Difference between revisions of "Advantages"

Revision as of 00:18, 17 January 2017

This news file covers how we handle Advantages, encompassing the various skills, powers, assets, etc. that characters may have. Each Advantage is tagged with a classification based on the Advantage's power, scope, and narrative relevance to the character it's attached to. Classifications are Defining, Significant, and Minor.

An entry might read --> Buster System <Defining-Copy1>: Megaman can copy one attack from an enemy's arsenal. This is easier to do on a defeated foe, and the target's player determines the attack received.

Note: Some narratively powerful advantages -- like Power Copy, Teleportation, and Multiple Discrete Actions -- are required to occupy a minimum Advantage classification. This doesn't mean a Defining or Significant Advantage must be something powerful; they should be what your character is best at, which could be their investigative or cooking skills just as readily as any of these restricted things.

Advantage Style: When writing advantages, keep your word count to a minimum and your advantage titles short, simple, and tilde (~) free. Eliminate source material-specific jargon where possible, and minimize it where not possible. Advantages should be clear (if not dry) and homogenized, not personalized. They should not read as gushing or a love letter to the character's abilities.

Advantage Classifications & Tags

Defining

Defining Advantages are the core lens by which a character solves their problems or lives their life. They don't have to be powerful, but they're where a character has put all their metaphorical points and will tend to be strong. Characters may have up to two Defining Advantages. Note that highly subjective traits like "Charisma", which can be botched in play, may not be Defining advantages.

Examples: Wolverine's Regeneration and Adamantium skeleton, Magneto's Electromagnetic control, Darth Vader's cybernetics and telekinesis / telepathy, Megaman's power copy, Himura Kenshin's swordsmanship, Willy Wonka's candy-making acumen, C3-P0's vast communications library, Link's Master Sword, Ganondorf's Triforce of Power, Batman's investigative skills.

Significant

A Significant Advantage is a significant, potent part of the character's tool set. They're go-to tools, even if not the primary "problem-solving" tool. It's normal for a character to have a handful of these, but they shouldn't be very numerous within a character's Advantage set. Characters may have up to four Significant advantages.

Examples of Significant Advantages: Wolverine's special ops training and enhanced senses, Darth Vader's piloting and mechanical skills, Magneto's technical skills which allow him to construct an anti-telepathy helmet or machines that boost the magnitude of a mutant's powers.

Minor

A Minor Advantage is useful, but it's not something the character focuses on doing and usually doesn't have much potency. The number of Minor Advantages isn't tracked, but there is still a line of too much.

Examples of Minor Advantages: Wolverine's physical traits are generally superhuman but only really on the order of you might expect of a larger animal.

Supplemental Tags

Supplemental tags are tags that can be attached to an advantage. They identify a specific quality that is attached to that advantage.

Consent

Consent is a tag that is attached to dictatorial advantages (see below). Mind control, invasive investigative, transformative, etc.

Example of a Consent tag: Telepathy <Defining-Consent>: Professor Xavier has telepathic abilities that let him communicate remotely, read minds, and if necessary control another person altogether as if they were a puppet.

Copy#

Copy is a tag that is attached to Power Copy advantages. # indicates type, with Copy1 being standard power copy, Copy2 being Assimilation, and Copy3 being Mimicry. Copy2 and Copy3 double as consent tags.

Advantage Philosophy, Umbrellas, and Slot Requirements

There's only so much a character can have before people start rolling their eyes whenever that character enters a scene. Such a character has exceeded what we call a "Conceptual Fullness" point. Worse, new applicants might look at oldbie characters that wouldn't be approved today and wonder why they can't get similar anymore. This is why we limit the number of non-Minor Advantages. This leaves some powerful characters through fiction in the sticky spot of being unacceptably broad for the MUSH, but that's a necessary and deliberate casualty to keep things reasonable.

A common trend when making films about comic books (or other ported media) is for characters to have a simplified version of their abilities. Magneto for instance is still very powerful, but couldn't reverse the polarity of the planet to cause untold devastation like he could in comics. What we want out of "Conceptually Over-Full" characters is a "film version" of those characters in terms of advantage spread. It bears mentioning this is a retroactive change to the character, to avoid the old, "If not for the Multiverse nerfing me, I could've killed you all!" attitude. Superman never COULD push planets out of orbit on our game, it's not that he was sapped of that ability when he unified. Furthermore, movie Superman never needed to do that.

