Jab’s Power Profiles: Deleted 2nd Edition Powers- Ward! Area Effects!

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Jabroniville
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Jab’s Power Profiles: Deleted 2nd Edition Powers- Ward! Area Effects!

Post by Jabroniville »

JAB'S POWER PROFILES:
* Welcome to an all-new thread! This one is based off of one Squirrelly-Sama created many moons ago, where he looked at the various powers in Mutants & Masterminds and tried to figure out if anything was wrong with any of them, and which ones could be fixed. I found it very fascinating, but it was a LOT of work and it stopped after a point. My intention here is to see how far I can go with it, and hopefully draw some interest and commentary from others. This will be updated MUCH less frequently than my other threads so power discussion won't be buried.

POWERS:
* Affliction
* Blast
* Burrowing
* Comprehend
* Communication
* Concealment
* Create
* Damage
* Dazzle
* Deflect
* Duplication
* Element Control
* Elongation
* Energy Aura
* Energy Control
* Enhanced Trait
* Environment
* Extra Limbs
* Feature
* Flight
* Force Field
* Growth
* Healing
* Illusion
* Immortality
* Immunity
* Insubstantial
* Invisibility
* Leaping
* Luck Control
* Magic
* Mind Reading
* Mimic
* Morph
* Move Object
* Movement
* Movement- Dimension Travel
* Movement- Environmental Adaptation
* Movement- Permeate
* Movement- Safe Fall
* Movement- Slithering
* Movement- Space Travel
* Movement- Sure-Footed
* Movement- Swinging
* Movement- Time Travel
* Movement- Trackless
* Movement- Wall-Crawling
* Movement- Water-Walking
* Nullify
* Power Lifting
* Protection
* Quickness
* Regeneration
* Remote Sensing
* Senses
* Shapeshift
* Shrinking
* Sleep
* Snare
* Speed
* Strike
* Suffocation
* Summon
* Super-Speed
* Swimming
* Teleport
* Transform
* Variable
* Weaken

EXTRAS & FLAWS:
* Area Effects
* Feats
* Extras
* Drawbacks
* Flaws
* Devices

Deleted 2nd Edition Powers:
* The Afflictions
* Anatomic Separation
* Area Effects
* Array
* Boost
* Confuse
* Container
* Density
* Dimensional Pocket
* Immovable
* Mind Shield
* Power Reserve
* Probability Control
* Spinning
* Super-Senses
* Super-Strength
* Suspended Animation
* Telelocation
* Trip
* Troubleseeker
* Ward
Last edited by Jabroniville on Thu Oct 26, 2023 3:51 am, edited 66 times in total.
Jabroniville
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Power Overview

Post by Jabroniville »

POWER OVERVIEW:
-So since this is a point-buy system, the cost of powers is of paramount importance. So it's important right away to nail down what points are actually "worth", as this defines what other abilities are worth.

One Point:
-In the M&M system, one point is seen as worth:

* One rank of hitting power.
* One rank of toughness.
* Doubling your lifting strength.
* Doubling your non-aerial movement speed.
* Adding a single Advantage or Feature (typically a small bonus like Increased Mass) to your character.
* Two ranks of any skill.
* One basic Sense, or increasing the range of a pre-existing one.
* One rank of Concealment in a non-visual sense.

Most of these are GENERALLY within reason of being close to each other, and are the bottom-tier stuff. One issue is that as the ranks get higher, certain things are less "worth" it- most movement-based powers don't really see much benefit from Rank 12-20 the way hitting power would, for instance.

Two Point:
-Two points are seen as worth:

* One rank in any of your Abilities.
* One rank of Flight speed or Teleport distance.
* Making any close-in power Ranged (such as a Blast or Affliction).

These are sort of close in importance, though others are not (much debate can be had about Abilities, especially onces like Awareness or Presence). Generally speaking, this means that any power that costs more should generally be even BETTER than all-important things like hitting power.

