Precognition

[iamlibertarian]

Whenever I create a character, I usually have some cool idea in mind for how I expect their powers to work.  It's not always at the front of my mind, but it's usually somewhere lurking.  The key with Precognition is to figure out what the player has in mind for it (and, to a lesser extent, figure out how time-related stuff works in the game).  

 

"Pure" Precognition is the straight up Clairsentience (Precognition) Power.  GMs need to know that it can get out of hand, and should be willing to say no (or sufficiently Limit it) especially when it either steps on other Powers (Danger Sense, bonuses to OCV/DCV, among others) or turns into an "I win" button (the aforementioned "seeding" the combat area a la Slippery Jim diGriz).  The TV Tropes page I linked to above can help with figuring out if a potential future will play out exactly as seen, or can be set up in some way so that what they saw wasn't really what happened, or if it can be changed, or even "butterfly effect"-ed out of existence.  And the GM and player need to be on the same page; if a character spends 40 points on Precognition, the player rightly expects to get 40 points worth of utility out of it.  

I like this very much Chris.

 

I mean, if all the player wants out of it is, "Is the hallway empty for 5 minutes, so we can teleport in," I think that should be easily doable, and even then, if that changes the players' actions, that can always change what happens in the next 5 minutes. If all they want is to see is the dice rolls at a craps tables, they better also be buying Filthy Rich, and if not, it creates a plot seed where Casinos track down this filthy cheating scum, lol.

 

If they only want combat value out of it, they can do what the books say and just use Precog as a Special Effect for other abilities (OCV, DCV, etc.)

 

Or if reading tomorrow's headlines for a, "Superhero Group once again foils a tragedy." outcome, it just lets them be there to be a part of the action (plot seed) but guarantees no specific outcome.

[BoloOfEarth]

That is a marvelous way to run a Precog, for sure

 

Would you let a PC have it? Or would that Eff Up your plots?

 

Good question.  If a PC had the skill low enough that anything beyond, say, a 5- or 20-minute jaunt causes significant risk of injury, and if nobody on the team has Healing (which would make most injuries from longer jaunts much, much less worrisome), and with the understanding that I don't want to re-run combats all the time just because he wanted a better outcome, yes, I'd probably allow it.  And I'd expect that occasionally, it would Eff Up my plot. 

 

On the combat side, I might have the occasional time where I'd tell that player, "Okay, so after you guys take some serious injuries on the first time fighting the Big Bad Guys, you skip back to warn your teammates that Villain A apparently knows about Hero A's vulnerability to fire and will focus on him, and also that it looks like Viilain B takes extra damage from Hero C's cold blast.  Oh, and Villain D is running around invisible, hoping to steal the MacGuffin while his teammates keep all the heroes busy."  Basically, give him some freebie info from a hypothetical first run-through of the combat -- not with all villain teams, just those powerful enough to seriously threaten the heroes.  That should help justify the point expenditure on the power, without being overly disruptive to the game. 

 

Once, it might even be interesting to pull a Groundhog Hour on the player -- have something cause his power to kick on against his will at the same time, sending him back an hour in time over and over again.  (In that case, I would ignore the Required Roll and just make it happen without injury every time.)  I'm imagining something like the Stargate SG-1 episode where O'Neill and T'ealc kept repeating the same day.

[massey]

Personally, I'd allow precognition to act in three general ways.

 

1)  It's a GM tool to feed the players plot information.  When used in this way, it has unlimited range and can see as far into the future as the GM wants.  What it shows will be accurate, but may not be very specific.  This basically lets the GM shout out "You're all doomed!  DOOMED!!!" and show flashes of catastrophe to the player with precognition.  It gets the players involved in the coming events.  It shows however much the GM wants, and no more.

 

2)  It lets the player go fishing for clues.  Want to know where the bad guys will strike next?  Look into the future and see.  The power when used this way will show specific information, but it may be incomplete or misleading.  Seeing Doctor Photon blasting Captain Freedom may lead you to think you'll come into conflict with him.  But perhaps that's an evil Captain Freedom robot duplicate?  When a player tries to over-use this aspect, the GM is free to limit the player to exactly what he paid for -- remember that Clairsentience has a range of Active Points x 5" (10m).  With sight and hearing, plus precog, that means you can see into the future up to about a quarter mile away.  And you have to pick a certain location every time you use the power.  Now I'd normally waive those requirements for needs of the plot, but if the player is trying to abuse it, that will rein it in very quickly.  Presumably that's why precogs meditate a lot when using their power -- they're looking into the future and seeing a lot of pointless crap that they have to sift through.  It takes a long time to see anything important.

 

3)  It lets the player look at very specific points in time.  "Is there going to be anyone in the hallway in 5 minutes?" or "what will the next roll of the craps dice be?"  Those things should generally be allowed.  But I wouldn't let players just have a standing order that "I'm always looking ahead 5 minutes into the future to see what happens."  They have to ask specific questions about a specific area.

 

In situations where player character actions can influence what happens, then the future hasn't been written yet.  You can't look into the future and see who is going to win a fight between you and the Fangtastic Four (a group of vampire supervillains), because you haven't fought the fight yet.  Who the winner is depends on what choices you make.  But you may be able to look and see what happens if you don't do anything.  This keeps it useful while preventing you from using precog to eliminate any drama in the campaign.  It's not "Detect: Correct Thing To Do Next".

