Enraged Strength "Hulk Up" ability, please examine

[griffinman01]

Re: Enraged Strength "Hulk Up" ability, please examine

 

In the original Secret Wars Miniseries Hulk, Human Torch, Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic had a mountain dropped on them by the Beyonder.

Hulk was able to hold up a small cavity to keep them from being crushed. Mr. Fantastic was insulting Hulk/Banner almost continuously to make sure he was ANGRY enough to keep it up while he McGuyvered Iron Man's armor to accept Johnny's ability as a power source to his repulsers so they could blast out an escape hole.

 

The one fatal flaw with transitioning this into champions is that, assuming you have extra strength as part of being enraged, if you ever flub that enrage roll and break out of it you get a lot of super pancakes. Or the alternative is that those comments don't seem to piss you off and you don't actually enrage, resulting in the same pancakes. That's why I figured making it conditional off of a stat would be a bit more consistent since it never has that chance to fail and always triggers as soon as you reach the threshold. Considering that the lowest recovery rate is 8- (~28%) and the best enraged rate is 14- (~87%), you've got a fair chance of this happening. That could mean death for your heroes or 'performance' issues for your villains (pretty embarrassing).

 

Bottom line is, if you want consistency, remove rolling dice from the equation and stick to straight numbers. Odds are it's hard enough to trigger the enraged (not too many people willingly piss off the Hulk) and you don't want to make it worse by flubbing the roll a few times.

[ErikModi]

Re: Enraged Strength "Hulk Up" ability, please examine

 

The one fatal flaw with transitioning this into champions is that, assuming you have extra strength as part of being enraged, if you ever flub that enrage roll and break out of it you get a lot of super pancakes. Or the alternative is that those comments don't seem to piss you off and you don't actually enrage, resulting in the same pancakes. That's why I figured making it conditional off of a stat would be a bit more consistent since it never has that chance to fail and always triggers as soon as you reach the threshold. Considering that the lowest recovery rate is 8- (~28%) and the best enraged rate is 14- (~87%), you've got a fair chance of this happening. That could mean death for your heroes or 'performance' issues for your villains (pretty embarrassing).

 

Bottom line is, if you want consistency, remove rolling dice from the equation and stick to straight numbers. Odds are it's hard enough to trigger the enraged (not too many people willingly piss off the Hulk) and you don't want to make it worse by flubbing the roll a few times.

 

That was exactly the problem the GM and I had with the first iteration of the power, which was based on ordinary Enrage. I was pretty much pestering the GM all the time with "do I roll Enrage now? How about now? How about now? Do I roll now?" Now, part of that was because we were a bit fuzzy in defining specific Enrage conditions. Recently we'd switched to a "Rage Meter," which we'd worked as an Endurance Reserve that starts empty and can't be spent and only fills on specific conditions. It was better, but not by a lot, mostly because we did away with the Enrage rolls for it. Once the Rage Meter was full, Enrage was triggered, and I started rolling to come out when the meter was empty. With the Triggered Aid to Strength, we can set a few conditions, which will hopefully be met before the start of each of my phases, giving me a gradual build-up of Strength as the fight progresses.