Difference between revisions of "Advantages"

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==What Advantages Are==
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=What Advantages Are=
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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:
 
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 also prevents the Saiyan Jedi Fairy Princess Dragon Rider Keyblade Wielder of the Justice League singularity of characters continually accruing new things in play for a long time.
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'''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 that being able to do them is to the character, and how effective they can expect them to usually be. This communicates how the character plays out, and is agnostic of special theme hierarchies, power levels, numbers or measurements.
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'''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.
  
Essentially, 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 specific means through which the character accomplishes them, using the framework below. As long as those check out with the system, the details, description, and flavor they want are all basically free. In other words, 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.
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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.
  
==Advantage Classification==
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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.
All Advantages are first given a classification based on the Advantage's power, scope, and narrative relevance to the character. The core classifications fall into three tiers: Defining, Significant and Minor.
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==Advantage Structure==
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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:
 
   
 
   
===Defining===
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●: 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.
Defining Advantages those so centrally iconic to the character and vital to their struggles that they would no longer be the same character without them. These represent the core of the character's abilities, and where they would be sinking their metaphorical XP into. The Defining classification usually allows a greater ceiling of effectiveness for Advantages, so carefully consider how much an Advantage is used and how important it is to the character.
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''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.''
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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.
  
===Significant===
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●●: 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.
Significant advantages represent a broader arsenal of tools and abilities that a character uses in various situations that call for them, rather than as their flagship way of tackling obstacles. While still very effective, the character could probably get by for a while without relying on them, and they're likely to shine best in certain circumstances instead of all the time.
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''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. Link's inventory of gadgets like the hookshot and boomerang. Batman's Batmobile.''
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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.
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===Minor===
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A Minor Advantage is something useful, but often more of a passive perk or situational tool that the character doesn't really rely on. They typically provide thematic flavour, unique conveniences, or occasionally allow for a very niche application, but don't have much narrative potency, and always lose out to a Significant or Defining Advantage.
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''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. Darth Vader showing up with a team of Stormtroopers is certainly something he does, but they rarely accomplish much more than menial tasks and adding scenery to a fight where he does all the heavy lifting. Link accrues a number of items that are important to game progression, but rarely all that important otherwise, or else eclipsed by later acquisitions, such as the ability to hold his breath longer underwater, or fire a slingshot in addition to a bow.''
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●●●: 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.
  
==Advantage Structure==
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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.
Each player character is limited to a grand total of:<br>
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'''''Two''''' Defining Advantages.<br>
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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.
'''''Four''''' Significant Advantages.<br>
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A '''''reasonable''''' number of Minor Advantages, subject to request of being condensed. In practice, above 3 full Advantages is where evaluation begins, and above 6 full Advantages is almost never permissible.<br>
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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.
  
Each of these Advantages is meant to be a concise chunk of a character’s overall abilities and toolset, containing a handful of conceptually related “tricks”, “stunts”, “applications”, “roles”, “talents”, or whatever you’d like to call them. These are almost never defined power by power, but are abstract representations of “as many of the character’s abilities as contribute to a single narrative niche”. For brevity’s sake, we call these areas of capability “Points”.
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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.
  
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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.
  
Each of these Advantages serves to bind together '''up to three Points''' into a conceptually related package; the Advantage itself is a thematic package, while the Points define what uses and applications it has in play.
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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.
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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.
  
In many cases, characters might have a singular ability, item, or other conceptually indivisible "thing" that has too many applications to fit inside a single Advantage and its three Points. This is fine. You can dedicate as many Advantages to it as you need until all of its Points are covered.i.e. A wizard divides his magic casting ability into "Offensive Spells" "Summoning Spells" and "Utility Spells" for a total of 9 Points of space to fit in all his magic.
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A character cannot have more than 6 ● Advantages, more than 6 Incidental Advantages, less than 3 or more than 8 ●●●+ Advantages. Numbers of Redundant Advantages should be "within reason".
  
In rare cases, a character might have a singular defining ability that doesn't relate to anything else. A huge part of their character might simply be their phenomenal strength or skill with a sword, and trying to cram conceptually unrelated tricks into the same space muddies it up. If this happens, you can leave the Advantage with only one Point. Mono-Point Advantages, informally, are understood to get a little more respect, efficacy, and leeway, for their focus.
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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.
  
Lastly, a character could theoretically be so broad in their capabilities that they cannot fit all of them into 6 Defining and 12 Significant Points. It's up to player to compromise on this. “The movie version” of that character is our advice; apply for what the character would use on screen instead of everything in their bio. These changes are assumed retroactive and always the case.
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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 ●●●.
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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==
 
==Applying for Advantages==
When writing Advantages on your Character Application, divide all the capabilities you want them to have into the Defining, Significant, and Minor categories, observing the maximum limit. Give each Advantage a name, optionally adding descriptive text of your choice beneath it, list out its Points beneath that, and write in their descriptive text beside them. An example is provided on the Application. '''''Failure to use the demonstrated formatting can result in application rejection'''''. Outside of it sometimes just being hard to read, our character generation code breaks if people misformat things or make up their own unique notation.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
 
   
 
   
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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 ●, and don't count towards the limit on Advantages over ●●●.
  
For brevity and ease, we refer to the descriptive text in Advantages and Points as "trappings". The trappings of an Advantage or Point are free space for you to detail whatever you like about the character's particular abilities, and your prime real estate for describing the character's cool traits. To keep things sane though, we do demand all trappings observe the following things:<br>
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=Advantage Formatting=
Trappings must be '''no more than 240 characters each'''. If you find yourself struggling with this, make sure to use concise, understandable language that gets to the point, and look for places where you might be repeating yourself or adding unnecessary articles. We only flex this limit when it is absolutely necessary. 99.9% of the time, it isn't. If multiple Points necessitate being "on the same line", being inextricably tied together, their limits are naturally combined.<br>
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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.<br>
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A complete Advantage grouping looks like:
Trappings '''must meet any Required Text''', if any exists for that Point. Please read the Required Text of a Point you're applying for, and satisfy it in the text.
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Black Magic:
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Black Mage is a career expert in wielding destructive and debilitating magic, using elemental attacks and status to destroy his foes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
 
   
 
   
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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.
  
All available Points are laid out in the following list. Though we do include a Wildcard option for things that just don't fit, historically, it's been used single digit times. The following should be considered more than capable of representing any given character. You aren't required to read the full list, but you should carefully read the full contents of the Points you're applying for; the necessary reading isn't very long, and will save you rejections and revisions.<br>
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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 colon. Trappings go in-line with the Advantage name. Vanity pips go inside parentheses. Any Redundant Advantages go fully inside parentheses.
Apply for Points by name, and note any redundant "free" Advantages with (Parentheses:). Free Points do not extend limits on trappings, and all free Points that don't fall in-line with another Point must be included in a single line with its own 240 character limit.<br>
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If a Point ends with an extender (Point - ''Category'') then you need to name what it applies to. The same Point may be bought multiple times with different categories. Other Points cannot; please don't add category extenders to Points that don't have them.<br>
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==Minimum Expectation==
A Point marked '''Standalone''' occupies an entire Advantage; it effectively costs 3 Points by itself.<br>
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A Point marked with a tier (such as '''Minor''') can only exist within that tier.<br>
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A Point marked '''Consent''' is an Advantage that has an effect so binary or dictatory that our usual policy of "something happens is better than nothing happens" is diminished for it. It's generated with a tag that indicates certain applications of it are always acceptable for anyone to say no to, and pressuring it can be considered abusive.
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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.
'''Accepted Advantage Designations and Trappings'''
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==Non-Advantages==
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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.
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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.
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==Redundant Advantages==
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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.
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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.
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=Advantages A-K=
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'''Advantages A-K'''
 
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! class=HeaderCell | Trappings
 
! class=HeaderCell | Trappings
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Agelessness'''
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Adaptation'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character does not age in the conventional sense, or ages at an arbitrarily extremely slow rate, such as with robots, Tolkien elves, and various immortals.<br>
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Minor'''<br>
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'''Required:''' What kinds of environments the character can mitigate. This list should be comprehensive, and not implicit, wherever possible.<br>
'''Required Text:''' None.
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'''Investment:''' A broader range of environments, and/or greater protective strength against them.<br>
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'''Related:''' Adaptation confers protection, not capability. You still require '''Flight''' to fly through space, '''Mobility''' to burrow through desert sand, etc.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Analysis'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Analysis'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has the ability to intentionally examine a target and gain useful information and details about its nature and capabilities. High-tech scanners, classical psychometry, and magic detection spells are frequent examples, but determining someone’s recent activities by smell or instantly analyzing a machine’s function with raw intellect are equally valid ones.<br>
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Consent''' when studying PCs and/or their stuff.<br>
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'''Required:''' What targets are valid for Analysis (people, machines, landmarks, etc.) and what information they get from them (functions, elemental alignment, origins, weaknesses, etc.).<br>
'''Required Text:''' What kinds of targets the character is able to analyze (people, machines, landmarks, etc.) and what kinds of information are typically filled in by doing so.<br>
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'''Investment:''' Information of greater breadth, detail, and/or obscurity.<br>
''Note: This Point is for intentional and targeted examination. For abilities that passively pick up on cues or simply look for things in a wide area, see '''Extraordinary Senses'''.''
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'''Related:''' Analysis is a targeted examination of something. To pick up on cues inherent to the locale, see '''Extraordinary Senses'''.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Anti - ''Power Genre'''''
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Anti - Power Genre'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can dampen, counter, or nullify the use of a certain kind of other power by their interference. By far the most common example of this in fiction is the concept of an anti-magic field, as well as counterspells and disenchantment, but other incarnations might include suppression of psionic powers, or use in wards or technology that block teleportation.<br>
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Consent''' except against other Consent Advantages.<br>
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'''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).<br>
'''Required Text:''' A well-defined “genre” of power that this Advantage applies to, of no more broad a category than Anti-Arcane, exemplified by hitting wizards with counterspells; or Anti-Psionics, exemplified by scrambling psychic powers. Should also include what means the character takes to counter these powers, and must at least implicitly include how another character could avoid or get around it (for instance, getting out of a magic suppression field).
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'''Protected:''' Always.<br>
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'''Investment:''' Stronger interference.<br>
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'''Related:''' This Advantage interferes with other actors using their powers, and does not personally protect the character from being affected. See '''Resistance''' for personal protection.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Attack List - ''Melee/Ranged'''''
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Arsenal - Melee/Ranged/Named'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has a variety of damage-dealing abilities or weapons that are generally too numerous and relatively similar to deserve separate entries. This is a very common Point, seen everywhere from elemental JRPG spells, to Pokemon moves, to the high-tech arsenals of shooter or mecha protagonists, to the ki techniques of anime martial artists, to all kinds of named and typically shouted special attacks.<br>
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
For the purposes of Advantage notation, Ranged indicates attacks that happen, deal damage, and stop, even if they can be or are used at point blank range. Melee is reserved for forms of attack that allow for complex close combat, usually being actual weapons, not not always. Basically, if you can stop a sword with the attacks on your list without an extraordinary feat  skill, it’s probably Melee. Otherwise, it’s probably Ranged. Some bleed between the two is fine when a character has both, such as enchanting their weapons with attack magic.<br>
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'''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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' A solid idea of the theme the attacks follow and enough examples of outstanding gimmicks that any remainder can be easily inferred. The variety of attacks that be encompassed within this Point can be very broad, but it should still constrain itself to a coherent, overarching motif or classification.<br>
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'''Credit:''' ● to an Arsenal - Melee if the character possesses at least ●● Arsenal - Ranged, or ● to Arsenal - Ranged if the character possesses at least ●● Arsenal - Melee.<br>
''Note: This Point is a heavily subsidized space that compresses large and unwieldy lists of weapons and spells down to a single Point. By doing that, this Advantage only covers the attacks’ ability to deal damage, and not any special effects and applications that might come with them. An ice spell will deplete the target’s HP bar, but not freeze an enemy solid without any other Points, and a laser cannon will slag enemy mecha, but it won’t snipe missiles out of the air on its own. If you want to add status effects, see '''Debilitation'''. For crazy weapon stunts, see '''Weapon Mastery'''. Note that the existence of this Point to represent weaponry does already imply a degree of proficiency in using it; an Attack List of weapons is justification in of itself to fight with them to a reasonable level of skill. '''Weapon Mastery''' is geared towards representing a wide variety of offensive, defensive, control, and scenery stunts with a weapon, whereas this Point is heavily geared towards large selections of weapons and/or special gimmicks/abilities/twists to their attacks. The two are considered equally effective at winning fights.''
+
'''Investment:''' More powerful or more complex special attacks.<br>
 +
 
