krevvie

I was trying to introduce some new players to the game (5er) and setting pre-COVID, so I had a DEMON Morbane break away from the fold to make some money selling a street drug that let the user experience any hallucination he wanted for a few minutes, completely under the user's control, no limits of any kind. It was called the God Drug and it was, of course, just addictive as hell. The fun part is that it achieved this effect by being comprised of demonically-tainted human blood, and the users that willingly ingested it were willingly donating a portion of their own blood (more than they'd like) to summon a demon prince once enough people were using the drug. (I figured demons would have no problem giving people hallucinations, and also deliberately injecting demon-tainted blood counts as "active voluntary submission.") VIPER caught wind of the plot from an informant and did not want to deal with a full-on demon prince, but didn't have nearly enough information to do anything (including to get law enforcement involved.) So they sent a fake PRIMUS agent to get the PCs on the trail and monitored their progress as their "friendly contact." The PCs were enthusiastic, good-natured and impulsive the way only new players can be. First they destroyed a building full of police evidence for reasons I was never clear on, then they managed to nearly destroy a shopping mall just trying to buy some of the drug, then after one of them (multiple science Ph. D.s type) determined that the drug was made of super strangely contaminated human blood and not much else, another one ingested it anyway and decided it was awesome and he wanted to keep using it forever. We stopped meeting because of COVID right when the players managed to inadvertently expose VIPER to PRIMUS and got both sides into a full-on battle with each other--and the players, with no idea who was who, were in the middle of attacking both sides. The very last action a PC took before we wrapped up the last time we played was to direct-charge an APC head-on. He's a new player, we're having fun, the group's definitely got a good social vibe; I won't kill him if we ever meet again. But that was definitely one of those "that's a big heavy gun pointed right at you and you can go literally anywhere else, are you SURE?" moments. Good times.

bigbywolfe: How should it go, then? I played it that way based on 5ER's description of the difference between Trigger and Delayed Effect; I would've played Delayed Effect as on-the-spot breakout rolls.

Hrm. Maybe I've been playing this wrong. I'd been playing it as a AOE (large, but *not* mega scale) Invisible Cumulative Mind Control with a Variable Trigger. So the mentalist saunters into the police station - where nobody knows who he is - and starts filling out some paperwork or whatever. While he's doing that, he starts flooding the building with a "Defend me at all costs" command, triggered by different cues each time: three clicks on the radio, or a code word from him, or seeing a specific image or whatever. I've been playing it like: the cop (for example) goes along with his life, but breakout rolls don't start because the power hasn't actually happened yet--Variable Trigger. Then, the breakout rolls kick off when the Trigger goes, but Cumulative has meant that the mentalist could get some pretty spectacular EGO+50 lined up with some time: Violently Opposed; Victim Thinks It Was His Idea. They've been making their breakout rolls in due time, but not before critical treachery was accomplished. (Plus the power's Invisible, so heroes with Mental Awareness don't have anything to notice until the bombs go off.) If the breakout rolls start up when the power's put "in place" - before the Trigger fires, in other words - that would make for a completely different situation. At this point, the discussion's a little academic: my hero team got finished off last session, and the mentalist is somewhere sunny, wealthy and surrounded by girls. In all fairness, the PCs missed pretty much every clue out there: when a trusted friend opened up on them, they figured the attack was coming from behind him to frame him, etc. There have been a steady stream of those sort of mistakes, and in the final battle, fully half the team had been hypnotized to attack the other half, anyway. We had a good laugh at the tale of the tape at the end. That said, I've enjoyed the thoughts. I should've registered here years ago.

Yow. Okay! So the moral of the story is: Cumulative Mind Control is scary. Thanks again!

I certainly don't see "since one book doesn't list X as an option the organization simply doesn't have it in any form on any level, for any reason" as being a logical result of what is seen in the books. Fair enough. I wasn't trying to nitpick; I was trying to speculate from the material I had at hand. Thanks for the thought.

Yep, that's the question I've been asking myself, all right I was wondering if there was an "official line" on the subject. Like I said, the source material seems inconsistent, and even if mentalists are rare, enough VPPs exist to make me wonder if mentalists aren't wildly OP, after this little exercise. (*Cumulative* mentalists are something I will be very cautious of in the future, either way!) Thank you (all) for your thoughts!

I'm running a 5th Ed Champions campaign in Millennium City, using the sourcebooks basically as-written. What I want to know is: how affordable and/or commonplace is technology that gives normal people Mental Defense? Does it even exist? UNTIL's Peacekeeper suits have Power Defense and two types of Flash Defense--but no mental defense. VIPER's got a "Psionic Shielding" option listed that can be installed on any of their helmets, but assuming that many of them can have it as a standard option - but UNTIL can't, at all - seems stupid to me. My problem here is that I've got a mentalist villain with a mass post-hypnotic-suggestion effect, an AE low-level cumulative Mind Control with a variable trigger. Even a little Mental Defense should leave someone essentially unaffected by him, but the normals will be surprising themselves if he's been around them even a few minutes. He is turning out to be way, WAY more powerful than I expected him to be. I wanted him to start small - utility companies, garbage men, etc and work his way up to the police. Okay, good and fine--it's what I would do if I were conquering the world, I suppose. But once he started walking into police stations and planting commands that leave the heroes blown to bits every time reinforcements arrive, I realized I've written myself into a corner here. I asked this on the chat room and the gist of the response was, "if a standard supervillain can clear out the police in a fight, why shouldn't a standard mentalist be able to do the same?" They offered that maybe 1% of the population might have spontaneously developed some sort of mental defense, like a low-level mutation or at least (adaptation), but that there was no reason to expect that the MCPD, corporate execs, etc. (to say nothing of trash companies) would have tech like that around for security's sake. Is there an official line on this one? Thanks in advance for your thoughts!