Umbrella Advantages: Some characters will have Umbrella advantages, encompassing a group of abilities or applications of the same ability. We expect these to be tightly defined and focus on the character's core abilities, not the most broad interpretation imaginable. An Umbrella advantage should have no more than three solid tricks in it.

An example: Darth Vader's Defining Advantage is The Force. Technically this could encompass every Force power, but that's not appropriate or allowed. Instead it would encompass his core kit: Telekinesis, Telepathy, Self-Enhancement. The stuff he uses less would be under a separate Significant Advantage. On the unacceptable end of things, "Being a Dungeon and Dragons Wizard" could encompass a near endless array of sub-advantages and that's not okay.

Slot Occupancy and Minimum Required Classification: Some Advantages occupy an entire slot and cannot be placed in an Umbrella. These are listed below, and are called Standalone Advantages.

Standalone Defining: Power Copy, Defining-Grade Teleportation, Multiple Discrete Actions, Stable Time Loops, Resurrection*.

* Real Resurrection is where a dead person comes back to life full stop.

Standalone Significant: Significant-Grade Teleportation, Long-Term Future Sight.

Some Advantages may deemed to be standalone during processing that are not necessarily on this list. A probable example of this is broad element manipulation traits like Avatar the Last Airbender's Bending, or Iceman's hydro or cryokinesis.

On Spending Multiple Slots & "Specialism": Spending multiple slots is for advantage features, not advantage potency. Darth Vader might have two Force entries to accommodate doing X, Y, Z and then A, B, C. He would not have two Force entries for X, Y, Z to make him X,Y,Z^2.

Teleportation Gradients

Defining-Grade: Defining Teleporters have little to no limits. They always penetrate preventative measures, usually accommodate passengers, and at most might have a range limit. In other words, they can just Go Places and there's almost nothing anyone can do to stop them. Examples are Protoman from Megaman, Kibito from Dragon Ball, and Nightcrawler from X-Men.

Significant-Grade: Significant-Grade teleportation has flexible limits. They might need to know a target location, have range or arrival limitations, and might be stoppable with dedicated effort. Highly powerful but extremely conditional teleportation, like being summoned when your name is called, also goes here. Examples include Star Trek Transporters, DnD's Teleport spell, Bloody Mary, Beetlejuice, or Hastur.

Minor-Grade: Minor-Grade teleportation is Stage Select, Video Game Fast Travel, or "false" teleportation like flash steps. It'll get you to the start of a "level" or back to someplace you've already been speedily, but it has no narrative oomph; it won't get you out of a normal jail cell, a raging battle, or any situation you'd assume somebody should use it in but never does. Examples include every Megaman robot, many RPGs that give you little items to revisit all the cities you've visited, and nearly every shounen character on the face of the planet.

Advantage Policy

A Foreword On the Player Character Glass Ceiling: This isn't the game for Cthulhu being a force that simply defeats you if you challenge it. That said, we can play looser with things that aren't a permanent fixture on the MUSH, so if we decide a plot demands ghosts need to be dealt with by resolving their issues instead of re-killing them, you won't be able to re-kill them like you would a ghost PC. As before, it's impolite and incorrect to speculate how beyond a PC your Plot Boss is, and it discourages staff from greenlighting those conceits for you if you do.

Interaction by Proxy: Characters who act through proxies instead of their own are required to receive feedback no less dangerous to them than the proportional damage suffered by their proxy. This encompasses characters who remote control spare bodies, swap bodies at will but only occupy one at a time, etc. In summary, people aren't meant to be de facto immortal through "avatars." Primary examples include .Hack, Sword Art Online, Warframe Operators, and strongly transhuman characters.

- Minions and Monsters of the Week: Characters who engage through minions (who can be lost and inflict a meaningful failure on the character) do not fall under this rule. Queen Beryl may not fight directly that often, but she can be meaningfully physically threatened and her minions can botch their mission and die.

