Power Stunts

[Mike W]

I've mentioned this on another thread a while back but thought I would give it its own thread.

 

The old Marvel Super Heroes game had some problems, but it also had one great idea - the Power Stunt. This is where your character suddenly says, "You know, theoretically, I could do this..." even though it isn't on their character sheet and then gets a crack at it. I always wanted to adopt it for HERO and a buddy and I sat down and wrote out rules for it once.

 

Essentially, you bought on the spot a one shot use of a power/power variation that your character could use but: you generally couldn't buy persistent powers. And you had to spend EXP equal to 10% of the power's cost(which was then "banked" as dedicated XP toward purchasing the power outright).

 

Example: Sonic Boy(sound powers, obviously) has an EB and an NND. He is tracking a missile that is going to hit Millenium City, killing everyone. He tries shooting it with his EB, but can't hurt it or drive it off course enough to prevent it from hitting the city(it's just a couple blocks off instead). Sonic Boy comes up with the idea of creating a wall of sound(read Force Wall) to put in the way of the missile, hoping it will detonate early. Technically, he can't do this because he doesn't have the power. But with Power Stunts, he could build a Force Wall(say 60 pts worth), pay the XP(in this case 6 pts) and get a one shot sue of the Force Wall power which he could then stick in front of the missile.

 

What does everyone think of this idea? Is it too unbalancing? Does it need tweaking in the way it works?

[tgrandjean]

Re: Power Stunts

 

It sounds workable. I wouldn't worry too much about requiring a pool of CP, only requiring that XP expended be banked eventually.

And of course, this stunt can only be performed with GM permission (as with Pushing).

[BigJackBrass]

Re: Power Stunts

 

This is a feature I'd forgotten. It's been a long time since I made mine Marvel.

 

Recently I've been considering how to make a game, where everything tends to be defined down to the nth degree, have the same fluid feeling as a comic, where every writer and artist had their own ideas on exactly what a character could do or how powerful they were. This might just do the trick.

[MitchellS]

Re: Power Stunts

 

I guess no one likes the official power skill rules?

[ghost-angel]

Re: Power Stunts

 

What MitchellS said....

 

5th Ed. has it: It's called the Power Skill.

 

A basic explanation is on 5ERp67. An excellent full run down of using the Power Skill as you describe can be found on USPD1p267.

[BigJackBrass]

Re: Power Stunts

 

Aha! Quite how I overlooked that one I don't know. It's even in Sidekick, so it's not as though we're dealing with a very obscure rule.

 

[Note to self: increase caffeine intake before reading rules]

 

Having looked at the skill as well as Mike W's suggestions I don't think that either quite does what I've been thinking of, but on the other hand I'm still not sure that mimicking the very flexible (and contradictory) benchmarks of the comics is going to really add much to the flavour of my games, so I may just abandon the whole thought.

[Trebuchet]

Re: Power Stunts

 

Having looked at the skill as well as Mike W's suggestions I don't think that either quite does what I've been thinking of' date=' but on the other hand I'm still not sure that mimicking the very flexible (and contradictory) benchmarks of the comics is going to really add much to the flavour of my games, so I may just abandon the whole thought.[/quote']Just out of curiosity, where exactly does 5th Edition's Power Skill fall short of where you wanted it to be? It looks tremendously flexible to me. I've even got a 43 DEX PC with "Dexterity Tricks"; although she's never actually used it in a game. I'm not really certain what one could even do with dexterity tricks. I used it to allow her to plausibly juggle in a recent short story, but somehow I doubt that fulfils the skill's full potential for mayhem.

[BigJackBrass]

Re: Power Stunts

 

The problem, I think, lies with my own rather fuzzy notion of what I'm interested in replicating.

 

The Power skill allows players to tweak and push their characters, changing the "limits" on exactly what they can achieve, so it does address the issue to some degree. What I've been considering is the way that comics change, often dramatically, over time and with new writers and artists. Frequently the vulnerabilities of a character, the boundaries of their abilities and their interaction with the universe itself alters. That makes sense in a comic, especially back when continuity was not a big issue and comics were not gathered in graphic novel format and kept in print, although it might upset the readers now and then.

 

After mulling it over I think that it's the sort of change only a GM can make, not a player, and in order to make sense there must be some sort of plot reason behind it. In general play, although it might produce an interesting feel in mimicking the old comics, I suspect that the annoyance to players would far outweigh the benefit to atmosphere and genre-simulation. As the basis of a single adventure, however, I think that it has possibilities, particularly in a campaign just beginning to touch on the cosmic or mystical, where Our Heroes find that their powers begin to operate under unfamiliar rules. Consequently such a theme may best be employed without any specific rules element behind it.

[Sketchpad]

Re: Power Stunts

 

I've used the Power skill for power stunts before and it works great. Working with your above example, I'd have it played out like this:

 

Example: Sonic Boy (sound powers, obviously) has an EB and an NND. He is tracking a missile that is going to hit Millenium City, killing everyone. He tries shooting it with his EB, but can't hurt it or drive it off course enough to prevent it from hitting the city (it's just a couple blocks off instead). Sonic Boy comes up with the idea of creating a wall of sound (read Force Wall) to put in the way of the missile, hoping it will detonate early. Technically, he can't do this because he doesn't have the power. But with Power Stunts, he could build a Force Wall (say 60 pts worth), use the Power (or what I'd call Sonic Mastery) skill and get a one shot sue of the Force Wall power which he could then stick in front of the missile. So, let's say he has a Power Skill 15- ... he decides to make the 60p FW, which boils down to a -6 to his Power roll (AP/10=difficulty). So he rolls 3d6 against a target of 9- and gets a 6 ... success!

