sinanju

I'm with Lord Mhoran and Hermit--I like that her mad hacking skillz are just that: mad skillz. Not the result of some superhuman talent. (Not that I don't object to the 21st century equivalent of "A wizard did it" as the result of hacking efforts...but Agents of Shield is hardly alone in treating hacking like 21st century magic.)

Not really. No more so (or little more so) than an average citizen. If you reasonably* believe your life is in imminent danger, you have the right to use lethal force to protect yourself. EVEN IF YOU'RE WRONG, if your belief was reasonable, you haven't committed a crime. (You've probably committed a tort and can be sued into bankruptcy...but not a crime.) The issue is that many people, including myself, believe that too many cops have *unreasonable* perception of danger and are way too quick to shoot or use other levels of force than are called for. A friend of mine who is a former cop and professional instructor in self-defense and rules of force, often said that the 3 primary rules for cops on the job are: 1. Come home alive at the end of your shift. 2. Do your job. 3. Don't get sued. He also freely admitted that there were way too many cops for whom rule two was last on their list of priorities, if not completely dispensible. These last are at best a drag on the department, dead weight that everyone else has to carry. At worst, they're not only fearful, they're bullies.

Well...yeah. But there's the Idiot Ball* and there's the Idiot Ball. Yes, they're nerfing Barry's powers, but they're not doing it so egregiously that I can't enjoy the show. An example of the latter was Peter Petrelli from HEROES, who was so insanely overpowered that only his superhuman stupidity prevented him from singlehandedly ending every threat the moment it appeared. And Hiro, whose mastery of the idiot ball prevented him from preventing every threat BEFORE it occurred (Teleportation and Time Travel are a potent mix). *So called from Hank Azaria asking the writers of Herman's Head (I think) every episode, 'So who's carrying the idiot ball THIS week?"

Well, if superpowers--or supertech, especially--only function in Places of Power , that would explain the Reed Richards Is Useless trope--he can't mass produce his supertech because it doesn't work in most places. The Baxter Building is his kingdom because it sits squarely on a site of power, so all his invention work there. Take them elsewhere and...not so much. It also means there's going to be heavy competition (amongst those in the know) for control of those sites. Why do Hero A and Villain Z fight constantly? Because they're tussling over control of one or more power sites*. And depending on the supertech available, such sites could be jewels of great value to ANY organization, including entirely mundane ones. If you have a Stargate, for instance, the fact that it only works under Cheyenne Mountain (or in the Antarctic) is irrelevant. Ditto for a device that lets you spy remotely on your enemies. Build your Situation Room around it, or your spy HQ, and use it there. It doesn't HAVE to move. Vehicles are going to be the least useful devices, with weapons somewhere in the middle. They may not work on the battlefield, but they make it a lot easier to defend (or attack) your Place of Power from enemies with conventional weapons. Such sites might be large, and in the middle of cities--so you get cities like Marvel's NYC, and DC's Gotham or Central City, where you have lots of heroes and villains. Or they might be small, but in densely populated areas: again, like the Baxter Building or Dr. Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum. Or small and in isolated locales, far from anything anyone else would find of value--the isolated but very dangerous lair of a witch deep in the dark forest or in the middle of the desert. Or it could be in an inhospitable area but large, and you get your mystic cities high in the Himalyas, or Atlantis, or whatever. *The RPG Feng Shui posits sites of great feng shui, and that if you control such sites, it gives you good fortune. You must attune yourself to the site (through a lengthy meditation period on the site), and can only do so if you have UNCONTESTED control of it. And if you lose that control, you lose the benefits of it--wherever you are. The history of the Feng Shui world is controlled by various factions fighting a never-ending battle throughout history for control of the timeline, and one of the biggest advantages of being attuned to certain sites (which allow you to enter the other-dimensional Netherworld, thru which one can reach other times) is that if the world changes around you, you remember the world as it was. Unlike everyone else. It's not quite the same concept as you're describing, but it may have some ideas you could use.

There's a game (based on the FATE system) called Base Raiders with some of this as part of the background. It's a world where there used to be lots of superheroes and supervillains, from the street level to the godlike. And then one day, about a year ago, they all vanished overnight. Nobody knows what's happened to them. At first, everyone waited for them to return. But as days turned into weeks into months...people began to grapple with the idea that they WEREN'T coming back. Which means that all those safe houses, and hideouts and secret lairs were up for grabs, unattended and ripe for plundering. Hence "Base Raiders," the folks who, rather than being the recipients of god (or accident) given superpowers, go out looking for them. Either to acquire their own superpowers or supertech and become superheroes/villains, or to study, or replicate, and become very, very rich. It's dungeon crawling in a world of magic and mutants and superscience and cosmic forces nobody understands. And one of the most common sources of powers is: super-soldier drugs. Rescued from secret bases or manufactured by people who discovered caches of them and reverse engineered them, or found the recipe in an abandoned base somewhere, or downloaded a recipe off the internet (some for free, others for sale on sites devoted to illicit supertech and supersoldier drugs).

