"Necessary Evil" - supervillains save the world!

Game Master ZenFox42

Storm Dragon - thanks for the explanations, they make sense! I agree with your rationalization of the limitations on Force Control, it just seems weird that it can lift and throw non-living things, but not living things. Ah, well, just a quirk of the power (in in-game terms), I guess...

Diffraction - the Fighting and Throwing skills are still linked to their normal Attributes. Apparently you can't fly yourself with Force Control, but you could put some points into the Flight superpower. Even so, I don't think a Skill is needed for it. The force cage would *be* the grapple.

Sound good?

That sounds great, it is already along the lines of my thoughts, I took Flight, armor, and the other powers all tied together as more specialized uses of "Force Control" Is teh flight Skill ever likely to come up?

Only if you get into an aerial "dogfight" with someone...

All, I am in the midst of con season and I have two cons in the span of a month, one of which I am working as staff. If I am slowing things down, please feel free to bot me. If you are in my group, please be patient and I will check in as often as time allows. Things should be back to normal after the first weekend in March.

Okay, since I've done all the scouting, and it seems that most of the guards are concentrated in one area, it seems like now is a good time to attack.

Or, like someone suggested, if we just want to destroy the hooks, that could work.

At the very least it will make some of the guys inside go outside, and I can wreak havok inside.

I feel the need to reiterate the question: why attack?

All but one guard is inside. We could either take him out quietly or just ignore him and get in the sub. Are they going to swim after us?

There are clamps on the sub which need to be released. One way would be to turn them off from inside the building, which is full of enemies.

Mind you, I'm not opposed to just killing the one guard outside, and destroying the clamps.

Indeed, I recognize that as the superior idea.

Actually, it may be a positive to have them come to us anyway.

Alright, let's let the DeadHand have the try at ruining the clamps and take it from there.

Once we're through this section, mind if I rearrange my skill points? Not putting ranks in Stealth was kind of a big oversight for my assassin character.

I can just drop the ranks in Intimidation and reassign them, and maybe the ranks in Tracking as well.

No problem.

Let me see if my mental picture of things is correct.

Paradigm is talking to a drone next to the sub. Hrungir wishes to teleport Ibrahim and himself behind them.

We are currently (pre-teleport) near the door to the control room, where Ibrahim has just killed a drone.

Roland is inside said control room, with five other drones, invisible.

Everyone else is ???

I think Dark Angel is flying high overhead waiting

Oh, and Diffraction is attempting to gain access to the facility....I think?

That's my understanding, too.

Hmmmm. I continue to believe that our chances at disintigrating the clamp are greater and easier then taking on 6 V'Sori.

Also, if we start wrecking the clamp, and they find out, then they need to come to us. They have to pass through a bottleneck (the door) and then come to us, giving us the advantage.

If we go inside, then we have to go through a bottleneck, and deal with them as they just have to stay where they are and shoot us.

All in all, I think starting with the clamp is still the better idea. (Also, it shouldn't be that hard. Start with the spot where the clamp attaches to the dock. You're not even touching the sub. Once the clamp is removed from its connecting base, it might just come apart from having nothing to hold it together any more.)

Of course, the downside is that if anything goes wrong, the sub becomes useless. You cant just patch a hole in something that needs to withstand the 170 atmospheres worth of pressure at 1600 m deep.

Going the other way, even if we cant hack the computer after killing the V'sori, we can still try to destroy the clamp.

Diffraction - could you please add a "header" list (between the PC name and the image icon) of your PC's most important specs (at least Parry, Ranged TN, Toughness, etc.)? See the other PC's for ideas about what to include.

Also, your Toughness should be listed as 13(6) if I'm reading your character sheet right. It's total Toughness, with armor in ().

Done

Hrungir - I looked up the Stun power and even tho your version has an Area Effect, according to Clint (a SW system developer), that MBT would be *centered on you* without also having the Ranged Touch Attack modifier. So what I would suggest you do is take the 2 PP from Area Effect and change them to Ranged Touch Attack for now. When you get more PP, you can add the Area Effect back in.

