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View Full Version : Lets Play: Icons, Superpowered Roleplaying (AKA, Vote Up A Superhero)



Xefas
2013-05-01, 11:07 PM
So, there's this game: ICONS: Superpowered Roleplaying (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/81475/ICONS-Superpowered-Roleplaying). It's a superhero roleplaying game by Steven Kenson, designer of another superhero roleplaying game, Mutants and Masterminds.

One of its features that I find relatively unique is that it has a large random component to its character creation process, and I don't hate it (the not-hating is the unique part). I, personally, enjoy tables, and lists, and randomization things a good deal (note my Lets Play How To Host A Dungeon (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=207903) thread). Not always, of course - most of the time I have a concrete character idea in mind for a game that I want to play. But sometimes, I like random. And while some roleplaying games' random character generation stuff has rubbed me the wrong way, ICONS doesn't, for reasons I don't fully comprehend.

Still, there are many choices and decisions to be made, and that's where You All come in. My objective here is to generate a character that I have as little say in as possible, relying on randomness, and the internet for anything non-random. And then, fate willing, take that avatar of the Playground's whims and play them, as a player, in a real game (and, of course, write a little campaign log for you all to see the fruits of your labor).

In the process, I hope to disperse some knowledge and stir up some interest for a neat little (and cheap, like $10) game whose pages haven't seen enough eyes, in my humble opinion.

Note, every roll I make here will be via a digital dice roller (the d20srd one, specifically) for maximum randomization, with no fudging involved. Things for Playgrounders to vote on will be in Blue. With that, Lets Play.

Part 1: Origin

First, we roll for Origin. Basically, where your brand of unusualness comes from. They all come with their own benefits (and sometimes drawbacks). The six Origins are: Trained, Transformed, Birthright, Gimmick, Artificial, and Unearthly. Aaaand...

I rolled 11: Unearthly. This means the character will be from another world or supernatural dimension. An alien, demon, elemental, deity, etc. They have a choice of two benefits for being Unearthly. You can either add +2 to two ability scores (see further down in the post), but have one less superpower (minimum 1). Or you can roll twice on the Origin table again, and get the effects of both rolled Origins, incorporating their themes into your character concept.

Part 2: Abilities

In ICONS, there are six Abilities, rated 1 through 10. Prowess, your skill is close-quarters combat. Punching, kicking, stabbing, etc. Coordination, your agility and dexterity. Dodging, acrobatics, shooting ranged attacks, etc. Strength, your, uh, physical strength. Determines damage for melee and thrown attacks, effects your Stamina (Hit Points, essentially), and helps you out with any raw physical activity. Intellect, your smarts, of course. Inventing, learning, solving problems, etc. Awareness, your intuition, attentiveness, and perceptiveness. This is for sensing danger, spoting/hearing/smelling something, and generally using your gut instincts. Willpower is your mental strength and force of personality. It effects social interations, as well as your Stamina (Hit Points-esque), and your aptitude on the mental battlefield (should mental attacks become an issue).

A 1 for an Ability means you're probably crippled somehow. This is the Strength of a feeble old man, or the Intellect of the mentally handicapped. A 3 for an Ability is average. Bog standard average dude on the street. A 6 for an Ability is the absolute, astounding, and incredible peak of humanity's farthest potential. You're smart like Iron/Bat -man, or strong like... most comic book heroes, after a few years of power creep, I'd guess. 7 is solidly and obviously superhuman. A 10 for an Ability is crazy and ludicrous. Your Strength 10 character juggles sky-scrapers and bench-presses Australia.

We roll 2d6, and apply it to a table (2 = 1, 3 = 2, 4 =3, 5-6 = 4, 7-8 = 5, 9-10 = 6, 11 = 7, 12 = 8). Notice that you can't roll higher than 8; to get a 10 at character creation, you have to apply some other factor, such as our Unearthly Origin. You apply them in order as you roll, but you're allowed to swap two of your rolls for one another, one time, if you wish.

