Mystery Powers

[DrSavant]

I was hoping to start a thread on how to handle "Mystery powers". So here are some things I've done as a GM;

 

Hold back on EXP to players, for the eventual

"Radiation Accident", that grants a new power.

 

Ideally the new power should have the following

limitations to represent the "mystery" of the new power;

NO CONSCIOUS CONTROL [power is literally unknown]

2 x END cost [ Extra effort, since how it works is a mystery]

Activation Roll [ Character has had no chance to practice]

Side Effect [ "Blacks out" when power is used-classic]

 

Anyone else have any other suggestions or ideas???

[Lord Liaden]

How about Invisible Power Effects? This would be useful for those powers that cause "bad luck", like Telekinesis, Change Environment or Transform. In conjunction with No Conscious Control, the possessor of the Power might not even be aware that he or she has been causing these things to happen.

[Yogzilla]

When I started my current game, I told my players to write up idealized versions of themselves (i.e. how they'd see themselves as action movie characters; like that), but they must be completely normal.

 

Then, I came up with a couple of questionaires, trying to get into their mindset. The final question was very obvious, though - "If you could have one superpower, what would it be?"

 

With that info obtained, I took it upon myself to create the superpowers that the characters would get. I made sure to give the players pretty much what they wanted, but also add in a couple surprises for them to discover.

 

Some of them were easy (the player who wanted superspeed and is a known Flash fan), others less so (the player who wanted telekinesis so he could launch spacecraft). So far, though, everyone seems to be enjoying themselves.

 

-Yogzilla

[Tech]

My take on Mystery Powers was more of a 'you have a power but don't know what it is. Even the player doesn't know.' Assuming I follow this train of thought, I've only done this once with a character. It's great fun but takes a lot of trust on behalf of the player because the player doesn't want the GM to monkey around with his or her concept and send the character in a direction it wasn't supposed to.

 

(This was under 3rd edition rules.)

A player had a shapechanger character, into various cats. The final form was a sabre-toothed tiger (nice PRE attack, nasty all around). Still, the idea that the character might be able to sense danger on a primal level was interesting. I asked the player if I could introduce a mystery power. She agreed to it. I added that if the power wasn't liked after finally being revealed, that an adventure could be done to rid the character of it. That factor allows the player to be at ease with their character structure.

 

Simply put, it was Danger Sense 11-, Act 11-. I didn't consider it redundant to add the Act 11-. The power only came into being about half the time and even then, the power only worked about half the time. Eventually, the character and player started to figure it out. At that point, the power was shown to everyone. However, it was a long time a-coming because Danger Sense 11- would be noticed quickly by the character. Adding the Activation made it work only here and there.

 

Regardless of the mechanics, it worked well and eventually became a full-time power for the character. Mystery powers can be great fun but as GM, you've got to be careful not to do something that'll make the player get upset and hear:

"Hey, my character wasn't ever supposed to be able to do that!"

[JohnTaber]

Hi DrSavant,

 

I heard a neat idea from someone else on the board about radiation accidents and mystery powers. The GM gave out EP as normal. If the player was willing to let the GM come up with a mystery power/radiation accident/etc then he could give the GM back EP. Any EP the PC gives back is at a 1.5x rate! Thus if I give back 12 EP to the GM he will spend 18! Get it? Kinda fun...

[BoloOfEarth]

My first Champions GM (God bless you, Martin, wherever you are) had a rule that, if you saved up 50 EP, you could have a nuclear accident and rewrite the character within reason. Since Bolo was only my second character (we won't even talk about GI Jones, my first character), the original writeup needed a lot of fine-tuning, so I saved up my EP until I had enough.

 

When the time came, I set aside a nice chunk of points (100+ IIRC) and told Martin to do what he thought best with them. He could alter existing powers I had chosen, add new ones, whatever. He came up with two neat things I loved: a teleport that warped around metal (the character had electrical powers) and a set of backup bolos (a multipower with 8-10 slots that were all a mystery to me). I had lots of fun with that, but I agree that you need a GM you can trust.