Special effects not to choose

[assault]

I was reading Galactic Champions, and it occurred to me that having your characters' special effects be "cosmic power" wasn't the best idea in the world.

Why, because everyone and their dog will have defences "only against cosmic power" and maybe some other effect. For example, Lightning Lady will have a force field "only against cosmic power, electricity and lightning". Why? Because, of course, her "lightning" powers are a specific manifestation of "cosmic power".

The LSH works quite well, incidentally. I've been building their early members.

In 1953, there was a story called "Superman's Big Brother". It was reprinted in "Superman in the 50s" in 2002. The character that showed up there was a precursor of "Superboy's big brother" - Mon-El. He had all the stuff that Superman had, except that he had to pay endurance for it, and wore out really quickly. In other words, he's a really easy design. And his costume was exactly the same as the one Mon-El wore when he turned up later in the same decade.

The original three members of the LSH were pretty easy designs. Two were energy projectors, and the other was a mentalist. And then there was Ultra Boy. He was basically just an energy projector with a bunch of enhanced senses on his first appearance.

In other words, before you get into them in detail, the LSH consisted of three energy projectors (Lightning Lad, Cosmic Boy and Ultra Boy), a mentalist (Saturn Girl) and a Superboy lookalike (Mon-El). Modify Mon-El to be his precursor that I described above, and you can build them all on whatever points you like.

And, of course, they all can suck up "cosmic power" until the cows come home. After all, what do you think is powering their powers.

So cheap. So easy.

[Wanderer]

I was reading Galactic Champions, and it occurred to me that having your characters' special effects be "cosmic power" wasn't the best idea in the world.

Why, because everyone and their dog will have defences "only against cosmic power" and maybe some other effect. For example, Lightning Lady will have a force field "only against cosmic power, electricity and lightning". Why? Because, of course, her "lightning" powers are a specific manifestation of "cosmic power".

The solution to this dilemma is in the fact that every cosmic character and his dog has either a VPP, or Variable Special Effects, or Variable Advantage, appliable to Variable Special Effects, or all of them. Switch the Power to some SFX the opponent has not tailored his defenses against, and he is toast. If I remember correctly, the first chapter of GC discusses just this point.