Teambuilding MetalWorks

Team building is one of the things which is more important in Superhero gaming than any other genre of RPG’ing, or so it would seem. I’ve known gamers to agonize over getting just the right superhero team dynamic (to the point of ditching otherwise perfectly good hero characters) while they wouldn’t bat an eyelid at playing Yet Another Fighter in D&D when there’s still no Cleric in the party. Strange, that.

Perhaps it’s because there isn’t really such a thing as a “poor” or “boring” choice in Mutants & Masterminds, because you build the characters from scratch yourself. I dunno. Whatever.

Anyhow, I’ve been Team Building. A good hero team needs (as a minimum) a Blaster, a Brick, a Covert, a Mover, a Brain and a Shield. Blasters attack at range, Bricks go hand-to-hand, Coverts do sneaky stuff, Movers have special movement powers, Brains do the thinking and tactical planning and Shields provide cover and protection for the rest of the team. In D&D terms, the classic team-up of Fighter, Ranger, Cleric, Thief and Mage covers all those bases neatly.

Some heroes in every team will serve double (or even triple) duty, but that’s par for the course. Wolverine, for example, is one of the X-Men’s Bricks and Coverts.

Anyhow, here’s the team structure for Metal Works:

Agent Gold – Super-Agent (Brain and Covert)
Silver – Hyper-speed racer (Mover and Brick)
Bronze – Cyborg (Shield and Blaster)
Copper – Elven Sorceress (Blaster, Covert and Shield)
Mercury – Beautiful paragon (Brick and Mover)
Lead – Demon (Brick and Blaster)

This gives me 3 Blasters, 3 Bricks, 2 Coverts, 2 Movers, 2 Shields and 1 Brain. Not bad for a team of six Agent Gold is the sole tactician of the team, so he’s the most valuable member, but the rest of the team have enough brains to get themselves out of most scrapes. Except Lead, maybe

All I need to do is render Silver and Bronze in Poser 6 then stat them all up.

Easy!

RPG