Advantages
Contents
What Advantages Are
The Advantages system here is how MCM represents the nearly infinite number of potential powers, assets, abilities, and skills that characters can bring to a game like ours. Rather than require that players write up a pitch for all the things they want and ask staff "please", or detailing out an incredibly crunchy mechanical system instead, MCM concerns itself with two things:
Breadth of Advantages: The Advantages system establishes an objective point against which the conceptual fullness of a character can be judged and agreed on. This prevents the Saiyan Jedi Fairy Princess Dragon Rider Keyblade Wielder of the Justice League singularity of characters who continually accrue new things through play for a long time.
Narrative impact of Advantages: The Advantages system establishes what a character Actually Does on the grid, how central doing them is to the character, and how effective they can expect those things to be in narrative. This communicates how the character plays out, and is agnostic of special theme hierarchies, power levels, numbers, or measurements.
Using the framework below, a player maps out the major things that the character can do, in the sense of "stunts", "special actions", "contextual buttons", etc. irrespective of the means by which the character accomplishes them. As long as those check out with the system, the details, description, and flavor they want are all basically free.
In essence, the Advantage system keeps things simple, accessible, and objective, by having players apply for Effect instead of Cause. If a character's Advantages satisfy the relevant rules, they pass.
Advantage Structure
The central resource and metric of the Advantage system is a character to character value called Pips (●s). Each character has a total number of Pips to divide up amongst all of their Advantages, which determines how many they have, and how potent each of them is. Pips don't strictly represent "Advantage power", but rather indicate where the character's focus is, which Advantages are most important, and how much narrative impact they have. That is to say, a titanic dragon character who easily can throw boulders around, but only invested one Pip into their super strength, has less scene-solving, strength-related clout than a Captain America who put in three, and they would be a narrative underdog in a test of raw strength between the two, through whatever clever or heroic lens the latter devises. To help get the idea of how many Pips buys what, the rough guideline is:
●: A one Pip Advantage is a trait, tool, ability, or skill, suitable for solving problems outside the scope of what an average person can handle. The character can expect to successfully deal with minor and moderate challenges, but struggle to deal with serious obstacles with only these Advantages.
Examples of these look like Jotaro's physical strength and toughness, Kamina's swordsmanship, Doctor Strange's medical genius, Kirito's ALO avatar spells, Zuko's lightning redirection ability, Emiya Shirou's reinforcement magecraft, Steve Rogers' firearms training, and similar.
●●: A two Pip Advantage is one of the character's strong points, which allow them to tackle the broad variety of challenges they face with reliable success. The character might be able to get by without these Advantages for a while, but they're valuable and effective tools in their kit.
Examples of these look like Batman's batmobile, Link's secondary gadgets such as the hookshot/mirror shield/hover boots, Captain Picard's phaser, Cloud Strife's Materia magic, Anakin's starfighter piloting, Leon Kennedy's stunt driving, Weiss Schnee's summoning ability, and similar.
●●●: A three Pip Advantage is something iconic, central, and/or defining to the character. These Advantages claim the lion's share of a character's narrative weight, are likely where a character has sunk most of their focus and/or potential, and they would be unrecognizable without them. These can be expected to suffice in any situation where it's reasonable for a PC to succeed with hard work.
Examples of these look like Superman's superhuman physique and flight, Darth Vader's lightsaber skills and Force powers, Goku's martial arts and ki techniques, Saber's Excalibur, Tony Stark's Iron Man suits, Solid Snake's stealth skills, Alucard's immortality, and similar.
None: An Advantage without any Pips is an Incidental Advantage. It has no important function in scenes. It exists as pure flavor, VFX, a neat benefit that doesn't meaningfully translate to an advantage in RP, or something with borderline superfluous utility.
Examples of these look like Sonic's skating skills, John Egbert's absurd inventory mechanics, C3P0's language and diplomacy protocols, Frieza being able to breathe in space, and similar.
4/5●: A four or five Pip Advantage is an area of excessive hyperfocus where the character overwhelmingly specializes. They're exceptionally impressive in use, but mostly indicate when a character has pushed a single capacity well beyond the point necessary to overcome related challenges. These usually belong to extremely narratively focused characters as their One Thing.
Note: In as far as MCM tracks any kind of mechanical Advantage resolution, hard policy is that all problems within the scope of a scene are three Pip-resolvable at most. Advantages past three Pips are always "extra"; the only new functionality they enable is self-starting, out of scope ideas.
Examples of these look like the Incredible Hulk's strength, the Flash's speed, Wolverine's regeneration, Rock Lee's taijutsu, Megaman's mega buster, and similar.
All characters have 38 Pips in total. This can be increased to a small extent by the addition of Flaws, as described in our Disadvantages article. There isn't any strict policy by which we dictate where a character is allowed to put theirs in which powers; a large part of applying for Advantages comes down to the player's perception of which things are most important or fun about a character.
A character cannot have more than 6 ● Advantages, more than 6 Incidental Advantages, less than 3 or more than 8 ●●●+ Advantages.
It costs 2 Pips to push an Advantage above ●●●, and another 2 above ●●●●. No more than 8 Pips can be spent pushing any Advantages above ●●●. In practice, this means that if a character has any ●●●● or ●●●●● Advantages at all, the maximum is 5/5, 5/4/4, or 4/4/4/4.
A character with fewer Advantages, who doesn't spend all of their Pips, can convert the rest to Vanity Pips. As per their name, Vanity Pips don't do anything concrete, but they highlight and emphasize which Advantages matter most, and should be given some extra spotlight where possible. Any Advantage can have any number of Vanity Pips, which don't cost extra above ●●●.
In addition to its Pip rating, all Advantages are given descriptive text, referred to as trappings. The trappings of an Advantage are basically the free space in which a player describes the traits/powers/items/skills/assets/etc. that the Advantage comes from, and gets to talk about what the Advantage looks like and how it works. There are a few rules that must be followed when writing Advantage trappings <link to the section>, but otherwise, the player can write whatever they like.
Applying for Advantages
All Advantages should also be organized into thematically related groups, labeled with a header. This can include its own flavor or fluff text, but at bare minimum, it needs a title. You can group Advantages however you like, but don't leave loose Advantages scattered around the section on their own, or Advantages without trappings.
Split your advantages between the Integral and Supporting sections as you see fit; the section names are only descriptive. Each section has a maximum text limit of 3800 characters, including spaces, pips, etc. You can easily check this with the word count feature of any word processor.
Trappings should not use theme-specific jargon. A player who is unfamiliar with your theme should be able to understand what they mean. You may briefly explain any exclusive or unique terms within the trapping itself if the jargon is essential to include.
Trappings should also keep in mind language appropriate to the Advantage's level. Describing being a "Peerless master swordsman, unmatched by any man" on a ● Advantage is self-evidently dumb. If an Advantage name ends with an extender (Advantage - Category) then you need to name what it applies to. The same Advantage may be bought multiple times with different categories. Other Advantages cannot; please don't add category extenders to Advantages that don't have them.
An Advantage marked Protected is an Advantage that guarantees a certain amount of extra player leeway on the receiving end, due to being recognized as having the potential to be highly dictatorial, invasive, or un-fun when given the fullest possible weight of our "something happens is better than nothing happens" policy. When Protected-marked Advantages are used on a PC, that player is never obligated to provide anything more than "something to work with", if appropriate, as a result; pressuring a player to accept all intended consequences of the Advantage can be considered abuse.
Some Advantages come with a Surcharge. These are Advantages with much greater ability to bend roleplay around them than most. To buy this Advantage at ● or higher, the character has to pay an amount of extra Pips. Other advantages might have a Credit, which makes it less costly to bring niche Advantages up to a valuable level. These are free Pips automatically added to the Advantage once it reaches ●. Only the base number of Pips spent on the Advantage, without the Credit, counts towards any limits on how many Advantages of what rating a character may possess.