I will divide all the powers into four different broad groups- Movement Powers, Physical powers (ones that typically benefit your own body), Damage powers (blasts, afflictions, weaken, etc.) and Others. This'll let me go into the finer points of each one. I hope everyone can add in their own commentary here and there!

The Template I'm using:

POWER NAME:
Effect:
(I describe what the effect does, and what it costs)
Who Uses It?: (more or less which characters use it- usually comic book characters, but other uses for it, like with animals, vehicles, etc.)
Extras & Flaws: (the ways the game allows you to modify it- what's typical in comics and the genre itself)
Related Stuff: (powers that are often used in tandem)

How Effective Is It?: (the controversial stuff- detailing if it's cost-effective or broken; "auto-takes" may be OVERLY good, too)
Fixing It?: (if it's broken in a bad way, how I would go about improving it)
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Movement-Based Powers

Post by Jabroniville »

MOVEMENT-BASED POWERS:
-Movement powers are all handily set under one heading, as the book gives you a ton of options just for enhanced speed. As the main original superhero, Superman, was defined by his "ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound", this has been a long-standing thing that differentiates superheroes from other, ordinary protagonists. Flight became a common power even in the 1940s (Superman soon mimicking Captain Marvel by gaining it himself).

These powers are good enough that when I recruited for my game long ago, I noticed EVERY BUILD had a movement power built in- but often only a couple ranks. Super-strong guys throwing in Leaping, others adding Speed, etc. Just rank 1-2 stuff, but it was so common I immediately realized players were gaming the system a bit to prevent one of the usual problems- characters being unable to close distance. In M&M, this can cause you to miss out on fights or fail to back up your buddies. So it made sense for people to toss in a couple ranks of speed onto their builds just to remove this problem. In this case, all movement powers are INCREDIBLY useful in small amounts, almost to the point of being "auto-takes" in an effective build.

"Speed" is the basic movement-based power, costing 1 point per rank, and we see right away that it uses the "Rank & Measurements" table at the front of the book. One thing I notice through everything is that most of the powers come back to this somehow, and it's the root of a lot of the tiny issues that creep up in the system. I get WHY they did it- it's incredibly efficient to have everything under one section- from time to distance to mass. You just shift gears here and there to increase the size and distance of everything and you're done. Very handy! Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuut because they largely set themselves to measuring everything via distance DOUBLING, it causes a major problem throughout all the powers- because when you get right down to it, doubling 32,000 mph to 64,000 mph is really not that big a deal in the game, yet it costs an extra point (TWO if Flying)- the higher your rank, the less it matters than you're faster than the one in front of you, so Speed rapidly loses its cost-effectiveness once you hit the speed of sound or so (Speed 8). This gets especially bad with Flight, which costs double your land speed.

Most things in here are "Speed But Better/Worse", with Speed relating to Burrowing & Swimming (both of which are pricier by a couple ranks), Flight (double cost). Movement is its own thing with a variety of small effects, a few related to Teleport, which is a huge mix of complicated Extras & Flaws. Quickness doubles your activity speed, and Leaping simply crosses distance while kinda ignoring time.

The Powers:
* Speed
* Burrowing
* Swimming
* Flight
* Movement (these will be weighed separately)
* Teleport
* Leaping
* Quickness
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles!

Post by RainOnTheSun »

Pricing Flight and Teleport is tricky because the first rank gives you so much more than any of the subsequent ranks do. Buying Speed or Quickness or Leaping makes your character better at things they could already do, but one rank of Flight or Teleport expands their mobility in enormous, fundamental ways. But every rank has to cost the same amount to keep the system simple.
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles!

Post by Jabroniville »

RainOnTheSun wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 8:52 am Pricing Flight and Teleport is tricky because the first rank gives you so much more than any of the subsequent ranks do. Buying Speed or Quickness or Leaping makes your character better at things they could already do, but one rank of Flight or Teleport expands their mobility in enormous, fundamental ways. But every rank has to cost the same amount to keep the system simple.
Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyup. A more "fair" system would probably charge out the nose for a couple ranks in either, and then charge incremental amounts for later bits.

