GM Question: How to torture, errrr, 'improve' PC's over a campaign.

[KA.]

I have been reading Marvel Essentials : Daredevil recently, while at the same time reading Villainy Amok.

Between the two, an idea was born, for helping motivate players into having more rounded characters.

Most superheroes seem to have an array of skills and abilities that some players seem to 'forget' to include when actually building a character.

Things like Area Knowledge, Professional Skills, etc.

Nearly every comic book hero exhibits these abilities from time to time, but players often seem to want to omit them in favor of one more die of damage.

It was while reading Villainy Amok that I got an idea of a good way to help motivate players to add these abilities with experience, or, perhaps, build them in when characters are created.

In Villainy Amok, they describe a scene where a hero is on patrol and hears an alarm go off. He immediately thinks: "that came from the Sixth National Bank"

But imagine the player's reaction to the following:

"You hear an alarm going off, somewhere below you."

"Okay, what's down there?"

"Well, you are flying over the city, it could come from anywhere in a couple of block radius."

"Okay, I swoop down, where is it now."

"You think it is somewhere near an intersection you see, but you don't know the names of the streets."

"Okay, I'll just follow the sound."

"Since you don't have any enhanced senses, it is kind of hard to tell, the buildings are all brick and glass and the sound is bouncing all over the place. After a few more seconds, it stops."

"Well, crap! Okay, I'll start searching in a grid pattern, up and down the blocks until I find something."

"After a while you see the front of a jewelry store. The front window is smashed, and it looks like someone cut the alarm wires and then stole everything in the front cases."

"Why didn't I know there was a jewelry store here?"

"Ummmm, Area Knowledge?"

 

Now I am not talking about GM's trying to pick a character to death for not having every possible skill.

 

But I would like some help with ways to show players the value of purchasing something other than just combat abilities.

 

Think of it this way.

 

If a player spent all his points on Knowledge Skills, you wouldn't let him say:

"I ought to be able to hit Grond with a 20 d6 Energy Blast, after all, I'm a Superhero!",

so why should the player who spent all his points on the Energy Blast be able to say:

"I ought to know where every Bank and Jewelry Store in my city is, after all, I'm a Superhero!"

 

KA.

[OddHat]

Re: GM Question: How to torture, errrr, 'improve' PC's over a campaign.

 

I strongly urge characters with any kind of high-speed movement power to take Bump of Direction or Navigation, and a few AK are always good as well. I also suggest appropriate Life Supports for Flyers.

 

Sure, you can fly at Mach-3 a mile in the air. How are you going to find your way home? Also, it's gettin' kinda chilly...

[OddHat]

Re: GM Question: How to torture, errrr, 'improve' PC's over a campaign.

 

I would add that this is a problem with GM-Player communication more than anything else. If you've decided as a GM that you want to see more non-combat skills and tallents, the easiest way to manage this is to tell your players directly, before character creation begins, and then to make sure that those skills are (potentially) useful in game. If a player spends a point on KS: Greek Mythology, then as a GM I try to either find some situation where that KS will come in handy, or tell the player that I don't see that coming up in this campaign. Forcing a player to sink 50 points into skills in a game where they'll never be used is pointless.

[Supreme Serpent]

Re: GM Question: How to torture, errrr, 'improve' PC's over a campaign.

 

Yeah, "AK: Campaign City" is pretty much a must for me, unless the character is a recently-landed alien or something.

 

The method you propose seems to be a) more work for you and annoying to players. I'd much rather discuss it with the players beforehand or just give it as a freebie "Everyman" at 11-.

[Half Baked]

Re: GM Question: How to torture, errrr, 'improve' PC's over a campaign.

 

Your example is the best way I have found of making non-Combat skills and abilities important and one I have used on more than one occasion. Another thing to add in is features of the terrain/setting that would be beneficial in a super battle if only the superhero knew about. Perhaps someone with Area Knowledge will know their is a theatre next door with all manner of levers, ropes and counterweights to use to slow down or entangle their opponent if only they could lure him into the building.

[OddHat]

Re: GM Question: How to torture, errrr, 'improve' PC's over a campaign.

 

Yeah, "AK: Campaign City" is pretty much a must for me, unless the character is a recently-landed alien or something.

 

The method you propose seems to be a) more work for you and annoying to players. I'd much rather discuss it with the players beforehand or just give it as a freebie "Everyman" at 11-.

 

I usually give CK:Home City as an Everyman at 8-, which is about the level I think most people have it.

 

Personally, I can find my office no problem, I can find an address, I know a few good bars, clubs, stores and restaurants, and I know a few places to be avoided. If you dropped me in the middle of a part of Philadelphia I rarely visited and asked me how to get to a major highway, it would take me some time to figure it out. That seems like an 8- to me. Of course, your interpretation may vary.

[Supreme Serpent]

Re: GM Question: How to torture, errrr, 'improve' PC's over a campaign.

 

I usually give CK:Home City as an Everyman at 8-, which is about the level I think most people have it.

 

Personally, I can find my office no problem, I can find an address, I know a few good bars, clubs, stores and restaurants, and I know a few places to be avoided. If you dropped me in the middle of a part of Philadelphia I rarely visited and asked me how to get to a major highway, it would take me some time to figure it out. That seems like an 8- to me. Of course, your interpretation may vary.

 

Well, "Everyman" as in "Every super who goes on regular patrols."