Advantage Formatting
A complete Advantage grouping looks like:
Black Magic:
Black Mage is a career expert in wielding destructive and debilitating magic, using elemental attacks and status to destroy his foes.
Combat Options***(*): Black Mage can fire blasts of fire, ice, and lightning to defeat his enemies, as well as damaging toxic and non-elemental energies, usually being projectiles and explosions.
Debilitation**: In addition to damage, Black Mage can use the elements to weaken and hinder foes, such as lingering burns with fire, slowing cold auras with ice, brief stuns with lightning, etc.
Field Shaping*: (Combat Options***:) Lastly, Black Mage can manipulate the field of battle by creating spires of ice, walls of fire, toxic miasmas, and other such elemental hazards and terrain.
Use this formatting. Character generation is mostly processed automatically, and making up your own special formatting breaks the code unless we meticulously edit it by hand.
As shown, headers go above header text, which goes above Advantages names. Advantages each go on their own lines, unless desired if their functions naturally blend together and their trappings are clear in which Advantages they're referencing. Pips are noted with *s and go after the Advantage name and before the colon. Trappings go in-line with the Advantage name. Vanity pips go inside parentheses. Any Redundant Advantages go fully inside parentheses.
Minimum Expectation
When filling out your Advantages section, carefully read the entry for any Advantages you choose, and fulfill their requirements (if any). Applications with Advantages that fail to clearly meet any inherent requirements will be sent back for revisions with pretty much just a direct pointer to the requirements being flubbed. Since the minimum rules are right next to the Advantage's own name, staff aren't expected to reiterate and reexplain basic rules in every reply to every email. Staff offers detailed help for issues that aren't explicitly or implicitly pre-explained by these rules.
Non-Advantages
Some staple fictional powers don't appear in the Advantage list because the power itself doesn't doesn't do anything specific. Powers like shapeshifting, transfiguration, super inventing, or having a doom fortress, are examples. These describe a broad thematic with a number of possible functions, and those functions themselves are the Advantages, such as the abilities of the forms a shapeshifter can turn into, or the utilities of the doom fortress they have.
Access to things that anyone should be able to get, or which just don't ever matter, is also beneath the Advantage system. Nobody needs an Advantage to have a car, own a place to live, or carry tools a civilian could legally acquire.
Redundant Advantages
Advantages are concerned only with what the character does as a whole, and so they naturally compress otherwise extensive lists of powers or items into single entries that represent all of them. If it's difficult to group conceptually related Advantages without up bringing an Advantage you already have, you can reference it as a Redundant Advantage, which can be repeated at the same Pip rating or lower at no cost. For example, if a character has a grouping all about their personal combat tech with Combat Options to represent their firearms, and then a grouping all about their battle mecha, it's acceptable to repeat the Combat Options Advantage (in parenthesis) if they want the mecha entry to reference it having a pile of mecha firearms.
As a universal rule, characters are always assumed to have access to basic traits required to usefully exercise their Advantages. No Advantage requires another Advantage to work.
Advantages A-K
Advantages A-K
| Designation | Trappings |
|---|---|
| Adaptation | The character is less affected by the hazards of hostile environments, such as hard vacuum, crushing pressure, lethal heat or cold, deadly radiation, etc. or specific exotic threats ambient to a locale, like Toukiden's Miasma, the Abyss of Dark Souls, or the Wyld from Exalted. Required: What kinds of environments the character can mitigate. This list should be comprehensive, and not implicit, wherever possible. |
| Analysis | The character can examine targets of their attention and gain useful information about them that wouldn't normally be discernible. High tech scanners, psychometry, and detection spells are obvious examples, but things like determining someone's recent activities by smell or instantly analyzing a robot with intuitive genius are also valid ones. Required: What targets are valid for Analysis (people, machines, landmarks, etc.) and what information they get from them (functions, elemental alignment, origins, weaknesses, etc.). |
| Anti - Power Genre | The character can dampen, counter, nullify, or otherwise interfere with the use of some kind of power in their presence. Counterspells, disenchantment, teleportation shields, psionic suppression fields, etc. are common examples. Required: A well-defined "genre" of power that this Advantage applies to which is significantly more specific than universal catchalls like "magic" or "technology", and at least implicitly how another character would get around it (for instance, moving out of a suppression field). |
| Arsenal - Melee/Ranged/Named | The character has one or more attacks, whether through weapons, magic, technology, natural abilities, or special techniques, that are specialized to them and likely unusually powerful or complex when compared to the arsenals of combat characters of their theme archetype. The character may have a short list of favored or iconic attacks, or even just one or two that are extra important, but the idea is that the character has some degree of special emphasis on a narrow selection of them. The character is presumed to be competent enough in using them to make them effective in combat, but mainly, these specific attacks are either extra powerful and damaging for an attack of their rating, or they possess some complex and dangerous form of delivery mechanism, damage type, special gimmick, etc. The narrower the range, the more powerful the individual attack sources can be, or the more elaborate the gimmick. Required: A clearly defined and limited selection of damage-dealing abilities. They should be described as inclusively as possible, instead of using implicit bounding. Many different sources of the same kind of attack, such as many different guns that all shoot the same homing trickshot smart bullets, are fine as long as the attack itself is defined. Arsenal - Named requires a category; Named is replaced with the name of the attack the player chooses. Arsenal - Melee strictly contains attacks that are used in close range combat, with some extra leeway in how they're utilized as a close combat stunting ability. Arsenal - Ranged can contain attacks that work at long range, but are strictly damage delivery mechanisms and nothing else, however fancy or complex they are. Arsenal - Named may have only one major gimmick per Pip invested, and splitting it between gimmicks reduces each one's individual effectiveness. |
| Bane - Target | The character is readily able to exploit the weaknesses, flaws, nature, or behaviors of a specific archetype of enemy. They might habitually carry specialist gear, such as silver bullets, garlic, cold iron, etc. or they might simply be an accomplished specialist at fighting a certain kind of foe, or in some cases, they might have some ability that reacts especially effectively with certain targets. A World of Darkness hunting urban supernatural evils with silver, fire, and True Faith is an example, as is Geralt of Riviera from the Witcher and his encyclopedia of tactics and poisons to use against monsters of folklore. Required: A clearly defined and coherent archetype of applicable enemy. There are examples further down the page. |
| Buffs | The character possesses means to improve the the overall effectiveness of individuals or groups when engaged in certain tasks, whether through magic, science, psychic powers, supernatural leadership, etc. The targets (including the character) don't gain a specific new ability, but their efforts are enhanced directly, such as their combat efforts being enhanced by various attack and defense buffs, or their hacking efforts enhanced by a technopathic overclock, or magical efforts enhanced by the character serving as a magic battery or amplifier. Required: The specific arena(s) of effort the character can improve upon. |
| Combat Options | The character possesses a variety of means with which to straightforwardly attack and deal damage, whether they be weapons, spells, natural abilities, psionic or elemental powers, etc. This Advantage can encompass very large numbers of different attacks and techniques at little cost, and is in fact intended to make it easy to buy up full lists of things like elemental blasts, firearms and explosives, etc. in one go, but its sole purpose is dealing damage. These attacks have no extra effects, and the maximum level of unique delivery or behavior they can come with is defined roughly at "a heat seeking missile" or "chain lightning". The character is presumed to be competent enough at using this Advantage to be an effective attacker. Required: A list of the types of attacks the character has access to, which need not be exhaustive, but must clearly indicate the limits of its thematic breadth and reach. |