 +
'''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.<br>
 +
 
 +
'''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.<br>
 +
 
 +
'''Arsenal - Named''' may have only one major gimmick per Pip invested, and splitting it between gimmicks reduces each one's individual effectiveness.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Not every character that can fight will need Arsenal to represent it. The majority of characters lean on '''Combat Options''', which provides a very broad variety of many attacks for less Pips than Arsenal, though of less especial complexity, or '''Weapon Mastery''', which provides various manners of effective attacks and stunts that the chosen weapon or weapons could be used to pull off.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Bane - ''Target'''''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Bane - Target'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has immediate access to the typical weaknesses of an archetype of enemy, in as far they help in killing them, or a particular weapon or ability that is especially lethal against a specific class of foe. Typically, this Point is meant to indicate that the character probably has the necessary knowhow and gear on hand to exploit a weakness or Disadvantage that harms or weakens an applicable target (such as a werewolf and silver, a vampire and garlic, a fairy and cold iron, etc.). A World of Darkness Hunter carrying silver bullets and possessing True Faith to hunt modern-mythos supernatural evil is an example, as is Geralt of Riviera from the Witcher and his encyclopedia of tactics and poisons to use against monsters of classical folklore, both of which should be taken as an indicator of the maximum breadth of this Point.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' A clearly defined and coherent archetype of applicable enemy. The criteria that define a valid target should be narrative and descriptive where possible; a vampire in one setting may be unholy and undead, but someone infected by nanomachines in the other, and merely share the name.<br>
+
'''Required:''' A clearly defined and coherent archetype of applicable enemy. There are examples further down the page.<br>
''Note: There are some examples of acceptable archetypes later in this section.''
+
'''Credit:''' ● for no more than two Banes.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' More severe effects against the chosen enemy type, clearly in service of "fighting an enemy".<br>
 +
Minimum ●<br>
 +
'''Related:''' The trope kind of expertise that usually goes with the "monster hunter" archetype is easily represented with '''Analysis''' or '''Knowledge'''. A Bane doesn't give them special information about a target.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Buffs'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Buffs'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}}  
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
The character can, through means magical, scientific, or otherwise, improve the effectiveness of others applied to a task in a general sense. The character does not grant new abilities wholesale to other characters, but rather enhances their existing abilities and basic performance within a given area, typically being combat, though not always. This always expires at or before the end of a Scene. Most videogame buffs fall under this banner, but other incarnations could be things like a technopath increasing the performance of their allies’ gear, or the trope wherein a character with unusually high magical energy serves as a battery for a proper spellcaster.<br>
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'''Required:''' The specific arena(s) of effort the character can improve upon.<br>
'''Required Text:''' The arena of interaction in which the character improves others. Combat buffs are the most common, but this can be reasonably bounded areas like general physical tasks, magic casting, building things, etc.<br>
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'''Investment:''' More powerful buffs, and/or slightly broader applicable tasks.<br>
''Note: For more involved empowerment of other characters, see '''Share Powers'''. Worth noting is that generic buffs to parameters like strength do not result in an increase commensurate to '''Superhumanity'''.''
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'''Related:''' The thing that fully gives other characters full Advantages is '''Share Powers'''.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Conveniences'''
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Combat Options'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has access to one or more convenient gadgets or powers, defined as being not significantly greater than “what a middle-class citizen of New York would be able to do with what they have on the street”. For the most part, it is absolutely unnecessary to note that a character has a phone or a laptop, but using telepathic messaging to communicate, or having a memory equivalent to a quick Google search of information, are flavorful alternatives with occasional niche benefits.<br>
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Minor'''<br>
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'''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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' None, though the general thematic of the conveniences should be clearly established.<br>
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'''Investment:''' A broader range of attack themes and types, and/or more powerful and impressive attacks.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Attacks with major gimmicks or heavy individual importance fall under '''Arsenal'''. Attacks that cause status effects will likely use or include '''Debilitation'''. Significant all-around skill with specific weapons or combat styles falls under '''Weapon Mastery'''.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Cure - ''Self/Other'''''
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Communication'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can heal or dispel abnormalities and afflictions that negatively impact another character, which fall outside the purview of the natural result of having taken a bunch of damage. Final Fantasy’s Esuna spell and Pokemon’s status clearing items are familiar examples, but this can be more realistically grounded in things like extensive surgical or toxicology skill. The affliction being cured need not be physical, so breaking curses and dispelling debuffs are far game too. This Point is effectively the direct opposite of '''Debilitation'''.<br>
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' The scope of abnormalities and afflictions that the character can cure.<br>
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'''Required:''' N/A<br>
''Note: Just about any Advantage can be made to target the character’s self or another character, but healing is such a common one on both sides of the fence that we want to make it obvious up front in the designation. This distinction is effectively using the same rules as '''Share Power''', so if the character has that Point as well , pick a default form of Cure and simply write its opposite into either set of trappings. Only take Cure twice if the character doesn't share any other Points (in which case it's just neater and simpler), or if one type of Cure is a higher Advantage tier than Share Power (in which case the extra Point entitles the Healing to a greater degree of respect). Recovery of actual damage, see '''Healing'''.''<br>
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'''Investment:''' This Advantage can only be purchased for ●<br>
 +
'''Related:''' To intuit information that another entity isn't communicating, '''Mind Reading''' or '''Mental Intrusion''' is usually appropriate. Lifting information from things that don't communicate at all is usually doable with '''Hint'''.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Damage Reduction'''
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Contract - Collateral/Exchange'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can survive significantly greater amounts of damage than a normal person, due to anything from armor to energy shields to protective wards to supernatural toughness. This is an extremely broad Point, and intentionally encompasses as many sources of “surviving damage” as possible, with the assumption they are relatively effective against almost all types of damage to some degree.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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 the corresponding article.<br>
'''Required Text:''' None.  
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
 +
'''Protected:''' Always.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' More Contracts active at once, a longer expiry time, and more potential positive effects.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' The means by which a character can always give out as many benefits as they want, provided they are at the scene itself, is still '''Share Powers'''.
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 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Conveniences'''
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 +
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' The Advantage can only be an Incidental Advantage. It's little more than a flavorful and occasionally very niche twist on Non-Advantages.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Having casual access to normal items of a significant grade of utility frequently entails '''Wealth''', or an associated '''Skill''' with which it'd be used, such as a '''Skill''' in medicine to have automatic access to professional medical equipment as a prerequisite.
 +
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 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Cure'''
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 +
'''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.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' A greater breadth of curable maladies and/or greater efficacy in curing severe ones.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' If you're looking to heal someone from the damage they've taken, '''Healing''' is it. If the character themself shrugs off status effects on their person, see '''Immunize'''.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Debilitation'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Debilitation'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can inflict temporary maladies and afflictions on other characters that significantly hinder or harm them. The video game versions of poison, paralysis, freeze, etc. as well as most kinds of debuffs are the usual suspects, but this Point is intentionally extremely inclusive. Naruto martial arts pressure point tomfoolery and powers such as Prof. Xavier’s psychic seizure field from X-Men qualify, as do very realistic ideas of targeted crippling and riot control tools, and weird/exotic ideas such as found in various tabletops, like magically sticky floors.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' The overall thematic of the debilitations the character inflicts. Not necessarily exhaustive, but should have clear bounding.
+
'''Required:''' The overall thematic of the debilitating effects the character inflicts, with clear bounding.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' Greater variety and/or potency of effects.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' An effect that would take someone completely out of an interaction, like "realistic" paralysis, strictly falls under '''Incapacitation'''. For something that directly suppresses a specific kind of power, see '''Anti'''. Though generic "poison" or "burn" conditions can appear here, they tacitly acknowledge that they can't seriously injure someone on their own, and exist as a complication; '''Combat Options''' or '''Arsenal''' would deal real damage.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Destruction'''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Deconstruction'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has an ability, tool, or talent for accomplishing targeted and extremely thorough destruction of selective targets. This is assumed to be very different from the usual destructive effects of hitting people with missiles and fireballs, which exist to Deal Damage and Defeat the Target (though this Point will typically wind up being harmful to people anyways). This Point exists to represent the ability to do things like destroy equipment like a D&D Rust Monster, annihilate set pieces with controlled black holes, or turn someone to a pillar of salt like Drakengard’s Legion. In short, if it's possible to salvage the remains for anything remotely useful, it probably doesn't need this Point.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Significant''' or higher.<br>
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
'''Consent''' when used on possessions of consequence belonging to other PCs. Being used on PCs themselves is just subject to normal combat exchange.<br>
+
'''Protected:''' Possessions of consequence belonging to PCs. Being used on another PC will result in a harmful attack, if appropriate.<br>
''Note: For extremely destructive abilities that reshape the battlefield at large with their power, rather than being highly targeted, see '''Field Shaping'''. Further note that this Point is not mandatory for damaging things that aren't people. Objects have HP bars, and intentionally attacking an object will apply the damage of the attack to it. This Point largely disposes with tracking this interaction, and instead directly applies a discrete destructive effect.''
+
'''Investment:''' The ability to affect more important/protected targets; taking a unique, powerful, big deal magical artifact straight off the table isn't a ● Advantage.<br>
 +
Minimum ● There's absolutely no point to an Incidental Deconstruction.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Any kind of damage-dealing Advantage, such as '''Combat Options''', Arsenal''', an appropriate '''Weapon Mastery''', or perhaps even a relevant '''Skill''' such as for demolitions, can break or destroy something in a standard way.
 +
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 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Defensive Paradigm'''
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 +
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.<br>
 +
'''Required:'''The nature of the defensive stunting, and in the case it can invalidate a very wide range of types of attack, a salient limitation; a character's defense button cannot work perfectly against everything until the player deems that it hasn't.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' An increased number of special defense mechanics up to the Pip rating of the Advantage, or a more extreme gimmick with greater reach and impact on a fight. An Incidental example works only on attacks that wouldn't be allowed to work anyways. An example any lower than ●●● cannot expect to work on "everything, unless".<br>
 +
'''Related:''' There is a ton of overlap from a lot of different Advantages that could probably serve to fill the role of this one, depending on the example. '''Defensive Paradigm''' exists to bend the usual flow of combat a little in a cool and flavorful way, rather than have immense utility; someone with '''Teleportation''' who could already easily dodge the attack, is able to dodge by teleporting out of the way instead of ducking or diving, and someone with '''Speed''' and '''Weapon Mastery''' at a high level can parry bullets with a sword. Pick this one if the gimmick in question has a very narrow, strong, characterizing trick to it.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Disguise'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Disguise'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can effectively assume the form of something or someone else, whether via expert makeup and impersonation, magical shape changing, optical camouflage, etc. This Point does not cover gaining any Advantages associated with the new persona or form, but solely passing as them to avoid suspicion, gain access to their things, or what have you. Sometimes this Point comes down to simply adopting an alter ego or identity on a day to day basis, like Batman with Bruce Wayne, sometimes with minor cosmetic changes, in which case this Point qualifies for a '''Minor''' slot.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Consent''' to impersonate another PC.<br>
+
'''Required:''' Who or what the character can disguise themself as.<br>
'''Required Text:''' Who or what the character can disguise themselves as.
+
'''Protected:''' Impersonating another PC.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' More convincing and comprehensive disguises. A simple "alter ego" is usually only an Incidental Disguise, like Clark Kent putting his glasses and collared shirt on.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Adopting an appearance meant to hide the character from even being see is certainly a type of '''Stealth''' rather than being "disguised" as a bush or something.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Entry Methods'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Entry Methods'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character is exceptionally talented in gaining physical access to places that are difficult or restricted in entry. This is differentiated from various forms of stealth, in that the character is not necessarily sneaky about it, but through skills in break and enter or typical “dungeoneering”, or perhaps shrinking to a tiny size, turning into mobile mist, or some other trick, they are very good at reaching where they’re going without having to force down the front door, as well as potentially opening the way for others.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' What entry methods are available to the character.
+
'''Required:''' The general variety of security measures or obstacles, manmade or incidental, that the character can get past.<br>
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+
Minimum ● If security is meaningful enough to require an Advantage, an Incidental Advantage won't do it.<br>
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Environmental Protection'''
+
'''Investment:''' The ability to gain entry to harder to reach areas.<br>
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can act with some significant degree of safety in hostile environments that would otherwise pose a significant or severely dangerous obstacle to a normal person. Hard vacuum, crushing pressure, high radiation, lethal heat or cold, extreme gravity, and other associated background hazards can be cited as things the character is prepared to deal with, as well as highly theme-specific threats, like Toukiden’s Miasma, the Abyss of Dark Souls, or the Wyld from Exalted.<br>
+
'''Related:''' A character that simply goes right through walls would be looking for '''Intangibility''' instead. A character that gets into places by just leveling or making ways through any obstacles would be looking at '''Field Shaping'''.
'''Required Text:''' What environments the character can mitigate. This list should actually be more comprehensive than implicit where possible.<br>
+
''Note: This Point does not confer broad capability in unusual environments, only safety. If the character wants to rocket around in space, see '''Flight'''. If they want to maneuver around under the sea, see '''Mobility'''. So on, so forth.''
+
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Extraordinary Senses'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Extraordinary Senses'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character’s senses are so finely tuned that they can pick up cues that no normal person would be able to, or the character possesses senses beyond the customary five that allow them to pick up cues that similarly would be otherwise undetectable. 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, or sensors that search an area for specific criteria like sonar or infravision, fit this bill.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' What additional sensory acuity the character has, and some examples of what they might pick up. Common, real life technology may not require examples. It’s expected that everyone knows what night vision goggles do. Likewise, generic ghost/spirit sight should just state that the character can see ghosts/spirits. '''These cues must be actual cues in roleplay, rather than just the desired target''', i.e. “sensing invisible things” is not a valid trapping. Said cues should also not make dictatory presumptions of other characters in order to work, such as with the anime trope of “killing intent”, where a successful spot check presumes another character was bubbling with murderous emotions all along.
+
'''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".<br>
<br>
+
'''Investment:''' A greater range of extra sensory cues and/or heightened awareness of them.<br>
''Note: Though this Point is typically something that a character simply has “switched on” at most, if not all times, a character is only going to get full use out of it by actively applying it. Passive info gathering is something other people might opt into, rather than something a character with this Point is entitled to. Extraordinary Senses expand the range of what cues might be obvious to a character that others otherwise wouldn’t normally notice, but unless the character decides to actively make use of them, information and clues that a scenerunner or other player might choose to give the player of a character with this Point, without prompting, are effectively voluntary. Simply put, if Extraordinary Senses aren’t being directed towards something, it is entirely possible for the character to not be told details that they might otherwise have noticed.''
+
'''Related:''' This Advantage picks up an element of the scene that would otherwise go unnoticed (a "cue"). To get a bunch of new information about something the character is already aware of, see '''Analysis'''. This may and can result in an '''Extraordinary Sense''' making a character aware of a new cue, thus becoming a valid thing to analyze.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Field Shaping'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Field Shaping'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has the ability to alter large portions of the scene itself in the physical sense. An Earthbender from Avatar raising structures out of the terrain, a D&D Wizard laying down grease spells and walls of fire all over the battlefield, a giant monster or super robot leveling buildings or creating massive craters, and a skilled demolitionist collapsing caves or creating new passages around an area are all equally valid examples. This can also cover leaving the effects of other Points as traps or remote fixtures.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' The general extent to which the character can manipulate the field and a clear idea of the breadth of its effects.<br>
+
'''Required:''' How the character can influence the field, in a strongly bound way.<br>
''Note: For highly targeted and specific removal of major scene obstacles, such as melting a way through a bulkhead to reach a command deck, potentially see '''Destruction'''.''
+
'''Investment:''' A greater range of effects and/or alterations of greater scope.<br>
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+
'''Related:''' The Advantages '''Arsenal''' or '''Combat Options''' can be used to create deadly hazards, while things like '''Debilitation''' can create tactically advantageous zones. '''Toughness''' might create large shields to protect others. '''Teleportation''' is often combined for the purpose of making portals or wormholes. Almost anything can be made an area effect, though largely indiscriminate in its use; not like '''Buffs''' or '''Share Powers'''.
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Flash Movement'''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}}
+
The character has the ability to move from one point to another virtually instantaneously. Though in many cases, the character does not actually traverse the space in between, the character can only use this Point to move to somewhere they could already physically move without it. This Point is always the basis for a teleportation ability, though by itself the character can only instantly move to a place that rapid movement could carry them normally (think "flash steps").
+
 
+
 
+
Combinations of various other Points can naturally enhance this. '''Intangibility''' allows this Point to target through walls and obstacles. '''Mobility''' allows it to navigate through dense and complicated terrain to a desired point without line of sight. '''Flight''' allows it to travel high into the air, and sustainably through the air, like characters do in Dragon Ball and Bleach as examples. '''Share Power''' allows the character to teleport others along with them. '''Field Shaping''' allows them to leave accessible teleportation around the area which may undermine certain obstacles, usually being “gates”, like Chell from Portal or Yugo from Wakfu. '''Attack List''' could allow the character to “telefrag” into people. '''Remote Viewing''' could allow the character to teleport to faraway places they have previously never seen. This allows players to scale the space their teleportation takes up and down on a gradient of flexibility and power.
+
 
+
 
+
Grades of this Point based on the tier of slot they use are relatively concrete. Most examples use combinations of Points to achieve their canon powers, and are placed as useful narrative benchmarks.<br>
+
'''Defining''' Flash Movement has few to no limits on its distance and what places the character can end up in. They might instantly travel between entire worlds and almost always penetrate preventative measures, meaning that they can often Just Show Up. Examples of users of Defining Flash Movement are Protoman from Megaman, Kibito from Dragon Ball, and Nightcrawler from X-Men.<br>
+
'''Significant''' Flash Movement is generally limited to moving around the area of a scene, though its speed and distance are usually sufficient to provide a convenient escape or entry, and an advantage in combat. It usually does not allow a character to appear in an area protected against teleportation and similar, but it may if it happens under highly specific circumstances, such as the character’s name being called. Examples of Significant users of Flash Movement include Star Trek Transporters, Nox from Wakfu, Beetlejuice or Hastur.<br>
+
'''Minor''' Flash Movement is mostly cosmetic or convenient in nature. It rarely covers enough distance fast enough to allow it to be much more effective than a standard dodge or to establish surprise in combat, or in the cases it does cover long distances, it requires enough preparation that it can’t be used as an escape or entry in danger, or anywhere particularly secure, resembling a Stage Select, video game “fast travel”. Either way, it has no significant narrative strength.. It won't get the character out of a jail cell, intense combat, or anyone you'd assume somebody should use it but never does. Examples include every Megaman robot, common RPG town recall items, and nearly every single shounen character who gains teleportation in-story.<br>
+
'''Required Text:''' Descriptive terms that encompass the Flash Movement’s range, expedience, and possible destinations, which should be very clear and understandable.<br>
+
''Note: While it is expected that '''Share Powers''' is necessary for situations where other characters are able to actively take advantage of a Flash Movement ability or ability package, it's worth noting that a character with this Point has a small amount of leeway in transporting other characters on their own terms. In the same way a character could throw someone over their shoulder and carry them somewhere with '''Mobility''' or '''Flight''', a character with this Point can typically grab someone and take them somewhere under the standard qualifier for Flash Movement, i.e. "as far as they could without it".  
+
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Flight'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Flight'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character, put simply, can fly. We really don’t care to differentiate between different arenas of flight (mostly air and space), and so they can be applied for under one Point, but it still should observe canon/implicit limits. Hovering or slow non-combat flight typically occupies the '''Minor''' tier.
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can fly. Aerial flight or space flight are encompassed the same way under this Advantage, or both.<br>
'''Required Text:''' None.<br>
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
''Note: While this Point covers getting around through the air, skipping over ground obstructions and hazards, and general combat flight, it and '''Mobility''' are separate narrative spaces that do stack. Extremely agile Flight fit to zip through an obstacle course or dogfight inside of an office building will likely require the second Point.''
+
'''Investment:''' Greater control and range of flight. Not extreme speed. A minimum of ● is required to essentially negate the threat of heights.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Gaining greatly increased speed via flight still requires '''Speed'''. Stunting around difficult or hazardous terrain that would impede flight still requires '''Mobility'''.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Hacking'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Hacking'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can take over digitally controlled machines. It is generally understood that characters with this Point may use it to substitute for a variety of other Advantages where hackable items appears appear in a scene, and so this breadth should be counterbalanced by respecting the bounds of the genre that the hacking applies to. Hacking cyborg/android/AI PCs plays out as combat does, and is not a binary win-lose state. Characters like the Major from Ghost in the Shell, Sombra from Overwatch, and Cortana from Halo, are examples.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Consent''' where it concerns dictatorial effects, outlined later in this section.<br>
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
'''Required Text:''' None.
+
'''Investment:''' Access to more secure devices and greater control.<br>
 +
Minimum ●<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Hacking of sapient mechanical entities still requires '''Mind Control''' or '''Mental Intrusion'''.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Hammerspace'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Hammerspace'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has a pocket dimension, Bag of Holding, a videogame inventory, impossibly roomy clothing, or something else that allows them to carry an unrealistically large amount of stuff very conveniently.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Minor'''<br>
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
'''Required Text:''' None.<br>
+
'''Investment:''' Hammerspace is usually an Incidental Advantage. Pips are only required for performing scene-altering stunts with the storage itself.<br>
''Note: This Point is allowed to be '''Minor''' only on the presumption that the character can’t use it to solve obstacles of significant scale. Dropping an incoming meteor into a Bag of Holding goes way beyond the these bounds, and thus require '''Significant''' or higher.''
+
'''Related:''' The idea of catching and reusing attacks is covered by '''Defensive Paradigm''' or '''Power Copy'''. The stuff usually inside the hammerspace itself still requires Advantages.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Healing - ''Self/Other'''''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Healing'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has the capacity to heal others or themselves of damage at a speed that is useful within the timeframe of a single scene. “Damage” in this case is more or less defined as “lost HP”, so this Point is all that is technically sufficient to prevent a character from becoming incapacitated through combat and dying, but it doesn’t extend into purging other harmful or inconvenient effects. Healing used on other characters is most straightforwardly exemplified by video game mechanics such as Final Fantasy’s White Magic or the healing technology of Overwatch’s support characters. Self-healing often takes more niche forms, like Wolverine’s regeneration from X-Men, or a vampire’s ability to restore itself by drinking blood, and self-healing is almost always something they can do on their turn alongside other actions.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' None.<br>
+
'''Required:'''N/A <br>
''Note: Just about any Advantage can be made to target the character’s self or another character, but healing is such a common one on both sides of the fence that we want to make it obvious up front in the designation. This distinction is effectively using the same rules as '''Share Power''', so if the character has that Point as well , pick a default form of Healing and simply write its opposite into either set of trappings. Only take Healing twice if the character doesn't share any other Points (in which case it's just neater and simpler), or if one type of Healing is a higher Advantage tier than Share Power (in which case the extra Point entitles the Healing to a greater degree of respect). For non-HP purging of secondary effects, see '''Cure'''.''
+
'''Investment''' More effective healing.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' If the character heals on their own, or heals themself, '''Regeneration''' is needed. '''Cure''' is the Advantage for removing "status effects" or things like diseases.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Hint'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Hint'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has some sense or ability that they can invoke to gain useful insight regarding a situation or course of action, such as future sight, divine inspiration, or some spark of unusual genius. This Point is essentially requesting that the runner of a scene or plot give your character some form of information that will help move events forward to a desired conclusion, or present an actionable opportunity to gain something. Though this Point is not technically tagged with Consent, in practice it’s pretty much impossible to do it without.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Defining''' where the Hint provides useful and actionable information one or more scenes in advance.<br>
+
'''Required:''' An idea of where the Advantage can gain information and of what kind.<br>
'''Required Text:''' Under what circumstances the character gains hints, and the nature of information that they reveal, or nature of task they are applicable to.
+
'''Investment:''' More detailed information and/or a greater variety of appropriate situations.<br>
 +
 
