Sparking the imagination

While I was looking over the ICONS material in preparation for this playtest, it occurred to me that some of the games systems I read cause a flurry of sparks, and some do not. Wild Talents does not, even though I can see where it should; Champions did. What I've heard about AMP doesn't yet, but I haven't read the book(s). Interestingly, Mutants & Masterminds 3rd edition doesn't for me, but 1st did. (Second edition is sort of in the middle.)

ICONS first edition did, and second edition less so.

So I've been trying to figure out why that is, for me. Because this is a very personal thing; I know what makes one person's head light up makes another person go, "Meh."

Part of it is the specificity of the game system. The more generic the game system gets, the more flexible it might be, but the more I really have to get into it before I can say, "Oh, here's something we can exploit." In Champions, I was younger but I would also create characters based on the game system. Oh, this character uses this power, which means he can do this, or he can't do that. System mastery is, I guess, part of that appeal, but there's also the old creativity exercise--it's very hard to describe a wall in an interesting way, but it's easy to describe a brick.

Another part is the setting. Does it have nooks and crannies that I can take advantage of? There's a fine line between Freedom City's plethora of characters who probably render the PCs redundant, and the lack of a setting in ICONS or Supers! but both the latter have implied settings that you can grab onto. (Or not, depending on your tastes.)

Part must be presentation, but I'm not sure how.

Part is creativity. I'm sorry to say it, but a chunk of the problem for Capes, Cowls, and Villains Foul for me is that none of the sample characters grabbed my attention. If they had, maybe I'd have looked deeper into the system and grokked it more fully. I grabbed the first villains book, hoping it would do it for me, and it didn't. Now, that might be rectified if I played a game with someone who knows, but I often have to teach myself these games out of the book.

You can combine the setting and the creativity to get some idea of the core activities, what the world is like. I know that to a large degree, the worlds are superhero worlds, and yet some of them (just like some comics) fall flat for me.

Your thoughts?

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.

Sidekicks

One of the things that's part of superhero lore that doesn't show up a lot in RPGs is the sidekick. (By sidekick I also include pets and familiars, so Zabu, the sabre tooth tiger with Ka-Zar, counts as much as Robin or Stripesy.) I'm really talking about sidekicks as sidekicks, not a Teen Titans model where they fend for themselves.

A superhero sidekick is tough to play. When I think about it, I've only had sidekicks show up three times in decades of superhero RPGs: Once, the sidekick was actually an ex-sidekick; another time, the sidekick was simply another player character hero, and there's an agreement between players that character B is the sidekick of character A; in DC Heroes, where there was a specific in-game mechanic for handling sidekicks (that also existed in Golden Age of Champions, but I never used it). I've used sidekicks as a GM to comic effect (such as with Gecko and Lizardboy, where Lizardboy was actually the crazed millionaire's middle-aged butler), but for players, not so much.

Who Plays the Sidekick?

There seem to me to be four options:

1. The GM plays the sidekick.
2. The player plays the sidekick.
3. Another player plays the sidekick.
4. Rotating people play the sidekick.

Which is best depends on the situation and your players.

If the GM plays the sidekick, you have the advantage that the sidekick can do things that the player doesn't expect. There's also likely to be more emphasis on the disadvantages of a sidekick.

If the player adds the sidekick on to his or her usual load, you have the advantage that the regular PC and the sidekick really do function as one person. The player gets twice as many opportunities to act, which can be a disadvantage (though the player probably paid for this advantage, with an actual cost or a quality). It's rather like Duplicating powers that way.

If another player plays the sidekick, you have the same advantage as if the GM plays, but the amount of trouble generated depends on the players' relationships. I would assume things are easier for the character, but that won't always be true.

If you play the sidekicks in troupe style, then you can take advantage of all of these. 

I think it might be interesting in a low-membership group to have each player take a sidekick of one of the other players. That is, Player A plays Character A and Sidekick B, Player B plays Character B and Sidekick C, and Player C plays Character C and Sidekick A. You get six characters and because the sidekicks are usually lower-powered, they don't stress the players out as much.

