Der Psychology of der Super Human

[David Blue]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

I'll keep my replies in this thread, but there were some great posts in:

http://www.herogames.com/oldForum/Champions/002196.html

(Thanks, Mutant For Hire.)

 

mfterman: "Being a heroic mentalist is a special form of hell."

 

Being a heroic mentalist is wonderful. Mind-controlling yourself produces only beneficial effects, and every day in every way, the effects get better and better. Deeper and deeper into the mind-controlled state I continue to go, and tomorrow I will go deeper still. I will count to five, and after I get to five, it is certain that I will be happy, positive, and confident all day. One: happy positive and confident all day." [And the first whacking big mind control roll, undefended.]

 

I adventured with a mentalist who started every day like that. It was ... an experience.

 

The good side was, when a villain would knock him into the middle of next week he would make a more objective post-fight review. But he was still living in his own private Idaho.

 

It became very, very believable to me that no matter how often you beat a mentalist, he or she will be full of confidence next time. A mentalist doesn't have to live with any thought that makes him unhappy. He really doesn't.

 

By the way, if a mind-controller would find it a completely heart-breaking thought that you didn't love him too, or that the only reason you did love him was because he kept you mind-whammied, there is no reason why he would have to have either of those negative thoughts. A lie detector test would confirm his innocence of everything, with no conscious cheating.

 

Since our team mentalist hero had a public identity, courts accepted his testimony as an expert witness on what was really going on in people's minds. I wouldn't have, but I had a secret identity and couldn't testify.

 

mfterman: "As for relationships, who wants to be in a relationship with someone who can read your mind? Who knows all your secrets and can tell what you're really thinking."

 

Lots of people think that they are wonderful, if only you could somehow know them as they "really" are (not as they act). The down-side is, if they find out that to know, know, know them is not at all to love, love, love them, they can take it hard, or want to remove the unflattering image (or the head it's contained in), or generally just refuse to accept this most spiritually intimate of rejections. (Cue: "Play Misty For Me".)

[David Blue]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

mfterman: "People often get restless if they're not allowed to use their limbs. TK's would tend to be lazy, but I can't see them not using their arms and legs."

 

I agree. You get all this lovely feedback from using your body. Touch feels good. A workout feels good. I can see telekinetics developing quite respectable physical abilities, juggling glasses with two hands and much heavier objects with their minds and so on, just for the fun of getting everything to work together harmoniously.

 

Skills that most people may find uncomfortable to learn could be relatively stress-free for a telekinetic, because you know that if you get into trouble (say with a looming motorcycle crash) you have an extra option to rescue yourself and/or any others present.

[Lightray]

I still remember a throwaway line in the Sheri Tepper True Game novels, about how teleporters were so often... not around.

 

If you have the ability to teleport anywhere you want, suddenly what is "local" to you can be worldwide to everyone else. Maybe it's not that big of a psychological change, but you're most likely not going to find that teleporter at home. Or stuck in traffic. And his favorite bistro for lunch is in Paris, even though his job is in Hong Kong -- and his home in Oklahoma...

[Kristopher]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

Can you imagine being a typical speedster, with the accelerated movement, reactions and perceptions that entails, and being stuck in a world of SPD 2 or 3 normals?

 

I imagine the frustration would be intolerable, waiting for them to ploddingly make up their minds, to *always* be in the way when you need to get past them, to be so clumsy...

 

I really hate shopping in crowded supermarkets, aisles blocked with people trudging along at 0mph and seemingly in a shopping trance. Being a speedster could engender the same reaction *all the time!*

 

((shudders))

 

I need to go lie down for a while or else I may turn all my npc speedsters evil just out of reaction!

 

The shopping experience you describe was the first thing I thought of as you started describing the speedster frustration, even before I got to your mention of it!

[Kristopher]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

The sense of victory you feel is always directly tied to the risk of defeat. If there is no risk of defeat' date=' you might never feel a sense of victory. [/quote']

 

????

[zornwil]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

????

I can see what WD is saying. There are some situations I've succeeded in that I could have cared less about - because I appreciated no risk of defeat, no notion that I'd lose out anyway, so the "victory" didn't register at all. It was meaningless. Now imagine every situation is a foregone conclusion ..it's like the Twilight Zone with the mobster trapped in an after-life where everything goes his way ALL THE TIME.

 

Of course he wasn't imaginative - I'd say "I want a 60% chance of success..." and let those dice roll!

[Kristopher]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

I guess I see life as so overwhelmingly full of uncertainly and risk that a few more foregone conclusions, a few more known successes, would be a relief, not a cause of boredom.

