DasBroot

Wastelander game.  Vega (me) has failed his sexual compulsion's self-control roll in a big way (as he usually does) but rolls in such a manner in a bar that he ends up picking up two women and a man and leaving with them despite some hefty penalties.

Grim: "I'm beginning to think the only difference between a sleazy pervert and a sex addict is success rate."

 A post nuclear 'Fallout' style game I'm in.  My character is sex addict with the social skills needed to get a near 100% success rate and while I don't eat up a lot of play time with it in order to not be disruptive the GM always makes sure to include throwaway lines even in travel montages about his conquests and we *have* been run out of town before.

Upon reaching a fortification in hostile ghoul territory:

Gate Guards: "If you want to stay with the Sewer Rats for the night. You will need to offer trade - or tribute."

*everyone at the table immediately looks at me, in character and out*

Vega (me): "*sigh* If I must..."

(We ended up raiding an abandoned hospital for medical supplies instead)

After we headed back and were waiting for entrance

Grim (the hardened survivor soldier): "Well, if Kas' (our merchant player character) oral skill doesn't pan out here...."

Team of bricks running at whatever PD/ED cap I set. They're the most prevalent archetype in comics,come in a wide variety of flavours and personalities, and are by far the 'easiest' thing to GM for. 

EGO 10 minion? Ha. half of the characters in the campaign have 10 EGO. If I add an enemy mentalist (again- last game I used a mind control and took control of the brick to attack the party for a few phases), they are in trouble. And most of the party has 10-13 PRE, I will be using PRE attacks too...

 

 

 

Thanks to the help of the people in the forum, i've learned a lot. Thank you all.

 

Do you think water or fog or smoke would create a situation where the invisible character would be seen or at least note a fringe?

Careful with the presence attacks and mental attacks.  You have to use those sparingly lest the players feel the need to start an 'arms race' with their GM in order to survive.  Nobody likes feeling that the next 5 xp they get better go to Presence (or Ego) or they'll no longer be of use to the team.  I've seen that mentality plenty of times on both sides of the screen and ultimately the GM will 'win' any such arms race (his antagonists are built on unlimited points, after all) and 'lose' the game.

Whether water or fog or smoke will reveal an invisible character depends entirely on the special effect of the invisibility.  If it's your classic 'bend light', etc - sure, it's classic.  If it's a type of mind control that makes people automatically ignore his presence? No. 

Humans are nothing special in David Brin's Uplift series or in John Scalzi's Old Man's War series - both feature humanity tiptoeing around and only picking fights with aliens within striking distance of their own tech level lest they get stomped into toothpaste.  Both feature higher tech races that basically let the other races around them survive due to racial psychology / cultural restrictions.

In tv there was always Babylon 5 - several other races had higher tech that they, for their own reasons, didn't use to wipe out everyone else. V for Visitor, both series, same sort of thing - basically humanity enslaved for quite a while until they can figure out what the hell they can actually do. And then getting lucky because the writers have painted themselves into a corner and the series needs to end on a happy note.

Movies tend to be about wooden vessels (humanity) vs modern battleship (aliens) - where through sheer numbers, attrition, desperation, time, exploits, and drive to win we can board that vessel and claim it for our own / destroy it. It's not a very fun story where the aliens play to their technical levels and take off and nuke us from orbit (it's the only way to be sure).

That's really the heart of the problem with 'worthless' humans in a story.  If a genocidal hostile force has a glaringly obvious and overpowering technical advantage humanity can only survive due to plot armour - so they have to pray for the conquering hostile force.  If it's a conquering force with serious enough advantages then humanity will have to do what humans have had to since the dawn of recorded history: wait for the superior alien culture to change in such a manner that it is no longer fashionable, profitable, or deemed ethical to keep other sentients enslaved.

For the record, the GM response was 'if you want to spend a character point to create a custom power that can fill up to a bathtub full of drinking water per use go right ahead'.

Occam's razor and all.

Discussions on how many points a $20 swiss army knife would actually cost in a superheroic game are one of the most fun things about the system, though.

Tasha's absolutely correct. It's pretty much superhero levels *only*.

 At 30 - 45 points mental powers barely do anything but at the same time superhero standard 60 point levels tends to be about as high a point cap you can go without risking every enemy becoming a brain in a box (result +30),  You can invest 60 points into mental illusion and on average you'll get a result of 42.  That's enough to brain in a box a weak willed minion (ego 10) but any self respecting mastermind villain better have an ego of 15 or higher.  Even against those types a dangerous +20 (ego / md 22 - harder) is about what you can expect.

Aiming for the +0 to +10 makes pretty much everything in the game Naked before the Eyes of God when dealing with even a 60 point mentalist.

It gets worse if the cap is 80 or even higher.