Here's what I got:
Prowess: 3 (Average Brawler!)
Coordination: 5 (Olympic Gymnast!)
Strength: 5 (Bodybuilder!)
Intellect: 2 (Stupid!)
Awareness: 4 (Good Instincts!)
Willpower: 5 (Balls/Ovaries of Titanium!)

Part 3: Powers

First, we roll for the Number of Powers, before we roll for powers themselves. Of course, some powers (Wizardry, Time Control, etc) cost more than one "Slot", I guess you could call them. Powers can potentially come with several choices; for instance, if you roll more than one of the same "Type" of power (Alteration, Control, Defensive, Mental, Movement, Offensive, Sensory), you can reroll. If you roll the same power twice, you can reroll, or you can boost the effectiveness of that power. Some powers have a 'bonus power', which is something that, if you have the available slots, you can choose to take as one of your powers without rolling on the table. For instance, if you get Elemental Control, you can auto-choose Blast, where your blasts use the same element that you can control.

I rolled that we have 2 Powers. Now, depending on what you all choose for our Unearthly Origin, this might be shrunk down to only 1 Power, or it might be effected in other ways if we go dual-origin. So, I'm going to leave the document here, until we get some votes.

Recap: Things To Vote On

Origin: +2/+2/-1 or Dual Origin?
Abilities: Do you want to swap any two ability scores? Or do you want to Save This Choice For Later? I'm inclined towards the latter, because it would let us get a better idea of what abilities would be useful for the powers we get, but I don't get to decide!

(I believe there will be a lot more stuff to vote on later, so I hope to get past the first few phases fairly quickly.)

TuggyNE
2013-05-02, 12:42 AM
I says Dual Origin, because that seems more interesting (even if it's less powerful?), and save ability-swap for later, since, as you say, no idea what strengths we're gonna have.

Slipperychicken
2013-05-02, 02:04 PM
I'll just start up a bandwagon, with no idea how the system works.


Dual Origins
Save the Swap

Xefas
2013-05-03, 08:07 AM
Alright, well, lets move on, and hopefully interest will pick up. :smallbiggrin:

Dual Origin

Alright, I got 5: Transformed and 10: Artificial. (Full disclosure, I actually got two 5s, but you reroll duplicates in this case.)

Transformed means that you were normal for your race, but through some happenstance, your fundamental nature has been altered. Stuff like the Fantastic Four or Clayface; pretty much any Superhero that was born via a freak accident (often because of Science!). One of your Abilities, or the rating for one of your Powers is increased by +2.

Artificial means that you're an artificial life form, of course. Traditionally, you're a cyborg, android, robot, golem - that sort of thing. However, it could also denote that you're a clone, or a purely synthetically produced biological organism, or something like that. You get a straight-up +2 to Strength, and you have the option of replacing any one of your rolled Powers with the Life Support power.

Life Support is a bit like the Construct Immunities you get in D&D. The higher its rating, the more stuff you're immune to and/or don't have to deal with, like sleeping, eating, breathing, toxins, etc.

Soooo. I guess this Origin means that... we were a normal extraterrestrial/extradimensional being. But then we got Robocop'd ('on our home world or on Earth?' is an interesting question)? That's how I'm reading it, but, of course, it's up to the Playground.

Part 3B: Powers, continued

So, we're got two powers. Rolling... rolling...

Alright, I've got Blinding [Rating 3] and Emotion Control: Love [Rating 6].

Blinding does what it says on the tin. The attack is ranged, and therefore Coordination based. The duration of its blindness is based on the Coordination roll, so its actual Rating is less important; it mostly determines whether defensive superpowers are capable of shrugging it off.

Our Coordination of 5 means that most non-superhumans won't want to tangle with us, since we can probably keep them blind for most of a fight while we wail on them. Combined with the area-enhancement (see options below), we can easily de-fang the standard villainous mook-swarms, blinding whatever mob of ninjas/pirates/werewolves/ninja-pirate-werewolves the big bad sends at us.

Options include:
-By default, this power robs its target of sight. However, you can choose to have it cause deafness, or a loss of smell, taste, touch, or even superhuman senses, such as Danger Sense or psychic Detection, instead. These are fairly niche; but I figured I would mention it anyway.

