[The Human Element] Radio Chatter

bwah, I still haven't found time to reallocate points. There's no need to wait for me to do so before progressing to things in the next day or two, though, if I'm holding things up.
 
How extraordinarily frustrating. I'm stuck at work - even though I don't work weekends any more, go figure - and was going to catch up on posting since I'm at my one site I have decent internet access.... guess what I don't have on my Kindle? MnM. And my access isn't so good here that I could grab it off my home computer or find it online. *sigh* I will at least give my character a once-over and decide what can go, what must stay, etc and figure out what kind of point budget I'll have to reallocate. I'm going to focus him in harder in ranged combat and investigation and drop a lot of his general utility, because right now I'm finding him worthless in combat and significantly overshadowed in every other arena he can compete in.


At a quick glance, looking at dropping Mental Quickness, some Immunities, Teleport, all the tether based powers, and three feats (only one of which I've successfully managed to use at all). Probably upgrading base stats (T/F/R/W/AC/To-hit) and AMMO, either dropping or upgrading Flight, and possibly moving the "talk with anything" power to the head computer instead of dropping it. Expect AMMO to gain a few new forms. I believe I'll have room to keep Nicky, though I might end up raising or lowering his Sidekick rank. We can fluff that as having programs or limitations that were based on the tether and are so lost. I think I'll be a lot happier with the character, and he should actually support the story, too. I decided "talk to computers" is too useful to pass up, even if we already have another character with it ^_^ it's reasonably impressive. I'll write the post today and do the exact mechanics when I get home.
 
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I'm going to try to make some time to post in the next day or so. Life's been kinda kicking me in the teeth lately. I developed a bad rash, for no apparent reason, which is entirely baffling my doctor. She put me on some super strong meds to clear it, which made me feel fantaaaaaastic but put a bit of a damper on my productivity. Anything resembling attentiveness I've poured entirely into writing. On the plus side, I've got more than 46k for wordcount.
 
I have a half-completed "respec" post up I will try to finish today, too


EDIT: So, I'm not finished re-working Stefan. But I'm mostly done.

I redid a lot of his gear's optimization, pulling the same effects out of fewer points, without giving up or adding much (so he'll still be thematically the same). His effects will just work better now, and he's learned from experience and will have a larger variety of weapon effects in case of unusual enemy situations, like intangible energy beings from outer time-space.


LETHAL configuration's mis-nomer is fixed, and it is now Ranged Autofire Damage with Accurate x2 (bringing his total to-hit to +10, the power level's max), Full Power, Lethal, and possibly some range modifiers (because a laser's accuracy dropping off after 100 feet is a bit meh)


RIOT I haven't finished yet, but I hope to make it capable of effecting non-minions semi-reliably, at least a DC 15 save on each effect.


SLEEP will have an effect against powerful opponents.


Stefan's uniform is now an array-based device that can reconfigure, giving less protection the more options like Flight or Immunity to suffocation that are added.


Nicky should still be awesome while still being Nicky, too. I decided I couldn't get rid of him, I like him more than Stefan :tongue:


The biggest issue I had trying to get inspired to rework him was taking points out of powers to put into other powers, etc... if anyone else ever is trying to "fix" a Mutants and Masterminds character, take it from me, it is MUCH easier to just start over and use the original character sheet as inspiration. I started by dividing my powers into five rough mental categories (must keep, should keep, meh, should scrap, must scrap) and just rebuilt the whole character using what I had as a guide. I took the same powers in largely the same ranks, except for most of the tether-based powers, tweaking as I went. It's worked very well. I think both and Ms. Jane will be pleased with the result. I can't work on it at work during the week, so it may be a day or two yet, but I'll do my best.
 
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xD I would be sad if he got rid of Nicky. I don't know if I'd say I like him more than Stefan, but the two of them definitely provide a good foil for each other. If you've changed the sheet, I'll comb over it in more detail at some point when I'm not so brain-tired. New thread's up for the infirmary if anyone wants to go check on poor Charity.


On another note, what's that Dean Koontz book called that you based Stefan off of? I know you said, but I forget. And I just finished Dante's Inferno, and am now reading some of C.S. Lewis' more philosophical stuff...I think I might be in the mood for a bit of fluff.
 
Lightning.


RIOT mode is giving me some difficulties, the huge price difference between Dazzle and Emotion Control is complicating matters. At the same range and area and action settings, Dazzle ends up being about 8 times more expensive than calm-only EC - as a standard action, Dazzle is 2 PP/rank while Calm is 0.25 PP/rank, or as full actions they're 1/rank and 0.125/rank respectively. I will probably stay up late tonight ironing out the wrinkles, since work decided to give me the holiday off.
 