 +
Minimum ●●● for obtaining information about things one or more scenes in advance.<br>
 +
 
 +
Minimum ● otherwise. Hint cannot be an Incidental Advantage.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' To gain information about something of specific interest, look at '''Analysis''', which allows a character to target a scene element and learn desired details about it. To simply pick up on special cues within a scene, '''Extraordinary Senses''' may be appropriate.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Illusions'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Illusions'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can create convincing facsimiles of people, objects, scenes, et. which can pass for the real thing, usually for purposes of deception and misdirection. Holograms, magically conjured phantoms, or direct psychic impressions are common ones, but regardless of the means, the illusions are insubstantial and harmless.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Consent''' along the same guidelines as Disguise.<br>
+
'''Required:''' The scope of what can be faked, and what can give them away.<br>
'''Required Text:''' The scope of how much can be faked at once, and what could give them away.<br>
+
'''Protected:''' Impersonations of other PCs.
''Note: This Point does not cover using an illusion to render oneself invisible or make oneself look like someone else. See '''Invisibility''' and '''Disguise''' respectively for those.''
+
'''Investment:''' Larger/more complicated/more convincing illusions that might deceive more senses.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Illusions can't be used to make a character or object simply disappear; this is a function of '''Invisibility'''. Likewise, though illusions might help greatly with sneaking, '''Stealth''' is still an applicable Advantage to put it to use, and to hide, maneuver, and accomplish tasks stealthily.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Immortality'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Immortality'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character does not die, or does not stay dead, when injured it ways that should be instantly or irreversibly fatal. Voldermort from Harry Potter, Alucard from Hellsing, Cell from Dragon Ball Z, and the Chosen Undead from Dark Souls are various examples. This Point, regardless of its tier, absolutely requires a “Catch”; a set of criteria in which the character faces the very real risk of permanent death, or a permanent state wherein the character is no longer playable. Depending on this Point’s tier of Advantage slot, this could be relatively easy to fulfill, or much more specific and difficult, but the Catch must always be something that the overwhelming majority of PCs could feasibly do if they put in the extra time and effort, and preferably something that could feasibly happen more often than very rarely in high-danger GMed scenarios.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' The Catch, as well as when and where the character comes back to life, if it is somewhere else.<br>
+
'''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.<br>
''Note: There are some examples of acceptable Catches later in this section. Certain other Points may shift the definition of “fatal” for the purposes of this Point. A Defining regenerator may feasibly survive being stabbed in the heart just fine, since loss of heart function actually takes several minutes to cause total death, but regenerating from having their head blown off or being totally incinerated requires this Point.''
+
'''Investment:''' The Catch becomes more difficult to fulfill. Again, the list of Immortality Catches should give a good idea of what tier of relevance this has.<br>
 +
Minimum ●, Maximum ●●●<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Immortality means the character doesn't die, not that they aren't harmed. A character who gets back up with restored health right after being killed would need '''Regeneration''' to heal in combat time. A character that simply tanks through being killed, or reduces the damage of fatal injuries, could probably use '''Toughness'''.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Improbable Defense'''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Imperishable'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character is able to apply their defensive options on an extremely implausible scale or basis, or the character possesses exotic defensive options that apply to esoteric or niche threats. Examples include Raiden parrying Metal Gear RAY and hellfire missiles with his sword in Metal Gear Rising, Avalon’s active defense from Fate/Stay Night, or Exalted perfect defense Charms. This Point is for evading active, rather than passive, threats to the character. Punching apart a tornado with their fists, parrying a volcanic explosion, or blocking a magical curse with a shield is a valid use of this Point, but “I dodge the background radiation” is not a valid way to get around the scary bits of the Fallout ‘verse (which would instead work off of '''Environmental Protection'''). This Point will generally not be necessary for characters who perform implausible feats that are justified by other Advantages. Vergil from Devil May Cry is justified in deflecting bullets with his katana by having superhuman swordsmanship and speed in his Advantages.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Significant''' or higher, as Minor Advantages are presumed to fail in contest with "bought" abilities.<br>
+
'''Required:''' Which basics the character is not affected by.<br>
'''Required Text:''' What kind of situations the character’s defenses apply in, and what drawbacks or holes they may include in the case that they are overwhelmingly broad.<br>
+
'''Investment:''' Imperishable is always an Incidental Advantage.<br>
''Note: Exalted is used as an example here, but MCM does not ever permit defenses that automatically succeed and negate all consequences of another PC’s non-consent-based attacks. An improbable defense is not a guaranteed defense. Effectively, you are buying the ability to use your defense in a situation where it normally wouldn’t apply, not invincibility.''
+
'''Related:''' The corner case of "not needing air" can only be significant defense against hazards with Advantages like '''Adaptation''' or '''Resistance'''.
 +
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 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Immunize'''
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 +
'''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.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' Greater resilience or purging of more powerful and/or varied status effects<br>
 +
'''Related:''' In all ways, this Advantage is the self-affecting version of '''Cure'''. The same relations apply, such as needing '''Healing''' to gain back "HP" or restore damage.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Incapacitation'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Incapacitation'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character is highly capable of neutralizing or subduing opponents without relying on lethal harm. This Point goes a step beyond simply restraining someone or slapping them with the blunt side of a sword, which anyone can do, and enters the realm of methods that hit a coadjacent “health bar”, where the end result is being decisively incapacitated in some manner different from bleeding out. Examples include specialized non-lethal weapons such as phasers set to stun from Star Trek, or the infamous tranquilizer guns from the Metal Gear Solid series, various magic along the lines of The Sleep from Cardcaptor Sakura, Mid-Childan magic from the Nanoha series, or conditions such as Frog or Stone from the Final Fantasy series, as well as mundane methods like paralyzing poisons. While many of these methods are extraordinarily binary in their source material, it is understood that they will rarely be so effective on PCs. This Point may wind up easily knocking out NPCs en mass, but doing so to a PC will involve repeatedly hitting them with multiple applications, taking gradually further effect until they succumb, like regular damage with a different result.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Consent''' in the case of examples that alter some aspect of the character or reduce some part of their effectiveness beyond what combat damage would do.<br>
+
'''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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' A precise and fairly detailed account of the end condition the character achieves, and how it can be lifted (or else how long until it wears off naturally).<br>
+
'''Protected:''' Making transformations to other characters.<br>
''Note: Permanent use of this Point on PCs is not something MCM generally allows. Particularly severe examples may fall into the same restrictions as plots that involve capturing PCs. It is a universal assumption that if a character possesses this Point, it has the full functionality and weight of any other Advantage, and thus does not represent the character “holding back” or limiting themselves in some way. This Point represents a propensity for incapacitation as effectual as lethal combat of the same level.''
+
'''Investment:''' Dealing more "incapacitation damage", in terms of applying it more swiftly and reliably.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' In some cases, it might be appropriate for a user of '''Weapon Mastery''' to pull off combat stunts that restrain or knock their opponent out without killing them, though probably still fairly harmfully, and only with a reasonably narrow category and with a reasonable Pip investment. '''Debilitation''' is a better source of weakening and impeding an enemy for an immediate advantage.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Intangibility'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Intangibility'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has the ability to pass through solid objects. This could be a typical ghost phasing through walls, a Fate/ series Servant or Exalted spirit dematerializing, Kitty Pryde from X-Men, or as part of a teleportation ability in tandem with '''Flash Movement''', as examples. An extremely important point is that '''MCM does not allow invincibility to be an Advantage''', and so any long-lasting or permanent form of this Point automatically comes with the caveat that any other PC possesses whatever criteria is necessary to physically harm the character while they are intangible. Brief Intangibility may be a reason for an attack to have missed, but only within the confines of what the character could already avoid, otherwise the character needs '''Improbable Defense'''. Because this Point often allows the user to basically go wherever they please, it may be subject to the same preventative measures that keep out '''Flash Movement''' and similar.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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 an already avoidable attack, but since invincibility isn't a permissible Advantage on MCM, any form of Intangibility the character can maintain for a while is automatically susceptible to all attacks the character usually is.<br>
'''Required Text:''' None.
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
 +
Minimum ●<br>
 +
'''Credit:''' ● if the character has Teleportation ●● or higher.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' The ability to pass through more "restrictive" or "defensive" objects. The physical characteristics, like density or weight, don't matter narratively. A ● Intangibility can't pass through a highly secure bunker, or escape a grapple from a skilled enemy.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' If the character becomes intangible as a primary form of reducing or negating harm, '''Defensive Paradigm''', or possibly '''Toughness''', are appropriate.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Intrusion Immunity'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Intrusion Immunity'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has some form of special training, protective equipment, natural immunity, or similar, against unnatural mental influences and invasive examination of their thoughts or mindstate. This Point is essentially a hard "opt out" of effects that dictatorially affect a character's mental state, including some or any combination of mind reading, mind control, memory erasure, brain simulation, etc. While we still ask people to not be disrespectful about shrugging off hazards and powers, these spaces are so consent-heavy and tied up in players not getting to play their character that this Point is accepted as being playable up to the level of hard immunity to the same Advantage tier or lower.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' None.
+
'''Required:''' N/A, though it's encouraged to provide what the theme of the immunity is.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' Immunity to higher tier effects, from both PC and NPC sources.<br>
 +
Minimum ● Maximum ●●●<br>
 +
'''Surcharge:''' ●<br>
 +
'''Related:''' In certain cases, it might be plausible to cure or shrug off "mental status effects" inflicted by mental influences, using specialized '''Cure''' or '''Immunize'''. These never reject the primary effects of things like '''Mind Control''', '''Mind Reading''', or '''Mental Intrusion''', but may be justified in healing harmful madness, trauma, delusions, etc.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Invisibility'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Invisibility'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has powers of concealment that are potent enough for the default assumption to be that the character simply will not be found unless he does something obvious. This could be actual invisibility, chameleonic camouflage, a psychic compulsion to ignore the character, etc.; all are considered Invisibility. Grades of this Point based on the tier of slot they use are relatively concrete.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Defining''' Invisibility is at near enough to flawless that the character flat out won't be found out until they do something overtly noticeable, or are contested by a great deal of effort put towards finding them. It may conceal them in multiple ways beyond purely vision, or naturally resist methods that would normally be expected to reveal the character, and it likely continues to function in combat. Examples are Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, Kusanagi Motoko's opticamo, the Invisible Stalker from D&D, or Toru Hagakure from My Hero Academia.<br>
+
'''Required:''' N/A, though without further description, the invisibility is assumed to apply only to sight.<br>
'''Significant''' Invisibility has notable limitations that are sufficient to cap the character's ability to go where they please. It may fail against reasonably important equipment or spells, have a strict time limit, dispel when the character attacks, or give off subtle clues a wary PC can watch for. Examples are most incarnations of the Predator, the Spy's cloaking watch from Team Fortress, the Dummy Check esper ability from A Certain Scientific Railgun, and your typical tabletop RPG invisibility spells.<br>
+
'''Investment:''' Greater effectiveness, and possibly a greater range of senses affected. ● Invisibility will usually provide cover from individually unimportant but collectively meaningful NPC attention, or provide niche invisibility regarding a specific stunt or power of the character's. ●● Invisibility is presumed to be effective in concealing the character, has notable limitations that cap the character's ability to go wherever they place all the time, like subtle visual cues, a strict time limit, dispelling when attacking, etc. ●●● Invisibility is close enough to be flawless that its integrity isn't in question until the character engages in very obvious activities or suitably great effort is put towards discovering them.<br>
'''Minor''' Invisibility is only useful for discretion's sake, and likely only effective against unimportant NPCs. Anyone relevant to the plot will likely see through it unless they have some sort of deficiency, or aren't paying attention at all. If the invisibility can be obviated by a special trait that is common in the cast of the original source, it's assumed that all PCs count as having that trait. Examples are dematerialized Heroic Spirits, a Stand from JoJo's Bizarre Adventures, various ghosts and spirits with true forms, and basically every single ninja in shounen anime.<br>
+
'''Surcharge:''' ● for ● Invisibility, ●● for ●● Invisibility, ●●● for ●●● or higher Invisibility.<br>
'''Standalone'''<br>
+
'''Related:''' Invisibility alone doesn't guarantee that a character can accomplish things stealthily or undetected. '''Stealth''' covers the major aspects of being genuinely sneaky, and Illusions still have their major use in misdirecting and deceiving people, which synergize with Invisibility if desired.
'''Required Text:''' What traits of the character the Invisibility conceals, and at least implicitly how they could be detected in spite of it.
+
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Knowledge - ''Field'''''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Knowledge - Field'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character is exceptionally knowledgeable about a particular field of something, whether that be science, social interaction, tactics, etc. The Knowledge is broadly useful in enough circumstances that it still deserves to be called an Advantage, but it cannot grant the character the use of another Point implicitly (for instance, choosing “computers” as a category of this Point does not suddenly make the character capable of '''Hacking'''). This Point is effectively a differently flavored mirror of '''Skill'''.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' The character’s Advantage-worthy area of knowledge, with at least two example applications.<br>
+
'''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.<br>
''Note: There are some examples of acceptable categories later in this section. A character being knowledgeable about their own theme, including the minutiae of its cosmology, local events, or unique mechanics, is not considered an Advantage. Incredibly theme-specific info is better used to run plots or scenes with. Knowledge in STEM fields will generally not be accepted as a Minor. These fields are too practically applicable for a Minor to be anything but useless trivia better left unpurchased.''
+
'''Investment:''' Broader and more detailed knowledge with greater practical impact.<br>
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+
Minimum ● Trivially accessible knowledge is something any character can have.<br>
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Low Intake'''
+
'''Related:''' A character cannot implicitly gain the use of another Advantage for having Knowledge. For instance, Knowledge - Computers doesn't give a character the use of Hacking, though a thin slice of shared effect space might exist. Carefully consider whether the character actually needs Knowledge to do the things they do, or whether it's simply an element of their background.
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has little to no need of one or more typical biological necessities, such as food, water, sleep, and similar. Regular maintenance of their person is not a notable consideration.<br>
+
|}
'''Minor'''<br>
+
</div>
'''Required Text:''' Which things the character doesn’t need.<br>
+
</div>
''Note: This Point does not negate or reduce actual threats in any significant way. Not needing to sleep doesn't protect you from a sleep spell, and not needing to breathe doesn't save you from a gas attack. Non-casual instances of dealing with threats like these are encompassed by '''Environmental Protection''' or '''Resistance'''.''
+
 
