EldritchFire wrote:Just wanted to chime in here. Power balance is achieved in play, not in chargen. No matter how many do you roll in your pool, you only add two for your total. Sure, you can spend Plot Points to include more dice in your total, but that's not happening much for the "high powered" characters. Follow me here.
Your main source for Plot Points (PP) is opportunities, or when your roll a 1 on a die. The high powered characters are throwing around d10s and d12, not too likely to roll a 1. Lower powered characters are throwing around buckets of d6s with the occasional d8, which are more likely to roll 1s.
This means that the lower powered heroes are chucking smaller dice, but have more PPs to play with, so are stunting more (a stunt is when you pay a PP, describe how awesome you are, and add a d8 to your pool), adding in more traits, and including more dice in their total.
Granted, you can use a distinction as a d4 to gain a PP, but that's only good for one PP per roll, where as inf you roll 3 ones, you could get 3PPs from that roll!
tl; dr
Superman is rolling a handful of d12s, while Batman is sporting d6s and d8s. Batman rolls more 1s and gets more PPs, where as Supes is, well, boring.
This is all somewhat true, but only somewhat. I think it's important not to get too carried away with the general idea.
First: across any given dimension, more or bigger are better - meaning, give you a better chance of prevailing. Yes, when you roll 3d8 and I roll 5d8, we're each, by default, keeping only our top two dice. But probability means I'm going to have a better top two, on average over the long run. And, when you roll 4d8 and I roll 4d12, on average, my two best dice are going to total more than your two best dice. That's just math.
Here's a limit case: Take any existing datafile, and set every single Power Trait and Specialty to D8. Now make another copy and set every single Power Trait and Specialty to D10; and make a third where every single Power Trait is rated at d12. I think you will find that, yes, the D12 version overshadows the other two in play against real villain datafiles and real Doom Pools.
Plot Points are cool: love 'em! But there are some differences that, for player heroes, they have a hard time making up. In particular, it's not so easy to use PPs to get a D12 out of a default die-pool full of D8s. (Let alone D6s.) Multiple 1s don't step up for players who buy them the way they do for Watchers. Depending on how you read the rules, it seems like the only asset you can step up by buying opportunities is one you "just created." Against a Doom Pool of 5-6 dice with at least 1 D12 and a couple D10s and no D6s, this will matter. (e.g. on a healing action in a transition scene).
I think it's fair to say that the mechanics of play HELP to smooth out differences in power levels. AND, it's fair to say that there are enough layers to an MHRP character that it's not always clear what is and isn't "unbalanced." But I do not agree, based on my play of the game so far, that play as such levels the contributions that heroes make to an Event regardless of their trait scores. And while I realize you've played the game at least as much as I have and almost certainly more, I suspect you're doing so with datafiles that - like the ones in the Basic Game! - have all sorts of little "balancing bits" built into them. However consciously or not.
Finally: Superman is only as boring as his datafile, right? If you're using a datafile that makes Superman "boring," you need to rewrite it.
Jim
