Strange combo of advantages?

[SSJ Archon]

Alright I got this player who wants his character to make a cloning virus. It goes around like any virus, and causes those it inflicts split into to two identical beings. (Those Beings are immune afterward.)

My thoughts are Duplication, Sticky, Usable on others, and Only Uninfected -1/4 ?

Doesn't seem right...

[WilyQuixote]

Usable as Attack might help.....

[Snarf]

You would have to spend a ridiculous amount to be able to duplicate someone worth a lot more points than you. This might end up costing more than it's worth for its usefulness.

[Dr. Anomaly]

Then don't do it that way.

 

Buy it as a Cumulative Major Transform, Continuous (so even 1d6 will eventually do it), 0 END, and probably take Gradual Effect (so it doesn't do its work in under 5 minutes...let it take several days to build up enough to cause the cloning). Give it Invisible Power Effects and Sticky, and people won't even know they've been infected and are transmitting the disease.

 

What's it transform them into?

 

It transforms them into:

 

Exact copy of themselves, but with the following additions:

 

LS: Immune To Clone Virus (2 pts)

 

Duplication (exact copy of the person as they are now, but without the Duplication power), No Concious Control, 1 Charge Never Recovers, Cannot Recombine.

 

Once the disease reaches this stage, they manifest the effects by splitting off the Duplicate, which due to the limitations, can never recombine. Viola! A permanent clone, and done MUCH more cheaply than trying to buy Duplication, UAA, Sticky, etc.

[Kintara]

I guess this is kind of off topic, but this reminded me of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where one of the characters gets split in two with a weapon (the Ferula-Gemina).

 

Basically, the weapon distills you into two seperate beings. A super would have all his Super-related character traits in one side, and all the "Normal" stuff in the other one. The Super-distillate would probably be even more badass than before (freed from all the weaknesses of being normal), but the rub is that they both die if one of them dies (as they are both aspects of the same person).

 

Of course, in the episode it hits someone who is already normal, so it just splits him into his strongest and weakest traits. So one side is really together and smooth, and the other is all bumbling and pathetic.

 

It's a cool concept, but the problem is that I doubt it could be statted out very favorably.

[Derek Hiemforth]

Originally posted by Dr. Anomaly

Once the disease reaches this stage, they manifest the effects by splitting off the Duplicate, which due to the limitations, can never recombine. Voila! A permanent clone, and done MUCH more cheaply than trying to buy Duplication, UAA, Sticky, etc.

Nice build, Dr. Anomaly!

[Southern Cross]

Hear,Hear !!

[Dr. Anomaly]

Thank you, thank you!

 

A doctor should know diseases, right?

[Bengal]

Yep, that is one heck of a build. But isn't transform already cumulative?

[Dr. Anomaly]

These days, sure. But you can take a Limitation on it to make it all-or-nothing. Since this build will still be pretty expensive (though a lot cheaper than going the other route) I just trying to point out, "in passing" as it were, that taking that Limitation wouldn't be a good way to save points. More sort of a reminder: "Make sure to leave it Cumulative."

[Derek Hiemforth]

I was thinking about this some more, and realized that Dr. Anomaly's excellent solution probably needs a few more tidbits to work as desired.

 

1. In addition to granting LS: Immune to Clone Virus and Duplication, the Transform would also need to pass on the Transform itself in order to keep spreading the disease.

 

2. The Transform needs to be Uncontrolled (in addition to Continuous) so that the infecter doesn't have to focus their actions on just infecting people.

 

3. The Transform should also be Persistent and Always On (so the infecter can't stop infecting people).

 

4. If it isn't airborne, then it should be No Range and possibly "Requires Skin-to-Skin Contact."

 

How does this look?

 

Cost	Power	END
18	The Clone Virus: Major Transform 1d6 (People into themselves, but adding this virus and the Life Support and Duplication powers below, Healed back by medical treatment of the disease), Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2), Persistent (+1/2), Uncontrolled (+1/2), Sticky (+1/2), Continuous (+1), Invisible Power Effects (Fully Invisible; +1) (75 Active Points); Gradual Effect (1 Week; -2), Always On (-1/2), No Range (-1/2), Requires Skin-to-Skin Contact (-1/4)
14	The Duplicate: Duplication (creates 500-point form), Cannot Recombine (+0) (100 Active Points); 1 Charge which Never Recovers (-4), No Conscious Control (-2) [Notes: At this point level, the Duplication can create a clone of a character up to 500 points. The clone is an exact duplicate, except that it does not have the Duplication power. If the clones are not carriers of the disease, then it also lacks the Transform. If the clones can catch the disease themselves (even though the "parent" character is now immune), then it also lacks the Life Support.]
2	Immune To Reinfection: Life Support (Immunity to The Clone Virus)

[Dr. Anomaly]

Derek,

 

I believe I did mentioned giving it Invisible Power Effects and Sticky, which should cover spreading it to other people, BEFORE the cloning takes place. After all, a great many diseases have a period of time in which the person with the disease is infectious BEFORE the symptoms manifest, making them an unwitting (and inobvious) carrier. Meaning the victims don't necessarily need to be given the power itself by the Transform, though there's certainly no prohibition against doing so.

 

I purposefully didn't set a given price on the Duplication, since it is going to be a different price for everyone. I figured the procedure would be like this:

 

1) To find out how much the cost of Duplication for a given person will cost (using the Limitations 1c Never Recovers, Cannot Recombine, NCC), take the total cost of the character and divide by 35, rounding in the usual HERO fashion (.5 rounds down, .51 rounds up) with a minimum cost of 1 regardless of rounding.