| Communication | The character can make themselves understood regardless of the entity they're speaking to, as long as it has the intelligence to process the concepts they are communicating. Likewise, the character can perfectly comprehend the closest thing to communication that their partner has. They may be able to apply this to written languages as well. Required: N/A |
| Contract | The character can forge agreements with other entities that establish specific terms between them, by which violating them inflicts some sort of punishment, and/or succeeding provides some sort of reward Faustian bargains with devils, boons and curses granted by gods, or various magical geases, can fall here. The full workings of Contract are explained in this article. Required: N/A |
| Conveniences | The character has access to one or more convenient gadgets or powers that make their life a little easier, defined as not being significantly more potent than "what a middle-class citizen of New York would carry on their person", such as having telepathic communication instead of a cellphone, or an eidetic memory for Google search-type trivia instead of a laptop. Required: N/A |
| Cure | The character can treat others to heal or dispel harmful abnormalities and afflictions. These afflictions may be physical, but also possibly mental or magical, like dispelling curses or curing madness. Curing someone doesn't treat the basic effects of "taking damage", beyond perhaps pain. Final Fantasy' Esuna spell and Pokemon's status clearing items are examples. Required: The scope of the variety of abnormalities and afflictions the character can cure. This may be a little open ended by necessity, but must be clearly limited. |
| Debilitation | The character can inflict detrimental effects and adverse conditions on others to disrupt and hinder enemies. Video game-style debuffs, paralysis, freezing, etc. easily fall here as the most generic example, but things like pressure point strikes, riot control tools, various drugs and poisons, physic hallucinations, gravity or slow fields, or even tabletop spells like magically sticky floors, are solid examples of this Advantage, as a broad catchall. Required: The overall thematic of the debilitating effects the character inflicts, with clear bounding. |
| Deconstruction | The character has some tool or ability that selectively and concisely removes an element somewhere in a scene. Whether it's a D&D Rust Monster disintegrating a metal item, a Starbound Matter Manipulator breaking down terrain into raw components, a micro black hole spaghettifying the surroundings, a Magic the Gathering-style extraplanar banishment, or an angry god turning someone into a pillar of salt, a target that "fails the save" is just not in the scene anymore. Unlike hitting something with enough damage to break it, it's fairly unlikely that the target is salvageable in any major way. Required: N/A |
| Defensive Paradigm | The character has an unusual defensive ability or property that influences combat in a dynamic way. They might use precognition to defend against normally unavoidable attacks, reflect them back at other targets, cut through curses or brainwaves with a sword, share the pain of taking damage, negate the inertia of being hit, reverse time to retry a defense several ways, teleport through attacks, or any kind of specific, crazy gimmick that alters how a fight with them is fought. This Advantage doesn't make them passively harder to kill, like with armor or self-healing; it's a defensive stunt that is intended to be respected. |
| Disguise | The character can adopt the appearance and form of someone or something else, whether via expert makeup and impersonation, magical shape changing, holographic camouflage, etc. They don't gain or lose any traits or abilities; they are disguised to avoid suspicion, gain access to things, places, information, etc. Required: Who or what the character can disguise themself as. |
| Entry Methods | The character has extraordinary means obtaining entry to places they aren't supposed to go, by defeating or overcoming obstacles meant to keep them out and opening up a way in. Anyone can kick down a door or blow a hole in a wall; the character might instead pick locks, hack keypads, detect and dodge wires, fit through tiny spaces, precisely breach with controlled damage, or so on. Required: The general variety of security measures or obstacles, manmade or incidental, that the character can get past. |
| Extraordinary Senses | The character is able to pick up on some sort of sensory "cue" or stimuli within a scene that would normally be undetectable, giving them extra information to work with. Sonar and infrared sensors, feeling vibrations through the earth like Toph Beifong from Avatar, picking out someone's appearance from listening to rain like Daredevil, the D&D "detect spells", fit the bill here. Required: What additional sensory acuity the character has. This usually entails an example of what they might pick up, though common knowledge and parlance like "night vision goggles" doesn't necessitate one. This cannot simply be declaring a target of choice and writing "I sense it"; being able to sense auras of evil-aligned magic is not the same as "I sense evil people". The sole exception is the common and generic "I can see ghosts". |
| Field Shaping | The character has the capacity to radically reshape the nature of the area around them, whether in the literal sense by manipulating the terrain itself, destroying it with massive attacks, or creating structures, or by means such as flooding it, filling it with smoke, altering gravity, or using their Advantages as traps or obstacles. Required: How the character can influence the field, in a strongly bound way. |
| Flight | The character can fly. Aerial flight or space flight are encompassed the same way under this Advantage, or both. Required: N/A |
| Hacking | The character can access, utilize, and/or control secure computers and/or machines. This Advantage has broad utility when interacting with things that are ostensibly hackable, but is strictly limited to those things. The Major from Ghost in the Shell, Sombra from Overwatch, and Cortana from Halo, are examples of big users of Hacking. Required: N/A |
| Hammerspace | The character can store and carry improbably large quantities of stuff on their person with ease. Things like bags of holding, video game inventories, and pocket dimensional storage fall here. Required: N/A |
| Healing | The character can heal injuries and damage sustained by people or creatures. This Advantage concerns "HP loss" and only strictly related symptoms. Targets are not necessarily required to be strictly organic. Required:N/A |
| Hint | The character has some ability they can invoke to gain useful information about their situation or a course of action. Future sight, divine inspiration, psychometry, talking with spirits, or plain super genius often fit here. As per its name, this Advantage essentially asks for information from a scene runner or fellow player. Since this Advantage isn't marked Protected, the player is always entitled to something helpful in the spirit of the Advantage, but not necessarily a highly specific or detailed piece of desired information. Hint is an active Advantage; it's not entitled to anything unless a player uses it. Required: An idea of where the Advantage can gain information and of what kind. Minimum ●●● for obtaining information about things one or more scenes in advance. Minimum ● otherwise. Hint cannot be an Incidental Advantage. |
| Illusions | The character can create convincing illusions of people, places, objects, or other things. Usually these are visual illusions, but they might apply to other senses too, like conjured sounds or phantom sensations. Holograms, psychic powers, illusion magic, or similar are commonly here. Illusions never affect their environment, nor people; they can only deceive or misdirect them. Required: The scope of what can be faked, and what can give them away. |
| Immortality | The character doesn't die, or at least doesn't stay dead, when fatally injured. Voldermot from Harry Potter, Alucard from Hellsing, Cell from Dragon Ball Z, and the Chosen Undead from Dark Souls, are examples of this Advantage in action. All Immortality on MCM requires a "Catch"; a set of criteria where the character can actually die for real, or is otherwise "not a Player Character anymore"; there is no infallible mortality on MCM. Required: The Catch, as well as information on where and when the character reenters play. Since this can sometimes be difficult to nail down, some examples of commonly accepted types of Immortality Catches are listed on this page. |