That said if someone was really worried about mental powers it is cheap to defend against them.  In my example, not factoring disadvantages, it would cost someone 32 AP to become basically immune to the 60 AP mentalist.  It's often just hard to include that kind of resistance on a character.

(Power defence is even more hateful.  A drain costs 15 AP per 3.5 points of effect .  4 AP of power defence per 15 AP drain sends it packing.)

THat is one reason I loathe mentalists.  Even with benevolent ones, it is hard not to see a power like telepathy as being mind rape.

In my setting mentalists are common enough that psychic evidence gathered from a suspect is not admissible in the court of law (in the US) due to the 5th Amendment - but psychic evidence gathered from a victim who consents to having their mind read is - and any non-consensual telepathic intrusion itself is an assault (usually proven, ironically enough, by the victim having their own mind read since you usually get to know the identity of your attacker when mind powers are used against you).

There are also a ton of other laws in place that make the team mentalist always be on their toes such as the laws on using mental powersl: It's ok to use mental powers, even mind control or mental illusions, to stop an attacker from attacking you or someone else.  It's not ok for... well... anything else.  So commanding a thug to 'stop attacking' is fine but telling him to attack his allies will get YOU arrested on a variety of slavery/compel to criminal activity charges, assault, etc..  Even Mind Scans are supposed to be cleared by the mentalist department of the police (though in practice they'll really only detect you if you do a city/world/whatever wide scan).

Details, my good man: details!

This is actually the driving force of one of my settings most prominent recurring supervillians. 

He postulates that with increased intellect 'low brow' crime rates would drop and 'white collar' crimes would remain the same or slightly increase.  That more intelligent people gravitate towards crimes, if they're criminally minded in the first place, that offer the most reward for the least risk.  He also postulates that a person not already a criminal probably won't become one just because he's a genius now.

He postulates that the blue collar working class will, for the most part, grow rebellious for a time as job satisfaction drops.  It's not that a person of average intelligence is dumb, per se - it's that a genius level IQ person will only enjoy such a job if they truly enjoy such a job on all levels. Anyone borderline will want something 'more'.   He speculates that over time the working class will cease to exist due to automation and that by sheer necessity wealth will become more evenly distributed by all (glut of doctors, more competition in the stock market speculation, etc).  He has no delusions that Utopia will occur where money is a thing of the past.

The characters, for their part, think he's mad - a smarter street thug will still be a street thug, a serial killer will just get better at evading police (but the police will get better at catching them), etc - that crime won't stop as people realize it's 'stupid' to commit crimes.

That's a fundamental miscommunication between the heroes and the villain - he doesn't expect some golden age of crime free enlightenment.  He doesn't care.  He wants more people of intelligence working on the big problems - that's it - that the world can only gain from more geniuses. 

He's mostly a villain because a statement in one clash (paraphrased from Babylon 5) "I'm going to unleash an avalanche of reason. Why on earth would I give the unenlightened pebbles a vote?" indicated that he's not allowing people to opt out of getting smarter (which, in his mind, only a truly stupid person would do - but the world is full of them).

There are a bunch of ways to do it legally.  Filling a swimming pool isn't exactly a combat power.  It's something where the GM should be pretty easygoing with the players on letting them do it.  "Your superpower can be used to substitute for a garden hose???  That's unbalancing to my campaign!!!"  Riiiiight.

 

And finally (though I'm sure Tasha will hate this), I think you can use Summon.  Summon lots of water.  A hex of water is cheap.  It's basically just Body.  Maybe Desolid, always on, only vs physical.  It doesn't actually do anything, so it's cheap.

Nobody would care if I could fill the pool in a single action (and it wouldn't be hard, either - once you pile on the AoE you start getting a lot of cubic meters of water in a hurry).  It's definitely a design choice.

Summon was my second thought (and honestly closer than transform in concept - it's a micro portal to the elemental plane of water) but I tend to agree that it's for beings - despite Champions Complete saying you can use it to summon vehicles, etc. The problem is the tasks list.  The water (which can do nothing) has to be slavishly devoted by the CC rules for summoning objects and is good for ego tasks (what tasks? It's a puddle of water) and then ... fails to wander away because it can't? Same thing with summoning your mountain bike - you can drive it for a few phases of combat and then it's no longer under your control.... but... it's a bike so what happens?

Messy.

"heals" by evaporation.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

That is exactly what I came up with when I started doodling the power in the builder after the input from the thread. Thematic and obvious!

I could do both, actually. The life support usable on others (super cheap in the multipower) for long term use is a good idea.  Transform could be used to put out campfires, fill swimming pools (after 2400 uses!), etc. 

I mostly have an issue with the 'healed back'  criteria, which I usually do.  

I've played Shadowrun since 1st Edition and it's one of those RPGs where I always feel the game has improved every edition.

