Master Villains

[Duke Bushido]

17 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

Dr. Destroyer, Takofanes, Mechanon, are supposed to be in the upper rank of the setting's villains. Nobody is telling Marvel to get rid of Thanos or Magneto because they're too powerful. 

 

Are you sure about that?  There are reasons I didn't watch X-men or any of the Infinity war (or other Avengers, really) movies.

Edited April 2, 2019 by Duke Bushido
My content was in the Twilight Zone, and it didn't like ponies.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Dr. Destroyer, Takofanes, Mechanon, are supposed to be in the upper rank of the setting's villains. Nobody is telling Marvel to get rid of Thanos or Magneto because they're too powerful. 

 

No, but they're not all hanging out on earth and honestly these guys as written in the books are WAY more powerful than any of those villains.  Thanos is a tough guy, but he's not omnipotent without the gauntlet, and he's out in space doing his thing, not on earth plotting to take over.  I don't mind villains like Tyrannon from Mystic Masters being that kind of power level, because he's the emperor of another dimension and there's a good reason why he's not mucking about in the hero world taking over.  But the power creep has gotten ridiculous

[massey]

32 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Dr. Destroyer, Takofanes, Mechanon, are supposed to be in the upper rank of the setting's villains. Nobody is telling Marvel to get rid of Thanos or Magneto because they're too powerful. 

 

No, but they're not all hanging out on earth and honestly these guys as written in the books are WAY more powerful than any of those villains.  Thanos is a tough guy, but he's not omnipotent without the gauntlet, and he's out in space doing his thing, not on earth plotting to take over.  I don't mind villains like Tyrannon from Mystic Masters being that kind of power level, because he's the emperor of another dimension and there's a good reason why he's not mucking about in the hero world taking over.  But the power creep has gotten ridiculous

 

I'd disagree.  I think Thanos is more powerful than any of the listed Champions villains.  He'd bend Dr Destroyer over.  Of course, the Champions aren't the Avengers either.  Thanos is opposed by characters who are more powerful than any heroes in the CU.  There's no Silver Surfer out there fighting Takofanes.

[Dkap]

If i run a master villain i try a few mock combat to make sure the fight goes more than 3 rounds and if it doesn't minions or for the PCs agents or police can interfere in the fight 

[massey]

Perhaps it would help to have some guidelines for a sort of "floating" character writeup for master villains.  So you could have a baseline Dr Destroyer character sheet for the published Champions Universe, and then you could have a section that talks about what stats he should have for your campaign.

 

Something like::

Attacks -- Dr Destroyer's main energy blast should be 4D6 higher than the average attacks of the heroes in your group.  If your group averages 10D6, Dr D should have a 14D6 attack.  If your group averages 15D6, Dr D should have a 19D6 attack.  If one of the heroes has a particularly high attack (15D6 in a 12D6 average), or a particularly low attack (8D6 in a 12D6 average) than Dr D should be at least 2D6 more powerful than the heavy hitter, and you should not include the low outlier in the campaign average.  Dr Destroyer hits very hard.

Defenses -- Dr Destroyer should have PD and ED equal to approximately 3x the average dice of the hero group.  Dr D's Con should be high enough that he will not be Stunned by the average roll of a Pushed Haymaker attack of the average D6 of the group (12D6 pushed and haymakered is 18D6, average roll 63 minus his 35 PD/ED -- he needs at least a 28 Con).

Speed -- Take the number of heroes in your group, or the highest Spd value of any character in your group, and add 1 Spd.  This is Dr Destroyer's Speed value.  He has to fight an entire group by himself, so he needs lots of actions.

Combat Levels -- Dr Destroyer's OCV should allow him to hit the highest DCV character in your group on a 13-.  This does not include bonuses for Dodging, but it does include levels that are normally assigned to DCV.  His base DCV should be equal to the DCV of the highest DCV hero (not including dodging or combat levels).

Endurance -- Dr D should be able to fight for at least 2 Turns before he needs to take a Recovery to restore his Endurance.

Stun -- Dr D should have enough Stun to survive a full Turn assuming each hero hits 50% of the time and rolls average damage.

Special Defenses -- Dr D should have an attack that allows him to affect each hero.  This means he may need an Affects Desolid attack as well as a special sense for invisible characters.  He should also have enough Flash Defense so that those attacks will not inconvenience him for more than a phase.  He should have enough Power Defense that he will only lose single digit points from the average attack.  His Mental Defense should be very high, at least 2x the D6 of the hero's mental attacks.

