ICONS: Being Nausated...an alternate technique

Icons

As you know, I do solo plays converting adventures from other systems, and that means sometimes coming up with Icons-appropriate things to do instead of the original. So here's another post about a situation and what an Icons-appropriate solution might be.

An "Icons-appropriate thing" might be a pyramid test, creating an Advantage or Disadvantage, or a succeeding at a test scaled by results rather than a series of tests. That is, instead of saying:

Interrogate thugs

DC	Result
DC 10	The gang is recruiting
DC 15	The gang has superhumans recruited
DC 20	This robbery was to get money to fund the next part of the scheme

It becomes:

Interrogate thugs, Willpower test, Difficulty 3

Result	Information
Failure or marginal success	No info
Moderate success	"The gang is recruiting"
Major sucess	"Our gang is recruiting and we've already got supervillains, so you better watch out"
Massive success	"We're recruited people, even supervillains, and this robbery will pay for the next stuff to come!"

When converting M&M stuff, it's generally fast enough to say DC 10 = Difficulty 3, DC 15 = Diff 4, and so on, adding 1 for every 5 or so (and always adjusting based on what they're actually trying to do; this isn't a blind process).

In Sewer Kings, by Victory Games, I ran across an option to have the heroes nauseated by suddenly going into a sewer (and presumably not a storm sewer, though that can smell bad, too). I don't have my copy of M&M2E handy, so I can't look up the effects of Nauseate rank 4 or rank 8, but I'm guessing that it paralyses them with the smell unless they make a CON roll.

(This analysis is based on that concept. If that's not what Nauseate power did, well, it's wrong for this situation, but the idea might be useful for something you're running.)

In that case, the intent is to have them lose actions until they make the roll, but I looked at it and said, "So what?" They're not meeting the villains until later, and if they can't move, well, they can't meet the villains; at this point there's no time constraint. So blindly substituting Stunning doesn't mean anything.

But creating Trouble — a -2 to any action other than trying to fight the smell — that might be useful.

Plus, Icons has mechanisms for eliminating Trouble. An awful smell might be dealt with by creating a nose covering, by putting on the rebreather the character carries for underwater adventures, by activating the sealed life support systems that aren't normally on, and so on....all of which can be dealt with by a Maneuver or spending a Determination Point.

Instead, my solution was that all players get Trouble (and a Determination Point), manifested as a -2 to any action other than trying to fight the smell. They can use the normal techniques for getting rid of Trouble. (Characters who can't smell or are androids or whatever just bypass this: no Trouble, no DP.)

And, because people get used to terrible smells (even normal people) whether the character does something or not, the Trouble goes away once the character has succeeded at a Pyramid Test, strength tests against difficulty 3 by default but player suggestions encouraged.

This idea can be used for any kind of physical inconvenience that people eventually get used to, like sea sickness or terrible smells. You might adapt it to something like emotional hardening to the unearthly if you were going to run a horror sword-and-sorcery game with Icons.

Hope that's a useful idea for people. I'm sure that's in one of the published adventures, but I seem doomed to re-invent the wheel, so here it is.

That Silver Age Feel

Any Superhero Game

Someone on Facebook asked about running a Silver Age-feeling game, and it so happens I've been thinking about it. Now, I greatly respect Dr. Christopher McGlothlin's work, but I think his Silver Age supplement for Mutants & Mutants misses the mark because it assumes you're going to set the story in the time period (about 1956–1984). Running an historical game assumes that people know about the time, which makes it a heavier lift.

So what do I think?

Less heavy continuity. Even when there were continuing plot elements—usually the soap opera elements—the event plots were one-and-done. The Ringmaster is here with his Circus of Crime! Lois thinks Clark is Superman and Metallo is out again!

A lot of the Silver Age stuff falls out of three factors: The Comics Code, the belief that the audience was kids, and the belief that the audience rolls over every four years.

• The Comics Code means there’s a lot of invention (not necessarily good invention) to get around what was forbidden by the Code. (You can find a copy of the 1954 version of the Code in a number of places, like here.) The Code had a couple of requirements that seem to be relevant to me: No horror, no crime; crimes are always punished in the story; no one can profit from a crime.
• The idea that the audience was kids streamlines the stories to (for the most part) down to: “Here is the problem or mystery; here it’s elaborated as they try to solve it; here they make a last attempt that doesn’t work; using the knowledge from that attempt, they solve the problem or puzzle.” You don't do a lot of continuing plots, even though you might have continuing elements. They tend to be more devices or tropes than plots, right. Lois Lane is a bundle of plot engine tropes: she wants to marry Superman, she is terribly jealous, she is nosy about Superman's secret identity.
• The belief that the audience rolled over lead to many versions of the same invention, because the audience wouldn’t know about the earlier stuff. Some of that was already being subverted in the “See ish 255” or whatever captions, and I was astonished at the nascent continuity in Supergirl Vol 2 trade paper. The author was clearly paying attention to the other Superman mags.

So it’s largely SF because the Code outlawed horror/magic stuff — Marvel danced around that later with “zuvembies” and Morbius, the scientific vampire. The Code also required the bad guys to get their comeuppance by the end of the story.

Now, how to translate that into a game.

1. Bad guys don’t kill the heroes and generally don't kill. Mostly they want to get the heroes out of town/the country/the planet.
2. Fun! The stakes tend to be high or miniscule: A comet will destroy the earth or help the young girl who hates superheroes without her knowing it!
3. Real world problems need not apply.
4. Sidekicks were huge, either formal (like Robin) or informal (like Jimmy Olsen). Possibly the best way to handle them in a game environment is to make them NPCs, because they function as a replacement for internal monologues (and well-meaning lectures) and as hostage-of-the-week.
5. Relatively little carry-over from session to session: a criminal’s plot is hatched, seems overwhelming, and is defeated in a single session.
6. Science fiction, not horror or fantasy. (The Code specifically forbade crime and horror comics.) It doesn’t have to be plausible, but it’s got to have an SF veneer. Even Batman spent time on alien planets (see “Robin Dies At Dawn!”)
7. Steal from classic SF for ideas. Robots. Evil twins (oh, man, there are like six ways to be an evil twin of a player character, and if I could come up with an overarching idea, I'd run an adventure with all of them, kind of the Superman Revenge Squad). Alternate dimensions. Psionic powers. Miniaturization. Aliens. Throw in some mecha, too.
8. As a trope, think about including talking gorillas, motorcycles, Atlanteans, an undiscovered forgotten land with monsters.
9. Anything can be a problem to be overcome.

