"Cramming", but for fightin'!

[Dr Rotwang!]

Hi, everyone. New poster, sort of. As always, leeching off of everyone else's expertise! Hoo-hah!

Well, my wife's got this idea for a character, see. She can learn to do anything she sees -- if she reads it, she can recite it; if she scans the recipe, she can cook it; if she watches Legend of Drunken Master, she can...uh...get drunk and beat the hummus outta people, I guess.

So...outside of a Taskmaster-ish VPP that'll let you re-assign combat maneuevers etc (she wants to KEEP what she learns!), what would you guys suggest?

The Legendary* Dr Rotwang! Depends On You!









*No Longer So Legendary. Void Outside of RPG.Net, and even there, not so hot either.

[Monolith]

First off, welcome to the Hero boards! :)

One of the easiest ways of doing this would be to have your wife build the character and buy all the Disadvantages, but leave some 30 points unspent. That way the character has points to spend on certain abilities which she will want to make permanent. I would also have the character take the Cramming skill as the catalyst for the entire power/ability.

As far as combat skills, that really depends on the nature of how you normally handle such things. If the character already has Martial Arts, you just might want her to spend an XP on the appropriate Knowledge Skill (she sees someone doing Drunken Kung Fu, and so spends one point on KS: Drunken Kung Fu 8-). If there are different combat maneuvers associated with the new style which she does not have, then she should purchase one or two of them. But that would be fairly rare as most Martial Arts packages consist of only a few maneuvers renamed due to the SFX of the style.

If you want to be hardnosed about it, you could even have her buy a second Cramming skill and call it Combat Cramming. Personally I would not go that far. I would require the player to put at least 1 XP per session which she gains experience into the skill pool, that way she should never run out of points to keep buying new skills with.

During role-playing and normal gaming I would also play up the aspect that there are many skills that a person has which the really have no roll for. That way your wife could keep a running list of skills which cover her general knowledge, but are not really so important as to require a roll. After all, how often does someone really need to roll to have a knowledge of Lord Byron poetry? :)

[WhammeWhamme]

I've actually built a character with more or less this power:

Buy every skill imaginable with the limiter 'only to copy exactly what you've seen' and CSL's with Variable SFX's: Any Combat technique you've seen. Add on Eidetic Memory, Universal Translator and a huge 'KS: Stuff, SS: Science and AK: The Universe' and you're good to go.

Simple, painless, and no upper limits!
It gets expensive...

[Dr Rotwang!]

Hey, thanks!

She likes both ideas and wants to try them, see how it comes out. You guys are good.

What I'd come up with was to let her buy a power called "Combat Mimicry". 30 points, period. THEN, she sets aside a buncha points and just buys maneuvers and WFs (but not CSLs!) when she comes across 'em. It requires a skill roll and so has a Limitation mod, but that's OK.

So if she watches, say, a Barsilat fighter do his Staff of Grisly Hopping maneuver, she can make her INT roll and spend the points to have that maneuver (with attendant SFX) on-the-spot.

'Course, now that I think, Monolith is right in saying "most Martial Arts packages consist of only a few maneuvers renamed due to the SFX of the style".

...

...Hmmm.

Back to the drawing board and so on.

Thanks for the welcome!