Ranged Touch Attack is described as follows :

"The Touch Attack is replaced by a straight Fighting roll if the trapping summons some sort of force or material at the spot of the attack (like grasping hands, swirling spirits, or poisonous fauna).
The Touch attack is replaced by Shooting or Throwing if the trapping involves firing or hurling some sort of missile such as spitting venom, tossing a grenade, or firing beams from one’s hand or eyes."

So please decide now what the Trapping is to determine whether you need to make a Fighting or Shooting roll (at +2) in order to affect your targets from now on. Then, back in gameplay, please make 1 such roll (for the Fin).

Hey all kinda new here to SW and the Superhero setting, but i've been ok'd by Zenfox to post my PC here for overview. Name is still up in the air, but i'm feeling pretty good about it for now.
I've been told that the team is currently in a mission so no joining for now, which gives me plenty of time to change things as needed if there are any errors. But i've read up on the entire story and hope that I can offer some good rp and stats to the group and hope to learn what i'm unaware of in the system as we go(only played 1 other SW game before and it died a few months after starting with not a whole lot of play.)

Name: Gabriel Vale
Alias’s: Ice lance(Hero)/Frostbite(Anti-hero)
Human-Hexxed

Note- Requires activation is on the armor, otherwise it'd always be active, it was more for flavor also so i don't just have 12 toughness all the time it feels a bit strong if it's always active. I think it'd be neat if he got a +2 to toughness from armor so long as he was wearing his suit, but need to truly activate it to access the contingent powers, but *shrug*.

Hrungir - the power is by default a *Touch* attack, but to affect others far away from you, you need to turn it into a *Ranged Touch* attack, which is a 2 point modifier. And if you ever want to add Area Effect to it, you'll need Ranged Touch so that you can move the burst template away from being centered on you.

Ugh. System knowledge fail.

Ok, I'll adjust it down to a single target thing for now.

Can anyone suggest the *easiest* way to 1)Draw a map, and 2)Make it available to everyone? I don't have a lot of free time to put into map making, so I'd rather keep it as "theatre of the mind", but I'll do one if I can do it quickly.

I think i might be able to get ahold of some of the Neccessary evil maps if you wanna post them in a google slides thing.

Azil - maps for each scene? Because each scene is at a different location, they'd all have to be different.

Also, can I import images (your PC's icons) to Google slides, and overlay them on the map?

Yep, you can put pretty much any graphic on the slides.

Azil - maps for each scene? Because each scene is at a different location, they'd all have to be different.

Only the ones provided, in the book, anything they don't actually have a set scene for you'd have to custom draw. It's better than nothing for some parts of the game though.

I was reading the campaign page and saw a house-rule I missed before.

When you use an Advancement to get a new skill at d4, you may also increase one other skill that is currently *less* than its linked Attribute by one die value as well.

I updated my character.

For consistency, I'd like to ask everyone to always finish a run of Aces until you don't Ace, no matter how ridiculously high the total gets. Thanks!

Yeah, it curtails some minor cheating in the PbP format so you can't just nix an Aced Shooting roll of 8/8 and save the extra Ace for another d8, or d6, or what have you down the line. On purpose or accidentally, since some people don't quite understand how the dice roller works at first RE: rolling order.

Could anyone explain contengient(2) for me, the book example doesnt make a whole lotta sense to me.
Also if you tie growth(with the monster property) to something that requires activation does the growth only activate when the contengient power is active or is it always active still. Ie: alternate form where you become larger

Could anyone explain contengient(2) for me, the book example doesnt make a whole lotta sense to me.

Basically, it requires another power to be successfully used before it can be used.

As an example, I made a character for a friend's game recently (BTW thanks for introducing this subsystem to me ZenFox! Savage Worlds was already probably my favorite RPG and we wanted a new system for a Mutants and Masterminds game) that has Growth, Attack: melee, and Explode all Contingent on his primary ability, which is Absorption: Kinetic Force.

