How I Balance My M&M Encounters

Hello heroes! This is a brief, but relevant detour in my Writing Super Hero Adventures (Step 1, Step 2, Step 3) series that we’ve been presenting on the blog. I’ve tried to make that series system agnostic, because I know not all of you are playing Mutants & Masterminds. There are plenty of great super hero RPGs on the market. I’ve enjoyed Icons, Prowlers and Paragons, Supers!, Rotted Capes, and Savage Worlds Super Powers expansion, but personally Mutants & Masterminds has always been my favorite. This probably isn’t a surprise to anyone, considering my position at Green Ronin Publishing as well as all of the M&M content we stream live here at USP (Shoutout to Netherwar on Mondays and our upcoming Tuesday night City of Destiny: Emerald City Knights playthrough.)

Mutants & Masterminds is just a system that keeps capturing my imagination. I love the narrative focus combined with the little bit of mechanical crunch that it offers, as well as how powerful it makes your superheroes feel. I prefer to capture that larger than life feeling in my games, similar to the DCAU or Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Stories where superheroes get to be well super! M&M offers that feeling through its combat system and through the amazing Hero Point mechanic.

That being said, someone recently asked me how I balance my encounters in Mutants & Masterminds. Which is a fair question, one that I feel like I have to answer, before I can move on to Step 4 of Writing Super Hero Adventures. M&M uses a Power Level system to set the limits of the PC characters. Power Level determines how high a character’s to-hit can be when compared to their Damage and how high certain Defenses can be when compared to one another: Dodge/Parry versus Toughness and Will versus Fortitude. These numbers can only add up together to equal Power Level x2. So if we use PL 10 as our baseline: to-hit +10 can add to Damage 10 to equal 20, to-hit +8 can add to Damage 12, so on and so forth. Comparing PC PL versus NPC PL is the main thing we want to look into when considering encounter balances.

I start by establishing what a medium difficulty encounter looks like. Combats that can go either in the PCs favor or against them depending on the roll of the dice and effective tactics in combat (using things like Maneuvers or clever Power Stunts.) I have the following chart that describes those baselines:

NPC PL compared to PC PL Amount of Enemies

• PC PL -4 or Lower: 4 per party member
• PC PL -2 or -3: 2 per party member
• PC PL -1: Party size +1
• PC PL equal to equal to party size
• PC PL +1: Party size -1
• PC PL +2 or +3: 1 per 2 party members
• PC PL +4: 1 per 4 party members

This is the baseline I work with when designing 80% of my encounters, because ideally you want most of your encounters to be fair and winnable, especially in a super hero fight. I’ve just found in my hundreds of M&M games that these levels are a decent challenge for a group of heroes. Especially stacked up against the fact that the majority of combats in tabletop RPGs last around 3 rounds.

If I want to make an encounter especially difficult or especially easy I take these numbers and I multiply them by 1.5x or .75x (usually adding or subtracting 2 villains per tier.) Another thing to shout out, is that M&M has a Minion mechanic that affects my table above as well. Minions are villains who statistically still match up to Power Level limitations, but they have a couple of factors that make them easier to handle. Firstly, they can only suffer one degree of failure on a resistance check before they are eliminated from the fight. Secondly, heroes can attack minions as a routine check (attack modifier +10), so they don’t have the risk of rolling a 1 and missing. Finally, minions cannot critically hit non-minions. With those limitations in mind, I’m usually happy to double the amount of bad guys present per tier if they are all minions.

So this system is all well and good if all of the villains in a scene are the same Power Level, but what happens if you decide to mix and match? Say a Mastermind villain has a group (or groups) of minions with them, or the Legion of Doom happens to have a couple of interns at the fight that day? That requires a little more experimentation to balance correctly, and I don’t have a hard and fast formula for how I do that.

The closest thing I have to that is I’ll use the Equal to PC PL level as a solid middle and combine the categories that are above and below. So if the Mastermind is PC PL +2 or 3 I’ll give them cohorts who are PC PL -2 or 3 and move some numbers around. Assuming 4 PCs, instead of having 2 PC PL +2 or 3 villains, I’ll just have the one and I’ll only do 2 PC PL -2 or 3 cohorts (or 4 if they’re minions.) It’s all very fluid and experimental, which is fine in Mutants & Masterminds. One other time-saving piece of advice I’ll give you, while we’re talking about being fluid, is that you rarely need full character sheets for NPC villains.