 

This allows for the one time use power within a reasonable extension of their power set. I usually rule that the same power can be used 3 times before the Hero must buy it as one of their powers, allowing people to experiment and see how things work ... a test-drive in some ways

[Steve Long]

Re: Power Stunts

 

In a lot of our books that have pre-built powers (like UMM and the forthcoming USP), there's a category in the power listing with a Skill modifier so that you can easily use the power as a "power stunt" via the Power Skill, if desired. It's one of the great ways to use that sort of material, IMO (it's even suggested in the intro text to those chapters). For books that don't specifically list the modifier as a separate category, you can often use the END cost -- or just look at the listed Active Points and quickly divide by 10.

[David Johnston]

Re: Power Stunts

 

Just out of curiosity' date=' where exactly does 5th Edition's [i']Power Skill[/i] fall short of where you wanted it to be? It looks tremendously flexible to me. I've even got a 43 DEX PC with "Dexterity Tricks"; although she's never actually used it in a game. I'm not really certain what one could even do with dexterity tricks. I used it to allow her to plausibly juggle in a recent short story, but somehow I doubt that fulfils the skill's full potential for mayhem.

 

It may be flexible, but it's useless for direct combat purposes. It's the thing you'd roll on if you were an electrical projector who wanted to provide electricity to a hospital when the emergency generator failed in a blackout, or if you wanted to disrupt a tsunami by flying past it at hypersonic velocities, or if you wanted to spin around in circles at superspeed to slow a falling victim's descent. I figure DEX tricks would mostly consist of duplicating noncombat DEX skills you did not in fact have, but only once or twice before you'd have to buy the skill. So you can wriggle free of your shackles one or twice but after that you have to get actual Contortionist.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Power Stunts

 

It may be flexible' date=' but it's useless for direct combat purposes.[/quote']

untrue.

[Mike W]

Re: Power Stunts

 

What MitchellS said....

 

5th Ed. has it: It's called the Power Skill.

 

A basic explanation is on 5ERp67. An excellent full run down of using the Power Skill as you describe can be found on USPD1p267.

 

Power Skill is helpful, but the way it is written in 5th, I don't think it can do quite everything that the old Power Stunt could do from Marvel. Maybe it was expanded in the most recent revision of 5th, but the description in the book I have(just 5th, p.47) says you can only pull a stunt once before paying for it and it can't provide any kind of Combat Bonus or put an Advantage on a power. Even the description makes it a bit vague as to how far the skill can really go but it's dubious if it can do anywhere close to what Power Stunts could do in combat situations.

[David Johnston]

Re: Power Stunts

 

untrue.

 

Maybe they rewrote in it the revised edition. But in mine it says: Characters shouldn't use Power to provide Advantages for their Powers or to overcome Limitations (except in rare circumstances), nor should it provide bonuses in combat.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Power Stunts

 

Maybe they rewrote in it the revised edition. But in mine it says: Characters shouldn't use Power to provide Advantages for their Powers or to overcome Limitations (except in rare circumstances)' date=' [b']nor should it provide bonuses in combat[/b].

Bonuses in Combat does not equal useless in combat.

 

There are plenty of Combat Application Tricks that can be used with the Power Skill such as adapting an attack for a single use in a particularly tough fight.

 

For instance Shock Man has learned to project various electrical blasts to hurt enemies... but this time he needs to temporarily immobilize an enemy while a 'mate of his performs a critical task. Problem is he doesn't have Entangle... but he gets an idea if he uses his Lightning Bolt jsut right he might overload the nervous system to freeze the enemy (Entangle: Electrical SFX)... so he goes with a Power Skill roll to try and use his EB as an Entangle .... it should be a small entangle - nowhere near the AP of his EB, and it's really a one time stunt for now (though he gets the idea on how to do it and later buys a full Entangle Power) ... but it's a Combat Application that doesn't provide Bonses to an existing Power.

[CrosshairCollie]

Re: Power Stunts

 

I kind of hybridized the concepts that have been discussed here.

 

I use the Power skill to let people spend XP in mid-fight on power stunts. Every 1 you make the roll by is 1 XP you can spend on the power (since Multipowers are omnipresent on characters, this actually matters more than it sounds like); if you need more power than you have spare XP laying around, you apply limitations like Increased End Cost that you can buy off later. I encourage my players to have a couple of XP floating around for 'emergencies'.

 

The idea of 'owing' XP is something I hadn't considered ... I will take it under consideration, but it's one of those 'I'm not sure' kinda deals.

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Power Stunts

 

Before I got 5th Edition and saw the various newish ideas for Power Skill being used in stunts, I used to allow one off stunts like this at a flat cost of 1 point, inspired by Favors. And I allowed deficit spending as well. If you pulled a stunt that'd cost a point, and didn't have the point to spend, I had a "negative favor" to pull against you, uless you bought it off before I pulled it onyou.

 

Kind of like a Karma system. It was the part of the overall way I handled "HERO points"