   You want to do Lex Luthor stealing 40 cakes? Okay. The 40 cakes were accidentally made with formitium, which looks like flour. (Miss Tessmacher was making birthday cakes for the gang.) It’s also exceedingly rare, which is why Lex needs those cakes instead of other cakes. He’s going to re-extract the formitium to build a device that will destroy Superman!

More as I think of them. I don't feel like these are actual tools to create a Silver Age feel yet, just suggestions.

ICONS examples: Second character (Vacuum Flux)

SYSTEM: ICONS

One more. I want to make the two characters fight in a third post, and having two characters who can't affect each other, well, that would be a bad example. (Or a great one that shows the use of Qualities to totally change the environment.)

Origin

Origin: rolled a 7. Birthright; either +2 to a power or a new innate power.

Attributes

Attribute	Roll	Level
Prowess	4	Average (3)
Coordination	5	Fair (4)
Strength	9	Great (6)
Intellect	6	Fair (4)
Awareness	7	Good (5)
Willpower	8	Good (5)

Stamina is 11.

Number of powers

Rolled a 10 for number of powers, so that's 4 powers.

Powers

Just the rolls and results.

2d6 for type	Type	Power Roll	Power	2D6 for level	Level
8	Movement	5+6	Wall-Crawling	3	2
6	Defense	6+4	Resistance	9	6
10	Alteration	1+6	Density	6	5
9	Alteration	6+1	Animal Mimicry	9	6

Well, Density already includes Damage Resistance, so that might be used for an extra. A dense wall-crawler? No ideas sprint to mind.

Animal Mimicry has the most, uh, flavour, so it's likely to be predominant. In fact, by mimicking a spider or gecko, the character can have Wall-Crawling, so that one becomes tentative, too.

The combination of Density and Animal Mimicry appeals to me. Maybe this character is a child of two supers and has a weird combination of powers from his or her parents?

Would one extra power just tie it together or am I better off picking one power as a theme and converting all the other powers to extras?

Well, I really want someone who can affect that light-based being created in the other post, and the one that looks useful for that is density—density brings to mind gravity, and gravity bends light... So we'll make Density the main power, use +2 from the origin to up it to Incredible, and turn the other three powers into Extras, one of which will be Gravity Control:

• Incredible Density
  • Extra: Effect (Gravity Control) (with GM's permission, default effect will be Affliction: he touches you and creates a quantum black hole inside you. It evaporates, but the tidal forces inside your body can have lasting effects)
  • Extra: Telekinesis
  • Extra: Flight (so he can move around)

Determination

If this were a villain, I wouldn't bother with Determination (which is 6 - # of powers, or 4 = 2).

Specialties

Rolled a 6, so two specialties.

I'll pick the Specialties after I figure out the character.

Thinking about character

Born to it? Let's say child of supers, still. Something to prove. I think of Rosa as being older, maybe thirty or in her thirties, so this character is young: sixteen or seventeen.

Digression about Strobe

Rosa could be sixty, but the accident that transformed her into light made her young again, and when she becomes corporeal, she becomes herself in the time after the accident, when she was obsessing over her looks and how she had changed. That...is a detail I could use. Also gives the GM a different backstory with more history to work with. I digress.

End Digression

Because I don't want anything romantic between an adult and a sixteen year old I'm going to make this character not sexually attractive...that is, a male.

(Name? Gravity control leads to thoughts of black holes, which leads to the Schwartzchild radius, which leads to a look: When using his powers, he's covered by a black sheen and becomes slightly smaller; light bends around him. Table the name until later.)

He should probably have Science as a specialty. The other, I'm going to be a total combat nut and say Aerial Combat.

Quality

Well, say that he started the fight, so "Something To Prove" could be a Quality.

I also like the idea that being a super is new to Strobe and having powers is old hat to him, because he was born with them. "Nah, This Ain't Weird" might reflect that.

(Actually, I'm going to reverse an earlier decision and pick "Power Gravity Control" as the specialty instead of "Aerial Combat". It could help in maneuvers to create advantages for stunts.)

And some kind of epithet or power description to make stunting powers easier..."I'm the event, meet the horizon" for lack of a better one.

Name?

Okay, a name. Is there something about to shadows between flashes of light? Or something about light bending? Nothing's coming to mind.

Okay, I don't like the name but it fits with the mental image I have of this guy: Vacuum Flux

I want to up the science quotient a bit, so I'm going to trade two attributes, Intellect and Awareness. That way he's Intellect 5 and with Awareness 4.

The final result

Name: Vacuum Flux (North Reiss)
Prowess	Average (3)
Coordination	Fair (4)
Strength	Great (6)
Intellect	Good (5)
Awareness	Fair (4)
Willpower	Good (5)
Stamina	11	(Strength+Willpower)
Determination	2 (if a PC)
Specialties	Power (Gravity Control) Science
Powers	Incredible (7) Density Extra: Gravity Control (default power: Affliction) Extra: Telekinesis Extra: Flight
Qualities	Something to prove "I'm the event, meet the horizon" Nah, it ain't weird

ICONS examples: First character (Strobe!)

SYSTEM: ICONS

Three posts put ahead of time here: two sample characters and a fight between heroes. This will be wordy, but I'm going to try to explain some of what's going in my mind as I roll up the character, try to make some representative decisions, and try not to cheat. I don't have dice handy, but I do have a dice roller on my phone, so I'll use that.

Remember that my creative process is not your creative process. This is an example, but you do you.

Our First Hero

Here we go; please forgive any sexism, racism, age-ism and so forth because this are my default assumptions (like, the character will start as a white cis straight male because, well, I am, but might not stay that way).

Origin

Origin first, rolling 2d6 and looking on the chart on page 56: 3+2=5. Transformed. So I get to add +2 to something at the end.

There's so much thinking and inventing that goes on as I create a character that knowing I have an option at the end to change things is useful...but you could always roll for Origin as the step before finalization.

