Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

[Memona]

I've made my share of strange characters over time. One of the ones that I've always wanted to try out was MMOGIRL, a character who gains her powers from playing too many Online Games. She was empowered by a Singularity that sucked her into the game yet at the same time placing her soul outside of the game. It just doesn't make sense!

 

I have also made one other character that would measure as strange. He whole concept that he knew he was inside of game and thus he metagamed! His stats were odd and his powers even stranger. He even had a nice power metagame power. What was it you ask? Detect Character Sheet. His name was, you guessed it, the Character Sheet.

 

Anyways:

 

MMOGIRL

 

Value Cost

15 STR 5 HtH 3d6 Lift 200kg END (3)

20 DEX 30 OCV 7 DCV 7

13 CON 6

10 BODY 0

10 INT 0

15 EGO 10 ECV 5

10 PRE 0 Presense Attack: 2d6

30 COM 0

3 PD 0 10 (20) rPD/13 (23) PD

3 ED 0 10 (20) rPD/13 (23) ED

5 SPD 30 Phases:

7 REC 0

26 END 0

36 STUN 0

 

MMO Powers

 

11 Mana Pool: 60 END, 2 REC, 6 REC if sitting

20 Link Death: Invisability to Sight, Hearing, Smell, Touch, Taste and Radio groups, Cannot Move, OAF

8 l33t Speak: 3d6 Suppress INT, OAF

30 Nerf Powers: 3d6 Suppress Powers, the highest point power a character has, OAF

10 Lack of Customer Service: 6d6 Mental Illusions, only to show that something failed that seem to be your fault but was because something suddenly stopped it, OAF

23 /tell: 5d6 Telepathy, Megascale, Anyone on Planet Earth as long as you know their FULL name, Communication Only, OAF

30 Macro Attack: 8d6 EB, Autofire: 5, OAF 3

3 /shout: +10 to PRE attacks, Can speak loudly over a mile, OAF

15 Spam shout: 25" Darkness to Hearing Group, OAF

18 Utility Map Programs: Radar: +14 to PER checks, OAF

3 In game Clock: Absoulate Time Sense, OAF

15 Alkhazam's Realm: Find Weakness, 14- with Macro Attack, OAF

67 Respawn System: 20 BODY Healing, Regeneration, Trigger PLUS Teleportation, Megascale, Gate, Leaves a Corpse Behind that must be retrieved to gain any powers back, OAF

8 Fully Buffed: 10 rPD/10 rED Forcefield, Extra Time to Activiate: 1 minute, OAF

15 l33t Purple Epic Armor: 10 rPD/10 rED Armor

3 Con: Analyze: General Power 11-, OAF

15 Lag: 3d6 Drain SPD, OAF

 

Disadvantages

10 Physical Limiation: When in hero form, pestered by idiots and horny teenagers

10 Distinctive Features: Large bosumed woman with 1 and 0s around her spandax costume

25 Hunted: The GMs

20 Hunted: Code Versus Killing

15 DNPC: Code programmers, 16x

20 Secert Identity

5 Rival : Men dressed as women

[wcw43921]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Most of my strange concepts are villains rather than heroes. This is one of them--

 

SLEAZEBALL--The ultimate slob. So disgusting is he in his appearance, manners and demeanor that people desire their utmost to ignore him. He is able to psionically tap into this desire to make himself, for all intents and purposes, invisible and inaudible. He uses this power to take just about whatever he wants or needs to survive (not unlike Christopher Eccelston's character on Heroes) and to observe beautiful women in the act of undressing or fornicating.

[Hermit]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Spyder-Robots can make good superheroes, but most of them look, act, and want to be human. Spyder looks like its name sake (admittedly much bigger) and while it does not hate things of the flesh, it has no desire to be one.

 

I know, that may not seem weird, but I've never played it or seen it.

[Bloodstone]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Long ago, we played a game where the GM said you could play anything you wanted.

 

Tom: Can I be a sentient sphere of energy with the power to warp reality?

GM: Sure. So , Dave, what do you want to be?

Dave: I'd like to be a giant cube that eats sentient spheres of energy...

