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Unaging Characters and Skills


Anaximander

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I appreciate that this is stating the obvious, but Hero, being point based, means that if you are good at one thing you have to be less good at something else. Longevity is a good background for certain builds but gives no inherent advantage. You could build a highly skilled character and explain that with long life and lots of time to learn or you could build a very physical character with few skills and explain that as a hormonal thing that means he or she spent the last 50 years packing on muscle, but never picked up a book or even went abroad on holiday.

 

There is no right way to do it, or rather lots of right ways to do it.

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You definitely have a point their.  If I were to allow a character to build their own version of Thor or Hercules based on mythology, I wouldn't expect their characters to be Rhode scholars just because they've been alive along time, but I think there is also a sound argument for my point that people who do pay attention to what's going on around them will amass a lot of information that others wouldn't, and a mechanic that could easily account for that without costing the moon would be good to have.  Particularly, for characters who are classified as fonts of wisdom who are still active and useful in the field.

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This the build for a immortal who has been around since 5000 BC... he has a very good memory... he likes art and traveling...

 

 3  Knows Everything... - Scholar 

 2  1) Art of the World:  KS: Art History (INT-based) 13-

 2  2) History of the World:  KS: World History (INT-based) 13-

 2  3) People of the World:  KS: People of History (INT-based) 13-

 2  4) Weird Things of the World:  KS: Unusual Things and Events (INT-based) 13-

 

 3  Traveled Everywhere... - Traveler 

 2  1) Cities of the World:  CK: Cities of History (INT-based) 13- 

 2  2) Cultures of the World:  CuK: World Cultures (INT-based) 13- 

 2  3) Places of the World:  AK: World Geography (INT-based) 13- 

 

20 Worldly...  +10 with all Knowledge Skills; Limited: Life Experiences, Limited: Only to offset penalties to Knowledge Skills 

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Just because it's my favorite....Expert: Many lifetimes, well lived  3  KS: Fine art,1 KS: Great Cities, 1 KS: Great Minds, 1  etc...If you blow the roll, you weren't at Woodstock, etc " Sure I partied with Frida, but I never met Picasso...."

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The problem...well, a problem with KS History, of KS anything, is that you can roll one week to see if you have a bit of knowledge of Woodstock, and succeed, then roll the next week and fail.  That could be because you were at Woodstock but passed out in a field when Jimi Hendrix was on, but you were front and centre for Sly and the Family Stone, but bear with me.

 

There is no easy way around this, of course, without going into far too much detail about what your areas of knowledge actually are, but you can build up a picture.  Each time you make a roll based on your longevity (whatever skill you might decide that entails) you can note whether you succeeded or failed, and what the roll was.  Should something come up again about that specific area of knowledge then you use the recorded roll, rather than a new one.  This allows more consistency: if you know about Woodstock (at least to a certain level of detail established by the roll) then you always know about it.  If you don't know about the Isle of Wight Festival (you blew the roll), indicating that you were not there, then you are never going to 'remember' in future.  Of course there is nothing stopping you Googling it, and learning all about it, but if you want to emulate a body of experience, then that is probably the way to do it.

 

Of course that technically applied to any skill roll, and for most people, most of the time, it is too much trouble to record all your skill rolls and what they were about, but for a long lived character it might be interesting to build up their history in that way.

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This sort of thing is part of the reason that I made the first rank of any non-combat skill free to buy in my games. It's worked out well for my group - nobody has yet to write down every skill in the book just in case they need to use it someday (most characters take 5 to 15 'free' skills that they probably don't even increase in rank - only the 'super scientist' types take more and then start spending points).

 

I even give out ranks depending on skill and affect in general play.

 

Ie: Does having been a baker or cobbler in the 1400's affect the game in any meaningful way on a regular basis? No? Free.  Want it at 18-? Still free.  Congratulations, immortal superhero, on being one the best shoemakers in history and making truly legendary cookies

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Ie: Does having been a baker or cobbler in the 1400's affect the game in any meaningful way on a regular basis? No? Free.  Want it at 18-? Still free.  Congratulations, immortal superhero, on being one the best shoemakers in history and making truly legendary cookies

Pay For What You Use (6E1 10)

What Not To Spend CP On (6E1 31, CC 10)

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Pay For What You Use (6E1 10)

What Not To Spend CP On (6E1 31, CC 10)

 

Exactly.  My favourite guideline.  I give out so many freebies in my modern set superhero game - tvs, stereos, iphones, public transportation : all cost a surprising amount of points if you try to build them using the rules but unless you take negative wealth you have access to them if you want. (Just expect them to periodically crap out in times of crises compared to ones actually purchased with points - the iphones in particular are often a target of ridicule for the power armour character who paid a ton on his sensor suite).

