest and greatest and use 6th.

For a short version of where Hero System/Champions stands there are roughly 4 generations ...

• Champions 1st-2nd-3rd pretty much were just building on the same framework and tweaking one design. This was before the concept of "Hero" as a system, not a set of similar but different games, had arisen. It's more loose, there are some holes and weird rules interactions here and there but it is totally playable as many of us ran many games back then.
• Champions 4th came out in 89 and was the big blue unifying rulebook that took many of us through the 90's. I suspect that popularity-wise this was the high water mark for the game as I knew multiple groups playing it then and there was a ton of support for it. One version even came with a character generator on a floppy to expedite character creation. I would run this today if someone wanted to. This is also where the game became part of the "Hero System" and the rules got unified. Some people did not like the changes here and stuck with the older editions and whatever house rules they had created - the first schism.
• Champions 5th and 5th Edition Revised (2002 & 2007) was a big black book that was very similar to 4th but with a lot of things more defined and more definitive language in general. It was less "fun" in some ways as a read and while it's a tighter ruleset it comes at a cost that was too much for some and this is a second break point among fans. This version was very well supported though - lots of cool and interesting books. The revised rulebook mainly added in examples - lots of examples.
• Champions 6th edition (2010) finally grew too large to be contained and was split into two books. I'd say this one has the biggest breaks from the past as it drops all figured characteristics - a signature feature of Champions in my opinion - the comeliness stat, certain powers - at least as separate powers, and just rearranges a lot of classic Champions features. Now I don't hate it but if you had been playing for 20+ years when this one came out it brought a lot of changes that not everyone was asking for - the third break among fans. 

So nowadays if anyone talks about a Hero or Champions game one of the first questions has to be "which edition?" and then the real conversation starts. Hero Designer thoughtfully includes both 5E and 6E so there is support for the two latest versions. If it did 4th I'd probably jump back there out of sheer nostalgia. Since I don't have a working floppy drive any more it's probably smarter to go with 5th or 6th so I can use the current application.

That leaves coming up with the actual campaign outline, regardless of mechanics. I think a short campaign is better to start but Champions takes enough initial investment that a one-shot would be kind of pointless so I'm thinking something with 3-6 sessions of "go" in it. Start small and expand as we go. I have a vision of a campaign with short bursts in the 40's, 60's, & 80's timejumping forward to each in turn to set up some history for the current day where the longer campaign would sit. It's probably too ambitious but I'm noodling on it for now. If I'm finally going to commit to a long term superhero game, why not make it something ambitious?

Even came with documentation right there in the book

This is also ignoring the imminent arrival of the M&M 4E playtest rules this weekend which will probably fire up this cycle all over again.

I just need more time! 

More to come. 

Mutants & Masterminds 4th Edition Announced

 

Well I suppose it was inevitable. It has been 15+ years since M&M 2E became M&M 3E (well, "DC Adventures, -then- M&M3) and that's a ridiculously long run for one edition of an RPG.

I thought Cam Banks' comments were funny so I left them in

I am happy to see something new that's big for M&M as it's been slow to quiet for a long time in the new product department. Some renewed activity should be a lot of fun. I am also very happy that Steve K is running it. I am a fan of his work.

That said I am heavily invested in 3rd Edition and I am not all that excited at buying a 4th iteration of the Freedom City sourcebook, or an expanded powers book, or a villain sourcebook if it's just a reprint of all the villains we already have and know. I have everything they printed for 2E and 3E and both of those are flat-out comprehensive rulesets for running a superhero campaign. I'm not sure what a new edition is going to improve and I hope they have some good new ideas to share and we are not going to see the same set of books we already have with some slightly tweaked mechanics.

There were some mechanical things in 3rd that could benefit from some adjustment - the effectiveness of Toughness versus Defense is a big one. I always thought a "revised 3E" rulebook could have probably taken care of those kinds of wrinkles. I recall SK stating years ago that if he did ever do a new edition that he would go back to pre-built powers in the core book and save the power building for a separate book - like 2nd Edition - and agree with that choice. It's bound to be confusing for people looking for an Energy Blast power or a Web power being directed over to the "Damage" or the "Affliction" powers. From a design perspective it makes a lot of sense but from the "intuitive" sense it's a little trickier. I've seen a rumor that they are doing away with Dexterity and Fighting as separate stats and presumably going back to Agility as the baseline? That would be a move back towards the D&D standard ability spread which is probably smart in the "D&D is everything" environment we live in now and it worked for 2nd Edition so it's probably fine.