Most of this is less important when doing builds of official characters for as NPCs, but for PCs where points are a big deal, it's quite unfortunate that such issues exist.

Has anyone else noticed the "Auto-Take" phenomenon with low-cost movement-based powers, or was it just my game where this happened?
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OwOMotaros
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles!

Post by OwOMotaros »

Jabroniville wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 9:53 am
RainOnTheSun wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 8:52 am Pricing Flight and Teleport is tricky because the first rank gives you so much more than any of the subsequent ranks do. Buying Speed or Quickness or Leaping makes your character better at things they could already do, but one rank of Flight or Teleport expands their mobility in enormous, fundamental ways. But every rank has to cost the same amount to keep the system simple.
Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyup. A more "fair" system would probably charge out the nose for a couple ranks in either, and then charge incremental amounts for later bits.

Most of this is less important when doing builds of official characters for as NPCs, but for PCs where points are a big deal, it's quite unfortunate that such issues exist.

Has anyone else noticed the "Auto-Take" phenomenon with low-cost movement-based powers, or was it just my game where this happened?
I've totally seen it. I'm the one doing it half the time (I don't think I've built a PC without at least the Speed 2/Leaping 2 combo power). And a lot of the players in a server I work for have picked up on that too, to........annoying degrees (seriously, why are you taking Speed 20 as a PL 10. YOU HAVEN'T EVEN HIT DEFENSIVE PL!)
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squirrelly-sama
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles!

Post by squirrelly-sama »

Jabroniville wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 9:53 am
RainOnTheSun wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 8:52 am Pricing Flight and Teleport is tricky because the first rank gives you so much more than any of the subsequent ranks do. Buying Speed or Quickness or Leaping makes your character better at things they could already do, but one rank of Flight or Teleport expands their mobility in enormous, fundamental ways. But every rank has to cost the same amount to keep the system simple.
Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyup. A more "fair" system would probably charge out the nose for a couple ranks in either, and then charge incremental amounts for later bits.

Most of this is less important when doing builds of official characters for as NPCs, but for PCs where points are a big deal, it's quite unfortunate that such issues exist.

Has anyone else noticed the "Auto-Take" phenomenon with low-cost movement-based powers, or was it just my game where this happened?
Pretty much all my builds have that. I see it as rather benign since getting screwed over by being slightly too slow, or even just having the same speed as an opponent, can lead to loosing a lot of turns just moving around in a fight. Since movement scales so highly large areas are very likely and getting stuck with 30 feet of movement chasing a crook who's like 150 feet away gets old very fast. Having just a couple ranks seems fine, it's enough to get around a map and most basic obstacles but not enough to invalidate actual attempts to leverage for a mobility character to shine.

It certainly helps that most heroes in fiction also come with mobility powers of some sort, flight being VERY common. But even seemingly mundane heroes are generally considered fit enough to quickly outpace most trained athletes and jump clear over people.
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles!

Post by Shock »

I find that movement powers are auto-take simply because if you don't have one, you're limited to dealing with stuff that happens right in front of you. What's the use of listening to a police scanner or watching the Troub-Alert if you can't respond to something more than a couple blocks away? A team transport doesn't always fit the game and not everyone has a Batmobile
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles!

Post by Jack of Spades »

I ripped out Speed, Flight, etc. entirely in my house rules and substituted forms of Movement. But I also almost never measure distances on a map, just use it for general layout. It's worked okay.
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Jabroniville
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles!

Post by Jabroniville »

Shock wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 2:22 pm I find that movement powers are auto-take simply because if you don't have one, you're limited to dealing with stuff that happens right in front of you. What's the use of listening to a police scanner or watching the Troub-Alert if you can't respond to something more than a couple blocks away? A team transport doesn't always fit the game and not everyone has a Batmobile
Yeah, stuff like that CONSTANTLY came up in my game, even if by accident (the fight happened a few blocks from where other characters were investigating). It made me realize why every single player was doing that- any player had experienced that happening to them.