-By replacing our other power (Emotion Control), we could have this power effect two senses at once. Blinding + Deafening, for instance.

-By replacing our other power, we could have our Blinding power actually be a burst that effects a significant area around the point of impact.

Emotion Control: Love is extremely powerful indeed. It has a long range, and is a Rating test vs the target's Awareness. If you succeed, the target falls in love with you almost indefinitely. If you fail a check to control them, it becomes harder to do so in the future, but once you have your hooks in them, the only way they can break free is if you ask them to do something against their nature, in which case they can make another opposed check.

It being Rating 6 means that the average guy on the street has little-to-no chance against enslavement. Short of the goddamn Batman, most humans would be powerless before us. It's a bit scary, actually.

Recap: Things To Vote On

Origin: Choose one Ability or Power to grant +2.
Origin: You can replace either Blinding or Love Control with Life Support, granting us some immunities (we don't know what the rating will be yet).
Blinding: You can replace Love Control with the Double Sense or Area of Effect enhancement for our Blinding Power.
Ability: We can still swap two Ability ratings.

Our stats so far:

Origin: Unearthly (Transformed, Artificial)

Abilities:
Prowess: 3 (Average At Fighting)
Coordination: 5 (Exceptionally Agile and Dextrous)
Strength: 7 (Superhumanly Strong)
Intellect: 2 (Dumb)
Awareness: 4 (Significantly Perceptive)
Willpower: 5 (Unshakably Confident)

SilverLeaf167
2013-05-03, 08:19 AM
You're an ancient god, the Marvel sort, who came to Earth for whatever reason. Aphrodite, maybe? Your gorgeous beauty is charming at the least and literally blinding when truly revealed. Unfortunately, you attracted the attention of a mad scientist who captured you and made you into a cyborg of sorts in a perverse attempt of having complete control over you and "perfecting you further". In the end, you managed to escape, but the change was already done and you couldn't return to your godly realms in this "impure" form of yours.

My votes:
Origin: Increase Blinding's rating by +2. I assume you'd want it to work on superhumans as well.
Origin: Don't replace anything, since my idea uses both of those powers you already have. :smallbiggrin:
Blinding: Don't replace.
Abilities: Swap Strength and Intellect, maybe? Depends on how you want to play her. A bow would be neat...

Slipperychicken
2013-05-03, 10:20 AM
Questions:

So, let me get this straight: We're a dumb strong alien who got turned into a robot with the power to blind people and make them fall in love like a fembot from Austin Powers?

Can we maintain Emotion Control on multiple creatures at once? If so, I think a "spread the love" campaign may be in order, where we accumulate a cult following of adoring fans.

Are any of our powers affected by our ability scores?

What happens if we boost Emotion Control's rating by 2? Would it then affect superheroes the Batman too? What would be immune to it?

Xefas
2013-05-03, 10:57 AM
So, let me get this straight: We're a dumb strong alien who got turned into a robot with the power to blind people and make them fall in love like a fembot from Austin Powers?

That's one possible interpretation. Flavor is rather mutable at this stage.

We could be, I dunno, a person made from clay by the Goddess of Beauty (Artificial), and then that Goddess was killed, and we ascended in their place because of our devotion/we killed them (Transformed), and then we fell from grace/were banished/are vacationing to Earth (Unearthly).

Or, y'know, Martian Robocop with pheromone dispensers. There's a lot you can do with it.


Can we maintain Emotion Control on multiple creatures at once?

Yes.


Are any of our powers affected by our ability scores?

Blinding is heavily effected by our Coordination, as it needs to be aimed. From what I can tell, the actual Rating for Blinding doesn't mean a whole lot. There are a few situations where it will come into play, but not very often.

Love Control relies exclusively on its own Rating, from what I can tell.


What happens if we boost Emotion Control's rating by 2? Would it then affect superheroes the Batman too? What would be immune to it?

Love Control 8 would be crazy powerful. Potentially, very few things would be outside of our reach. In fact, if our character wasn't a moron, they'd be prime take over the world material, with that kind of resource at their disposal.