Attributes

Now some levels for attributes:

Attribute	Roll	Level	Comments
Prowess	2+1=3	2	(He's not a martial artist at this point, anyway.)
Coordination	6+5=11	7	A power for determination and stunting purposes
Strength	5+1=6	4	Fair
Intellect	2+4=6	4	Fair
Awareness	2+5=7	5	Good
Willpower	4+4=8	5	Good

I'm going to wait until I know more before I decide to what will get +2, or if I trade two attributes. (For example, if all the powers attack with Prowess or Willpower, then I'll probably want to trade that 7 for the value for Prowess or Willpower). And all things being equal, I'd like high values for Strength (it affects Stamina and punching damage) and for Willpower (if a high Strength doesn't seem appropriate).

Number of powers

I roll 1+3=4 for 2 powers. (This guy is not looking like a Swiss Army Knife of supers.)

Powers

For this character, I'm going to roll powers and levels immediately, type-power-level, but if (say) I wanted to keep page flipping to a minimum, I might roll all the types first, then the powers, then the levels. Just be consistent. Anyway: onward.

The first power is...5+2=7, Offensive. Rolling on the offensive table, I get 4+2, or Dazzle. And another roll for level gives me 4+3=7, or Good (5).

The second power is 5+1=6, or Defensive. Well, I suppose that's good; the character's Stamina at this point will be 9 but that might change. A 9 Stamina is okay. 3+5 is Reflection, and the level is 3+6=9, or Great (6).

Offensively, that's not much. I mean, a punch does Fair damage, and the Reflection will work a lot of the time; the Dazzle is useful...

I can make the Dazzle a little more powerful by making it an Extra: Effect (Dazzle) of the Reflection. If the Dazzle is light, that gives some kind of light theme to the Reflection, too. And the high Coordination means he's likely to hit. I might not do it, though: it's just a kind of reflexive min-maxing, trying to find something interesting.

Normally by now I'd have an idea and I'd just pick the Specialties. But the character looks inchoate at this point, so I'll roll for Specialties and see if that sparks ideas.

Specialties

How many Specialties? Let's roll...6+2=8, for three Specialties.

We'll roll for three, and I might adjust them if I think one should be an expert or some idea strikes me.

Roll	Specialty
Another 6+2	Technology. Okay...so we'll probably go with a science-based excuse for the powers. (Don't have to; this character might be a mechanic with a magical gem, but we'll use science as the first approach.)
3+6	Military. So maybe a military experiment gone wrong, but tough to reconcile "soldier"with the low Prowess.
4+5	Power.

Great (he said, sarcastically).

Maybe you're looking at it and going, "Oooh, I could do this" but you're not here. So let's prod the character around a bit.

Back to fiddling with powers

I really want to add another power, because Dazzle and Reflection together don't really spark anything for me. Mechanically, I'll add it as an extra to the Reflection, but I'll need a limit to pay for that extra.

(A limit can (a) pay for an extra on the same power, or add +2 to the power, or give back a point of determination when you're calculating determination.)

Ah: this seems sort of light-based powers in my mind, but of course I didn't roll anything as nice as Light Control. Let's say Stunning: the Dazzle flickers at a particular rate and causes the equivalent of epilepsy in the target, which can render them immobile (if it works). And because of that biological basis, it doesn't work on machines, or through machines. So it definitely doesn't work on robots or security guards watching on closed-circuit TV. That's (a) offensive and (b) ranged, taking advantage of that high Coordination.

Now the powers look like:

• Great (6) Reflection
  • Extra: Great Dazzle
  • Extra: Stunning (vs Strength) Limit: Not on or through machines.

That's not bad. But you know, I'm starting to get the idea of someone who turns into light. I think Alternate Form Light would be excellent... It also gives movement and immunity to physical harm. Ah. Just thought of a way to do that.

Instead of making Dazzle an extra of Reflection (which I was just doing for the points, really), let's use the rule on page 81 to substitute Alternate Form Energy (Light) for Reflection, and make it an extra of Dazzle. The powers now look like:

• Good (5) Dazzle
  • Extra: Effect (Alternate Form: Light)
  • Extra: Stunning Limit: Not on or through machines

As part of my points-mongering nature, it seems to me that the +2 should be added to the Dazzle. Because Extras are at the same level as the "parent" power*, it'll cascade down to the other powers that are extras:

• Incredible (7) Dazzle
  • Extra: Effect (Alternate Form: Light)
  • Extra: Stunning Limit: Not on or through machines

* Okay, not necessarily for the "pool" powers that let you choose the effects: Gadgets and Magic. But we're not dealing with either of those here.

Our hero so far

NAME (unknown at this point)		Comments
Prowess	2	Poor: below average
Coordination	7	Counts as a power for figuring determination
Strength	4	Fair
Intellect	4	Fair
Awareness	5	Fair
Willpower	5	Fair
Stamina	9	Strength 4 plus Willpower 5
Specialties	Military (+1) Power (Stunning, I think) (+1) Technology (+1)
Powers	Incredible (7) Dazzle Extra: Effect (Alternate Form: Light) Extra: Stunning Limit: Not vs or through machines

Determination

The high Coordination counts as one power, plus three more (Dazzle, Alternate Form, Stunning). Determination is 6 - 4 = 2.

Character Story

Now to think of a character...and I kind of like the idea that the character wants to be in light form...that's the default...and when a "regular person" lots of attention is spent keeping together; that's why the Prowess is low. He or she is thinking of keeping the body solid rather than fighting. I'd have to talk to the GM about whether the Dazzle and Stunning can be used in Alternate form: I think so, from the description, but some GMs are fussy and would say it's equivalent to being Phased. (I've run across that.) As I say, I think it's okay, but I'd talk to the GM to make sure that I don't, say, unleash the Stunning when the GM doesn't think it's appropriate.

So a soldier who was working as a technician on Yet Another Supersoldier program...or maybe an ex-soldier at a fusion power plant experiment. There's a problem with the equipment—I just re-watched Captain America: The First Avenger last night, so we'll say it was sabotage.

I kinda like the idea that the character is gay, forced out by don't ask, don't tell just before it was repealed, and then immediately hired as a civilian contractor. (Had the necessary skills and security clearance...) (Or am I channelling the Ray? I know so little about the character that I can't be sure.)

