Show first few characters of each blog

I have a blog which is displayed using the (Posts) Frontpage menu item. Is there any way to have this page show a list of my blog posts with only the first 200 characters or so instead of the entire blog post?

I do not want to use the read more feature, because when this is used, the text before the read more break does not get included when viewing the entire blog post.

I see in the Settings - Layout - Listings area that there is a setting for Show Post Content (which is set to yes) and Maximum Content (Characters) but changing these settings doesn't seem to affect anything.

Thank you.