Heightened Agility, Lightning Control, inventiveness and little powers:
Union
Now we get to my PC from this game, and we see how much
modification is needed to shift characters from one system to another. I warn
you that a lot of Union was built to take advantage of the Marvel Super Heroes
rules point buy and how that accommodated a lot of ‘weak’ powers.
Heightened Agility
Agility is one place where the system is, er, potentially
bustificated. Not in a ‘if we make this tweak it can model a different power
level’ but in a ‘Holy sweet Cthulhu is this potentially overpowered!’ sort of way.
The simple truth is that the combination of high Hit Point modifier, accuracy
bonus and damage bonus makes a high Agility more useful than any other stat.
There are a few ways to ‘fix’ this but any of them will radically change the
underlying system and support existing support materials. I’ll run through
them, but at the end of the day high Agility is, I think, something the GM is
just going to have to monitor on their own. If everyone in the campaign has a
high Agility, it’s no problem if the GM is ready for it. If one or two people
have it as a core power, again no real issue. If everyone except one or two people have it, it’s a big issue. That’s when
you end up with really bored players.
The first, easiest solution is to eliminate the Damage
Bonus for Agility. This makes high Intelligence more useful comparatively as
there’s no other route to Damage Bonus. Remember that every +1 of Damage Bonus
is statistically the same as a die code (+1=1d2, +2=1d3, +3=1d4 and so on) so a
high Agility character with a +5 Damage Modifier is the mechanically the same
as adding 1d8 to every attack. That’s a ton of bonus, and stripping it out does
a lot to bring Ht. Agility in line.
Another possibility is reducing the Hit Point Modifier
for Agility, often by swapping it with the Strength modifier. This makes
Strength more powerful and Agility less, tilting HP more towards overall
toughness than the combination of stats. This works to solve what, back in the
day, Daniel Harvey referred to as the Mary Lou Retton Chained To The Wall
Problem: why would a high agility give you HP when you can’t move. The answer,
of course, is that all Hit points are abstractions, that high agility carries
with it some connotation of physical fitness and stop worrying about it.
You can tone down the Accuracy Modifier, setting it equal
to the Damage Modifier for Intelligence, or even lower. I do not advocate
unless you’re also making the changes I recommend for Heightened Expertise
because the Agility modifier is baked in to so many weapon expert and martial
artist characters. Besides, with the change as to when the defense table is
checked after the bonuses are added the Accuracy Modifier loses some of its
punch.
Finally you can change the Initiative Interval - which is
currently 15 phases between actions - making it less useful at higher levels of
speed. It could be 15 for the first action, then 18, then 20, meaning you need
ever higher agility scores to get those 3rd or 4th
actions. I’m a fan of changing initiative Intervals for some things like weight
gains from Growth or Chemical Power but not for this. It’s too much fussiness
for too little reward.
Lightning Control
This one is a pretty classic power that V&V nails. It
might be a bit fiddly, with rolls against Intelligence and Agility for
controlling things and Endurance for shorting them out, but that just makes the
power require a broadly skilled character to really make use of. Now, as a GM I
am more than willing to swap out certain things – take away the range on the
attacks to add on Flame Powers style flight, eliminate the control to raise the
short out percentages – to get the power closer to the player’s ideal state,
but those are all minor changes.
In the comics a lot of characters with Lightning Control
have some weak Magnetic Powers (or vice versa) so I will also let players swap
between those two powers, or justify invention rolls to expand into their
counterpart ability a little bit.
Heightened Intelligence A
Getting a boost to Intelligence makes the character
slightly more combat capable via Damage Bonus and a little more aware of their
surroundings, but the biggest boost comes in Inventing Points and Inventing
Percentage. Inventing is where the difference between a 15 and a 25 is worth
noting because you now get 2+ inventing points per level and a high enough
percent chance to make invention attempts worthwhile. Heightened Intelligence A
is what makes Peter Parker, with his mini-camera and spider tracers and
spidey-light and spider-mobile and the various other one shot gizmos he whips
up.
I have a few usual questions with inventing in play:
First, how much do the knowledge areas play into this? Are
they blockers, where you have a reduced chance to invent outside your areas of
knowledge or are they adders were you have the normal rules everywhere else and
a bonus within your knowledge areas? I prefer the latter – for non-Heightened
Intelligence characters the chances are pretty poor to begin with, so a little boost
doesn’t hurt. I allow an extra .5 Intelligence multiple to the inventing
percent for each Knowledge Area that fits the invention, so if one fits its
Ix3.5, if 2 fit it’s Ix4 and so on. That gives an advantage without it being
overwhelming.