 

Probably about 15 years ago there was a game book published called Omlevex.  It had terrible art and was not a particularly great game system (though I think they had conversions for Champions), but it took the perspective of the writers of an old comic book talking about their fictional characters.  Think Stan Lee in Mallrats.  "Oh yeah, I remember when we created that guy.  The point was we needed a villain to oppose the hero.  And he wore those purple pants because the color got screwed up at the press.  But then he became popular and we had to leave it.  And so the guy had to be tough enough that he could survive the hero's big attack, so that's why we decided to make him a ghost."  It might help to include some pure out of character, out of universe information on why the designers made the character that way.  You wouldn't have to do it from the perspective of a fictional comic book author, but something to help GMs understand what role the author envisioned for this villain, how it is intended to be played.  More info from that angle. 

 

"And so when Dr Destroyer shows up to battle the heroes in Detroit, we knew he had to be more powerful.  So he got a one-time power boost there, an experimental new type of armor that was made with a rare element.  We knew we couldn't let him keep it, but we needed him to be powerful for this one story.  So for a couple of years he's totally unstoppable by normal teams, but then maybe he found out it was causing cancer or something so he had to quit using it.  So the Doctor has returned to the level of stats listed above, but maybe the older he gets the more likely he is to say 'screw it' and put on the experimental suit to go out with a bang."

[DShomshak]

That's excellent suggestions from Massey. The "Campaign Use" section in 6e character write-ups is a start -- notably, suggestions on ramping a character's power level up or down -- but for major, campaign-defining villains there could be more.

 

The CU's villains have certainly seen power creep. It isn't just the dice of attacks, either: The character sheets have bloated. Much of this is to assure that a villain has an attack versus every possible defense, and a defense against every possible attack, and every possible skill that might be used. I admit I did it too when I invented Skarn. But my experience in actual play is that villains with Swiss Army Knife power options usually end up using just 3-4 attack modes. There's rarely a more effective choice than Just Do Damage. (Which goes for the heroes, too.)

 

Listing all of Doctor Destroyer's Knowledge Skills (for instance) may make a statement about what a genius is, but OTOH paper costs money and column inches cost reader attention. Better perhaps just to follow the example for his Bases/Followers/Vehicles, etc. and just say he has whatever Skill he needs to make a story work. Or if it's a significant weakness for a master villain that he/she-it doesn't have particular skills, that's probably more important to spell out than to list a bunch of skills and hope readers notice the omission.

 

Dean Shomshak

[archer]

49 minutes ago, DShomshak said:

Listing all of Doctor Destroyer's Knowledge Skills (for instance) may make a statement about what a genius is, but OTOH paper costs money and column inches cost reader attention. Better perhaps just to follow the example for his Bases/Followers/Vehicles, etc. and just say he has whatever Skill he needs to make a story work. Or if it's a significant weakness for a master villain that he/she-it doesn't have particular skills, that's probably more important to spell out than to list a bunch of skills and hope readers notice the omission.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

Marvel's Doctor Doom tends to kidnap specialists, force them to work for him, dispose of them when he no longer needs them, then claim all the credit for the research and the resulting inventions.

 

I think a lot of Champions master villains could take a page out of his book.

[Lord Liaden]

I've long favored a Variable Power Pool, only for Skills, for my polymath characters. Lots of flexibility for a relatively small point output.

 

Another approach was taken for the "cosmic entity" types statted in Champions Beyond. They're given KS: Everything There Is To Know, with a really high roll.

[assault]

15 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

Dr. Destroyer, Takofanes, Mechanon, are supposed to be in the upper rank of the setting's villains. Nobody is telling Marvel to get rid of Thanos or Magneto because they're too powerful.

 

The thing is that Magneto isn't usually that powerful. He's a "fight the X-Men" character, and I'm not talking about Dark Phoenix.

 

Nor, for that matter, is Doctor Doom, usually. A lot of his plots involve him trying to achieve extreme power levels, rather than him having them as his baseline.

 

I could add Ultron to that.

 

All are global threats, but that is because they are plotters.

 

For a sheer raw power threat, there is Graviton - but there are reasons why he has only appeared a handful of times - and it's because he's not very interesting, not because he is overpowered.

 

Now there is a place for villains who could oppose a notional Superman scale hero, but I'd personally handle them differently.

 

---

Sidetrack:

 

Dr Destroyer as pre-Crisis Mad Scientist Lex Luthor? Wrong feel.

Mechanon as Brainiac? That works - but Brainiac is usually an invader, rather than a resident threat.

Takofanes? Meh. Not my taste. 

