Monday, June 26, 2017

Freedom Force!

SYSTEM: ICONS

My son has fond memories of Freedom Force, an old PC game I played when he was a child, and while he's recovering from having his wisdom teeth out, he said he might like to play superheroes. So I did up a bunch of the Freedom Force characters, and might eventually talk about why I made the decisions I did. For now, you can find them here. (It's a PDF.) It's not all the characters, and I might change my mind about them.

(Updated: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0KkM_vAe2HXdnRZTWpsQWRuMzg)
(In fact, I have fond memories of Freedom Force...I did a Freedom Force campaign back in the days of Mutants & Masterminds 1st edition. You might be able to find it written up (in part) on the Green Ronin site.)

Usual caveats, plus I'm sure that my interpretations of the characters reflect my play style for the game rather than how you play the game.

In general, I used the Freedom Force Wiki to remind me of what powers they had.  Still...
  • Things aren't as fine-grained in ICONS as in the game, so I distinguished Mental, Mystical, and Damage mostly. 
  • There's a 9 point scale that maps fairly nicely on to the ICONS levels (3 is average), though you might move anything labelled "Extremely" into superhuman. And I didn't give anyone Coordination 1, even if they were labeled a "Klutz".
  • As a real-time game, the speed of the characters was important. I checked to see whether the character might have Super-Speed and then ignored it.
  • Jumper was turned into Leaping if the character Strength was less than 7.
  • Lifter I just added 2 to the Strength.
  • I did Eve mostly because I had a 45-pt archer hanging around. I did her beauty as Aura (Stunning). 
  • Almost all melee attacks were left as functions of Strength; the characters can stunt things like Burst if the powers affect an area.
  • Any Acid power usually became Affliction, Confusion became Emotion Control or Mental Control (depending on other effects)
  • Some things became Telekinesis with the Limitation Up or Away (Alche-miss has two of these, Bullet does and Man O'War has Whirlpool).
  • If something did stunning and a little bit of damage, it usually became just the Stunning power. 
  • I ignored knockback.
  • For Alche-miss' various curse abilities, I used Probability Control (Bad Luck), figuring that the altered state matched pretty well with Trouble of a Lost Panel. I did add Alteration Ray (Phasing) as an extra, but I think on consideration it's just a special effect. The target loses a panel because they've been turned into as ghost.

I strove to have the characters come in at 45-50 points, with the Extras/Limits rules. That was a rough balancing act.

And I re-discovered Homing, an extra from Great Power.

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