Hybrid Characters

[Wanderer]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

Hey' date=' Angel's earliest protrayals had him much more of a Martial Artist/Speedster hybrid.[/quote']

 

Thinking of Angel and the sheer injustices of superhuman genetic lotteries, where some end up with Nate Grey, Prof. X, or Magneto's powers, others with a lousy couple of seagull wings, I'm irresistily reminded of a Supreme Power quote "Hey, how it comes that the others got the suit of nifty powers -superstrength, invulnerability, flight, laser beams outta eyes-, while you picked the card with "You can run really, really fast" ?"

[caris]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

Nah, the person who got the fuzzy end of the Marvel Mutant fascination is, was, and probably always be Doug Ramsey.

[Lucius]

One for Teamwork

 

On the other hand, I have also designed characters that were very much "cogs in a team machine," concepts designed to work ONLY in partnership. The one that really stands out is Destrier, who could possibly be pigeonholed as a "Speedster" - at least, all his powers centered on the idea of movement, but not just on movement, but on CARRYING SOMEONE to wherever they wanted to go.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary says, "No, Lucius doesn't have any particular fascination with the concept of unusual riding animals....."

[CorPse]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

As once again' date=' I go against the grain of general convention advice. I have had no problem with either Whiz Kid (now Fast Track since he turned 21) or Nightingale as convention characters.[/quote']

 

Hmmm... I guess I think of the characters in your game as being nicely archetypical and straightforward to run, but it's been awhile. Also, you're games tend to be a lot more about role-playing and story-telling than most. I'd argue that this tends to insulate the players from the difficulties of how the character should be run as a point-based construct.

 

I've seen people do such strange and ineffect things with "complicated" characters at conventions in fight heavy scenarios. There's nothing quite like designing the heck out of a pregen only to see someone use one power over and over again. Just seems like it's a good idea to have a couple of bricks and point-and-shoot blasters in the mix. That way the players can find their natural difficulty level.

 

Sorry, I've gone on a bit, I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread: Hybrid Characters.

 

Love & Kisses,

 

CorPse

[BNakagawa]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

It depends on context.

 

In a small game (number of players-wise), hybrid characters are great because there isn't a lot of competition.

 

In a large game, hybrid characters become a bit more problematic in that there is more competition and only so much GM attention to spread around.

 

Also, the notion that a specialist or archetypical character will necessarily be better than hybrid or generalist characters isn't always true. In games where there are hard caps and a mix of experienced and beginning character, it's entirely possible to have a hybrid character who is as good or better than everyone at everything. This, I know from recent experience.

[AdamLeisemann]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

I prefer characters that don't fit nicely in one archetype.

 

 

Makes playing CoV hard. Stupid class-based system.

 

I know nothing of CoV, but if if you hate supers and classes, then do everything to avoid Heroes Unlimited. Let's just say I developed a distain for it.

[Kevin Schultz]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

I found that CoH/CoV was pretty good for helping me understand the benefits and restrictions on AT-styled gaming. Before I played it, I was heavily against having such strong AT's. After doing it for 1 1/2 years (I couldn't ever find anyone to tabletop RPG with for superheroes), I can appreciate the framework that it provides.

 

I kind of see it like learning to appreciate the shakeperean sonnet, and then appreciating free verse. If superhero powers rhymed and had iambic pentameter, anyway...

[AdamLeisemann]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

In my opinion, Hybrids offer greater flexibility. Granted, I tend to come up with characters that don't neatly fit into one particular category.

[David Johnston]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

As I was saying before I was interrupted, most battlesuit characters ARE hybrids in the first place. If you look at someone like Iron Man, he's actually a flying zapper/brick/gadgeteer. It's just such a common type of hybrid that it gets an archetype of its own. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with a Brick who maybe isn't quite so strong but knows martial arts, or a Mentalist who wears a protective suit of powered armour, or a stretching martial artist who can scan or attack the minds of people he grabs. Archetypes are fundamentally for beginners who are baffled by the complexity of the design system and need a hand.