I guess that's at the heart of any trepidation I have over a 4th edition: Are we doing this because we have some great ideas to make the game better after 15 years of publishing and tinkering with it? Or are we looking for a cash flow bump? There's nothing wrong with that in general but it's not a great reason to reboot a game line - for the players, anyway. For now I will trust this team, based on their excellent track record, that they are doing this for the right reasons.

Oh look, there are some notes going around the internet:

... and one more interesting bit of news:

Ongoing projects like the Event Horizon and the Vigilantes Handbook are still launching for 3rd Edition, serving as the final curtain call for a long and beloved era. Event Horizon will even offer GMs the opportunity to end their 3E campaign with a Crisis on Infinite Earths-style cataclysm or a seamless pivot into 4E.

For me this does add some urgency to getting that next campaign going. I've worked in a fair amount of superhero gaming the last ten-twenty years but it's mostly been short runs and one-offs with M&M, Icons, Marvel Heroic, Marvel Superheroes, and Marvel Multiverse. I haven't run a sustained super-campaign in a long time and I feel like this is signaling to me that this is a good time to really get my hands dirty with 3E for an extended time before the new version comes out. Now to figure out how to incorporate Time of Crisis into this ...

One last early plea: Put the Knockback rules back in the core book as a standard thing - it's too iconic of a comic book thing to make them optional! 

Green Ronin's Valiant Adventures RPG Kickstarter - Uses M&M

 

So this is similar to what GR did with DC Adventures years ago - a specific-universe game using M&M rules. That seems like a good idea for me and might bring some additional attention to M&M. Here's a link to the Kickstarter.

Looks like they are doing it as 2 books (rulebook + setting book) plus a GM kit at this point which I would say is perfectly legit as an approach. Steve Kenson is the designer so I am confident it will be decent and live up to the "fully compatible with M&M 3E"  statement. They have made their goal now so it's happening for sure. 

I will say I'm not a huge Valiant fan - I've tried to get into some of their books before and it never really took but as an M&M supplement in effect I am interested. It mentions they have access to Valiant's art files so it should like like it's supposed to look as well. 

There is a free quickstart PDF out on GR's Site and DTRPG too - I will review and post something here soon. 

Aaron Allston's Strike Force

 

This is an updated version of the original Strike Force from 1988 and is the product of a Kickstarter drive in 2016. I made a post about the original over ten years ago and thought very highly of it. With a newer version out there I figured it was high time I looked it over too.

Some straight-up comparisons:

• The original was a 96 page softcover while this one is a 256 page hardcover. Both are available in PDF.
• The original was black and white while the newer book has some use of color in layout and illustrations. It's not a Mutants and Masterminds book but it's not B&W either.  
• The Strike Force campaign kept running so while the original covers the first 6-7 years of the campaign this one includes information on what happened after that from AA's own notes.

So right there if you're interested in how an original superhero campaign progressed, well, there's a lot to explore. For one there was an alien invasion and then a third world war which had the heroes helping to rebuild the war  - here was a man who was not afraid to shake things up! I've preached for a long time that you have to be willing to let your PC's leave a mark on the world and here is a strong example of where that can go. Throughout this campaign there is dimension-hopping, space exploration, alien invasions, alternate earths causing trouble ... a bunch of comic book tropes used and explored and making permanent impacts on the world. This new edition covers another two decades of play so it is definitely worth a look for that. 

"Bolo"

There is a big section on the heroes and villains of the campaign. It took up roughly 50 pages in the original and it's around 100 in this one. In many ways this is the least valuable chapter in the book for me as the value in this book is less about Hero System stats and more about how the campaign as a whole worked over time. That said this also includes bios for most of the characters and those can help one make sense of the interplay between characters and the changes over time. For example, one of the early Dr. Doom-ish villains slowly moves away from world domination and by the end is more of a scientific benefactor aiding the heroes and the world in general - not something we see in a lot of superhero stories where some things need to be constant but totally applicable to an ongoing RPG campaign. For the major heroes it shows their Champions character sheet at the beginning of the campaign and then their updated sheet at the end of the campaign which could be interesting for Champions players and GMs.

Other interesting campaign material includes the expected timeline, discussion of major events, how magic works, how technology fits in and has changed over time, secret lands, major organizations, some secret societies, other dimensions, other earths, and alien races and empires. This all fleshes out the big picture side of the campaign with about 50 pages of totally steal-able ideas. The breakdown of magic in particular is a great example of laying the ground work for things by setting some boundaries and some common language while still staying fairly flexible. 