 +
= Advantages M-W =
 +
 
 +
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'''Advantages M-W'''
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{| class="LogTable"
 +
|- class="LogRow"
 +
! class=HeaderCell | Designation
 +
! class=HeaderCell | Trappings
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Mental Intrusion'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Mental Intrusion'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can perceive, analyze, intuit, influence, create, remove, and/or edit the thoughts, feelings, memories, emotions, etc. of other beings, to an unnatural or assumed accurate degree. This Point is most typically used for outright mind reading or mind control, but can represent things like simulating behavior, uncanny judgement of character, reading or using microexpressions, etc.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Consent''' always.<br>
+
'''Required:''' What types of influence the character has with minds.<br>
'''Required Text:''' What "inner information" the character can access from others, and/or what compulsions or alterations they are able to affect.<br>
+
'''Protected:''' Always.<br>
''Note: Note: There are certain mental effects that are so low-grade and simple that they can qualify for '''Debilitation'''or wholly positive enough that they qualify for '''Buffs'''. Inflicting supernatural terror that causes targets to flee for their lives certainly is this Point. Projecting an aura of intense stress, or speaking an abhorrent eldritch word that is painful to hear, probably aren’t; the specifics are in the other character’s court, and they are still wholly in control of their actions. A Bard’s Inspiring Tune certainly isn’t this Point either. Likewise, non-intrusive and non-dictatory means of assessing and intuiting people's thoughts and feelings probably qualify as a '''Hint''' or '''Analysis''', putting together useful patterns out of cues people are already expressing, instead of learning things the character shouldn't rightfully know.''<br>
+
'''Investment:''' More powerful and/or flexible effects.<br>
 +
Minimum ● Maximum ●●●<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Mental Intrusion is the appropriate, fully subsidized space for characters who can both read and write to other people's minds. For characters with a narrower range, see '''Mind Control''' or '''Mind Reading'''; having just one of them costs less Pips than having both functions inherent in Mental Intrusion.
 +
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Mind Control'''
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 +
'''Required:''' An idea of which kinds of control the character has over minds.<br>
 +
'''Protected:''' Always.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' More powerful mind control.<br>
 +
Minimum ● Maximum ●●● including Credit.<br>
 +
'''Credit:''' ●<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Though it's possible to simply force a mind controlled entity to verbally divulge what they know, any information gained in this way is assumed to be much less clear, reliable, unbiased, or complete, not to mention less subtle, than by using '''Mind Reading'''. If the character possesses both abilities however, '''Mental Intrusion''' is intended to be the more cost efficient catchall.
 +
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Mind Reading'''
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 +
'''Required:''' An idea of what information the Mind Reading extends to.<br>
 +
'''Protected:''' Always.<br>
 +
'''Investment:'''More far reaching and accurate information gathered.<br>
 +
Minimum ● Maximum ●●● including Credit.<br>
 +
'''Credit:''' ●<br>
 +
'''Related:''' As with '''Mind Control''', the completed suite of mind influencing abilities between the two is inherently cheaper with '''Mental Intrusion'''. '''Mind Reading''' and '''Mind Control''' exist as a subsidized spaces for a character to do one or the other for less cost.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Mobility'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Mobility'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can adroitly get around complex, dense, and/or hazardous environments by means of superior mobility, such as parkour, diving, jump packs, wall climbing, grapnel hooks, water propulsion, video game double jumps and air dashes, etc. They may also perform such feats as running across water, balancing on clotheslines, or clinging to ceilings. Examples are Spider Man, Batman and Catwoman, Mario and Luigi, Faith from Mirror’s Edge, Genji from Overwatch, and almost any Wuxia theatre fighter.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' The specific way in which the character's mobility is enhanced. Most of the examples listed above are acceptable short-hand.
+
'''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.<br>
 +
'''Credit:''' ● if the Mobility contains water-related or aerial stunts and the character already possesses '''Water Prowess''' or '''Flight''' at ●●● or higher.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' Greater ability to mitigate or ignore the difficulties or perils of navigating obstacles, or movement abilities with a wider variety of applicable situations.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Mobility might help the character avoid various perils, but if they wish to, for example swim safely in lava instead of water, or at the bottom of the ocean they require '''Adaptation'''; another example is that if they take a high speed fall from parkouring at height, '''Flight''' or '''Toughness''' would be what it takes to not splat at the bottom.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''NPCs'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''NPCs'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can command one or more other entities who will usually try to comply to the best of their ability. The NPCs may be fully realized characters, or simply generic monsters or drones, but overall their relationship to the Player Character is a subordinate one, and were they to leave or die, the character concept would not be overwhelmingly changed, though their loss must still amount to some kind of appreciable setback or non-trivial consequence for them. The Advantages that an NPC can possess are limited to those the PC already possesses (for instance, a knight skilled in swordsmanship and riding might command a unit of cavalry skilled in the same), unless more Points are given over to the NPCs’ use, though it’s very rare that an NPC possesses all the Advantages of the PC and vice versa. Grades of this Point based on the tier of slot they use are relatively concrete.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Defining-Grade:''' The NPCs are essentially at the same tier as PCs. They are serious combat entities, may be stronger or more capable than the character themselves in some areas, and can generally expect to viably compete with PCs in relevant situations. Usually, some Advantage space is dedicated to fleshing out their personal abilities. An example is Ash Ketchum's Pokemon team, including Pikachu. The loss of Defining NPCs is prohibitively costly to the PC, and represents a hefty diminishment of the character’s core effectiveness.<br>
+
'''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.<br>
'''Significant-Grade:''' The NPCs are essentially at the tier of a miniboss. They are meaningful obstacles in a conflict situation, and may have specialist skills or unique abilities, though they generally cannot expect to outdo a PC within their arena of expertise. Examples include R2-D2 or generic SOLDIERS from FF7. The loss of Significant NPCs is highly inconvenient to the PC, as they represent a great deal of investment and are effort/resource/time intensive to replace.<br>
+
'''Investment:''' More powerful, effective, and generally relevant NPCs.<br>
'''Minor-Grade:''' The NPCs are essentially window dressing or props. Their skills have niche uses at most, and cannot contribute more than a similar Minor Advantage would. Minor NPCs do not have PC-relevant combat power and are presumed to lose in any combat engagement against anything more important than them. Examples include C3-P0 or generic Stormtroopers from Star Wars, or generic “redshirts” from Star Trek. The loss of Minor NPCs is a lesser inconvenience to the PC, but one great enough that they have a good incentive not to throw them away without thinking.<br>
+
NPCs are at the level of mooks or extras. They can apply their abilities in limited situations and tackle minor problems in the character's stead, but overall they can't do much more than bog down another PC, limited to being a minor obstacle or inconvenience. Blobs of generic Stormtroopers, red shirts, or workmen are example. Losing them is a minor setback and they are quickly replaceable.<br>
'''Required Text:''' What the NPCs are capable of. This does not have to be extensively inclusive of specific Points, however “what the NPCs do” and the generalities of their limits should be obvious. A reader should be able to tell that Storm Troopers don’t use The Force or swing around lightsabers.<br>
+
●● NPCs are comparable to a "miniboss" or themed specialists. Their abilities and personal resources are meaningful enough to solve significant problems for the character, and they're meaningful, serious obstacles to other PCs in a situation where they conflict. NPCs of this rating still can't reasonably expect to defeat a PC in combat or categorically outdo them in their area of expertise, but they can present a stiff challenge. R2-D2, or generic SOLDIERS from Final Fantasy VII are examples. They represent a significant amount of investment and are time/cost/effort intensive to replace when lost.<br>
''Note: Where it actually matters, a Minor NPC specialized in combat will beat a Minor NPC that has no combat role. C3-P0 still loses to a squad of Stormtroopers, even though they're both Minor-grade.''
+
●●● NPCs are roughly at the same tier as PCs. They are serious combat entities, have skills that can solve the central problems of scenes, and can overall expect to viably compete with Player Characters; they might in fact be stronger than the character that has the Advantage in some areas. They usually have some Advantages dedicated to fleshing them out. Ash Ketchum's Pokemon team, including Pikachu, is a prime example. Losing these NPCs is prohibitively costly to the character, and significantly diminishes their effectiveness until they can get them back in action or replace them.<br>
 +
Maximum ●●● NPCs can't be completely stronger or better than PCs.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' If the character's '''NPCs''' have extremely limited function, or are personally irrelevant but amount to one of the character's main abilities, it may be valid to replace them with the Advantage itself. Tiny spy drones might just be represented with '''Remote Viewing''', or exploding suicide summons might just be a part of '''Combat Options'''.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Power Copy - ''1/2/3'''''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Power Copy - Derivative/Mirror'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} Because Power Copying is an Advantage that can be almost any other Advantage, and often several at once, the way that Power Copying works is not covered here, but [[Power Copy|in its own article]].<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Defining'''<br>
+
'''Investment:'''Minimum ●●●●●<br>
'''Standalone'''<br>
+
'''Surcharge:''' ●● for Power Copy - Mirror.<br>
'''Consent''' for 2 and 3.<br>
+
'''Related:''' There is no particular Advantage that can be pointed out in relation to Power Copy. It's important to note, however, that most characters with Power Copy also have Advantages that consistently show up no matter who they've copied, and it's highly encouraged to buy these Advantages for the character themself, instead of relying on trying to have them copied at all times.
'''Required Text:''' The scope of what is copied, in the case of '''Copy - 1'''.<br>
+
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Quantum Solution'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Quantum Solution'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has a knack for occasionally producing unique, irreplicable, and incredibly situational solutions to various problems they encounter, through MacGyver-esque ingenuity, arbitrary access to mad science gizmos, absurdly flexible but situational magic, miraculous luck, or some other similar bag of tricks. Once per scene, this Point allows the character to produce a solution to a single, discrete obstacle or challenge. As per this Point’s name, said solution essentially doesn’t exist until it suddenly does. The form this solution takes and how effectively it solves the problem are up to the discretion of the scene or plot runner, but in a situation where no agreeable compromise can be reached, this Point is not “used up”.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Defining'''<br>
+
'''Required:''' A strong theming for the nature of the Advantage. A character cannot produce solutions of infinite different thematics of infinite genres.<br>
'''Consent'''<br>
+
'''Protected:''' Always.<br>
'''Required Text:''' A strong idea of what thematics the Point follows.
+
'''Investment:''' Quantum Solution is always ●●●●<br>
 +
'''Related:''' No Advantages are strictly related to Quantum Solution, given that it is a once per scene golden ticket. If the character is more likely to simply solve problems with their given Advantages in clever ways, and figuring out how to do so is the hard part, '''Hint''' can be a good source of prompts.
 +
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Regeneration'''
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 +
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' More effective healing.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' If the character is able to heal other people with their powers, they require '''Healing''' to do so. '''Immunize''' is the Advantage for purging or shrugging off "status effects" done to the character.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Remote Manipulation'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Remote Manipulation'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can physically manipulate objects at long distance, whether through telekinesis, magical puppet strings, manipulation of an element, sticking their hands through tiny portals, etc. Universally, this Point is a utility, covering practical tasks that can be done with physical manipulation, and typically not effectually imitating other Powers. Telekinetic flight and barriers and powerful attacks require other relevant Points. The default assumption is that the character manipulates objects as they could with their hands, or appropriate mundane tools in the case of things like water or sand.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' What the character can manipulate and to what extent.
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' More precise and varied manipulation at distance.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' If the character's remote abilities vastly exceed their normal physical parameters, '''Strength''' or '''Superhumanity''' are necessary picks, such as to crush cars with the character's mind. Things like telekinetic flight and barriers are entirely different Advantages, such as '''Flight''' and '''Toughness'''.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Remote Viewing'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Remote Viewing'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can surveil a place extremely far away, or which they are otherwise unable to view normally, even with enhanced senses. Extremely mundane examples are the classical hidden camera and microphone, with fantasy equivalents being the crystal ball or Scrying spell, though this Point can also represent familiars or drones the character can see through, to name a few. This Point presumes that characters being watched are reasonably capable of realizing they are with mundane attention, unless appropriate concealment Points are taken alongside it.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Consent''' when spying on PCs.<br>
+
'''Required:''' A criteria that determines valid places for the character to view, as opposed to "the entire Multiverse."<br>
'''Required Text:''' The mechanism by which the character views remotely, and the criteria that determines a valid place for them to see into.
+
'''Protected:''' Spying on PCs without their knowledge.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' Longer viewing range, greater penetration of security, and/or greater awareness of a viewed place or multiple viewed places at once.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Remote Viewing itself doesn't guarantee that nobody knows the character is looking in; the default assumption is that other characters can become aware that they're being watched without anything special. '''Stealth''' would apply to this kind of Remote Viewing, or laterally, '''Invisibility'''.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Repair'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Repair'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character is able to repair various equipment, devices, or structures, to working condition. This is very often a mundane skill assisted by tools, in which case there is typically a more narrow field, but it can also use sci-fi reprocessing or powerful supernatural means, such as in Starbound and Eclipse Phase, or Josuke’s Stand, Crazy Diamond, from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures. How well the object functions when finished typically corresponds to the Point’s slot tier.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' What sorts of damages the character is able to repair, and at least implicitly, how their repair can be useful to a scene in progress. "Can repair things with enough time and the right materials to repair that thing" isn't a useful or accepted bounding.
+
'''Required:''' A metric by which Repair is more limited than "any object fully and instantly."<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' Faster, more complete, more varied repairs.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Repairs don't fix people. Even mechanical people. That requires '''Healing''', '''Regeneration''', '''Cure''', or/and '''Immunize'''. In some cases '''Resurrection''' might be appropriate, like bringing a dead robot or AI person back online.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Resistance - ''Source'''''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Resistance - Source'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has a natural resilience to, or a powerful preventative measure against, a specific category of harmful or unwanted influence. This can be almost anything, such as a red dragon having a Resistance to fire, but this Point has variable usefulness when it comes to PCs. As a general rule, a Resistance to a type of damage or harm can scale all the way up to an immunity to a natural or mundane source (such as a forest fire or black plague), provides a degree of utility based on its tier of Advantage slot against major plot obstacles (a melting down reactor or a super virus bioweapon), and only as much effect vs another PC as they are willing. How well this Point is respected by another PC is largely a matter of strongly encouraged etiquette.  
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 
+
'''Required:''' N/A. See some examples of valid categories in the appropriate section.<br>
 
+
'''Credit:''' ● if the Resistance is against damage type and the character has Toughness at ●●● or higher, or if the Resistance is against an ambient factor and the character has Adaptation at ●●● or higher. The Credit applies to no more than two Resistances.<br>
A Black Mage repeatedly slamming the canonically fire-immune Rubicante with fire spells, which he knows he should be strong against, while a whole list of other elements are at his disposal, is being a dick. An Avatar universe Firebender however, is free to light Rubicante up and assume it will be effective, perhaps with some extra effort, because it would be unreasonable to insist a Firebender couldn’t use their primary ability, and they don’t have much else to use anyways. The sole exception to this point is when a Point has an applicable '''Consent''' caveat, in which case it is generally acceptable for a Resistance to provide immunity of a certain level, understanding that the '''Significant''' and '''Defining''' Advantages of other PCs are still entitled to due sell when the target declines. The category of a Resistance that encompasses solely these effects can be fairly broad.<br>
+
'''Investment:''' More powerful resistances.<br>
'''Required Text:''' Informative examples of what sources of harm the character has a Resistance against.<br>
+
'''Related:''' A Resistance cannot provide its complete effects vs environmental factors unless it is narrowly categorized against one specific factor, such as Resistance - Acid allowing the character to dip into a vat of acid. In almost all cases, '''Adaptation''' is still a necessary Advantage to deal with hazardous environments. If the character has a wide variety of specific elemental resistances, a high-rated '''Toughness''' with simple written caveats that it applies more to some elements than others, is much more appropriate. Any Resistance that would be covered by '''Intrusion Immunity''' requires that Advantage instead.
''Note: For a resistance or immunity to mental intrusion effects, see '''Intrusion Immunity'''.''
+
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Resurrection'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Resurrection'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has the ability to bring back the dead with the functionality they had in life. For the purposes of this Point, “dead” is when a target is going to stay dead unless someone brings them back to life full stop, not clinically dead or a state a scene runner would be explicitly allowing to “come back to life” anyways, such as with defibrillation or Phoenix Down.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Defining'''<br>
+
'''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.<br>
'''Standalone'''<br>
+
'''Investment:''' Resurrection at a ●●●● rating has a very narrow criteria which a dead character must fit, and is too inconvenient to pull off to change the immediate course of a scene. Resurrection at a ●●●●● rating can resurrect dead characters within fairly broad criteria, and doable within the scope of an ongoing scene.<br>
'''Required Text:''' The criteria needed for a target to be eligible for Resurrection. Note that this does mean that there needs to actually be a state of “dead” that a character cannot resurrect. It is typically understood that entities killed offscreen or as part of a plot won’t be subject to the same level of finality as a PC using '''Skeleton Catch''', but it is an obligate condition of Resurrection that there be a reason the character cannot go rubbing resurrection juice on every dusty old femur they find scattered around a crypt, as it quickly becomes laborious for scenerunners to constantly fabricate NPCs out of nothing.<br>
+
Minimum ●●●●<br>
''Note: This Point does not extend to bringing your own character back to life. If your character self-resurrects, see '''Immortality'''. Obviously, resurrected targets are probably in perfect or near-perfect health, and so further healing Points are not strictly necessary. Not taking them does, however, mean that your character can’t heal someone who isn’t dead yet.''
+
'''Surcharge:''' ●●●<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Resurrection is absolutely not needed to revive, and in fact does not work on, a character who is merely "defeated", dying, or in critical condition. It may apply to, but is not strictly necessary for, characters who are "clinically" dead but still possible to save with ordinary medical attention. Since Resurrection only works on other characters, if the character who possesses it can come back to life, they require '''Immortality''' to do so.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}}'''Skeleton Catch'''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Skeleton Catch'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character kills people dead, period. They automatically fulfil the Catch associated with another character’s Immortality without having to go to extra lengths, and killing someone will prevent their return through Resurrection. This Point is an explicit exception to the general notion that no Advantage automatically trumps another Advantage when contesting an Advantage of equal or lower tier. Though Skeleton Catch is technically still a threat to characters possessing higher-tier Immortality, the existence of condeath makes this little more than flavor.
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
Because non-player controlled characters do not utilize the Advantage system, a Significant instance of Skeleton Catch should be considered adequate against entities that have any sort of defined Catch to their unkillability, and a Defining instance of Skeleton Catch should be considered always adequate period, including against theme entities that essentially aren’t killable without a plot.<br>
+
'''Investment:''' Skeleton Catch trumps Immortality of the same Pip rating or lower. ●●● Skeleton Catch trumps Resurrection. Since NPCs don't use the Advantage system itself, ● kill  NPCs that come back to life as a gimmick, ●● kills NPCs that come back to life as a major plot obstacle, and ●●● kills NPCs that essentially aren't killable without a plot.<br>
'''Significant''' or higher.<br>
+
Minimum ● Maximum ●●● Obviously, lower or higher ratings than these aren't meaningful.<br>
'''Required Text:''' None.<br>
+
'''Related:''' If you don't know what a Catch is, read '''Immortality'''.
''Note: Obviously, concepts such as condeath still apply. This Point is an allowance for certain characters who are willing to spend the Point to always be able to meaningfully threaten any entity with actual and permanent death. Unless chosen to explicitly note otherwise, for the purposes of this Point, dead is dead is dead, and no form of “technically dead” obviates it.''
+
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Skill - ''Field'''''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Skill - Field'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character is exceptionally skilled or capable in an area of expertise that is not encompassed by another Point, but is broadly useful in enough circumstances that it still deserves to be called an Advantage. The skill in question cannot grant the character the use of another Point implicitly (for instance, defining “programming” as a category of this Point does not suddenly make the character capable of '''Hacking'''). This Point is effectively a differently flavored mirror of '''Knowledge'''.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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'''.<br>
'''Required Text:''' The character’s Advantage-worthy area of expertise, with at least two example applications.<br>
+
'''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.<br>
''Note: There are some examples of acceptable categories later in this section, as well as a word on “skill minimums” required to make use of Advantages.''
+
'''Investment:''' Greater capability to accomplish difficult tasks<br>
 +
'''Related:''' This Advantage is a sort of mirror of '''Knowledge''', for relatively mundane but important learned attributes a character has which are academic rather than applied. Unusual skills with weapons or vehicles fall under '''Weapon Mastery''' and '''Vehicle Mastery''' respectively.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Share Powers'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Share Powers'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can grant the use of one or more of his Advantage Points to other characters, such as by handing out equipment, bestowing magical enhancements or blessings, synchronizing minds or abilities in some fashion, etc. Having this Point means that the character is able to provide others in the same scene with the benefits of their other Advantage Points of '''an equal tier or lower'''. In cases where the Point affects the self, such as '''Healing''', the character can now affect other characters, such as by casting healing spells. In cases where the Point is targeted at others, such as '''Attacks List''', the recipient gains the use of a similar ability for the scene, such as by handing them a raygun. In cases where the Point already affects others, such as '''Buffs''', the character is now able to use it on themselves, such as typical RPG moves. In cases where the Advantage is '''Standalone''' or incorporates '''Flash Movement''', others can only benefit from it by coordinating together with the character, such as huddling together under Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, or setting up fixed teleportation pads.  
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 
+
'''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.<br>
 