[OddHat]

Re: GM Question: How to torture, errrr, 'improve' PC's over a campaign.

 

Well' date=' "Everyman" as in "Every super who goes on regular patrols." [/quote']

 

Fair enough.

[BlackSword]

Re: GM Question: How to torture, errrr, 'improve' PC's over a campaign.

 

One of my players asked if he could cut-off a truck trying to get out of the city. He made his AK, and I told him where his character thought the truck was going and a possible ambush point.

 

This is a neat way to use AK. Its not something I would use every game session, but from time to time it could come in handy.

 

I think an 8- AK for a characters hometown is an appropriate everyman skill.

[CrosshairCollie]

Re: GM Question: How to torture, errrr, 'improve' PC's over a campaign.

 

Well, it must be admitted, sometimes you just forget things when you're making a character, especially with the functionally infinite number of Professional, Knowledge, and Science skills.

 

If something crops up that the character logically should have had, I let the character go into XP debt, as it were. If he spent his childhood in Spain, and we forgot to give him Language: Spanish or the like, then we let him pick it up mid-game and pay for it with that session's XP.

 

This *only* applies to skills, though, not powers, and there has to be an obvious oversight. If your soldier doesn't have WF: Small Arms, that's a glaring obvious omission. If your soldier doesn't have PS: Sculpture Appraising, that probably isn't an omission.

[Mike W]

Re: GM Question: How to torture, errrr, 'improve' PC's over a campaign.

 

I would add that this is a problem with GM-Player communication more than anything else. If you've decided as a GM that you want to see more non-combat skills and tallents' date=' the easiest way to manage this is to tell your players directly, before character creation begins, and then to make sure that those skills are (potentially) useful in game. If a player spends a point on KS: Greek Mythology, then as a GM I try to either find some situation where that KS will come in handy, or tell the player that I don't see that coming up in this campaign. Forcing a player to sink 50 points into skills in a game where they'll never be used is pointless.[/quote']

 

I'm with Oddhat here. I usually try to find ways to make those extra skills useful. KS: Villains comes up a lot. So does stealth. But I try to find ways to make having a few languages useful or scientific skills useful. Or whatever.

[sinanju]

Re: GM Question: How to torture, errrr, 'improve' PC's over a campaign.

 

I strongly urge characters with any kind of high-speed movement power to take Bump of Direction or Navigation, and a few AK are always good as well. I also suggest appropriate Life Supports for Flyers.

 

Sure, you can fly at Mach-3 a mile in the air. How are you going to find your way home? Also, it's gettin' kinda chilly...

 

Heh. I had great fun in Nexus' "Red Raptors" game when my character (who had just recently learned to fly) when flying at night over the city and soon realized she had no idea where she was. She had to swoop down low enough to read street signs, and eventually landed in a dark corner of a parking lot and walked into a 7-11 to buy a map of the city.

 

Later on she bought night-vision goggles and a GPS gadget on which she could set waypoints for various landmarks so she could find her way around.

[zornwil]

Re: GM Question: How to torture, errrr, 'improve' PC's over a campaign.

 

I strongly urge characters with any kind of high-speed movement power to take Bump of Direction or Navigation, and a few AK are always good as well. I also suggest appropriate Life Supports for Flyers.

 

Sure, you can fly at Mach-3 a mile in the air. How are you going to find your way home? Also, it's gettin' kinda chilly...

Respectfully, I beg to differ. Not on the general topic of fleshing out characters with appropriate skills and non-super/non-combat abilities, but as to the specifics of what to enforce in the name of realism along with super-abilities. I think if you have Mach 3 filght, you already can handle "some" coldness, and you can get around, kinda, in the sky, in that you can get from, say, New York to Paris, or, if you have a map, pretty much any reasonably sized city (after all, you just swoop low and follow the highway).

 

I worry more about the rules/Play Experience going the other way, I know, from experience, neither you nor KA are advocating getting to that silly level of granularity (as discussed in another thread, "you can't throw a bucket of water at someone because you don't have water attack" or such). But I see that as a real consequence of what I would call a level of nit-pickiness there, if I read the example correctly.

 

Now, that being said, I wouldn't let Mr. High-Flier hang out in -60 even if he can fly through it - as the emphasis is "through". Then again, I wouldn't object too much if he were locked up in the cold like that and he kept flying around to generate body heat (you could argue over whether 0 END means he really does so, but that's really getting nuanced and more or less beside the point at this level).

 

I think, as you stated later in this thread, that it is a communication issue. If a GM wants players to have certain abilities/knowledge, he needs to call it out. Personally, as to KA's example, I always figure someone can more or less find an alarm from hearing it, at least a super-person, as that's what the genre pretty much calls for in my view. I'm bad at documenting "Everyman" but I'd agree people know their cities about 8- as that sort of skill.

 

I've read enough of KA's posts to know that he's a good communicator; I would just, then, point out to others, if it isn't obvious, that springing on a player that "oh, you can't find the bank being robbed because you don't have a Sense and you don't have City Knowledge" is really buying a big stink on the spot. Many players will assume a sort of simplistic 4 color ethos where the good guy just gets to the scene, anything up to that is simply a plot device to get there. GMs need to be clear with players about this sort of thing.

 

All that being said, I have certainly allowed villains to get further in plans or get away because PCs couldn't travel fast enough or didn't know enough. I'm just objecting at a certain level of detail here.