You should of course build full sheets for your major adversaries, but lesser villains don’t need all that. You’re fine to get away with their Dodge/Parry (which I usually keep the same for my own sanity) Toughness, Fortitude, Will, their to-hit and Damage for 1 or 2 attacks, and any movement powers they have. I’ll also let you in on a little secret, I usually have a few templates I’ll use and just swap out offensive powers and movements. I’ll usually break it down like this:

1. Villain has numbers all equal to their PL (so PL 6 has 6s for Dodge/Parry, Toughness, Fort/Will, to-hit, and Damage/Affliction)
2. Villain has their numbers shifted by 2 in either direction (so PL 6 has 4 Dodge/Parry, 8 Toughness, 8 Fortitude, 4 Will, +4 to-hit, and 8 Damage/Affliction or 8 Dodge/Parry, 4 Toughness, 4 Fortitude, 8 Will, +8 to-hit, and 4 Damage/Affliction)
3. Villain has their numbers shifted by 4 in either direction (so PL 6 has 2 Dodge/Parry, 10 Toughness, 10 Fortitude, 2 Will, +2 to-hit, and 10 Damage/Affliction or 10 Dodge/Parry, 2 Toughness, 2 Fortitude, 10 Will, +10 to-hit, and 2 Damage/Affliction)

I’ll usually move Fortitude and Will around in these 3 templates if they don’t make sense, but I bet looking at those templates, you can tell what kind of villains fit those numbers. It keeps your prep work simple and let’s you improvise opponents on the fly if the PCs go left when you thought they were going to go right.

It’s important to keep in mind, when designing your encounters, that M&M is meant to replicate super hero stories, so combat is rarely supposed to be incredibly dangerous. There will be times when you want to go all out and have the BBEG boss fights or throw a group of joke villains at your heroes, but the majority of the time your players will just be content throwing down with villains and getting to show off their cool characters and powers.

There are plenty of things you can do as a Mutants & Masterminds GM to control the ebb and flow of combat, outside of the numbers on the villain’s character sheet. You can invoke Complications and force the heroes to deal with those situations on top of the fight. You can create interesting and dynamic settings for your combats which force your heroes to be creative in getting around and using the environment to their advantage. That’s all way more important than how high the bad guy’s to-hit bonus is. It’s also what we’ll be covering in my next blog post when we finally dive into Step 4 of Writing Super Hero Adventures: Designing Dynamic Encounters. For now, that should be a good baseline for you to start balancing and experimenting with your M&M encounters! Until next time, may all your hits be crits!

Step 3 for Writing Super Hero Adventures: Outline

Hello heroes! Welcome back to the next installment of my process for creating engaging and exciting superhero tabletop RPG adventures. In Episode 1 we talked about brainstorming, synopsis, research, and player characters and Episode 2 covered villains. Now we’re ready to get into the real meat of adventure design.

Today we’re talking about how to design a solid outline to function as the backbone of your scenario. I’m going to walk you through how I build my adventure skeleton, a skeleton which can be enough to run a full-on session without further development, but can also function as the jumping off point to create more in-depth adventures. I will continue to reference my Sinister Six example from the past two blogs.

Admittedly, there are two kinds of writers in the world, often called pantsers and plotters. Pantsers prefer to fly by the seat of their pants, working from nothing but their imagination and maybe a Post-It Note that says “Joker stuff this episode?” I am able to work in this format (and I have often had to due to procrastination) but I prefer to be a plotter. I find that taking the time to create a solid outline, leads to more enticing inciting incidents and better plot developments (things like plot twists and satisfying endings.) If you are a panster, I hope you’ll get something from my outline advice, but I admit you are a mercurial unicorn who walks your paths through wondrous places. As for the plotters, this is the perfect resource for you.