| Imperishable | The character has little to no need for one or more things that are considered basic staples of survival, including food, water, sleep, etc. They may or may not also suffer from ageing at a highly reduced rate, or not at all. They might also not strictly require oxygen, but this Advantage doesn't protect against any breathing (or lack thereof) hazards. Required: Which basics the character is not affected by. |
| Immunize | The character can rid themselves of, or immediately shrug off, harmful abnormalities and afflictions. These afflictions might be physical, such as being paralyzed, poisoned, or diseased, but also possibly metaphysical, like resisting curses. This Advantage doesn't restore the character's health beyond the removal of the condition. Required: The scope of the variety of abnormalities and afflictions the character can cure. This may be a little open ended by necessity, but must be clearly limited. |
| Incapacitation | The character has an effective and reliable means of subduing opponents with means other than physical harm, or which are at least minimally harmful. Incapacitation is meant to be for methods which are expected to be unusually effective, not just grabbing someone or hitting them with the blunt side of a sword and hoping it does the trick. Numerous examples include stun phasers from Star Trek, the tranquilizer guns and takedowns from the Metal Gear Solid games, magic such as The Sleep from Cardcaptor Sakura, Mid-Childan non-lethal magic from the Nanoha series, or "remove from combat" conditions such as Frog or Stone from the Final Fantasy series. While Incapacitation will often immediately remove minor NPCs from a scene, there is typically no such thing as instant incapacitation of a significant foe; hitting them with repeated applications or weakening them first should be expected, to adhere to sensible combat interactions. Required: A description of the state of incapacitation the character puts others in, and how it can be lifted, or roughly when it wears off by itself. The latter condition may be implicit in some cases. |
| Intangibility | The character can pass through solid objects without disturbing them. Typical ghosts do this a lot, though more specific examples are Kitty Pryde from X-Men, Fate/ series Servants or Exalted spirits dematerializing, or characters from games like Shadowrun or D&D using astral projections. Brief Intangibility may be used to stunt avoiding attacks, but since invincibility isn't a permissible Advantage on MCM, any form of Intangibility the character can maintain for long enough to be "unattackable" is automatically susceptible to all attacks the character usually is. Required: N/A |
| Intrusion Immunity | The character has partial or full resistance to effects that invasively influence or examine their thoughts and feelings. They might have special training, protective equipment, or just natural immunity, but regardless of the method, this Advantage is a hard "opt out" of dictatorially affecting what the character thinks or feels, or reading their thoughts or intentions. While MCM's policy still asks that this immunity not be outright disrespectful in nature; these spaces are already Protected, and so someone who has invested into this Advantage needs no further reason to block effects of the same tier or lower. Required: N/A, though it's encouraged to provide what the theme of the immunity is. |
| Invisibility | The character can conceal themselves in such a binary and effective way that it is no longer hiding or masking their presence, but that they just won't be found until they interact with something. The usual Invisibility is the visual kind, like provided by invisibility spells like in Harry Potter, optical camouflage like the Predator or Ghost in the Shell, or sometimes natural ability, like chameleonic skin, or superheroes like Toru Hagakure from My Hero Academia. Other forms however, like psychic invisibility compelled by the Silence from Doctor Who, the Stone Mask from The Legend of Zelda, or the Dummy Check Esper ability from a Certain Scientific Railgun, are considered to be the same effect. Required: N/A, though without further description, the invisibility is assumed to apply only to sight. |
| Knowledge - Field | The character is exceptionally knowledgeable about a particular field that is concretely useful in solving scene problems or specifically advantageous in scene scenarios. In this case, it's the information itself that is the valuable tool, rather than a practical effect. Required: A category of Knowledge, and at least two specific examples of how the field is useful to the character in day to day RP circumstances. A sweeping and vague "knows a lot about a thing" won't fly; it has to have examples of an obvious impact. |
Advantages M-W
Advantages M-W
| Designation | Trappings |
|---|---|
| Mental Intrusion | The character can broadly perceive, analyze, influence, and/or edit the mental attributes of other beings, whether their thoughts, feelings, memories, etc. This Advantage assumes the character can do this to a supernatural or superhuman degree, even if through mundane skill, rather than psychic control or super brain simulation. Required: What types of influence the character has with minds. |
| Mind Control | The character can directly control the minds of others, or else influence their thoughts and feelings with such effectiveness and precision that it amounts to the same thing. The character might be able to completely control the actions of another, but they might also be capable of performing elaborate tasks such as implanting compulsions and triggers, creating false ideas or delusions, changing feelings regarding things, or erasing or editing memories. Required: An idea of which kinds of control the character has over minds. |
| Mind Reading | The character can gain information about the thoughts, feelings, intentions, or mental characteristics of others. They might be directly reading the information out of their mind with psychic or magical means, but anything sufficiently intrusive, like simulating their thoughts with a supercomputer, or using superhuman intuition and psychology, amounts to the same effect. The Advantage allows for precise information to be easily and usually subtly obtained. Required: An idea of what information the Mind Reading extends to. |
| Mobility | The character can adroitly navigate complex, dense, difficult, and/or hazardous routes by means of exceptional or enhanced movement ability. Parkour, diving, jump packs, wall climbing, grapnel hooks, water turbines, video game-style double jumps and air dashes, etc. Feats such as running across water, balancing on clotheslines, or clinging to ceilings, are within reach of Mobility of a suitable rating. Examples include Spider Man, Batman, and Catwoman, Mario and Luigi, Faith from Mirror's Edge, Genji from Overwatch, and almost any Wuxia theatre-type character. Required: The ways in which the character's mobility is enhanced. References to commonly understood ideas are acceptable shorthand, though ideally some form of example stunt should be included. |
| NPCs | The character bit has the use of one or more entities besides the named central character themself. These "extra" beings usually comply or cooperate with the character, though even if they are less than cooperative in-character, the player still has full and total control over them. In all circumstances, the NPC or NPCs are of lesser importance and relevance than the main character; the benefits of the Advantage are that these extra characters can be easily changed up, expended, or sent out to represent the character's interests, without extra limitations on the player's part. The restrictions are that NPCs can only have access to Advantages that are on the character's list, and that losing the NPCs must still amount to some kind of non-trivial consequence or setback to the character, depending on their rating. Required: The generalities of what the NPCs do and their thematic limits. A reader should be able to tell that Storm Troopers don't use the Force or swing around lightsabers. |
| Power Copy - Derivative/Mirror | The character has the ability to make use of the Advantages of another character, in some form or imitation. Because Power Copying is an Advantage that can be almost any other Advantage, the full details of Power Copy are covered in their own article. This article is mandatory reading for characters who want Power Copy. Investment:Minimum ●●●●● |
| Quantum Solution | The character can produce situational solutions to seemingly most or any problems they encounter, which are unique, one-off, or otherwise non-replicable in a practical sense. Think MacGyver-esque ingenuity, arbitrary mad science gizmos, absurdly flexible but situational magic, miraculous luck, etc. As per the name, the concrete solution essentially doesn't exist until it suddenly does; it doesn't sit around forever "not being used". Quantum Solution allows the character to produce a solution to a single, discrete obstacle or challenge within a scene; the form this solution takes and how effectively it solves the problem are at the discretion of the scene runner, though the once per scene use of the Advantage isn't used up in a situation where an agreement cannot be reached. Required: A strong theming for the nature of the Advantage. A character cannot produce solutions of infinite different thematics of infinite genres. |