Kestrel

The last big chunk of the book is how Aaron set up a campaign, how he kept it going and kept people happy, and his advice on solving problems that can arise in a campaign. This is where much of the blue-booking discussion and the player archetypes discussion happen which are two of the things Strike Force is most known for. As an example of the contributions of others involved Steve Kenson gives some excellent advice on blue-booking in the age of smart phones and tablets. There is a lot of good, useful information here and the best thing about it is that it comes from actual play experience - not theory!

The only disappointment here is that a) it is a summary in many places of the campaign, not an actual-play recounting of the games and b) many known superheroes and things from other IP universes - like Battlestar Galactica - were used in the campaign, especially early on, and those have to be renamed when mentioned here so it's not always totally clear who was interacting with who (the real who) at times. The good thing is that the raw package of Aaron's notes is available apparently though I have not gone that far myself yet.

So yes, I would recommend this 100% if you've never read the original. While some of these concepts have leaked into RPG guidance in general it's still great to see them all in one place and there are undoubtedly at least a few concepts you will want to take home.

If you have the original it's a little more complicated. Did you like that book? If you didn't like it then this may not change your opinion. If you did, well, this book is a lot of what was in there, plus more. I have the original and I still bought it in hard copy and I have no regrets.

Skyrocket

I see a lot of "GM Advice" products out there now, since PDFs and DTRPG have made it where anyone can run 15 sessions of D&D 5E and call themselves an Expert Gamemaster. This is the opposite of those products - decades of running games distilled into one book. At this point in my gaming career I don't rate most of the advice I see out there as I've been playing longer than many of the advice-givers have been alive. I need a track record to pay any attention to this kind of thing. Take it from me, this guy had one hell of a track record.

If you're actually running a game, or planning to, and would like to see how someone else actually ran a game, this is probably the best written example there is.

Some links:
(these are not affiliate links, I don't do that. They are just here for informational purposes)

• Original Strike Force PDF
• New Strike Force PDF
• The Strike Force Archives (original campaign material)
• M&M character files for Hero lab
• Champions character files for Hero Designer

There are supposed to be character files for Icons and Savage Worlds as well but I am not sure where to find those.

Superhero RPG Roundup Part 2 - The Multiverse of Superhero RPGs

 

Given the opportunity to start a new superhero campaign I dove into the deep end and ran through a bunch of games I own and checked into a few I did not. Part 1 of this covered the Marvel Superhero options as I do love the old warhorse and there are a lot of options out there built around that chassis. 

Beyond that though there are many other games in this genre. I hit most of the big ones in my exploration so I thought I would share some thoughts on each in this post.

• First up, Mutants and Masterminds: In my mind this is the current standard for superhero RPGs and has been for more than a decade. Third edition is thorough and expansive game system with a unified mechanic that is fairly simple to run in play, options for point-build and random character generation, and supplement books to assist with deeper options in almost any area you can think of - powers, gadgets, locations, running a super team, cosmic campaigns, supernatural campaigns, adventures ... pretty much any area of running a game has extra material available if you want it. It's a great game and one I have run multiple times previously.
  
  For this campaign it was a strong contender but I decided to try something new. I will run this again, maybe later this year, but for now I chose "new" over familiar.

• Second, Champions - my first superhero RPG and one that still lives in my head whenever we get to discussing them even 40 years later. It works and works well if you want to have all the details. People fuss about math in this game but once you build your character the math is mostly "do I have enough dice to throw for this attack?" rather than anything particularly complicated. I love it and I have players with some experience with it and the current Champions Complete is the best version of it to be released in years.
  
  Despite this we will only be playing this game once a month and introducing some new players to Hero system when playing on that schedule is just not the best idea in my opinion. I'd love to run it and I will make an effort to do so but it's not the best choice for this campaign

• Next up - ICONS - lord knows I have talked about ICONS enough on this blog over the years. It's a great game with a ton of support that plays fast and is very good at letting your players focus on what they are doing in the game rather than how the rules work. Bits of MSH, bits of FATE, elements of M&M ... all combine to make for a really good game that can handle a wide range.
  
  For this campaign I was very tempted to use ICONS but in the end as mentioned above I decided to try something new. ICONS will be back in the rotation at some point as I have a couple of players that have never tried it but for this one I decided to go in a different direction.
  
  
  

• Savage Worlds - I am running a Deadlands game now and there is a shiny new Super Powers Companion that just came out so it would make some sense to run a Savage Supers campaign now. The new book is solid  - these things have really evolved since they were basically the powers chapter of Necessary Evil with some additional material added in. They have gotten further and further away from the standard SW approach of "powers cost ongoing power points" which is fine for wizards and mad scientists but does not work well for superheroes with permanent abilities so it's a welcome change - it's basically a point buy system for powers now. It is not as comprehensive as some of the other games but a lot of that is because it's a supplement to a game system and not a self-contained game in itself. I'll have a separate review of this one soon.
  