So he gets hit, it's hard enough to take a wound. He makes a Soak roll (essentially) to Absorb the damage, and then he can funnel it into those effects. But if he doesn't absorb any damage, he's essentially just a normal, physically fit high school student who's just weirdly tough but can't hit for shit.

So would tying growth onto altered form, be cont() or 2?

Azil - the SPC says in Contingent "If Toughness is linked to Altered Form, for example, the character cannot use Toughness without changing her form". So making Growth contingent on Altered Form means you cannot use Growth unless/until you are actually using Altered Form (even tho it's "always on", I would take that to mean that you have actively changed your from from its default state).

So I would say that making Growth Contingent on Altered Form would be Contingent(-1).

However, Altered Form itself says that it can "raise or lower [the user's] effective Size by 3", so that's already a form of Growth (but without the Toughness or Strength boosts).

Since i've got time i'm playing through some more possible ideas for characters, not sure what one i wanna truly submit for review right now. So some more questions instead.

Can you attach super skill, to the device quality? For example, Hero gains the benefits of superskill[2steps shooting] when using their trademark weapon, but not when using any other firearm and as such only cost 1 point. Could this apply to something like Parry or deflection as well if used in conjunction with a trademark weapon?

Would it be possible to slap Requires activation and slow to activate on something like Regeneration. For example, Hero gains the benefit of regeneration while sleeping or meditating making Regeneration[level 2(hourly)] only cost 2 power points.

Are vehicle prices the same as listed in the book? Wanted to grab a streetbike, but 3k is a pretty juicy pricetag(even with the 1k starting funds and rich perk[x3 starting funds] it'd leave you with 0 in the bank)

Azil - skills, deflection, etc. can be attached to a device. The gun might have an electronic targeting system to boost Shooting, and a built-in force field to increase Deflection.

I'd hesitate to put Requires Activation and Slow to Activate on Regeneration because that only takes 1 Free and 1 Regular action to activate respectively, which is not very slow.

I know that vehicles are expensive, but Dr. Destruction usually provides you with transportation.

Making it like that means it won't kick in automatically if he's Incapacitated, which is pretty big for Regen abilities.

Sorry for the lack of posting by the by; I didn't see that I was up and I'm having a bit of trouble following the action.

I'm also...not sure my character fits into this group very well? From the initial description I'd assumed two things: the group would be concerned with staying under the radar and B.) were "evil, but not Evil", where you guys are a pragmatic kind of "Aliens are bad for business" evil. So I made a guy who would be potentially good at getting jobs done slow and quiet and was made to mesh well with a team.

Neither of these things appear to be the case, where everyone else seems to be the "monologue-y" type evil and everyone just kind of does their own thing willy-nilly.

Would a different character fit better?

Meh. This is your first mission with the group, and we just took on a bunch of new characters, so nobody knew anybody's way of doing things.

I'm kinda in the same boat, as in, I can get in to trouble, but I need other people to get me out. ^_^

It looks like you have a decent build, to me, so I'd say give it a bit still and see if there's more gelling to do.

(As a thought, I usually go in first to scout places. Do you think you are able to come along most times?)

Storm Dragon - changing characters is entirely up to you, but the willy-nilly thing is because there's no clear group leader (I'm not saying there *has* to be, just that there isn't one). And since at this point the game consists of missions for Dr. Destruction, the PC's "evilness" hasn't had much of a chance to be demonstrated (altho it was in earlier missions, and at the very start of the game). Finally, "under the radar" is relative - yes, you're going on missions for Dr. Destruction which could potentially put you "on the radar", but how you handle each mission can keep you "off the radar". For example, earlier there was a mission to bring down a powerful gang lord, which was done almost completely covertly.

