Damage Transmutation

[astralfrontier]

I'm designing a low-powered NPC super with a single power: damage he takes affects his willpower and ego, not his body. The worse he's hurt, the less motivated and confident he becomes, though physically he stays intact.

 

What is the simplest and most straight-forward way to build this sort of power, given that Hero has no "sliding Willpower score" a la White Wolf?

[Ghost who Walks]

Hmm...

You might be able to do it as a disadvantage.

 

~Accidental change: psychological disadvantages change if he takes a certain amount of damage

 

Or With

 

~Enraged: Becomes less motivated and confident if takes damage

 

You can use enraged to simulate a variety of things (just change the word enraged to something else), and accidental change is a good way to do stuff like siezures.

 

Or if he has a lot of defenses, you could do it as a limitation on that.

[caris]

Actually, it sounds like a side effect on his defenses to me, a Drain on his EGO and PRE. Since the character apparently doesn’t take STUN or BODY, he would have very high defenses that when a certain level of them come into play he takes a Drain.

[farik]

This may seem a little too straightforward but I'd say just handwave this. Treat the character's EGO as BODY apply defenses normally but instead of reducing the BODY score just reduce the EGO score and follow the rules for negative EGO scores. If you want the character to have a lack of motivation just give them a very common minor psych lim: unmotivated EGO-5 to resist. That dropping EGO score will kick the psych lim into effect. Sure the character can't die technically but they could become a vegetable since how many people have heal EGO in their first aid kit? Even if they recover EGO as quickly as body REC/Month if they don't have a high recover (REC 3 for instance) it's 2 months before they get a +1 to their attempt to resist their psych lim.

[Snarf]

I would say destroying someone's willpower and ego is represented in Hero by taking stun damage. That's how the ego attack power works.

 

You could buy a bunch of defense and limit it so it doesn't protect against stun. It wouldn't actually transmute the damage, but you would take stun from hits instead of stun and body, which is pretty close what you wanted.