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Mutants & Masterminds - [Review] Gadget Guide: Heavy Weapons


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Gadget Guide: Heavy Weapons

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Vitals: Published By Green Ronin • 6(5) pages • $1.29 • full color PDF
*Whump! ... KA-BOOOM!*
What's in it?
In a word: lots. Gadget Guide: Heavy Weapons brings the goods, expanding on the core rules and detailing ways to simulate the really big guns.
Starting out with about a page of rules for targeting heavy weapons and the effects of hitting or missing. Multi-attack gets some expansion, with GM options for adding penalties to especially wide arc fire. The Indirect extra gets a little love to describe how indirect fire weapons, like artillery weapons, function. Generally this is a useful expansion on the rules, and the clarification for direct hits with partial ranks of Area (as seen on the Rocket Launcher in the Hero's Handbook) will likely make some people very happy.
Next Heavy Weapons are broken down into five broad categories: Machineguns, Artillery, Missiles, Nuclear Weapons, ans Super-Science Weapons. Of these Missiles and Nuclear Weapons get the majority of the text. Missiles get broken into four sub-sections on Guidance, Warheads, Defeating Missiles, and Torpedoes. These sections are largely discussion, as often descriptor based as not, though the section on Defeating Missiles does provide rules support on suggested difficulties or modifiers to apply. As one might expect the section on Nuclear Weapons focuses primarily on the blast effects and how to model them, complete with suggested power effects and ranks.
Three side bars help to fill out the Guide. The first discusses area effects and scatter, allowing for a more "realistic' (as heinous as I find that word often becomes in a game designed for Supers) by allowing the GM to institute attack checks on indirect fire area of effect attacks. The amount of scatter becomes dependent on how much the attack roll misses the target number. The second sidebar discusses the Penetrating extra on heavy weapons and how in most cases save anti-tank weapons it is simply not needed. The third sidebar brings planet busting weapons and effects into the game. This sidebar had been featured on Steve Kenson's own blog in the past, but it's inclusion here is welcome detailing just how powerful an effect would need to be to do damage on a planetary scale.
Closing Thoughts
Gadget Guide: Heavy Weapons is definitely one of the better Gadget Guides. Easily worth the price of admission if you intend to use large scale "conventional weaponry" in your game, or if you have a character who uses powers that mimic these kinds of weapons. The discussion and rules support here is top notch greatly expanding the limited offerings of the Hero's Handbook.
Rating: 95% - Easily worth the investment, especially if you want to blow stuff up.
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