Continuing on with the subject of actions scenes, I thought a post looking at the types of scene elements might be worthwhile. The core rulebook goes over them on starting on p.186, but there are other things worth mentioning for new gamemasters. There are five different types of scene elements, each of which offers different things to the GM. You normally have H elements to use in your scene design budget and the mix you select will determine the feel of the scene for your players.
Villains
Most actions scenes will have one or more villains as their centerpiece, and their motivations will tend to dominate events whether it's something as simple as "escape the heroes" or something more complex like carrying out one step of a convoluted scheme. The villain design process will let you make just about anything you can imagine, and most villains will be the single greatest threat a hero will face, often taking some cooperation to defeat.
There's a "secret" the rulebook doesn't emphasize: Villains are not created equal. Combinations of Approach and Archetype vary wildly in terms of effectiveness, and ability choices can make even identical A/A combinations behave very differently. There's a very large difference between an Underpowered/Fragile villain and an Overpowered/Titan, for example.
Despite this, each villain counts as a single element in your budget. This makes your choice of villains a dial you can turn to adjust the difficult of a scene, and it's a good idea to consider how much of a threat each villain will be to your group of PCs. Some key things to look for:
- Multi-target abilities are much more punishing than single target ones. Even if the multi-target abilities are defensive in nature being able to buff a group of allies means a lot more than buffing just one. If you find a villain overperforming because of these abilities, remember that you don't have to affect every target you could - and for more unstable or treacherous villains, including their own allies in mass attacks is perfectly in keeping with comic book tropes.
- Villains that can create more allies (usually minions) during a scene can make things very tough for heroes without multi-target abilities of their own. It can be simply impossible to keep up with a flood of new lackeys for some hero teams, and sparing the actions to defeat the villain creating them is a real struggle. To tone these types down use their creation abilities sparingly, and perhaps make suboptimal choices for the allies they do spawn. Legion archetype villains are probably the easiest "spawners" to adjust on the fly, while Overlord archetypes can be enormously powerful if their minions get out of hand.
- A few villains have access to very powerful healing abilities, with the Domain archetype being the worst offender. Be careful about using these abilities to stall out the heroes until the scene tracker expires, as it can easily feel like robbing your players of a hard-won victory. Sometimes it's fine for the heroes to lose, but doing it by tanking damage faster than they can deliver it doesn't make for great experience at the table for anyone.
Lieutenants
You get H/2 (round up) lieutenants for each scene element, and that can often make them collectively harder to take down than a single villain while still being easier for the GM to run. They're also quite action-efficient and should have an ability or two (or even three) to give them some individuality. This combines to make them quite popular and effective. If you're worried about them overperforming, remember that H/2 is the maximum you can take as one choice, and you could opt to just take fewer, especially for larger PC groups. With 5+ PCs they can be a bit too good in my experience.
Another interesting element of lieutenants is that they reward heroes who are good at delivering very large single-target attacks. The way their dice degrade usually means they take four or more separate hits to bring down, but if a hero can scrape up twice their current die size in one blow they pop as easily as a minion. Getting to 16+ damage to drop a d8 lieutenants isn't all that hard with some Red abilities or serious bonuses, and I've seen 20 or even 24 damage hits one-shot a big lieutenant. This is a definite moment of awesomeness for the player. This makes them natural partners for minions (who need lots of small attacks to dispose of efficiently) so PCs with both kinds of damage output can shine.
Minions
These come in blocks of H minions per selection, making them the best way to fill out the scene with a lot of weaker foes for the heroes to wade through. They're probably the most swingy of all scene element choices, being quickly disposed of by heroes with lots of multi-target abilities but overwhelming to heroes that rely on hitting one foe at a time. How many you use needs to be tailored to your PCs to avoid under- or overperformance, although there are some dials you can use here during play.
The rules strongly encourage you to spread Attack actions from minions as evenly as possible between heroes for good reason, and breaking from that to concentrate fire will make minions far more dangerous. That said, you can lower their effectiveness quite a bit by deliberately shooting at targets with damage reduction, a Defend buffer in place, and strong defensive reactions. With damage reduction, always do one roll at a time so any change in personal Zone gets to increase the amount of deduction for later rolls. Going from -1 in green to -2 in Yellow means a lot with d6 or even d8 minion shots. Contrariwise, you can make minions more dangerous by concentrating on the greatest threats they're aware of, which usually means heroes with multi-target attacks. Not all minions are smart enough to do this, but it's pretty reasonable behavior from (say) the reeling d4 survivors from an earlier assault if they don't just try to flee or surrender instead.