[nexus]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

Imagine winning a competition aginst 4 year olds. Bright 4 year olds, but 4 year olds none the less. The first time you might something "good" about it, guility perhaps, but ALL the time? Eventually, it would get dull. How long it took would depend in part on how petty a person you were.

[nexus]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

Someone more on topic there's an excellent (IMO) short story called "Facets of Solitude" in the anthology Forbidden Acts that shows some of the darker effects superhuman powers might have a person's psychology. Fair warning it is most definitely not "Four Color" stuff, more like the darkest of Dark Champions. In fact the entire book is pretty adult overall.

[zornwil]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

I guess I see life as so overwhelmingly full of uncertainly and risk that a few more foregone conclusions' date=' a few more known successes, would be a relief, not a cause of boredom.[/quote']

Sure, but you didn't grow up as Mr. Lucky who never witnessed any of those uncertainties or risks.

 

And I will add to my earlier statement, I've had easy/anticipated successes that I've also thoroughly appreciated nonetheless.

[BcAugust]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

I have to say this is one of the most flat out terrifying mentalist ideas I've seen in a while, though it's prompted some great villian construction. I do have to ask, what kind of campaign was this?

 

 

I'll keep my replies in this thread, but there were some great posts in:

http://www.herogames.com/oldForum/Champions/002196.html

(Thanks, Mutant For Hire.)

 

mfterman: "Being a heroic mentalist is a special form of hell."

 

Being a heroic mentalist is wonderful. Mind-controlling yourself produces only beneficial effects, and every day in every way, the effects get better and better. Deeper and deeper into the mind-controlled state I continue to go, and tomorrow I will go deeper still. I will count to five, and after I get to five, it is certain that I will be happy, positive, and confident all day. One: happy positive and confident all day." [And the first whacking big mind control roll, undefended.]

 

I adventured with a mentalist who started every day like that. It was ... an experience.

 

The good side was, when a villain would knock him into the middle of next week he would make a more objective post-fight review. But he was still living in his own private Idaho.

 

It became very, very believable to me that no matter how often you beat a mentalist, he or she will be full of confidence next time. A mentalist doesn't have to live with any thought that makes him unhappy. He really doesn't.

 

By the way, if a mind-controller would find it a completely heart-breaking thought that you didn't love him too, or that the only reason you did love him was because he kept you mind-whammied, there is no reason why he would have to have either of those negative thoughts. A lie detector test would confirm his innocence of everything, with no conscious cheating.

 

Since our team mentalist hero had a public identity, courts accepted his testimony as an expert witness on what was really going on in people's minds. I wouldn't have, but I had a secret identity and couldn't testify.

 

mfterman: "As for relationships, who wants to be in a relationship with someone who can read your mind? Who knows all your secrets and can tell what you're really thinking."

 

Lots of people think that they are wonderful, if only you could somehow know them as they "really" are (not as they act). The down-side is, if they find out that to know, know, know them is not at all to love, love, love them, they can take it hard, or want to remove the unflattering image (or the head it's contained in), or generally just refuse to accept this most spiritually intimate of rejections. (Cue: "Play Misty For Me".)

[starblaze]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

Imagine a character with mutant luck powers and everybody knew it. No matter what accomplishments he'd make, other people would just dismiss it as the result of his power. Most people would feel that he never really accomplished -anything-, he was just fortunate enough to be born with a mutant power that made sure he'd do well.

Would anything motivate him to do anything? No matter what he did, he'd succeed and nobody would give him credit. He'd probably become a dropout and dread getting lucky. Think about it. The sense of victory you feel is always directly tied to the risk of defeat. If there is no risk of defeat, you might never feel a sense of victory. Your life would become an endless expanse of grey. You might even try to commit suicide but find your luck power prevents you from succeeding.

 

This actually reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode. In this one a common hood type guy gets killed and goes to the afterlife. When he gets there he finds he has full run of his own city. He do anything he wants and even has a manservant who arranges everything for him. At first it's alot of fun, he gambles and always wins. He has beautiful women at his beck and call. Then it all goes bad when he realizes that everything is planned ahead of time. It gets boring and pointless. He finally tells his manservant that he doesn't want to live in heaven anymore he wants to go to the other place. The reply is said with an evil grin.

 

"You are in the other place".

[David Blue]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

BcAugust: "I have to say this is one of the most flat out terrifying mentalist ideas I've seen in a while, though it's prompted some great villain construction. I do have to ask, what kind of campaign was this?"

 

Thank you, I wish I could take credit for this idea, but it was from my best friend Peter, the player of the mentalist. Like myself, Peter researches his character ideas, and one of the first things he found was that hypnotists do not neglect the advantages of self-hypnosis. So: take it the extra step. You're super, right? Let's not do this by halves!