The approach I'm using in some of my fiction is a mix of 3-5. You aren't required to register simply because you possess superpowers. But if you intend on using those powers to fight crime, you must register. "Superheroes" are not exempt from the anti-vigilante and anti-mask laws; freelance policing and wearing an identity concealing mask in public (and especially both at once) is verboten, and punishable by serious fines and/or jail time. On the other hand, if you register and volunteer as an emergency responder, the government will take fingerprints, retinal scans, etc (whatever is needed and will work to positively identify you), train you in use of force law, first aid, crime scene security, and so forth--and provide some limited liability protection (like cops) and insurance coverage, as long as you play by the rules. That being said, the government doesn't wait for people to register. They proactively seek out people with powers, and keep an eye on them. When my heroine, who is a flying brick, takes to flying around the city every night (garbed in black to avoid being seen), the government becomes aware of her. But they don't do anything, because all she's doing is flying around. Then one night she stumbles across a crime in progress (a superpowered thug is causing havoc). She intervenes--and gets a visit from the feds the next morning. Because now she _has_ crossed the line into crime-fighting. They offer the carrot (join the Guardians, get training and legal protection) or the stick (be arrested for violating the anti-vigilante laws). They don't want to arrest her; they want her to join up.

EXTERIOR (DAYTIME, EARLY MORNING) A street in Campaign City Liam Neeson (to Gobble, the Giant Turkey, as he stands in the middle of the street, honing a butcher knife on a honing steel): "I don't have your size or strength. What I do have is a particular set of skills. Skills that make me a nightmare to entities like you. If you turn around and leave the city, that will be the end of it. I won't pursue you. If you persist in attacking the city, I will attack you. I will kill you. And I will cook and eat you." Gobble, the Giant Turkey: (dismissively) Gobble gobble gobble. Gobble. Expendable Old Friend of Liam's: "He said..." Liam Neeson: (sighs) "I know what he said." HARD CUT TO: EXTERIOR (DAYTIME, LATE AFTERNOON) Liam Neeson sits at the head a long, long table. Along each sit other superheroes and civilians. They are all eating a huge Thanksgiving meal. Huge hunks of turket on serving plates line the table....

Yes, very much this. The Secret ID (any limitation, really) should be taken as an actual Limitation only if you want it to affect the game. Otherwise, yes, you have a secret identity but you don't spend all your time explaining why you're always late to your boss or your girlfriend, or hiding bruises (or costumes) from people.

If we're talking Champions, there's an excellent chance that I'm playing a character with a VPP. Or, failing that, an extremely flexible Multi-Power (every slot is variable, and the pool or the slots have advantages like Variable Advantage, Variable Limitation or Variable SFX). So I watch the combat while I plot how I'm going to alter my VPP or MP slots for my next turn to gain maximum advantage. Yes, I'm an unrepentant power gamer, but I do the other players the courtesy of having my munchkinism already planned out and calculated by the time my turn comes around. And if I can't, I default to some pre-built power scheme.

This. Very much this. It can be difficult enough to get all the players working together if one or more is playing some kind of Batman/Dark Avenger type and tends to go haring off on his own in pursuit of some villain. It gets worse if they have secret identities, especially if they haven't (yet, one hopes) shared them with one another. And if they _have_ shared their secret identities, then you a team of superheroes and a suspiciously similar-looking team of ordinary people, who tend to hang around together. And if you think it's awkward how Peter Parker always disappears when there's trouble, consider what it looks like when Peter, Johnny Storm, Bobby Drake and Kitty Pride (who all hang out together) always vanish just before Spider-Man, Human Torch, Iceman and Whatever-Her-Name-Is-This-Week all show up to fight the bad guy(s).

They both got smacked with the ban-hammer a long time ago.

Don't forget Change Environment. With the right selection of adders, advantages and disadvantages, you can do all sorts of things.

Yes, the Empire's ships came to a stop before jumping--for a couple of reasons. First, it's hard to precisely plot an Alderson jump point. If you don't hit it exactly, you burn up a lot of fuel powering the drive...but go nowhere (or more accurately, you jump...then reappear at your starting point). Second, because the jump was hard on both humans and computers. So they shut down all the computer systems and the humans all strap themselves in before the jump. When the humans have recovered, they can start powering up the computers again. Jumps are even harder on the Moties. But they're so darn smart that even so they figured out how to hit the jump points at ludicrous speeds, so they pop out of the destination jump point moving at that same ludicrous speed...not that it helped.

