Lark of the Week: POWERS

[Bailywolf]

Ok, I was sitting in the Phily airport night before last, waiting (and waiting and waiting) for my flight, and I came up with a bare-bones scheme for a game concept called (at this point) POWERS.  

I don't have mechanics.  I don't have setting.  I just have a scheme for the weird mojo the game will use.  Here goes.

Basic Idea:  Supernatural powers are distinct, quantifiable little 'somethings' independent of the person who wields them.  A wielder is a person who can control and direct a power.  wielder's can trade powers as easily as shaking hands.  Powers can be stolen, hidden, and otherwise monkeyed with.  The powers themsleves are stated out independentaly of the character who uses them sort of like spells in D&D.

Note:  Yes, I know this is about 3 inches away from Sorcerer, but I think there are enough distinct elements to make it worth at least playing around with.   Powers arn't defined as characters; they don't have goals, drives, needs, or personalities... they are more like a combination of super power, social title, and divine attribute ("I weild the Greater Power of Fire, beware my wrath...")  

Complexities:  

Since powers are not inherent to the person who weilds them, under the right circumstances they can be stolen, passed on, inhereted, lost, found, or otherwise toyed with.  Characters can potentialy change their mojo during play, trade powers within the PC party, with NPCs, use them as currency etc.  I'll trade you the Lesser Powers of Wind, Thinder, and Lightning for your Major Power of Strength...  

Powers are ranked into three tiers:

Lesser.  A fairly common Power.  There are 9 identical versions of a Lesser power floating around.

Major.  A potent and rare power.  There are only 3 identical versions of a Major power.  Each is roughly the power of the combined force of 3 lesser powers.

Greater.   A unique powr.  Greater powers are the Big Guns.  They are singular.  Each Greater power is roughly the power of the combined force of all 3 Major powers.


Defining powers.  One scheme I toyed with in the airport for defining powers was to give them numeric ranks in certain functions.  The generic list looks like this right now:

Attack- use the Power to make a direct attack.
Defense- wards damage
Travel- some form of movement
Reveal- some form of information gathering
Control- manipulates natural behavior
Alter- changes natural form or function
Enhance- boost some natural capacity

A lesser power would have 3 levels of the above, a major power 9 levels, and a Greatest power 27 levels.  

Powers also have something I'm calling Aura and something called Tell.  Aura is a set of indirect effects of the power when it is used- how it makes you feel, what it looks like etc.  Tell is a outward sign you possess the power when it is not being used... obviously, higher rank powers have more pronounced Auras and Tells.  

Some Crunchy Bits-

Capacity- somehow a character's stats will determine the number and rank of the Powers he can wield... I'm thinking of some kind of spread... lots of lesser Powers, or few potent powers.  

Artafacts- simply powers imbued into objects.  Anyone can use them, and sometimes they can be broken down to extract the power they contain.  Useing Artafacts is a way of exceding your normal capacity, but it is fairly easy to divest you of an artifact.

Magical Creatures- magical beasts and monsters are created by imbueing mundane creatures with certain Powers.  Dragons can be created from lizards by empowering them with Fire, Strength, Ferocity etc.  Some hunt such beasts to slay them and steal their Powers.   Some weilders create magical creatures to serve them when they have powers beyond their capacity to weild, yet don't wish to entrust another weilder with them.

Transfer- powers will have a default mode of tranference.  Weilders can transfer their powers to others, sons can inherent the powers weilded by their fathers.  Dragons can be slain for their powers, and magic swords crafted with them.  The powers themselves are the same, regardless of the forms they are imbued into.

Setting expansion- a few example Powers can be provided, but players can create and define their own during character creation.  But by the nature of the Powers, this automaticaly defines other powers out in the world at large.  If you define a Lesser Power of Darkness it implies 8 other lesser powers, 3 major powers, and a big honkin Greater power of Darkness out there somewhere.


Design Considerations- a character's innate abilities are ranked independent of his Powers.  Capacity is derived from his mundane stats, and will change rarely... but a character's actual Powers will be highly fluid.  It will be possible to entirely remove a character's supernatural abilities as the story demands, only to imbue him with new and more awesome powers.  Always, power (and fortune)can be fleeting.

I may try to implement this with my QaD ruleset just for kicks.



Anyhow, any thoughts?  Any setting suggestions?  