Okay, we'll gender-flip: the character is a woman. Still forced out. Been working on this project for a decade. They're getting close. (Nah, not a supersoldier project: a power supply the size of a box from Amazon that can power a block of Manhattan for a century. With that, man-portable energy weapons become possible, and there are civilian applications: Imagine three of them shipped to a disaster site, like Puerto Rico. Hell, we'll make her a Puerto Rican lesbian.)

Actually, we won't have her forced out by don't ask, don't tell (but mostly because I don't want to research it); we'll keep everything else, but she lost a hand. In energy form, she gives herself the hand back...but can't touch things; as a physical person, she's missing the hand.

As far as a name...Searchlight would be good, but because of how I envision the Stunning power working, call her Strobe.

Qualities

"Lady of Light" is a good epithet. I can tag it for almost anything to do with powers or dealing with the public.

"Scarred by the service." That's not bad: it reflects the hand, but the GM can also use it to compel inappropriate reactions to military personnel and the ever-popular flashback.

The same impulses that made her join the service will make her a hero. Rather than something wordy, we'll just say, "Has to help" is the third Quality.

The Final Result

 

Strobe (Rosa Maria Quintero)
Prowess	2
Coordination	7
Strength	4
Intellect	4
Awareness	5
Willpower	5
Stamina	9
Determination	2
Specialties		Military (+1) Power (Stunning, I think) (+1) Technology (+1)
Powers	Incredible (7) Dazzle Extra: Effect (Alternate Form: Light) Extra: Stunning Limit: Not vs or through machines
Qualities	Lady of Light Scarred by the service Has to help

The road not taken: Egomaniac

I might have made different decisions. If I had had my heart set on playing a mentalist character, I could have traded the Coordination with Willpower. The character's Stamina would be 11 instead of 9. Reflection could work very well as the sum totality of psychic power, or something. While Dazzle can work with mental powers, say I substituted Telekinesis for the Dazzle. This other character (call him Egomaniac, and we'll make him a villain) probably also needs another power, or an extra for Telekinesis...so I'm going to say ESP because I've suddenly thought of someone who makes tumblers move inside locks or triggers items inside things. He can stunt Telepathy or Mental Blast if need be, and he protects himself against her strobe effect by closing his eyes and using ESP to see. He's definitely got a Power skill, and I'm going to bump it to Expert, then give him the other Specialty of Stealth:

Egomaniac (Norman Island)
Prowess	2
Coordination	5
Strength	4
Intellect	4
Awareness	5
Willpower	7
Stamina	11	Strength 4 plus Willpower 7)
Determination	*
Specialties	Power Expert (telekinesis) (+1) Stealth (+1)
Powers	Incredible (8) Resistance Extra: Effect (Telekinesis) Extra: ESP (vision) Limit: Preparation Stunts Flight, Blast, Burst
Qualities	Duh, it's in the name I never get my due, so I take it Inventive

I'm not crazy about those qualities, so they might change.

"There are too...many...of them..."

SYSTEM: ICONS

Over in the G+ ICONS community, Hallam Rickett asks about overwhelming numbers, such as Captain America attacking a Hydra base, where there are too many and the heroes end up captured. Steve Kenson already answered but I get to be both more orthodox and less orthodox, so I'll repeat and expand on my answer here.

First of all, what do you want narratively? (I don't think you should dictate everything that happens to your players, but sometimes you want to skip over some non-essential stuff or avoid having it send you into the weeds.) If you really want to do an adventure about how resourceful the heroes are without their gadgets or whatever, then you essentially set the terms and let them go.

In ICONS terms, you narrate the capture ("There are too many of them. When you wake up...") and give them each a Determination point to sweeten it. This sort of thing is (in my experience, as a person who has made many many of the mistakes that gamemasters can make) best done to begin the session or end it. You're framing this session or next session.

However, sometimes you're okay with them winning ("There's only like 200 agents on the island...") but you want it to be unlikely.

The fastest way is to use a pyramid test or two. If you're trying to model the experience of it being tougher after the alarm is sounded, maybe you use two pyramid tests, one representing before the alarm and one representing after. You figure the average difficulty of hitting an agent is 3 or 4, so that's the difficulty of the first test. The second test is harder—the agents are fighting smarter now, so the difficulty is 6 or 7. Everybody can contribute to the pyramid tests, so each one is probably a page or two.

But as variations:

• Use a single long test (requires two massive successes) but it escalates: the difficulty goes up by one every time failure, or every attempt.
• Use a long pyramid test for each player character, rather than having everyone contribute to one pyramid test.
• Use a pyramid test for each area they want to clear out, difficulty determined by the level of the opposition and whether the alarm has been raised.

Another way is to model the agents as a character that represents a horde. Fights take longer than tests, however, so this eats up more of your session.

Look at your individual agent, and fold any weapons or Martial Arts skills into Coordination and Prowess, because we're going for something like speed here even though we've decided to use a fight. Ignore body armor, which you might have lovingly crafted for individual agents, because we're going to abstract it all into Alternate Form Fluid, using the Damage Resistance in that to represent both body armor and that there are many agents.

A horde of agents might be:

Horde of Agents
PRO	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	STAMINA
4	5	4	3	3	4	8
Powers
Blaster Rifles or whatever they have to attack						6
Alternate Form Fluid Represents that there are lots of agents. Brings Damage Resistance 6, Stretching 6 to represent agents being in lots of places and how destroying some of them doesn't get all of them. Adjust level based on strength of hero attacks and number of agents.						6
Fast Attack, because there are lots of these agents. Assume they can attack twice more; that's a compromise between lots of attacks and time spent rolling dice						8
Regeneration Every 10 pages, the number of agents replenishes because more agents show up						10
Qualities
Horde of agents; every part is a minion but the whole isn't The "Alternate Form Fluid" attribute can be nullified for a page by smart tactics or moves Some quality reflecting the nature of the agents or a special ability

First, unlike what it says in the rules, in this case the Fast Attack doesn't have to be used to Coordinate attacks. You can, maybe you should, but I would say that in this case it doesn't have to be a Coordinated attack.

Second, maybe they have some equivalent to Growth or Wrestling when they get down to grappling with the heroes...individually they might not be strong, but if you get twenty agents hanging off you, well, it might get treated as a much stronger foe.