Odd Sidekicks

Everyone thinks of Robin, the boy hostage, but really there are a variety of sidekicks and one of them might be right for your character, at least for a while.

• The sidekick is the one with the power, rather like Johnny Thunder and the Thunderbolt.
• The sidekick is unwanted, rather like Frogboy or some other minor character who tries to emulate the PC.
The sidekick is actually disposable: the hero is running a Be A Sidekick For A Week contest on his website (or such a contest was run without his or her knowledge), and the winner of the contest is an elderly man who has always wanted to be a superhero. ("Look, Brassman, you said that in the armor, anyone could be a superhero. So I built a contest based on that. You signed off...it was in that stack of forms.")
The sidekick draws fire, either because he or she is immortal or very tough in some way.

In terms of powers, sidekicks are usually copies, having powers or origins essentially like the PC (Robin, Kid Flash), so the operative phrase becomes "Like the hero but..." However, some sidekicks are spackle or complements, filling in some of the gaps that the hero has. In both an RPG and a book, this often occurs because the GM has determined that they need some power in order to get the plot coupons they need to advance. And some sidekicks are wildcards, some kind of random assortment of powers, joined to the PC through some social or psychological mechanism. 

Animal companions tend to be complements, granting the hero some extra powers in battle or reconnaisance.

What Stories Do You Tell?

If having a sidekick is going to be a special event, then you have to know what you plan on doing with the sidekick. Usually sidekicks are all about Learning Responsibility and About Power. (We don't need sidekicks as audience stand-ins because the players have regular characters for that.) 

You could also use sidekicks as a way to talk about the grit and stick-to-it-iveness that one needs to be a hero. There's also betrayal and infiltration stories, where the sidekick turns out not to be so nice.

What Do You Do Mechanically?

In Supers!, a sidekick would be an Advantage, with the number of dice indicating how powerful the sidekick is. Unless there's special approval from the GM, I'd insist that sidekicks are less powerful than the PC; it's probably a 2D or 3D advantage.

In ICONS, you dedicate a quality to your sidekick. Unless you've arranged otherwise, sidekick powers top out at 7, with origins adding to the powers...until they get to 7. (This gives them roughly the two-thirds suggested in some game supplement. Wasn't it ICONS Team-Up?

The TL;DR version is that I suspect it's rare to have the sidekick as a regular thing...perhaps a bit more common with familiars-as-sidekicks. But there's no reason why you can't introduce a sidekick as a running plot for a while.

A general plotting rule

For all my superhero consumption:

If there's an easy way that normal people would handle a problem, consider that method for your super characters.

I know there are exceptions, such as when you want to show that someone is out of step with reality. Still, if it's something as easy as, "Phone work and claim the person is sick to buy time" rather than "Have the shape-shifting alien try to impersonate the person before the boss," well, I have to think, go the simple way. No, it's not as much fun as watching Melissa Benoist get to play a person pretending to be a person that she pretends to be, but it makes me throw up my hands less.

A supers setting of no import

Because I'm bored, here's rough notes for a setting start.

All kinds of heroes (mutants, transformed, robots, magic, aliens, etc.). If you can justify it, it can exist. Heroes have been public for a generation, starting with Galaxy in 1979. (Yes, that means that there were decades of superhero comics to draw from.) Some think that the pre-existing comics shaped what came.

North American superheroes appeared after the meltdown at Three Mile Island. Surely it wasn't the radiation; dirtier bombs had been exploded in earlier years. But if metahumans have long been with us, the incident at Three Mile Island spurred them to be public. Galaxy had just come into her powers, so she is no proof either way.

In the recent past, there has been a battle between good and bad on an unprecedented scale, though the numbers of metahumans were never so high that everyone was affected. At the end of it, the various groups were shattered. Oh, there might be a member or two left of some (even most) of them, but the : mighty battle between good and bad, has destroyed both and left power vacuums. (If we ever want to bring them back, they aren't dead, they're in the massive crossover event Clandestine Infinities.)