 

The game was surprisingly four-colour, Silver Age, brilliant fun, and unfortunately short-lived. All the players and the gamemaster were very strong, experienced roleplayers who liked extreme concepts, but who were also firmly in favour of real heroes, not costumed bums. So (by a sort of tacit, never-discussed bargain), we would take things way, way out there on the edge - and not leap off. You would see very clearly what The Amazing Blackstone (our mentalist) was capable of (in multiple senses), or what our martial artist or our brick or my energy projector might do - and then, maybe after a false start, a crisis, some roleplayed conflict, there would be a real decision - and it would be a hero's decision. It was like going back to the best of the Silver Age, with everything new and open to doubt. (Maybe the Thing really was going to turn murderously against his team-mates?! ... but no. Yayy!!)

 

The further you were out there, the better, like scoring more by doing an elaborate jump in ice skating - provided you completed the jump convincingly as a hero. (You should be able to show with strong roleplaying that the course ultimately taken was the one the character would take, not an arbitrary plot or a game convenience thing.) Falling on your backside into evil would have impressed nobody. That was the cheap choice. It seemed everybody in the 1990s was doing it.

 

I would love to play in a game like that again.

 

The details: Champions 4, I forget how many points but not much over 250-300, normal rules, not oo many skills. (We were a bunch or rubes who'd won the space lottery: PS Lawyer 11- and everyman skills were enough to start with, for a character without martial arts or anything like that. Our opponents included people who were much more skilled and smarter, which was scary.)

 

Aliens kidnapped a bunch of civilians and did things to them that misfired due to unexpected circumstances, producing heroes like the Fantastic Four, except that we were all strangers with unrelated powers, and by far the majority of us sooner or later turned out to be villains - with all the players firmly not noticing who had "PC" stamped on their heads, and therefore with nobody knowing who could be trusted, at first.

 

Only we had to trust someone. For one thing, our brick (a 1939 Superman clone) quickly decided that the smart thing to do would be to pick up the easy money for volunteering for medical tests - which (administered by an evil corporation behind which lurked our Lex Luthor) quickly revealed a deadly radiation susceptibility which we (the survivors of The Experiment) all equally shared. (The gamemaster had required the common origin so he could hit us all conveniently with the same Vulnerabilities, Susceptibilities, Limitations, Drains and plot-device effects. Good idea!) With no choices but to stand together against the threat to us all or else to knuckle under as radiation weapons were developed and some of our weaker-willed fellow supers decided to get with the strength and the easy money, we just had to make decisions.

 

Trusting the Amazing Blackstone was the hardest choice of all. I never liked being under the same roof as him, let alone going to sleep or otherwise letting down my mental guard. But his standing offer to make me positive like him, or just to end my nervousness (including forgetting that we had such an arrangement) was just an honest free offer, as long as the campaign went. It also helped somehow that he could get his clock cleaned out of artificial overconfidence, and did. It made him seem less scary.

 

And I wasn't so easy to live with either. Heat control offered me a lot of new options and affected how I acted. (I had so much information coming in from thermal super-senses and I could do so much invisibly that I just told people what I thought they needed to know, when I thought they needed to know it.) And our brick was so brick-y he could make you scream with frustration. (Anything, especially anything in skirts, was worth exploring without preliminaries.) And our martial artist could have been the long-lost twin brother of Carnifex from Wild Cards - not exactly easy company. So we all ... worked on it. With good results, except that life happens and the campaign ended.

 

I'm happy you got some good villain ideas from our amazing mentalist.

 

Did all that cover what you were asking?

[BcAugust]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

Actually, that answered it very well, and it sounds like a very fun game. I can understand the appeal. My own characters tend to be a bit on the outer edges.

 

Oh, another thought. What about invuneralibity/armor/LS people? What happens when clothing is only a matter of society approval? If you can stand in the heart of a volcano, would even the hottest summer day bother you? Now, think on all the implications of dealing with people that would have. Can you imagine team arguements over heating the house? Actually, the whole costume thing becomes bizzare the deeper you look at it. How people chose costumes and why makes less and less sense most of the time. Hmm, that might make a good thread in it's own right.

[Lightray]

What happens when clothing is only a matter of society approval?

I actually had this come up in my own campaign, back when FREd was first out.

 

One of my friends had chosen a nigh-invulnerable brick, Aegis. Since his character was raised in seclusion and by the ideals of Classical Greece, he decided his costume was a Spartan cloak.

 

First adventure, Aegis flies up to look at something, and the other PCs look up. And realize he's not wearing any pants. There followed a long sidebar argument for the rest of the game session, with Aegis calmly pointing out that (1) the human body was beautiful and should not be covered up, (2) he was nigh-invulnerable and didn't need protection from the environment, and (3) pants look stupid.

