Supers: The Defense Dilemma

As pleased as I am with the progress that's being made on this (on a daily basis, no less!), I'm not so taken with it that I don't recognize its flaws. And even if I were, I have commenter Robert Stehwien, aka The Guy Who Keeps Me Honest, to point them out, which is awesome. No, really -- it is. I mean, I know it's hard to read tone of voice over the Internet, so you may want to take that "awesome" as sarcastic, but seriously, it's sincere.

Specifically, the issue that keeps coming up is the Defense Dilemma: If you haven't bought up your mental and physical defenses to Extraordinary or above, you're boned the first time you run into Jean Grey or Superman. This potential pitfall exists in other games, too -- most notably Hero and M&M -- but that doesn't change the fact that it's a pitfall. On one hand, I'm heartless and inflexible. Of course someone without appropriate defenses is going to be screwed, and rightly so. But my frosted side knows it isn't fun to get one-shotted by a psychic from a mile away.

So, in the spirit of that, here are a couple clarifications currently present in the rules as they stand.

First, a mental attack is defined as the Attack trapping plus the Unusual topping, to account for its telepathic aspect. Those two plus Range makes your standard Ego Whip at least one trapping more expensive than a run-of-the-mill attack power like force beams or fireballs.

Second, as free hatani has pointed out:

Correct me if I am wrong, but couldn't Superman, under you hack, just pay a Fate point to gain "Mental Defense" trapping on his Super-skill for the scene?

 This is absolutely correct, as I acknowledged in the comments yesterday, with two caveats:

1. Superman's Concept aspect must be something that could reasonably be invoked for effect to improve his Mental Resistance. It doesn't have to be dead-on perfect or anything -- "Last Son of Krypton" would be fine, if the player could make a case for it. It references the fact that he's an alien, so maybe his alien mind is harder for a psionicist to navigate. "It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's Superman!" would be less fine, because it doesn't reference anything except the fact that he's neither a bird nor a plane.
   
2. Superman must have a super-skill onto which Mental Resistance could reasonably be tacked. As with the Concept aspect, as long as it's close enough, it's fine. Not to repeat myself from yesterday, but a super-skill called Alien Physiology would work, Man of Steel might, with a lenient GM, and Kryptonian Vision just would not do, ever.

So those are the checks in place right now against the Defense Dilemma. Clearly, there are some conditions that need to be met for the invoke-for-effect to actually work -- if your Concept aspect is "Sci-Fi Cowboy" and your super-skills are things like Six-Guns and Space-Bronco-Buster, odds are you're still screwed. And charging an additional trapping makes a mental attack power more expensive, true, but that's hardly a roadblock to abuse.

Keeping that in mind, here are some other things I'm considering:

• Make Psychic a topping of its own worth two trappings. You'd apply it to any trapping that doesn't already fall into that category, like Attack or Perceive.
• Invoke an aspect for effect to increase the tier of a defensive skill for one exchange. That's not exactly elegant, but nor is it unthinkable.
• Reduce starting points to 80 instead of 100. Combined with the Psychic topping, this would make mental attacks a more serious investment. Hell, I might do this anyway, psychic attacks or no. It isn't a nice round number like 100, but there's more to this than nice round numbers.
• Something involving consequences that I'm not ready to discuss yet. 

Thanks again, guys, for keeping the discussion going! It's helping!

Supers: Iron Man's Resolve

I think Robert's comments on my last post are extensive and insightful enough to warrant a full-post response -- the highest honor I can bestow to a reader! -- especially where this passage is concerned:

My concern isn't if Iron Man can take out the minion - of course he can with an apex skill of +5 vs the minions apex of 1 to 3 (the guy with the 3 might be carrying a bazooka).

With different scales as you have proposed where you either need to buy into the scale or spend will to temporarily act on that scale. My concern is more that Iron Man forgetting to take his Resolve to the super scale and Psychic Blast dude with a Fair super scale mental attack being able to casually mop the floor with Iron Man.

First thing I'd buy under your system is a super defense in every conflict category (probably Endurance and Resolve). And when everyone needs to do something like that to "feel playable" then IMHO something is wrong.

I totally understand the concern re: Iron Man's Resolve (didn't Hemingway write that?), and I'm aware this needs tweaking -- possibly past the point of recognition, but that's how these things often go. (I'm less married to the scales than to the player-defined super-skills-plus-trappings thing.)

My concern with removing the scales, or redefining what Superb means based on genre, is that within the supers genre abilities can vary so wildly I'm not sure a scale of +1 to +10 would really cover it. And once we get up past Superb, it really bugs me that the character's bonus far outstrips the variability of the dice. I admit it is more intuitive to just say "I'm the Hulk -- I have +10 Super-Strength!" but the +10 itself puts me off.

This reminds me a bit of something that came up for Legends of Anglerre. When we were tossing around ideas for epic-level characters, an early one someone proposed was the idea that you'd spend spin on an attack to do something extra, or to have an effect -- like spending spin to be able to harm a dragon -- but all that really boils down to is a +3 to the defender's defense. LOA still makes use of spin for epic-level stuff like that (last time I saw it -- who knows what it looks like after editing?), although the problem remains that equally matched high-skill opponents are no more likely to get spin on a roll than their equally matched low-skill counterparts.

That's the kind of thing I want to avoid, and am struggling with (or "with which I struggle"). I'm not comfortable with the Hulk having Superb Might while a mook has Average Might, but nor do I like expanding that range out ad infinitum to accommodate those extremes. I really want the split between Human and Superhuman to be more than a few degrees' difference on the ladder. I fervently believe there's another option, and if separate scales isn't the solution, then there are other switches and dials still left for me to fiddle with.