I'd also throw in 360 degree Spatial Sense. He can feel everything around him with his telekinetic touch. Makes it hard to sneak up on him. Add Penetrating and he can "see" through walls and other opaque obstacles as well.

There is a systemless horror scenario from Hebanon games called "The Wives of March" that has an interesting take on this. Spoilers ahead. It's not explicitly Lovecraftian, but it's just as horrible in its own way.

Tastes (and experiences) vary. I played for many years with a group composed almost entirely of rules-lawyering power gamers, myself included. Half the fun of those games was tying to win the perpetual game of King of the Hill (i.e., most absurdly overpowered, or cunningly designed) when designing characters. The GM was expected to (and generally did) spot these things and forbid them entering his game. A statement amounting to "Yes, you're very clever, but you can't do that in my game" was usually sufficient. The rules lawyer got some recognition for his cunning exploitation of the rules, and usually was then willing to tone it down to a playable level that didn't ruin the game for everyone. Sometimes a build slipped by the GM (or even more rarely, everyone was genuinely surprised by how monstrously effective a particular build could be). And then the GM would have to outlaw or compel a redesign of the offending character/power. We never thought of it as "punishing" the player. As I say, if anything, you got kudos for being so cunning in how you worked the rules to your advantage--but then you were expected to back off* in the interests of everyone having fun in the game. But that's what worked for the group I played with. Different groups approach things differently. *After all, the GM was a power gamer too, and he had an unlimited budget. In that kind of match, the GM could always win.

My solution to this problem would be: talk to the player (your wife) and explain that the power as designed is overpowered for the game. Try to reach an accomodation that lets her keep the character concept she wants to play, but which isn't quite such a one-shot-kill. She'd still be able to one-shot most adversaries of lower level, but boss monsters should be harder to handle. Everyone wants to have fun when playing the game, and having opponents who present no challenge isn't going to be much fun for her, and feeling superfluous because your wife's character can handle all the bad guys solo isn't going to be much fun for the other players. So in the interest of fun for all, some revision of the character is in order.

You say that like it's an "Aha! Gotcha!" moment. But the whole point is that I want players to take complications (if they do) because they want to roleplay the consequences, not just to maximize their point totals. If you want to play a completely mentally and emotionally balanced guy with no more pressing issue in your life than the Supervillain du Jour, you're allowed to do that. The flip side of that is that a player who has a strong characterization in mind for his PC can probably pick some extra XP by taking complications that reflect it. If your backstory is that you defected from the League of Assassins (to take a not-so-random example from a episode of Arrow I saw last night), you can take a Hunted complication if you like (and they'll turn up occasionally to try to kill or capture you or threaten your loved ones), or not. In which case, yeah, you're on a "kill or capture if it's not terribly inconvenient" list somewhere in LoA HQ, but that's about it.

I've done this, and I've played in games I enjoyed where the GM required this. I agree that it really helps flesh out your character. Too many player characters are orphaned only children with few friends. Murder-Hobos, in other words. Requiring the player to specify five ordinary NPCs the character interacts with on a regular basis goes a long way toward giving them some roots in the campaign. And it's one of the reasons I now make the distinction between "My hero has a girlfriend" and "My hero has the Complication DNPC: Girlfriend" in my games. In my games, if you want your character to have parents, siblings, a girlfriend, a best friend, a boss, or some combination of any or all of those, you DON'T have to take them as DNPCs. They'll be around. They'll interact with the player character, but they won't be subject to frequent/constant kidnappings, hostage situations and death threats. Plus, if you have four players, that's 20 NPCs you, the GM, don't have to create. But it provides you some insight into how your players see their characters' lives, and provides opportunities for you to add more NPCs (friends of friends, other coworkers, etc) to the mix, and make the game world that much more real.

Prepare to Die! by Paul Tobin. A novel of superheroes, sex, and secret origins (as indicated in the cover blurb). I bought it from the author at Rose City Comic Con last weekend, and only just started it a couple of days ago. I'm enjoying it. The protagonist is Steve Clarke, aka Reaver, a superhero who is Nigh Invulnerable , superhumanly strong, and about three times as fast as human (reaction time and running speed). He doesn't fly, doesn't have supersenses. But he does have the power to take a year off your life every time he punches you (assuming he pulls his punches and doesn't just kill you outright). Other supers in the book include Octagon (a mastermind), Tempest (weather controller), Laser Blast (guess!), Macacbre, Stellar, Paladin, Kid Crater, Warp, Siren, and others. The story is non-linear, jumping around in time a lot from the present, to Reaver's childhood, origin story, and the highlights (or lowlights) of his career, slowly filling in the background of his world, and his relationships with other supers, both heroes and villains. It's told in first person, and it's well done. I like it.

