Jab’s Power Profiles: Deleted 2nd Edition Powers- Ward! Area Effects!

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FuzzyBoots
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles: Quickness! Super-Speed! Teleport!

Post by FuzzyBoots »

I commonly put in on my grappling hook equipment for Street-level Heroes, alongside Swinging and Wall-Crawling (low level to model having to cast the grappling up and then clamor higher).
Jabroniville
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Movement- Sure-Footed

Post by Jabroniville »

MOVEMENT- SURE-FOOTED:

Effect:
You reduce the Speed penalty for movement through obtacles & obstructions by 1 per rank. This means that this is one of the only things in here that can be used for 3+ ranks... except even the "Environment" power only lets you impede people by two ranks. So effectively it's a 1-2 rank power.

Who Uses It?: I feel this power used to get used a lot more back in the day- old-school writers were quite interested in Spider-Man's ability to cling to stuff, and so it was used fairly often. The Beast used to have this ability mentioned CONSTANTLY in the old Marvel cards. I guess Octopi and other cephalopods do this.

Extras & Flaws: None, really.

Related Stuff: Other "Spider-Man" stuff, especially Wall-Crawling. Some immovable characters have a variant that's "Resist Movement" application of Strength.

How Effective Is It?: I dunno- 2-4 powers for a random thing that I can't imagine comes up a lot. It's effectively a power to counter another power, though the one it counters is often VERY expensive.

Fixing It?: *shrug*
Shock
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles: Quickness! Super-Speed! Teleport!

Post by Shock »

It's the parkour power. I could see it being useful in chase scenes, especially in low power games. Definitely seems like it could be an Advantage/Feat rather than a power.
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JDRook
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles: Quickness! Super-Speed! Teleport!

Post by JDRook »

It doesn't come up often, but it would be a good one for various Environmental Controllers. 2 ranks of Surefooted limited to your PC's specialty (ice, oil, weather, etc) would let them walk through Impedes of the right Descriptor for 1p. Arguably this could be folded in to things like the 10p Descriptor Immunity.
Shock
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles: Quickness! Super-Speed! Teleport!

Post by Shock »

JDRook wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 2:24 am It doesn't come up often, but it would be a good one for various Environmental Controllers. 2 ranks of Surefooted limited to your PC's specialty (ice, oil, weather, etc) would let them walk through Impedes of the right Descriptor for 1p. Arguably this could be folded in to things like the 10p Descriptor Immunity.
That's pretty much the function of Movement:Environmental Adaptation
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Batgirl III
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles: Quickness! Super-Speed! Teleport!

Post by Batgirl III »

You need to have more foot-chasing across the rooftops, through sky-scrapper construction sites, overgrown jungles, and dismal swamps if you aren’t seeing any usefulness for Sure-Footed beyond countering the impedes movement rate function of the Environment Effect.
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Jabroniville
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles: Quickness! Super-Speed! Teleport!

Post by Jabroniville »

Batgirl III wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 2:46 am You need to have more foot-chasing across the rooftops, through sky-scrapper construction sites, overgrown jungles, and dismal swamps if you aren’t seeing any usefulness for Sure-Footed beyond countering the impedes movement rate function of the Environment Effect.
haha, thank god I checked and my Tarzan build already had it: https://www.echoesofthemultiverse.com/v ... 330#p64330
Shock
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles: Quickness! Super-Speed! Teleport!

Post by Shock »

Batgirl III wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 2:46 am You need to have more foot-chasing across the rooftops, through sky-scrapper construction sites, overgrown jungles, and dismal swamps if you aren’t seeing any usefulness for Sure-Footed beyond countering the impedes movement rate function of the Environment Effect.
Those are really hard to adjudicate in M&M. You basically have to run skill challenges and hope it works out OK.
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squirrelly-sama
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles: Quickness! Super-Speed! Teleport!

Post by squirrelly-sama »

The worst thing about Sure-footed is that it's 4 times the price of just having speed limited to those situations to offset the speed reduction which would be how people would build it if the power didn't exist and basically how it functions when you actually look at the power. It's massively overpriced, whats worse is that it's not even a full immunity to getting your speed reduced it's just blocking one rank of reduction. So for every 2 points of this power you get a rank of speed limited to difficult terrain. There's even a question if this is ever even helpful, since mobility is something basically everyone invests in and the few tht don't usually have ranged attacks.
Shock
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles: Quickness! Super-Speed! Teleport!

Post by Shock »

squirrelly-sama wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 5:14 am The worst thing about Sure-footed is that it's 4 times the price of just having speed limited to those situations to offset the speed reduction which would be how people would build it if the power didn't exist and basically how it functions when you actually look at the power. It's massively overpriced, whats worse is that it's not even a full immunity to getting your speed reduced it's just blocking one rank of reduction. So for every 2 points of this power you get a rank of speed limited to difficult terrain. There's even a question if this is ever even helpful, since mobility is something basically everyone invests in and the few tht don't usually have ranged attacks.
Yeah it's the same price to add 2 ranks of speed, be as fast as you originally would have been through the reduction and much faster otherwise. It really should just be a 1 rank Advantage: Obstacles don't slow you down
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Batgirl III
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles: Quickness! Super-Speed! Teleport!

