World Building

Drop your character pitches and world dynamic ideas here!

I was originally going to play my character "The Ox" as a PC, but I'm realizing his power isn't really in line with the other amazing ideas I've seen so far. Luckily, he's a trust fund baby, so "Oxford Emmet Gennison, PhD, Chemist at Gennison Yachts and Luxury" will be your villainous patron instead.

Some of us have played "MASKS" and I really like the idea that famous heroes and villains are the source of the world's equivalent of DC and Marvel. I'd like to include that here, just from a cultural standpoint.

The character I am looking at is not named yet, but I'll calle her Becks for now. The idea is a young woman who tried to join a hero team a few years ago, but was not selected. What happened was, another recruit made fun of her weight, so during the tryout, Becks did not act when she could have and the bully took a bad hit. It wasn't lethal, but the recruiter washed her out. Becks got angry and decided to become a villain. Problem is she doesn't have a goal or real drive so joining a gang seems like a good starting point to find herself.

Her powers are "tactile telekinesis" like the 90s Superboy. She can fly, stop projectiles (as long as she knows they are coming), and lift nearly anything she touches. But her powers only extend about 3 millimeters away from her skin...so ahe can't throw things very far.

I also like the idea of Famous Heroes and Villains. In addition...what about a world like My Hero Academia...where nearly everyone has some sort of power, but most are not useful to the life of hero and villain?

My character is a thief who thinks that she is cool, suave. and extremely social. She is not. But she is a decent thief. She's never been caught, but that has less to do with her skill and more to do with her ability.
When she panics, or feels a very intense emotion (but mostly fear) she turns into a house cat. She has no control over thus, but maybe during the game she will. You know all those "I don't even own a cat" memes? that's her.
Usually someone leaves a door open, a window open, or tosses her out before she turns back. So she's been pretty lucky so far.

Hmm, hard to choose what kind of hero I want to play without knowing what the setting's like. Is it like a lighthearted spoof on classic comic books, a wacky Saturday cartoon, a grounded fiction with some incidental humor, etc.?

More the first two. Honestly I've also got a vibe in the back of my mind of the "sidekick" classes from "Sky High," if you've seen that movie. Seemingly ridiculous powers, but actually viable when given a chance (and some practice, and some luck).

My idea for a character is one who doesn't have many years left in her life. With the time she has left, she wants to leave her mark in history, and figured that notoriety was her style. Wears her medical support system as a power armor. Even though she's pretty much doomed, she's not too down about it, and is generally a boisterous and vivacious soul.

The Spectacular Tentacular, or Tentacular for short, flexi-limbed, many appendages when necessary, a bit of an oversized head (and ego to match, at one point), kinda like Mr Fantastic without being fantastic. Great with heists and petty crime and stretching from rooftop to rooftop, even better for crushing hugs and suction cupping. Way cooler in pre-2000s before the Deadpool-types cornered the market on off-colour humour.

Now a has-been, ever since the Teen Titanics, the premier former sidekick turned young superhero team started calling him Squidward and made it their point to take turns to defeat him at every turn in the most embarrassing ways possible. No one took him seriously after that. Now very very grouchy, Tentacular is looking for any opportunity to prove that he is no laughing stock.

Teen Titanics is the team my character tried to join then. I like this group so far.

Heh, please feel free to suggest a better name for them. All I did was blatantly rip off a placeholder name :D

I'm still struggling with the name of my PC. Your NPC team name is fine.

Do you want us to make our characters now @lavtodd? If so, how are superpowers going to be represented?

Yeah, everyone has a pretty good feel for their characters, I think. Go ahead and make characters as usual, since the villains are still pretty normal. To adjust for our game:
* Your first Habit must be your power.
* You need to include a "downfall" in your notes that will generally trigger either dice or RP disadvantage. Turning into a cat when panicked, lack of street cred, etc.
* I don't care which scale is tied to your power. Whatever fits your vision is fine by me.

Here's the book, and here's a blank character sheet you can copy. Please review the High Magic examples here so we're all on the same page with what's generally possible (of course the Low Magic examples are on the table, too). The nice part is, by making it a Habit, you should in theory be able to succeed on your checks more often than not.

Here's a sample sheet for Quinlan Gallagher, AKA Quantum Gal. She can manipulate light - as long as she's not observing it.

Working on character sheet now. Which picture do you think I should go with?

+Enough of character shown to give idea of what they look like, while leaving room for interpretation
+Looks like it can take a solid hit
+Looks like it can contain medical equipment
-Not a design that screams a desire for notoriety to me+Full view of character
++Has cat
-Doesn't look like it can take a solid hit
-Doesn't look like it can have medical equipment+Looks like it could be made out of medical equipment
+Looks like it can take a hit
+Distinctive look (I edited in the green line)
-No view of character

I personally like option 2 even though it leaves the least up to interpretation character wise. Something about the other mech suits look too custom to me, if that makes sense. Like, not having full body armor better implies the initial hodge podge nature of things. Also cat.

But that's just me. They're all cool images

I am the cat in the image

Knowing that her temper is directly tied to it, I think it can work.

Also, you're villains working for a villain. They'll probably try to twist the knife now and then.

If you want, go ahead and make her downfall her temper instead.

You're right...that would make a more acceptable option.

Still haven't had the spare time to put her sheet together. Since she currently has no control over her power, could I wait until another Milestone to buy it?

Heh. If you insist. But that'd mean the GM has input on cat-ification for Milestone 0

A level of chaos that I think could be quite fun.

Yep, that's kind of the point! (I watched way too much anime when I was in college....)

Working on a few character ideas, not 100% sold on any of them yet.

Submitted, I always make a mistake here or there when building a character so please let me know if I've missed something.

