What Do I Throw At Them?

[Balabanto]

Re: What Do I Throw At Them?

 

Buy Unkindness. Run that. Amp the villain to make him capable of fighting the characters. (Instructions semi-provided) What will they do when the villain is defeated? Characters like this are great for "For all of their massive power, when they encounter a villain they can't beat just by fighting him, what will they do?" stories. (Plus, I wrote it and the print copy is only 6.95 and the PDF is under four bucks.)

 

In all honesty, I'd ask Rod Currie for help and go to the Super-Squad America website to see how to handle characters of this power level. Rod's a master of this technique.

 

The bodyjacker idea is always a good one. Check out Foxbat for President for the gruesome means of doing this. Undead Skull is terrific for this, because he's a bodyjacker and he's holding the head of the victim hostage separately at the same time. (Yeah, I wrote that, too.)

 

The issue here is technique, so these scenarios in particular may help you with that aspect.

 

If you want a little more realism, have them live in a dangerous world. (See 6e2, the Living in a Dangerous World sections.) If you want to really have them live in a dangerous world, have them fight in locations that are exceptionally dangerous. The problem with being ridiculously powerful is that you can't afford to miss anything in these locations, ever. See Pretty Hate Machines for an example. Let them have a fight in that oil refinery (I spent a month working on it). The more powerful the characters are, the more dangerous that area becomes. God forbid they should have to fight some sort of massive Gojira-style lizard inside this place. (Yes, I wrote Pretty Hate Machines, too, but in this case, with such powerful characters, the rules on bad misses and the knocked back into traffic chart are probably worth the price of the adventure alone. 9.95 PDF and 19.95 in print)

 

While all of these products are available from Blackwyrm games, with the exception of Rod's site, you do have a couple other options.

 

Build "Team of Weaknesses." Pretty much, this is a group of slightly less powerful villains who attack the vulnerabilities of the heroes. This always hurts a lot. If the heroes don't have big vulnerabilities in a game at this power level, I question the wisdom of running for these characters in the first place.

 

"Welcome to Neopolis": A group of aliens kidnap the heroes to be superheroes on THEIR world, because Earth just doesn't have the capability to give them a real challenge. Neopolitan criminals are very competitive, ruthless, and smart, and would like nothing better than to humiliate the heroes and take them down a few notches.

 

The Twist: The Neopolitans want to conquer Earth. While the heroes are here, their army is on Earth, conquering and taking over all they see. By the time the players get back to Earth, they'll have to kick the Neopolitans out, fight mind controlled superheroes, and save their DNPCs.

[sinanju]

Re: What Do I Throw At Them?

 

Thanks for all the suggestions. As of now, I'm going to start them off in media res, finding themselves strapped into seats in some kind of military transport, along with a bunch of NPCs in spandex. They'll just have time to realize something really bad is going* down before the transport gets shredded around them and they get to freefall a few thousand feet into the ongoing destruction of Manhattan via Giant Alien Robot (think the probe from Monsters vs Aliens, but intentionally destroying the city, not just in passing while it chases someone).

 

After that, they'll have to deal with the Slaver** and his superpowered minions, to say nothing of the scores of elite powered armor troops sent to deal with a) the robot, and the Slaver who have all been coopted by the Slaver to do his bidding. (They work in teams of 5-6, and can use coordinated attacks to hammer my nigh-invulnerable PCs with lots and lots of STUN damage, even if they can't do lots of BODY to them.)

 

*Think of this as a "cut scene" in a game. They'll hear that lots of super-types are already dead or MIA; they're among the last to arrive from more distant locales. The NPC supers aren't going to be in their league, so they get to be Redshirts....

**as in Larry Niven's Slavers, a race of aliens with insanely powerful telepathic mind control powers

[Stone]

Re: What Do I Throw At Them?

 

You hit them with lots of drains and transfer attacks. You use images & invisibility to hide your villains, and you bring in one or more of the major villains from the books.

 

-OR-

 

Start a new campaign

[Ice9]

Re: What Do I Throw At Them?

 

When the PCs are rising in power like this, you really have two ways to go. Either can work, it just depends on what you and the players like better.

 

Onward and Upward

As the PCs get bigger, they face bigger threats. Instead of facing some small time thugs, or even standard supervillains, they're facing titanic monsters, dark matter aliens, psychic brains from the 5th dimension, and so forth. A key factor to avoid The Treadmill (see below) is that there should be some reason these "bigger threats" weren't around back when the PCs were less experienced. Maybe someone else was handling them, maybe they were still asleep/preparing, maybe they were off safely in another dimension until someone (like the PCs) blundered in and left an open portal. Another important factor is that the new threats have to be legitimately more threatening. Dark-matter Aliens, yes. Aliens that look just like the previous alien threat, but are blue instead of green and happen to be 10x as powerful, not so much.

* Pros: The foes always remain threatening, you get to use cool monsters that would have been overkill previously, flashy battle scenes still make sense.

* Cons: Vulnerable to DBZ syndrome (when the power-up cycle becomes too obvious and ridiculous) and Elminster syndrome (when the presence of ultra-powerful NPCs makes the PCs wonder why their earlier achievements even mattered). Can become The Treadmill if you aren't careful.