The person on the street in North America would recognize as good-guy teams the Liberty Union, the Justice Vanguard, the Appeal, the Shadow Cabinet, and the Golden Balance, and hero names like Exalted, Galaxy, Nimble, Spicer, Suitable, Maximan, and the Sky Clan. The same person would know about Doctor Apocalypse, about Count Infinity, and about the Darwin Association, who have all very publicly tried to destroy the world.

They are less likely to know about the other criminal organizations, such as the Benevolent Organization, the Parliament of Hunters, the Federated Autarky, and the Underworld Syndicate. Those organizations are in disarray, though they're likely to be re-built in some form or another. 

The Atlanteans have only just come out in the last fifteen years (since the disasters off the coast of Africa), though they claim to be older. There seem to be at least three types of Atlanteans, ranging from the human-looking sub-mariners through the merpeople to the Deep Ones. They are beginning to be a threat to shipping, though nominally some counrties have treaties with them. (Adventure idea: protecting a watery caravan.)

Fight club exists, and it's for supers. Imported from Thailand, the underground combat rings for metas are a place where heroes and villains have both trained.

This is a time when super villains start to appear, eager to make names for themselves and consolidate control. At the same time, non-super organized crime--the mundanes--are trying to re-grasp what has slipped from their fists.

There is no obvious government organization dedicated to metas--that function has been distributed among all the different alphabet-soup groups. There is fierce rivalry between the groups. 

But you don't start with any of this--you start with something small. A group of female villains who have all adopted code names that start with B (who call themselves the "B Hive") have decided on something flashy as their coming out crime. They expect police involvement and maybe a superhero or two, but the point is to demonstrate that they are tough and can't be stopped. 

This first crime is a pretty standard bank robbery, except that they have their escape already planned--they expect that the psionic powers of one of their team will let them leave whenever they want. 

There are more members than the ones on the job, but this caper is Brawn, Blister, Blackbird, and Bungee, with Brainz held in nearby reserve.

 

A link

What a week--from funeral to sick-as-the-canid-of-your-choice. 

But because I was talking about parasites a while ago (and because I like parasites), here is a bit of news:

http://phys.org/news/2016-02-morbid-leopards-toxoplasmosis-parasitized-chimpanzees.html

Now, there's an idea--an intelligent parasite can only breed in organisms with a certain set of characteristics. Before its mind was subsumed the host left its planet to prevent infecting others. (He was a genius on his world, a twelfth-level intellect on a planet of fifth-level intellects.)

The parasite has caused superpowers because they're a side-effect in humans of the characteristics that the parasite needs. 

That might be an interesting end-game to a supers campaign. All sorts of organisms can be infected, but only in supers (or a certain type of super--one of the player characters, perhaps?) can it breed. The PCs have to stop the infection from reaching those individuals and wipe out the infection... Or failing that, wipe out the individual.

Who, I'm sure, is beloved by enough people that it's going to be a battle. 

Another family death

Sorry for being so quiet. It's a combination of work and another family death. 

I guess my family has just reached that age. 

(So long as we don't repeat that time 20 years ago when I did six funerals in six months.)

What's your game about?

SYSTEM: Any

So Howard Tayler was, as of GenCon, writing a roleplaying game set in the world of Schlock Mercenary (I think the Kickstarter is over, so if you didn't know about it, you have to wait until it's really available). The podcast Writing Excuses this week was about worldbuilding for RPGs, and the very first piece of advice from the guests was knowing the purpose of your game. Not the higher moral purpose, but rather, when someone is playing your game, what are they doing? What's the usual activity?

And for superhero games, part one of that answer is almost always going to be, "Beating up supervillains." Another part is going to be, "Encouraging fun at the table" (however you describe fun) which I prefer to "good roleplaying" because I have discovered that "good roleplaying" varies with the group and the player or GM. So can "encouraging fun" but you run into fewer conflicts about whether a particular action was angst or wangst.

But as it happens, I'm also drafting the part of one manuscript where I talk about potential rewards.