[Doc Samson]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

I am currently playing a Sewer Worker turned Superhero. He was exposed to toxic radiactive waste that was discarded into the sewer system. He has the ability to create and project a super-adhesive glue-like substance (based on the USPD II section on Glue Powers) and is the self proclaimed protector of the city against sewer alligators. He also has a high level of the Access Perk to represent his ability to navigate the city using its sewer network. His name is...Sludge.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Gibraltar was my superhero PC for a short time years ago. He had great power to commune with, animate and control earth and stone, being one with them. That's because "he" was a rock. A real honest-to-Betsy piece of granite, roughly spherical and about half a meter in diameter. Not a magically-animated elemental, not someone turned to stone. He'd been around for billions of years, gradually evolving to sentience. He moved over most of the planet due to glaciation and tectonic shift, and had "seen" the whole panoply of life evolving on this world. He long had a fondness for the short-lived organisms, but only became directly involved in their affairs when an intelligent species (humans) emerged. Gibraltar was the basis for a number of legends about enchanted stones around the world, such as the Omphalos and the Stone of Scone.

 

Gibraltar was generally benevolent and protective of life, but took a long-term, "greater good" perspective that occasionally put him at odds with other PC heroes. I always played him as calm, patient and methodical, which aggravated a couple of the more impulsive PCs (in a good role-playing way).

[GoldenAge]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Though my characters have been relatively mainstream, I've GMed some silly (and great) characters:

 

Mr. Squeak: Originally "named" subject J-296, Mr. Squeak was just a hooded lab rat used as a test animal for the World War 2 (WW2) super solider program. One of the few test animals to survive the process, he mutated into an intelligent telepathic rat. After "talking" with the scientists he was assigned to fight the Nazis and saw some limited direct combat action though his forte was intelligence gathering and subterfuge.

Current day Mr. Squeak secretly roams the walls of the Viore Mansion keeping careful watch over Epic City's new brand of hero.

 

Caffeine Girl: Powered by the mighty combination of continuous triple espressos Caffeine Girl uses her "jitters" and titanium travel cup to zip around Epic City combating crime (and single-handedly supporting no less than 6 independent coffee houses in the 3rd 4th and 7th districts)

 

NOTE: These characters were created by Barton (a regular on the HERO site) and his wife. Though they only played a limited time, their characters are still a fun part of my game.

 

 

BTW Bloodstone... Mr. Squeak WAS traipsing around in the Viore mansion walls at the same time your team resided there. Unfortunately, he never found an appropriate moment to reveal himself (though once he did send out a subtle mental message to Quartermain).

[GoldenAge]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Oh, I forgot about Scrap!

 

Scrap was an inner city youth with the ability to create anything from junk. Unfortunately, all of his constructs immediately entered into an accelerated state of decomposition and would only last a few seconds before they turned to bodiless rust, dust or goo.

[Cancer]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Fulminus was a warped villain (He didn't think he was evil, but he'd been, shall we say, exposed to way too many explosions) who could make inanimate objects explode (bought as an RKA, limited to nonliving matter, with an explosive effect equal to the Body of the object but happened only if the object was reduced to zero Body by the RKA). His main shtick was robbery, where he'd do stuff like make cops' guns explode in their hands, and explode the tires of the vehicles chasing after him. Once he put a toilet seat around a hostage's neck....

[Certified]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Long ago, we played a game where the GM said you could play anything you wanted.

 

Tom: Can I be a sentient sphere of energy with the power to warp reality?

GM: Sure. So , Dave, what do you want to be?

Dave: I'd like to be a giant cube that eats sentient spheres of energy...

 

Funny you should say that...

 

After playing a ton of CoH I wanted to do something that could not be emulated in the MMO and so Fallout was born. He's your run of the mill giant mass of radioactive energies held together by force of will.

[jkwleisemann]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Hmm... well, Sparky's pretty clear, as is Puss in Boots (at any rate, most people thought that Puss was a strange concept). Links can be found elsewhere, or I'll hunt 'em down and repost by request.

 

A lot of my strange concepts actually come out of Lovecraft and similar things, so I don't know if it's fair to include them....

 

Though, actually, Fred the Nameless Extra's always been a fun one. Never actually *played* him in a game, but I've had him show up here and there, and he's always enjoyable to play - the guy's pretty much resigned to his inevitable fate by now.

 

A couple others were odd more by culture than by base concept - particularly my aliens. More than a few people have been weirded out by Mjolnir's long-standing refusal to accept that he actually *has* a personal identity (or, for that matter, that he's actually a person in more than the strictest biological sense - everybody just calls him Mjolnir because that's the model of power armor he was issued by his home planet), and while I never got to play Stranger long enough, I often found myself wondering how the other char's would have reacted to the fact that "he's" one of three genders from his world that literally had no equivalent on Earth.

