Mutants and Masterminds

I don't know shit about Dr Horrible, but I've been GMing a 3e game for about 4 months. The system is super malleable and can be used for just about any setting, but I would only recommend it to groups that don't care too much about crunch. If you mostly care about rolling dice and doing numbers to dudes it can get pretty damn boring, since the combat mechanics are really homogenous.

How does the system work?

I have a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure game starting in two weeks. Super excited to see what shenanigans happen.

Heretek, of course. So both!

This. Just remember the golden rules of DMing M&M

1
> Read over players character sheets have them explain what their powers do. Be hyper-vigilant, the system can be trivially broken by munchkins

2.
>Its ok to fuck with the players as long as you give them hero points for it. Give out hero points to have stuff fail so the plot works. Have comic book ends of act 1s - i.e. the players get beaten the first time they fight - as long as you give em hero points and let them use them + new found knowledge of the bad guy's weakness in the next round.

3.
>make sure the PCs are interesting. They need motivations and weaknesses. Go buy the "would you want to read a comic book about this PC?" maxim

4.
>Make sure the player's know all of the above, and know the type of cape-game you're going to run. You don't want a team of 4 dark loners. You don't want a Punisher in your silver age goofery. You don't want a magical girl in your gritty cyber punk game. You dont want Super-man in your street-level game, etc.

>TFW I'm playing a cowl, like Batman, only he actively hates his city and is attempting to lure the gangs into a war that wipes them all out.

He's basically a supervillain, but his psychosis is directed against the criminals that ruined his life.

Works like most d20 systems accept for damage/HP.
Roll a d20 for everything. If you hit, the target makes a save against by rolling + adding their relevant defense against the attacker's damage + 15. If they beat this total your attack bounces off. If they fail you injure them making further checks harder, and by every 5 points you beat them by they get additional status ailments until they fail by 15 or more and or killed/KO'd. It seeks to replicate the back-forth of a comic fight that ends with a quip and final shot. When it works its tense, when it doesn't its a slog through nothingness, but works more often than not.

For status effects like webbing/mind control/fear gas its works a similar degrees of failure. Like fail your reflex check against wbbing, you're slowed, fail by 5 and your immobilized, fail by 10 and you can take no actions, fail by 15 and you're helpless and can be coup de graced.

Characters work on a point buy system. 150 points is power level 10, which is good for avengers type stuff and is seen as the average. 5-8 is street level. 15 is high end, and 20 is gods.

The action point system is called hero points. You get additional ones for getting screwed by plot devices, or having your weaknesses attacked. Makes for fun story-telling when stuff like "your aquaguy is attacked by a lighting-man", and you take extra damage from electricity and are Ko'd and caputed. But later, when you wake up in the death trap, you use your hero point to edit the scene, and have a pitcher of water near the trap-controls, which you use your powers tip over and short out the trap and escape. Or the GM has you run out of web fluid in the middle of the fight, so you use your hero point to make sure your next punch destroys the goblin glider so you're both stuck on the ground. Or you miss out on the last fight because if you are tardy to class one more time you'll lose your scholarship. Etc.

Discuss your characters, Veeky Forums.

>You don't want a Punisher in your silver age goofery. You don't want a magical girl in your gritty cyber punk game. You dont want Super-man in your street-level game, etc.

And this is how I know you don't read comics. Even the most serious of serious business cape comic has an air of "..hell, why not?"

Bump?

Goddamn, I would be pretty upset to discover this.

>talks about Silver Age
>posts Golden Age
>complains that other people aren't as big of comic book nerds

Don’t know who Dr Horrible is but I have played M&M twice, and wacky shenanigans ensued both times.

Okay so we accidentally broke the game a couple of times, but if you are playing M&M right, it doesn't matter. Remember that the DM has fiat to make you fail or screw up AS THE STORY REQUIRES, and you get a hero point to compensate you.

For me the first stand out moment was a throw away one liner made by my character.
He was a mutant with obscene strength, specialised at grappling, and who could echolocate through walls. All the way through people kept telling him he wasn't human. He kept arguing that he was.
Final Bossfight, Alien BBEG monologing ends with "and there is nothing you puny humans can do to stop us!"
My guy has been working his way around behind the BBEG, in a different room. Bursts through the wall shouts "They keep telling me I am not human, lets see!" Spends his hero points and extra actions to grab & grapple and then break the BBEG.

The Second was in the next campaign, about a third of the way in. We were engaging in shenanigans involving reinstating ancient mystical sigils, to seal some evil entity inside a stone Monolith. None of us were enchanters or mages of any kind but I was a superscientist, so we made a super-science-magic-bubble-jet, to replicate them. But the originals had been painted by Zen Monks, and the full seal required the replacements were too.
Eventually we found a Zen Buddhist monk, got him out of bed in the middle of the night, and teleported him across the country to come turn our printer on for us.