A better use for minions is often to skip on Attacks and use other actions, spreading them around to support their more powerful allies. If they Boost and Defend other villains and Hinder heroes it will generally feel better for the players and lets them choose between powering through the mods and Defends to hit bigger targets or taking the time to scrub off the weak minions first. By not spamming minion Attacks they're still contributing but aren't putting as much immediate pressure on the PCs to avoid going Out.
Challenges
Challenges are an interesting way to mess with PC action economy during a scene, and the Overcome actions required to remove them often generate both twists and hero points, so both sides of the table get something out of them. The rulebook spends quite a lot of time explaining how to build challenges, and following those guidelines will still leave a GM with plenty of room for creativity. When doings so it's worth considering a few things beyond just what difficulty of element you want, though.
Simpler challenges are probably best as part of an environment (see below) where they can be introduced as twists gradually. Long, involved challenges are better used as elements unto themselves so that the PCs can start working on them from the start of the scene. Timed challenges can be tricky to balance, especially if introduced through a twist - it's usually pointless to put a three-turn timer on a Red zone environmental challenge since it won't trigger till the tracker runs out anyway, for ex.
Be careful of using too many challenges at once, especially if there are high durability enemies in the scene as well. A party of (say) five heroes only has a total of 40 actions between them in a normal scene (less if anyone goes Out) and not every Overcome action will succeed even with twists if there are any penalties in play on those attempting them. If you put in three major challenges that require five Overcomes apiece plus another two or three small challenges among your environment twists that need a total of four successes themselves, that's at least 19 actions needed to deal with them all, which doesn't leave many to dedicate to combat, buffing to improve Overcome odds, etc.
Another good idea is to be very restrained about challenges that put penalties in play until they're resolved. Those penalties make the Overcome actions needed much, much harder to accomplish, letting all the challenges in the scene "punch above their weight" in terms of impact. If you do employ that sort of challenge it would be best to limit the penalties so they don't apply to Overcomes or Boosts, giving the players a fair chance at solving things.
It's also good form to use challenges that give a significant reward to players for resolving them rather than applying a penalty. The carrot works better than the stick by putting less immediate pressure on the players (the scene tracker, environment and combat elements are doing that already) while still pushing them not to ignore the opportunity until too late. Challenges that apply a serious (possibly story-related) outcome if the tracker (or timer) runs out but give a commensurate reward for finishing them early might be the best option to get players to engage with them.
Environments
These are unusual because you'll never use more than one in a scene unless something very peculiar is going on - maybe a string of major twists throws all participants into a whole new environment mid-scene? An environment is a powerful storytelling tool by virtue of it twists, which can do almost anything the other scene elements can and more. You can add lieutenants, minions, and challenges this way, take actions that affect one or more targets and even accelerate the scene tracker, and that's just sticking to book suggestions. A GM can really do anything they want with twists, but there are some things to keep in mind.
- Because they're so versatile and essentially impossible to prevent or even foresee, individual environmental twists need to be fairly restrained so they don't dominate the whole scene. The rulebook gives good guidelines on this on p.244 in terms of power, with each GYRO zone having a single more potent major twist that can't be repeated and any number of weaker minor twists that can be reused. Unlike other scene elements the environment does scale up as the scene tracker advances, but its impact is rarely equal to the strongest villain and hero abilities even in Red.
- An environment's twists are just a menu of pre-planned possibilities - a rough "script" for the scene's extras and the special effects guys to work with, as it were. If the "leads" (the heroes) manage to derail things badly enough you may have to abandon your plans and improvise. If you've got twists planned where the nuclear micro-reactor starts leaking radiation but one of the PCs has thrown the whole thing into deep space, you need to come up with something new even if its just re-skinning the same mechanical effect.
- Similarly, the GM ultimately decides what twists to use and when to use them, although listening for player suggestions is always a good idea. Weirdly, most of those suggestions tend to be phrased in the form of "I hope X doesn't happen!" rather than just asking for X outright, but that's players for you. You can use your choice of twists to adjust difficulty in the scene up or down, and even avoid using some twists at all while repeating others if if seems like that will produce a better experience. The only real limitation is not to use more than one really strong major twist effect per GYRO zone, even when making one up on the fly.
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