What are the differences between DC Adventures and 3e M&M?

Question

DC Adventures is a version of 3e Mutants & Masterminds, released in advance of the core 3e books. In the course of answering someone's question on the Ronin Army forums about the legality of the Green Lantern build, I cited the different rule for Create, namely that ranged attacks were done as Ranged Damage with an allowable trade-off, versus standard 3e where they are treated as an Area Attack and thus are strictly PL capped.

That made me realize that I wasn't certain if I knew all of the differences between the two versions, aside from a different setting.

Answer 1

On initial release, there were three major mechanical differences between DCA and M&M 3E, and at least one minor one.

Create

Create had a different mechanic for making a ranged attack, using a rolled attack instead of an area attack.

DCA

Simply dropping an object on a target or targets requires a ranged attack check against Dodge. The object inflicts damage equal to its Toughness.

M&M 3E

Simply dropping a created object on a target is treated like an Area Effect attack based on the object’s size (see Area extra). The object inflicts damage equal to its Toughness, and targets get a Dodge check to evade the falling object. A successful check results in no damage (rather than the usual half damage).

This was fixed in the errata to match the 3E text (at the time, players noted that the original DCA version of Create gave all of the benefits of Ranged Damage, plus more, for the same cost).

Increased Duration

DCA allowed three levels of Increased Duration.

• Instant to Concentration
• Concentration to Sustained
• Sustained to Continuous

M&M 3E reduced this to just the first and third items.

• Instant to Concentration
• Sustained to Continuous

Growth / Shrinking

I've seen references to both Growth and Shrinking changing in their mechanics. The PDF I own of DCA has the same Growth description and cost as in M&M 3E (which also matches the errata entry). Shrinking has the same mechanics, but only costs 1 PP/rank (M&M 3E and the errata increase the cost to 2 PP/rank).

Extra Effort - Resistance

The DCA Heroes Handbook states:

Gain an immediate additional resistance check against an ongoing effect. If the extra effort incapacitates you, you forfeit all resistance checks against the effect until you recover. The fatigue conditions do not affect you until you are free of the effect.

The errata replaced this with the text seen in the 3E Heroes Handbook:

Gain an immediate additional resistance check against an ongoing effect. If you’re compelled or controlled, the fatigue from the extra effort doesn't affect you until you’re free of the effect; this is so you can’t resist yourself to exhaustion as a way of avoiding being controlled!