 

2) The total cost of the Duplication, plus the cost of the Immunity (and possibly the cost of the disease Transform power itself) is added to the formula for figuring how large a total is needed by the Transform dice in order to complete the change.

 

3) Let 'er rip, and sit back and wait.

 

And by the way, don't make the Gradual Effect one week, or you're only going to get 1d6 of Transform per week, which is far too long. By making it Gradual Effect: 1 Day, you get a window in which the person could be treated, but maybe two weeks at most before they 'split'.

 

You could also make it much easier to model/estimate the spread of the disease by making it Standard Effect (+0).

 

Just my 2 cp.

[Dr. Anomaly]

In other words, it ends up looking like this:

 

Cost	Power
19	The Clone Virus: Major Transform 1d6 (People into themselves, but adding this virus and the Life Support and Duplication powers below, Healed back by medical treatment of the disease), Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2), Persistent (+1/2), Uncontrolled (+1/2), Sticky (+1/2), Continuous (+1), Invisible Power Effects (Fully Invisible; +1) (75 Active Points); Gradual Effect (1 Day; -1 3/4), Always On (-1/2), No Range (-1/2), Requires Skin-to-Skin Contact (-1/4)
varies	The Duplicate: Duplication (creates duplicate of person as they were before the disease), Cannot Recombine (+0); 1 Charge which Never Recovers (-4), No Conscious Control (-2) [Notes: The clone is an exact duplicate, except that it does not have the Duplication power. If the clones are not carriers of the disease, then it also lacks the Transform. If the clones can catch the disease themselves (even though the "parent" character is now immune), then it also lacks the Life Support.]
2	Immune To Reinfection: Life Support (Immunity to The Clone Virus)

 

To figure out how many points the Duplication will cost: Total point cost of character/35. Add +1 to this cost if the clone has the disease power and/or the Immunity to the disease.

 

To figure out how much "effective" BODY the character that's been infected has (i.e. how long it will take them to split), use this formula: Character's BODY + (4 + total cost of character/175)

[Derek Hiemforth]

Originally posted by Dr. Anomaly

I believe I did mentioned giving it Invisible Power Effects and Sticky, which should cover spreading it to other people, BEFORE the cloning takes place.

Yes, I guess the Sticky does cover it. Good point.

I purposefully didn't set a given price on the Duplication, since it is going to be a different price for everyone.

I didn't mean to imply you did anything wrong. I just picked a cost out of the air for the purposes of the write-up. Definitely the cost woud vary.

And by the way, don't make the Gradual Effect one week, or you're only going to get 1d6 of Transform per week, which is far too long.

I'm not sure on this one. By my reading of Gradual Effect, I would assume that if a target was hit by 1d6 Transform with a 1 week Gradual Effect, then hit with it again a minute later, then again one minute after that, then the Gradual Effect would mean that the first die kicks in 1 week later, the second die 1 week plus 1 minute later, the third die 1 week plus 2 minutes later, etc. Nothing says you can only be under the influence of one occurance of Gradual Effect at a time.

By making it Gradual Effect: 1 Day, you get a window in which the person could be treated, but maybe two weeks at most before they 'split'.

I was just going by the time interval you mentioned -- "several days." I agree it might work better as one day.

You could also make it much easier to model/estimate the spread of the disease by making it Standard Effect (+0).

I dunno... I might leave it random. Different people often require different amounts of exposure to a disease before catching it. It would work either way.

[Dr. Anomaly]

Originally posted by Derek Hiemforth

Yes, I guess the Sticky does cover it. Good point.

Actually, it might not. It now occurs to me that Steve made some kind of ruling about Sticky only going out "two degrees of separation" from the original target (Target A hit with power; B touches A, gets hit; C touches B, gets hit; D touches C, no effect on D) and I seem to recall mentioning specifically that if that were the case, then modeling disease would require a Transform, not Sticky. So you may have been right and I was wrong. Now I gotta try and find that post; I wonder...did it make it into the FAQ?

In any case, leave the Sticky on it...it lets them infect other people even before they're fully Transformed, even if the infection from THEM can only spread a maximum of two layers "deep", but there's no limit on the number of people they could directly infect during this stage.

I didn't mean to imply you did anything wrong. I just picked a cost out of the air for the purposes of the write-up. Definitely the cost woud vary.

I didn't think you were implying that; I just wanted to make sure people realized there was not a set cost, and that 500 points is not the upper limit, that's all. Sorry if I gave you the wrong impression.

I'm not sure on this one. By my reading of Gradual Effect, I would assume that if a target was hit by 1d6 Transform with a 1 week Gradual Effect, then hit with it again a minute later, then again one minute after that, then the Gradual Effect would mean that the first die kicks in 1 week later, the second die 1 week plus 1 minute later, the third die 1 week plus 2 minutes later, etc. Nothing says you can only be under the influence of one occurance of Gradual Effect at a time.

I was just going by the time interval you mentioned -- "several days." I agree it might work better as one day.

Hmmm...you may be right. Perhaps "Extra Time: 1 Day" would be the better choice? Person gets affected; one day later, 1d6 of Invisible Transform. 24 hours after that, another 1d6 of Invisible Transform, and so on. That would mean, on average, a norm would need...what?...7 days to split?

I dunno... I might leave it random. Different people often require different amounts of exposure to a disease before catching it. It would work either way.

I was thinking more in terms of modeling how fast, on average, it would spread through a population and how long it would take to infect a given number of people.