Mutants and Masterminds, Linked power confusions

Question

• Knife Guy has a linked power related to his poisoned knife. It has a Damage and Weaken(Stamina resisted Fortitude.) effect.

Are the effects determined by the order they are listed on the sheet or are the effects only applied after both? In the first case listing the Weaken first is strictly better as it make it much harder to resist the Damage however if they are both applied after the turn it makes no difference.

• Rainbow has a power Rainbow blast which is written Damage(1, Red Laser) Linked Damage(1, Orange Laser) ... Linked Damage(1, Violet Laser)

Does Linking Damage Powers allow me to make as many attacks as I can justify within the descriptors? Obviously the seven tickle beams above aren't all that threatening, but if I give each of them Multi-Attack against a single target and improved Crit then circumstantial modifiers make them far more dangerous.

By the way. Thanks for the 3e tag.

Answer 1

Linked effects resolve in the order agreed upon by the player and the GM, but generally they do resolve in whatever order is most favorable. I would advise always having them resolve in the same order to avoid a player trying to argue changing the order where it might give them an advantage.

As regards chaining multiple effects of the same type, from the text of Linked:

Generally, the same effect cannot be Linked to itself to “multiply” the results of a failed resistance check (such as two Linked Damage effects causing “double damage” on a failed check).

This is consistent with how Homing and Secondary Attack specifically note that the same attack does not stack.

I'll poke around to see if there's a citation for 3E, but in 2E, it was specifically pointed out that any given attack can only force one save for a given save type. So if you happen to have, say, Damage 10 (Alternate Save (Will)) linked to Affliction 10 (Will save), then the target makes one Will save and compares it against all effects for that save. This is basically because the d20 has a fair amount of swing and the more times you can make someone roll a save, the greater chance that one of them will fail. Also, many GMs are skeptical about having too many Linked effects with different saves for the same reason. Paragon has a good discussion on the limitations of the PL system, and specifically Linked, here.