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So, looking at the Vigilante, seeing it tried out...
I can't really even call this class "half-done"
It's not even half-done.
It's more like one-QUARTER-done.
And the weirdest thing about it all isn't that the exact mechanics are bad, or poorly designed...
It's that the Vigilante doesn't know what the f@#% it is, and no-one else does. There's no special something to it to separate it from the other 30-odd classes out there. It's just... there. Doing it's thing, and no-one knows how or why it is, and it just ends up being a giant garbled mess of logical zig-zags.
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Let me explain:
You really have 3 types of Superheroes out there -
1) The always-on-Superpowers heroes. These are your Supermen, your Wonder Women, your X-Men, Spider-Men... these are the heroes who never, ever, EVER get to really "turn off" their powers. They may have alter-egos or disguises, sure; J'onn J'onzz has "John Johns", Clark Kent only puts on the Superman suit when he needs to, etc.; they may also have absolutely no secret identity at all - just look at John Constantine, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four...
2) Badass-Normal Capes. This is Batman, Black Panther, Daredevil, Green Arrow, Nightwing, The Phanton, Rorschach. These are guys who are mundane, yes, but are still capable of going toe-to-toe with literal Gods.
3) Part-Time Ass-Kickers. THESE guys have power, but on a limited basis. THEY actually DO have to change in order to become Superheroes. These are your Power Rangers, your Sailor Scouts or PreCures; these are your Kamen Riders. They are also Green Lantern, Iron Man & Warmachine, Shazam!, and He-Man.
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Now, I bring these up to show how the Vigilante doesn't know s!$+ about what it wants to be thusly:
Type 1 Superheroes are pretty-much already covered. They're covered by supernatural classes like Paladins, Sorcerers, etc.; they're also covered by Races to a large degree, and Classes are secondary to only explain their martial prowess and non-superpower-related skills (Superman and Icon are Brawlers with absurdly broken Races).
Vigilante isn't needed at all here, because even though they have secret identities their powers never cease. Clark doesn't HAVE to put on the blue suit to be Superman - he can never NOT be a Kryptonian, and thus can fly from Metropolis, Delaware to Tokyo, Japan THE LONG WAY whenever he damn well feels like it.
Type 2 Superheroes get a lot of love from the Vigilante class... until you actually READ what the Vigilante class does, and then you barf so hard you wish you'd never read it and proceed to go on making a Character with one of several existing Archetypes that just make your Disguise check absolutely heinous.
The Vigilante says that you can't have your abilities unless you're in your Super mode, and yet wants to convince you that you can be completely mundane and still be a Super.
Now, I don't mind the idea of a Mundane being a Super, obviously - Zorro, Phantom, Batman, etc. are all cool characters. But they never AREN'T cool characters; they ALWAYS are capable of snapping a hundred mook necks without breaking a sweat - the Suit just enables them to have a secret identity.
And yet the Vigilane class says that, no - the Vigilante's Street persona doesn't get the abilities of its Super persona; despite being the same person, despite being 100% muggle, despite their costume having absolutely no special qualities whatsoever and may as well be the clothes our Hero pulled off a drunken Bum last tuesday, Oliver Queen CANNOT shoot arrows as well as Green Arrow because of... reasons.
So, that just leaves us with
Type 3 Superheroes. HERE is where the vigilante class makes sense, mechanically, but is missing a MAJOR part of itself.
Type 3s make SENSE to have both a Muggle and a Super form. They NEED some measure of outside support to be a Superhero.
Power Rangers may be Teenagers with Attitude and know martial arts, but without the Ranger Suits, they're still wonderfully squishy and only have human-level strength.
I don't care how cool any of the Green Lanterns are, even John Stewart - they are all humans, plain and simple. Except when they're aliens, but that's just peripheral. Generally, unless you're a god-moding DAXAMITE wearing a Lantern Ring, you are one of the trillions and trillions of star-fairing-or-not races with vaguely-human level abilities and are VERY susceptible to Darkseid squeezing your head under his armpit.
And Billy Batson... Billy, Billy, Billy. You think THAT little twelve-year-old could lift an aircraft carrier without shouting the word, SHAZAM! and causing Tesla to pop a boner in the afterlife? HELL NO. Captain Marvel is the power; Billy just operates the controls, as it were.
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Type 3 heroes and villains are where the Vigilante shines; that's where the vigilante makes the most/only sense:
The Vigilante CAN'T let you use your Super abilities as a Civvie because your abilities are legitimately tied to your Alt-Ego.
And that's FINE; that makes SENSE, that works out fantastically with the class and would actually set it apart mechanically from the other classes.
Except that there's nothing in the class to explain this mechanically.
There's no Bonded Object or Object of Power; there's no Source for the alternate personality and a legitimate mechanical reason for their being two distinct characters in one body as it were.
There's no Scarab Beetle, no Ring of Power, no Powered-Armor, not even a Magical Command Word - NOTHING.
And BECAUSE there's nothing, you get the gigantic headaches of "why can't Bruce Wayne take down 5 Ninjas, but Batman can?", etc.
You get a giant piece of fluff and roleplaying folded sideways and shoved into the class, TRYING to make it fit, when it doesn't work.
As it stands, there's NO reason to not just make an NPC character, make a - I dunno... BRAWLER - character, and say they're the same people; one is just the "Secret Identity" while the other is the Hero.
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Look, I WANT their to be a Vigilante class; I do.
But whomever came up with this class is either not a very big superhero fan (which means they're the absolutely WORST person to write a Superhero CLASS for f*%!'s sake), or they got a little overzealous and tried to shove WAY too many different ideas into a class.
