M&M - First Impression

Our first Mutants & Masterminds session was kind of disappointing. I blame a number of factors, some having to do with the game itself and some not, but I think the biggest factor is simply that the first scene in the introductory adventure makes a lousy introduction to the game. Spoilers for the intro adventure follow.

I'll start with my overall impression: The author could not have created a more frustrating villain to put on the scene if he'd tried. For an (even slightly) experienced group that was already a team this would probably have been a reasonable adventure scene. For heroes who haven't met before (a circumstance considered by the author and mentioned several times) it was a disaster.

The scene is a bank, the heroes are in civilian garb and/or patrolling (we had both). A bunch of thugs and two supervillains enter, and one of the supervillains lays down a selective visual and auditory obscure effect that covers the entire bank and part of the street outside but doesn't affect the bad guys. So we've got heroes who haven't been played before and might not even know each other. Any in the bank are immediately rendered effectively blind and deaf. Any outside patrolling have no way to find out what's going on, even after they get inside.

So we wound up with, out of four heroes, one on the outside unable to look in (Vulkyrion), one in the bank entryway unable to see or hear what's going on after the initial entrance of the bad guys (Enigma), and two inside the bank who lost initiative to the second villain and immediately got blasted, staggered and stunned (ALICE and Hwacha!). Enigma dropped an area confuse that caught about half the thugs before the bad guys moved around so much that he/she didn't know where they were any more. ALICE and Hwacha! each burned their sole hero point to stop being stunned. Hwacha! threw out his own obscure so at least the bad guys would be blind as well. ALICE with its tremorsense was the only hero that could see, but it has no effective attacks and couldn't direct the others because we couldn't hear, either.

In the end, Hwacha! blundered into a group of thugs while trying to back away from the one covering him. Having noted that all damage in M&M is non-lethal unless specifically stated otherwise, he dropped a non-lethal suspension-of-disbelief-breaking fireball at his own feet that filled the entire bank and dropped all the bad guys, most of the bank patrons, and ALICE in one blast. This at least killed the blinding/deafening effect and allowed Vulkyrion to swoop in and have his host of summoned vikings quickly tie up all the bad guys.

Even as the player whose character "saved the day", I must say I found the whole thing highly unsatisfying.

Review: 4e DM screen

I had heard good things about the D&D 4th edition DM screen so I picked one up before the game last weekend.

I love it. I didn't have to reference it once, and I still love it. I don't care if I never have to reference it, I love it anyway. I love its shiny surface and its solid construction.

The construction on this thing is the second best I've ever seen, topped only by a generic one I can't find online at the moment (a big silver thing you could slide whatever printouts you wanted into) that I believe costs twice as much. The main thing, for me, is that it stomps my 3e screen and my old AD&D screen into the dirt. The 3e screen, even though it's also four panels in one piece, is toilet-paper-thin compared to the 4e beast. The AD&D screen was not as thick (though also not as flimsy as the 3e screen), but was two two-panel pieces that I was always clipping together with something or another.

I just wanted to say that, even though it was really terse. Now I want to go finish watching Heroes Season 2 and read War and XPs, two things which might have something to do with the terseness.