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:

Villain has numbers all equal to their PL (so PL 6 has 6s for Dodge/Parry, Toughness, Fort/Will, to-hit, and Damage/Affliction)
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)
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!