[Lord Liaden]

37 minutes ago, assault said:

 

The thing is that Magneto isn't usually that powerful. He's a "fight the X-Men" character, and I'm not talking about Dark Phoenix.

 

 

Guess it depends on which depiction of Magneto you look at. On more than one occasion he's fought the assembled Avengers, and withstood Thor's hammer. When writers are more creative the scope of Magneto's power has far exceeded manipulating mere masses of metal, such as reversing the flow of blood in a person's body by controlling the iron in it.

[massey]

57 minutes ago, assault said:

 

The thing is that Magneto isn't usually that powerful. He's a "fight the X-Men" character, and I'm not talking about Dark Phoenix.

 

Nor, for that matter, is Doctor Doom, usually. A lot of his plots involve him trying to achieve extreme power levels, rather than him having them as his baseline.

 

I could add Ultron to that.

 

All are global threats, but that is because they are plotters.

 

For a sheer raw power threat, there is Graviton - but there are reasons why he has only appeared a handful of times - and it's because he's not very interesting, not because he is overpowered.

 

Now there is a place for villains who could oppose a notional Superman scale hero, but I'd personally handle them differently.

 

Magneto is pretty high up there.  He fights the X-Men regularly, and has also fought the Avengers, and Thor one on one.  Most of the time, "fight" means he holds them off for a while (maybe until his Stun total starts getting low) and then he leaves.  Or he defeats the heroes... and then he leaves.  He's not homicidal, and so a Magneto victory isn't the end of the world.  I think 5th edition Gravitar actually stands in for him pretty well.  I could represent him in the 18-20D6 range, with maybe a bunch of extra TK only for noncombat lifting.

 

Ultron normally has pretty reasonable power levels (for an Avengers villain), just a buttload of defense.  I might give him 15-18D6 attacks, but he'd have like 90 PD and ED (all resistant of course) and 150 Stun.  At least the adamantium versions would.  Each version might have a different Vulnerability or Susceptibility that the players would have to figure out during the confrontation.  This gives the scientist types something to do.  Ultron is perfectly happy to stand there and trade blows with guys like Thor and Vision, while always taking a couple phases to blast at Hawkeye or Black Knight or some other poor low defense sap.  Eventually the smart guys figure out this form's weakness, and then he gets destroyed.  Mechanon isn't near tough enough to stand in for him.

 

Doom isn't at Dr Destroyer's power level as far as raw damage goes.  He's balanced to take on the Fantastic Four, and he does a good job of that.  I'd put him somewhere around 4th edition Destroyer level, but with extra gadgets.

[drunkonduty]

Doom also has a lot more class than Destroyer. As written Destroyer's personality is just boring.

 

Mechanon doesn't have a lot of personality either, but I'm happy to have a robot be a monomaniac. It works for me conceptually.

[BoloOfEarth]

19 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Listing all of Doctor Destroyer's Knowledge Skills (for instance) may make a statement about what a genius is, but OTOH paper costs money and column inches cost reader attention. Better perhaps just to follow the example for his Bases/Followers/Vehicles, etc. and just say he has whatever Skill he needs to make a story work. Or if it's a significant weakness for a master villain that he/she-it doesn't have particular skills, that's probably more important to spell out than to list a bunch of skills and hope readers notice the omission.

 

Why not just use the Universal Scholar (and Universal Scientist) perks mentioned in APG:49-50?  Given Dr. D's high INT, that gives him a really good roll on practically everything.  You could impose -0 Limitations on them or just hand-wave to cut out inappropriate stuff (e.g. saying that Dr. D has no real knowledge of popular culture / TV / movie references -- "Who is this Kim Kardashian person you mentioned?")

[DShomshak]

4 hours ago, BoloOfEarth said:

 

Why not just use the Universal Scholar (and Universal Scientist) perks mentioned in APG:49-50?  Given Dr. D's high INT, that gives him a really good roll on practically everything.  You could impose -0 Limitations on them or just hand-wave to cut out inappropriate stuff (e.g. saying that Dr. D has no real knowledge of popular culture / TV / movie references -- "Who is this Kim Kardashian person you mentioned?")

 

Well, the published character sheets generally stick to the core rulebook, so I am too. The Universal [X] talents would be highly appropriate, and I have long wondered why they weren't in the core rules along with Universal Translator.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Tech]

Yes, the superteams have met Dr Destroyer, Mechanon and so forth in big battles. However, it's our versions, not the ridiculous CU versions. Not all Master Villains are mega-powerful you got to remember; there's alot of damage a mastermind villain can do to make him a master villain.