Powers as Illusions

[bluesguy]

But in a way, the fact that mental powers can be very powerful, is not actually the core of the problem. The problem is that the style of play best suited to the mind mage - stay away from the action, neutralise enemies from a distance, extract information without physical confrontation, etc. is not much fun for the other players, and often vice versa. If the party frequently enters an encounter to find half their foes asleep and the other half fighting each other, the fighter feels a bit redundant. If the mind mage uses mindscan to check the castle bit by bit and neutralise the sentries, or get them to open doors, the rogue is likely to feel overshadowed. On the other hand, if the party likes to hurl itself into the fray, the mind mage is likely to feel out of place. That's the problem! And that's why I retired the PC in question despite the fact that I enjoyed the heck out of playing him.

 

It is also dependent on a player who really understands how use mental powers.  Mark you obviously got it.  In my campaign we used LTE to "manage" the player's sorcerer (mentalist).  He was much more careful about when  he used his powers.  Especially since he wasn't always guaranteed a good nights sleep to recover his LTE.  That one change still left him very effective but not so overwhelming compared to everyone else's character.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I guess I figure that most fights aren't going to be ones the party carefully sets up for and eats lunch while the mage casts spells over and over again so he can dominate everything.  In any case, Mental powers need some further examination, I agree.

[Markdoc]

I guess I figure that most fights aren't going to be ones the party carefully sets up for and eats lunch while the mage casts spells over and over again so he can dominate everything.  In any case, Mental powers need some further examination, I agree.

 

Actually, if the players are smart, then many fights CAN be set up like that. In the game I referred to, we actually rescued a captured prisoner from a fortified mansion house while sitting and eating dinner in a nearby inn. I kid you not. By using relatively minor mind control and telepathy on some of the junior (non-combat) staff (Cook's helper and cook, specifically) we were able to get a a good layout of the mansion, the guards and potential location of the prisoner (since they still had to eat, it was relatively easy to figure out who the guards were suddenly collecting food for). Mindscan allowed the location of guards and invisible domination (the EGO-reducing effect) allowed me to gradually expand the area of mindscan I could cover while still staying invisible to the people being scanned. It ended with all the guards along the escape route going to sleep, while the guard captain opened the prisoner's cell and escorted him to the back door where the rest of the party walked over and collected him.

 

You can see why that character was retired.

 

Then we got the hell out of town, before the guard captain had time to raise a general alarm among his troops. Now that was a pretty extreme example, but even in a more normal adventuring setting, a phase is only 3-4 seconds, so it takes a mind mage perhaps 12-16 seconds to scan a room, identify a target, crush their EGO to null and mindcontrol them - he can do all of that in the time that the rogue is opening the lock. Given 30 seconds, he can do that to 2-3 opponents. We're not talking about locking down the group for a half hour or so.

 

However, even given that experience, and given my own experience with mind mages in my own game, I don't think we really need to revisit the rules. Fantasy Hero is different from Champions in that many of the "mundane" powers we take for granted in modern setting - heavy firepower in the form of military equipment, instant communication in the form of telephones, etc don't exist for the bulk of the population in the standard pseudo-medieval setting. That can make some powers more powerful than they would otherwise be. In addition, in a Champions setting, all PCs - and many important NPCs, are superheroic and will have powers, and their minions will have powers as well. So players can't assume that - say - Viper agents will be unable to detect invisibility, in the same way that they can generally assume that for a bunch of town guards. More: you can assume the Viper guards have radio, reducing your ability to pick off small groups. But magical instant communication is not the default for minions in most fantasy settings.

 

This is not just an issue for mental powers. A 20 point forcefield is not over the top in Champions: but in Fantasy Hero, it essentially makes you nigh-invulnerable to mundane weapons. Flight is cool, but not overwhelming in Champions: but in a standard pseudo-medieval setting it renders the bulk of castle defences and town walls irrelevant - in a way that is not the case for a modern military setting where airborne assault is assumed to be a possibility. In other words, it's a setting problem, not a power-specific one.