Dark Angel is "evil" in the way that she deals with wrong-doers (killing them), but is very much against harming innocents. She does not harm civilians, and will not allow them to be harmed if she can help it. That said, even the simple act of pickpocketing is enough to merit punishment by losing a hand. Thus, she is evil, but not so much as others might be.

My point was actually more that half our party seems closer to Skeletor than not.

I'll stick it out for a bit and see what happens.

Can you elaborate on that point a bit?

Not sure what's meant with the Skeletor thing, but Gabe up above and the other character i'm cooking up aren't necessarily evil by factor of being your typical supervillan, so much as circumstance of the world. Gabe is 'evil' mostly due to him needing to simply act as such to get in with the good doctor and crew, but also because story-wise his curse makes it much harder to simply let people go when he gets into a fight.

The other character, which i think will have a great polarizing dynamic with Dark angel on account of being a half-demon, isn't evil, but more of a chaotic neutral force and the fins have been making it hard to pay the bills, oh and well demonic heritage and all kinda gives you that kind of rep.

Evil very much is a mind's eye kind of thing though, most people would see Ibrahim and say he's evil immediately, he's a zombie/undead and an assassin. Both things that are basically without a doubt labeled as evil. That being said, evil-doers often find that in situations such as this they aren't as evil as they once were especially when you take out the polar opposite force against them, the super hero. When there is less visible good the evil folks don't seem too bad. If the world was overthrown by fish people who literally enslaved(or are attempting such) the entirety of the world Shank-y Steve doesn't seem that awful.

TLDR; Prolly best to play it out a bit and feel the water some more, but as the others said it's up to you at the end of the day.

Can you elaborate on that point a bit?

Paradigm and Hrungir in particular, but also Thomas strike me as the "Let me tell you my evil master plan/gloat about my self-evident superiority" kinds of villains. In short, the "Evil and lovin' it" sorts, rather than the professional criminal sort of evil.

I cant speak for their intent in making or playing their characters, but keep in mind Paradigm and Hrungir are also both brand new, this being their first mission with us. If you read back over our previous missions, you'll see a trend, I think. We are what I would describe as Pragmatically Evil, much more Sinister Six than Snydly Wiplash.

None of use were Take Over the World types, or Evil for the luls types. We were mostly thieves, blackmailers, or robbers, and our main goals were generally to get rich and retire. The whole Alien invasion/all the heroes are dead so it's up to us now things just kinda messed that up.

We try not to kill bystanders because it is pragmatic (we are technically trying to save the world), and because excess mess tends to attract attention. Back in the day, if we killed a guard while robbing an armoured car, we'd think, well dang, oh well. But if we could robb the truck without killing anyone, all the better. Less mess, less media attention, fewer task forces, and fewer vengeful survivors.

Hrungir is evil in the "selfish and amoral in his approach" type of evil. He doesn't care about other forms of life, because they are inferior.

Paradigm is only Evil because he frankly doesn't care about who gets in his way of becoming a master of his powers. He recognizes stronger powers, i.e. Dr Destruction, and bides his time until he gets stronger. He knows he can't handle the aliens alone and he works with whoever is willing to help kick them off planet so he can get back to his research. Research is expensive and if I have to knock over a few banks to.. well, you get the drift...

Thomas Roland wrote:

Can you elaborate on that point a bit?

Paradigm and Hrungir in particular, but also Thomas strike me as the "Let me tell you my evil master plan/gloat about my self-evident superiority" kinds of villains. In short, the "Evil and lovin' it" sorts, rather than the professional criminal sort of evil.

*chuckle* Well said. =)

And, yes, this is one of the reasons why, at the very, very, very first outset, I asked "how evil is evil" (goodness is that two years gone by now?) and that was an interesting chat.

Mind you, Thomas is absolutely a psychopath and cares not a whit about who gets killed.

I thought it would make an interesting juxtaposition to all you goody-two shoes. ;-)

I feel like Thomas was, almost Han Solo right there.
"How's it going in there guys?"
"Who us.. it's fine we're fine good even... want us to throw the switch so we can leave? How are you?"