To begin, I look into Pre-Adventure Notes. This is where I will mark down who the main antagonist is, what their motivation is, and what they have done before the adventure to set themselves up for success. This is usually a paragraph or two of relevant information that the players will never see, but helps me begin imagining which scenes to build. Here is an example from a game I’m working on for Origins 2021:

Decades ago, long before the formation of the Justice League, the New God Metron brought a dying Billion Dollar Bates to Daxam. Bates was the sole mortal with the complete knowledge of the Anti-Life Equation and had spent the 50s and 60s being pursued by Darkseid’s agent DeSaad. This pursuit culminated in a battle beneath Bates’ mansion, with Bates and a cult known as the Sect facing off against DeSaad and an army of Parademons. DeSaad moved to capture Bates when Metron intervened.

Metron foresaw the damage Darkseid would do with the Anti-Life Equation and, in a rare moment of proactivity, grabbed Bates and took off through time and space for a world on the other side of the universe. Somewhere DeSaad would never think to search for a missing human: Daxam, 5,000 years earlier. Bates died shortly after arriving in Erkol. To Metron’s surprise, the Anti-Life Equation wasn’t so much in Bates’ head, as on it. His flesh fell away, revealing his skull upon which the equation was engraved. Metron buried the skull in the foundation of the in-construction royal palace, tuned his Mobius Chair to scramble his memories of the event, and returned to his original time.

For five-thousand years, the skull remained undisturbed as Daxam grew around it. Wars were waged, regimes rose and fell, and for a time, it seemed the universe would be safe. That is until Mongul arrived, overwhelmed Daxam’s military, and summoned the Sinestro Corps. to his side. Mogul declared himself ruler of Daxam and the leader of the Sinestro Corps. in one fell swoop and has spent the last five years as its undisputed dictator. During those five years, Mongul has rooted out dissenting members of his Yellow Lantern Corps, and pressed Daxam’s people into destroying their own world for resources to build war machines. He’s knocked down whole cities, torn asunder mountain ranges, and poisoned the oceans with heavy chemicals.

Kel Gand the former king of Daxam has organized a resistance to Mongul, but they have had a hard time standing up to Mongul’s superior power. They have relied on guerilla tactics and have been searching for any advantage they can find. Resistance scientists have been working around the clock to synthesize a Yellow Solar Energy Serum that could finally grant them the power they need to defeat Mongul. Finally, the resistance has brought a deep space transmitter online, and has broadcast their first distress beacon to the universe. No one answered. The message was intercepted by the Guardians of the Universe who have placed the planet on a quarantine, while they decide the best way to deal with Mongul.

Meanwhile, on Apokolips, Darkseid finally caught up with Metron and killed him in a massive battle over the devastated world. He seized the Mobius Chair and was granted all of Metron’s knowledge, including the scrambled memory of where the Anti-Life Equation was hidden. Lord Darkseid didn’t know where exactly Bates’ skull was hidden, but he knew it was on Daxam.

All this culminated a month ago when boomtubes opened across the space lanes around Daxam, and a massive invasion force from Apokolips took the planet. Darkseid himself led the battle against Mongul and crushed him in one-on-one combat. He destroyed Warworld, captured their Central Power Battery within the wreckage, and recalled all of the Yellow Lanterns’ rings, leaving them powerless to resist. Mongul and Kel Gand met in secret and decided they should work together to overthrow Darkseid before continuing their own war. The resistance has now fired off one more distress beacon…

This lets me know as I’m planning the adventure that there is going to be conflict not just with Darkseid but with the opposing members of the resistance: Mongul and Kel Gand. I also know what Darkseid is looking for, so I need a scene that describes exactly where Billion-Dollar Bates’ skull is. And I know that the resistance leaders will have their own plans for how to stop Darkseid so those can be scenes as well.

After this Pre-Adventure section, it’s important to decide how many scenes you need. I define scenes in a roleplaying game as individual story beats or instances where the action changes from one type to another. I usually estimate that one session of an adventure (about 4 hours of gameplay) needs 6-8 scenes with a break in the middle for people to stretch their legs and refill their drinks.

Once I decide how many scenes I need I’ll list them numerically and categorize them along the following categories: Conflict, Challenge, Roleplay, Investigation. These four broad categories cover the major ways PCs can interact with the world in a super hero RPG.