 

There's two ways to handle this: the first is to simply to fight fire with fire. Assume a high-magic setting and simply swap out technology with magic. Town guards have 2-way mindlink, and are armed with magical firelances. Castles have lightning guns mounted in their towers, and merchants can travel from town to town on the royal teleport network. It's an interesting concept, but takes us far away from the traditional fantasy mileu. It also has the potential for turning into fighting fire with gasoline: setting off a magical arms race, where players seek ever more powerful magical gear and the GM responds with ever-more powerful magically enhanced foes. That is what eventually happened to the game I referred to in the examples above: it was set in Tekumel, which is already a high magic/magicotech setting, and as the campaign developed, the gap between magic-haves and have-nots became insupportable. One scene that stands out in my memory was the party warrior leading a squad of soldiers in battle. The squad was hit with a Doomkill spell (a very powerful explosion). Every single soldier in the squad was killed outright - except for Ke'el, the warrior, secure in his magically-enhanced armour, who wasn't even stunned. Later in the same game, he charged down a huge squad of elite archers - whose arrows pattered off his armour like gentle rain. It was a great game, in a lot of ways, and I learned a lot from it, but the GM closed it down: the power creep became too much.

 

Personally, while allowing for higher-powered magic, I prefer lower-magic settings. You can build for fantasy games in this mould, but it takes a bit more thought. There are a lot of ways to do it. One is to restrict magic, so that it cannot be used at will: as already noted I require ALL human magic (PCs and NPCs) to take limitations that restrict how much it can be used (especially in combat). Secondly, I don't allow players - initially at least - to design their own spells, without very compelling reasons, and I require magic to fall into defined schools, making it hard (not impossible, just hard) to master every aspect of magic. These two options not only make the mind mage playable again, but they greatly ease the problem with all types of mages. I also assume that magic - though uncommon - is ubiquitous, and that people living in this world know this: so they take it into account. For castles, for example, they know that airborne attackers/infitrators are a possibiliy, so castles are designed with internal checkpoints and defences against internal as well as external attack. It doesn't have to be supermagical - an iron door and some sentries will often do. Key areas in more sophisticated defences can be expected to have magical defences as well: a simple mindlink spell for key guard posts, an amulet for the guard captain with 5 points of mDEF, a spell to detect mental control ... etc. It doesn't have to be much: I'm not a big fan of the heavy-handed approach such as "The entire castle is covered by a field that blocks your magic and you can't dispel it, so nyah, nyah"). Secret organisations will assume that they can be watched/mind-controlled, etc. Most thieves guilds, for example operate in a cell system, where the members of a gang don't actually know the identity or location of their controller, so that if one gang is compromised, the whole guild is not compromised, much as terrorist operate today.

 

With a little forethought, I haven't had too many problems with mindmages or indeed mages at all. At the same time, they are always valued party members.I don't think I've ver had a FH group that didn't include at least some mages, and generally more than half the group tends to have a least a smidgeon of magical ability by the end of a campaign: if they don't start with it, they pick it up along the way.

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

Oh - and one other GM'ing trick I find useful: in many games, bulk NPCs - minions and the like, tend to just have base 10 stats with a standard template whacked on top, meaning  that all guards have an EGO of 10, for example. What I tend to do is - when relevant - mix this up a bit, by rolling non-essential characteristics on 3d6, and essential ones on 7+d6 - or even higher. So for example, STR, DEX and CON are essential characteristics for an ordinary guard: you won't normally get a fighting job if you are unusually weak, clumsy or feeble. But guards - outside of the elite - are generally not screened for intelligence or strength of will. So although the average in stats is assumed to be 10+Template, if it comes to a specific question - is this particular guard strong enough to force that blocked door, is this particular guard strong-willed enough to resist domination, then I roll. That way, instead of all guards having STR 13 and EGO 10, they have that as an average and actually range from STR 11-16 and EGO 3-18.

 

It doesn't sound like much, but simply having the possibility that one guard has in a group has EGO 15 is enough to suddenly make things much  less certain for a mindmage.

 

cheers, Mark

[Outsider]

The idea that a rich merchant or nobleman, or his security apparatus, would be so vulnerable to magical attack that they could be defeated by a single magician sipping beer in an inn across town seems ludicrous.  If that were the case, the merchants and nobles wouldn't stay merchants and nobles for long.   A world with accessible magical attacks would have accessible magical defenses.  Those defenses might not be cheap, but they'd be there, and the wealthy, at least, would have them  

 

One way I did this was to have gold, silver, and copper interfere with magic.  Magic could not directly affect them, and worked poorly in their proximity.  The continuing value of these metals, and their relative worth vs each other, was tied to how effectively they interfered.    So.. lay thick copper (or thin silver, or even thinner gold) wire between each course of blocks in your castle wall and desolidified people can't easily pass through them.  Crowns made of precious metals become more than decorative symbols of temporal power, but add mental defense to the wearer.  And so on.  

