Mastermind’s Manual Design Journal: Combat

Clobberin’ time! Superhero comics feature plenty of fights, and Mutants & Masterminds is designed to handle those sorts of fights, from rounding up some thugs to epic battles between heroes and villains. The Mastermind’s Manual provides options for customizing combat in the game to suit your own style and that of your series, ranging from four-color to detailed and realistically deadly.

Defense Roll

More randomness in combat can sometimes take away those "foregone conclusions" about a hero who always hits or a lowly opponent who never has a chance to. A good way to introduce this is to allow defense rolls. Every time a character is attacked, rather than just using his normal Defense, he rolls 1d20 and adds his Defense modifiers. Every attack becomes an opposed roll, with attacker and defender matching their modified rolls against one another. (One way to look at it is that without the defense roll, characters are taking 10 on their defense roll each round, and thus are using a base of 10 for Defense.)

The Defense roll can be expressed like this:

This variant adds some excitement to combats, particularly at higher attack bonuses when heroes seem to hit almost every time. Unfortunately, it can slow down play because it doubles the number of rolls in any given combat. A compromise might be to have each defender make a defense roll once each round, using that same total against all attacks made against him that round, rather than once per attack. As an alternative, make a Defense roll once at the start of combat and use it against all attacks in that combat. However, these options can penalize players who roll poorly (and reward those who roll well), so they should be used with care.

Tougher Minions

A failed Toughness save normally leaves a minion unconscious or dead. In this variant, minions suffer only a stunned result from a failed Toughness save and must fail by 5 or more to be rendered unconscious or dead. This allows for occasions when heroes merely stun minions with an attack and makes minions a bit more difficult to take out in combat. It’s best suited for genres where minions are supposed to be a bit more of a threat.

Save vs. Stun

With this option, rather than automatically suffering a stun result from damage, the character makes a Fortitude saving throw (DC 10 + attack’s damage bonus) to avoid being stunned. This adds some variability to the chances of a stun, and provides a slight edge to characters with better Fortitude saves, but also adds another die roll to combat, which may slow things down.

Variable Critical Hits

A critical hit normally imposes a +5 to the attack’s save DC, likely increasing damage from the attack to the next highest result on the Toughness save. This variant allows a successful critical hit to have one of a number of different effects, depending on the intentions and wishes of the attacker.

Essentially, when a critical hit is scored with a particular attack, the attacker can choose for the hit to have a different additional effect of up to 10 power points in value (in place of the normal +5 bonus to saving throw DC). This includes any power effect the GM judges suitable for the attack. Particular effects most likely to be associated with critical hits include Dazzle, Drain, Fatigue, Nauseate, or Stun, but others may be appropriate at the GM’s discretion.

Example: The Bowman scores a critical hit with a boxing-glove arrow. Rather than the additional damage, he decides to inflict an additional Stun effect along with the arrow’s normal damage. The GM finds this reasonable and agrees. Since the Stun power costs 2 points/rank, Bowman can force the target to make a DC 15 Fortitude save against the Stun effect along with the normal Toughness save for the arrow’s damage.

This variant adds some variety to the effects of critical hits in the game, and allows players to choose them for greater effectiveness. If desired, you can make this an option only available to players willing to spend a hero point to change the critical hit into some effect other than just additional damage, making it less frequent and keeping decisions about the effects of critical hits from bogging down game-play.

Mental Grappling for Effect

If you want to limit the usefulness of mental powers in your campaign, you can require the user to mentally grapple the target and establish a mental pin before any mental power requiring a saving throw can be applied. The target does not suffer the normal –4 modifier for being mentally pinned; the save is at the normal bonus.

For example, a character with Mind Control has to first engage a target in a struggle of wills (a mental grapple); only when the target is mentally pinned does the save against the Mind Control take place. In this variant, any character with a mental power requiring a saving throw can initiate a mental grapple, but only for purposes of using that power on a target.

This variant makes mental powers more difficult to use in the midst of combat unless you have overwhelming mental superiority (enough to mentally pin your target immediately). Even then, characters can’t establish a mental pin in less than a round, so all mental effects essentially take at least an extra round (if not more) to use. You can mitigate this if you wish by saying the mental grapple itself takes no time; the struggle takes place instantly in the minds of the attacker and defender. Even then, mental effects become less reliable, since the target effectively gains two (or more) chances to avoid the effect, rather than just one.