| Regeneration | The character can heal their injuries and physical damage they've taken. They might do this passively over time, or by using special healing spells or techniques on themself. This Advantage concerns "HP loss" and only strictly related symptoms. Required: N/A |
| Remote Manipulation | The character can physically manipulate objects at long distance, as by telekinesis, elemental manipulation, magical puppet strings, sticking their hands through tiny portals, etc. This Advantage is always a form of utility, covering practical tasks that can be accomplished with physical manipulation, or using physically oriented Advantages the character possesses at a distance; it is typically not an effectual substitute for an Advantage the character doesn't have. The default assumption is a type manipulation commensurate with the character using their hands, but things like water or sand or fire will obviously default to a more abstract representation. Required: N/A |
| Remote Viewing | The character can look into places far away from them without being physically present, usually for the purposes of surveillance. This can be very mundane, such as with cameras and microphones or drones, or with fantasy equivalents like crystal balls, Scrying spells, and sense-linked familiars, to name some. Required: A criteria that determines valid places for the character to view, as opposed to "the entire Multiverse." |
| Repair | The character can fix damaged or broken things up to a usefully functional state, far more quickly and effectively than would be possible with simple access to parts, plans, and time. They may just be implausibly effective with mundane repair methods, like a super mechanic or arbitrary mecha repair junkie, but oftentimes sci-fi nanobots or repair rays are involved like Eclipse Phase or Starbound, or else supernatural abilities like Josuke's Stand, Crazy Diamond, from Jojo's Bizarre Adventures. Required: A metric by which Repair is more limited than "any object fully and instantly." |
| Resistance - Source | The character has an unusually high resilience to, or preventative measure against, a specific type of harmful or unwanted influence. A D&D red dragon's resistance to Fire, a Fate/ Servant's resistance to magecraft, a robot's resistance to poison, etc. This Advantage has variable usefulness against PC Advantages, but not simple PC means; Resistance - Fire works normally against a PC pickup up a torch or opening a nearby lava floodgate, but sharply gives way against a PC who manipulates or shoots fire. The amount to which it falls off vs PC Advantages largely depends on the PC's access to arbitrary equivalents. It's understood to be a dick move for a wizard with every element to slam Rubicante with fireball over and over again, but an Avatar Firebender is free to borderline ignore it completely, given that fire is their number one interaction method. Protected effects are always valid to hard resist. Required: N/A. See some examples of valid categories in the appropriate section. |
| Resurrection | The character can bring people back to life. Period. If they were dead, they aren't anymore. These people come back with all the functionality of their living selves, even if not necessarily in exactly the same shape. Required: Some criteria under which a dead character cannot be resurrected. Resurrection cannot be universally applicable on every random skull a character finds in a dungeon or name they find on a grave marker, because of how unduly laborious it is for scene runners to constantly fabricate NPCs out of nothing. |
| Skeleton Catch | The character can kill people dead full stop. They automatically fulfill the Catch associated with any form of Immortality, and the limitations of any form of Resurrection, unless they choose not to. This Advantage is an explicit exception to the notion that no Advantage automatically trumps another (though in reality, the existence of condeath typically means it's little more than a theoretical threat to other PCs). Examples are pretty rare, along the lines of Sekiro's Mortal Blade, Star Butterfly's killing spell, or the First Hassan from Fate/Grand Order. Required: N/A |
| Skill - Field | The character is exceptionally skilled in an area of expertise whose practical applications are not wholly or mostly encompassed by another Advantage, and is useful enough to frequently have Advantage-worthy applications under various circumstances. The skill cannot grant the character use of other Advantages implicitly; Skill - Programming doesn't grant free Hacking. Required: A category of Skill, and at least two specific examples of how the skill is useful to the character in day to day RP circumstances. The category must be something grounded in reality. Skill - Magic isn't valid; "does magic" could mean anything. |
| Share Powers | The character can grant the use of one or more of their Advantages to other characters, such as by handing out equipment, bestowing magical enhancements, giving out blessings, synchronizing minds, etc. Having this Advantage means the character is able to provide others in the same scene with the benefits of any of their other Advantage Points of the same Pip rating or lower. The way that the Advantage looks in someone else's hands may change radically, but it functionally performs by the same limitations. Advantages are only shared during the same scene; the character can't lend out Advantages when they aren't around, or on a permanent basis (that would be covered by an Upgrade Application). Any Advantage with a Surcharge that is shared requires that the beneficiaries act in concert with the sharer; characters that are the recipient of Advantages like Teleportation or Invisibility can't all run off and use it for their own ends separately. Required: A description of the form in which the character shares their Advantages, usually defined as a broad thematic, like mad science gadgets or magical enchantments. |
| Speed | The character can act and/or react at speeds far beyond normal human capability. They might move at tremendous speed, such as with Sonic the Hedgehog, they might have incredible reflexes and mental speed, such as Wrath from Fullmetal Alchemist, or do pretty much everything at super speeds, like the Flash reading books or building walls in seconds. At least a small investment usually applies to extremely fast vehicles. Required: N/A |
| Split Actions | The character is able to split their attention, physically as well as mentally, to the ends of pursuing several different major courses of action at the same time, possibly even in different places. This can apply to character bits that are made up of multiple entities (though far from a majority of them), but also characters that create doubles or projections. For example, the typical JRPG party is rarely ever applicable, pretty much always sticking together and tackling the same objective, but a super AI forking its brain to be in a bunch of places, manipulating different systems, always is. Required: N/A |
| Stealth | The character is adept at getting around unseed and undetected. Their stealth might be enhanced by, or wholly created by, camouflage technology, magical silence, extremely small size, etc. This Advantage covers "doing things stealthily" as a whole, rather than just moving around unnoticed. Solid Snake, Altair from Assassin's Creed, Garret from the Thief Series, and James Bond are examples. Required: N/A |
| Strength | The character wields physical strength far beyond normal human capabilities, to the point that feats of strength alone become a valid way to solve a wide variety of problems. This Advantage is usually the primary physical focus of the character, like with the Incredible Hulk, Shizuo Heiwajima, Suika Ibuki, or Herakles. Required: N/A |
| Superhumanity | The character has some combination of strength, speed, reflexes, durability, and/or stamina well above the human norm. They may favor some physical characteristics over others, but this Advantage is intended to be a way of easily representing a character being "generically" all around superhuman, extremely common in anime/comics/manga/video games/etc. With characters like Goku, Superman, Dracula, Cloud Strife, etc. Required: N/A |
| Survival Skills | The character is expertly capable at providing for themselves and others without infrastructure suited to providing for people. This Advantage usually represents a bundle of closely related skills in navigation, foraging, identifying and being protected from things strictly related to "living off the land", or else abilities that trivialize it, like creating food and clean water with magic Required: N/A |
| Teleportation | The character can travel from point A to point B instantaneously (or close enough). A Wizard's teleportation spell, Nightcrawler's Mutant power, Chell's Aperture Science portal gun, Goku's Instant Transmission technique, Star Trek Transporters, or even characters summoned by their name or some other trigger, like Beetlejuice or Hastur, are some examples amongst many.