Sadly, at the moment, we don't have enough brain power to turn cereal into breakfast.

Spamotron
2013-05-03, 11:19 AM
I'd say swap strength and Intellect. With artificial's plus 2 to Strength you'll have no substandard stats and great Intellect makes the Love power more dangerous. Then boost Emotion control with the + 2 from transformed to make it 8.

The combination of Unearthly and Transformed makes me think of a NWOD style Changeling. You were an ordinary human that was snatched by an alien being who warped you into a paragon of beauty for its own purposes. You escaped but the ordeal has physically (artificial) and mentally changed you to the point that you can't really be called human anymore.

Slipperychicken
2013-05-03, 12:20 PM
Better idea: we're Lelouche Vi Britannia, only more lulzy and overpowered.

Emotion Control= Geass
Blind= throwing birds into people's eyes (like in Code Ment, a parody of Code Geass).

Swap Strength for Int
Boost Emotion Control by +2
Keep the Blind power.

Xefas
2013-05-03, 03:09 PM
Better idea: we're Lelouche Vi Britannia, only more lulzy and overpowered.


Just to clarify, Love Control doesn't let you control the target like a puppet (there's another power for that, and it's a bit harder to use). If you put the whammy on some random dude and then ask them to charge Galactus with a stick, you'll have about the same outcome as you would asking your spouse to do so. They still feel things like fear and self preservation.

You could probably get the Hulk to rampage in the direction of your choice. With a little subtlety, you could probably hit all the major world leaders and eventually orchestrate world peace and/or nuclear holocaust. You could probably charm entire boards of directors and secretly control every major corporation in the world from the shadows. You could probably get an Arkham guard to just shoot the Joker in the face and have a few witnesses testify that he was trying to escape.

You probably couldn't get the Hulk to stop being angry, or get Poison Ivy to buy a lawn mower. Probably.

Eldan
2013-05-03, 03:14 PM
I suggest swapping Blinding for Life Support and play...

The LOOOOVE Machine.

I'd also suggest getting at least a decent intelligence. If you swap Willpower and Intellect, he can have a badly masked inferiority complex.

Zovc
2013-05-03, 03:30 PM
We could be, I dunno, a person made from clay by the Goddess of Beauty (Artificial), [...]
+1
Origin: You can replace either Blinding or Love Control with Life Support, granting us some immunities (we don't know what the rating will be yet).
I am partial to doing this, to keep in line with the 'made of clay' thing we have going.


I'd say swap strength and Intellect.
[...]
Then boost Emotion control with the + 2 from transformed to make it 8.
+1
Ability: We can still swap two Ability ratings.
Origin: Choose one Ability or Power to grant +2.

AgentofHellfire
2013-05-03, 05:41 PM
Love Control 8 would be crazy powerful. Potentially, very few things would be outside of our reach. In fact, if our character wasn't a moron, they'd be prime take over the world material, with that kind of resource at their disposal.

Sadly, at the moment, we don't have enough brain power to turn cereal into breakfast.

...the combination of omnipotence and lack of ability to use it is amazing.

Do Love Control 8! And low Int!

Xefas
2013-05-04, 12:33 AM
I believe the votes looked a bit like this, this time around, and I'll be proceeded with this assumption.


Origin: Choose one Ability or Power to grant +2.
Blinding +2: 1 Vote
Love Control +2: 4 Votes

Origin: You can replace either Blinding or Love Control with Life Support
Don't Replace Anything: 2 Votes
Replace Blinding With Life Support: 1 Vote

Ability: We can still swap two Ability ratings.
Swap Strength and Intellect: 4 Votes
Swap Willpower and Intellect: 1 Vote
Don't Swap Anything: 1 Vote


Part 4: Stamina and Determination

Not much to say here. Our Strength of 4, plus our Willpower of 5, gives us 9 points of Stamina, which function like Hit Points. That's above average, certainly, but not astoundingly superhuman.

There's not an abundance of healing in this game (there's Wolverine-style Regeneration, as a power, of course), but you can recover all of your Stamina by resting for a few hours, and hits tend to take off only a few points at a time, anyway.