I define these categories the following way:

• Conflict: PCs engage in a combat scene against supervillains or their minions. Generally takes 30-45 minutes depending on complexity or the opponents’ abilities.
• Challenge: PCs use their skills and powers to overcome an obstacle presented by circumstance or the environment. (I.E. Sneaking into a facility, protecting the city from a tsunami, catching an asteroid and throwing it back into space) Generally takes 15-30 minutes.
• Roleplay: PCs take time to interact amongst themselves or with NPCs. Often expositional in nature or a source of character development. Varies wildly depending on the nature of the scene and whether or not you step in as the GM to push things on.
• Investigation: PCs inspect an area for clues related to their current mystery. Generally in a more localized space than a Challenge sequence. Generally takes 15-30 minutes.

These categories are not mutually exclusive either. Scenes can be a combination of two types, or can be an either/or situation in case there are multiple ways a particular story beat can be resolved. You should be open to thinking through a couple of different ways your players will approach any scenario. You don’t need to write a whole scene for each category, but having a sentence or two talking about what to do if your knock out brawl turns into conversation will help your future self at the table.

So what do you do with these categories? You look at the amount of scenes you have and divide them up between the four categories. Doing this ensures that your adventures won’t feel samey during the session, and you can check your outlines between adventures to make sure you’re not doing too much of one thing from adventure to adventure.

There’s an example of what the split looks like below:

• Pre-Adventure Notes
• Scene 1 (Introduction) Conflict Scene
• Scene 2 Investigation/Roleplay Scene
• Scene 3 Roleplay Scene
• Intermission
• Scene 4 Conflict or Challenge Scene
• Scene 5 Challenge Scene
• Scene 6 (Climax) Conflict Scene
• Epilogue
• Rewards
• Consequences
• Cast

The important thing to note is that these scenes (apart from the first and last scene) aren’t necessarily in chronological order. We’ll go over how to connect the scenes together a little later in this piece. For now you just want to make sure you have a decent variety.

So, now we know what kind of scenes we want to feature in our adventure, we can begin constructing those scenes. For me, this takes the form of scene cards. I literally use index cards at this point, but you could accomplish the same thing in a word processor like Word or Google Docs. I use one card for each scene, and they contain the following information:

• Scene Name: I give each scene a one sentence name, mostly to keep them straight in the outline, but also for my own amusement
• Scene Category: Which of the types or type combinations I assigned in my outline
• Scene Synopsis: A one-two line breakdown for what happens in the scene.
• Scene Location: The setting of the scene. (I.E. city street, hero HQ, villain’s lair)
• Scene Characters: The relevant NPCs for the scene.
• Scene Conflict: The driving drama of the scene, this can be the goals of the NPCs, environmental hazards, or anything else that can challenge the heroes.
• Related Plot: This is reserved for campaign style adventures. I’ll mark down if this scene relates to the overarching main plot of the campaign or if it’s related to a subplot. I’ll talk more about subplots in a future campaign oriented blog post.
• Transitions: Connections between the other scenes in the adventure. Particularly helpful for mystery adventures. I’ll also mark down any time sensitive plot points related to the scene (I.E. If the heroes go to Scene 4 before Scene 3, Scene 3 changes in X way.)
• The Back of the Card: If I’m feeling inspired, or I know the scene cards are the extent of my preparation, I’ll write flavor text on the back of the index card.

I like to use index cards because I can visualize how the plot can move, and I can paperclip the index cards to my GM screen.

Here is an example Scene Card from my Sinister Six game:

• Scene Name and Number: Aggressive Journalism #1
• Scene Category: Conflict Scene
• Scene Synopsis: The Sinister Six stage an attack at the Daily Bugle, hoping to lure Spider-Man into a trap. They get more than they bargain for when they kick in the door only to find a force of Symbiotes.
• Scene Location: The Daily Bugle
• Scene Characters: Symbiote J. Jonah Jameson, Symbiote Minions
• Scene Conflict: The Sinister Six have to survive an attack by an even angrier than usual J. Jonah Jameson and his Symbiote reporters. Physical conflict. Skyscraper is ten stories tall so there is the risk of falling. The Bugle has several large printing presses which can be used to hinder characters (especially those with capes or tentacles that can be shoved into the press) or just as thrown weapons.
• Transitions: This is the intro scene so it leads directly into Scenes 2, 3, or 4.