The round robin Initiative as opposed to the top down initiative (which let someone with wired reflexes 3 kill three or four people before they got to retaliate and lead to a lot of bored mages sitting around waiting for their turn) was a great change.  Also everyone and their dog stopped buying wired reflexes and/or Improved initiative spells to stay relevant.  Diversity in cybernetics and spell focus / talisman was nice.

I wouldn't mind something similar done for Hero - so that speed 6 doesn't act so many more times than speed 2 or 3 - but have no idea how it could work.  Speed is very expensive for a reason.

Eidetic Memory and a few multiples of Rapid on Sight would be pretty fun.

I've used it a few times but have always limited the numbers to what it appropriate for a particular adventure over how many I could create.

One NPC in my game - an 'ace' reporter - is a secret mutant with this power.  The players interact with her all the time and are pretty sure she's hiding superpowers (she always seems to be the first on scene) but haven't guessed this one yet (last guess was Danger Sense and a Megascale movement of some type).

A character I played used it for the "Wolverine Effect" - even if the group was split for story reasons a copy of him was with each team.  He was a stereotypical 'quiet defender' character specifically so I wouldn't double my RP screen time.  If he was on his own, though, watch out.

Another, as Scott said, didn't really have duplication at all - it was the special effect on his attacks.  An AoE accurate attack was a dozen of him attacking from all angles, etc.  He did not wear orange and black.

I'm making a character that can create or control up to 1 cubic meter of water as their mutant power. It's in a multipower for a few effects (change enviroment -run speed - the floor is wet, a blast of 5d6 with a water special effect to represent dropping it on someone (weighs 1000 kg), a low point summon to make a 1 meter tall water elemental, telekinesis (water only) )

The last trick I'm trying to add is the ability to fill up people's glasses at a party.  Honestly it could probably be hand waived but I'm curious as to how to mechanically pull it off.

Transform air to water? Seems easiest.  How would it be written up? Are there better options?

The idea is that he COULD fill a swimming pool..... eventually... 

Just about anything with "Always On" is going to suck to have. There's a reason it's a limitation and not an advantage, you know. Too easy.

 

Now, come up with a few that aren't Always On.

 

Far too easy example: Immortality (IMHO).

If that weren't 'always on' - why would it suck? Immortality with an escape clause for when I feel that I have seen too much, lost too much? Sign me up.

The Power to See Through Everything.

 

We've all imagined being able to see through walls, but if everything opaque were perfectly transparent to you, then everything would be effectively invisible. You would have an unobstructed view of infinity - and be completely blind.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary claims that on a totally clear day you can see forever.

If you could see through everything and therefore see nothing you would, as you noted, be basically blind.  Not sure that spending a ton of points to blind yourself is in the spirit of 'incredible power'.

Now if you could see through everything except living flesh - I think that would technically count.  A sea of naked people and (not naked) animals.  You would have to define where cars and buildings were by the context of what their occupants are doing.  You'd be able to see survivors in a landslide and have no context on how to reach them....

Nothing really minor about 30 points.

Humm... Regeneration, 1 BODY per turn, can regenerate limbs. No need for the hospital.

Better yet: Regeneration (1 BODY per Minute), Can Heal Limbs, Usable Simultaneously (2 people) (+1/2) (28 Active Points). You don't need a hospital, and if you visit one you can become the hospital.

+30 INT or PRE would be far more useful, though (I'd still take the regen and hit every children and veterans hospital in North America)

Here's a fun topic - what incredible super power built with the Hero System would be completely terrible to have?

I'll start it off with an NPC from my game.  My players seriously feel for this guy - he's drawn the most empathy of any NPC they've ever come across.

Life Support  (Immunity: All terrestrial diseases), Persistent (+1/4), Inherent (+1/4), Usable Simultaneously (up to 2,147,483,647 people at once; +9), Recipient must be within Limited Range of the Grantor for power to be granted, Grantor must grant power one Recipient at a time. (52 Active Points); Extra Time (1 Minute, Only to Activate, -3/4)

It's actually 17 billion people at once.  I broke the character generator program.

A medical student with the potential to innoculate the entire planet (twice over) - ending disease for a person's entire life  - and knowing that he can never do it.  Knowing that he could literally spend every waking moment doing this and never reach his potential.  At best he could hope to help 39 million of 8 billion in his life  - an incredible number of lives made better but how do you choose? How could anyone choose? How dare anyone choose?

Pretty heavy for a 52 active point power.

Another one I've spotted is that Barriers must be anchored and there's no specific call-out for non-anchored barriers -- whereas in 5er it was explicitly stated they could float if permitted by GM.  (GM can always allow it, I know...)

Non-Anchored is a 10 point adder - page 52 Champions Complete.

