Minion Aiming? (M&M 3rd edition)

[Flashkannon]

I picked up the Mutants and Masterminds 3rd edition Deluxe Handbook relatively recently, and I was doing some thinking.

The Aid standard action allows one to add a +2 or +5 to the attack roll of an ally engaged in melee. I can't seem to find any rule that would prevent one from simply:

-getting a bunch of minions by acquiring the Minion advantage (or, if my reading of the SRD is correct, getting one minion and one sidekick)
-giving them each a very low Damage attack and the highest Dexterity or Fighting the PL allows
-having them each Aid their hero every round
-give the hero a low Fighting score but a huge Damage ability
-use the +4 to +10 from the minions to make it hit anyways, essentially bypassing power level restrictions

Of course, this wouldn't be very sporting to use more than a little for an actual game, but still.

If a rule exists to stop this, I fully expect to have this shiny new top hat of a loophole rightfully stomped to dust by the fine people of this forum.

[icefractal]

The minions being vulnerable to attack is somewhat of an issue. Can be somewhat helped by unusual minions (ghosts? little imps that ride on your shoulders?), but it's still a concern, and with their lower points they might be pretty fragile.

But other than that I think it works, yeah.

[Grod_The_Giant]

AoE attacks have a tendency to make minions vanish real fast. And there's nothing stopping an enemy from grabbing a Perception-range attack, 2 ranks of Takedown, and just sweeping the board clear of minions on their first turn.

But speaking more broadly, M&M has plenty of exploits like that. It's inevitable in a game with such deep customization; the fact that it's a superhero game with deep customization makes it all worse. Including a wide variety of enemies and attack types helps, but ultimately it's up to the players not to be d*cks. Which is...kind of true for all ttRPGs. Heck, all social activities.

(Also, for what it's worth--I've played and run a lot of M&M 3e, and in my experience you're a lot more likely to see players come up with underpowered characters than overpowered ones, either because they're not experienced with the game's math or because they're thinking in terms of narrative where weaknesses and limits make things more interesting).

[Flashkannon]

Thank you for the answers, all. I'll have to be careful.

I suppose there's practicality concerns with losing minions and sidekicks (somewhat lessened if you stray from more conventional humanoid minions and toward, for example, an AI or some kind of endowed object), and thinking on it a little more, you also need to consider that to accomplish this your Fighting needs to be low, all the time. That, I suppose, is enough of a balancing factor, since it has an exploitable weakness of some kind.

[Reversefigure4]

Sure, works on paper. And while you're there unchecked by the GM, you might as well make the minions (and possibly yourself) invisible and insubstantial to prevent comebacks.

It's a power level loophole, alright. But it's one in a game where for a third of your starting points you can throw the Earth into the sun, killing everyone on the planet as a standard action.

Or go first with your 40+ Intiative then run to the other side of the planet as a move action.

Or once you have an infinite GM budget of points, Mr Minions is opposed by Miss Charming, who has a massive area effect mind control aura. Before your minions can Aid, they decide they want to Aid her.

Heck, a 1 point immunity to "Mr Minions power" shuts this down instantly.

Every character in M&M, PC or NPC, is a gentleman's agreement to create something narratively interesting rather than broken, and this loophole is just one more thing.

[Flashkannon]

Sure, works on paper. And while you're there unchecked by the GM, you might as well make the minions (and possibly yourself) invisible and insubstantial to prevent comebacks.

It's a power level loophole, alright. But it's one in a game where for a third of your starting points you can throw the Earth into the sun, killing everyone on the planet as a standard action.

Or go first with your 40+ Intiative then run to the other side of the planet as a move action.

Or once you have an infinite GM budget of points, Mr Minions is opposed by Miss Charming, who has a massive area effect mind control aura. Before your minions can Aid, they decide they want to Aid her.

Heck, a 1 point immunity to "Mr Minions power" shuts this down instantly.

Every character in M&M, PC or NPC, is a gentleman's agreement to create something narratively interesting rather than broken, and this loophole is just one more thing.
Goodness. I must confess, I'm more used to systems where the rules close all the loopholes they can think of, and thought I was just missing something in the rather thick Deluxe handbook. I suppose the presence of Immunity: The PC You Don't Like is always an option, but that's not really any different from any game's rule 0, is it?

[Batcathat]

Yeah, I suspect the designers realized pretty quickly they wouldn't be able to close anywhere near all the loopholes without completely crippling the power design system, so just didn't even try. Even exactly as intended some powers are pretty bonkers, after all.

Though while I've played with people whose characters are certainly leaning in the min-max direction, I don't think I've ever seen one anywhere nearly as bad as it could be, so I think maybe the fact that it's so easy breaking things mean people don't really try to do it.

[Grod_The_Giant]

so I think maybe the fact that it's so easy breaking things mean people don't really try to do it.
Agreed. You're using very straightforward tools, so there's not much of a problem-solving high, and it's not very exciting to get an absurd result when the entire system is built to give you absurd results.

Much more fun than optimizing power, I think, is trying to build the weirdest possible characters. Figuring out how you'd play a pair of shoes that possess whoever wears them, or a hive-mind made up of eleven crabs, or a character who goes through time backwards-- THAT'S where you can really sink your teeth into things.

[Reversefigure4]

Goodness. I must confess, I'm more used to systems where the rules close all the loopholes they can think of, and thought I was just missing something in the rather thick Deluxe handbook. I suppose the presence of Immunity: The PC You Don't Like is always an option, but that's not really any different from any game's rule 0, is it?