Damnit, I want to play M&M now.

I played it back in high school with a couple of my buddies. We had a really lighthearted, Dr. McNinja style game. My friend and I played two characters with the same name arguing over who got to keep it. I was a lobster man in a leather jacket with a sonic guitar, he was a geomancer with a granite claw. We both went by Rock Lobster.

It was a neat. We fought a gang of brother-cousin hillbillies led by Floaty O'Brian, the Brain Hick.

Is it at all possible to represent a musical in a tabletop game?

>You don't want a Punisher in your silver age goofery
Unless one of your players want to laugh at how the world twists in absurd ways to deny him his edge.

You should definitely watch it, the whole thing's only about half an hour.

However, you may become TWIGGERED because I guess one of the actors is in a PWOBWEMATIC webshow or something. I don't know, but that's usually the biggest complaint about it.

How do you mean?

The actor who plays Dr. Horrible's love interest was (is?) on some web show about D&D.

It angers a lot of people on Veeky Forums because she's a pretty girl who plays D&D and is popular.

I actually only know Felicia Day from Dr. Horrible. I knew she was in some other things, but not what.

>I actually only know Felicia Day from Dr. Horrible. I knew she was in some other things, but not what.
Same.

She was in The Guild.

I feel a bit embarrassed to say this but I'm trying to work out how to invent a new sense using supersenses (M&M 2e) and the wording is getting me a tad confused. I'd appreciate a little help here if possible.

The idea is for a blind geomancer, who can use their connection to the world about them to act just as easily as if they were sighted. Obviously that means I want Blindsight (And likely Radius as it's a general sense rather than sight)

However, I'm trying to work out if it would be Detect or Awareness to get the sense in the first place. While the sense IS magical, it's not detecting magic. It's detecting the physical world like a mental version of vision.

bump

The example is still sound because "Punisher thrawted by being in the wrong series" is more charlie the unicorn.

...

She apparently values herself at 5 grand a weekend. Plus travel expenses, food and accommodation.

Is it possible to create pic related with Mutants and Masterminds?

Just ran a small quick start session and i got goosebumps from how cool it was

You really can do anything. Just run your made up flaws past the GM first.

this was in wild talents, but still

I made a rock, with the ability to mind control anyone who touched it. It wasn't able to read the person's mind, and immediately went away as soon as contact with Rock was lost,

and on top of that rock without a host was just a rock. Had no perception, no ability to move, and was surprisingly fragile.

Personality wise, he was just a kind of tag along kind of guy. just happy to stretch his legs and see the world for a bit.

He managed to keep a boss controlled for a solid 5 sessions, which was pretty cool

I'm playing a cripple in a robot suit from the future. It's pretty neat.

Why didn't he get himself implanted into someone's body?

I'm playing a 'collateral damage queen' style magical girl whose power is four deadly, nearly-indestructible ribbons of forcefield. They're statted up like extra limbs, with linked projection, multiattack, enhanced strength and combat. That's normally pretty cool... But then I gave them linked enlongate and linked remote sight (With the tips of the ribbons as a medium), so she can search entire buildings by slithering them under doors and such.

Theoretically, I can deal more damage than the power level normally allows... By picking someone up, enlongating straight up, and letting go.

in short? He would get bored of hosts really quickly. him not having a host was only a problem for the party, he actually left the party cause the constant activity was too much for him. (He was used to only having a host for a day or two every century or so)

You mean like literally a rock? Like a normal rock. Tell us his story

I mean it's nothing grand.

The set up was pretty basic, we were a group of super thieves trying to gather info on these biker type guys so actual heavy hitters wouldn't be going in blind when the fight broke out.

The party consisted of the talents (system term for super) Canary gasshaft, appraisal, alarm, doctor boom, seg_fault, and rock (me).

Respectively, the powers were danger sense that gave info as to the nature of the danger, touch based info dumps of wildly varying usefulness, the ability to set triggered alerts (would tell him when certain things happen) that could be rigged to things he touched as well, healing grenades who could selectively effect targets (including the environment, hurt bad, heal good essentially), sort of technomancer with caveats, and the rock that lived vicariously.

Rock had become "aware" around the early 1800's, and had only had about 30 or so hosts before the group found him on one of their heists. Enough where he knew the basics of being a person, and how to blend in, but was still really off if you payed him too much attention.

It was the little things he would screw up on. Like not being able to do more than surface level conversation, or forgetting to change facial expressions, and the dullness he tended towards.

anyway the story began with him having taken control of Appraisal while the guy was trying to get a read on Rock. The group wanted to figure out why what seemed to be an average rock was in the same vault as super viruses and "weird" artifacts (items that contained powers).