+
'''Credit:''' ● if he character already possesses Contract at ●● or higher.<br>
Recipients who wish to obtain these effects permanently must file an Upgrade Application as normal. Characters cannot Share Powers with recipients if they are not actually in the same scene. Certain Points are not eligible for sharing due to creating undesirable or redundant interactions. See '''Power Copy for this list''', as Share Powers' should be considered identical.
+
'''Investment:''' Being able to share Advantages of an equal or lower Pip rating.<br>
<br>
+
Maximum ●●●<br>
'''Required Text:''' In what form the character shares their Advantages with others, defined as singular, broad thematic, such as mad science gadgets, enhancement spells, etc.<br>
+
'''Surcharge:''' ● if the character wants to be able to share a 4 or 5 Pip Advantage. This still requires ●●●.<br>
''Note: This Point is actually not strictly necessary to use Advantages on, or give them out to, other people. Just about any Advantage can be defined to do so, but in that case, it only works on '''others''' (or on oneself if it normally only works on others). This Point is '''always''' more efficient, and always preferred, when a character has more than one of these Points at a time, and should always be used in these cases.''
+
'''Related:''' Any Advantage listed as an invalid target of '''Power Copy''' cannot be shared by this Advantage. Having this Advantage obviates the need to take versions of an Advantage that exclusively effect the character or other characters, such as both '''Healing''' and '''Regeneration''', or '''Cure''' and '''Immunize''', at the same time; sharing '''Regeneration''' is healing another, sharing '''Healing''' with yourself is regenerating yourself. Strictly speaking, it's possible, though very rare, to make any valid Advantage explicitly affect only other people, in which case this works in the same way as the above. If the character wishes to divulge material to others on a large scale and/or semi-permanent basis, '''Wealth''' is required to do so.
 +
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 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Speed'''
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 +
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' Greater potency of character speed. There isn't a hard scale on how fast a character can move or react with this Advantage, but it's loosely understood that a higher investment means that the character is faster than they would be with a lower investment; ● Speed doesn't get supersonic parkour.<br>
 +
Minimum ●
 +
'''Related:''' To get around places really well, rather than just really fast, use '''Mobility'''. If the character only has some sort of super fast defense, see '''Defensive Paradigm''' for things like precognitive dodging or parrying bullets.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Split Actions'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Split Actions'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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, allowing them to accomplish more in the same amount of time and possibly in different physical locations. This often, though not nearly always, applies to character bits that are made up of multiple entities, though it can also apply to characters that create doubles or projections. For the most part, the typical JRPG party sticks together and tackles the same obstacle as a unit, and is frequently not an example of this Point. Conversely, the typical super AI forking its personality off to be in multiple places and manipulate multiple system almost always is. This more likely to be something possessed by a bit that is The Payday Gang or Master Chief and Cortana rather than a hypothetical team of Power Rangers or the appable cast of a Fire Emblem game.
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
 
+
'''Investment:''' By default, MCM expects that each player in a scene is getting One Big Thing done during each of their pose rounds, and doesn't allow for someone posing twice as much to be in two places advancing two different objectives, effectively "doubling their attendance". This Advantage allows a character to do exactly that (though no more than two). They can gun down a horde of zombies while hacking a computer mainframe, or perform a magic ritual while building fortifications.<br>
MCM ascribes to the principle that each player in a scene should get to focus on getting One Big Thing done on each of their pose rounds. Gunning down a horde of zombies, breaking the magical seal on the tower, hacking into the mainframe to track a target with security cameras, fighting another PC; these are things which the character should obviously be devoting their time and attention to, and other actions they perform at the same time will inevitably be relatively minor. This Point is an explicit exception to this general rule, allowing the character to pursue a second major course of action in each pose round, essentially “doubling up” on their attendance at the scene. The character might fight off the terrorists while also defusing a bomb, distract the guards with a fake report while looting the gold, hijack and remote control the mad science fortress and its traps while also chasing down the boss, etc. This stops at, and is hard limited, to two major actions.<br>
+
'''Minimum:''' This Advantage is always ●●●<br>
'''Defining'''<br>
+
'''Related:''' The NPCs Advantage covers the vast majority of characters having underlings, monsters, allies, drones, etc. Darth Vader's troopers succeed only when he's on screen with them to contribute his big deal presence.
'''Required Text:''' None.<br>
+
''Note: There are two natural exceptions to the general One Big Thing rule. They are: when three or more PCs are engaged in combat in unbalanced sides (in which case, the outnumbered PCs gain exactly as many extra actions as necessary to even it out, solely for the use of fighting those PCs outnumbering them), and when circumstances necessary to progress a scene require criteria that too few PCs at the scene possess (in which case the relevant PC can take the extra action to move things along for everyone’s benefit, e.x. Gandalf decodes the map, translates the Elvish text, finds the secret entrance and casts the correct magic because the rest of the party is combat Dwarves and a Hobbit and can’t do any of those things). This Point can confer one additional action in excess of these if the character is benefiting from them.''
+
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Stealth'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Stealth'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character is skilled in getting around unseen and undetected. This may be a enhanced by, or a result of, things like camouflage technology, magical silence, extremely small size, and the like, but this Point is sharply differentiated from '''Invisibility''' in that the character can always be detected by sufficient mundane effort or attention, no matter the circumstance, and must actively avoid notice, instead of being presumed unnoticed until they engage in a competitive task, or something does something special. Users of this Point include Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid, Altair from Assassin’s Creed, Garrett from the Thief series, and James Bond, though they rarely use only this Point.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' None.<br>
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
''Note: For approaches where the character is obviously present but undercover or unremarkable, see '''Disguise'''.''
+
'''Investment:''' More effective stealth.<br>
 +
'''Related: The main boundary of Stealth is that someone could be alerted to the character with enough mundane effort. If it's presumed the character just won't be seen until they do something to affect someone or something, it's in the wheelhouse of Invisibility.'''
 +
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 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Strength'''
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 +
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' A greater ability to stretch physical strength into a problem-solving device. There isn't a hard scale of how much a character can lift, break, etc. with this Advantage, but it's loosely understood that a higher investment means that the character is stronger than they would be with a lower investment; ● Strength doesn't flex tanker ships.<br>
 +
Minimum ●<br>
 +
'''Related:''' '''Speed''' and '''Toughness''' are essentially counterparts to this Advantage.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Superhumanity'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Superhumanity'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has a “generic” kind of overall above-human physical aptitude, typically encompassing some combination of superhuman strength, speed, resilience, reflexes, stamina, etc. This is an unbelievably common package in anime, comic books, and martial arts films, and incredibly common among non-human races in fantasy and sci-fi books, games, and movies. This can all be represented as a single Point simply because it would be prohibitively unwieldy to do otherwise, however, some small amount of emphasis can go to particular traits if the character is only superhuman in a few areas.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' None.<br>
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
''Note: For characters with individually outstanding physical traits which cannot be called generic, such as the Flash’s speed or the Hulk’s strength, see '''Superior - Attribute'''. The big three of Superior - Strength, Superior - Speed, or Damage Reduction, have greater narrative potency due to their greater focus and Advantage cost, while Superhumanity is subsidized, compact, and generalist. Where it matters, one of these Points at Significant can compete with, but not exceed, Defining Superhumanity, but it should be understood that this arrangement is redundant on the same character.''
+
'''Investment:''' A greater extent of superhuman physical capability. This Advantage is roughly equivalent to half as many Pips in Strength, Speed, and Toughness.<br>
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+
'''Related:''' To emphasize a particular attribute instead of a whole, "generic" package, see '''Strength''', '''Speed''', and/or '''Toughness'''. Having all three as a more expensive way of having even greater physical prowess is explicitly okay. Superhuman senses are covered by '''Extraordinary Senses'''.
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Superior - ''Strength/Speed/Stamina'''''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has a single physical trait which vastly exceeds the norm to the point of becoming one of the character’s primary tools, as opposed to '''Superhumanity''' being a general package.The Hulk would take this Point in “strength” instead of Superhumanity, which Superman might take instead, representing that all of his metaphorical “XP” is loaded into being really really strong, and that his strength is more relevant than a generic superhuman’s in solving problems.<br>
+
'''Minor''' in the case of Superior - Stamina.<br>
+
'''Required Text:''' Which of the character’s attributes is exceptional, and at least one example of a feat they can perform with some, but not exceptional, effort.<br>
+
''Note: Anything like “Superior - Durability” is represented with '''Damage Reduction'''. Something like "Superior - Reflexes" is still represented under the Speed class. Speed assumes the reflexes to use it and vice versa. Emphasizing one and downplaying the other, such as in the case of super reflexes but normal speed, is simply a matter of writing it into the trappings.''
+
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Survival Skills'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Survival Skills'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character is well-versed in what it takes to provide for themselves and possibly others in situations far away from civilization and dependable infrastructure. This Point typically represents an abstract collection of abilities such as navigation and foraging suited to particular environments, but which rarely have central relevance, given that MCM’s structure makes it difficult to really be stranded anywhere for long.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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<br>
'''Minor'''<br>
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
'''Required Text:''' What kinds of places the character is skilled at surviving in.
+
'''Investment:''' This Advantage is always an Incidental Advantage. PCs being stuck out in the wilderness for long periods of time is almost never going to be a relevant challenge.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' For meaningful protection against serious environmental dangers, and/or environmental protection that allows the character to be useful (as opposed to hiding in a shelter), see '''Adaptation'''.
 
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{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Temporal Acceleration'''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Teleportation'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can accelerate the passage of time for other things. This could cause plants to grow, weapons to rust, food to rot, creatures to mature, machines to work faster, stone to wear away, etc. so long as it is naturally affected by the progression of time. How much what target can be accelerated almost wholly depends on how useful it is to actually do it. In any tier of Advantage slot, rusting away the blast doors of a sealed starship bridge would be more difficult than ageing a bottle of wine by the same amount of time. It is understood that many problems may simply be beyond the scope of being solvable by any practical amount of time passing.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.
'''Consent''' when applied to PCs, or possessions/NPCs of consequence.<br>
+
<br>
'''Required Text:''' None.
+
'''Required:'''  The limitations to where the character can teleport, essentially a description of why the character can't teleport "anywhere and everywhere in the Multiverse". The trappings cannot be written along the lines of the character "being so fast they move instantly", or else it's just sneakily describing Speed; Teleportation is strictly a transport Advantage.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' ● Teleportation is limited to instant travel to places within the character's immediate surroundings that they have the ability to access already, as a sort of "flash step" or similar. ●● Teleportation allows a character to go through most walls and obstacles, and get to most places in a scene, with some salient limitation to their destination. ●●● Teleportation allows basically unrestricted access to anywhere within a scene with only very minor limitations. Anything higher removes those minor limitations and is assumed to trump anti-teleportation measures. Incidental Teleportation is limited to limited fast travel-style transit to points of interest, and casual intros/exits from scenes.<br>
 +
'''Surcharge:''' ● Teleportation has no Surcharge. ●● Teleportation has a ● Surcharge. ●●● Teleportation has a ●● Surcharge.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' If the character can go through walls and such without instant travel, see '''Intangibility'''. If the character can do other things than "get to point B" seemingly instantly, you'll need '''Speed''' instead, and probably at a high investment. If the character creates wormholes or warp pads for a sort of persistent teleportation, you'll want '''Field Shaping''' to place teleportation features into a scenescape. Catching and/or redirecting attacks through little wormholes is likely going to be a use of '''Defensive Paradigm'''.
 +
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 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Temporal Acceleraton'''
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 +
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
 +
'''Protected:''' When applied to PCs or their possessions as per Deconstruction.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' Applicability to more narratively impactful targets.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Temporal Acceleration does not equate to super speed. Time-flavored speed boosts like Haste spells still require '''Speed''' or '''Superhumanity''', and '''Share Powers''' is required to lend the full weight to others. '''Buffs''' may be a substitute for generically increasing speed as part of an overall increase in competence.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Time Loops'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Time Loops'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character can create closed time loops with themselves, wherein an iteration of them from the future briefly returns to present to assist them in some task, and then at the same point in the future, the character undertakes the same action of returning to the same point in the past in order to keep causality happy. This is the only form of personal time travel that MCM accommodates. Future selves are primarily useful for already knowing of dangers ahead of time, having partial or full solutions to puzzles, or items that make a problem easier which lie beyond the problem, and so frequent consultation with a scene runner is usually necessary to be playable.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' None.<br>
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
'''Note: This Point does not cover having future selves travel back in time to multiply the number of things you can do at one time. See '''Split Actions''' to do so.''
+
'''Investment:''' Minimum ●●●<br>
 +
'''Related:''' While having no particular limit on its use, the wide variety of things that a time loop can accomplish are bounded very narrowly within the theme of "the progression of time being able to solve it". For a "silver bullet" to just about any challenge, see '''Quantum Solution''', which contains a maximum use of once per scene.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Time Stop'''
 
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Time Stop'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has the ability to stop time, or else somehow act outside of time, such that they are able to act literally instantly. This is differentiated from slowing down time, in that their actions take place without significant opportunity for other characters to follow them until they’ve already happened. Grades of this Point based on the tier of slot they use are relatively concrete.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Defining''' Time Stop is extremely reliable and easily used, allowing the character to enhance nearly everything they do, often to the point their actions become difficult to follow. Similar to Defining teleportation and invisibility, the character often Just Shows Up out of frozen time. Examples are Sakuya Izayoi from Touhou, Dio Brando from JoJo's Bizarre Adventures, Shadow the Hedgehog's Chaos Control, and Homura Akemi from Puella Magi Madoka Magica.<br>
+
'''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.<br>
'''Significant''' Time Stop is incomplete, limited in use, very short lived, or else plausible to “resist” without any special powers, but still lends the character considerable utility in situations to which it is well suited. Other characters often don't have a hard time figuring out what they've done when time resumes, or else may be be able to anticipate or counter it with mundane effort and skill. Examples are Nox from Wakfu, Esdeath from Akame ga Kill, the Time Clow Card, and most usable incarnations in videogames, such as Castlevania or Bayonetta.<br>
+
'''Investment:''' Time Stop at a ● rating is strictly limited in what actions the character can use it for, amounting to a number of small stunts that exist in laterally related space to things like speed, reflexes, teleportation, special dodges, attack gimmicks, etc. The character might be unable to interact with the world, or only accomplish single motions, or skip time without getting to change what they started doing. Hit's initial appearance in Dragon Ball Super is a solid example.<br>
'''Minor''' Time Stop is more or less a flashier version of super speed or super reflexes. The character might only be able to see and not move while time is stopped, or else be unable to interact significantly with the environment while time is stopped, or the pause in time has such a short duration that little more than single motions can be accomplished. Examples include Accel World's Brain Burst program, and Hit from Dragon Ball Z Super in his first appearance.<br>
+
 
'''Standalone'''<br>
+
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.<br>
'''Consent''' where actions taken in stopped time would directly affect another PC or undercut them to a goal without allowing for a competing effort.<br>
+
 
