I know, unusual day for a V&V post, but I hadn't been able to finish the Magic table for yesterday's post, so here it is.
Some things, like Illusions, Invisibility, Weather Control, and Non-Corporealness, were obvious small-chance powers for magic for being classical magical abilities.
Death Touch and Revivification are also magic powers more than they are almost anything else, and both advertise themselves for getting redefined as death and life related powers.
I hemmed and hawed about Telepathy, Teleportation, and Telekinesis because they are so classically Psionic, but kept them on because lots of magical heroes have some version of them.
Absorption, Dimensional Travel, Transformation, and Transmutation were added not just because they can feel Magic-y, but also because they are so very open ended in their design. You can do lots with these in ways that don't make the character feel like everyone else with that power.
I could have added a lot more, or created more special powers that perfectly fit the setting, but these work for me. Next week I will do some of that, creating new text for Cosmic Awareness, Death Touch, and Revivification that makes them more innately useful and comic-booky.
Ok, JFF, I rolled up some characters with this table to see what I'd get, just rollong on this table.
ReplyDeleteFIrst char:
2 powers (1 on powers roll, or is it 1d6+2 drop lowest? But then I'd have to roll a weakness so better to just roll 1d6+1 I think)?
Heightened Charisma B
Animal/Plant Control
So either Poison Ivy (just animal/plant control), or magical Purple Man (heightened charisma, and with that as the only power it ends up likely ramped up into effective mind control, I guess)
5 powers:
Magic Spells
Revivication
92...your table doesn't have 90-92, so rerolling...
17...missing 17-19, too
Dimensional Travel
Non-corporealness
Transmutation
Ok, lots of choices here (and rolling up magic spells makes everything better), but I think dropping that last power is great -- it gets use a psychopomp sorcerer, who can cast spells, but has as a primary roll guiding the dead...and occasionally sending them back if they judge it isn't their time yet (at a cost)!
Ok, one more:
7 powers! Well, I was hoping for an interesting roll...
Pet/Companion
Heighteend Charisma B (goes well with Pet)
Death Touch!?
Magical Spells (well, at 6% this isn't demonstrative, but you do actually want a good chance of spells from the magic table!)
Emotion Contrl (Ok, so that goes along well with HCB)
Heightened Charisma B (hello. IIRC rolling a bonus power twice means, if you keep them, you just get the bonus power twice? Or could use for the drop)
Heightened Intelligence B
Hmm. THis is an interesting set. Probably most interesting thing to do is build a hyper charismatic mastermind, dropping death touch, doubling up on HCB to have -massive- charisma, with Pet probably runs an organization...I think depending on stats we're talking a demigod, with instinctual emotional control, minions, -obviously- a high intelligece, and oh yes, if they need to act personally they can cast spells.
(65-67 is missing too; I just didn't manage to hit it between 16 rolls)
ReplyDeleteOk, clearly something got messed up when i re-sorted this alphabetically. Will fix today
ReplyDeleteYeah, looks great now. Not sure what was happening with the numbers before (the method makes sense as stated below as a spreadsheet either; just curious as to what I had a smaller chance of rolling with the originaly posted table...other than I think death touch which was only 1/100 instead of 1/25). Huh. I think the original table was missing weather control?
DeleteI corrected the table - the Concat column hadn't sorted with the math and names when I alphabetized it and I didn't notice. Oops.
ReplyDeleteThe rule is 1d6+2 powers +1 weakness, and then you drop one power, or two powers and your weakness. I'll be doing a new Weakness table soon as well. This means
* Character one would have a weakness along with Ht. Charisma B and Animal Control; Given the limited range of the character if this were a PC I would a) state that you use Charisma rather than Endurance to calculate HP for the purposes of the number of animals you can control; b) let the control extend to all mammals and c) you can develop animals as Henchmen, magically uplifting them a little so you have an animal support staff as well as randomly controlled animals in combat.
* The second character works as you described - Magic Spells, Dimensional Travel, Non-Corporealness, Revivification - makes a great Phantom Stranger style character. I can easily see this being an anthology book where our narrator helps the wrongly dead character of the month restore their nearly lost life, or battles things from the afterlife.
* Third character, yes if you roll a power you can double the effects. If you keep the weakness you're looking at a 6d10 add to Charisma, so somewhere in the 40's on average. Genius with an +3d10 to Intelligence. Empathic Powers. Magic Spells. Powerful familiar. I would immediately have the 'large organization' be a secret worldwide cult. This just screams long term villain, but it would be cool to see as a hero.
Right? The dice were actually really helpful here (and/or your table worked really well); all three rolls strongly suggested a great concept, even the one where I got only 2 powers (I was basically assuming that only rolling d6+1 instead of d6+2 would let me assume I dropped the weakness and 2 powers, but you're right that for the first concept the powers rolled work well enough toether, conceptually, that we'd probably keep the weakness.
DeleteAnd yeah, the third one basically screams "anti-hero with an evil/evilish organization as a pet", but that kind of against the grain setup has a lot to reccomend it even if one goes with straight hero. That one was a 6 on the d6 for powers, so if we drop transmutation and the unknown power, there's no weakness; otherwise death touch fits into the whole "evil power package but they're the protagonist" if the rolled weakness fits well with that concept, which it very well might.
er, transmutation (which I was somewheat less sure what it was; is that matter transmutation, polymorph, or something of each?), not death touch which the nicely suggestive spectre-type roll and will probably drop unless they get a really good weakness, but either would actually workreally well.
DeleteTransmutation is the ability to turn something into something else, with those somethings being defined by the player at character creation. So it could be matter transmutation, or alchemical changes, or polymorphing your opponents, or turning your victims into vampires, or whatever, as long as thing A becomes thing B. That open endedness is why I put it here. Plus there are tons of obvious magical effects.
DeleteIf you wanted to keep the Transmutation one the first thing that comes to mind is the Spectre's ironic death transmutations as a finishing move, where he turns the murderer to cheese and lets rats eat him, or glass and lets him shatter, or whatever.
*nod* It would act as a singular attack power for a combination that, while flavorful, doesn't have anything taht stands out as having offensive use, aside from the swiss-army nature of the "magic spells" power.
DeleteSimilarly, if the "oops, all evil powers" mega-charisma character kept death touch, that would serve as a singular direct attack power for someone who was otherwise all about manipulating people and having minions.