Immortality, Invincibility, Intangibility: We don't allow PCs to have abilities that stop them being physically threatened, and our core policy is that engagement between PCs must occur by range, means, and methodology that all parties can interact with. For characters who soak damage like Superman and Dracula, they're still tough but people are assumed to be able to inflict meaningful damage to their lifebar anyway. Ghosts and spirits have it rougher; all PCs are assumed to have the requisite properties to both perceive and slap them around.

PCs aren't allowed unconditional immortality. Conditional immortality is allowed with a clearly defined and reasonably accessible Catch. It's important that Catches be accessible enough that the character's life can be meaningfully threatened by somebody willing to put a little effort into it. Being killable only with one weapon doesn't qualify. Being killable with a special class of weapon or "with enough effort" is fine. As-is, condeath is rarely lost by players. What we're trying to avert here is characters who can justifiably feel as if nothing is threatening to them. Catches should be marked at the end of a relevant advantage with a simple explanation of what the Catch is, like so: <CATCH: No extra lives = no regeneration, enough brute force will kill Alucard.>

- Damage Immunities: Damage immunities generally don't apply to other PCs. You can be invulnerable to mooks, to natural instances of an element, etc. But as-is noted above, even something that shouldn't be physically interactable like a spirit is assumed to be vulnerable to PC action here. Niche immunities such as elemental immunity get a little more respect, but only a little. For example, if somebody is fire-immune and you have ways to attack them that aren't fire, it'd be rude to knowingly slam them where they should be strong. On the other hand, Fire Man from Megaman or a Firebender from Avatar would be within their rights to light you up and have it work just fine.

Teleportation: Teleporters are required to define the range, requirements (or lack thereof) to deploy (line of sight, previously visited, etc.), cooldown time, usability if imprisoned or restrained, indirect applications (telefragging), possibility of taking passengers or other masses, etc. teleportation of the "I can just show up anywhere" variety is obligate Defining, as are other high-end versions of teleportation. Lower gradients of teleportation such as line-of-sight solo-only "flash steps", or RPG "I can revisit these towns but it doesn't work if I'm in prison!" are a lesser tier of advantage.

Multiple Discrete Actions: The ability to take multiple major actions in a scene may only be taken as a Defining advantage. PCs are limited to one additional major action per round as a part of their Advantages. Note that this Advantage type is under consideration for banning.

For example: Multiple Man can make multiple versions of himself to engage multiple tasks simultaneously. This is an example of an appropriate Defining advantage that lets a character engage multiple discrete tasks, such as fighting while trying to disarm a bomb. On the other hand you have any RPG Protagonist who has a party to work with, but it usually doesn't split to engage separate tasks. This is an example of a character who "technically could," but for whom it isn't a valid Defining advantage, and therefore shouldn't be branching out into multiple tasks in a given scene.

Exception: In situations where one side of a conflict is outnumbered, the disadvantaged party (whether group or individual bossing up) is assumed to have a number of bonus actions equal to their opposition.

For example: There are 5 members of the Concord fighting 8 members of the Watch. The Concord gets 3 bonus actions to distribute among its PCs to address the imbalance. However, this doesn't scale with MDA advantages. So if for example there were 8 members of the Concord fighting 5 members of the Watch and one of those Concord members had MDA as an Advantage, the Watch would only get 3 extra actions, not 4.

Scope of Effect: In day-to-day use, Advantages shouldn't exceed a Scope of Effect of one city block, the upper end of which we identify as Kowloon Walled City. When mass destruction happens, we want it to be a plot-significant event, such as when Alderaan is destroyed by the Death Star; not Nappa blowing up a city for giggles. If an environment has little narrative weight or doesn't map to realspace, we don't mind if destruction is abnormally upscaled there. Blowing up a mountain in the boonies or a pocket dimension just doesn't matter that much.

Range of Effect: Any advantage that targets another PC is assumed to have a delivery mechanism that is avoidable, even if that's untrue in a source material. Or to put it another way, Everyone Gets A Save Against Everything. All combat powers are assumed to function at a range and methodology which would permit meaningful interaction between all players.

Intensity of Effect: Almost no advantages are absolute. Defensive advantages acting against highly dictatorial advantages can be, but when somebody "attempts to do a thing to you," it's preferable for "something to happen" rather than "nothing to happen," although the specifics are in your court. Fiction often has things like Avada Kedavra which will kill you instantly, and these sorts of things are just powerful attacks here. Nobody is expected to die from them even if hit repeatedly.