Third, if you want the agents to be unbeatable unless something smart is done, you say that the PCs have to use Advantages to neutralize the Alternate Form Fluid...the heroes do something smart, it counteracts the damage resistance of the Alternate Form, and the attack can do Stamina damage. Otherwise, the agents are nearly unbeatable if the Alternate Form is set at the same level as the highest PC attack or higher. (I might not count Combining attacks to increase effort as smart on the part of the PCs...depends on the players.)

Again, you might vary it by having each area of the base as a "horde" character, so you have the Lab horde, the Living Quarters horde, the Airfield horde, and so on. And this has the advantage that if some player does something clever, like using the security system to lock various agents in place, you aren't forcing yourself to a fiction that if the one horde character is defeated, they all drop unconscious. Really, you'd claim that the other agents surrendered or something in that case, but this way lets you have them if you need another fight later.

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.

Things I forget in ICONS

Hey, folks. Sorry I've been away; chemotherapy is really busting my butt these last couple of weeks. What I thought was that it was like antibiotics...I'd start, and I'd feel better and better, and eventually we'd be done. Unfortunately, chemotherapy is more like they're trying to kill you and they hope the cancer dies first. So until you're done, you keep getting worse. Still, past the midway point.

SYSTEM: ICONS
Anyway, there are a couple of rules in ICONS that I rarely act on, mostly because I skimmed them on my first read and didn't catch them until recently.

• Automatic hitbacks So when anyone tries to hit your character with Prowess or Coordination and the result is a massive failure, you automatically succeed in hitting back, if that's plausible. (ICONS Assembled, pages 43, 138, 139) In the case of a Dodge (using Coordination), it's a bit more limited...throw back thrown projectiles...but it's there. Your high Prowess or Coordination hero can attack multiple heroes in this way without stunting Burst.
• Villains spending Determination When a villain would spend a Determination point (from a power or usually from stunting; Steve Kenson is quite clear on the fact that only heroes have Determination, but some power descriptions include Determination), the affected player gets the Determination. That I remembered. But if the villain uses a maneuver or a tactic to get the Advantage, then the player doesn't get the Determination, because the villain has already paid the "cost" of the Advantage. Good to know.
• Buying vehicles When I looked at Vehicles and the Vehicles power in the various Justice Wheels supplements from Fainting Goat, I realized that the Assembled version of a vehicle would be a reskinned Servant power. While Servant grants you a pool of points to buy Prowess, Strength, Coordination, and any powers, a Vehicles version would give you a pool of points to buy Handling, Speed, and Structure, a movement power (Flight, Aquatic, Burrowing, or Super-Speed), and any other powers. Stealing from the Justice Wheels power, the default number of passengers is 2, and you can spend a point for each extra five passengers. (No, you don't get points for saying 1 passenger only.)
• Old Elemental Control vs. New Element Control As originally written, Element Control had five possible descriptors; you got two and the rest could be bought as Extras(we would call them now): Attacking, Defending, Moving, Creating, and Shaping. Creating is now assumed (that is, it's a Limit if you can't create your element or energy). Attacking, Defending, and Moving are usually obvious Effects (probably Blast, Force Field or Resistance, and Telekinesis, but certain behaviours might call for something different). But that darn Shaping has always been an issue for me. However... There are two options:
  • Just call out Shaping as an Extra. You're the GM, of course you can do it.
  • The book Great Power contains the extra "Force Constructs" for Force Control, and I see no reason why you couldn't apply the Extra "<Material> Constructs" to your power to signify creating earth walls or water walls or force walls or darkness walls or whatever. (The Extra is also how you might do the old Champions power "Force Wall".)

Point buy in ICONS

SYSTEM: ICONS

ICONS isn't really a point-buy game--it's a random-roll character creation game. But it does include a point-buy option that isn't terrifically well explained. But point-buy is useful for some online games, at least until the GM is comfortable with how Determination Points balance things.

So I thought I'd give a shot at explaining point-buy. This is based on information I've picked up from Mr. Kenson's posts on the ICONS Yahoo group and G+ and elsewhere. The caveat is that I might be wrong, and I hope someone more knowledgeable will correct me. I'll try to keep this post up to date as I'm corrected.

If you don't have a copy of the rules, you might want to pick up a free copy of the hero character creation quicksheet, from DriveThru or RPGNow.

The Basics

Everything costs one point per rank. Prowess 7 is 7 points. Specialty Law (Master: +3) is 3 points. The Power Danger Sense 1 is 1 point. With the exception of Extras and Limits, to total the point cost of a character, you add up all the rank values.

Bob Average
Prowess	3	Specialties
Coordination	3
Strength	3	Powers
Intellect	3
Awareness	3
Willpower	3

So Bob Average costs 18 points. Bob Specialist (the same guy with one specialty) would be 19 points.
Here's Bob Guard, who has some points in powers as devices:

Bob Guard
Prowess	3	Specialties
Coordination	3	Law
Strength	3	Powers
Intellect	3	Pistol (Shooting)	3
Awareness	3	Nightstick (Strike)	4
Willpower	3

He's a whopping 26 points: 18 for the attributes, 1 for the specialty, and 7 for the powers.

The catch is Extras and Limits. They add a lot of versatility, but they muck up the accounting some.

Extras

An Extra is something you add on to a power. For the most part, Extras are the same rank as the power they're based on. An Extra on a power that's rank 1 is also Rank 1. An Extra on a power that's rank 9 is also rank 9. For many of the extras, rank doesn't matter, because the benefit of the extra is binary: it affects phased items or doesn't, for example. Still, in point-buy, that means that it costs the same as the original power. Leaping 9 + Extra: Defensive is 9+9=18 points.

Here's Bob Extra:

Bob Extra
Prowess	3	Specialties
Coordination	3	Law
Strength	3	Powers
Intellect	3	Shotgun (Shooting) Extra: Burst	5
Awareness	3	Nightstick (Strike)	4
Willpower	3

Without the extra, he'd be 28 points (18 attributes, 1 specialty, 9 powers). With the extra, he's 33 points. Yup. With extras, your character can get expensive, fast. But you can't really do Burst other than as an extra. (Okay, you can stunt the extra if you only need it occasionally.)

For convenience in calculating, I generally put the rank of the extra beside it, so it becomes Extra: Burst 5.