[bluesguy]

The idea that a rich merchant or nobleman, or his security apparatus, would be so vulnerable to magical attack that they could be defeated by a single magician sipping beer in an inn across town seems ludicrous.  If that were the case, the merchants and nobles wouldn't stay merchants and nobles for long.   A world with accessible magical attacks would have accessible magical defenses.  Those defenses might not be cheap, but they'd be there, and the wealthy, at least, would have them 

 

Unless you are running a world where magic is 'running out of juice'.  One of the premises in the Valdorian Age was that magic was becoming very rare.  It had been powerful and widespread but now it was almost considered a myth.  People, even well traveled people, might not ever run into a mage.  A world like this one a sorcerer (mentalist) is going to be very powerful because no one is expecting those kinds of powers.  They aren't expecting magic at all.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Everyone in my Hero games has mental defense as a starting 2 point stat, which would make that kind of character less effective, and yeah if someone was in a party that read books and painted landscapes while the mage took several minutes to cast spells on creatures far away to utterly dominate the campaign, I'd start giving them more ego and mental defense as well.

[Outsider]

Unless you are running a world where magic is 'running out of juice'.  One of the premises in the Valdorian Age was that magic was becoming very rare.  It had been powerful and widespread but now it was almost considered a myth.  People, even well traveled people, might not ever run into a mage.  A world like this one a sorcerer (mentalist) is going to be very powerful because no one is expecting those kinds of powers.  They aren't expecting magic at all.

 

 

If magic is so rare as to be considered a myth, then a player characters probably shouldn't have access to it.   Unless, I suppose, you're playing a "the PCs are the most powerful people in the world" campaign.  And if you're doing that, then dealing with a kidnapping by 'muggles' is some serious slumming on their part, and probably shouldn't even be played out.  The GM says 'yeah, its no problem.  You handle it while having breakfast.  Now, that elder god trying to break through from another reality, that's going take some effort.  What's your plan for dealing with  that?"   World shaking heros deal with world shaking problems, and all that.

[Markdoc]

Yeah, this is one of the problems with the fantasy genre in general, and balancing it is always tricky. Magic lets players pull off  all sorts of stunts. You can build defences into the game, but when you do, it starts to rapidly evolve away from the classic fantasy tropes and into something more resembling modern day/science fiction.

 

To take the examples given above "The idea that a rich merchant or nobleman, or his security apparatus, would be so vulnerable to magical attack that they could be defeated by a single magician sipping beer in an inn across town seems ludicrous.  If that were the case, the merchants and nobles wouldn't stay merchants and nobles for long.   A world with accessible magical attacks would have accessible magical defenses.  Those defenses might not be cheap, but they'd be there, and the wealthy, at least, would have them".

 

Now this seems pretty reasonable, but think about the implications for a bit. If magical defences are really expensive only the richest will have them. So far, so good. Of course that means that the richest can plunder and loot their less wealthy competitors with near impunity because their competitors won't have protection against mental coercion or spying, while they do. Moreover, it implies that magic is something that can be purchased - and for the cost of mentally fortifying a mansion, you could buy a flying ship, or a series of teleportals. And for less than that, you could buy immunity to disease and aging, which is going to have some pretty serious social implications. Wealthy nobles should be able to afford armour that makes them more or less invulnerable on the battlefield, and arm themselves with weapons that allow them to annihilate mundane foes.

 

You could, of course, handwave all that, and I've played with some GMs who do: they assume that magical defences are erected wherever the PCs happen to be - but not elsewhere - and that the monsters are wherever the PCs happen to be (but not elsewhere, except as background flavor). That's not been - in my experience - a sign of competent GM'ing. But if you don't handwave it, the game moves rapidly out of the familiar pseudo-medieval fantasy area into something by John M Harrison or Jack Vance. I'm not saying that's a bad thing: my own campaign world leans that way . I'm just pointing out that assuming a high magic environment to counter those pesky players is likely to have significant consequences. Now, of course, you could come up with reasons why that doesn't happen - and that's where the GM really needs to put in a good bit of background work.

 

Balancing what the PCs can do with what everybody else can do is always a difficult act and it really requires a great deal of thought by the GM. You want, generally, the PCs to be able to perform heroic actions, but in most games, you don't want them to be (at least initially) totally dominating figures in the landscape. My own response to this conundrum has been to severely restrict how easy magic is to do, but allow it to be flexible and powerful. So rich merchants do lie awake and worry about mercenary mages making off with their strongbox - and they hire their own mages as guards in response.

 

cheers, Mark