 

Conversation 11- if you want it, though? Useful in my game and free (frankly I'd rather you had it than didn't - and it won't outshine the 14 to 18 - the actual social character is sporting.)

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I agree, if you want to be an expert on mayan pottery, that is free...if you spend a point (or more) then it becomes my responsability to make that expendature count. Maybe Viper is funding their operations by smuggling meso american artifacts.....

 

I don't pass out "free" skills, except as "everyman", but I use a "heroic actions" rule that says acting as a hero ( outside of battling Villans) always works, so a (8) is all you'll need for "normal" activities.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Wow, -5 is on the heavy-handed end of 'extremely difficult' when considering skill modifiers (per published Hero System materials), so I'm rather surprised at a -5 for each category step of a KS, too.

 

 

-5 isn't unreasonable if you look at point expenditure vs effect.

 

In JohnnyAppleseed098's example, there are 4 steps down between the world and an individual city, each at -2.

 

Player #1 : Buys Traveler (3 points) and half a dozen Area Knowledge skills (1 point each, after traveler mod)  and 6 skill levels for all AK skills (4 points each):   Total cost 33 points..

Player #2 : Buys  "General Area Knowledge: The World" (2 points), and 14 skill levels in it (1 point each).   Total cost 16 points.

 

Character #1 : Has a 17- in six specific cities

Character #2 : Has a 25- in "The World"

 

If we set the step penalty to -2, this means that Character #2 is at a -8 to get to the city level (per JohnnyAppleseed098's example).  That gives him the same 17- roll that Character #1 has, but he also has the same level of knowledge for every other city, in the world.  AND he spent less than half as many points to get it.

 

Player #1 is now probably pretty unhappy.

 

Even changing the step penalty to -5 isn't enough.  It just requires another dozen levels (12 points) to counter, so Player #2 still spends less (28 vs 34) to have his character match Character #1, and more.

 

 

The only way I would even consider allowing "General Knowledge" with a -2 step modifier is if there is a hard cap on how high a skill roll can be.   Make 18- or 20- the maximum allowable skill and the best "General Knowledge: Earth" man can do is a 10- or 12- for any given city.  Character #1 gets to outshine Character #2 in his six cities, Character #2 gets to be useful everywhere else.

 

PS : PSLs count.

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  • 10 months later...

The one point that never came up in that thread is Unaging SFX.
Before I can answer how to build my brain's capacity I have to know why it is immortal.

If my cells are somehow indestructible, than the neurons with my memories will be, and I will remember Sumeria and Atlantis as they were yesterday.
If my longevity depends on my cells regenerating all the time, then my neurons will degenerate and regenerate, so my memories will become more and more selective.
If my immortality somehow means all my metabolic processes stopped (usually some kind of undeath), than I will have problems even growing new neurons and will be damned to live in my old memories. The typical anachronistic vampire count in victorian attire, the depressive last survivor of ancient Macchu Picchu, still living "inside the ruins" in his mind.
And then there is the traumatic version of resurrecting which might wipe your memories, although your ego and personality somehow reboot (giving you a chance to explore existential questions of "Who am I and how many if I cannot remember?").

Wolverine tends to loose most of his backstories.
Vandal Savage (50.000 years) more keeps existing on than really learning from his times as Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great. An immortal caveman stays a caveman.
Gandalf is good at remembering earlier ages, but not that helpful with telling you "Oh, we did that last time we tried to save Middle Earth and it didn't work out that well".
The Guardians of the Universe (Green Lantern's bosses) are at least 1.000.000.000 years old (probably more along 5 billion years) and do not seem prepared to history suddenly exploding and the DC universe getting destroyed 5 times within 100 years after "nothing" happening for so long. :winkgrin:

On the other hand there are well-written villains and heroes that are very adept at recognizing new situations by comparing them to earlier ones. This propably is less of a skill build than using higher INT, DEX, perhaps even SPD.
Neil Gaiman came up with the Technophage, an intelligent dinosaur hunting us for 65 million years. He is terribly efficient in looking through you.

The SF series Perry Rhodan focusses on the titular hero and several other terrans, who got cell activators, amulets that make them immortal. After 40 years of writing and more than 2000 years of plot the authors had to come up with plausible answers where there hero is storing his experience (especially as his best friend is Atlan the last survivor of Atlantis who has the same problem some 10000 years longer). They just came up with: It's in the cell activators. So you actually can have your undying knowledge in an IAF.

And then there always is that option of pulling slimy white threads out of your brain and storing them in some kind of unaging soup ... :rofl:

 

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No disrespect intended, but I would only go into that level of SFX detail if I wanted to use it as part of a character's story. Since AFAIK there is no immortality, unaging, undeath, etc. in the real world, fictionally it can work however I want it to. If I really needed to I could come up with some logical-sounding hokum to rationalize it. For example, maybe in an undead person the seat of consciousness is the soul rather than the brain, which can continue to expand on the astral level to accommodate new memories.