Post by Batgirl III »

If they ever make an M&M4e, I think they should explore having various Power Effects have an “entry cost” for the first rank and then a different points per rank cost afterwards.

The various “big” movement effects – Speed, Flight, Teleport – all have a much bigger impact on a character when you go from 0 to 1 than from 1 to 2. Likewise, the various “minor” movement effects – safe-fall, leaping, wall-crawling – are little more than feats or versions of the “big” powers with flaws baked in (Leaping is just Flight with a 250 MPH cap and you have to land eventually).
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Harnos
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Re: Quickness

Post by Harnos »

Jabroniville wrote: Tue Jan 03, 2023 11:09 pm QUICKNESS:

Effect:
Unique among powers, this literally just lets you do basic tasks more quickly than normal. Subtract the effect rank from the normal time alotted to do something- typically, each rank DOUBLES your speed! The example is that Quickness 7 lets you do a routine task taking an hour in a mere 30 seconds. Anything taking less than a second "may" (if the GM allows it) be treated as a Free Action. It's only 1 point per rank, which is quite cheap.

Who Uses It?: Many Speedsters, especially types like the Flash, Superman & Quicksilver, do this as a way to show off or solve a problem REALLY quickly. Old 1950s comics have Superman save Metropolis from a huge meteor shower in SECONDS just by flying around and vibrating buildings back into place good as new when they're shaken apart. Computer-minded characters will often solve math problems or the like very quickly, making it a rare power that normal humans can justify in small amounts.

Extras & Flaws: Limited to Mental Tasks is common for computers, robots and anyone who's a super, SUPER genius. You could also have it be only Physical Tasks. Others are limited to only one kind of task (math, reading, etc.)- a -2 Flaw.

Related Stuff: Speedsters also tend to have Multiattack or Area Attack to showcase them striking multiple people at once- this is a separate (and expensive!) power.

How Effective Is It?: This is mostly a utility power sent in to... well, justify the stuff Speedsters do in comics. It's not usually THAT helpful, but can be in huge amounts (a hero defeating a certain scheme in a few rounds instead of spending months doing it). It was seen far more often back in the 1950s to explain away certain things, so it's helpful for a secret identity (Clark Kent once got tied to a chair, but escaped so fast he "disappeared" and changed to Superman. Heroes who can change clothes quickly have a great advantage over others in the secret identity game.

A key "trick" could be combining this with the "Inventor" Feat (which almost no comic book characters do- it's too unbalancing)- it costs an hour per power-point for an invention... a Speedster with Quickness 10 could build a 10-pp invention in only twelve seconds! um, GMs should limit this, as it's effectively 11 points (Inventor + Quickness 10, maybe with Speed and the like) for an "Any Power Ever" one-off.

Fixing It?: Nothing really to fix here, honestly. Just... watch carefully if you're a GM, because sneaky players might try to get things past you.
I think Quickness could be built as part of an array for many speedster characters. They could choose between multi-attack or quickness for example.
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Batgirl III
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles: Quickness! Super-Speed! Teleport!

Post by Batgirl III »

When building the Eldar from Warhammer 40,000, I gave them all enough ranks in Quickness to accomplish physical tasks twice as fast as baseline Humans and mental tasks approximately ten times as fast.

I use the Eldar as one of the space-faring empires in my homebrew world, sort of filling the same “niche” as the Shi’ar or Kree. Their rapidity in communication amongst themselves (they can can an hour’s worth of communication in a matter of minutes) is useful in baffling outsiders and their physical actions being ever so slightly more efficient and rapid that a normal Humans is something that I try to stress in roleplay interactions, pushing the Uncanny Valley nature of them as aliens.
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Harnos
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Re: Flight

Post by Harnos »

Davies wrote: Fri Dec 23, 2022 10:18 pm
JDRook wrote: Fri Dec 23, 2022 9:56 pm The "Winged" Flaw can also be applied to things that aren't actually wings, but can also get entangled to stop Flight in the same way. A propeller on a helicopter or even a modern drone is going to go down if you throw a bolo at it just right, the same as any winged PC. Tossing something in a jet engine could work too. For the sake of concept you might want to give it a different name but mechanically it would be identical.
Which means that the Flight of most real-world flying vehicles should only be priced at 1 point per level. (Likewise, the Swimming of most real-world water vehicles should be priced at 1 point per 2 levels, as it's Limited to surface travel.)
That makes sense.
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Batgirl III
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Re: Jab's Power Profiles: Quickness! Super-Speed! Teleport!

Post by Batgirl III »

Flying 60’ per turn is clearly a lot more impactful to a character than a ground-speed of 60’ per turn.
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