 

However, that doesn't mean that people who want to be able to do absolutely everything can't annoy me. When someone designs a character with all basic levels in stats, but then buys them all up through a focus so they'll have enough points to make Captain Everything and turn all of the other characters into his supporting cast, that annoys me. When, once again, somebody gets the bright idea of designing a Captain Trips so they'll have an identity for each and every occasion I get very tired. And above all I get most annoyed by people who want to do everything and end up spreading themselves so thin they can't do anything, or making massive math "errors" to make it fit.

[McManus]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

One of the questions I have gotten form various GMs is "If Legion [or whichever multipowered hybrid I am trying to offer up] already has the powers of a whole super team, why does he need to be in the Justice Friends?"

 

Is there a good answer to this from a GM perspective? Most of the answers in this thread seem to talk about players and their preferences. I wonder if people might comment from the GM perspective. Is designing adventures for hybrids (as part of a team) more difficult than for archetypal characters? "I have Speedy Guy caught in the near unbreakable web of slowness. . .but wait! He can also shrink small enough to slip between the threads . . . Drat his surprising versatility!"

[Victim]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

One of the questions I have gotten form various GMs is "If Legion [or whichever multipowered hybrid I am trying to offer up] already has the powers of a whole super team, why does he need to be in the Justice Friends?"

 

Is there a good answer to this from a GM perspective? Most of the answers in this thread seem to talk about players and their preferences. I wonder if people might comment from the GM perspective. Is designing adventures for hybrids (as part of a team) more difficult than for archetypal characters? "I have Speedy Guy caught in the near unbreakable web of slowness. . .but wait! He can also shrink small enough to slip between the threads . . . Drat his surprising versatility!"

 

Well, the obvious reason to team up is that even someone with a wide range of powers can get stomped solo. Against enemy teams, his action deficet - even with a big SPD - can be a big problem, and if hit with a lucky incapacitation effect, that's it. Against a solo heavy hitter, he probably won't be able to withstand being the only target.

 

And Speedy's surprising versatility is only going to be a surprise the first time.

[Hugh Neilson]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

Well' date=' the obvious reason to team up is that even someone with a wide range of powers can get stomped solo.[/quote']

 

The versatile character tends to be less powerful in any given area than the more focused character (especially when points available are consistent for all characters), so versatility doesn't equate to "more powerful" in all situations.

 

Why should he join a team? "Because even an android needs a friend." I would hope your characters have reasons for existence other than winning a fight with the bad guys.

[Victim]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

The versatile character tends to be less powerful in any given area than the more focused character (especially when points available are consistent for all characters), so versatility doesn't equate to "more powerful" in all situations.

 

Why should he join a team? "Because even an android needs a friend." I would hope your characters have reasons for existence other than winning a fight with the bad guys.

 

Those too.

 

The point is, even someone like martial manhunter has a variety of reasons for teaming up.

[Kristopher]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

Using Omega Girl (Cosmic VPP, almost 1300 points) as an example, she's versatile and very powerful, but she's young and inexperienced. She'd join someone like the Avengers or JLA because they'd have a lot to teach her.

[Vondy]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

As a GM I don't really care about archetypes. I want a well conceived character who fits into the world and the group. That will always be better than an archetype. On the other hand, archtypes can be an excellent starting place for a character, and I've had one or two players who really needed an archetype and common genre tropes to feel comfortable in the game (even though it didn't always fit the campaign to do that). Its not my job to judge them. That's what they needed, and within the greater context of the game I tried to accomodate them. They were good players and added to the group - "character classes" or no.

[Terrapin]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

As a GM I don't really care about archetypes. I want a well conceived character who fits into the world and the group.

 

I share these goals. For me, archetypes (pure or mixed) are part of what I look at during party generation, because it is vital to me that every player should feel that his/her player has a valid role to play in the group, and archetype is one of the defining elements of role.

 

For instance, if Joe wants to play a brick and Fred also wants to play a brick, that shows up as a little magnifying-glass-symbol in my GM's mind; there's nothing inherently wrong with having two bricks on one team, but neither one should end up feeling like a redundant feature.

