Brain-in-a-Jar quandries

[Rumbane]

AKA Iron Man minus the man.

 

I've been invited to play my first Champions game (4e), & while I kinda had some academic familiarity with 4th edition a good 15 years or so ago, I can't find my books. The GM will write my character up for me, but I want to get a feel for whether or not I'm wasting both our time with my concept. Let's say I want to play a character whose base form is merely a psychic consciousness held in a 'psychic bell jar' linked to x cryopods holding bodies I can inhabit. Some Powers & Skills are in my base character & some in my Multi-Forms (let's say for now there are 2 Multi-Forms but with the possibility that I may unlock others further down the road. I would want to buy back all my Base Physical Characteristics to 1 yes? I'm concerned that with the things I'll want to do in the mid-to-long term that while I might make a fair jack-of-all-trades (Multi-Forms covering several of the Archetypes like Brick, Weapon Master so on), that I'm going to end up rather weak in comparison to everyone else when huge chunks of my points will be sitting off-stage in their stasis chambers. Is there a hard point of diminishing returns I should know about? Will I be spending so many of my points into my Multi-Forms just to stay on-par that I won't be able to invest in say a ship or other secondary interests?

[Hyper-Man]

I think you will initially be more adaptable than other characters built on the same points (not necessarily more powerful).  You will eventually fall behind on the power curve due to how you would need to spend eXperience Points (XP) on such a character (the base form plus an investment in the Multiform Power so the other forms can increase abilities as well).  I've never invested the time to build such a character but I've seen a couple of characters on KillerShrike's site that might be of use for comparison. 

 

http://killershrike.com/HERONet/Goodspeed.aspx

 

http://killershrike.com/MillennialMen/MillennialMen_WarMan.aspx

[sinanju]

I think you will initially be more adaptable than other characters built on the same points (not necessarily more powerful).  You will eventually fall behind on the power curve due to how you would need to spend eXperience Points (XP) on such a character (the base form plus an investment in the Multiform Power so the other forms can increase abilities as well).  I've never invested the time to build such a character but I've seen a couple of characters on KillerShrike's site that might be of use for comparison. 

 

You are correct, sir. I played a character like that once. It was a Round Robin game (each player acted as GM for 2-3 sessions, then passed the baton on to the next) in which we routinely gained 25 XP after each 2-3 session arc. We started as standard superhero level characters, but rapidly acquired ridiculous point totals*. I was playing a "genie" more or less--a VPP with the "cosmic" attributes. I was far more adaptable than anyone else, and for a while I was probably the most powerful because of it, but as the game went on, I fell behind the power curve for exactly the reasons mentioned. I had so many points locked up in the control cost of my cosmic power pool that while I could almost anything, I couldn't do any single thing as effectively as someone who specialized in it.

 

*And we agreed to let one another use rules gimmicks and builds that none of us would have permitted if we'd been running a single-GM game. But part of the point of this campaign was to see what we could do, what broke the game and what didn't.

[BlueCloud2k2]

I saw the title of this thread and immediately thought of Irregular Webcomic.

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/cast/cliffhangers.html

Hitler's Brain in a Jar FTW!