Spreading Mental Powers

[Dust Raven]

Well, why not?

 

Just about every example of Mental Powers I can think of involves the ability to affect a small area, or using some of you "mental energy" to get through to other minds (seen here as a target's ECV).

 

Does anyone allow this? If so, how as it worked in your campaigns?

 

If not, why and do you think it would be unbalancing?

[Hawksmoor]

Re: Spreading Mental Powers

 

I never saw any problem with being able to spread Telepathy, Mind Control or the like. You are doing the exact same thing as a Energy Blast being spread: Wasting dice to enhance a chance to hit a target.

 

Go with it.

 

Hawksmoor

[Gary]

Re: Spreading Mental Powers

 

Well, why not?

 

Just about every example of Mental Powers I can think of involves the ability to affect a small area, or using some of you "mental energy" to get through to other minds (seen here as a target's ECV).

 

Does anyone allow this? If so, how as it worked in your campaigns?

 

If not, why and do you think it would be unbalancing?

 

 

In practice, I don't see it as mattering a whole lot. Usually, mentallists have enough ECV to hit virtually any non-mentallists anyway. And vs other mentallists, they usually have enough mental defense so that weakening your attack is a severe penalty.

[Hyper-Man]

Re: Spreading Mental Powers

 

Well, why not?

 

Just about every example of Mental Powers I can think of involves the ability to affect a small area, or using some of you "mental energy" to get through to other minds (seen here as a target's ECV).

 

Does anyone allow this? If so, how as it worked in your campaigns?

 

If not, why and do you think it would be unbalancing?

I've never seen it done first hand but I think the sentiment of reluctance to allow it might be due to most gamers desire to min/max their character's physical combat effectiveness and unfortunately mental powers get overlooked. As a result, the effectiveness of mental powers when they do appear in most games is that much more enhanced.

 

I am not saying that this is necessarily a good thing but that is my opinion on most HERO gaming, and yes I have probably been guilty of it as well. I think mental powers can be very cool in a game but I could see where a GM of a game with a mentalist would have to adjust his stories to account for that character with mind control, mental illusions and telepathy a lot more than others.

 

Conversly, a player team that does NOT have a mentalist would probably groan whenever a known mentalist villain showed up. One way to prevent these kinds of problem is for the GM to preach team balance with regard to power/skill as much as possible and in as many different ways to get the point across. This of course assumes that the GM is willing to deal with the added complexites mentioned earlier.

[Hyper-Man]

Re: Spreading Mental Powers

 

let me clarify, my response was to the idea of using spreading to hit more than one target with a single attack, not increasing the chances to hit one target in which case I agree with Hawksmoor's post.

[Dust Raven]

Re: Spreading Mental Powers

 

My original idea when posting was to be able to trade DC for OCV, but I noticed the source material makes more extensive use of spreading for area. What I wanted was a spiffy Mind Scan trick, where if I could find the mind I was looking for (using dice for CV to counter penalties), I could then use the full dice to try attack that specific mind without penalty. Then I started to think about all the implications of doing something like this with other Mental Powers, like using Mind Control on a small crowd (say a group Viper Agents I want to all stand still/not run away while the rest of the team blasts them).

[Lightray]

Re: Spreading Mental Powers

 

Mind Scan already has a built-in adder to give additional CV to counteract the area being scanned. So I probably wouldn't allow spreading with Mind Scan. (besides, it's -1d6 per additional hex affected, isn't it? Mind Scan is already LOS, so scanning a few measly additional hexes doesn't seem much of a benefit)

 

I did say I'd allow spreading of mental powers in our game. So far, our one mentalist hasn't bothered. She usually wants quite a high level effect, so she's not interested in dropping dice. Same reason she hasn't been interested in AoE Selective powers.

[zornwil]

Re: Spreading Mental Powers

 

I suppose with the mental attack it depends a lot on "how can it spread", what is the nature of the attack. Never really thought about it before. I think the issue is that mental powers aren't quite like energy or physical and it's harder to determine how they "really" work in that the others have analogues in the real world. What about the source material? Do "true" mental powers that are normally nto AoE get spread?

 

My first guess is that most mental powers are so targetted they woudn't work "spread" - for example, Telepathy to read minds, how do you really spread and then get all the info back effectively? You'd have to have some way to sift through it all. Mind Control on the other hand, if a simple and general enough command, maybe, but then we get into the issue of how abusive it could be. And a spread Mind Control would be of concern to me, as one of the "built-in" advantages of Mental stuff is that a large number of opponents are not resistant typically.

 

Spreadable would be an interesting advantage for powers not normally spreadable...