Well the paranoid group of super thieves reacted about as well as you think they would, and canary promptly wrecked my shit (he was a big guy, and surprisingly armored), and I threw myself at a passing security guard to escape.

It was at this moment that the party realized that I would be fucking amazing at infiltration if fed the right info, and appraisals power told him that I was basically an ok... thing. (ctd)

ctd
I could go on if you want to know how the whole biker plot worked out, and let me know if I wasn't clear on stuff. I've never really told a story like this before

IS the rock a stone person or is the rock a autistic dwayne johnson jr?

Both would be way cooler than what I did.

Rock is literally just an oversized piece of gravel, He's actually a rock. like you'd find on the side of the road. barely larger than a piece of gravel

to clarify, if someone touches rock, basically their mind gets overwritten by rock's until contact is broken. rock is semi-sentient without a host, just enough to realize time is passing

>tfw everything you ever

I think that post is mainly talking about a player issue and not a character one. If you want to run a goofy game and you have guy that insists on playin Ennius era punisher one of you going to be disappointed unless you both understand are shooting for the comedy that comes from that kind of juxtaposition

Just to be clear, Neil Patrick Harris is gay, and Felicia day is hack.

Current party consists of
>Santa's dead beat son
>tattoo artists who can peel her tattoos off and have them come to life
>Bigfoot is a super scientist but mainly focused on 1990s era 'save the rainforest and the ice caps'
>American Hercules
>dishonored eggplant themed sentsi ranger

Honestly the eggplant ranger is my favorite. His player is doing a great job of anime-comics culture shock. Like he keeps asking the other other characters why they don't shout the names of their special attacks, and is trying to convince them to let him choreograph a group pose and intro monologue for use before every fight. It's great

Witch Doctor character who uses magical masks to access different power sets of various spirits. Baseline he's voodoo tough and can resurrect in a few days when given the proper treatment.

Alternatively, when I GM I use a Boss Hogg style crooked businessman/land-owner in Louisiana, about Kingpin size but can turn into a fuck-huge gator.

It actually bothers me nph as a kid that nph always seemed to be in a straight romance, even the music meister.

I am not demanding he only does gay roles but until Olaf I haven't seen him get to just play a dude not sexually interested in people. It's always a plot point.

That seems pretty reasonable to me. She may only be a B- or C-list celebrity, but between the time costs involved in preparation and travel, it's still a decent amount of work for her. It's about the same as what you'd pay for, say, a good wedding photographer.

How's your cowl different from the Punisher?

But don't you know its morally wrong to ask for more money than some hypothetical client feels you deserve? And always remember, when its big money in the eyes of a NEET, its big money in the eyes of the world.

I assume he's more focused on gadgets and plots than small-arms and windowless vans

>just to be clear, that actor is actually acting in that movie, and he isn't actually a superscientist who kills people, just to be clear

Thanks user, I was sure Neil Patrick Harris was actually trying to ask Felicia Day out on a date but was stopped by Nathan Fillion until you posted that.

what's the point then?

Educate yourselves.
youtube.com/watch?v=Of9kHpCv1ts

vimeo.com/42254051

Could this be done with everyone taking turns as Italian Spiderman per scene change and tossing obstacles in his way when they're not the main PC?

Might make his awesome/incoherent power suite a bit more mechanically sound.

Bump

why bump? is there a specific thing you're looking for?

He's more a pulp hero like the Shadow and the Spider than he is like Batman, but has it right.

Sorry, I meant to quote this guy: .

I just wanted more people to watch the blog.

this made me angry. I run M&M regularly and would have loved to have Jackal in my group

Can you guys help me name the third facet of my alternate form array? I'm playing a cowl, and I'm putting different skills and feats in different alternate forms to save on points.

I have Brains (Knowledge skills, as well as various inventor feats and mental Quickness), Brawn (combat skills and feats), and a third alternate form filled with skills and feats that help my character get around undetected.

I'm just not sure what to call that final array. I'd like it to start with a 'B' to fit the pattern, but I can't think of a fitting word.

Do you guys have any ideas?

Nothing comes to mind. Do they have to be B words? Is there a thematic reason? If not, maybe you change Brains and Brawn to something else.

Even if you did find the right B word, it would have to be a Br like Brass to sound cool and not out of place.

I suppose they don't have to be 'Br' words.

Do you have other suggestions?

Well I can't think of anything that sounds clever, just basic shit like Strength Smarts Stealth.

Its hard to work in the third one because Stealth is much less broad of a concept that Strength and Intellect. Maybe you want to find a good word for your stealth one first and work from there.