 

I never heard what threat Dragon Lady used, but next game when he flew up to look at something, he muttered "um. and i'm wearing shorts, now." Since Dragon Lady had no powers to threaten Aegis with, I had to assume that it was peer pressure that got him to conform.

[David Blue]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

BcAugust: "Can you imagine team arguements over heating the house?"

 

Why argue? The base temperature might be whatever suited the invulnerable hero's true love of the week, day or afternoon, plus any companions, lackeys or whatever. Computers like the same sorts of conditions people do, as do books and a bunch of other familiar tools and conveniences.

 

There's no obvious incentive for an invulnerable man to argue with what fragiles need, unless he dislikes having them around (in which case, you obviously pick a riff-raff-unfriendly environment) or unless he finds the "hostile" environment useful in some way, or decorative. (Dramatic lava this week, decorative glaciers the next - fun, but tough on the help.)

 

 

BcAugust: "What happens when clothing is only a matter of society approval?"

 

Then wearing appropriate clothing might be a measure of how connected someone was to society and peer expectations. That's how it worked in Watchmen, with Doctor Manhattan shedding his clothes as he disconnected from humanity, until he was nude, living on Mars, seemingly sexually indifferent to his former lover, and inclined to forget things like "human beings need air to breathe".

 

Lightray: "Since Dragon Lady had no powers to threaten Aegis with, I had to assume that it was peer pressure that got him to conform."

 

That or sneaky mind control.

 

Either way, I would agree with Dragon Lady, even though I am a big fan of the ancient artistic convention of heroic nudity reflected in superhero costumes. (I'm also a huge Richard Corben fan, and my next character - I hope - Last Hero is a clone of a Corben character.)

 

It's less scary for the ordinary folks on the street if the invulnerable man shows some respect for contemporary taboos. Let's not raise questions about what other ancient quirks this Heroic Age Greek character might have, such as collecting spear-won lovers, or being all for exposing unfit infants on mountain-sides.

 

As Buffy the vampire-slayer once said, also in the context of invulnerability: "That was then. This is now." Or as Einstein might have said: "Super-hero costumes should be as simple as possible - but not more so."

 

Maybe you could have split the difference with some fig-leaves?

 

BcAugust: "How people chose costumes and why makes less and less sense most of the time. Hmm, that might make a good thread in it's own right."

 

Your idea, and interesting to me. OK: you start the new thread, and I'll chime in.

[sinanju]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

Actually, that answered it very well, and it sounds like a very fun game. I can understand the appeal. My own characters tend to be a bit on the outer edges.

 

Oh, another thought. What about invuneralibity/armor/LS people? What happens when clothing is only a matter of society approval? If you can stand in the heart of a volcano, would even the hottest summer day bother you? Now, think on all the implications of dealing with people that would have.

 

A character of mine, Iron Maiden, is a flying brick with great invulnerability--as well as life support vs heat and cold.

 

Because she doesn't like the "cheesecake" factor of skin-tight costumes, her costume consists of black tights, a skirt, a tank top--and a wool coachman's cloak (knee length, with an elbow length mantle) or a gothic-style calf-length trenchcoat. No matter what the weather or temperature.

 

Like Superman's cape, the cloak or trench coat often get reduced to tatters or burned away in the course of a fight--but at least most of the time, she's mostly concealed by them.

[bubba smith]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

Here's the last thread we had on this, which I really recommend people take a gander at, because it includes some interesting posts about the psychological impacts of training on RL martial artists.

 

http://www.herogames.com/oldForum/Champions/002196.html

i clicked on the link and the page read not found

[OddHat]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

Gadgeteers would build really good VR rigs, program up the Planet of the Happy and Receptive Bikini Gymnast Girls, and become completely unproductive thereafter. That's why this Earth doesn't have any first rate gadgeteers.

[SSgt Baloo]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

Gadgeteers would build really good VR rigs' date=' program up the Planet of the Happy and Receptive Bikini Gymnast Girls, and become completely unproductive thereafter. That's why this Earth doesn't have any first rate gadgeteers.[/quote']

 

...that we know of. Perhaps there are several scattered about the globe slowly wasting away in their VR harnesses, oblivious to anything but the Planet of the Happy and Receptive Bikini Gymnast Girls. Of course, I imagine that by now a few have become dessicated corpses, but the basic theorem is still valid.

[Doctor Agenda]

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human

 

In my Alts Universe setting there was a public service ad that went something like:

 

Can you become invisible? Control minds? Create illusions? Teleport? Walk through walls? Do people tell you your powers are only good for crime? We're here to tell you those people are wrong! Contact your local Bureau of Paranormal Affairs office for information on how you can pursue an honest, productive, and lucrative career in a variety of fields no matter what your paranormal ability may be.