[iamlibertarian]

Thanks everyone. I am getting great info on how to make the Precog (true precog power) useful to the game, and bring Extra fun to the game instead of hamstringing it.

 

DC

[Lucius]

 It's not "Detect: Correct Thing To Do Next".

But this is

 

Detect: Correct thing to do: (Total: 42 Active Cost, 42 Real Cost) Detect A Large Class Of Things 11- (Unusual Group), Discriminatory, Analyze, Increased Arc Of Perception (360 Degrees), Penetrative, Sense, Tracking (Real Cost: 42)

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Detect: Palindromedary

[mrinku]

Or you could go with

 

KS: Etiquette for Any Situation 11- (2 pts)

 

[Cassandra]

There was a show called Wonderfalls where a young woman developed precognition which came in the form of seeing inanimate objects talking to her and giving her clues to what was about to happen.  They caused her to do things and go places where she needs to be to solve a problem.

 

Of course they didn't warn her about a crazy Nun who chloroformed her and tried to perform an exorcism.

[Sidume]

Clairesentience (especially Pre- and Post Cognition) has a stop sign for a reason.  Actually, a several of them.

 

The GM doesn't have precognition.  An RPG is not a novelist writing a story.  The GM has to interact with the players to determine what happens.  

 

Further, you need to define which precognition it is.  Is it Dream Girl's "My visions always come true" power?  That really hamstrings the GM and the players.  Or is it the precognition of a possible future that the players can stop?  This is a plot device that may negate the cost effectiveness of buying the power.

 

And postcognition can really put a damper on any mystery that a GM may want to run.

 

If you allow players to by Pre- or Post-cognition for their characters the GM will have a bear of  time keeping track of things.  If you allow it, you may want to have it highly restricted with limitations. 

 

 

[dsatow]

I'm not one to generally allow it for PCs, but if I did allow it for PCs, the general rule is:

1. This is events that were probably going to happen, but the future is fluid and by peering into the future, you have altered what will happen, consciously or not. (butterfly effect/7 days)
2. There are certain powers in the universe that do not like their plans being spied upon.  Too much peering into the future may attract these endless ones.

[JmOz]

A little off topic, but just posted a precog

 

http://jawedel01.wixsite.com/kountry-gaming/copy-of-heroes-of-san-corona-brute

[TheDarkness]

I actually have worked on a general system to deal with this, I'll put the link to the discussion where I first brought it up. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, especially since it requires a fair amount of work ahead of time.

 

The main issues tend to be that precognition tends to be some combination of:

• modeled as different powers that presume some foresight(my excellent dodge is due to knowing what is coming), which models some aspects but not others of seeing into the future. This one is the only approach commonly used that isn't problematic, but only models a narrow range of what precognition would allow
• is almost worthless, as the 'visions' one may have are purposefully limited to a point that begs the question 'should the player have to pay for this?'
• is too much a GM tool and not a power of the players, yet still is paid for by the player, which is dodgy in the extreme

At various points in the thread I'm attaching, I discuss a setup using cards that contain campaign personas and general types of people, cards that contain campaign locations and general types of places, cards that contain tropes/conflicts/relations.

 

The advantage of the system is that the more detail one wants, the more elements one must include(I'll choose this one location, and x number of persona cards, and x number of trope cards), and thus, the more uncertainty about what it all means, plus it aids the GM in making the vision without the GM being able to railroad away details in order to use the player's power to run the show completely. The GM sees the cards, must include all of them, but has the leeway to influence enough to make sense(well, this trope makes no sense given the two npc's the vision includes, so there must be a third, unseen npc or pc, only unseen because the precog selected too few people to view- seeing the future should not mean seeing it more clearly than the present, what is not directly viewed in the vision will often have as much or more weight as what is). Another advantage is it does give the GM story elements on the fly without turning what the player paid for into a leash that the GM has on the players.

 

 

[LoneWolf]

Also keep in mind just because you have the ability to see into the future does not mean you know everything that will happen.  You still need to know where to look before you can see anything.  If you want to figure out what the villain is doing you have to be able to know where the villain is going to be at any particular time.  Even if you know the villain is going to be meeting someone to set something up you probably do not know where they will be meeting.   In the scenario with tomorrow’s newspaper you have to figure out where a paper is going to be that you can read.  Remember that precognition does not allow you to interact with the future just see it.

 

Another important detail is you have to have a reason to look for something.  Unless you have a reason to suspect something is happening why you would even be looking in the first place.  If the players cannot tell me what he is looking for and justify why his character would be looking he does not look. 

 

As it is written in the book precognition does not allow you to rapidly scan the future.  It takes as long to view something with precognition as it would take to happen.  If you want to keep watch on the hallway to figure out when it will be empty you may need to blow a lot of time. I do not allow the rapid adder to be purchased or to be used with precognition.

 

Like Chris Goodwin I also require the player with precognition to make a perception roll, but in some cases I add a penalty based on how far into the future it is.  Basically it is a range penalty based on time.