As to the Mental Paralysis itself, I got the impression from the OP that it was excessive and disruptive, but I could be wrong.  I do know that it can easily become a mentalist's go-to power, especially if the target has low EGO or the bad guys don't have a mentalist handy.  And the OP's statement of the mentalist tactic of using a 6d6 Drain EGO + Mental Defense, followed by the 4d6 Mental Entangle, sounds a lot like he's using it as an automatic "I WIN" power.

 

Oh, there's no way he isn't in this situation.  Though frankly the drain 6d6 Ego is already "I win" enough unless someone's packing a decent amount of power defense - EGO 0 isn't a happy place to be - and shows a player's intent nicely.  There's always the one person that doesn't throw 50 points into strength - he throws it into presence.

It's hard making a mentalist that won't either (1) be ineffectual, or (2) walk all over most everybody.  Then throw in (3) make the GM happy.

Incredibly true.  Psychics are relatively common in my setting, on both sides of the law, so there's a lot of in world counters and almost no serious villain (or hero) is without mental defence - just enough for a tap or two of cumulative to overcome in most cases (balancing around 'ok, it would take the brick three punches to 'ko' this guy - it should take the mentalist three 'hits' to put them out of the fight).  Also common is the 'would take the brick 6 to 8 punches to KO this guy - mentalist still can do it in three.  

It's hard work even without someone actively trying disrupt things.

Also Entangle is Obvious and I don't see anything in the advantages taken to make it 'mental paralysis' that changes that.

2) Always on is only a -1/4 limitation, Also this IS a roleplaying game, so I would allow the invis character to speak. I would also allow characters with Targeting Hearing (ie Sonar) to target the otherwise invisible character. Rules wise, I would say that it depends on the power's special effect.

 

I don't know about 6th proper but it's -1/2 on page 97 of Champion's Complete (which the OP is using).  I like 1/4 as a cost better, though. 

If the hero caves, I'd honor that deal, and then have just the occasional villain having an AWG handy after the 6-month moratorium.  Just enough to be a nuisance without being overbearing.  And if MindSniper says "No way!", AWGs can become as common as 5-point Flash Defense OIF goggles (which I believe may be a prize in cereal boxes).

I agree with the spirit of this but problem player or not I don't feel any character should ever feel they have to 'cave' to villainous manipulations.  I'd give a couple of stronger villains the item over time, certainly, as his power becomes well known - but if it's his favourite power (and he's not doing this to intentionally disrupt the game) I'd also make it useful every fight.  You can't take Doctor D out with such trickery, but throw Gigaton or similar into the fight as mental paralysis bait and he's saved his team a world of hurt.

 

* It would not be useful for any kind of combat modifiers,

 

* those influenced would have a difficult time trying to give an accurate description after the fact.

 

The combination of these two is tricky.

 

The combination of these two things is basically the Anonymity perk (instead of giving an accurate description and nobody knowing who that is they're giving an inaccurate description) and an agreement between player and GM about not revoking it unless the player starts abusing it somehow.

An Area of Effect Selective Change Environment - penalty to perception - might work for this as well.

With something hefty like a -8 only the luckiest or perceptive guards would notice the character moving through.  He's not invisible - they just don't notice him.  This leaves room for natural counters in the game - highly perceptive people, etc - that are less extreme than the ones needed to counter full invisibility. 

Costs on it could easily balloon to higher than invisibility for an inferior power, though.

Mental Paralysis is practically its own power on page 65.  The reason that it is a 3/4 is a specific level for it that over-rides the advantage on the next page - because the mental paralysis paragraph describes how to use it. Since it  can be affected by mental attacks it's not the full +1 but because it's mental they over-costed the 1/2. It's a custom modifier.  Mind you, you're in trouble if they pay the full +1 instead - that's when your 'sleep' or common circumstance rears its ugly head as even mental powers stop working on it.

There doesn't *need* to be a common way of removing it, technically, because it's not the full +1 - 65 specifies what can and can't affect it.  That those effects aren't common are part of the reason that it's costed the way it is.  Is it still too cheap? That depends on your campaign setting - in mine it's *rare* to find anyone, especially heroes or villains of merit, without Mental Defense or Ego - psychics are a known phenomena and people have taken steps to protect themselves (mental defence isn't as common as PD or ED, but it's more common than  Flash Defense in my campaign):  You wouldn't try to arrest Mr Bulletspam without a bulletproof vest, you wouldn't try and arrest Mindplaydoh Man without a psionic resisting helmet.  

In other campaigns, as mentioned, it can easily be an "I win" button. If nobody knows that mentalists are out there then mentalists get to run amok and can be among the most disruptive things in a game. Encourage the rest of the table to throw dice at the offending player whenever he ruins a night of heroic fun for them by putting Doctor Destroyer's brain in a box on phase 12.

As for making mental attacks visible - I usually do in order to save some character points (perceivable disadvantage).  As GM you could enforce that - but if you have a problem player it's better to suggest saving some points this way (or suggesting they don't take the power at all if you think it's truly disruptive).

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