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As someone who is approaching 50, I know that I don't have all of the skills and abilities that I used to, but I can still sometimes surprise myself, but there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to what I remember and what I don't.

As someone for whom 50 is officially in the rear view mirror...yeah, I hear ya. Knowledge fades to make room (sometimes) for other things; there are subjects I knew a lot about 20-30 years ago that I barely have superficial knowledge of now because I haven't kept up.

 

Similarly, I can point to a number of Skills I used to be proficient at back in my military & law enforcement days. Take Land Navigation: 20 years ago I was pretty damn good at it (if I do say so myself). But scratch off 2 decades of rust and what's left today? Maybe an 8-, tops. Now if all the GPSes fail, does Mr. Old School have an advantage over someone who's always had that tech to rely on?* Maybe. But even then it's more Less Bad than More Good.

 

Similarly, I was a damn good shot once. But I haven't pulled a trigger in 10+ years and am probably down to basic WF. Give me a decent Training Montage (set to the 80s power ballad of your choice) and could I get it back? Probably. But even then I'm not quickly going to surpass someone who's been shooting consistently for years. What you knew/did decades ago doesn't matters nearly as much as what you've done regularly, recently.

 

* I assume the Army still teaches old school map-&-compass work, but I don't know how much time they spend on it?

 

Ie: Does having been a baker or cobbler in the 1400's affect the game in any meaningful way on a regular basis? No? Free.  Want it at 18-? Still free. Congratulations, immortal superhero, on being one the best shoemakers in history and making truly legendary cookies

Right. Even if those skill were to come up in game, if the character hasn't kept up with the field, good luck making shoes with modern tools that look nothing like what you used 600 years ago. In my last time travel game, anything that was "mostly useless" outside of the player's home time period was free or at least sharply discounted. One player wanted his PC to be an expert in military fortifications, circa 1000 BC. Nice bit of background color, but I'm not going to charge you for that. Later, as the character's knowledge base modernized and became more useful, he threw a few points into it.

 

Outside of time travel games: I love it when players take things things like PS: Gourmet Chef and KS: Beatles Music, and I'll try to work them into the story once in awhile. But I'm not going to make them pay as much for those as the next PC pays for something like PS: Detective or KS: Arcane Lore that comes up every other session.

 

Wow, -5 is on the heavy-handed end of 'extremely difficult' when considering skill modifiers (per published Hero System materials), so I'm rather surprised at a -5 for each category step of a KS, too.

Ultimate Skill is a great book, but it by design it kindof leans towards increased granularity, if you want it. I've seen games where folks like getting into the nitty gritty detail of specialized fields of study. (SS: Particle Physics vs PS: Theoretical Physics and so on.) In a game like that, a -5 for a different specialization might be appropriate. These days I tend towards more broad skills (PS: Physics and call it good), so -5 would definitely be over the top. Just depends on the style of game you're playing.

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Longevity is a good background for certain builds but gives no inherent advantage.

IIRC there was a thread a few months back about what in-game advantages Longevity actually provides, and whether or not it was overpriced. Several of us endorsed treating it as a kindof VPP for marginally-useful Background Skills.

 

The one point that never came up in that thread is Unaging SFX.

Before I can answer how to build my brain's capacity I have to know why it is immortal.

Fair point. But even assuming no physical loss or cognitive decline, knowledge and skills only stay fresh if reinforced regularly. That's why "Mr. I Was A Professor Of X For 30 Years" makes such a regular ass of himself in the comments section: not only has he not added any new knowledge since he retired 20 years ago, but he's lost much of what he once had. (And yeah, I realize this is a gross overgeneralization, but we've all heard from That Guy.)

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An immortal would get older jokes that a person of the current generation probably wouldn't. For example, if you sat a teen or twenty-something of today down to watch a 70s era episode of Saturday Night Live or SCTV, they might laugh at some of the jokes, but others would go over their heads because they involved subject matter you'd only understand if you were around back in the day. Hell, I only know about Classic SNL and SCTV in the first place because I watched Nick at Nite back in the late 80s/early 90s.

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You even could watch Shakespeare and sigh: "Oh, seems the actor and the director did not get the real joke. Hell, they ruined the best part."
Or read Don Quijote and laugh: "Oh, that one is SO fresh. *urm* Looses a little bit since they abolished knights."
(And if no one understands what you are talking about: Even better role-playing.) :yes:

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Cramming of some form could be used to represent old skill that have not been practiced by the immortal in years.

 

 

 

 

Dr Who has a character made immortal during the Viking time of England. The next episode where the Doctor meets her agin in 1600 or 1700. He tries to use address her with original name but she does not remember it. Eventually he goes to her home ant it is filled with journals that she wrote to keep her memories intact.

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