How do I kill people? (M&M)

[digiman619]

I recently picked up a copy of Mutants and Masterminds. It looks interesting, but the one glaring thing I noticed is "Where are the Hit Points?" I must have missed where it said, but, well, how do I hurt people, and how much hurt can I do to them before they die? I feel stupid for asking, but I'm stymied.

[Milo v3]

The Damage rules of 3e M&M's is on page 189, with rules for finishing attacks on page 197-198. There is also "Going for the Kill" optional rules on page 206.

[Doorhandle]

I recently picked up a copy of Mutants and Masterminds. It looks interesting, but the one glaring thing I noticed is "Where are the Hit Points?" I must have missed where it said, but, well, how do I hurt people, and how much hurt can I do to them before they die? I feel stupid for asking, but I'm stymied.

There aren't any hit points: your Toughness, however, fulfils the same role.

When you're hit by an attack, you make a toughness save (DC= 15+the damage the attack deals.) If you succeed you don't take damage.

When you fail the toughness save, the result depends on margin:
if you fail by 1 degree, you just take a minus penalty to toughness, but these stack. The more toughness saves you fail, the less damage you can resist and the less you can resist the next stages.
If you fail by 2 degrees, you take the same penalty, but you're dazed until the end of your next turn as well.
If you fail by 3 degrees, you're staggered, take a -1 penatly to further toughness saves, and if you fail by 3 degrees again you take the fourth effect.
If you fail by 4 degrees, you are incapacitated. Making the other guy take this result is how you knockout/kill people.

So basiclay to knock someone out.
1. Roll to hit with your attack.
2. If it hits they need to make a toughness save, based on how much damage you did.
3. If they fail by four degrees (so the need to get 20 less than the save), they're incapacitated in one hit. yay!

Note however, the latter is very unlikely, so you are more likely to get the other results first. Doing so will chip away at their toughness until you can get the last result, or get the third result twice. Basically, there is no hp pool like most games, but toughness still decays similarly.

Also, if minions fail the toughness save at all, they're incapacitated, full stop. It sucks being a minion.

[JustIgnoreMe]

From personal experience, combat takes ages simply because you need to grind the bad guys down, and the PL limits the bonuses you have to your rolls. Unless you can work out what your enemy is weak to (assuming they're weak to anything), combat will take a while.

[SoulSalvage]

All of what Doorhandle said above is true, but just as a clarification:

Damage normally goes against toughness, and bruises (a shorthand form for '-1 circumstance penalty to damage checks') do indeed stack, but they apply ONLY to damage checks and ALL damage checks.

So, if you look in the powers and find the pre-built Mental Blast power, you'll see a Perception Range Damage Power that targets Will instead of Toughness. If a character already had, say, three bruises, their defense roll would be d20+Will defense-3 bruises, even if the damage previously came from Toughness checks. Also, bruises are only good against damage checks; if another power targeted toughness, even if that character had 8 bruises, their result would be d20+toughness defense with no penalties for the bruises.

[awa]

From personal experience, combat takes ages simply because you need to grind the bad guys down, and the PL limits the bonuses you have to your rolls. Unless you can work out what your enemy is weak to (assuming they're weak to anything), combat will take a while.

Really? maybe we played a different edition but my experience was guys got dropped pretty easily with a single bad role. Assuming equal dam and toughness they have a 25% chance of taking no dam 25% chance of being bruised 25% chance of being stunned and 25 % chance of being staggered.

Once a guy got stunned he tended to get stun locked unless he had an ally so it went pretty quick

minions of course went down fast as designed at least in our games some one would usually take an ability to kill large numbers of mooks in a single turn