My approach to Complications in any Champions game I ever run in the future will be thus: 1. Players get a flat number of character points to build their characters. NO points from Complications. None. Nada. Zip. 2. Player may take as many complications as they like, or as few, or none. As GM, I retain the right to veto a given complication if it strikes me as silly (the kind of thing that will break the mood of the game) or otherwise unworkable (a tendency to go into an indiscriminate killing frenzy at the drop of a hat, etc). 3. When (AND IF) the Complication comes up in play, and the player actually treats it as a problem and doesn't gloss over it, the player will get an EP bonus for it at the end of the session/adventure. The end result is that players can freely take which complications they really want to play out*, ignore those they don't, and they only get an XP bonus if they actually live up to the ones they take. I'm of the school of thought that taking a particular Complication means you WANT it come up. If you want to play Spider-Man and take "Complication: Secret Identity", it means you WANT to have to deal with missed dates, missed work, angry girlfriends and bosses,a reputation for being a forgetful flake and so forth. If you want to play Spider-Man but don't want to deal with those things, you don't take that complication. You can still _have_ a secret identity, but it's not going to be an issue for you. With any requirement to take complications just for the points removed, I would hope the players will only take complications that accurately reflect the sort of character they want to play.

That won't necessarily make it any better. Some players hate that kind of deus ex machina, or "railroading" because they think they were unfairly denied a chance to fight being captured and (quite possibly) defeat the villain(s) or at least escape. I mentioned upthread that I played for many years in a campaign where being captured and then escaping (wrecking the villain's lair, and often his plans) in the process was practically mandatory. It was a very pulp-oriented game, and we all knew that going in. And yet...sometimes we too got annoyed, and one or another of the players (or rarely all of us) would decide that, yes, THIS was the hill we were ready to die on. Sometimes we won (or the GM recognized our mood and changed his plans), sometimes we lost. Basically, there's no guarantee that any particular approach is going to satisfy your players.

Do I, as a player, hate having my character captured? It depends--on the GM and the genre of the game. My long-time gaming group in Virginia was very pulp-influenced, no matter the genre we played. And the heroes being captured was (and is) a staple of pulp adventures. They get captured, they discover important clues, and then they find a way to escape...usually bringing down the villain's lair in the process. In THAT campaign, we often got captured. And mostly we rolled with it. Oh, occasionally, if the GM had been leaning a little too heavily on that plot element, we players would all silently agree that it was time to pull out all the stops and refuse to give in no matter how daunting the odds. "Not this time!" was our rallying cry. Sometimes actually managed to pull it out, and defeat (or at least escape) the bad guy's forces. Sometimes we didn't. But mostly we didn't mind. We knew the GM wasn't going to keep us imprisoned for long, wasn't going to unceremoniously kill off our characters (Pulp-style tropes work both ways), and that we'd get our chance for revenge and final victory before the adventure was over. On the other hand, I've played with GMs who seemed to treat the game as a contest between GM and players, and I absolutely would not go along with being captured. Better to get your PC killed off, then pack your stuff and go home and do something that would actually be fun.

Give him enhanced senses (his visor/helmet and uniform/costume could have sensors embedded throughout, giving him 360 degree perception (perhaps with "picture in picture" if you don't want true 360 vision). Or a limited Danger Sense (his AR rig alerts him to imminent attacks). The right sensors would give him sharper, more acute sight and hearing, as well as perception into ranges he couldn't normally detect. Don't forget to give him Spatial Perception and/or limited X-Ray vision. Not that he can literally see thru walls, but...he can track the cell phones most people carry these days. If he's got IR vision, he can track heat signatures. His computer can also hack into surveillance feeds, dig up archived floor plans and building specs, and synthesize it all into a virtual 3D rendering of his environment, complete with people and objects that are outside his normal lines of sight. A really high KS: Info Available On The Internet doesn't hurt either, and can be added to his AR perception as tags. He looks at Villain du Jour, and a bunch of tags pop up: his current legal status (wanted, outstanding warrants), known powers and abilities, typical MO, known associates/family, etc.

Not hardly. My favorite change in 6th Edition was the greatly reduced number of Complication points. I always hated having to stack on tons of Disads just to get the same allotment of character points as everyone else. I much prefer a game where you only take the disads that really fit your character concept/background.