Dictatorial Advantages: These are advantages that strip control of a PC from their player, or which are highly invasive, or which dictate outcomes substantially. Mind control, investigative powers that examine the minutiae of a target's being, transformatives, depowering, instant incapacitation, significant alteration, or abilities that remove from a PC in play in any way all qualify as Dictatorial Advantages. Abilities like these can always be non-consented to even without a counteracting Advantage. To be transparently straightforward this does mean Professor Xavier will have a harder time using his abilities than Magneto. This also includes characters like Magneto, or Benders from Avatar the Last Airbender trying to control materials in another character's body.

Element Bullets vs Elemental Control: Characters with element-themed abilities are common. In Final Fantasy, this is like having elemental bullets; you throw Fire, Ice, Lightning, etc. and that's that. You don't alter the terrain, control it, or produce a lasting effect. You can have several elemental bullets that only count as a single advantage entry. Having fine control over such powers, as in the case of *-kinetics (Example: pyrokinetics) requires a dedicated advantage per element to account for increased utility.

Conservation of Ninjutsu: It's possible to create PC-class power. It isn't possible to mass-produce PC-Class power. Cloning Superman once might get you another Superman, cloning him a hundred times gets you Superman-flavored mooks.

Interaction with MUSH Meta-Elements: You may not have advantages that interact with Warpgates, Unification, or any other element of the MUSH's back-end. You may not "de-unify" or leave the Multiverse or MUSH setting.

NPCs: NPCs come in three flavors. NPCs do not get a full advantage kit. If you want them to do things you'll have to allocate slots to them, the same as any other advantage.

Defining NPCs are at the "PC tier". They are meaningful combat entities, and usually some of your Advantage slots would be dedicated to fleshing out their personal abilities. Example: in Final Fantasy X-2, Paine and Rikku could be Yuna's Defining NPCs.

Significant NPCs are "Miniboss Tier". They're serious combat obstacles or might have specialist skills. Examples include R2-D2 and ARC Troopers from Star Wars, or generic SOLDIERs from FF7.

Minor NPCs are window dressing or niche specialists. They don't have serious combat skills, but some of them might have something small or unique to contribute. Examples include C3-P0 and Stormtroopers from Star Wars, and Redshirts from Star Trek. To be clear, Minor NPCs can't have a PL. They're presumed to lose in a combat engagement against anything bigger than them. This includes, for instance, C3-P0 (a noncombatant minor NPC) losing against Stormtroopers (a combatant minor NPC)

The Etcetera Rule: If you use 'Etcetera', 'and so forth', or other thought extenders, it must be used only in the context of a tight grouping of examples to save space.

+ Acceptable: Black Mage has the magical power to fire blasts of elemental energy - fire, ice, etcetera.

In this example, 'etc' clearly includes extra elements, but the tight grouping of magic has a clear purpose. Black Mage could shoot Dark element spells, or lightning, or water, or earth but it doesn't add anything or expand on the ability's applicable uses, merely the colors of the blasts he shoots.

- Unacceptable: Superman has Kryptonian abilities, including flight, laser eyes, ice breath, powerful superhuman physique, etc.

In this example, 'etc' has no clear bounding. This could be x-ray vision, elemental powers, super hearing, flying so fast he goes backward in time, super knitting, etc.

Implicit Limitations: Just because an advantage doesn't say you can't do something doesn't mean you CAN do that thing. Cloud Strife, Superman, and a vampire will all have similar-looking superhumanity advantages, but they don't actually have the exact same toolkit or limits. In short, don't use broad categories to reach into things your character has no business doing just because you're not explicitly barred from them.

- Conceptual: The term "conceptual <blank>" is often used as shorthand for "reaching broad control over a specific space" that ends up interpreted with no implicit limitations. Don't use this terminology. Explain in detail what your advantage is and what it does.

Patch Notes 1/12/2017 8:31 P.M.: Edited out Monsters of the Week as a standalone advantage. A MotW would be a "blank" Defining NPC entry with possible advantages fleshed out as a mix'n'match package defined as a part of the character's other advantages.