Librarian, looks good. The downfall, of course, is "unconrtolled cat-ing," but we discussed that.

Khaki, I love the concepts, but they're not quite pathetic enough. Could be adjusted though. Perhaps something along these lines.
ElectroLite - Really nitpicky about what kind of metals work.
Heartbreaker - Actually possibly a viable villain, but too self-centered to actually work as a team member
Aster - Yeah, I'm not sure how to adjust this one without making it too boring.

Ooh i forgot to say i submitted as well. Decided to take 2 Habits. Parking the stretchy powers under Problems (Heart).

Nice!

Reworking 1 and 2, scrapping 3

ElectroLite: What if they work like a simple on/off switch, and couldn't move at fast speeds? I'm thinking when the powers activate, either metal stuff comes flying at them, or they go flying at metal objects like a shitty Spiderman.

Heartbreaker: What if instead of being entirely self-obsessed they were obsessed with everyone else's perception of them? More willing to work with a team that way - so long as they are paid lots of compliments and held in high esteem (to their face at least).

I think either interpretation of ElectroLite's power is a lot funnier than Heartbreaker's. Also, I personally feel bad about Heartbreaker's whole team dynamic. Seems like a bad high school clique cliche of the gofer.

Yeah, Heartbreaker would have to walk a fine line between unstable and unbearable. Feels a bit tenuous for a PbP, so ElectroLite might be the direction.

I'll let ElectroLite make an intro then move yall on.

Calling Cards:

The corporate office is set up thusly on the first floor. The "pie slices" are the cafeteria, on the left, and a conference room on the right. The rectangle is the main entrance.

Then there's two floors in this basic setup filled with offices and "labs" in the pie slices, and the top floor is where the big cheeses work. In this case, the right pie slice is a conference room, and the left is Grady's office, which has a balcony. It's an older building and the water table is an issue, so there is no basement. The curve faces the water, and there's an ample lawn for office culture and whatnot.

Allied Cruises Map

Saevikas you raise a dang good point about the damage. When I was tweaking this part, my alpha testers were already a few milestones in, so 2x and 3x didn't seem as intense. I'll roll it past them since they've been playing the longest.

Health does look correct for everyone. For now we'll judge wounds narratively. Riven and ElectroLite are still KO'ed until their players have some time to post. Then they can come to. It'll make it easier than trying to NPC them.

Okay, I've chatted with my alpha testers and here's the plan.

For the sake of simplicity, instead of starting at Milestone 0, you all start at Milestone 1. We'll say your first milestone is your backstory.

Your health is now the max value of your Power die, times your Milestone. So right now y'all should be at 4's or 6's

Attacks have modifiers up to 3

+0 = normal punches
+1 = blunt weapons (improvised or not)
+2 = knives, daggers, standard superpower uses
+3 = guns, extreme superpower uses (once per encounter kind of stuff)

Healing will also use these modifiers for improvised / basic / intermediate / advanced resources.

Which means Quantum Gal still did 3 damage with that blast to anyone she hit, but now her max is 8 instead of her average being 7.

If y'all end up developing a Doomsday device or something we'll talk about +4 and higher.

What do you think?

I think that health might scale too fast. This is considering that damage stays somewhat consistent as one progresses, save for when a stat is stepped up. To illustrate, after a character's first milestone, their health doubles. This is odd not only mechanically, but narratively. Imagine if a new TV show had their main characters become twice as tough after the pilot episode.

If the amount of health was fine for the alpha testers who were a few milestones into their game, then I would think that indicates the health range that works. It should be possible to design a formula that keeps health values in that ideal range. Something like starting with the lower end of the ideal health range and adding health incrementally with each milestone. So if the lower end of the range was 6, then maybe the formula could be 6 + Milestone Count or something simple like that.

As for the damage, I prefer the 1d/2d/3d thing from before. It makes for a more interesting damage scale which keeps deadly weapons deadly throughout a character's journey. I don't really have too much of a problem with the modifier method though, though I can imagine being able to tank a +4 doomsday weapon given a couple of milestones.

I guess something to consider before that would be if your game actually needs health progression or not. There are plenty of games that don't have health progression for a reason.

On the topic of damage, I decided to narratively describe double attack and damage to see if something like double damage is deadly or not. But as far as I understand from the rules, each attack is an opposed roll? So in this case it depends on what QG rolls against my rolls right? I guess that mitigates some concern about the relatively high damage possibilities against milestone 0 or 1 characters.

Bed, short answer yes. The opposed rolls make up for a lack of quantified armor.

Saevikas thanks for the feedback. I do apologize for this accidentally being a test game. Thought I'd worked out all the kinks :P

If y'all are willing to give me a little more time, I'm gonna ask my stats buddy for some advice. Thank you.

No prob, do what you feel like you need to do.

Agreed, being in the test game I can say we have significantly less fisticuffs to test. Or those that do get involved are the beefier ones.

Okay, I think this will simplify things, at least enough to get moving again.

Milestone 0 health is your power die. So everyone should have 4 or 6 right now.

After that, you'll add your power score each milestone. It'll allow for a difference between brute and fine motor characters without ramping super fast, and unlike the system in play with my alpha group right now, it's only one math problem. I know future milestones have an extra health option, but I'll figure that out later. I think it'll go towards advantage on defense, but I'll keep you posted.

For now! Expect a post as soon as I finish feeding the smol bean. Thanks!

Posted!

Regarding the habit or bonus health mechanic, let's swap bonus health for resistance.

Every Milestone gives you the option to shift a score by 1 point or take extra health. Instead, you can take 1 point of resistance up to the value of your power die.

This means that everyone has 4 or 6 health max, and those of you who took extra health can now instead ignore the first 1 point of damage from any attack.

Think this for the dress.