''Note: For simply slowing down time, see '''Superior - Speed''', or for slowing down the time of a specific entity, see '''Debilitation'''. '''Superior - Speed''' and '''Flash Movement''' can be considered optional ways of representing time stopping characters, especially those who use it largely cosmetically or to simple effect in their source. Using one or both instead of this Point is less taxing on a character’s Advantage space, and adheres to general logic rather than the Consent tag, but the tradeoff is that actions the character takes using their time stopping powers are then eminently obvious and preventable, as well as lacking the same degree of flexibility and narrative punch. The choice is up to the player most of the time.''
+
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.<br>
 +
'''Surcharge:''' ●● for ● Time Stop, ●●● for ●● Time Stop, ●●●● for ●●● or higher Time Stop.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' Time Stop, by its nature, overlaps with small sections of functionality from '''Invisibility''' and '''Teleportation''', but cannot seriously supplant them; the character cannot simply "be invisible" for any amount of time they're around, nor do they get from place to place with any extra convenience. Likewise, though a primary part of Time Stop's importance in fiction is skipping the process by which people can watch it the character do things and jump in to interrupt, what the character accomplishes isn't necessarily subtle in any way; '''Stealth''' is still required to do most major things "without anyone knowing it happened", instead of just "without anyone seeing the character do it".
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Vehicle Mastery - ''Vehicle'''''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Toughness'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has a high degree of personal skill with operating a certain class of vehicle or in control of a certain kind of mount. When at the wheel/saddle/etc., in addition to their normal uses (taking off and landing with a helicopter, ramping off things with a motorcycle, etc.) they are capable of performing a variety of uncommonly skilled and/or unusual stunts. Due to the way Advantage Redundancy works, as highlighted later in this section, character is not obligated to spend Points on "having a vehicle". The Vehicle Mastery justifies its own use. Exceptional vehicles with unusual qualities or extremely high performance may require other Points.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' The category of vehicle or mount the character is extraordinarily skilled with.<br>
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
''Note: There are some examples of acceptable categories later in this section.''
+
'''Investment:''' Greater defensive strength.<br>
 +
Minimum ●<br>
 +
'''Related:''' For strong protection against narrow sources of damage, or things that aren't strictly damaging, see '''Resistance'''. If the character is "tough" because they're really good at defending themselves, likely see a '''Weapon Mastery''' or '''Defensive Paradigm'''. For powerful passive protection against environments, see '''Adaptation'''.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Weapon Mastery - ''Style'''''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Unlimited Activity'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has a high degree of personal skill with a certain category of weaponry or in a certain style of combat. When using those weapons or within their arena of combat expertise, in addition to their normal uses (speed loading revolvers, parrying with swords, grappling in hand to hand, etc.) they are capable of performing a variety of uncommonly skilled and/or unusual stunts. Due to the way Advantage Redundancy works, a character is not obligated to spend Points on "having a weapon". The Weapon Mastery justifies its own use. Unusual or extremely exceptional weapons or attack techniques may require '''Attack List'''.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' The field of weaponry or style of combat the character is extraordinarily skilled in.<br>
+
'''Required:''' The resource or resources the character has in abundance.<br>
''Note: There are some examples of acceptable categories later in this section. This Point is for above typical skill. MCM does not require players to spend Advantage space to put the pointy end of a sword towards the enemy, and does not run on “weapon proficiencies” like in tabletops. A character with Advantage space dedicated to a weapon or fighting is presumed to have a minimum amount of capability to use it effectively.''
+
'''Investment:''' Unlimited Activity is always an Incidental Advantage; the frame of time over which it's relevant exceeds a single scene, and is mostly flavor space.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' If a character doesn't need even the bare basics of life to keep working, they require '''Imperishable'''.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Wealth'''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Vehicle Mastery - Type'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character is fabulously wealthy or has access to incredibly abundant resources of a generally valuable rather than immediately practical nature. This Point doesn’t represent things that the character happens to own because they are wealthy, which would simply be a trapping. It represents an amount of liquid assets or useable resources they can throw at a problem by itself, such as bribing guards for entry, paying off politicians for info, hiring local help for a task, or local mercenaries to fight, investing capital in an ongoing project, taking ownership of set pieces to use immediately within the scene(s), reserving public spaces for Elite use, etc.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' None.
+
'''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.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' Greater proficiency with the chosen mount or vehicle, including when accessing one that is part of the scene.<br>
 +
Minimum ●. Nobody needs to justify driving a sedan to a store or riding a horse at a walk.
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Wild Card - ''#'''''
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Water Prowess'''
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} The character has an Advantage that isn’t sufficiently covered by anything else on this list! Human decisions made by staff on what may be required of this Point are unavoidable, and so the Point may wind up being considered '''Consent''' applicable, or may be asked to be tweaked in some other fashion to remain consistent with MCM’s universal rules. Wildcards are given a number instead of a category in their designation.<br>
+
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
'''Required Text:''' A very clear and detailed explanation of what the Point is supposed to do and how, as well as any information required for others to known how to interact with, around, and against it.<br>
+
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
''Note: The category for Wildcard is simply a number, referencing how many the character has, since possible categories are about as broad as the Advantage’s name.''
+
'''Credit:''' ●●<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' Since one Pip is enough to gain a ●●● rating, investing beyond this point is only for consummate specialists, for mastering the most outrageous and unreasonable obstacles, performing the most improbable of stunts, or extending their prowess to less related liquid environments.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' This Advantage represents an all in one package of everything related to water capability. If the character has incidental abilities surrounding traversing or navigating water, these can usually be part of a '''Mobility''' and/or '''Adaptation''', which are allowed to be broad and give the character other tricks as well. This Advantage provides the character no resistance against water-type attacks, which would be covered by '''Toughness''' or '''Resistance'''.
 +
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Weapon Mastery - Type'''
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 +
'''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.<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' Greater proficiency in the chosen weapons or style, including when picking up weapons that are part of the scene. An Incidental Weapon Mastery is nothing more than barebones proficiency, however, and even more "just for show" than usual.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' A character who is nominally skilled at fighting with one or more weapons, but mostly just attacks straightforwardly with them, rather than stunting off of them, should get by fine with '''Combat Options''', or if they have a special technique or two, '''Arsenal - Melee''' and/or '''Arsenal - Ranged'''.
 +
{{!}}- class="LogRow"
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} '''Wealth'''
 +
{{!}} class="LogCell" {{!}} 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.<br>
 +
'''Required:''' N/A<br>
 +
'''Investment:''' Greater wealth.<br>
 +
'''Related:''' The character can likely bribe, hire, or pay off people for help on the scene, but for hirelings that the character usually or always has access to, you need '''NPCs'''.
 
|}
 
|}
 
</div>
 
</div>
 
</div>
 
</div>
 +
 +
=Advantage Category Examples=
  
===Non-Advantages===
+
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.
Some staple fictional powers don't appear in the above 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 broader Advantage with a number of possible functions, and those functions are applied for as Points, such as the abilities of the forms a shapeshifter can turn into, or the utilities of the doom fortress they have.<br>
+
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.
+
  
===Redundancy and Prerequisites===
+
==Bane==
Since Advantage Points are concerned only with what the character does as a whole, they naturally compress otherwise extensive lists of powers or items. In some cases though, it makes more sense for another Advantage to restate it as part of its conceptual package. In these cases, the same Point recurring at the '''same tier or lower''' effectively becomes a “free” Point. It is still noted in the Advantage slot, but it no longer costs any space.
+
e.x. A character has an Advantage slot that gives them sturdy, environmentally pressurized power armor, represented by the '''''Damage Reduction''''', '''''Environmental Protection''''', and '''''Superhumanity''''' Points. They also have a giant mecha, which has its own, different Advantage. They can add (Damage Reduction, Environmental Protection, Superhumanity:) as a new line.<br>
+
  
As a universal rule, characters are always assumed to have access to basic traits required to usefully exercise their Advantage Points. No Point requires another Point to work.
+
Modern Mythos Supernaturals -- Werewolves, vampires, zombies, famous regional monsters such as yeti or chupacabra, most ghosts, some instances of demonic possession, etc.
  
=== Advantage Category Examples ===
+
Classical Folklore Monsters -- Gorgons, basilisks, sea serpents, banshees, hydra, faerie, most dragons, etc.
Points with - Categories are bounded to a maximum limit of what they can contain in one Point. This involves a small but necessary degree of eyeballing, to keep things relatively even, instead of allowing Points 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 ====
+
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.
{| role="presentation" class="wikitable mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"
+
 
| <strong>Examples</strong>
+
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.
|-
+
 
| '''Modern Mythos Supernaturals''' -- Werewolves, vampires, zombies, famous regional monsters such as yeti or chupacabra, most ghosts, some instances of demonic possession, etc.<br>
+
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.
'''Classical Folklore Monsters''' -- Gorgons, basilisks, sea serpents, banshees, hydra, faerie, most dragons, etc.<br>
+
 
'''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.<br>
+
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.
'''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.<br>
+
'''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.<br>
+
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:
'''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.
+
 
 +
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==
 +
 
 +
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."
  
This Point 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:<br>
 
'''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.<br>
 
'''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 ====
 
{| role="presentation" class="wikitable mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"
 
| <strong>Examples</strong>
 
|-
 
| Immortality is concerned with acceptable Catches rather than a category itself. Some unofficially named examples are:<br>
 
'''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”. A Defining might need them to be completely obliterated. A Significant might require excessive violence that doesn't typically exist in accidents or normal fights; someone would have to go the extra mile. A Minor would only help survive very casual threats, or battles with enemies not serious about killing them.<br>
 
Cell from Dragon Ball Z, the Thing, and many iterations of Godzilla, are examples.<br>
 
'''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. A Defining would probably take a concerted effort to trap or track, and repeatedly kill the character for a while. A Significant 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. A Minor example will only work to stabilize a character when they go a few metaphorical HP negative, and they could still be easily finished off.<br>
 
Alucard from Hellsing and Fujiwara no Mokou from Touhou are examples of this Catch.<br>
 
'''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. A Defining would rarely or never fail on its own, and require deliberate effort and setup to enforce a scenario where it would. A Significant could provide broad scenarios where the Immortality is basically guaranteed to work, but will have its reliability be in question in other, non-irrelevant cases. A Minor example would never save the character from an engineered death, but only a trivial, pointless, or ignominious one.<br>
 
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.<br>
 
'''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. A Defining presumes that it would almost never happen unintentionally. Someone would have to know the Catch and plan for it. A Significant presumes that the fatal threat won’t be commonly present, but may still turn up from time to time in regular scenes, and wouldn’t be too hard to acquire it if necessary. A Minor presumes that chances for it to fail are are abundant in everyday adventuring.<br>
 
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.<br>
 
''Note: Past a certain level, a mechanism can be considered too obscure or difficult, and thus not acceptable (for instance, Ganon only dying if killed by the Master Sword).''<br>
 
'''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. A Defining 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. A Significant 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. A Minor has some intensely limiting factor that makes it easy to locate and destroy, such as having to be kept within 100 meters, or opening a portal directly to itself the character’s soul slips through.<br>
 
Character examples include Voldemort from Harry Potter, 2B and 9S from Nier: Automata, and every single Lich ever.<br>
 
''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.''<br>
 
'''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 Defining 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. A Significant means 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. A Minor means only that the character can tap out and choose to abandon the proxy before they're killed through feedback barely any less lethal than their own durability.<br>
 
 
Character examples include Neo from the Matrix, Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell, and the Tenno from Warframe.
 
Character examples include Neo from the Matrix, Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell, and the Tenno from Warframe.
|}
 
====Knowledge====
 
{| role="presentation" class="wikitable mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"
 
| <strong>Examples</strong>
 
|-
 
| '''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.<br>
 
'''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.<br>
 
'''Psychology''' -- Attempting to ascertain someone’s honesty, psychological profiling, finding the right approach in interrogation or negotiation, dealing with victims of traumatic events, etc.<br>
 
'''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====
 
{| role="presentation" class="wikitable mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"
 
| <strong>Examples</strong>
 
|-
 
| 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 incorporating the Point, 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 '''''Environmental Protection''''' (such as Resistance - Space Hazards).<br>
 
'''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.<br>
 
Resistant: Flamethrowers, plasma guns, critical reactor heat, fire spells, stellar exposure, etc.<br>
 
'''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.<br>
 
Resistant: Supernatural or magical diseases or illnesses, curses of poor health, chemical weapons, weaponized viruses, animal venoms, lethal poisons, etc.<br>
 
'''Arcane''' -- Immune: Minor cantrips, mild hazard spells, pockets of wild magic, or '''Consent''' effects such as polymorphs or disintegrations.<br>
 
Resistant: Direct forms of arcane attack or impediment, like magic missiles, curses, explosive runes, binding spells, offensive teleports, etc.<br>
 
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.<br>
 
|}
 
  
====Skill====
+
==Knowledge==
{| role="presentation" class="wikitable mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"
+
| <strong>Examples</strong>
+
|-
+
| '''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.<br>
+
'''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.<br>
+
'''Scouting''' -- Tracking quarries, finding secret passages, discovering or making shortcuts, erasing tracks, picking up on environmental signs, etc.<br>
+
'''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====
+
{| role="presentation" class="wikitable mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"
+
| <strong>Examples</strong>
+
|-
+
| '''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.<br>
+
'''Air-Ground Support''' -- Helicopters, gunships, landing craft, space troop transports, etc. Likewise large, low-flying riding animals can work here, like dragon strafing runs.<br>
+
'''Watercraft''' -- PT boats, hovercraft, jet skis, speed boats, kayaks, amphibious vehicles, etc. Practically any marine creature significantly smaller than a whale.<br>
+
'''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.<br>
+
'''Multi-Wheeled''' -- Cars, trucks, ATVs, jeeps, tractors, APCs, armored vans, etc.<br>
+
'''Heavy Military Ground''' -- Tanks, APCs, self-propelled guns, drawn siege-engines, war elephants and similar big stompy monsters, etc.<br>
+
'''Single Riding''' -- Motorbikes, jet skis, snowmobiles, horses, etc. Most mounted ground combat could be covered.
+
  
This Particular Point allows for extremely limited selections with broad roles, such as:<br>
+
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.
'''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.<br>
+
'''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.<br>
+
|}
+
====Weapon Mastery====
+
{| role="presentation" class="wikitable mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"
+
| <strong>Examples</strong>
+
|-
+
| '''Hilted Slashing''' -- Most swords and daggers, axes, sickles, naginatas, most vibroblades, some energy swords or psychic/magic blades, etc.<br>
+
This is as wide and catchall as melee weapons get, and it should be assumed that the weapons in this category are being applied in their generic roles; it won't get get you the unique styles and tricks of everything with a cutting blade.<br>
+
'''Polearms''' -- Spears, pikes, halberds, glaives, naginatas, polehammers, scythes, shock staves, etc.<br>
+
'''Heavy Striking''' -- Maces, hammers, war picks, polehammers, clubs, batons, realistic flails, suitably sized improvised cudgels, etc.<br>
+
'''Hand-To-Hand''' -- Claws, powerfists, knuckle weapons, pile bunkers, etc. May include unarmed combat itself, or things such as knives used as CQC enhancers.<br>
+
'''Modern Infantry Firearms''' -- Typical rifles, shotguns, handguns, submachine guns, etc. May include somewhat more specialist weapons used in a generic role, up to and including basic grenades.<br>
+
This is essentially the "Hilted Slashing" of guns.<br>
+
'''Flexible Wire''' -- Whips, weighted chains, mono-wires, lassos, tentacle spells, etc.<br>
+
'''Martial Arts Sticks''' -- Various staves, escrima sticks, tonfas, nunchaku, three-section staff, etc.<br>
+
'''Mounted Heavy Weapons''' -- Missile launchers, miniguns, autocannons, ballistae, mangonels, etc.<br>
+
'''Archaic Hand-Powered Projectile''' -- Bows, crossbows, javelins, throwing knives, shuriken, etc.<br>
+
  
 +
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.
  
This Particular Point allows for extremely limited selections with broad roles, or extremely broad selections with limited roles, such as:<br>
+
Psychology -- Attempting to ascertain someone’s honesty, psychological profiling, finding the right approach in interrogation or negotiation, dealing with victims of traumatic events, etc.
'''Knives''' -- Just knives and that’s it, but the character would within their rights to use them as a melee weapon, CQC enhancer, and thrown weapon, as per their roles in Hilted Slashing, Hand-To-Hand, Archaic Hand-Powered Projectile. The extreme focus affords versatile capabilities with that weapon.<br>
+
'''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.
+
|}
+
  
==Advantage Standards==
+
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.
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 for Advantages to do exactly what they say.
+
  
==="Conceptual" and "Molecular" Terms===
+
==Resistance==
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.
+
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 Environmental Protection (such as Resistance - Space Hazards).
  
===The Et Cetera Rule===
+
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.
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.<br>
+
'''-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.<br>
+
'''''-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.
+
  
===Up-rating Tiers===
+
Resistant: Flamethrowers, plasma guns, critical reactor heat, fire spells, stellar exposure, etc.
When a single package of abilities is split up across multiple tiers of Advantage, any mention of the higher tiered Advantage should only appear in the lower tiered Advantage, not the reverse. Written inclusions of Significant or Minor Advantages shouldn't be appearing in a Defining Advantage's text.
+
  
===Implicit Limitations===
+
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.
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 Attack List - Ranged, 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 an Attack List - Ranged for the others.<br>
+
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".
+
  
===Hard Numbers and Figures===
+
Resistant: Supernatural or magical diseases or illnesses, curses of poor health, chemical weapons, weaponized viruses, animal venoms, lethal poisons, etc.
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===
+
Arcane -- Immune: Minor cantrips, mild hazard spells, pockets of wild magic, or Protected effects such as polymorphs or disintegrations.
Advantages should not be written so that their trappings reference the Advantage system as a meta entity. Dictating interactions with Points by their official names, directing the reader around an Advantage section like a wiki, explicitly leaning on conventions such as the Defining/Significant/Minor tiering system, or universal rules on scope/range/etc. is either making pseudo-policy calls, or already implicit in it being on MCM at all.  
+
  
===Anti-Consequence Advantages===
+
Resistant: Direct forms of arcane attack or impediment, like magic missiles, curses, explosive runes, binding spells, offensive teleports, etc.
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.
+
  
===A Word on Force Fields and Energy Shields===
+
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.
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.<br>
+
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 armour 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".
+
  
===Advantage +1===
+
==Skill==
Lastly, MCM does not consider Advantages recurring multiple times equal to “Advantage but better”. A natural superhuman might put on a suit of powered armor that further enhances his superhuman physical abilities, but Superhumanity is Superhumanity, and is worth 1 Point. There is no Superhumanity+1, double Superhumanity, or Superhumanity squared.
+
  
==Basic Advantage Policy and Limitations==
+
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.
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.
+
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==
 +
 
 +
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.
 
   
 
   
'''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 Point) abstractly have "whatever abilities are good for the story and fun", and can't enforce things like Skeleton Catch or Power Copy - 1, 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.<br>
+
This Particular Advantage allows for extremely limited selections with broad roles, such as:
'''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.<br>
+
'''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.<br>
+
'''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.<br>
+
'''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.<br>
+
'''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.<br>
+
'''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.
+
  
==Advantage Format on Applications==
+
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.
This is the section to reference when filling out Advantages on a Character or Upgrade application. A walkthrough of the format follows:
+
  
 +
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.
  
Which Advantages are Defining, Significant, or Minor is determined solely by which section they are placed under. i.e. an entry written under '''3b-1. Advantages: Defining''' on a character application is automatically a Defining Advantage. A name should be given to each Advantage by the player, which can be just about anything, though it should be related to what the Advantage represents. A very brief description of the Advantage may be added as well, as a form of broader trapping to the whole package. This follows the same guides for trappings on Points: less than '''240''' characters is the ideal. No more than this should really be needed when the Advantage Points will cover the bulk of explaining what it does.
+
==Weapon Mastery==
 +
Polearms -- Spears, pikes, halberds, glaives, naginatas, polehammers, scythes, shock staves, etc.
  
