Weekly Games: M&M

Okay, firstly, my apologies. I'm running on about 4 hours sleep, not enough caffeine, and a lot of frustration.

Last night I tried to run my weekly Mutants and Masterminds game. I love the system, for a lot of reasons, and I have a pretty hefty plotline on the go (okay, so some of it is being constructed on the fly, but I've left myself a lot of wiggle room, so that's okay).

For any of my players reading this - there are some spoilers in here, so please try to maintain Player vs. Character knowledge separation.

The Situation

As a result of interfering with the Zodiac group's plans once too often, a group of stealthy watchers (ninjas? Maybe) have been sent to follow the heroes. Thanks to this, one of the characters' secret identities has been effectively blown, and the bad guys have decided to make their displeasure known - by kidnapping said character's children.

(For anyone interested, I used the tracking rules from M&M, and no, not one of the heroes has noticed that they're being followed. Yet.)

This is a side-plot. A use of a complication to enhance the story a little. The kidnappers are negligible in threat to the PCs - if they can stand for more than two rounds of combat against the party, it can only be as the result of some abominable dice rolls.

In fact, the main aim of the scene is so that at least one of the players can find out that they're being followed.

All well and good. Now for the frustrating part.

The M&M game is being played over IRC, on a private server. We have two channels dedicated to the game on that server - an IC channel and an OOC channel. All game mechanics are dealt with in the OOC channel (we even have a dice bot on the server to allow public rolls), with the IC channel reserved for descriptions and IC speech.

In addition to this, I, as the GM, have the following running when we play a combat scene:

HeroLab with a profile containing all of the characters in the scene.
HeroLab Tactical Console for tracking damage and initiative.
HeroLab Dice Roller for GM only private dice rolls.
All 6 characters open in their own tabs of a web-browser, for another reference source.

Plus I have the M&M rulebook, Ultimate Power and the Freedom City campaign setting books within easy reach, or open, with bookmarks to important or relevant pages.

I do not use mapping software, preferring my own imagination to paint the scene. I might change this practice, after last night.

During a fight, I have to keep track of the IC channel, the OOC channel, HeroLab Profile, Tactical Console and Dice Roller, as well as the combat system from the M&M rulebook. I've never run an M&M game around a table, so my knowledge of the combat rules is a little sketchy, despite its similarity to D&D.

Maybe I'm taking on too much, and should share some of the responsibility. On the other hand, I'm trying to keep as much of the mechanics invisible to the players, so that they can focus on description and heroism.

The Scene

The kidnappers have made a potentially fatal mistake - they had to stop for fuel only a short distance away from where they snatched the children. The heroes have raced to the gas station, because the security cameras managed to peg the SUV's license plate and alerted the authorities.
I based my mental image of the petrol station on one I use a lot, close to my home. There were three vehicles refueling (one of them being the SUV, with a man who wasn't the driver actually at the pump), a fuel truck refilling the station's storage tank, and an old granny using the ATM.

What Happened

Things went swimmingly for the first couple of actions. Sure, the players didn't do what I was expecting, but I've always maintained that no plot survives contact with the players, so that wasn't a surprise. We have the makings of a gunfight on a petrol station forecourt.

AWESOME!

Two of the PCs were standing beside the SUV, having both attacked the guy fueling it at short range. The driver of the SUV slammed his vehicle into reverse, hurling it backwards a few feet, hitting the obnoxious guy waiting behing him in a sports car, and sending both vehicles into a spin.

...

So I don't think it's all that unreasonable for the two characters standing next to the rear end of the SUV before it started moving to be at risk of being hit by it as it spins, so I call for Reflex saves from them both.

Not according to my players.

To be fair, I may not have described the scene well enough. They may have had a poor understanding of position and where the vehicles were.

I have 11 screens open on my PC to manage this scene. I'm trying to update information and provide descriptive text in realtime to ensure that it goes as smoothly and quickly as possible, so that the players don't have to wait while I trawl through notes and information and stuff in books before typing things up.

The last thing I need at a time like that is a rules discussion. Heck, not really a rules discussion, but an objection to my interpretation of the scene.

If a 15 foot vehicle that you are standing within 5 feet of goes into a flat spin, you are at risk of being hit by it. That's simple geometry. I do not have time to discuss geometry while I'm trying to keep a fight moving smoothly, alt+tabbing between 11 different screens, clicking, adjusting, typing descriptions and so forth.

To answer the objections that were raised would have resulted in the scene grinding to a halt. We hadn't even finished the first round of combat, and already the scene was at risk of stopping.

Combat scenes in this game are slow. They take forever to resolve. I love the game, I'm enjoying the plot and the story that's coming out as the players get involved and regularly bend the plot over a barrel, but any amount of fighting is a pain in the ass to resolve. It's the most stressful thing I do on a regular basis, in fact. Work is a doddle, compared to the prospect of running a fight in my M&M game. Which doesn't stop me enjoying it. It's just a lot of stress, and a lot of work.

So... I logged out. I really couldn't handle it, and I didn't want to get involved in a discussion with six other people about why I was unable to handle it - the management of the game is meant to be invisible to the players. They have no need to know how much work I do to keep things running, because all I want is for them to enjoy the story.

We'll undoubtedly resume next week, hopefully with me in a better frame of mind.

I'm seriously considering some sort of mapping software, though. Not an online tabletop, though - just a shared map. That would really help, except for the fact that I prefer non-mapped RP combat, and M&M's combat system is designed to be non-mapped.

We'll see.