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| Temporal Acceleraton | The character can cause other things to experience the passage of time at a highly accelerated rate. This could cause plants to grow, weapons to rust, animals to mature, concrete to dry, machines to work faster, etc. The degree of acceleration always depends on how meaningful it is for the acceleration to occur. Ageing a bottle of wine is trivial enough to be arbitrarily accomplished. Causing the reactor of a starship to run out of power so it falls out of orbit is a very significant, and thus very difficult, task. Required: N/A |
| Time Loops | The character can create closed time loops with themselves, defined as an iteration of them from the future briefly returns to the present to assist them in some way, and then at the same point in the future, the character undertakes the same action of returning to the same point in the past. This is the only form of personal time travel that MCM naturally accommodates, as it involves no retcons or dependencies. The usefulness of the future selves depends mostly on how much "being further along the line" matters to the current situation; the character's future self might come bearing warnings of danger, solutions to puzzles, clues to a mystery, items recovered past the current obstacle, etc. Though this Advantage technically doesn't have Protected limitations, consulting with the scene runner is obviously necessary to know what the future self gets to access. Required: N/A |
| Time Stop | The character has the ability to stop time, or else somehow act instantaneously, outside the bounds of "super speed", differentiated by the presumption that the character is taking an actions that usually resolve first and are followed second at great difficulty, rather than applying the "super fast" adjective to their actions. While this Advantage doesn't technically have Protected limitations, adherence to the basics of our Advantage policy implicitly limits its ability to behave dictatorially on other players. Required: N/A. We leave it up to the player to define what means or mechanic it is that guarantees other PCs "a save", as per our Intensity of Effect rules. Time Stop at a ●● rating has considerable constraints on its use such that it's plausible to resist or contest it with mundane extra effort, awareness, and/or cleverness, or else it isn't very subtle or versatile, but is still a considerable advantage in any time-sensitive context. Nox from Wakfu, Esdeath from Akame ga Kill, the Time Clow Card, and most video game incarnations such as Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, fall here. Time Stop at a ●●● rating is a primary power wherein the stopped time is reliably and easily accessed with a full range of available actions, letting the character enhance most things they do. The enhanced actions are very difficult to keep track of or brute force past, and are a predominant gimmick added to interactions. Dio Brando from JoJo's Bizarre Adventures and Homura Akemi from Puella Magi Madoka, are credible examples. |
| Toughness | The character can take much more damage than a human normally could. Whether they're naturally super tough, use strong armor, energy shielding, psychic or magic barriers, or just have a ton of metaphorical HP, what matters is that they can take a lot more damage. Required: N/A |
| Unlimited Activity | The character can keep expending their energy or resources on a task near or effectively indefinitely. They might have superhuman reserves of stamina that let them run or labor for days, a way to constantly gather infinite magic, a power source that can run devices for the foreseeable future, or even just an inexhaustible pile of ammunition and expendables. Required: The resource or resources the character has in abundance. |
| Vehicle Mastery - Type | The character has a considerable level of prowess with a certain kind of mount or vehicle. When in the saddle or behind the wheel, they can pull off a variety of expert maneuvers and stunts that wouldn't be possible for someone merely licensed. Obviously, the character is presumed to just have access to basic examples of the relevant ride. Required: The type of mount or vehicle the character is extraordinarily skilled with This Advantage is category bounded; one purchase covers a limited breadth of mastery. Look further down the page for some acceptable examples. |
| Water Prowess | The character has extremely high effectiveness in all things regarding acting on or under the water. When swimming, diving, sailing, etc. water features have little bearing on them as a hazard or obstacle, whether from pressure, drowning, currents, or similar. This capability may extend to similar liquid obstacles, depending on rating though it won't protect them from the dangers of things like lava or acid. Required: N/A |
| Weapon Mastery - Type | The character has a considerable level of prowess with a certain kind of weaponry or certain combat style. Within their arena of expertise, they are capable of executing a variety of stunts and maneuvers outside the grasp of merely hitting and blocking. Obviously, the character is presumed to just have access to basic examples of the relevant weaponry. Their capabilities only extend to what could be accomplished with any example of the weapon; sword beams and hammer explosions aren't a form of mastery. Required: The type of weaponry or style of combat the character is extraordinarily skilled in. This Advantage is category bounded; one purchase covers a limited breadth of mastery. Look further down the page for some acceptable examples. |
| Wealth | The character is unusually wealthy in a liquid sense; they have so much money to casually throw around that they can buy away a lot of problems on the spot, and bankroll large projects. Having access to items that are available to ordinary people, but are normally way too expensive, can be assumed to be part of this Advantage. Required: N/A |
Advantage Category Examples
Advantages with - Categories are bounded to a maximum limit of what they can contain in one Advantage. This involves a small but necessary degree of eyeballing, to keep things relatively even, instead of allowing Advantages like Resistance - Everything. To help judge acceptable categories at a glance, we've listed a number of examples below. These are not complete entries. The categories themselves are valid, but the contents aren't trappings. Don't copypaste the whole thing.
Bane
| Examples |
| Modern Mythos Supernaturals -- Werewolves, vampires, zombies, famous regional monsters such as yeti or chupacabra, most ghosts, some instances of demonic possession, etc.
Classical Folklore Monsters -- Gorgons, basilisks, sea serpents, banshees, hydra, faerie, most dragons, etc. Eastern Tradition Creatures -- Youkai, Ayakashi, spirits and gods of individual objects or locations, evil ghosts borne of improper burial, archetypes of Kitsune, Yuki Onna, etc. Undead -- Ghosts, vampires, liches, skeletons, zombies, various necro-horrors, etc. up to and including “technically dead” targets, such as zombies by lethal infection rather than necromancy. Mechanical Beings -- Cyborgs, androids, most robots, various forms of AI with relevant physical access, etc. Does not cover robots too simple to be called beings or that are clearly accessories, like a manufacturing arm or a tank. Divine Power Users -- Gods, demigods, avatars of such, typically all kinds of angel and equivalent divine servant, priests/clerics/shamans/monks, etc. that directly invoke a divinity’s power. This Advantage may contain categories that are extremely variable on a theme to theme basis, or categories that are so narrow they apply with a great degree of cross-theme lenience, such as: Profane -- Creatures declared anathema by a primary divine power, and which are subjugated, harmed, or repelled, by divine power. Depending on theme, this could be almost anything. Common subjects are demons, vampires, evil spirits, corrupt gods, the undead, dark magic users, etc. but its massive reach into so much space means that it's at the mercy of a theme's internal conceits. A vampire might be cursed and unholy in one world, but what is blatantly a vampire in another may be some kind of disease or mutation and have no such stigma. Dragons -- If it’s a big, scaly, winged and tailed, flesh and blood creature, likely with some sort a damage dealing breath, it probably counts. It doesn’t matter whether it’s called a Drake or a Wyvern or a Lung or a Fell Beast; a dragon is a dragon is a dragon. Conversely, this sometimes might not apply to some entities that use the name “dragon” only in metaphor or homage, as clearly some kind of elemental or space god, or something like a dragon-shaped rock golem. |
Immortality
| Examples |
| Immortality is concerned with acceptable Catches rather than a category itself. Some unofficially named examples are:
Extreme Overkill: The character is killed for good when hit with unreasonable amounts of firepower in a short period of time, essentially “killing them really really dead”. At ●●● they might need them to be completely obliterated. At ●● it caps out around grossly excessive violence that doesn't typically exist in accidents or fights. At ● it thwarts incidental or dubiously credible deaths that didn't have a serious attempt at following up ("nobody could have survived that fall"). Cell from Dragon Ball Z, the Thing, and many iterations of Godzilla, are examples. Immortality Juice: The character keeps coming back to life until they can’t anymore. The character could have extra lives, a lottery on whether it works, resurrecting could be draining to their stamina or magic reserves, etc. At ●●● it would probably take a concerted effort to trap or track, and repeatedly kill the character for a while. At ●● it has a plausible chance of wearing out in an especially prolonged fight, or enough of a failure chance that the character thinks twice about dying in general. At ● they're looking at probably just once or twice depending on how easily killed they are, and can't have it based on random chance. Alucard from Hellsing and Fujiwara no Mokou from Touhou are examples of this Catch. Minimum Bar: The character only returns from death if specific circumstances are met. They may have had to die while acting a certain way, in a possession of a certain object, in defense of a certain cause, or only if they can pass some sort of bar of entry that a character could reasonably interfere with, such as retrieving their corpse. At ●●● it would rarely or never fail on its own, and require deliberate effort and setup to enforce a scenario where it would. A ●● could provide broad scenarios where the Immortality is basically guaranteed to work, but will have its reliability be in question in some non-irrelevant cases. At ● it can be threatened by circumstances that are common to high threat scenarios, or a wide variety of uncommon ones. The God Tier mechanics of Homestuck characters fall here, as well as the Undead from Dark Souls, or any number of characters that carries some kind of self-resurrection mcguffin. Achilles Heel: The character is only killed for good when exposed to, or killed by, a certain class of attack, object, stimuli, etc. They might only die when burned to death, by a silver blade, under the light of the sun, specifically when decapitated, etc. This is graded by how obscure or difficult to obtain the killing mechanism is. At ●●● it's presumed that it would almost never happen unintentionally; someone would have to know the Catch and plan for it. At ●● it's presumed that the fatal threat won’t be commonly present, but may still rarely turn up in regular scenes, and wouldn’t be too hard to acquire it if necessary. At ● the character is going to frequently encounter the source of their Catch, and someone could probably fabricate it on the spot with some cleverness. A massive list of classical monsters could go as examples, such as vampires and stakes to the heart, as well as the Highlander series, and every other boss from the Resident Evil series. Backup Box: The character dies, but revives at a remote object or place, often defended for obvious reasons. The success of the mechanism is rarely ever a question. Disabling or destroying it is the obvious method to fulfill the Catch. At ●●● this means the character is almost never in fatal danger unless an enemy significantly plans for their demise, though there should still be some pertinent reason they'd hesitate to actually drop dead. At ●● it means that the process could be compromised in some way more accessible than doing the full dungeon run to destroy it,though it'd still take some effort to acquire a means to interfere, or locate it. At ● there is some intensely limiting factor that makes its primary defense just the surprise, such as having to be kept within 100 meters, or opening a portal directly to itself the character’s soul slips through. Character examples include Voldemort from Harry Potter, 2B and 9S from Nier: Automata, and every single Lich ever. Note: A Catch like this cannot ever be defended or secured by a conceit or fixture of a theme at large. Requiring an enemy to turn a critical fixture upside down or inflict mass casualties to threaten the PC results in being behind multiple shields of extra consent and dissuasion. Proxies: The character works through expendable proxy forms instead of being physically present at the action. Usually, the canon Catch in this form of immortality is that the character has to be tracked down to their real location and killed in the flesh, but this isn't acceptable as the sole Catch on MCM, since someone has to exit the scene to do so. The character must be subject to some kind of sympathetic trauma from damage to the proxy, or the proxy must present a way for something to deal damage to the character through it. A ●●● example entails the proxies being expendable enough to repeatedly throw at a single danger. Fatal feedback would require killing multiple proxies, or inflicting as much extensive injury to one as possible before destroying it. A proxy link could be as narrow as uploading a tailored virus through a robotic body, or exorcising a character possessing someone. At ●● that feedback can be lethal if the proxy is damaged to an egregious extent, or a link might be more like electrically overloading a robot body, or destroying a homunculi's animating gem. At ● the proxy is only sufficient to prevent the character being killed under controlled or low-stakes circumstances, such as sent in advance into a dangerous unexplored room or to trigger a trap as a failsafe, and feedback ensures that they wouldn't want to do so more than once or twice per scene. A proxy link in this case would be as broad as "anyone meaningfully intend to kill the character behind the proxy, instead of just destroy the proxy and remove their involvement." Character examples include Neo from the Matrix, Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell, and the Tenno from Warframe. |
Knowledge
| Examples |
| Computers -- Finding evidence of forced entry, learning how to operate unfamiliar systems, analyzing the capabilities of robots by their programming, tracking by someone’s internet activity, etc.
Occult -- Knowing favored items to negotiate with spirits or things that repel them, resolving the unfinished business of a ghost, decoding ciphers in arcane texts, etc. Psychology -- Attempting to ascertain someone’s honesty, psychological profiling, finding the right approach in interrogation or negotiation, dealing with victims of traumatic events, etc. Tactics -- Anticipating an ambush, predicting an enemy’s movements ahead of time, reading into a goal or strategy through a group’s actions, picking naturally defensible places to build, etc. |
Resistance
| Examples |
| Each example includes examples of things a Resistance could reasonably claim immunity to, and which could reasonably provide useful protection from. Obviously, any and all of these examples are subject to the tier of the Advantage, and any special factors that make the source important. Immunities are automatically trumped by PCs, according to the rules expressed in the table, and which examples apply to the character should be made clear in their trappings. No Resistance may be so broad that its environmental examples functionally eclipse Adaptation (such as Resistance - Space Hazards).
Fire and Heat -- Immune: Natural heat such as the air of a desert or volcano. Forest fires, burning clothes, or a naturally occurring magma pool. Resistant: Flamethrowers, plasma guns, critical reactor heat, fire spells, stellar exposure, etc. Toxins and Disease -- Immune: Ordinary diseases and infections, and toxins that are “bad for you” but don’t have consequences that would manifest within a scene, asides maybe throwing up. Resistant: Supernatural or magical diseases or illnesses, curses of poor health, chemical weapons, weaponized viruses, animal venoms, lethal poisons, etc. Arcane -- Immune: Minor cantrips, mild hazard spells, pockets of wild magic, or Protected effects such as polymorphs or disintegrations. Resistant: Direct forms of arcane attack or impediment, like magic missiles, curses, explosive runes, binding spells, offensive teleports, etc. This is specifically bounded by the origin of the effect being some sorcerous, enchanted, magical creature, magitechnological, or similar means. Resistance - Magic is a supertype so broad that no longer meaningfully resists anything. |
Skill
| Examples |
| Architecture -- Building useful structures, reinforcing existing ones to combat readiness, renovating a ruin into a home base, finding structural weak points for demolition, discovering secret rooms, etc.
Mechanical Engineering -- Assessing the purpose of an unknown device, manually operating things like bridges, hangars, and generators, performing standard manual repairs, salvaging for useful parts, performing tuning, upgrades or restorations, etc. Scouting -- Tracking quarries, finding secret passages, discovering or making shortcuts, erasing tracks, picking up on environmental signs, etc. Spelunking -- Navigating, map making and reading, climbing and rappelling, squeezing through small spaces, reading air currents and natural signs, finding things in the dark, etc. |
Vehicle Mastery
| Examples |
| Aerospace Superiority -- Jets, combat planes, bombers, starfighters, VTOLs, etc. Works for equivalent flying riding animals such as pegasus knights, griffons, and dragon riders, etc. so long as air combat is happening. Would need an additional Point for exceptionally skilled ground riding.
Air-Ground Support -- Helicopters, gunships, landing craft, space troop transports, etc. Likewise large, low-flying riding animals can work here, like dragon strafing runs. Watercraft -- PT boats, hovercraft, jet skis, speed boats, kayaks, amphibious vehicles, etc. Practically any marine creature significantly smaller than a whale. Fully Staffed Ships -- Destroyers, frigates, battleships, etc. of the water, space and air varieties. Riding equivalents are usually colossal war beasts or flying whales or the like. Automobiles -- Cars, trucks, ATVs, jeeps, tractors, APCs, armored vans, etc. Military Heavy Armor -- Tanks, APCs, self-propelled guns, drawn siege-engines, war elephants and similar big stompy monsters, etc. Single Riding -- Motorbikes, jet skis, snowmobiles, horses, etc. Most mounted ground combat could be covered. This Particular Advantage allows for extremely limited selections with broad roles, such as: Flying Cavalry Beasts -- Would allow solely for things such as pegasi, griffons, etc. but would cover all aspects of riding them, air, ground, support, dogfighting, mounted combat, etc. Humanoid Mecha -- Similarly, this allows for mecha combat in space, in the air, on the ground, etc. so long as it’s a giant metal person and acts like one. |
Weapon Mastery
| Examples |
| Polearms -- Spears, pikes, halberds, glaives, naginatas, polehammers, scythes, shock staves, etc.
