[Supers] What's the point of making Mêlée-oriented characters?

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by Anthony

We don't? What exactly is the human torch's nova blast?

An energy based atttack that is far too weak to blow the atmosphere off the planet the way a Nova scaled blast should, so we can dismiss it as hyped up.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Note that the word "rarely" has a specific meaning in English.

Note that I did not claim that this was the only example of characters doing this. If you're going to banish energy projector stuff into the generic Ultrapower, you can do the same thing to super-ST, and probably want to anyway.

[Nosforontu]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

No, my example was two rounded characters with some explicit, and some implied, non-damage abilities. However, one of them chose to dump the remaining points into ranged attacks, and the other dumped the remainder into mêlée attacks.

I don't think that you are actually going to see that to often in play though molokh, blasters and bricks simply have different point priorities and when you are typically looking at 500 to 1,000 points for most super builds those different priorities tend to lead to very different builds by the end of character design.

Even if we accept that they are largely the same except for the points spent on their attack and whatever discount that they received to get the equivalent attack, they still will have their roles to play and those roles will remain important under game conditions.

The biggest reason is that different attack profiles means that their is no simple single answer to provide optimum defense against the enemy super team. If the team was pure birck's then it is easy for the bad guys to make the simple logical decision to concentrate the fight in areas that are wide open and require several turns for the bricks to get to the fight while your side lays down long range fire on the bricks.

If the other side is pure blasters then you want constrained terrain that prevents them from having easy line of sight and effect to their opponent essentially taking away much of the range benefit that the blaster enjoys and forcing him into tight confined spaces.

When you have bricks and blasters operating against you then you have much more difficult decisions to make. Open spaces lets you target the enemies bricks easier but also exposes you to their blasters while tight terrain makes it much more likely that the other sides bricks will get in close enough to hurt you badly.

In supers it has been my experience that different ways of achieving similar goals is a good thing. The more different things that the party can do to the bad guys the less likely that I can justify a villain that is tough against everything they can do. For example a fatigue attack is pretty expensive compared to a basic crushing attack, but if the party has both crushing attacks and fatigue attacks then both my fatigue score and hit point score both become important considerations when designing the op force.

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by Bruno

And yes, there's rules in Powers for "improvising" alternate abilities, and for temporarily "stunting in" enhancements, as inspired by Mutants and Masterminds.

Sorry, But Marvel FASERIP had that idea long before M&M...

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by roguebfl

Sorry, But Marvel FASERIP had that idea long before M&M...

And yet the rules in Powers were inspired by Mutants and Masterminds, to the point of having one of the M&M designers on the playtest.

[Dangerious P. Cats]

I guess it all comes down to how you make your supers. I tend to make my characters by choosing their powers first, and then making their combat abilities to support that, melee seems a more reasonable choice if I want speed powers for example.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

I guess it all comes down to how you make your supers. I tend to make my characters by choosing their powers first, and then making their combat abilities to support that, melee seems a more reasonable choice if I want speed powers for example.

Why? A quickest shooter in the world is a concept as cool as many others.

[Dangerious P. Cats]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Why? A quickest shooter in the world is a concept as cool as many others.

I can't imagine someone being too accurate when moving at high speeds, but I guess it comes down to you campaign and GM.

The other thing to keep in mind is that some enemies in supers campaigns may be more succepable to the types of damage melee weapons dish out than those of shooting weapons.

[The Benj]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

I can't imagine someone being too accurate when moving at high speeds, but I guess it comes down to you campaign and GM.

Gunslinger is your friend here.

The other thing to keep in mind is that some enemies in supers campaigns may be more succepable to the types of damage melee weapons dish out than those of shooting weapons.

True, but that's an issue for setting design more than core system.

[Nosforontu]

Originally Posted by The Benj

True, but that's an issue for setting design more than core system.

But it probably does come up enough (even if it is a case of individual enemy builds) for a PC to cover it on a super team