''e.x.''<br>
+
Chopping Blades -- Cleavers, axes, hatchets, halberds, machetes, etc.
''Black Magic:''<br>
+
''Black Mage is a career expert in wielding destructive and debilitating magic, using elemental attacks and status to destroy his foes.''
+
  
 +
Heavy Strikers -- Maces, hammers, war picks, polehammers, clubs, batons, realistic flails, suitably sized improvised cudgels, etc.
  
After that, the Advantage can be populated with up to '''3''' Advantage Points. Write the proper designation of the Advantage Point, end it with a colon for neatness’ sake, and then fill in the Point’s individual trappings as desired. For the most part, keep one Point to one line. If two Points are extremely obviously intertwined and could be attributed the same trapping (such as with the components of a teleportation power), they can be put on the same line.
+
Modern Small Arms -- Typical rifles, shotguns, handguns, submachine guns, etc.
  
''e.x.''<br>
+
Explosives -- Grenades, rockets, missiles, fuse and barrel bombs, cannonballs, etc.
''Black Magic:''<br>
+
''Black Mage is a career expert in wielding destructive and debilitating magic, using elemental attacks and status to destroy his foes.''<br>
+
''Attack List - Ranged: 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.''<br>
+
''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.''<br>
+
''Field Shaping: 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.''
+
  
 +
Hand-To-Hand -- Claws, powerfists, knuckle weapons, pile bunkers, etc. May include unarmed combat itself, or things such as knives used as CQC enhancers.
  
Finally, add any “free” Advantage Points (as explained in the main body of the Advantages article), if any, to the end. All free Points should go together on a single line, and use the same trapping to encompass all of them, since by their very nature they should need a quick recap at the very most. If there are free Points that are clearly intertwined, they can go on the same line as an existing Point, as explained before. Put all free Points in (parenthesis) to designate them. Reserve parenthesis solely for free Points.
+
Flexible Wire -- Whips, weighted chains, mono-wires, lassos, tentacle spells, etc.
  
''e.x.''<br>
+
Martial Arts Sticks -- Various staves, escrima sticks, tonfas, nunchaku, three-section staff, etc.
''Black Magic:''<br>
+
''Black Mage is a career expert in wielding destructive and debilitating magic, using elemental attacks and status to destroy his foes.<br>
+
''Attack List - Ranged: 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.''<br>
+
''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.''<br>
+
''Field Shaping: (Attack List - Ranged): 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.''<br>
+
''(Destruction, Incapacitation): Black Mage can use personal versions of the intensely destructive or non-lethal spells of his Aeon Summons, albeit weaker and more localized.''<br>
+
  
 +
Mounted Heavy Weapons -- Missile launchers, miniguns, autocannons, ballistae, mangonels, etc.
  
In this example, the free Point added to Field Shaping is not strictly necessary, since how it relates to his elemental attack powers is blatantly obvious from its organization and trapping. It’s only an example of how it could be done. The example also references an Aeon Summon Advantage that obviously isn't included to demonstrate unrelated free Points. As a general rule, players should assume that explicitly compounding Points like this is unnecessary when their relation is very clear, or it’s very easy to figure out what comes out of the combination. i.e. Superhumanity + Weapon Mastery - Swords = superhuman feats of swordsmanship.
+
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.
  
The character’s +advantages entry on the MUSH will parse in ANSI to make things easier to read: Advantage titles are white, Points are green, free Points are blue, and any Point that has a Consent application is automatically marked with a red asterisk (this*) by our code. Since Share Power can encompass Advantages up to and including “all of them”, there is no special format; the trapping should give a good idea of what Advantage Points it shares. Please format applications correctly to make things easier on staff generating your character, and to prevent errors.
+
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.
  
==Quick Characters==
+
=Rules on Trappings=
Apart from the standard format presented here, written for MCM’s default character application process, players wishing to app relatively streamlined and straightforward character concepts have the option of writing their character to in the format of a "Quick Character Application".
+
 
+
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.
The Quick application effectively does the following:<br>
+
 
The character still has up to '''two''' Defining Advantages.<br>
+
=="Conceptual" and "Molecular" Terms==
The character now has '''two''' Significant Advantages, rather than the default four.<br>
+
 
The character is still limited to a reasonable number of Minor Advantages, but this will rarely be allowed to exceed '''three''' slots.<br>
+
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 '''Wildcard''' Advantage Point is not accessible. Highly fiddly Advantage Points with high bars of required text (such as '''Improbable Defense, for example''') are discouraged but not disallowed, so long as they are relatively simple examples of their breed.<br>
+
The character is obligated to fill out '''only''' a '''Trouble''' for Disadvantages. No further Disadvantages, Significant, Fluff (Minor) or otherwise, should be sent for approval.<br>
+
+
Submitted Quick Character Applications are something staff places slightly higher priority on processing, and due to being smaller and simpler in scope, are generally processed and approved more quickly, which makes it the preferred format for characters who just don’t need the full sprawl of Advantage space.
+
 
   
 
   
A character approved under the Quick format can, at any later date, obtain the same '''four''' Significant Advantage slots, somewhat '''increased''' Minor Advantage slots, and access to the '''Wildcard''' Advantage Point, as well as more technical examples of other Advantage Points, afforded to regular character applications, by submitting an [http://multiversemush.com/mw/index.php?title=Upgrade_Application| upgrade application] which fills out the minimum three Disadvantages a normal character application requires. If the player anticipates their character will be upgrading into further Advantages in the near future, they should send in a full character application rather than the Quick format and a following upgrade shortly thereafter. Otherwise, this can be done at any time, so there are no lasting restrictions on a character approved under the Quick format.
+
==The Et Cetera Rule==
+
To submit a Quick Character Application, simply submit the existing character application and re-title it from '''Character Application - Name - Faction''' to '''Quick Character - Name - Faction'''. Staff will process it under these adjusted parameters.
+
  
 +
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.
'''Patch Notes 9/11/2019''': Overhaul to most text to drastically decrease length and amount of reading. Mind Manipulation and Mind Reading folded into new Mental Intrusion Point. Oration removed. Attack Redirection removed and considered part of Attack List or Buffs. Water Functionality removed and considered part of Environmental Protection and Mobility. Multiple Discrete Actions renamed to Split Actions. Required text in Repair changed. Benchmarks of comparison between Superhumanity and Superior - Attribute added.
+
  
'''Patch Notes 9/24/2018''': Required Text for Field Shaping and Power Copy cleaned up. Superior - Attribute now broken down into Superior Strength/Speed/Stamina.
+
-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.
  
'''Patch Notes 5/13/2018''': Standards on Meta Reference and Rules Restatement added. Cure now uses the Self/Other notation as Healing. Destruction and Skeleton Catch made Significant minimum for common sense's sake. Skeleton Catch now has more explicit interactions in its Significant permutation. Extraordinary senses now more clearly defines required cues. Mind Reading clarified for the purpose of "mundane" versions. NPCs are now more explicit about the fact that are required to be a non-trivial investment for the character, as opposed to Proxy. Share Powers now references the banlist of Power Copy to be specific. Both NPCs and Share Powers have had their standards of Required Text updated to account for the new Meta Reference and Rules Restatement clause.
+
==Hard Numbers and Figures==
  
'''Patch Notes 7/5/2019''': Proxy rolled into Immortality, Anti-Power Genre Required Text example regarding Anti-Magic revised, Stubs removed, Non-Advantages section added, Gestalt policy on Troubles updated.
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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.
  
'''Patch Notes 1/19/2018''': Flash Movement interaction with passengers, Healing interaction with different-tier Share Powers, and Destruction and Skeleton Catch interactions in general, clarified.
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==Meta Reference and Rules Restatement==
  
'''Patch Notes 1/13/2018''': Further/missing notes added to Destruction, Improbable Defense, and Mind Manipulation.  
+
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.
  
'''Patch Notes 12/31/2017''': Advantage Redundancy and associated instances of free Points updated.
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=Advantage Policy=
  
'''Patch Notes 12/29/2017''': Missing Required Text added. Format example expanded. Up-rating Tiers section created.  
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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.
  
'''Patch Notes 12/24/2017''': Format updated to 5.5 Application standards.
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==Non-Player Characters Don't Have Advantages==
  
'''Patch Notes 6/14/2017''': Edited to flow better for learning the new system.
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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 - 1, 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.
  
'''Patch Notes 2/22/17 7:15 P.M.''': Edited the Conceptual file to encompass another form of broad shorthand: Molecular-level control.
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==Threat to Player Characters==
  
'''Patch Notes 1/16/2017 6:18 P.M.''': Edited Minor NPCs to clarify that they cannot have a PL, and how two minor NPCs of different specialties might interact.
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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.
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 +
==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.
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 +
==Scope of Effect==
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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.
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 +
==Interaction with MUSH Meta-Elements==
 +
 
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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==
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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.
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 +
==On Force Fields and Energy Shields==
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 +
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==
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 +
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".
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'''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.
 
 
[[Category:News File]]
 
[[Category:News File]]

Revision as of 23:15, 17 February 2020

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. Numbers of Redundant Advantages should be "within reason".

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 ●, and don't count towards the limit on Advantages over ●●●.

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 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.
Investment: A broader range of environments, and/or greater protective strength against them.
Related: Adaptation confers protection, not capability. You still require Flight to fly through space, Mobility to burrow through desert sand, etc.

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.).
Investment: Information of greater breadth, detail, and/or obscurity.
Related: Analysis is a targeted examination of something. To pick up on cues inherent to the locale, see Extraordinary Senses.

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).
Protected: Always.
Investment: Stronger interference.
Related: This Advantage interferes with other actors using their powers, and does not personally protect the character from being affected. See Resistance for personal protection.

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.
Credit: ● to an Arsenal - Melee if the character possesses at least ●● Arsenal - Ranged, or ● to Arsenal - Ranged if the character possesses at least ●● Arsenal - Melee.
Investment: More powerful or more complex special attacks.

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.
Related: Not every character that can fight will need Arsenal to represent it. The majority of characters lean on Combat Options, which provides a very broad variety of many attacks for less Pips than Arsenal, though of less especial complexity, or Weapon Mastery, which provides various manners of effective attacks and stunts that the chosen weapon or weapons could be used to pull off.

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.
Credit: ● for no more than two Banes.
Investment: More severe effects against the chosen enemy type, clearly in service of "fighting an enemy".
Minimum ●
Related: The trope kind of expertise that usually goes with the "monster hunter" archetype is easily represented with Analysis or Knowledge. A Bane doesn't give them special information about a target.

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.
Investment: More powerful buffs, and/or slightly broader applicable tasks.
Related: The thing that fully gives other characters full Advantages is Share Powers.

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.
Investment: A broader range of attack themes and types, and/or more powerful and impressive attacks.
Related: Attacks with major gimmicks or heavy individual importance fall under Arsenal. Attacks that cause status effects will likely use or include Debilitation. Significant all-around skill with specific weapons or combat styles falls under Weapon Mastery.

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
Investment: This Advantage can only be purchased for ●
Related: To intuit information that another entity isn't communicating, Mind Reading or Mental Intrusion is usually appropriate. Lifting information from things that don't communicate at all is usually doable with Hint.

Contract - Collateral/Exchange 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 the corresponding article.

Required: N/A
Protected: Always.
Investment: More Contracts active at once, a longer expiry time, and more potential positive effects.
Related: The means by which a character can always give out as many benefits as they want, provided they are at the scene itself, is still Share Powers.

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
Investment: The Advantage can only be an Incidental Advantage. It's little more than a flavorful and occasionally very niche twist on Non-Advantages.
Related: Having casual access to normal items of a significant grade of utility frequently entails Wealth, or an associated Skill with which it'd be used, such as a Skill in medicine to have automatic access to professional medical equipment as a prerequisite.

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.
Investment: A greater breadth of curable maladies and/or greater efficacy in curing severe ones.
Related: If you're looking to heal someone from the damage they've taken, Healing is it. If the character themself shrugs off status effects on their person, see Immunize.

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.
Investment: Greater variety and/or potency of effects.
Related: An effect that would take someone completely out of an interaction, like "realistic" paralysis, strictly falls under Incapacitation. For something that directly suppresses a specific kind of power, see Anti. Though generic "poison" or "burn" conditions can appear here, they tacitly acknowledge that they can't seriously injure someone on their own, and exist as a complication; Combat Options or Arsenal would deal real damage.

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
Protected: Possessions of consequence belonging to PCs. Being used on another PC will result in a harmful attack, if appropriate.
Investment: The ability to affect more important/protected targets; taking a unique, powerful, big deal magical artifact straight off the table isn't a ● Advantage.
Minimum ● There's absolutely no point to an Incidental Deconstruction.
Related: Any kind of damage-dealing Advantage, such as Combat Options, Arsenal, an appropriate Weapon Mastery, or perhaps even a relevant Skill such as for demolitions, can break or destroy something in a standard way.

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.
Required:The nature of the defensive stunting, and in the case it can invalidate a very wide range of types of attack, a salient limitation; a character's defense button cannot work perfectly against everything until the player deems that it hasn't.
Investment: An increased number of special defense mechanics up to the Pip rating of the Advantage, or a more extreme gimmick with greater reach and impact on a fight. An Incidental example works only on attacks that wouldn't be allowed to work anyways. An example any lower than ●●● cannot expect to work on "everything, unless".
Related: There is a ton of overlap from a lot of different Advantages that could probably serve to fill the role of this one, depending on the example. Defensive Paradigm exists to bend the usual flow of combat a little in a cool and flavorful way, rather than have immense utility; someone with Teleportation who could already easily dodge the attack, is able to dodge by teleporting out of the way instead of ducking or diving, and someone with Speed and Weapon Mastery at a high level can parry bullets with a sword. Pick this one if the gimmick in question has a very narrow, strong, characterizing trick to it.

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.
Protected: Impersonating another PC.
Investment: More convincing and comprehensive disguises. A simple "alter ego" is usually only an Incidental Disguise, like Clark Kent putting his glasses and collared shirt on.
Related: Adopting an appearance meant to hide the character from even being see is certainly a type of Stealth rather than being "disguised" as a bush or something.

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.
Minimum ● If security is meaningful enough to require an Advantage, an Incidental Advantage won't do it.
Investment: The ability to gain entry to harder to reach areas.
Related: A character that simply goes right through walls would be looking for Intangibility instead. A character that gets into places by just leveling or making ways through any obstacles would be looking at Field Shaping.

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".
Investment: A greater range of extra sensory cues and/or heightened awareness of them.
Related: This Advantage picks up an element of the scene that would otherwise go unnoticed (a "cue"). To get a bunch of new information about something the character is already aware of, see Analysis. This may and can result in an Extraordinary Sense making a character aware of a new cue, thus becoming a valid thing to analyze.

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.
Investment: A greater range of effects and/or alterations of greater scope.
Related: The Advantages Arsenal or Combat Options can be used to create deadly hazards, while things like Debilitation can create tactically advantageous zones. Toughness might create large shields to protect others. Teleportation is often combined for the purpose of making portals or wormholes. Almost anything can be made an area effect, though largely indiscriminate in its use; not like Buffs or Share Powers.

Flight The character can fly. Aerial flight or space flight are encompassed the same way under this Advantage, or both.

Required: N/A
Investment: Greater control and range of flight. Not extreme speed. A minimum of ● is required to essentially negate the threat of heights.
Related: Gaining greatly increased speed via flight still requires Speed. Stunting around difficult or hazardous terrain that would impede flight still requires Mobility.

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
Investment: Access to more secure devices and greater control.
Minimum ●
Related: Hacking of sapient mechanical entities still requires Mind Control or Mental Intrusion.

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
Investment: Hammerspace is usually an Incidental Advantage. Pips are only required for performing scene-altering stunts with the storage itself.
Related: The idea of catching and reusing attacks is covered by Defensive Paradigm or Power Copy. The stuff usually inside the hammerspace itself still requires Advantages.

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
Investment More effective healing.
Related: If the character heals on their own, or heals themself, Regeneration is needed. Cure is the Advantage for removing "status effects" or things like diseases.

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.
Investment: More detailed information and/or a greater variety of appropriate situations.

Minimum ●●● for obtaining information about things one or more scenes in advance.

Minimum ● otherwise. Hint cannot be an Incidental Advantage.
Related: To gain information about something of specific interest, look at Analysis, which allows a character to target a scene element and learn desired details about it. To simply pick up on special cues within a scene, Extraordinary Senses may be appropriate.

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.
Protected: Impersonations of other PCs. Investment: Larger/more complicated/more convincing illusions that might deceive more senses.
Related: Illusions can't be used to make a character or object simply disappear; this is a function of Invisibility. Likewise, though illusions might help greatly with sneaking, Stealth is still an applicable Advantage to put it to use, and to hide, maneuver, and accomplish tasks stealthily.

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.
Investment: The Catch becomes more difficult to fulfill. Again, the list of Immortality Catches should give a good idea of what tier of relevance this has.
Minimum ●, Maximum ●●●
Related: Immortality means the character doesn't die, not that they aren't harmed. A character who gets back up with restored health right after being killed would need Regeneration to heal in combat time. A character that simply tanks through being killed, or reduces the damage of fatal injuries, could probably use Toughness.

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.
Investment: Imperishable is always an Incidental Advantage.
Related: The corner case of "not needing air" can only be significant defense against hazards with Advantages like Adaptation or Resistance.

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.
Investment: Greater resilience or purging of more powerful and/or varied status effects
Related: In all ways, this Advantage is the self-affecting version of Cure. The same relations apply, such as needing Healing to gain back "HP" or restore damage.