 

Big Fish

As the PCs get more powerful, their role changes. Originally, they may have just focused on keeping one city or neighborhood safe; but eventually, they becomes world-class heroes who can battle Destroyer to a standstill, or even send him running. At the high end, fighting against standard supervillains becomes the flavor text - the real challenge is in other types of situations. For instance, maybe Godzilla poses no personal threat to you, but can you stop him before he destroys the city, without doing so yourself? You may be able to survive a nuke, but can you prevent a looming nuclear war?

* Pros: Definite sense of achievement and change; you're not on the treadmill here. Easier to plan for, because many of the challenges don't need balancing for the exact power level.

* Cons: The nature of the game changes over time - not ideal if you were enjoying it how it was. Coming up with challenges of this type can be tricky, and often the solutions require on the spot adjudication. Can become "Your Powers Won't Help ... Again" if you aren't careful.

 

 

There's also a some paths that (IMO) should be rigorously avoided:

 

The Treadmill

Aka palette-shifted foes. The DM just ups the numbers on the foes, without really making them different in any substantial way. So early on you were trying to stop the crowbar gang from stealing an antique vase - now you're trying to stop the atomic power-crowbar gang from stealing ... a really important vase.

 

The Cakewalk

What it sounds like. All threats go over like dominoes, no threat, no challenge.

 

Your Powers Won't Help ... Again.

This is a bit more controversial, because "your powers don't work here" is a classic plot, and there's nothing wrong with its use ... in moderation. But IMO, this is a seasoning, or at best a side-dish, and you shouldn't make an entire meal of it. If your powers are always blocked, or inapplicable, or otherwise void - then why do you even have them? Which might be fine for a rules-light game where you started out this way. But for players who have created their abilities in careful detail, and gradually improved them to their present level, basically ignoring those abilities isn't fun.

[Clonus]

Re: What Do I Throw At Them?

 

I really like the "world on the verge of nuclear war" issue. That'd make them have to do some thinking if the players are responsible.

[jms1973]

Re: What Do I Throw At Them?

 

A couple of other ideas you might want to try are the Super-Adaptoid/Amazo option or the Nemesis Kid option. With the first you get an opponent that can duplicate all of your characters powers and abilities at the same time. A nice twist on the characters fighting themselves. With the second option, you have an opponent whose ability is to adapt himself to defeat any one opponent. the trick in this scenario is for the antagonist to somehow separate the team so he can take them on one by one. The challenge for you of course is to find some way to keep the players occupied so that at least at first they won't be able to help each other out.

[Clonus]

Re: What Do I Throw At Them?

 

A couple of other ideas you might want to try are the Super-Adaptoid/Amazo option or the Nemesis Kid option. With the first you get an opponent that can duplicate all of your characters powers and abilities at the same time. A nice twist on the characters fighting themselves. With the second option' date=' you have an opponent whose ability is to adapt himself to defeat any one opponent. the trick in this scenario is for the antagonist to somehow separate the team so he can take them on one by one. The challenge for you of course is to find some way to keep the players occupied so that at least at first they won't be able to help each other out.[/quote']

 

It helps for the character to be significantly faster than any of the characters he is mimicking.

[Asperion]

Re: What Do I Throw At Them?

 

Here is a fun idea straight from our favorite Dark Knight:

 

The "villain" is actually a normal person who has an extremely high intellect, especially when it come to tricks and riddles for the heroes to solve. Be sure that the villain has stats that the heroes would find way below them, but his INT is at such a level that even the most intelligent hero would go ga-ga over. Basically, the villain is a cross between the Joker and the Riddler. Look at the players and heroes to find out why they would be targeted by by this villain and why they would want to solve the problem(s).

[Hyper-Man]

Re: What Do I Throw At Them?

 

You throw the kitchen sink at them of course.

 

Here's one with convenient handles:

 

[Peregrine]

Re: What Do I Throw At Them?

 

Pies!

[Hyper-Man]

Re: What Do I Throw At Them?

 

Pies!

 

Humble preferably.

[Greywind]

Re: What Do I Throw At Them?

 

Pies!

Send in CLOWN? or The Fox?

[Doc Samson]

Re: What Do I Throw At Them?

 

I would combine the Cloverfield and mirror-mirror ideas and put them in a Zombie World.

 

Session 1: They must survive clashes with the zombie horde (I would stat the zombie horde as a single giant monster with massive regen and resurrection). The SFX of damaging attacks are zombified super heroes and villains that they recognize from other story arcs.

complication - The characters should be able to confront a horde but not completely destroy it. A defeated horde will regenerate and resurrect with the SFX of zombies shambling from everywhere until it is a horde again. Have the horde attack any time the drama stalls.

 

Session 2: They must save any survivors they find until they piece together what happened. Travellers from a parallel universe brought the "zombie virus" and infected everyone.

complication - Pockets of survivors they discover only have pieces of the story but eventually lead the characters to the last holdout of humanity. If the characters drag their feet, have one of them become infected and a survivor tell them there is a rumor of a cure.

 

Session 3: They must destroy the source of the virus so that the last holdout of survivors can use the cure they have developed. The source of the virus is zombified versions of the characters themselves.

complication - If the charcaters get stumped on what to do next, have the zombie versions of them seek them out to destroy the cure because "they like what they have done with the place."