These scene cards are the majority of my outline. Once I have a card for each scene I can start looking at the bottom portion of the outline. This includes the following four parts:

• Epilogue: A paragraph about the resolving action of the adventure. This is basically a rundown of what happens after the climax of the adventure. Sort of providing the specifics of happily ever after. Superheroes like to hear how they made the world a better place through their actions, so come up with some short-term and long-term benefits for their actions.
• Rewards: What the heroes gain from the adventure. This can be something mechanical like Character Points or something more roleplaying oriented, such as a contact or a relationship with an organization. You can also award them reputation bonuses with their city or new equipment.
• Consequences: This is like the Transition point on the scene card, but for the whole adventure. These are story developments that are a direct result of this adventure. They can be loose threads that didn’t get wrapped up (maybe the mastermind escaped or the heroes don’t know the supplier of the street gang’s super weapon.) They can also be consequences of the heroes’ actions (maybe the criminal they accidentally dropped in a vat of acid comes back as an even worse supervillain.) As long as you include this section for most of your adventures, you’ll never run out of story threads.
• Cast: This is where I mark down which NPCs I’ll need for the adventure and where I place their statblocks. Depending on how much prep I’m doing for an adventure I’ll either place full-sized statblocks here or I’ll put shortened statblocks with only the particulars I need.

At this point we have a finished outline. This skeleton is enough to run the adventure from if you’re confident in your improv abilities, but it’s also a great bedrock to build a more elaborate adventure from. As a bonus, I’m going to include a blank outline template below that you can use to create your own outlines. That’s enough for right now.

Next time we will dive into exactly how I created a Dynamic Scene, so we can flesh out this outline.

Blank Outline

1. Pre-Adventure Notes
2. Scene 1 (Introduction)
   1. Scene Name:
   2. Scene Category:
   3. Scene Synopsis:
   4. Scene Location:
   5. Scene Characters:
   6. Scene Conflict:
   7. Related Plot:
   8. Transitions:
3. Scene 2
   1. Scene Name:
   2. Scene Category:
   3. Scene Synopsis:
   4. Scene Location:
   5. Scene Characters:
   6. Scene Conflict:
   7. Related Plot:
   8. Transitions:
4. Scene 3
   1. Scene Name:
   2. Scene Category:
   3. Scene Synopsis:
   4. Scene Location:
   5. Scene Characters:
   6. Scene Conflict:
   7. Related Plot:
   8. Transitions:
5. Scene 4
   1. Scene Name:
   2. Scene Category:
   3. Scene Synopsis:
   4. Scene Location:
   5. Scene Characters:
   6. Scene Conflict:
   7. Related Plot:
   8. Transitions:
6. Scene 5
   1. Scene Name:
   2. Scene Category:
   3. Scene Synopsis:
   4. Scene Location:
   5. Scene Characters:
   6. Scene Conflict:
   7. Related Plot:
   8. Transitions:
7. Scene 6
   1. Scene Name:
   2. Scene Category:
   3. Scene Synopsis:
   4. Scene Location:
   5. Scene Characters:
   6. Scene Conflict:
   7. Related Plot:
   8. Transitions:
8. Epilogue
9. Rewards
10. Consequences
11. Cast

Step 1 for Writing Super Hero Adventures

I’ve played a lot of games in my years with the tabletop RPG hobby. I’ve Called Cthulhu, fought a Dungeon in a Dragon, and sailed the 7th Sea as a pirate. I’ve traveled to Worlds most Savage and even told a Tale around the Loop a time or two. With all of those games and all of those characters I have never had as much fun as when I sit down and strap on my imaginary spandex to take on the role of a super hero. I love being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, taking down melodramatic supervillains, and grappling with obstacles that would shake the heart of even the most stalwart paladin.

That being said, being the Game Master in this genre is definitely a challenge, and can seem overwhelming if you’re coming from a game genre that is more interested in telling players what they can’t do, rather than can. In the following piece I will provide some advice that will help you in the first part of designing a super hero adventure. This is the first in a series of articles covering super hero adventures, from design to execution.