The Extra: Effect adds a power, and the rank is still the same as the original power. Force Field 4 + Extra: Telekinesis 4 is 4+4=8 points. Now, in point buy, there isn't so much reason to use a power as an extra....you can just say you have the power at whatever level you can afford....unless the power also has a limit.

Limits

A Limit is a limitation on a power. When you apply a limitation to a power, you have a choice. The limitation has one of these three effects:

• Raises the rank of the power by +2
• Reduces the cost of the power for figuring Determination
• Cancels the cost of an extra on that power

We'll concentrate on that third one for now. (When you're submitting your character to your GM, please let them know which use of a limitation you're going for. Otherwise, they might do the math differently.)

Why?

Why would you do this? Given that you have pretty much total control in a point-buy situation, why would you make any power an extra?

To cancel out the cost with a limitation.

Back to the Topic

A couple of things to note:

• You can put limitations on an Extra: Effect
• If the power has no extra, then you can't cancel out the cost of the extra.

That is, it's okay to do this:

Telekinesis	5
Extra: Force Field Limit: Temporary

The cost for the kit and caboodle? 5 points, because the Limitation cancels the cost of the extra.
Clear it with your GM, but I think this way of writing makes it clear that the Force Field has the Temporary limitation, not the TK power.

To be clear: If you wrote the power this way, the limitation would still cancel the cost of the extra:

Telekinesis Limit: Temporary	5
Extra: Force Field

The rules aren't clear, but I'd interpret that as meaning that the Temporary limitation applies to the Telekinesis and pretty much every Extra on it, including the Force Field. (Feel free to correct me, and if you get agreement otherwise from your GM, that trumps everything.)

More Examples

Telepathy

4

Cost: 4

Telepathy Extra: Rangeless 4

4

Cost: 8

Telepathy Extra: Rangeless 4	4
Telekinesis Limit: Close Range	4

Cost: 12 (8+4, and limit is given to making the Determination cost 0 on Telekinesis)

Telepathy Extra: Rangeless 4	4
Extra: Telekinesis Limit: Close Range	4

Cost: 8 (because the Limit cancels out the cost of the Telekinesis extra)

I don't think that's a complete discussion, but it includes a number of areas that seem to cause difficulty. I'll expand as necessary.

The Cornucopia Powers

Sometimes you are looking at a character with something in mind, and you think, "Hey, five powers (six if you got lucky with your origin) aren't enough!"

Yes, there is stunting, and frankly, all you need to stunt is an Advantge and there are several ways to get those. But there are a couple of powers that are meant to duplicate any other power that's reasonable for your fictional description.

Now, I'm not talking about Cosmic Power. Cosmic Power was a pretty wide-open power when ICONS was first released, but with the Assembled Edition, it's mostly just a slutty power description that will take any extra. "I have Cosmic Power...and I'll take Aquatic as an extra, and Animal Control." No, once upon a time, Cosmic Power was truly an opportunity for every power, but not now.

No, the two powers that really are meant for duplicating powers are Gadgets and Magic. (A slight change to Magic has made it encompass the "old" Cosmic Power.)

One of the things I liked about Mike Lafferty's Recluse write-up was the use of Gadgets to cover the web-shooters: Swinging was Gadgets 3, Binding was Gadgets 7 (I'm making up the ranks), and it allowed the web-shooters to do all the things they do in the comics.

Obviously, if you spend a Determination point, you don't need the attribute test. (It's not clear, but I suspect an Advantage works here as well as a Determination point. The rules only call out Determination points, though.)

The biggest disadvantage to both of them (I think--I don't have the rulebook handy) is that you don't pick a power that they emulate by default. (You do for Cosmic Power, for instance.)

Both require a page of preparation, but you can buy that off with an Extra: No Preparation.

Gadgets requires an Intellect roll against the rank of the device you have or are building. Swinging 2 is an Intellect test against 2. Binding 4 is an Intellect test against 4, and so on. Obviously, if you're naked on an island with nothing but fish skeletons and sand, the GM might deny you the use of your Gadgets ability.

Magic is a little more versatile and a touch more complex. When you get the power, you define the attribute that you roll against (Will is common, but it might be Awareness; Flex Mentallo might use Strength) and you get to define a specialty that will help, such as Occult, Power Ring Usage, or Muscle Mastery. However, Magic also has the Performance limit: you have to speak the spell, gesture with your ring, or pose magnificently. (You can buy that off with another extra, if you want.)

Magic offers Mastery, which Gadgets does not (officially): Mastery essentially means buying the power as an Extra, and then you don't have to worry about preparation or performance for that Mastery. Still, it's expensive from a point view, and it starts to look like Cosmic Power is a reasonable bet, then.

So if you're thinking that the problem with ICONS is not enough powers, try Gadgets or Magic.

• Gadgets: Intellect roll, page of preparation.
• Magic: A [choose one] attribute roll and a Specialty, page of preparation, and performance.

ICONS Templates

SYSTEM: ICONS

ICONS is fast already, and I already provided one idea for faster character creation.

However, I was creating some characters for it recently for something else, and I ended up doing this, so I thought I'd share it.

It's the archetypes from SUPERS! or the templates from  Mutants & Masterminds done as 40 point characters.

To use:

1. Pick or roll an origin (because that gives a great deal more juiciness; if all the players are, "I'm going to pick Unearthly because it offers the advantages of two origins," they're gaming the system and next time origins are just descriptions).
2. Apply origin (if the origin calls for a new power, it's at level 5)
3. If the origin calls for a new power, it's at level 5; otherwise, they have 3 or 5 points to spend.
4. Adjust Stamina and Determination if necessary.
5. Write Qualities.

Obviously, if you know the system already, you don't need templates. Go. Adjust as you are interested.

Addendum

For some of them, I've added ideas on how you could change them up in a section called "Addendum."

I have specifically not done a "Construct" one because I think the Artificial origin does a great job on that. I feel like that "Construct" is less about what the character can do and more about the character's origin and qualities, and these templates are more about what the character can do. You add the personality and qualities.

Lessons learned so far, ICONS Play-by-post

So I'm testing an ICONS adventure idea as a play-by-post thing in G+. This is an experiment for me; I'm not currently in a position to actually meet people who play, and this seemed like a reasonable compromise.

