supers: nine options

[whswhs]

Now I've take another look at Mutants and Masterminds, bearing in mind that it allows buying Super-Strength on top of Strength, which avoids one of the problems that I thought I saw.

I made the very strong character my test case again. I was aiming at 5x human strength, but each level of Super-Strength roughly doubled lifting capacity, so I gave her three levels (equivalent to 15 levels of Strength), for 8x human strength.

There was a bit of ambiguity in the rules, which said on one hand that the damage bonus for a power was equal to the number of levels of the power, but on the other hand, under Super-Strength, that it didn't add anything to damage from striking or grappling. That doesn't make much sense to me, but okay. But since I wanted her to hit hard, I gave her Strike 3 for 3 points, effectively raising the cost of her strength to 3/level and making it work the way I thought it ought to; and I gave her Protection 3 for 3 points, letting her stand up to her own blows. When I finished giving her stats, skills, and feats, I had her nearly up to 30 points, so I added on a couple of minor extras. That made me think that 30 points was the right budget.

To do this, though, I needed to ignore the rule that a 30-point character could only have two levels of any power. It seems as if M&M is aiming at characters with several different powers, where I was looking for a narrower spread.

On the other hand, this didn't seem to make her very superhuman when I looked at how the combat rules actually worked. She had a 60% chance of hitting Mr. T.C. Mits, an 85% chance of bruising him, and only a 60% chance of stunning him. And Mr. Mits has a 55% chance of hitting her (dropped to 30% if she blocks, but then she forfeits her own attack), a 45% chance of bruising her, and a 20% chance of stunning her; that seems kind of fragile for a character whose strength is boosted by a factor of 8! The odds work out that she'll stun him 36% of the time and he'll stun her 11% of the time.

I would be okay if I got this result for the street tough, I think, but getting it for the Average Man doesn't feel right.