Awareness.exe

[BoneDaddy]

SPOILER ALERT: This thread references a power in the new novel "Soon I Will Be Invincible," which I recommend as heartily as I can recommend a book. If you haven't read it yet and are a tender soul about spoilers generally, you may wish to back away from this one. It isn't a major plot point or anything, but I try to be considerate.

 

Here goes.

 

A character has a power called awareness.exe, a program that works with her many enhanced senses, providing information about everything she sees around her. That information is culled from public and possibly restricted government databases, and includes information about which powerlines are buried where, basic city mapping, archived information about people recognized by facial recognition software, and even the likely travel histories of individual vehicles based on their plates and the credit purchasing habits of their registered owners. It's a nifty power that provides a scad of potentially useful date that ordinarily shouldn't be too damaging to game balance.

 

How to stat it out? It has aspects of retrocognition, instant (limited) AKs, a sort of danger sense, too, if her on board computers determined the heat source to be a potential threat.

 

quoted from the book: "Awareness.exe is on, tagging the world's heat sources, metals, and fast movers, chattering away. Cars are fountains of information, driver bios and state by state itineraries. Power cables run like ley lines through the park."

 

If you haven't read the book, for heavens sake go out and get a copy right away.

[Comic]

Re: Awareness.exe

 

Deduction, 19- or higher.

 

Area Knowledge, 19- or higher.

 

This allows use of the 'impossible' skill achievement options I like to employ, and reflects more or less what the power delivers?

[csyphrett]

Re: Awareness.exe

 

I tried to build a power like this years ago. The best thing I could think of was clairvoyance and retrocognition, based on public records, using a computer link to public databases.

 

CES

[OzMike]

Re: Awareness.exe

 

Awareness.exe is on, tagging the world's heat sources, metals, and fast movers, chattering away. Cars are fountains of information, driver bios and state by state itineraries. Power cables run like ley lines through the park.

 

Ok, according to that quote:

First we have some kind of IR Vision or Thermal-based N-Ray Sense.

Next we have a simple Sense Metals.

Next we have a Sense Motion.

The car one... back to that later...

We have a Sense Power Sources/Grids too.

 

All probably have discriminatory and analyze on them, and either heaps of telescopic (if they are usable in the immediate area and in combat) and probably targetting .... or scalable megascale and no targetting.

 

The car one could be done as a ultrahigh relevant knowledge skill I guess, or a weird sense.

 

Looks pretty expensive to me, but when the character pretty much joined the 'Justice League'* it was apparent she was more than a few points.

 

* Rather than the Avengers. All the characters were pretty powerful in their own right - there didn't seem to be a huge gap in ability or power level between them, like Mockingbird to Iron Man say. Plus the group in the novel seemed to filled the archetypes that the Justice League has rather than those that the Avengers often runs with.

[Comic]

Re: Awareness.exe

 

For some of it, at least, a high Computer Science roll with Mind Link (computers) seems also appropriate. Since that's the special effect of the power, as well as of part the effect.

[transmetahuman]

Re: Awareness.exe

 

Thanks for the heads up - I just put it on hold from my local interlibrary system.

 

As for your question, how do you feel about esoteric Detects like "Detect Travel History" or "Detect Blueprint"?

[braincraft]

Re: Awareness.exe

 

She has an internal computer with some pretty huge KSes and AKs, possibly with limitations like 'must be connected to wireless network'. The computer also has a really high Speed and DEX, because it generally manages to get a lot of processing done even when shit is going down at super-speed.

 

The character in question also had scads of super-senses; just about everything in the book and then some, plus her internal computer constantly interpolates that information and compares it against its database. Almost all of her senses have Discriminating, Analyze, Rapid, Microscopic and Telescopic, and a bunch have N-Ray penetration.

 

At some point, you may as well give her a Detect (Any Ass Thing) with +50 levels — it would be easier than detailing every one of her myriad senses. She basically knows at a glance everything there is to know about anything that isn't specifically invisible or shielded.

 

If anything, I figure she fills the Martian Manhunter slot. She has tons of incredibly useful sensory powers even though she takes a backseat in the cartoon.

[Markdoc]

Re: Awareness.exe

 

I had a character with a similar ability, if not quite as high powered (Bo Zhao from Mike Surbrook's Kazei 5 game: a cyborg cop with a link to vast police and corporate databases).

 

I bought it as a follower (a computer) and mindlink (wireless access). Since the follower was basically just a brain in a tank, I could spend all of his points on giving him a huge INT, a mass of KS.s and AK.s and a mass of sensors (with indirect and telescopic) limited by angle of view and weather (satellite arrays).

 

The character described could cheaply buy a follower who could then sink 350 points into skills and high INT that way, giving her a vast array of skills with a ridiculously high roll (especially if she buys skill modifiers like Traveller, in which case she gets CHA-based rolls at 2 points a go) and still have plenty of points to use on buying enhanced senses for her personal use. If you want to get gross, allow the AI to have a Mimic pool for skills, and give it computer hacking skills, allowing it to hack into any database and then use the VPP to "leach" any useful information out of that system. A 100 point VPP for KS's and AK's should give you all the information you could ever want.

 

cheers, Mark

[pinecone]

Re: Awareness.exe

 

Thanx for the heads up...I put this on "hold" at the local biblioteca