 

If the characters have different personalities (if, let's say, Joe's brick is a grizzled ex-military leader type and Fred's brick is a brash young kid), then they could have exactly the same powers and still each have a unique place in the group's dynamic. I once played in a campaign with a pair of martial artists, one of whom was an upstanding, code-versus-killing patriot-type and one of whom was a hard-bitten, ex-mercenary ruthless scary guy. They honored for each other's skills and had saved each other's lives several times over, so they played off each other as a double act which established the boundaries of our team's moral spectrum. It worked because both players were willing to play out a rivalry balanced with enough respect to keep the tension constructive, not an impediment to enjoyable play.

 

When primary archetype and attitude are looking a little too similar, I might want to work with the players to hybridize a little, in order to establish separate capabilities so that they'll both feel useful.

 

Some players who prefer to play classic archetypes are really into being "the best they are at what they do". It can be a real killjoy for them if two other guys on the team are just as good at whatever it is that they do, and GMs who want their campaigns to thrive need to avoid setting a player up for an unpleasant experience (not character-unpleasant as in 'last session I got Haymakered by Durak', but player-unpleasant as in 'last session there was nothing for me to do, again'). This can be especially important with skill- and knowledge-intensive archetypes such as the Sleuth, Gadgeteer or Mystic; after all, two guys with 60 STR can punch out two different villains and both feel like they're contributing, but if two heroes can deduce that the arcane symbols drawn in blood at the crime scene are of Lemurian origin, one of them gets to say so, and one gets to stand there and say "I knew that, too".

 

Archetypes also tend to determine a team's style of encountering and engaging obstacles, and a GM can use this knowledge to foresee problems. If the party's starting character concepts include a high percentage of indirect support types, skulkers and standoff types, that can make trouble for whoever gets stuck shouldering a disproportionate share of the front-line work. I was once in a short-lived campaign with a team that included a commando-trained super-sniper, a permanently invisible martial artist, a mentalist who preferred to stay well off the battle map and a four-color flagsuit with moderate defenses. In every single fight, the entire villainous side would target the only hero they could detect, the 4CFS would be brutally overwhelmed, and then the rest of the team would stalk and snipe away at the opposition while the patriotic smear on the floor moaned and congealed. It's great if the team has one (1) stealthy scout, and it can work when the entire team is stealthy and makes sneakiness the group's trademark style, but it's the GM's responsibility, IMHO, to try to envision whether the team will be unbalanced in a way that will prevent some players from being able to enjoy the game.

 

As for hybrids, I find that the longer people play Champions, the more they tend to gravitate toward complexity in their characters, and so veteran PCs tend to be the ones who like to design hybrids - it's more challenging for them. Generally, I won't stand in their way; the experienced players know what they're doing. I'd be more worried about a neophyte designing a 'multi-class' hero out of an impatient desire to be all things at once; I'd want to oversee character design carefully, to ensure a playable result.

[McManus]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

In my current campaign I ruthlessly enforce niche protection. When I laid the high-STR smackdown on Plasmoid, I'd suddenly trampled all over the team brick's schtick. He was a little miffed. So now, the Martial Artist does not have more DEF or STR than the Brick in my game, and the Brick does not have more DCV than the Martial Artist -- no matter how they whine.

 

They whine more if another PC beats them at "what they do".

 

This from another thread.

 

Is this the same as enforceing archetypes? THis is a similar ruling to one I was refering to earlier. This allows players to feel superlative . . . not just super. Is this common amoung GMs.

 

Not sure if I am trying to push the discussion in any given direction but I am intrigued by the responses.

[wagnern]

Re: Hybrid Characters

 

Ok, HERO has no charictor classes. You develope a consept that you like, and you and your friends work out how the team will work together. Think of Archtipes as "what job do you do in the team?" in any team there should be some overlap of capabilities. If Masionite is the only one with a strenght above 10 and he is knocked out, who is going to carry the 3 ton guy out of the exploding Zeplin base? Luckily Zapp-a-rella is also strong (not nearly as strong as Masionite, but she can lug his rock but out in time.)

 

This is a mature game, just because you -can- do something with your points does not mean you -should- do it. You are not only building and advancing a charictor, you are also building and advancing the team.

 

Be true to the charictor, be true to the consept, work with your friends.