 

Of course, if you count psychological instability as making for an unusual concept... well, then we'd never get out of here.

[Plex]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

The oddest character I created was for our Aqua Force team. I created Man-O-War, an alien from a water planet that looked a lot like our jelly fish here on earth, except roughly humanoid shaped. (Picture a large jelly fish on top of a humanish body.) The jellyfish on earth were actually something akin to our satellites and rovers for exploration for this species, so he could communicate with them. Unfortunately no one called him Man-O-War, they just called him Jellyfish Man, and it stuck. I'll have to see if I can find the write-up. If I remember correctly, he was pretty effective but couldn't get too far away from the water for extended periods without help.

[Mister E]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Here's the quote from StarHERO that inspired a strange character idea from me:

 

Can the character work with others? A water-breathing alien in a crew of air-breathers is going to have problems, as will a dinosaur-sized being aboard a ship built for Humans.

 

Dinosaurs belong in space, even if it takes affirmative action to make it happen.

 

So, I envisioned a cyborg Tyrannosaurus Rex that can remotely operate a synthetic human as a handy interface for dealing with the 'people-world.' He's originally from an alternate virtual reality where dinosaurs rule "Planet of the Apes"-style... a world that functions way faster than the shared default reality of the campaign. He's been fitted with the memory engrams of his paternal ancestry back to the genesis of his native virch, which makes him something of a Bene Gesserit among T-rex's... and his skin has been enhanced with a bright glowing thought-reactive video material so that he can radiate whatever amusing images he wishes to, right on his massive body, just like it's a dinosaur shaped movie screen.

 

I was thinking he'd make a great brick for a cyberpunk space-opera. The kind of crewman that's known for biting the heads off Wookiees when he's not waxing on about some bizarre ancient Saurian allegory that he thinks is pertinent to the situation. Plus, I like the idea of potential romances his synthetic human body might have. It's sad, but Tyrannosaurus Rexs in fiction don't get many chances to do mushy scenes normally. You might even think of it as a glass-ceiling for dinosaurs trapped in this 'Man's World.'

[Balabanto]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Well, actually, the weirdest concept in Legacies is Lady Polarity, who has the power of Weak Force Control. That's right, she controls submolecular cohesion.

 

It sounds stupid, but sadly, she's phenomenally powerful for her point total.

[Spidey88]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Spyder-Robots can make good superheroes, but most of them look, act, and want to be human. Spyder looks like its name sake (admittedly much bigger) and while it does not hate things of the flesh, it has no desire to be one.

 

I know, that may not seem weird, but I've never played it or seen it.

 

Ha! It's obvious you've never roleplayed with me before!

 

(3 or four Rifts/Heroes Unlimited characters I've played have fit that summary pretty well...)

[Hermit]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

 

Ha! It's obvious you've never roleplayed with me before!

 

(3 or four Rifts/Heroes Unlimited characters I've played have fit that summary pretty well...)

 

Heh. Fair enough

[Zeropoint]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

I guess this isn't all that strange, but for a while, I've wanted to play a character who got eaten by a shoggoth . . . but somehow in the process, his consciousness over-wrote the shoggoth's. This would create a human in a shoggoth's amorphous shape-shifting body, but with a shoggoth sub-conscious.

 

I thought it might have interesting roleplaying opportunities.

[Mister E]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

I guess this isn't all that strange, but for a while, I've wanted to play a character who got eaten by a shoggoth . . . but somehow in the process, his consciousness over-wrote the shoggoth's. This would create a human in a shoggoth's amorphous shape-shifting body, but with a shoggoth sub-conscious.

 

I thought it might have interesting roleplaying opportunities.

 

This seems totally plausible to me. A wicked concept for a metamorph.

[AdamLeisemann]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Well, if I were to get into any discussions of strange hero concepts, I can't ignore Renn "Reinard The" Fox, who could best be described as having the mind of Batman and the body of Roger Rabbit (though, actually, he's a fox, but you get the idea)

 

Another brainchild that my brother put into stats was K. Dogma, originally a mutant canine M. Bison (a' la Street Fighter). This one was a villain, however.

 

And then I have Lab Rat, who while far from strange in concept (a genius genetic throwback who resembles a Kangaroo Rat and has the powers of infosponging and invention), he certainly could be considered wierd for the ways his geekiness comes into his gadgeteering, like a Nintendo Wii-mote becoming a lightsaber, The Powerglove becomming a telekinetic device ("I still gotta work out some flaws." "Flaws?" "Yeah. It's still crap for games.") and the fact that the pestbots are stored in devices that look uncannily like pokeballs. And soon, he may be converting a Robosapien into something.