One of the things I happen to believe is that, when you get points for killing things, everything looks like it's got hit points. (I ran into the equivalent when running Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.) So what do I want to encourage in the context of the game? What's the point of this little adventure?

Back in the Herozoic era, when I began, there was a table for XP, and it had things like:

• Just being there (1)
• Long involved adventure (2)
• More than one session (+1)
• Outnumbered (+1)
• Clever, inventive, roleplayed well (+1)
• Characters totally failed at purpose of adventure (-1)

Now, that's not "Kill things and take their stuff" territory, but it is kind of vague, and you notice that only the lines "clever, inventive, roleplayed well" and "totally failed" have anything to do with what you as a player did after you got there. More than half was just showing up. Frankly, my first draft of experience looked pretty much like that. (I've been influenced, what can I say?)

Both Supers! and ICONS have abandoned that XP approach for an "achievements" approach. Minor achievements might be just showing up (and as I get older and life seems to get more complicated, I do appreciate it), but they can also be things like resolving the storyline. There's a little less of the "you showed up, you get a point" kind of thinking.

Still, they don't give you an actual guideline. In one way, that's awful, but in another way, that's great. You get to define what your game is about. You get to say what a minor achievement is, and what a major achievement is. In fact, Base Raiders formalizes this as goals for your character. (Some other time we'll talk about goals-you-can-achieve and goals-that-are-your-pole-star, and whether they're the same for everybody.)

Because you know that players are going to do whatever gets them character advancement. If it's "solve a mystery" then they're going to find a mystery and solve it. And, out of fairness, the GM better put the thing in there that gets them character advancement. It's not nice to say they advance by solving a mystery and then not providing one, or worse, by killing kobolds and then giving them a whole village of kobolds they have to save.

Frankly, I still think just showing up is worth a point, but why not give it out at the beginning of the session instead of the end? Every Supers! player gets a competency die, just because they're there. ICONS players get Determination points.

But beyond that... Depends on the type of campaign you're running.

You are the city's premier group.
Minor achievements:  Rebuild the section of town destroyed by natural disaster. Resolve the plot of the session. Protect your secret identity. Make it to your son's graduation. Have a date.
Major achievements: Rescue the mayor. Save the city from the doomsday device. Help the new team. Expose the imposters.

You are shadowy vigilantes.
Minor achievements:  Don't get caught. Take down bad guys without help.
Major achievements: Escape jail. Keep your secret identity.

You are students at a super school.
Minor achievements:  Get that cute MOTAS to notice you. Survive hazing. Reach out to the new kid. Survive the betrayal of the cute MOTAS. Fight off the bad guys from the rival school but be open to the good guys from the rival school.
Major achievements: Get picked for a super team. Pass the test. Discover and defeat the invading clones. Get the school to change its policies.

You are a supervillain's enforcement group.
Minor achievements: Succeed in the mission, which he will outline to you; keep your family in the dark; escape jail; don't lose any members in a fight with the heroes; avoid getting killed or fired by the boss.
Major achievements: Get a promotion; get your superior arrested or slaughtered; get your daughter into a good school; manage to hide your true identity all through Parent-Teacher Night even though rival villain or hero group shows up.

To add to your animal mimicry/totem list

SYSTEM: Any

The biggest problem with playing (or writing) a character who has the powers of the animal kingdom! is that you have to know some of the cool animal powers out there. Yes, you can go the Vixen route, and grab the cheetah, the rhino, a vulture, a killdeer, and an elephant, and you have speed, strength, and flight, which is good. (Not knocking those powers or animals at all.)

But sometimes you want the weird factoids that you used to get from reading comics in the sixties. You know, "Dung beetles can pull 1000 times their own weight!" and other factoids that Gardner Fox used to throw into stories.

I need a place to put them when I run across them, and that place is here.