Determination is a bit more interesting. Your character has 6 Determination, -1 per Power you have, and -1 per Ability rated at 7 or higher. With the Strength <-> Intellect swap, we end up with no Abilities at 7 or higher, so that gives us 4 Determination. Not bad!

At the beginning of each session, your pool of Determination Points will rise to this level, if it's lower, or remain at its current level if it's higher. What do DPs do? Well, they can be used for five things; Determined Efforts, Focused Efforts, Recoveries, Retcons, and Stunts. All of them are pretty powerful; they're meant to balance out the characters with few superpowers with the characters with a lot of superpowers.


A Determined Effort, you declare before you roll the dice. Essentially, you've declared that the action you're taking is so important that failure would be unthinkable. A bomb is about to go off and kill the entire party, and you've got one chance to disarm it. The alien leader has declared humanity a lost cause and his hand hovers over the Planetcracker button, and you've got three seconds to convince him not to press it. Secret gnomish Illuminati mind control squids are about to scoop out your free will and turn you into a willing zombie slave, and your fate rests on one Willpower roll. In this case, you roll, and for every 2 points you fail, you sacrifice 1 Determination, and you succeed through sheer force of Goddamn Batman. You must sacrifice at least 1 Determination, even if you ended up succeeding, so it's never free. And if you don't have enough Determination to pay for all your failure, all of it gets spent up and you fail anyway.

A Focused Effort costs 1 Determination and allows your character to substitute one Ability for another, for one roll. The example is a character with low Intellect but high Strength being able to Fonzie a malfunctioning computer; that is, whack it really hard, and that miraculously fixes it. You could also use it for things like a high Intellect, low Willpower character being able to use Intellect to ward off a psychic attack; their brain is less like a steel wall, and more like a ludicrously complex Escher maze that the attack gets lost in.

A Recover costs 1 Determination and lets you instantly recover [higher of Strength or Willpower] points of Stamina. You may only do this once per conflict (presumably while you spit out a tooth and rattle off a wry one-liner; I feel like that should be mandatory).

A Retcon costs 1 Determination and allows you to declare some fact about something your character knows that has not already been determined. For instance, "We have to go to Atlantis? Well, it just so happens I also have a Bat-Submarine that would be just the thing. Why wouldn't I? I've got a Batmobile, a Batcycle, and a Batplane, don't I?" or maybe "I'm a ninja. Of course I swallow a set of lockpicks before every mission. It doesn't matter that they took our equipment; I'll throw it up and get us out of this cell!" Get the gist? You just retcon tidbits of convenient information to keep the story rolling along.

A Stunt costs 1 Determination and allows you to drift one of your superpowers a bit. You could use your Superspeed to create an area-attack in the form of a tornado, or use a Lightning attack to Blind instead of deal damage by generating a super-bright arc of electricity. This also factors into the character advancement system. If you Stunt a particular effect long enough, you'll eventually be able to learn it as a normal Power. So, the aforementioned Lightning Guy could eventually gain the Blinding power, and no longer have to pay Determination every time he does his bright arc thing.


Part 5: Specialties

First you roll for the number of specialties your character has. I got 7: 2 Specialties.

Specialties are little areas of specialized knowledge that give your character a bonus whenever he interacts with the subject of his specialty. For example, "Spacecraft Specialist" would give you a +1 bonus on Coordination checks while flying a spacecraft through an asteroid belt, it would give you a +1 bonus on Intellect checks to fix a broken spacecraft, a +1 bonus on Awareness checks to identify the make and model of a passing spacecraft, a +1 bonus on Strength checks to exploit a structural weakness in a spacecraft when you try to tear it apart. Etc. etc. Anything involving Spacecraft, at all, gets a +1.

You can also buy multiple levels of specialty. You can be "Spacecraft Specialist", a "Spacecraft Expert" or a "Spacecraft Master", which would provide a +1, +2, and +3 bonus, respectively. Each level costs 1 Specialty slot.

Specialties can be anything, so long as they're narrow enough. Acrobatics, Criminology, Languages, Law, Medicine, Occult, Psychiatry, Robotics, Stealth, a musical instrument, - you could even have one dealing with a particular alien culture.