I'm trying to think of how common/uncommon it is for superheroes to have movement-based powers. Most solo heroes seem to- Spider-Man & Daredevil can swing, as can the Bat-Family. Of the Avengers, only Black Widow, Hawkeye & Scarlet Witch seemed limited in movement (Hawkeye could zipline from on place to another, but not swing like DD, and Widow only rarely did the same), assuming you gave Cap a rank of Speed (typically he wouldn't outpace his team, though). All the Justice League could move quickly save Aquaman on land (who some might give Speed). Of the FF, only Ben Grimm was slow (fitting his stance as a powerhouse). The X-Men, typically, were much more limited- they usually had only a couple fliers and everyone else was ground-based. If anything, that helped them seem more scrappy and "Street Level" compared to the elite "pro" teams like Avengers & FF.

A few characters had vehicles, too, like the Punisher's Battle Wagon of old- both the Avengers & X-Men had iconic jetplanes.
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Speed

Post by Jabroniville »

SPEED:

Effect:
Every rank doubles your movement speed- human baseline at character creation is 2 mph- Speed 1 makes it 4 mph. It upgrades to 8, 16 (where most fast animals lie- at Speed 3), 30, 60, 120, 250, 500 and so on, more or less doubling with each rank. Of importance is the "Athletics" Skill, which allows for a DC 15 Athletics check to double your speed for one round. Extra Effort will enable you to do so again. This means that everyone, even normal humans, can theoretically attain Speed 2 without spending any points at all, save for a requirement of good Athletics. Someone like Batman, with a lot of Athletics, can make this routinely.

Who Uses It?: For super-heroes, obviously the Flash is the definitive Speedster. Most comic book companies built characters like this, with DC's Flashes being most prominent (and first), while Marvel's Quicksilver became a thing. Marvel heroes top out around Speed 10 while DC heroes can go all the way up to Light Speed. This is also the obvious domain of animals- most decently-sized creatures on four legs can run MUCH faster than humans, at least for a short distance. As such, dogs & cats would have Speed 2- cheetahs are the most famous land animals who do this, packing Speed 4, but two ranks fade in my build of them- they are ONLY sprinters and can't maintain this for any distance.

Animal-Based characters, like Feral, Wolfsbane, etc., all require a bit of Speed and probably Leaping to justify their speed compared to normal humans, too. Building a "Sprinter", even a normal human, could justify this as well- for this reason, I even give Captain America a rank in it. Vehicles get Speed 6 (120 mph) almost by default- many cars can get around 200 mph.

Extras & Flaws: Typically not many, as it's a barebones power. Limited to certain scenarios is common, like heroes with a "Roided Up" state that enhances physicality.

Related Stuff: Burrowing & Swimming are both the same power, but shittier and more expensive. Flight is just Speed in the air, too. Most characters with the Speed power also have Multiattack for their hitting, Area Effects, can create windstorms, etc. Quickness & Improved Initiative are so linked to it that they all used to be the same power in 2nd Edition- you can still find "Super-Speed" buried in the main rulebook for this reason.

How Effective Is It?: As mentioned, low-tier movement powers are among the most cost-effective things in the game for sheer utility- if you need to get from Point A to Point B on the battlefield quickly, you're better off getting Speed or Leaping 1-2 to cover that. The main issue, as with most movement powers, is the cost of high speeds- The Flash has Speed 20 because he can hit light-speed... but how often is that gonna come up and require something Speed 14 couldn't cover?

Speed honestly doesn't cost THAT much, however, and could be handy on just about anyone- if anything, most of its related powers are WORSE.