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.
Protected: Making transformations to other characters.
Investment: Dealing more "incapacitation damage", in terms of applying it more swiftly and reliably.
Related: In some cases, it might be appropriate for a user of Weapon Mastery to pull off combat stunts that restrain or knock their opponent out without killing them, though probably still fairly harmfully, and only with a reasonably narrow category and with a reasonable Pip investment. Debilitation is a better source of weakening and impeding an enemy for an immediate advantage.

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 an already avoidable attack, but since invincibility isn't a permissible Advantage on MCM, any form of Intangibility the character can maintain for a while is automatically susceptible to all attacks the character usually is.

Required: N/A
Minimum ●
Credit: ● if the character has Teleportation ●● or higher.
Investment: The ability to pass through more "restrictive" or "defensive" objects. The physical characteristics, like density or weight, don't matter narratively. A ● Intangibility can't pass through a highly secure bunker, or escape a grapple from a skilled enemy.
Related: If the character becomes intangible as a primary form of reducing or negating harm, Defensive Paradigm, or possibly Toughness, are appropriate.

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.
Investment: Immunity to higher tier effects, from both PC and NPC sources.
Minimum ● Maximum ●●●
Surcharge:
Related: In certain cases, it might be plausible to cure or shrug off "mental status effects" inflicted by mental influences, using specialized Cure or Immunize. These never reject the primary effects of things like Mind Control, Mind Reading, or Mental Intrusion, but may be justified in healing harmful madness, trauma, delusions, etc.

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.
Investment: Greater effectiveness, and possibly a greater range of senses affected. ● Invisibility will usually provide cover from individually unimportant but collectively meaningful NPC attention, or provide niche invisibility regarding a specific stunt or power of the character's. ●● Invisibility is presumed to be effective in concealing the character, has notable limitations that cap the character's ability to go wherever they place all the time, like subtle visual cues, a strict time limit, dispelling when attacking, etc. ●●● Invisibility is close enough to be flawless that its integrity isn't in question until the character engages in very obvious activities or suitably great effort is put towards discovering them.
Surcharge: ● for ● Invisibility, ●● for ●● Invisibility, ●●● for ●●● or higher Invisibility.
Related: Invisibility alone doesn't guarantee that a character can accomplish things stealthily or undetected. Stealth covers the major aspects of being genuinely sneaky, and Illusions still have their major use in misdirecting and deceiving people, which synergize with Invisibility if desired.

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.
Investment: Broader and more detailed knowledge with greater practical impact.
Minimum ● Trivially accessible knowledge is something any character can have.
Related: A character cannot implicitly gain the use of another Advantage for having Knowledge. For instance, Knowledge - Computers doesn't give a character the use of Hacking, though a thin slice of shared effect space might exist. Carefully consider whether the character actually needs Knowledge to do the things they do, or whether it's simply an element of their background.

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.
Protected: Always.
Investment: More powerful and/or flexible effects.
Minimum ● Maximum ●●●
Related: Mental Intrusion is the appropriate, fully subsidized space for characters who can both read and write to other people's minds. For characters with a narrower range, see Mind Control or Mind Reading; having just one of them costs less Pips than having both functions inherent in Mental Intrusion.

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.
Protected: Always.
Investment: More powerful mind control.
Minimum ● Maximum ●●● including Credit.
Credit:
Related: Though it's possible to simply force a mind controlled entity to verbally divulge what they know, any information gained in this way is assumed to be much less clear, reliable, unbiased, or complete, not to mention less subtle, than by using Mind Reading. If the character possesses both abilities however, Mental Intrusion is intended to be the more cost efficient catchall.

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.
Protected: Always.
Investment:More far reaching and accurate information gathered.
Minimum ● Maximum ●●● including Credit.
Credit:
Related: As with Mind Control, the completed suite of mind influencing abilities between the two is inherently cheaper with Mental Intrusion. Mind Reading and Mind Control exist as a subsidized spaces for a character to do one or the other for less cost.

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.
Credit: ● if the Mobility contains water-related or aerial stunts and the character already possesses Water Prowess or Flight at ●●● or higher.
Investment: Greater ability to mitigate or ignore the difficulties or perils of navigating obstacles, or movement abilities with a wider variety of applicable situations.
Related: Mobility might help the character avoid various perils, but if they wish to, for example swim safely in lava instead of water, or at the bottom of the ocean they require Adaptation; another example is that if they take a high speed fall from parkouring at height, Flight or Toughness would be what it takes to not splat at the bottom.

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.
Investment: More powerful, effective, and generally relevant NPCs.
● NPCs are at the level of mooks or extras. They can apply their abilities in limited situations and tackle minor problems in the character's stead, but overall they can't do much more than bog down another PC, limited to being a minor obstacle or inconvenience. Blobs of generic Stormtroopers, red shirts, or workmen are example. Losing them is a minor setback and they are quickly replaceable.
●● NPCs are comparable to a "miniboss" or themed specialists. Their abilities and personal resources are meaningful enough to solve significant problems for the character, and they're meaningful, serious obstacles to other PCs in a situation where they conflict. NPCs of this rating still can't reasonably expect to defeat a PC in combat or categorically outdo them in their area of expertise, but they can present a stiff challenge. R2-D2, or generic SOLDIERS from Final Fantasy VII are examples. They represent a significant amount of investment and are time/cost/effort intensive to replace when lost.
●●● NPCs are roughly at the same tier as PCs. They are serious combat entities, have skills that can solve the central problems of scenes, and can overall expect to viably compete with Player Characters; they might in fact be stronger than the character that has the Advantage in some areas. They usually have some Advantages dedicated to fleshing them out. Ash Ketchum's Pokemon team, including Pikachu, is a prime example. Losing these NPCs is prohibitively costly to the character, and significantly diminishes their effectiveness until they can get them back in action or replace them.
Maximum ●●● NPCs can't be completely stronger or better than PCs.
Related: If the character's NPCs have extremely limited function, or are personally irrelevant but amount to one of the character's main abilities, it may be valid to replace them with the Advantage itself. Tiny spy drones might just be represented with Remote Viewing, or exploding suicide summons might just be a part of Combat Options.

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 ●●●●●
Surcharge: ●● for Power Copy - Mirror.
Related: There is no particular Advantage that can be pointed out in relation to Power Copy. It's important to note, however, that most characters with Power Copy also have Advantages that consistently show up no matter who they've copied, and it's highly encouraged to buy these Advantages for the character themself, instead of relying on trying to have them copied at all times.

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.
Protected: Always.
Investment: Quantum Solution is always ●●●●
Related: No Advantages are strictly related to Quantum Solution, given that it is a once per scene golden ticket. If the character is more likely to simply solve problems with their given Advantages in clever ways, and figuring out how to do so is the hard part, Hint can be a good source of prompts.

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
Investment: More effective healing.
Related: If the character is able to heal other people with their powers, they require Healing to do so. Immunize is the Advantage for purging or shrugging off "status effects" done to the character.

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
Investment: More precise and varied manipulation at distance.
Related: If the character's remote abilities vastly exceed their normal physical parameters, Strength or Superhumanity are necessary picks, such as to crush cars with the character's mind. Things like telekinetic flight and barriers are entirely different Advantages, such as Flight and Toughness.

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."
Protected: Spying on PCs without their knowledge.
Investment: Longer viewing range, greater penetration of security, and/or greater awareness of a viewed place or multiple viewed places at once.
Related: Remote Viewing itself doesn't guarantee that nobody knows the character is looking in; the default assumption is that other characters can become aware that they're being watched without anything special. Stealth would apply to this kind of Remote Viewing, or laterally, Invisibility.

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."
Investment: Faster, more complete, more varied repairs.
Related: Repairs don't fix people. Even mechanical people. That requires Healing, Regeneration, Cure, or/and Immunize. In some cases Resurrection might be appropriate, like bringing a dead robot or AI person back online.

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.
Credit: ● if the Resistance is against damage type and the character has Toughness at ●●● or higher, or if the Resistance is against an ambient factor and the character has Adaptation at ●●● or higher. The Credit applies to no more than two Resistances.
Investment: More powerful resistances.
Related: A Resistance cannot provide its complete effects vs environmental factors unless it is narrowly categorized against one specific factor, such as Resistance - Acid allowing the character to dip into a vat of acid. In almost all cases, Adaptation is still a necessary Advantage to deal with hazardous environments. If the character has a wide variety of specific elemental resistances, a high-rated Toughness with simple written caveats that it applies more to some elements than others, is much more appropriate. Any Resistance that would be covered by Intrusion Immunity requires that Advantage instead.

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.
Investment: Resurrection at a ●●●● rating has a very narrow criteria which a dead character must fit, and is too inconvenient to pull off to change the immediate course of a scene. Resurrection at a ●●●●● rating can resurrect dead characters within fairly broad criteria, and doable within the scope of an ongoing scene.
Minimum ●●●●
Surcharge: ●●●
Related: Resurrection is absolutely not needed to revive, and in fact does not work on, a character who is merely "defeated", dying, or in critical condition. It may apply to, but is not strictly necessary for, characters who are "clinically" dead but still possible to save with ordinary medical attention. Since Resurrection only works on other characters, if the character who possesses it can come back to life, they require Immortality to do so.

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
Investment: Skeleton Catch trumps Immortality of the same Pip rating or lower. ●●● Skeleton Catch trumps Resurrection. Since NPCs don't use the Advantage system itself, ● kill NPCs that come back to life as a gimmick, ●● kills NPCs that come back to life as a major plot obstacle, and ●●● kills NPCs that essentially aren't killable without a plot.
Minimum ● Maximum ●●● Obviously, lower or higher ratings than these aren't meaningful.
Related: If you don't know what a Catch is, read Immortality.

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.
Investment: Greater capability to accomplish difficult tasks
Related: This Advantage is a sort of mirror of Knowledge, for relatively mundane but important learned attributes a character has which are academic rather than applied. Unusual skills with weapons or vehicles fall under Weapon Mastery and Vehicle Mastery respectively.

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.
Credit: ● if he character already possesses Contract at ●● or higher.
Investment: Being able to share Advantages of an equal or lower Pip rating.
Maximum ●●●
Surcharge: ● if the character wants to be able to share a 4 or 5 Pip Advantage. This still requires ●●●.
Related: Any Advantage listed as an invalid target of Power Copy cannot be shared by this Advantage. Having this Advantage obviates the need to take versions of an Advantage that exclusively effect the character or other characters, such as both Healing and Regeneration, or Cure and Immunize, at the same time; sharing Regeneration is healing another, sharing Healing with yourself is regenerating yourself. Strictly speaking, it's possible, though very rare, to make any valid Advantage explicitly affect only other people, in which case this works in the same way as the above. If the character wishes to divulge material to others on a large scale and/or semi-permanent basis, Wealth is required to do so.

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
Investment: Greater potency of character speed. There isn't a hard scale on how fast a character can move or react with this Advantage, but it's loosely understood that a higher investment means that the character is faster than they would be with a lower investment; ● Speed doesn't get supersonic parkour.
Minimum ● Related: To get around places really well, rather than just really fast, use Mobility. If the character only has some sort of super fast defense, see Defensive Paradigm for things like precognitive dodging or parrying bullets.

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
Investment: By default, MCM expects that each player in a scene is getting One Big Thing done during each of their pose rounds, and doesn't allow for someone posing twice as much to be in two places advancing two different objectives, effectively "doubling their attendance". This Advantage allows a character to do exactly that (though no more than two). They can gun down a horde of zombies while hacking a computer mainframe, or perform a magic ritual while building fortifications.
Minimum: This Advantage is always ●●●
Related: The NPCs Advantage covers the vast majority of characters having underlings, monsters, allies, drones, etc. Darth Vader's troopers succeed only when he's on screen with them to contribute his big deal presence.

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
Investment: More effective stealth.
Related: The main boundary of Stealth is that someone could be alerted to the character with enough mundane effort. If it's presumed the character just won't be seen until they do something to affect someone or something, it's in the wheelhouse of Invisibility.

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
Investment: A greater ability to stretch physical strength into a problem-solving device. There isn't a hard scale of how much a character can lift, break, etc. with this Advantage, but it's loosely understood that a higher investment means that the character is stronger than they would be with a lower investment; ● Strength doesn't flex tanker ships.
Minimum ●
Related: Speed and Toughness are essentially counterparts to this Advantage.

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
Investment: A greater extent of superhuman physical capability. This Advantage is roughly equivalent to half as many Pips in Strength, Speed, and Toughness.
Related: To emphasize a particular attribute instead of a whole, "generic" package, see Strength, Speed, and/or Toughness. Having all three as a more expensive way of having even greater physical prowess is explicitly okay. Superhuman senses are covered by Extraordinary Senses.

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
Investment: This Advantage is always an Incidental Advantage. PCs being stuck out in the wilderness for long periods of time is almost never going to be a relevant challenge.
Related: For meaningful protection against serious environmental dangers, and/or environmental protection that allows the character to be useful (as opposed to hiding in a shelter), see Adaptation.

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.


Required: The limitations to where the character can teleport, essentially a description of why the character can't teleport "anywhere and everywhere in the Multiverse". The trappings cannot be written along the lines of the character "being so fast they move instantly", or else it's just sneakily describing Speed; Teleportation is strictly a transport Advantage.
Investment: ● Teleportation is limited to instant travel to places within the character's immediate surroundings that they have the ability to access already, as a sort of "flash step" or similar. ●● Teleportation allows a character to go through most walls and obstacles, and get to most places in a scene, with some salient limitation to their destination. ●●● Teleportation allows basically unrestricted access to anywhere within a scene with only very minor limitations. Anything higher removes those minor limitations and is assumed to trump anti-teleportation measures. Incidental Teleportation is limited to limited fast travel-style transit to points of interest, and casual intros/exits from scenes.
Surcharge: ● Teleportation has no Surcharge. ●● Teleportation has a ● Surcharge. ●●● Teleportation has a ●● Surcharge.
Related: If the character can go through walls and such without instant travel, see Intangibility. If the character can do other things than "get to point B" seemingly instantly, you'll need Speed instead, and probably at a high investment. If the character creates wormholes or warp pads for a sort of persistent teleportation, you'll want Field Shaping to place teleportation features into a scenescape. Catching and/or redirecting attacks through little wormholes is likely going to be a use of Defensive Paradigm.

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
Protected: When applied to PCs or their possessions as per Deconstruction.
Investment: Applicability to more narratively impactful targets.
Related: Temporal Acceleration does not equate to super speed. Time-flavored speed boosts like Haste spells still require Speed or Superhumanity, and Share Powers is required to lend the full weight to others. Buffs may be a substitute for generically increasing speed as part of an overall increase in competence.

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
Investment: Minimum ●●●
Related: While having no particular limit on its use, the wide variety of things that a time loop can accomplish are bounded very narrowly within the theme of "the progression of time being able to solve it". For a "silver bullet" to just about any challenge, see Quantum Solution, which contains a maximum use of once per scene.

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.
Investment: Time Stop at a ● rating is strictly limited in what actions the character can use it for, amounting to a number of small stunts that exist in laterally related space to things like speed, reflexes, teleportation, special dodges, attack gimmicks, etc. The character might be unable to interact with the world, or only accomplish single motions, or skip time without getting to change what they started doing. Hit's initial appearance in Dragon Ball Super is a solid example.

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.
Surcharge: ●● for ● Time Stop, ●●● for ●● Time Stop, ●●●● for ●●● or higher Time Stop.
Related: Time Stop, by its nature, overlaps with small sections of functionality from Invisibility and Teleportation, but cannot seriously supplant them; the character cannot simply "be invisible" for any amount of time they're around, nor do they get from place to place with any extra convenience. Likewise, though a primary part of Time Stop's importance in fiction is skipping the process by which people can watch it the character do things and jump in to interrupt, what the character accomplishes isn't necessarily subtle in any way; Stealth is still required to do most major things "without anyone knowing it happened", instead of just "without anyone seeing the character do it".

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
Investment: Greater defensive strength.
Minimum ●
Related: For strong protection against narrow sources of damage, or things that aren't strictly damaging, see Resistance. If the character is "tough" because they're really good at defending themselves, likely see a Weapon Mastery or Defensive Paradigm. For powerful passive protection against environments, see Adaptation.

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.
Investment: Unlimited Activity is always an Incidental Advantage; the frame of time over which it's relevant exceeds a single scene, and is mostly flavor space.
Related: If a character doesn't need even the bare basics of life to keep working, they require Imperishable.

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.
Investment: Greater proficiency with the chosen mount or vehicle, including when accessing one that is part of the scene.
Minimum ●. Nobody needs to justify driving a sedan to a store or riding a horse at a walk.

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
Credit: ●●
Investment: Since one Pip is enough to gain a ●●● rating, investing beyond this point is only for consummate specialists, for mastering the most outrageous and unreasonable obstacles, performing the most improbable of stunts, or extending their prowess to less related liquid environments.
Related: This Advantage represents an all in one package of everything related to water capability. If the character has incidental abilities surrounding traversing or navigating water, these can usually be part of a Mobility and/or Adaptation, which are allowed to be broad and give the character other tricks as well. This Advantage provides the character no resistance against water-type attacks, which would be covered by Toughness or Resistance.

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.
Investment: Greater proficiency in the chosen weapons or style, including when picking up weapons that are part of the scene. An Incidental Weapon Mastery is nothing more than barebones proficiency, however, and even more "just for show" than usual.
Related: A character who is nominally skilled at fighting with one or more weapons, but mostly just attacks straightforwardly with them, rather than stunting off of them, should get by fine with Combat Options, or if they have a special technique or two, Arsenal - Melee and/or Arsenal - Ranged.

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
Investment: Greater wealth.
Related: The character can likely bribe, hire, or pay off people for help on the scene, but for hirelings that the character usually or always has access to, you need NPCs.

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

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

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

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

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 Environmental Protection (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

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

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

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 - 1, 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".