So, pick two. You can buy one level of two specialties, or two levels of one specialty.

This is also the point where we should be considering and discussing our Background and Appearance. Just, in broad strokes - Where do we come from? Why are we here? How long have we been here? What do we look like? Are we male, female, both, neither, or something else? What are we interested about or already learned in? Do we wear Earth clothes, a tights + cape, alien clothing, are we actually just a void of darkness lit like the night sky, accented with shining stars at our joints like a living constellation? Do we have a secret identity?

Specifics can be hashed out later (in fact, there are a set of mechanics for it! Heroic qualities! Like a catchphrase, epithet, archnemesis, and so on. But we'll get to that later.)

What I think I'll do is, if a consensus cannot be reached, I'll take some of the common traits and have a structured vote-off for what traits stay in the background.

Our Stats So Far


Origin: Unearthly (Transformed, Artificial)

Abilities:
Prowess: 3 (Average At Fighting)
Coordination: 5 (Exceptionally Agile and Dextrous)
Strength: 4 (Noticeably Stronger Than Average)
Intellect: 5 (Extremely Intelligent)
Awareness: 4 (Significantly Perceptive)
Willpower: 5 (Unshakably Confident)

Powers:
Blinding: 3
Love Control: 8

Stamina: 9
Determination: 4

Slipperychicken
2013-05-04, 01:19 AM
You forgot the +2 to Love Control. It should be 8 now.

Is it possible to Stunt our Love Control power into straight-up brainwashing or domination? I mean, doing that would flush our morality-meter down the toilet (brainwashing tends to be frowned upon in most games' morality systems), but it would still be pretty damn useful, even if we could only do it 4 times a session (how many permanent thralls do you really need to get by, anyway?). If so, we should spend the majority of our Determination points to do this and eventually learn true mind-control for good.


Would getting a specialty in negotiation give us a bonus on superpower-rolls made to influence negotiations, or does it only apply to our muggle-skill?

Xefas
2013-05-04, 01:35 AM
You forgot the +2 to Love Control. It should be 8 now.

Thanks. Fixed now.



Is it possible to Stunt our Love Control power into straight-up brainwashing or domination?

It's certainly possible, though some of it has to do with how the character is... characterized. But it seems like a short enough leap to be reliably doable.



Would getting a specialty in negotiation give us a bonus on superpower-rolls made to influence negotiations, or does it only apply to our muggle-skill?

A specialty of "Negotiation" would effect pretty much everything having to do with negotiation. You could probably even use it for stuff like rolls to recall historic information surrounding famous negotiations, such as treaties and peace summits. But, yes, that would definitely include rolls with our Powers to influence a negotiation.

Spamotron
2013-05-04, 02:38 AM
I think one specialty should be a social-fu thing like the aforementioned Negotiation would be good. But using everything to Min-Max the Love Control power is a bit boring. So I think the other specialty should be more flavor oriented and fun. A supernatural siren/nymph of some sort seems have a strong backing. A Music specialty fits the archtype rather well even if it is a tad uncreative.

Edit: Following the Music Specialty line of thought how about this for fluff: A "Rock," golem that has come to our world to spread love and joy through the power of sweet guitar riffs. And the blinding power is channeled through an Elvis/Liberachi style rhinestone suit. Negotiation still fits for gig contracts.

The Bandicoot
2013-05-05, 10:41 AM
I think one specialty should be a social-fu thing like the aforementioned Negotiation would be good. But using everything to Min-Max the Love Control power is a bit boring. So I think the other specialty should be more flavor oriented and fun. A supernatural siren/nymph of some sort seems have a strong backing. A Music specialty fits the archtype rather well even if it is a tad uncreative.

Edit: Following the Music Specialty line of thought how about this for fluff: A "Rock," golem that has come to our world to spread love and joy through the power of sweet guitar riffs. And the blinding power is channeled through an Elvis/Liberachi style rhinestone suit. Negotiation still fits for gig contracts.
+1 to the Rock Golem idea.