Thanks

-Ben

[Mike Holmes]

Hmmm. Powers can be stolen? How? How does having them in an artifact make them more susceptible to a character being "divested" of them?

What I'm getting at is that it seems like it requires a touch to echange powers, or to steal them. Which seems not much more difficult than stealing an object. What am I missing?

Mike

[Bailywolf]

Yes I see what you mean.  Stealing a magical device can be as simple a getting you drunk and swiping it... or picking your pocket... or konking you over the head and running off with it.  You have no special tie or bond to the thing...its an object in your possession which can be taken from you.

Stealing a power requires the stealer have an empty 'slot' (as described by his capacity thingy) for it, and you must be subject to some kind of ritual, specil defeat, or disempowering circumstance.  I can't decide how the powers themselves would exist independent of a wielder... perhaps as glowing constructs of energy or something.  So stealing a power either requires some kind of special circumstance (you set up an oponent so that you subject him to humiliating defeat in the place where he suffered his greatest personal tragedy while observed by people he hates etc... thereby weakening his will suffeciently to allow you to rip off his Powers).

I was thinking that some element of willpower was what let you hold onto your powers tighter, so the trick to stealing powers effectively is to come at your enemy where he is personaly vulnerable- friends, family, loved ones, hopes, fears, ambition.  Break his spirit to steal his power.  More developement is needed here.

Basicly, taking an artafact is as easy as swiping an object... taking a power is a matter of breaking your enemy first.  Torture might work in the right circumstances...but you can't torture the Greater Power of Fortitude for crap... but if your destroy his family, his calling, his very love of life then confront him at his weakest... his power will be only loosly anchored inside him...

I was also thinking that when a weilder is slain, his powers come free, flowing along their normal default lines of Transfer.  You kill a weilder, you loose your chance to steal his powers... better to keep your victims alive and suffering so you can take their powers...

A wielder can always choose to divest himself of a Power, imbueing another with it as desired.  A handshake is enough for this kind of transfer... and a basic character concept I had in mind... the lowly servent boy imbued for mysterious reasons by and unknown stranger with an awesome Power...

[Mike Holmes]

Cool, I get it. You were wondering about a way to limit slots - what about just using the 3, 9, 27 power descriptor totals? Say a character can have a total of 39 or something. Or perhaps you could say that they are worth 3, 6, 9, which makes the higher ones much more valuable.

Are you going to work up a system?

Mike

[damion]

Sounds like a cool idea. One easy thing to do would be to write up each 'power' on a 3x5 card, then players could just give cards when powers are transfered.  What you have now sounds more like a board/card game than a RPG, but it could make a good RPG with a little setting.

Ideas: Possibly artifacts ARE intelligent and have their own agenda.

Might want to drop the explicit 9:3:1 ratio to prevent running out of powers, or have to make cheesy duplicates (Uh, major power of short swords. Hm, I have major of bastard swords, we're even)

Another idea would be to put in some rules that encourage swapping, like powers time out or something, or maybe only two people with powers can come into conflict at once, so all the PC's lend their powers to one of their number who fight the villian, but each PC controlls their own powers still. Kinda like a duel everyone can participate in.

[Bailywolf]

I'd like to avoid the powers-as-entities thing... Ron has a lock on that angle.  

As for the overlap factor... Some guideliens are needed for defining one's powers.  Not too specific... something like the Power of Blades would be fine... covering all edged weapons.  Guidelines needed certainly.  

To encourage ballanced characters, I'm thinking about basing a character's capacity 'slots' on the difference between their highest and lowest basic stat.  The greater the difference, the more slots you get... but the weaker those slots are.  I'd work the numbers out so the actual number of 'build points' used to create the powers to fill the total slots equals out...there is no 'magic ratio' for stats allowing an uber-character.  

Say there is a basic trait range of 1-6... the differences range from 0 to 5... say you get something like this:

0-1  1 greater power; 3 Minor Powers (36 points)
2-3  3 major powers; 3 Minor powers (36 points)
4-5  1 major power; 9 Minor powers (36 points)

At start of game, everyone has 27 points in Powers assigned as limited by their stats.. but since powers can come and go...

[Tim Gray]

Given that "lesser" and "greater" form a complementary pair, I suggest that you change your labels so powers progress lesser > greater > major.