1. Purpose: The first question I ask myself before I sit down to brainstorm my ideas is, “What is the purpose of this session?” Is this a convention one-shot? Is it a demo of the RPG you designed? Is this episode one of a new campaign? Is it episode 323 of an ongoing campaign? Narrowing down the reason for the game you’re writing is crucial before you start thinking up ideas about it. If a game is only going to last 4 hours for strangers at Gen Con, your needs are going to be different than running for your friends at home. This will help you come up with ideas that are either self-contained or can lead to an ongoing story. If you only have one session, you don’t want to come up with such an elaborate plot that the heroes can’t realistically investigate and solve in one go. Likewise if you’re running an overarching campaign, you don’t want every story thread to be wrapped up at the end of the game. This is also generally where I ask myself if this is going to be a custom story (ala my Titan City Chronicles series) or a licensed game (like our Justice League Dark Gen Con stream from last year.)
2. Brainstorming/Synopsis: Once you’ve sussed out your purpose for the scenario, it’s time to start brainstorming so you can come up with a one-two sentence synopsis about the story. That synopsis is critical because it will trim all of the excess off your idea and focus it onto the meat of the story. This phase looks similar for me if I’m running a custom game versus a licensed one.

   I’ll begin by going over my world-building notes (or a DC/Marvel wiki about the characters I want to showcase) or my campaign notes to see if there is anything that jumps out at me that I simply HAVE to tell a story about. This can be a location, a character, an object, a situation, anything that jumps out at my lizard brain and says tell my story. Once I have this picked out, I’ll go to a journal or open a Word document and write down that thing or person, then I’ll do a stream of consciousness exercise. I’ll write whatever comes to mind as I’m mulling over that concept. I’ll do this, uninterrupted for five-ten minutes and then step back to review it once the time is up. Using the words I’ve vomited all over the page, I’ll begin constructing my synopsis. For example, I’m running a Sinister Six scenario at Origins this year. After my brainstorming led me to, “Wouldn’t it be neat to fight Symbiote Spider-Man,” I came up with the following synopsis: “The Sinister Six are all that stand between New York and an army of ravenous symbiotes.”

   It’s short, it’s sweet, and it tells me everything I need to know and research to begin laying the foundations of my adventure. Armed with the synopsis I can move on to my next step.

3. Research: So now that we have our idea, we can really dig into it. This is where I will deep dive into the resources I mentioned above. Looking through back issues of Sinister Six and the Marvel wiki in this instance. This information forms the backbone of my design decisions. If an event I want to cover in a game has already happened in canon, I’ll look through it in depth to make sure I know what has come before and how I can put my own spin on it. If it’s a one-shot I’ll look through the roster of various hero (or villain) teams and start selecting who the pregen characters will be, or I’ll decide to allow people to bring their own characters at this stage.

   If I’m designing a campaign scenario, I’ll consult my campaign journal to see which plots or subplots I haven’t touched on in a while and try to find a way to forge a connection between the last story arc and the next one. I like to do my supers game in arcs of 3-6 adventures, so I’ll begin brainstorming this next connection around the halfway point of the current arc, so I can make sure we have a driving point and ensure that we have an organic hand off from story to story.

4. Characters: The next step is to finalize the PCs who are going to be going through your super caper. If you’re designing an adventure for your ongoing campaign, this step is super simple. You’re going to keep using the characters who have been in the story so far, unless someone is switching characters or replacing a lost hero. In that case take this step to brainstorm how those new characters are joining the team. Extra points if their introduction is tied to the story arc or event that is coming up in the next session!

   If I am bringing pre-gens I’ll also decide if I want to go narrow or wide with character options. Some scenarios I’ll bring 80+ pre-gens so players have the chance to play that one super hero they’ve always wanted to. Other times I’ll narrow it 6 and ensure that each of those characters has a specific spot to shine in the encounters I’m preparing. If you bring a ton of pre-gens, it is important to make sure your scenario (or your GMing style) is flexible enough to allow creative problem solving. For example, if you’re running a DC game and the party is Superman, Supergirl, Superboy, Krypto the Superdog, and Mon-El they’re going to approach the game a lot differently than if everyone picks a member of the Bat Family. I’ll go over how to design adventures to accommodate a wide variety of abilities in the following article.

So now we have a purpose, we’ve brainstormed, we’ve done our research, and we’ve selected our PCs. Now it’s time to begin designing the actual adventure itself. I will cover how to go through this design in another post next week or the one after! For now, start gathering those ideas and brainstorming new nefarious ways to challenge your heroes. Thank you for reading and may all your hits be crits.