  As much as it would make sense to use this option - especially since I was considering a WW2 supers game and I have the Weird War 2 book as well making this really easy to run - I ended up deciding to hold off. My main concern is running two games in Savage Worlds in parallel at different power levels and possibly making one feel "less" than the other. There's also the danger of making them feel too "samey" using the same rules for two different games. I will need something to run after Deadlands and I'd say Savage Supers would be a good fit when that day comes so that's probably where it will come into play.
  
  

• Finally I looked at the Sentinel Comics RPG. I had run one of the starter kit adventures a few years ago and it was cool though some of the concepts were tricky coming in cold. I did the Kickstarter and had the rulebook and the GM kit but had not really dived in with an eye towards running it until now. There's a lot of Marvel Heroic (Cortex) in there but it's not just a clone.
  
  For example you're only going to be rolling 3 dice in your pool - a power, a quality, and your status dice which is a new concept that sort of replaces the solo/buddy/team element in MHR.  This status is determined by a Green/Yellow/Red system which has two tracks. One is your health - as your character takes damage they begin "Green" then move into Yellow at a certain point and then finally into Red as they take more and more damage. There is also the Scene Tracker which replaces the Doom Pool from MHR with a fixed countdown by round that moves through a G/Y/R sequence to show things escalating automatically - no die manipulation necessary. So your status die is determined by the current "color" (some may progress upward d6-d8-d10, some downward, and some may be steady) and also some of your powers are gated by this as well - the biggest bangs are only available when things turn red, for example. 
  
  This is a great concept that really anchors certain tropes into the mechanics. There are a lot of changes like this where things that were somewhat abstract in MHR become more defined and set and I would say more intuitively playable. I'll do a longer review later but there is so much clever stuff in here that I had to give it a go so it will be our system for this next campaign.
  
  

So, more to come on all of this. More in-depth reviews of some of these books and some session summaries as well. So far 2023 is a pretty good year here. 

My Mutants and Masterminds Kickstarter Conundrum

 

So Green Ronin is running a kickstarter to get a bunch of M&M 3E books back into print. That's a good thing, happy to see it. One complication is that I already own all of the books, including multiple copies of the main rulebook. Well maybe they're putting out something new too as part of this ... (looks through campaign description and stretch goals) ... nope. Wait - they are publishing two new novels -set in the M&M setting I guess? This creates a bit of a conflict for me.

I really want to support this - the game, the company, and the creators have all done a great job and have been doing it for 20 years now. I like the rules, I like the setting, and I like the presentation. I think it's the best all-around supers RPG you can buy.  I figured I was contributing by picking up a copy of everything they cranked out as it was released. I've even bought a few extra copies over the years and handed them out to friends when I was getting ready to run a game. 

Not kidding here- that's the M&M shelf

This kickstarter though ... I was in on the 10th anniversary book ten years ago and it was excellent. It was also something new and significant. It's still one of my favorite RPG books ever. Unfortunately there is nothing like that in this effort. It is all reprints of existing material. Well, except the novels -let's talk about the novels.

They've put out a couple of novels previously. I don't own them. I am truly not that interested in superhero novels. If you were going to take that approach how about a novelization of, say, Centurion's story? Maybe the Terminus Invasion? The birth of the Freedom League? These are all background events of significance in the Freedomverse's history and would probably make for a decent story. Instead we get characters we don't know and it sounds like, at least partially, settings we don't know ... so why are these the only new effort in an M&M kickstarter? What do they have to do with the setting and the game? 

Continuing the questioning, why are we doing novels at all? For a superhero game why are we not doing some comic books? A graphic novel? Champions had a limited series  30+ years ago! City of Heroes had several comic book runs! It's the preferred medium for the genre, the dominant one, and a successful one for over 80 years - doesn't that seem like something worth exploring? Maybe even one worth its own KS initiative!

Tier pricing is a little iffy to me too. At 15$ you get one of the novels and for 25$ you get both. The game books start at 40$ for one and but at 100$ you get the three main ones they want to renew which is the core book, power profiles, and the gadget guide. That's not a terrible deal and that may be where I end up if I jump in. There's no PDF-only option - all the game books are for print and PDF both.

So I'm a little torn here. I know superhero RPGs are a niche of a niche and there are a ton of challenges in making them. I want to help but I'd really like something new to spend money on as the incentive. 

Anyway they're getting close to hitting their goal and if you're at all interested the Deluxe Hero's Handbook is definitely worth picking up if you don't have it. I'll probably post here again when it's over and share what I end up doing.