Why not start characters with one single power, magnitude determined by points spend? This brings them into the game, and starts them on the ladder of acquiring more, if they choose.

You could remove innate limits on powers, and just say that the more you've got the more of a beacon you are to everyone else. Maybe sensitivity to other powers comes with having your own. So if you want to avoid young bucks challenging you at every turn and assassins trying to steal your powers, keep it low-key. But have a couple of artifacts in a secure vault nearby. (I suppose the problem with this is that some people will accumulate a lot and become virtual gods. That might be fine in a fantasy setting, but not in others.)

Don't think you said anything about a setting. Would it be a modern day secret war type thing, some sort of fantasy world, or what? Perhaps have an atmospheric name that people actually call the powers, or the power-providing energy nexus. (EDIT: this could work really well as anime!)

By the way, your power descriptors have similarity to the properties/domains ascribed to the planets in astrology and alchemy (Mars=antipathy, Venus=sympathy, Mercury=movement and communication, Jupiter=expansion, Saturn=limitation...). Also very similar to a list I used in Legends Walk! for magic descriptors.

[Bailywolf]

Anime was certainly an influence- especialy the 'collect-em-all' stuff.  One limiter I considered was removing the fixed 'slots' on powers and simply setting it up so that the more powers you had, the weaker your hold on any one power... it gets easier and easier to strip you of your powers.  So the guy with one minor power pretty much has no wories about it being ripped off... the guy with the (I'll take your suggestion Tim) one Major power will have a lose grasp...the guy with a whole bucket of powers is looking at trouble as any monkey who comes by and upsets him can swipe a power or two.  A natural limiting factor.

[Walt Freitag]

Setting expansion- a few example Powers can be provided, but players can create and define their own during character creation. But by the nature of the Powers, this automaticaly defines other powers out in the world at large. If you define a Lesser Power of Darkness it implies 8 other lesser powers, 3 major powers, and a big honkin Greater power of Darkness out there somewhere.

Anime was certainly an influence- especialy the 'collect-em-all' stuff.

I think you're on to something very useful here. It's a lever that allows a small amount of character creation to influence a large amount of setting and situation. I'm curious as to what style of play you see going along with this. A game system with a strong metagame and GM-ful play doesn't really need an artifice like this to give players control over the setting, while a conventional canned setting-and-metaplot wouldn't have the flexibility to make use of it, given that a relatively minor bit of creative character creation can bring a new major Power into the world. It sounds to me like it would be strongest when settings and situations are dynamically created during play while still GM-mediated, such as in sim exploration of setting or situation with a strong secondary GM priority on story outcome, or in vanilla Narrativism using intuitive continuity techniques.

Conventional collect-em-all bits have always been around, of course (D&D had the Rod of Seven Parts, instant extended quest campaign, just add water) but your Powers have some different twists. Explicitly inviting players to invent new Power sets in character creation (with the implication that the other powers in the set will definitely turn up, at least occasionally) is unusual. Also, each Power implies not just a set of other peer Powers but a hierarchy of them, which makes each new Power much more situationally significant. There's no comparison to working simple character choices like player-invented super powers or spells or origin cultures into a setting. You can't even really compare it to Sorcerer's demons which, like everything in Sorcerer, are entirely focused on the player characters.

Question: is there too much of this "leverage" for a system to handle? Coming up with that ninth minor power of fog might be a creative challenge sometimes. (But, I suppose you're never forced to do so.) And what happens if a new character enters a well-established game with (say) three new Power types; where have the thirty-six related Powers at large in the world been hiding all that time? Even an on-the-fly method of establishing setting and situation might have trouble with that. Not a problem with short games, but the number of powers in a set and the way you've described PCs gaining and losing powers suggests to me that you're thinking of longer-term play. The system you embed this in, and the setting itself, are going to have to provide some tools for handling the necessary flexibility. For example, is it known that new Powers sometimes appear? How long have the current dominant society and Powers coexisted? If Powers are a relatively new or at least not yet fully explored phenomenon (like the Pokemon world), perhaps because they began with a recent upheaval or are native to a recently settled world, it would explain a lot. I'm less optimistic about the modern world secret wars approach; it sounds to me like Powers are too numerous and, well, powerful for their existence to plausibly be secret for very long. A contemporary setting would have to be more like a supers world, where the existence of Powers is generally known.

All in all, this is a very interesting direction to be thinking in.

- Walt