Fixing It?: Most movement powers would be served by a compression of the Ranks & Measures table at higher ranks. I'd make Light Speed cost more like 15 ranks, squishing the higher end of the scale down a bit. Baseline Speed is so good you could be justified in making it PRICIER, but I probably wouldn't.
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Re: Speed

Post by EternalPhoenix »

Jabroniville wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 10:09 pm SPEED:

Who Uses It?: For super-heroes, obviously the Flash is the definitive Speedster. Most comic book companies built characters like this, with DC's Flashes being most prominent (and first), while Marvel's Quicksilver became a thing. Marvel heroes top out around Speed 10 while DC heroes can go all the way up to Light Speed. This is also the obvious domain of animals- most decently-sized creatures on four legs can run MUCH faster than humans, at least for a short distance. As such, dogs & cats would have Speed 2- cheetahs are the most famous land animals who do this, packing Speed 4, but two ranks fade in my build of them- they are ONLY sprinters and can't maintain this for any distance.
I was gonna say something about how taking a full round action and All Out Moving (base speed x4 for CON score rounds before making Con check to continue) was basically sprinting so something like a cheetah needs less ranks of speed than one might think, but it seems that option doesn't exist anymore. 3E really slashed speed down, huh?
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Re: Speed

Post by JDRook »

EternalPhoenix wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 11:15 pm
Jabroniville wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 10:09 pm SPEED:

Who Uses It?: For super-heroes, obviously the Flash is the definitive Speedster. Most comic book companies built characters like this, with DC's Flashes being most prominent (and first), while Marvel's Quicksilver became a thing. Marvel heroes top out around Speed 10 while DC heroes can go all the way up to Light Speed. This is also the obvious domain of animals- most decently-sized creatures on four legs can run MUCH faster than humans, at least for a short distance. As such, dogs & cats would have Speed 2- cheetahs are the most famous land animals who do this, packing Speed 4, but two ranks fade in my build of them- they are ONLY sprinters and can't maintain this for any distance.
I was gonna say something about how taking a full round action and All Out Moving (base speed x4 for CON score rounds before making Con check to continue) was basically sprinting so something like a cheetah needs less ranks of speed than one might think, but it seems that option doesn't exist anymore. 3E really slashed speed down, huh?
My interpretation on "sprinting" as a game mechanic draws a bit from 2e: I treat Speed as the distance rank of 1 Move Action, but if you use your Standard action as a second Move, you're obviously going twice as fast, or effectively one more rank. So technically even a Speed 0 Bystander could run screaming away at Speed 3 if they double-move, make their Athletics checks (no stumbling), and use Extra Effort until they pass out. That's an extreme case, but a consistent foot-speed of rank 2 is very doable for most PCs, particularly with a little Athletics skill which you already get for free at STR rank.

If you want a little more speed than that but want to keep it cheap, add on a Speed boost in the form of a bike or skateboard or something for 1ep.
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles: Speed!

Post by catsi563 »

Speeds effect to me is that it makes the speed ROUTINE, Cap is a prime exmaple of why id give speed 1 to most athletic characters that have a boost like super soldiers as opposed to a batman a highly trained one

Cap can keep the pace up nearly indefinitelt because of the ehnacments while batman because of his highly trained athletic ability MIIGHT falter after a while. both would keep up a grueling pace

a real good example of it would be the running scene in Winter Soldier where cap outruns Sam

Sam is making good time thanks to his athletic ability but because Steve has speed 1 he can just cruise at the same speed Sam has to push himself to get to,
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles: Speed!

Post by Gamebook »

As an RPG I think M&M3E is actually a bit archaic. It is very math and statistics heavy which most modern RPG's rather shy away from. A lot of the alternative rules takes people propose are a move away from defining your character with reams of numbers. Early RPG's, especially those from the first great blossoming of the genre in the 'eighties, were nightmares of numbers. The endless spreads of tables; rows and columns marching onwards for page after page. I still have flashbacks.

Oddly enough I find that this stat heavy approach works better for my Transformers builds than it does for my superhero builds. Transformers often are defined explicitly by numbers, with quoted figures for speed, lifting strength, weapons ranges, explosive power, armor penetration and so on being common in the writeups of them in the comics and on the toy boxes. By contrast superhero media are wild and woolly when it comes to the strength, speed and power of their characters, such as Marvel with their '100 ton' thing.
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