The noise of the pistol shrimp. Quoting Wikipedia: "The snapping shrimp [also called a "pistol shrimp"] competes with much larger animals such as the sperm whale and beluga whale for the title of loudest animal in the sea. The animal snaps a specialized claw shut to create a cavitation bubble that generates acoustic pressures of up to 80 kPa at a distance of 4 cm from the claw. As it extends out from the claw, the bubble reaches speeds of 60 miles per hour (97 km/h) and releases a sound reaching 218 decibels. The pressure is strong enough to kill small fish. It corresponds to a zero to peak pressure level of 218 decibels relative to one micropascal (dB re 1 μPa), equivalent to a zero to peak source level of 190 dB re 1 μPa at the standard reference distance of 1 m. Au and Banks measured peak to peak source levels between 185 and 190 dB re 1 μPa at 1 m, depending on the size of the claw. Similar values are reported by Ferguson and Cleary. The duration of the click is less than 1 millisecond."

Elephants communicate subsonically. So if you want characters to communicate and they don't have telepathy, and don't want to be heard by BatHearingGuy....

Love darts of the ninja slug. The ninja slug shoots darts into its potential mate. The calcium carbonate darts are tipped with hormones intended to get the target in the mood for love. If you replace the aphrodisiac hormones with other abilities, suddenly you've got a whole theme for a character.

Oppossums are immune to most venoms. Yeah, well, you figure this for an animal whose other defense is lying very, very still. But yes, oppossums have a protein called LTNF (Lethal Toxin-Neutralizing Factor) that grants them (and rats injected with LTNF) a very high resistance to the venoms of snakes, bees, and scorpions...even snakes that are not native to the same continent.

Exploding ants. A species of ant in Malaysia has members that can tighten particular glands all along its body, causing the secretions to, this is gross, explode out of the ant's head. I do not know if this kills the ant, but it probably does. What's even better (worse?) is that the explosive substance is sticky and binds together the limbs of the predator (up to a certain size, of course). The secretion has other unpleasant chemicals in it...expect a rash.

The jellyfish that's its own child...and possibly immortal. One particular jellyfish, Turritopsis nutricula, can revert to its polyp stage after reaching sexual maturity. And after that polyp gets old and becomes a jellyfish, it can do the trick again...and again...and again. Now, jellyfish polyps are immobile and tasty to many things, so it's really unlikely that there are any immortal T. nutricula, but there could be....and that kid over there might be a supervillain who's nine hundred years old and just occasionally imitates a T. nutricula. That's the scarlet jellyfish, I think (but am not sure).

Wolverine? No, hairy frog. The hairy frog can break its own bones and push them out through its skin to make claws.

Sticky stuff The stickiest salamander is the northern slimy salamander, which produces a mucous so sticky that attacking predator gets its mouth glued shut. 

Fiction vs. Roleplaying

SYSTEM: Any

While I was driving in this morning, I suddenly thought of a bit for a fantasy short story. It would probably start something like:

I heard the noise of  someone entering and I wondered if this would be the person who finally managed to kill me.

The narrator is a guardian spirit who has been trapped guarding the tomb for a long time. Long enough to regain a sense of self, long enough to be totally bored (I mean, if you have a sense of self, there is nothing to do in a tomb), long enough to want to die, but unable because of the geas to just give up.

Now, that's kind of an interesting character to run across, but I'd develop these totally differently for roleplaying than for fiction, and I offer these ideas as a way to compare and contrast the two. While roleplaying can use a lot of the same tools as fiction, I think that anyone who is trying to tell you that they are pretty much the same is wrong.

(Oh, they're very similar in a lot of ways...but they're very different in others.)

There are lots of ways this could go (maybe it's set in historical times, because the guardian spirit is that old; dress it up the right way, and it could be nearly any setting, including superheroes) but for this discussion I'm going to assume plain-vanilla F20-style fantasy. It's a secondary world fantasy, a cod-medieval world with magic.

In fiction, it would be about the relationship between the guardian spirit and the invader. In that case, I might make the invader someone who is nominally harmless, maybe a young girl that the real thieves kidnapped and threw in here to deactivate the first trap, or a young boy (young to contrast immortal with youth) who is evading others and chanced into this tomb. (This would be a good way to bring it into the modern world, by the way.)