 

That's all I have to say for now.

[Doc Samson]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

I guess this isn't all that strange, but for a while, I've wanted to play a character who got eaten by a shoggoth . . . but somehow in the process, his consciousness over-wrote the shoggoth's. This would create a human in a shoggoth's amorphous shape-shifting body, but with a shoggoth sub-conscious.

 

I thought it might have interesting roleplaying opportunities.

 

Repped for coolness.

[Arkham]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

I have a few that may or may not qualify as strange. I hadn't thought they were ( mostly ) when I wrote them up, but others I've shown them to have.

I've a character similar to Caffeine Girl above, called appropriately enough Javaman! He is a barrista who when he ingests caffeine gains Totally Awesome Powers of Running Hella Fast, dude. Sounding much like Keanu Reeves, he, with his partner and best friend Fidgit, save the day, and the hotties from the evil forces of Baron de Cafe.

 

Bingo the Clowno is a detective, investigating crimes as he travels with his circus. He also metamorphs into a GIANT CLOWN, or a micro clown. He shoots rockets from his belly button, his head inflates into a hot-air balloon ( and a propeller pops out the back ), and his shoes inflate for great bounciness, and he has a circus in his pants ( which he only pulls out on special occassions ). His archenemy is the vile Ku Klux the Klown!

 

Senor Mysterio is a luchador, and one of the greatest masters of the ancient secrets of the Mexican Mystic Arts.

 

And though he wasn't a PC, Landshark is often quite entertaining. A shark who swam into the SF Bay and swam through a cloud of toxins that had been dumped in there, he gained sentience, arms, incredible strenght, and the ability to... move, somehow, on land. Kinda like Jabber Jaw, we don't really question how he walks on his tail fins. He was a villain for the longest time, but has since reformed, having taken inspiration from a film. "People are friends, not food." is his new motto. He's on parole, working as a delivery boy at various places. He was the UPS driver that delivered to the West Coast Supers. *knockknockknock* Landshark!

[T. K. Bertram]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

In the current supers campaign at the Rat's Nest the title of "strangest superhero in Millennium City" goes hands down to Hardpoint: an invulnerable seven foot tall Scottish-born Chinese soccer hooligan. Utterly without fear (or for that matter anything even within shouting distance of a self-preservation instinct), Hardpoint would head butt (his signature fighting move) Galactus if that entity ever showed up.

 

The truly sad part is that despite his utter inability to even consider a plan and his complete incomprehensibility (the rest of the team is mostly of Northern American extraction and have difficulties with his exceedingly thick Glasgow accent), Hardpoint is the de facto team leader. (Of the other characters on the team, Doctor Cranium (the mentalist/psychiatrist) is the subject of too many rumors concerning his moral character [he's been accused of being an extra terrestrial who keeps a harem of beautiful earth women]; Jammer (the gadgeteer) has a well known romantic fixation on a local supervillan; Jack (the team brick) actually has a day job; Dr. Pope (now retired from the team and working for the MCPD forensics department) was disqualified during her tenure for being an android; Zero Strike (the martial artist/detective) is too new to the team; and Mage is trying to keep as low a profile as he can, being an immortal.)

[Zed-F]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Scissor Queen, his partner Rockhard, and their adopted son Paper Boy.

[yamamura]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

Ariel and Jinx, Two teen-age girls with one mind between them. Actually Jinx is built as a duplicate for Ariel with a mind link that even other dimensions can't break. Ariel tend to use her Jinx body as way to release urges that she would not do as Ariel. Basically practical jokes and general wildness.

[Kevin Schultz]

Re: Strange Hero Concepts: Discuss Your Own!

 

1. An anime-themed character I'd like to play (in a villian game) is as someone who has a polymorphic aura - it always returns positive when queried by a magic spell, regardless of the question. The practical effect is that he can use any piece of mystical gear, as most magic only queries for the positive: "are you my rightful owner? Yes." The character works as a mystical bounty hunter, hunting down magical sentai teams for their stuff. He's also got a menagerie of magical animal companions, each of which is convinced that he's the "sole true heir to " or "the last reincarnated princ(ess) of ".

 

2. A grizzeled, John McLain-type character who has the power of cutsie 80's cartoons (Care Bears, Smurfs, Snorks, etc.). Other than that, he's a standard shotgun-toting, trenchoat-wearing, Dark Champions character.