It's not working, and it's not going to work.
At worst, this class needs to either drop the purely-mundane shtick and go with a "Super Item Grants Abilities" setup, OR it needs to allow the Civvie to use some abilities of the Super (although that just raises a lot of headaches) It doesn't need to have spells, but SOMETHING needs to say why Jim-Bob the Janitor and Captain Andoran can't have the same abilities 24/7.
At worst, this class NEEDS to be broken up into 2 different classes: one which is Mundane, and one which is Supernatural in some way or another.
Frankly, I'd go with the first choice, and just drop the "I'm Batman" thing entirely.
Unless you can work out MECHANICALLY how a Secret Identity makes logical sense AS A MECHANIC to let Batman be Batman in a better way than doing what the Internet has been doing for decades - I.E. building Batman exactly without ever needing a "Secret Identity" mechanic - then it's better to just completely drop that idea.
I don't think many people will cry; we've already spent decades building Batman, Daredevil... hell, even Iron Fist... without the Vigilante Class.
However, what HASN'T been done as an actual Class is the Power Rangers, Green Lanterns, et all.
EVERYONE has come up with their own ways in which a character can go from Mundane to Super in a heartbeat, and the Vigilante Class would actually be a legitimate, elegant answer to that.
BUT, the Vigilante can't just stay as it is - it needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up, and it needs something to make it ACTUALLY mechanically different and interesting compared to the other classes, to set it apart and give it that "yeah, this really IS the only or best way to do this design" feeling that every other class has.
My vote for that "something" is an Item of Power.
Lots of good points there chb. And there are already a few threads discussing the problems of Dual Identity and the ubiquity of pwer across the characters two identities. Hopefully the designers will chime in soon...
I'm not sure your system of three types of Superheroes is completely solid, but it works for this discussion.
The problem of the Item of Power is that it won't fit plenty of themes. I do think the devs/design team will make an archetype that uses that trope.
I'd settle for them first making it function mechanically. Should, IMO, be a Full-Round from 1st level to change.
Then they can get into explaining WHY it functions that way. Especially interesting if it's different for every Specialization.
Avenger: The Spirit of Justice possesses you and drives you to RIGHT WRONGS! (This would be a good way to get rid of the nonsensical Alignment change thingy but bring it back for one quarter of teh class).
Stalker: Honestly? Dunno.
Warlock and Zeaot: SHAZAM!
I'm not sure your system of three types of Superheroes is completely solid, but it works for this discussion.
Yeah, no, that's really broad strokes, and there are a TON of nuances among superheroes.
BUT you really can break them down into "perma-powered", "non-powered", and "sometimes-powered".
Sure, there are "perma-powered" characters that have very weak powers they don't use often, and rely on otherwise-mundane abilities. Deathstroke is just such a character.
BUT the point stands that they still have powers that never really turn off; the powers don't care what they're wearing or anything - Deathstroke's healing factor will work regardless of if he's in his The Terminator outfit or if he's out & about as Slade Wilson.
Jaime Reyes, on the other hand, is pretty much useless without the Beetle.
That's the point I'm making, and the way the Vigilante class is now, it makes more sense with Jaime than it does Slade.
Carry on chb! I think your initial post is well reasoned, and a good discussion point for further development of the class. Let's get these rather larger issues out of the way before refining minutiae that may no longer exist further down the design path...
Warlock - Maybe an item from the list of Arcane Bond items which they use to channel their powers?
Zealot - A prayer/ritual ala Etrigan/Jason Bloods rhymes.
Stalker - a special mental focus ritual?
And if you squeeze some Occultist Base Class theme in there you get the Phantom...
Stalker - a special mental focus ritual?
That sounds creepy as hell...
And then I think of Grendel and suddenly it seems to work so well.
Of course, that's just for Grendel. There may be other characters for which a ritual wouldn't work.
AND, arguably, I think Grendel may be more a Rogue or a Slayer. The more I think about it, the harder I lean towards Slayer.
That sorta illustrates my point: Power Rangers et all fit so nice & snuggly into the Vigilante that it warms the cockles of your heart; meanwhile, things like Batman or Grendel make you go "well... why aren't they something OTHER than the Vigilante"
ANYWAY, back to the conversation at hand here...
I think, like Arcane Bonds, it'd be best to leave the thing that enables the transformations up to the player to choose - whether it be an object, a special command, or potentially something else.
Personally I think Objects are the most manageable, but obviously there are examples in comics & literature of both objects and phrases allowing for transformations.
I think the thing is, its not that Batman loses his powers when he is Bruce Wayne, its that Bruce Wayne has to be super careful to prevent his secret identity from being revealed. Otherwise friends and family would be targeted, and he would go to jail.
In the Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne sneaks out before becoming batman. He doesn't immediately kung fu every clown in the room. Yeah he takes out one goon as Bruce, but that is only ONE goon.
Practically every super hero tv show has some episode (or multiple episodes) where a character has to choose between saving the day/himself and revealing his secret identity. This is the trope they are going for.
I think a clause could be added to the class that allowed it to use all vigilante powers in his social persona when alone with a single enemy or something (or something like this could be a feat). But I like the secret identity aspect of the class. The social persona just needs a bit better integration.
For the most part...GM should not put the social persona in combat situations except in very rare cases. A GM who has a social persona be attacked in practically every situation he appears in is being a brat, and its not different than a GM who constantly tries to make a paladin fall, constantly puts wizard characters in magic free zones, or who immediately takes away the gunslinger's weapon.