In fiction, the other person would also have an agenda. Maybe she wants to get revenge on her uncle who sold her into this slavery, maybe he wants his family back, maybe the invader wants to help the spirit or hurt the spirit, but both sides want something.

I'd tell the story from the guardian spirit's point of view, as above. Maybe there'd be a twist ending, maybe not; maybe I'd have a third group involved, maybe not.

And, in fact, maybe the guardian spirit shares his story...he was a temple thief himself, and got caught. He thinks; he might have made that up, after seeing so many tomb robbers. He can read and write, which makes him think that maybe he was a priest. Maybe a priest turned thief?

So he tells the invader, "I have to hurt you if you cross this boundary. I like you. Please don't do it. But if you do it, you have until I hit you three times to get to this rock on the tomb and destroy it. That's how you kill me."

And none of that mental exercise is suitable for a roleplaying game.

Maybe I could use some of it with pre-generated characters and a con session. Maybe.

As a GM, what I have is a guardian spirit who wants to die, because he or she or it is bored.

I have very little control over what the characters want. I can suggest things, I can put strong forces in place, but I can't make the characters want things. It's always a choice for somebody to decide that staying in town and huffing paint would be better. Well, we assume they want to adventure, because they're playing adventurers...but they don't have to interact with the guardian spirit beyond, "What level is he? Crap. Can we get out? Right, we were running away from the barbarian horde. Well, we camp outside its range but in hiding until the angry barbarian horde goes away."

In fiction, they have to engage because I want them to. In roleplaying, they engage because they choose to. I have made the other options so awful or this one so attractive that they choose to do it.

In both cases, the stated reason can be flimsy ("it's raining") but underlying it is choice.

Now, the spirit has an interesting (to me) backstory. How are the PCs going to hear about it? In fiction, I could just provide it as part of the narration, or I could guide the conversation, but I can't do that here. What can I do?

Well, the spirit's first speech could indicate that he's been there a long, long time. I could do that with elevated speech or with something painfully direct. That is, the guardian spirit could say:

Long have I waited here for someone puissant enough to challenge me. I can never know the release of the afterlife which I have given to so many. 

Or the spirit could approach them this way:

You're using pick-axes of dwarven manufacture and your clothes are strange. Foreigners who do not know of the dangers I present? Or has so long passed that I have been forgotten?

Or:

Any special last requests? Because no one else has been a challenge. 

Or maybe the spirit kept a diary in some way. A truly suicidal spirit might do that, leaving what hints he can in the journal and throwing it beyond his own boundary so that invaders might see it. (This suggests a scene where the actual bad guys get it, and the heroes have to save the spirit in order to get rid of the bad guys, and then get rid of the spirit.) Or worse, he's done it by erosion: there is a stream that passes through the tomb, and he has used his minor telekinetic powers to guide the water over the rock, wearing it down until it says what he needs it to say. (Hope someone in the party can read it.)

It would be nice to have the backstory contain the clue to defeating him, but then the players have to know the backstory. Maybe it's a legend told among priests, or sages, or thieves, that to create this particular kind of guardian, you need a specific kind of person, and you need to chain them to the sepulchre with chains interlaced with moly whose stems are tied in a particular way, and each guardian type leads to a different type of defeat. Then the party knows they have to talk to the guardian.

At some point, I would have to decide what the powers of the guardian are. These would be tied to the actual group. Perhaps it's a minor telekinesis tied with the ability to make paired portals. He makes a hole under the thief or thieves, and they start falling from one opening into the other. When they've reached terminal velocity, he makes the portals go away and they slam into the ground. If someone in the party has wings, he holds them together with his telekinesis, so they can't fly...and they eventually slam into the ground.

Yeah, that wouldn't kill a high-level party, but he could stop your blood flow with that portal thing (the portals are from the exit of your heart straight to the entrance, and the rest of your blood just...sits...so you pass out from lack of oxygen eventually). Certain spells would stop it, sure, but that's always true.

For my gang, figuring out the powers would be important, because that would be part of the key to defeating him, or re-directing him to the barbarian horde.

Same idea, difference focus.