Freeform Power Usage

[BhelliomRahl]

I am planning a new game and the key concept is that an incident has occurred which killed thousands of people but the survivors have gained powers.  The powers related to the Absorption, Control, Creation of a specific element (Natural and Synthetic).

 

One of the key points is that players are learning about their power and developing new and inventive ways of using them, in fact I would be more interested in my players think of ways to use their power that had not occurred to me.

What I want is for a player to explain what they are attempting to do and they make a dice roll to see if they have enough control of the their power to do it.

 

I was wondering if anyone had tried anything like this and what suggestions they might have for me.

 

My first thought was a Virtual VPP which represents their power level and I have a generic list of powers & Champions Power Book and quickly build the power.

 

This would mean a lot of work for me but I think I can handle it.

 

My worry is that Hero might not be the best system for these Freeform abilities, I could possible use Fate which leans towards this play style.

 

 

[薔薇語]

To be honest, I think your final sentiment is right: HERO may not be the best system for this. That said, I don't think any system would be that much better. While I have not actually run the game I am about to describe, I had an idea for a game similar to this and in general the following is what I was going to do:

I was going to have the players design their simple characters and they could choose a few limited things they always wanted to do. In your case, that might be a fire-based elemental girl who can always light a campfire or a telepath who always has a general empathic awareness of her surroundings.

 

Then I was going to tell the players that they all had extra hidden powers and abilities that the PLAYERS had no access to. But would all be themed together. Thus I needed a concrete theme they wanted to travel down - this relates to your addendum above about the characters being linked to something. Lastly, I was NEVER going to build any powers and just play it by ear. Everyone's pool was going to be limited to a certain number of DCs of effect and as time when on I would increase those.

The ultimate goal was to get the players to be inventive and more involved with the store and less with the mechanics. If I noticed a theme in what they chose to do, I would start to write up those powers and those powers alone. Lastly, when I thought the CHARACTERS had a real sense of mastery, I would take away the activation rolls and give the PLAYERS the full range of powers I noticed them use over the course of the campaigns. And probably with a VPP so they could continue to adjust things as they wanted on the fly. 

I feel perfectly comfortable with never writing up a power and just playing things by ear. If you and your players are equally comfortable with that, then you can take my idea above. If the players want to have or need to have a more concrete notion of the mechanics at play, though, then the above style will likely not mesh with them. For example, I had a friend who was devoted to the eternal re-write. Every time he reached perfection with his character's build, he noticed something needed changing or something could use tweaking. As such, he was never that comfortable with me controlling things for him. So if he was in my gaming group, then I would most certainly not do it the way I described above. 

 

All that said, though, if you are willing (or your players are willing), just using a VPP would be sufficient. Advise them on how to build things and to have several builds at various power levels ready for each game. Those will constitute the normal switches and only be subject to the normal activation rolls. Any NEW powers will be allowed but must be done quickly and will suffer from additional minus. This should help encourage variety without bogging everything down too terribly much. 
 

La Rose.