Second is whether someone can start play with inventions:
I say yes. If the player comes you before the first session with one or two
things they want to have built that help define their character, go for it.
Assuming they have the inventing points to back it up, of course.
Third is what really qualified as 1/4th to 1/3rd
as powerful as a regular power? For powers that have multiple aspects, like
Lightning Control, I’d allow only one of those per invention. Damages should drop
several die codes (from d12 to d8, 2d8 to 1d10) at a minimum. Things that
ratchet up by level for Powers should we fixed at first level. These things are
helpful add-ons but shouldn’t compete with someone who has this as a primary
ability. Stat boosts, if allowed at all, should cap at +3, similar to the bonus
to Agility that Wings provides. This is enough to give a legitimate boost in HP
and bonuses but not enough to compete with actual Powers.
Finally, I let people Invent new ways to use their
powers, stealing the power stunt rules from Marvel Super Heroes, because they’re
fun and they work.
Adrian “Union” Toomes
In the What If? Universe Adrian Toomes. Rather than
flying off the handle and attacking Gregory Bestman with his flight suit and
moving on to a life of crime instead hired young lawyer Matthew Murdock, who
re-secured some of his patents and income from the crooked Bestman. This gave Toomes
time to perfect his inventions and go on to become a small electronics repair
shop owner by day and the leader of the Avengers in this spare time.
He was a heck of a fun character to play. One thing about
building him is that the GM turned Marvel Super Heroes into a point system,
where we had a fixed number of points to be spent into 5 point intervals. So In
addition to the Agility boost that defined the character I pumped up Union
Strength, Endurance and Fighting to Excellent levels, gave him a little bit of
flight, a little bit of magnetic powers, and generally spread the points around
on the theory that being able to fly at slow speed is lands better than not
being able to fly at all.
Translating this back into V&V was a problem because
V&V focuses the characters on a smaller number of powers. That’s why I
played so much with the inventing rules, and shoehorned the flight into the
Electrical Powers. In the end it’s a good approximation.
| Identity: | Adrian Toomes | Side: | Good | ||||||
| Name: | Union | Gender: | Male | ||||||
| Experience: | 9,500 | Level: | 4 | Age: | 63 | ||||
| Powers: | Training: | 1)A; 2)S; 3)E currently I | |||||||
| Heightened Agility B Device: +26 | |||||||||
| Lightning Control Device: 22 charges. 1 action to start defense at 1 charge/hour. Attack has 1" range | |||||||||
| from connected metal for 2d8 damage at 1 charge/use. Flight at 50 mph normally or 400 mph over | |||||||||
| electrical field lines at 1 charge/hour. Control electronics or short out devices 1 charge/use (see book). | |||||||||
| Heightened Intelligence A +5 | |||||||||
| Inventions: 1) Ht. Agility device also gives +3 STR and END 2) Magnetic Device with 400 lb lift at 15", | |||||||||
| Defense only v Basic HTH. 1chg/hr 4 charges 3) Weighted steel cable for use with magnetics SR 10 | |||||||||
| 4) Eletromagnetic energy scanner 5" range. 5) carry harness for passenger in flight/emergency armor | |||||||||
| 6) chain mail suit acts as 31 ADR armor. 7) compressed iron ore to generate cloud with magnetics | |||||||||
| Weight: | 165 | Basic Hits: | 4 | Agility Mod: | 0 | ||||
| Strength: | 13 | Endurance: | 13 | ||||||
| Agility: | 36 | Intelligence: | 22 | ||||||
| Charisma: | 13 | React. Mod.: | 1 | ||||||
| Hit Mod. | 8.702 | Hit Points: | 35 | ||||||
| Dmg. Mod.: | 7 | Healing Rate: | 1.2 | ||||||
| Accuracy: | 6 | Power: | 84 | ||||||
| Carrying Capacity: | 247 | Base HTH Damage: | 1d6 | ||||||
| Movement Rates: | 62 | " Running (Base) | |||||||
| Flight at 220" per turn | |||||||||
| Det. Hidden: | 16 | % | Det. Danger: | 20 | % | ||||
| Inventing Points: | 8.8 | -7 | Cash: | $ - | |||||
| Inventing: | 66 | % | |||||||
| Origin and Background: | (American) Research/Technologyx2 | ||||||||
| Scientist (Electricity) | |||||||||
| Legal Status: | Leader of the Avengers | ||||||||
| (Sec. Clearance = | 15 | ) | |||||||
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