(For a reference for the system for the unfamiliar reader, a standard character is 150 power points. That's not remotely the same as a 'level 1' character - you can easily replicate Captain America or Batman or Iron Man with those points, although you'd need at least 100 more to achieve a full blown 'does everything Batman has ever done in a comic since 1940).

Two main things for M&M:

1. Powers are costed on how useful they are in solving superhero problems in a genre appropriate way.
2. You pay for the effect caused, not the description.

Take Time Travel. It costs an absolute maximum of 6 points to move anywhere in the universe at any time (like the Tardis). Far, far less than Laser Eye Rays, which cost you 20+ points. In theory, the Time Travel solves all your problems. When the bank is robbed, you go back in time and tie up the bank robbers before they succeed. When a bad guy threatens you, you go back in time and kill his parents so he's never born to threaten you. When you don't make your date because you were stopping the bank robbery, you go back in time to before your girlfriend is mad at you. No narrative consequences to failure, instant success in every fight. But when characters can Time Travel in comics (like the Flash), they never do this sort of stuff. (Likewise, a realistically smart Flash punches someone and runs away to the other side of the planet on his round, making him unanswerable). Or if they do, it ends badly. Or if they try, it doesn't work (can't kill the bad guys parents if you don't know his real identity, or if he's a fellow time traveller angry at you interfering with the time line. Whereas the Eye Rays get used in every fight.

Take Immortality (both the agelessness and the 'comes back to life after being killed' part). It can be a capstone for a 20th level DnD character. In M&M, it's 3 points minimum. Because it doesn't actually solve the sort of problems you'd face in an average session very easily. It's not much use when the city gets nuked if you personally come back to life a month later - the city is still gone and all the people are still dead. Likewise, it's worth noting you only get the effects you buy. It's easy to argue Immortal Man should be very wealthy from centuries of compound interest and have a high fighting skill and lots of knowledges. He probably should. But you need to buy those things separately (being a multi-billionaire is only 5 points), and your narrative description is that it's based on having lived through the last several centuries.

The anti-loopholes or guardrail protection M&M offers is the sidebars, which call out the more problematic powers. Time Travel is flagged as being suggested as Uncontrollable (the GM controls when your power works) or restricted so the story doesn't become entirely about time travel... unless the GM is up for it, at which point go nuts. Duplication (the ability to turn into multiple characters) is easily broken and flagged as such, but not forbidden, because you can produce a perfectly fine duplicator that's fun to play.

As the GM, you have even less rails (and no points budget). Making an Insubstantial ghost might be either a fun confrontation (the PCs need to think of another solution or Power Stunt an ability to hurt them, a trivial confrontation (the PCs are ghostbusters), or an incredibly unbalanced, unfun fight (the ghost is also a powerful Mind Controller, rending him able to take out the PCs easily while they can't lay a hand on him. This is also a system that explicitly gives you Power Level X, characters that simply Do Whatever The GM Says They Do, the sort of cosmic imps and reality controllers that need to be taken out in some convoluted way. They might not even have stats. You can trivially give an enemy Immunity to The Entire Party's Powers for a couple of points... but is that going to create something fun? As fun as the sort of fight where twin brothers Hydroman and Firespark are immune to each other powers, and so spend the fight slugging it out like children punching each other instead?

I've been playing this for 2 years now, and I've yet to run into anything that's particularly broken in play. The PCs aren't trying to min-max but feel very powerful, and the range of NPCs is incredible. If you go in trying to beat the game, either as a player or a GM, it's trivial... but if you go into it for fun, it's fantastic.

A handful of whackdoodle "broken" NPCs I've had:
- A construction monster that was Immune to Fortitude saves, all forms of damage, can't be tripped / grappled / tied up... as long as it absorbed building material every round. The fight becomes PCs trying to get it to a suitable location rather than just punch it down.
- A seductive touch-based Mind Controller with save DCs so high PCs could only pass on 20s... and no fighting skill to actually roll a to-hit roll. The fight becomes her brainwashed minions trying to grapple the PCs and pin them down to lower their defences so she can control them.
- A sentient cloud of data (Insubstantial to everything except electricity) with the ability to possess technology. The fight becomes the PCs trying to de-possess their battlesuit PC, while trying a bunch of different effects while the battlesuit PC tried hacking his enemy out of the suit.
- A cowardly speedster who can trivially outrun any PC and acts first with his 40+ Initiative. The fight becomes working out how to trap him or give him a reason to stick around.
- A reality controller with Power Level X who is Immune to Everything, flavoured as him controlling the PCs reality so they are unable to land their attacks. The fight becomes finding the source of his power and shutting it down.
- A giant kaiju made of plants attacking a bridge full of cars, exactly the sort of problem PCs can punch their way through... but the difficulty is in keeping all the civilians safe as the bridge falls apart around them because the roots are pulling the bridge apart!

Any of these could have been trivially made obnoxiously or impossibly difficult with a tiny spend of points to improve or min-max the NPCs... but at that point they'd have become frustrating rather than fun.

The most effective form of min-maxing is breaking Power Level (as you've discovered), or arguing to abuse logic in a world of comic-book science ("As a speedster, I should be able to take 100 actions before the next PCs" (ignoring the fact that in the real world, the speedster melts from frictions when he starts running)... yet in both cases, it's very easy for the GM to shut you down entirely. I've had no problems with players min-maxing, however - the fact that you can do anything (easily and straightforwardly) takes away a lot of the desire to do so, and all the PCs made genre-appropriate characters with weaknesses and flaws.