Chopping Blades -- Cleavers, axes, hatchets, halberds, machetes, etc. Heavy Strikers -- Maces, hammers, war picks, polehammers, clubs, batons, realistic flails, suitably sized improvised cudgels, etc. Modern Small Arms -- Typical rifles, shotguns, handguns, submachine guns, etc. Explosives -- Grenades, rockets, missiles, fuse and barrel bombs, cannonballs, etc. Hand-To-Hand -- Claws, powerfists, knuckle weapons, pile bunkers, etc. May include unarmed combat itself, or things such as knives used as CQC enhancers. Flexible Wire -- Whips, weighted chains, mono-wires, lassos, tentacle spells, etc. Martial Arts Sticks -- Various staves, escrima sticks, tonfas, nunchaku, three-section staff, etc. Mounted Heavy Weapons -- Missile launchers, miniguns, autocannons, ballistae, mangonels, etc. Archaic Hand-Powered Projectile -- Bows, crossbows, javelins, throwing knives, shuriken, etc. This particular Advantage allows for extremely limited selections with broad roles, or extremely broad selections with limited roles, such as: Knives -- Just knives and that’s it, but the character would within their rights to use them as a melee weapon, CQC enhancer, thrown weapon, et cetera, even as if they were under Hand-To-Hand, or Archaic Hand-Powered Projectile. The extreme focus affords versatile capabilities with that weapon. Personal Sniping -- Just about any weapon that could be used by an individual to believably engage in sniping, from marksman and anti-materiel rifles to longbows or lasers, but no matter what they use, any of these weapons will fill the role of “sniper”, with their other qualities mostly being perks and window dressing. The extreme focus affords a versatile selection of weapons in that role. |
Rules on Trappings
While MCM leaves the standards of writing trappings and designing Advantage space mostly up to the players, there are certain stylistic matters of policy that are mandatory. These are necessary to make sure Advantages do what they say, and not accidentally something else.
"Conceptual" and "Molecular" Terms
Advantages that work on a “conceptual” level cannot include said terminology in their trappings. Advantages have to explain what they actually do in clear terms, and utilizing "conceptual" language does exactly the opposite of this by reaching into abstract territory. “Molecular level control” is understood to be effectively the comic book equivalent of this.
The Et Cetera Rule
For the same sake of Advantage clarity, using “etc.”, “and so forth”, and other thought extenders, should only be done in the context of a tight grouping of examples that obviously relate.
-Acceptable: “Black Mage has the magical power to fire blasts of elemental energy (fire, ice, lighting, etc.)” The “etc.” clearly indicates extra elements, but the magic itself has a clear and sufficiently narrow scope. Black Mage could shoot dark or water or earth element attack spells, but it doesn't expand on the utility of the Advantage, merely the VFX.
-Unacceptable: “Doppelganger has the ability to completely transform his body into that of a different creature, such as a bear, spider, dragon, werewolf, android, etc.” The “etc.” has no clear bounding or obvious continuation. None of the listed examples are intuitively related, and the entry could spiral into turning into planet-sized space whales for all the reader knows.
Hard Numbers and Figures
In almost all cases, defining the limits of Advantages through specific, hard and fast numbers will result in being bounced back for revisions. MCM is not a roleplay where comparing statistics is very meaningful, and our Advantages system runs on narrative effectiveness, not power levels. Exactly how many tons a character can lift, how many kilometers per hour they can run, how many kilojoules their laser gun fires, etc. should not appear in Advantages. "Lift a semi truck", "sprint as fast as a car", or "melt holes in battle tanks" are useful and acceptable alternatives.
Meta Reference and Rules Restatement
Advantages should not be written so that their trappings reference the Advantage system as a meta entity. Dictating interactions with Advantages by their official names or Pip counts, directing the reader around an Advantage section like a wiki, reiterating universal rules on scope/range/etc. is either making pseudo-policy calls, or already implicit in it being on MCM at all.
Advantage Policy
As MCM allows an extremely wide variety of characters and character abilities, for the sake of keeping things sane and fun, there are a few universal rules that Advantages must abide by.
Non-Player Characters Don't Have Advantages: The Advantage system is the core method for PCs to interact with each other and RP as a whole. The many entities that will exist as fixtures of scenes do not adhere to, or benefit from, the same system. NPCs (not the Advantage) abstractly have "whatever abilities are good for the story and fun", and can't enforce things like Skeleton Catch or Power Copy, nor do they possess meaningful tiers of things like Resistance or Anti - Power that trump or cede to characters mechanically. Sometimes this means that plot entities can exceed parameters normally available to PCs for the sake of a story, but never as a long term or irremovable fixture that can still push PCs around.
Threat to Player Characters: MCM requires that all player characters are capable of being threatened by reasonably significant bodily danger. Serious enemies and hazards should always be able to present as credible risks to PCs regardless of theme. Though what matters might vary from PC to PC, there is no way to "switch off" the potential for consequences to a character.
Intensity of Effect: Almost no Advantages are absolute. When someone “attempts to do a thing to you”, it's preferable for “something to happen” rather than “nothing to happen”, but we leave specifics to the affected player. Transparently, there isn't, and shouldn't be, any way to enforce through rules that Avada Kedavara automatically kills any target, or an Exalted Perfect Defense automatically negates any attack.
Range of Effect: Any Advantage that targets another PC is assumed to use a delivery mechanism that is avoidable, even if it doesn't in the source material. To put it another way, Everyone Gets A Save Against Everything. All combat powers are assumed to function with range and methodology which permits meaningful interaction between all players.
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. Places with little or no plot significance can play more fast and loose with this rule.
Interaction with MUSH Meta-Elements: Advantages that interact with natural Warpgates, Unification, or any other element of the MUSH's back-end, are not possible to have. You can't "de-unify" or leave the Multiverse or MUSH setting.
Additionally, there are a couple of miscellaneous, but important and pertinent rulings on specific uses of Advantages that result in them going outside the bounds of acceptable play.
On Gestalts: Certain character concepts can make more sense to apply for as an amalgamation of multiple characters, rather than arbitrarily choosing one and designating the rest as NPCs. This is most common in cases where a pair of protagonists or a group of characters are presented with equal prominence and their dynamics with each other are the central focus. In these cases, where an applicant is applying for a duo or squad as a single bit, we expect that the entire duo or squad functions at exactly the level of one PC when all constituent members are participating in something. A gestalt of two characters is effectively half a character if only one is present and doing something. The bit just plain does not have access to the abilities of characters who aren't present, Likewise, all individuals in the gestalt must be represented in the bit's Trouble; it is not acceptable to tactically exclude members from a situation in which a Trouble might be tripped. The entire gestalt has one amalgamate "life bar" and/or resource pool like any PC.
On Force Fields and Energy Shields: Personal barriers that block incoming damage are common fixtures; a skintight energy shield from a high-tech suit of armor, a mental force field bubble projected by a psychic, or a barrier of magical energy summoned around a wizard to protect himself. These Advantages are okay to apply for, but require some extra consideration when portraying them on MCM.
When these Advantages are played, we require that taking significant damage incurs some kind of strain as a result, so the conceit of force fields completely shutting down damage and guaranteeing the character's safety up until their arbitrary failure point doesn't work out. The armor has a shallow shield with a fast recharge that accrues repeated spillover, the psychic taxes their mental reserves, the wizard takes magic burn damage, etc. Essentially, players don't get to decide on a point of "okay, now this enemy/hazard matters to me".
Anti-Consequence Advantages: Advantages that exist to prevent other characters from being able to affect their desired target, or generally do things to the scene, are not permitted on grounds of being dictatory and/or anti-RP. An easy example of this is the barrier field magic from the Lyrical Nanoha series, which shunts combatants to a dimensional space where they cannot affect the real world.
Implicit Limitations: Despite the extreme breadth most Advantages allow, MCM has expectations that Advantages be played to what they say, and not what they could theoretically justify. “My Advantage doesn’t explicitly say I can’t do it” doesn’t mean you can. A Black Mage, Link, and the Doom Slayer might all have Combat Options, but there is a serious problem when Black Mage pulls a BFG or a Hookshot out from under his hat because it would fit under a Combat Options Advantage for the others.
On a related note, there is no such thing as Advantages that implicitly exist. Robot NPCs don't confer a free version of Skill - Computers because "logically the character should be a computer wiz to make robots".
