Power Copy
This file is meant to delineate acceptable boundaries and practices for power copying Advantages and variants thereof, encompassing basic Power Copy / Mega Manning, Assimilation of another character's abilities into your own, and wholesale Mimicry of another character. All forms of Power Copying are required to be Defining Advantages.
"Why," you might ask, "are power copiers so heavily rules-laden?" To put it simply: We're a freeform roleplaying game where people usually play pretty powerful characters, and have an interest in advancing those characters by acquiring new toys. People gauge a character's competence by Width of Ability and Height of Ability. Height of Ability is capped by our Power Level system and combat rules, but width of ability has gone unchecked and power copier power creep is symptomatic of that. While reviewing these policies, a player pointed out that their copier had, by the end of the character's lifespan, accumulated 30 stolen weapons. The net effect of unchecked lateral growth is that power copiers experience arbitrary lateral "level-ups" unavailable to other PCs, bounded only by other players saying no to them.
In short: People like to "level up" / advance their characters, and lateral upgrades are the only option available to people past a point. So we don't want characters to be able to acquire an arbitrary (technically infinite) amount of lateral upgrades that never go away, especially when the mechanism is inherently aping somebody else's stuff.
Power Copying / Megamanning: Power Copying, or Megamanning, involves a limited-scope ability to steal an attack (or some similarly limited scope "something") from your target. This no longer requires consent to be used, but only six copied attacks may be stored. Copied attacks universally timeout after 90 days OR being used in three scenes, whichever comes sooner. The target player determines exactly what the copier receives. These rules retroactively override the rules and mechanics of the source theme.
Assimilation: Assimilation is distinct from Power Copy; it involves permanently stealing <X> from another player and incorporating it into your advantage kit. Examples include Sylar from Heroes, Bass.EXE from Megaman Battle Network, Shirou from Fate/Stay Night. These characters create advantage kits by taking from others. Characters of this type are welcome to have their core kit established -- Bass.EXE can float and shoot a killer wolf head cannon, Shirou can summon Archer's swords and Caliburn -- but they can't expand their toolbox without upgrade applications. Furthermore, as their advantage sets are usually complete once they have their core kit, we prefer them to settle on the most prominent kit they use from their source material and stay there instead of accumulating more.
On top of requiring consent from their target to take their stuff, and an upgrade application, Assimilators are limited to three (3) upgrades obtained in this way. Within the scope of our system these are three bullet points, which may not be umbrella advantages themselves, and may never be standalone advantages.
Mimicry: Mimics are characters who steal another character's everything: Abilities, body / appearance, etc. Aptom from Guyver is an example, as is Axl from Megaman X, and to a lesser extent Beck from Mighty No. 9. To put it plainly this isn't an Advantage category we want running live at all, and we want absorbed entire advantage sets lingering even less than individual tricks. As of this writing only one character has this kind of advantage, and also has no other powers of their own, requires both IC cooperation and OOC consent to do it, and retains the borrowed advantages only for one scene's worth of use.
Instances of Mimics will need to be discussed with staff on a character-by-character basis, with the understanding that it: 1) Needs to be your character's main gimmick, 2) Will require an upgrade every time it happens, 3) Caps out at 2 maximum (not assumed, unlike other copier types) stored extra advantage sets at a time., 4) Will have the expectation you're not as good as the original at whatever you gain from them. Much as is the case with Assimilators, it's still OK for a guy like Aptom to have his core kit -- that is, his "monster mash" form from having eaten a bunch of other monsters -- but we'd mostly prefer if characters like this picked their core gimmicks from their source material and stuck with that.
Point of Clarification: Taking another character's appearance alone without assuming their traits isn't nearly this heavily locked down.
Mono-Theme Power Copy: Copy abilities only applicable in-setting (such as Naruto's sharingan) and in-setting upgrades (Aptom eating new zoanoids to improve his monster mash) may get more leeway, but there still needs to be a ceiling that isn't arbitrarily high. Antagonist subsidies do apply here to an extent though.
Power Copy Lifespan Limit: Regardless of the copying method used, an advantage stolen from a character who is no longer played will be reviewed and possibly purged. It is the responsibility of PCs with power copy to, where possible, alert staff that they have abilities that have outlasted the character they were obtained from. Stealing the power to fly from a superhero probably wouldn't be purged, but stealing a character's core gimmick would be. The reason for this is that we don't, for example, want the Sailor Moon of 2008 to make the decision to let Power Copier X steal her Moon Crystal Power and for the Sailor Moon of 2016 (almost certainly not the same person) to have to live with that baggage.
Patch Notes 1/16/2017: Adjusted the number of copied attacks Power Copiers can keep, and the number of bullet points Assimilators can have.