We've only just begun playing. Fortunately, one of the players has much more experience with play-by-post games, so I'm leaning a bit on him. Here's what I've found so far:

• Point buy or random; not both. I'm pretty easy about character creation, and the game system really does even out power levels with the Determination point mechanism. I figured I'd let them either create the character they wanted (point buy) or roll up a character. It doesn't matter if the system evens things out: there are hurt feelings when Jack Point-buy is stuck with a 45-point character and Jill Random rolls up a 63-point character. It makes for better vibes among people if you pick one or the other. There are a couple of alternatives: Jill Random looks at her character and if the character is over 50 points, picks a limit for the highest power; if the character is under 40 points, puts an extra on the highest power; assign a higher point value than 45. But it's easier to avoid the issue.
• Pre-gens are tough to do right. Pre-gens were an afterthought with me. The players asked if I had any, and I found some I had done for a previous trial with in-person players. I did the pre-gens as random roll, and then picked some. I think I tended to pick the higher point ones. Provide pre-gens and the higher point ones get picked. I can't prove that--I've only had one pre-gen picked, but if you want to play a character, why not pick the one with more or better powers? So if you're going to offer pre-gens, use the point value as a way to make the pre-gens at roughly the same power level.
• Acting player/GM rolls 2d6-7. Yes, according to the rules, each side rolls 1d6. But what I realized is that if you post the villains or some fraction of their writeups, then each person can resolve a task in one roll. 
• Don't do initiative. We're trying this. People just post when they can, and I summarize at the end of the page. I might (haven't decided yet) go for straight coordination as initiative. That would be a house rule.
• Start in media res. This whole thing is slow, so you probably don't want to have a week of "and what are you doing?" Maybe the players mention what they're interrupting to be here.
• Regular posts and a default action. Post frequently, and every character has a default thing that they do if the player can't post. Blast, recover, hide, whatever...that's what the character does if the player can't make it by the deadline.

Maybe this whole thing will fall apart. I hope not: we're doing a single (long-ish) adventure, and I hope the limited scope will keep us moving. But even if it fails, I expect to learn useful things from this.

ICONS Tricks, part III

SYSTEM: ICONS

Just a quickie that Steve Kenson just pointed out.

You can certainly take the Limit: Source or Limit: Removable on a power that comes from a device, but the trade-off is that you no longer get Trouble from losing it.

The advantage to an item labeled as a Device is that you can generate Determination with it. Even if your Trained hero is an antisocial loner with no Qualities whatsoever, you can create determination just by having the Lonercycle stolen or the Lonerlasso broker. If the Lonercycle or the Lonerlasso is given with the Limit Source, you can't do that. You probably have more Determination because you used the limit to offset the Determination loss, but it is a trade-off, and you do have to consider it.

Power of the day

SYSTEM: ICONS

So about six minutes ago I had this idea for someone whose power is sort of duplication, but each duplicate represents a different part of the character's personality...and who has different powers. She or he splits and the new character represents something else. Sometimes the character pulls out the butt-kicking side, sometimes the brainy side, sometimes the manipulative emotion-controlling side, and sometimes the transformative "I'll change to be with you" chameleon side.

This is not a power that I immediately said, "Hey, it's easy to do."

This is kind of like Alter Ego, in that it's a different set of powers and a different character, and kind of like Duplication, in that both versions are around. (Otherwise, it would be straight Alter Ego.)

But it suddenly occurred to me that you could do it like this:

Duplication, Extra: Side Effect (Alter Ego)

Every time the duplication goes off, boom, the Alter Ego goes off for the duplicate. And you can either use a straight there-are-n-duplicates (except when narratively interesting)  or you can take the Dial-H-for-Hero serial extra on Alter Ego, and the character never knows what duplicate he's going to get, whether it's a known duplicate or some other aspect of personality.

As a GM, I'd probably ask the player to not go with the serial Alter Ego duplicate, just to keep things faster at the table.

EDIT the first: This is, of course, the Crazy Jane/Black Annis power, which I only just realized.

EDIT the second: Or, as pointed out by the lovely and talented Fabricio, you can do serial Alter Ego power by having the player or the GM generate a series of heroes that the character will turn into.  Depending on the degree of trust between GM and player, the GM might want to look them over before the game, but they're all likely to be gone soon. (There is the plotline where one of the supercharacter refuses to turn back--the Miracleman Jr. scenario--but the player and the GM will probably agree on that, because it isn't the concept of the character.)

The ups and downs of Abilities

SYSTEM: ICONS

Quick one today--gotta get ready for Mothers' Day. 

One of the things that ICONS doesn't do well as written is powers that adjust abilities. Yes, it has Ability Boost, but I'm thinking of things like a villain who drains an ability or or a suit of armor that "doubles his Strength"--or increases it  by +1.

The biggest problem with using Ability Boost is that the ability level drops by one after its use. For whatever reason, there is no Extra that buys this off, though you can make one up. The other is that by default it lasts for level number of panels. (There is an Extra to buy that one off.)

Ability Increase can be used for this sort of thing, with the Source Limit, but the game also lets you say, "As a normal, he's Strength 3". I don't want to get too far into having rules for everything because that way lies the Hero System. It's useful for suits of powered armor, though, without having to go, Transform: Grants wearer the following powers...

How do you drain abilities? Nullification doesn't explicitly touch abilities under 7 (they're not powers), but you could create an extra that will let it. Something like, oh, Nullification Extra: affects abilities, Limit: Extra only lets you create the equivalent of Champions' Will Drain. I would probably let it affect Stamina by default (it does in the comics, I think).

What else is tough to do in ICONS?

Conversions of Characters

This is just a reprint of something I wrote on Google+.

Conversions for ICONS

Now that I've done about a dozen A:EMH conversions for ICONS Assembled (not all are posted), I have some ideas about the conversion process. Understand that this is me thinking, and it in no way binds you to my ideas. For instance, I notice that ptah3 on the Yahoo group and I have different takes on some characters. Mine isn't right and his isn't wrong—they're just different.

So here are some guidelines I've find useful in doing conversions.

Less is more.

If it's a rarely-used power, then maybe it's a stunt. Randomly-created characters top out at 6 powers—I expect that long-running other-media characters have more powers, but ask yourself, “Can this be a stunt?” Example: Wasp can grow as well as shrink, but the only place I remember it is the episode Ultron-5.

How are they going to use the Qualities?

Can you imagine saying, “Because I'm The Strongest One There Is I can rip the arms off Ultron”? Or the GM saying, “Because you're The Strongest One There Is they are afraid of you and call the army”?  Sure, some Qualities are going to be mostly-positive or mostly-negative, but try to find a flip side. (For me, this is the area that really differs from the first release.) Every significant fight should offer the characters a chance to earn Determination as well as spend it.

Try finding what the character's stories are mostly about—Walt Simonson once said that Thor's stories are often about the parent he can never satisfy. 

Look at the source material.

Several times I thought that Alternate Form was the answer, but it just doesn't behave the same as the character does. Just because they say something ("Made of ionic energy!") doesn't mean it transliterates to game terms.

Look at the rules repeatedly.

I worried about whether the Hulk should have Life Support (cold) because of the time in the Arctic, and then I realized that at Strength 10 he was never going to fail his exposure Strength roll. Life support was not necessary in that case. Stuff like that always catches me off-guard so you might as well be wary too. I was very proud when I realized that the Uni-Beam could be a stunt of the repulsor beams.

Beware levels over 8. 

They should be really special. Once you have one character who's Strength 10, you want another one to fight him, and a third who has Damage Resistance 10 who can't be hurt by him. That way lies inflation. In ICONS, a character who is Strength 7 will sometimes win a Strength challenge against a Strength 10 character, despite the "fact" that one can lift about 10 times more. You don't need Resistance To Damage every time, either: in ICONS, Resistance is very powerful. A level of 8 is the best in the world; a 9 is the best of the century. A 10 is legendary. 

It's your game.

Scale everything together for your game. This is especially true if you're mixing companies for source material. Who's stronger, Superman or Hulk? Depends on who's publishing or writing the comic. In your game, you get to choose what's true in your world.. 

Leadership and Villains

SYSTEM: ICONS 

I admit that I frequently wondered what the point was of buying Leadersip for villains. After all, villains don't have determination, so the business about team determination didn't apply. It seemed like flavour to give to villains.

So I did as I often do and actually read the rules. In the description for Leadership is this line:

"Leadership is also a useful specialty for tactical maneuvers to learn, create, or activate qualities."

It can improve the attempt of a villain team to learn the Quality of a hero, which is great. Don't forget to apply the context of the team--the villain team Gravel Pit (Granite, Peastone, Chip, and Excavator) probably can't use Chip's Leadership to discover that the heroine Lextalion is secretly Prudence Juris, ADA, but they might be able to use it to help discover that her teammate Mudslide loses his shape shifting power if it gets too cold (Quality "Fair Weather Friend").

I might even go further and let the villain's Leadership oppose heroic maneuvers to try and discover villain Qualities. The leader has done things to cover up that they're all vulnerable to electrical attacks, for instance. 

Some ICONS tricks, part II

SYSTEM: ICONS

If you are converting a character from Champions, and said character has an NND, how do you represent it in ICONS?

Today's idea--

The attack is an Energy Drain, Extra: Ranged, Limit: Blocked by X, where X is whatever stops the NND.

No, it's not exactly  the same, but it's as close as I come today.

Vulnerabilities are a different thing.

I want a villain to take extra damage from a certain type of Attack, like the Champions vulnerability. Normally it's a limit on the defence (Resistance to Damage 8, Limit: not vs. cheese). 

Depending on the effect you want, I might try different vulnerability wordings.

If you want to be nibbled down, maybe my original thought--"Fire is a degree more effective" so even an effect of zero is treated like a moderate success.

Or maybe "Fire is twice as effective!" So a fire aura of 3 is treated as if it's a 6.

Steve's "Fire! My only weakness!" is great if what you want is stunning. I could justify the other responses, too

Minions could have "Kill it with fire."

Some ICONS tricks, part 1

SYSTEM: ICONS

These are some tricks I've developed or been told about ICONS Assembled character creation. I have this as part 1 because I'm sure that others will occur.

Do you need that life support? The rules for exposure indicate a Strength check against Difficulty 0. If the character's Strength is over 5, they're never going to fail the exposure check. There are cases where the life support is necessary, but for things like the Hulk wandering in the Arctic, it's not really needed.

Do you need that leaping? When I was putting together a 45 point Spider-Man, I had Leaping 2...but according to the rules, a character with strength 7 or higher can jump to Extended Range (you need to yell). An early info page on Spider-Man claimed he could jump across the street or up a three-storey building. That sounds like Extended Range to me.

Do you want that gadget to be a limitation? By default, devices are just devices. Yes, they can be taken away, but it's assumed that the character has more, or will get them back, and they're not a limit in game terms. Steve Kenson pointed out that the Source Limit works well to represent the kind of unique gadget without which the powers don't work.

Is that really Alternate Form? Doing conversions for characters from Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, I ran across three characters who were said to be made of energy (Wonder Man, Living Laser, and Zzaxx). In the first and third cases, they seem to interact quite well with the world, mostly through punching. Alternate Form: Energy explicitly denies that. Instead, I went with Qualities that said they were made of energy. That meant that players could come up with all those funky energy-related schemes but the characters could still punch and be punched.

Autofire Fast Attack... Something I've come up with. If a character has Fast Attack, let them combine attacks with themselves. This means that, say, Wasp with her stingers of 4 can fire twice at someone, and (assuming they both hit) combine them for a +1 damage, doing 5 damage. I'd probably put the implicit limit that it can't beat Resistance to Damage if the special effect doesn't allow it (armor might have a weak spot the attacks are focusing on, but a force field probably not).

Beware the Rhino! Another possibility I've come up with but not yet tested. Suppose a character has the Specialty: Power (Strength) Expert. He applies one of the specialties to the to-hit roll, increasing the chance of a massive success. If he gets to test for a slam attack, he then applies the other specialty to the roll for the slam attack, increasing the likelihood that the target will be slammed. This is to represent those characters who are very good at hitting people and knocking them out of the way.

Its force is so terrible I can use it only once! If a character has some overpowered weapon that has limited uses, rather than buying it full strength and putting a limitation on it, go the other way: the power is a stunt of some other power, using the +1 damage to push. The character has to have an advantage for this to work, usually gained by taking a trouble like "Other armor systems fail!" Iron Man's UniBeam is, I think, a fine example of this. It works only a limited number of times, and does extra damage.