Worked out my issue with RIOT mode by simply throwing more points at it. Methinks Stefan will end up a little more optimized than I intended for combat, but I have the feeling that won't be a huge drawback. He'll still be able to hold his own in investigation and social situations.


New combat mode: GHOST (Go Home Oppressive Spiritual Tormentor)


Has a passive Super-senses booster to allow Stefan to detect all the things, two linked Emotion Controls to inflict fear and despair, and a (non-linked, must be fired separately) Nullify Insubstantial to force materialization.
 
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Nicky is all I have left to do in this rework, and I'll be good to go again. All 153 PP spent. Unless Ms. Jane has a problem with the sheet. I did my best to abuse ALL the ways to tweak more effectiveness out of points, so it's possible she will. The only things I won't do are stack multipliers (like Device) onto something that's already been multiplied (like Sidekick), and I use a modified maximum for Sidekick that's lower than the book's technical maximum Sidekick ranks, though still higher than a lot of GMs might be comfortable with...


When the book says your sidekick needs to have less PP than you, I read that as "your sidekick needs to have less PP than you spent on yourself", meaning points you put into Sidekick or Minions don't count towards the max of how many points your Sidekicks and Minions can have. It's a little common sense thing to keep players from spending 30 points on a 150 point character to get a 150 point "sidekick" while their main only has 120 points left to spend on himself. It's still a little excessive when pushed to max, but not to the point that sidekicks have more raw PP than the character themselves.
 
Nah, I don't have a problem with a little system abuse for the sake of a good story. If your character was boring and had no personality, then I might. A buddy of mine once built a character for my game that was literally immune to everything. He couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, which was okay, because the only other power he had was healing anyway; he couldn't get the hell out of dodge to save his life, which wasn't a big deal because he was immune to anything you could hit him with. Plus all of it was innate. I would have been perfectly fine with all that...except he was the dullest character I have ever seen.


That's about when I started to 1) insist on pre-made characters that I built for my games (though these guys are my buddies, and I generally know what kind of character they like to play, so they were usually pretty happy with it), and 2) made complications mandatory.
 
Wow sounds like vlad when i first built him, hopefully hes more then shown himself to actually be a person rather then a toon for a game.
 
Innate Immunity to Everything and Innate Healing... and no offensive powers. I like it, to be honest. The reason for his no attack powers should have been a intense pacifism or something, though. Like, he wasn't always a pacifist (Healing alternate power: Drain [any trait]. ) But after literally sucking the life out of countless millions, he accidentally killed his great love or had an innocent child touch his heart as they died or something, and then swear to never use his powers to harm again, etc.


I'm hoping to finish Nicky today, Stefan's new stuff is already in his thread, if you want to make sure it's all ok. I abused Arrays to eke every use I could out of every point, so he has a crapton of versatility without sacrificing much power, but really, compared to Vlad's ability to respend every point on his sheet as a standard action, I don't think I CAN make a character that compares versatility-wise, so I'll settle for being very good at about 4 different things, instead of before when Stefan was average at about 3.
 
I looked it over, it looked all right. Like I said, a little system abuse doesn't bother me, so long as there's a good story behind it.


See, if he had a backstory like that, I'd been just fine with it. Story trumps everything. That sounds fantastic, actually.
 
Yea but every time vlad does that he puts himself in an indescribably vulnerable situation. To begin with he becomes susceptible to crits, any one shooting silver will have a much better chance of killing him that way, and to top it all off it takes him a full round to stand back up, he is for all intents and purposes dead in every sense of the word so all it would take is some one who knows where the heart is and enough ass and strength to back it up could simply walk up and put a stake in his heart and he would be dead until some one pulled it out of him or chopped his body up and burned it to ashes. If some one is shooting him up with silver hes pretty much fucked till he can pull them out and if hes killed with silver he cant Regen it till he removes all the silver, like all his regen stops when he gets staked or silver gets in him.
 
Yeah, so someone with enough know-how could give him a seriously bad day. Hell, he's probably seen a fellow vamp or two killed by Solstice in such a manner. They are incredibly efficient like that. Never mind all these complicated nullification formulas they'd have to use on other metas. Sometimes the simplest methods really are the best.


By the way, I managed to find Lightning in the book department at work (took me a bit. It was looking for a bit like we had every Dean Koontz book but that one). I'm about five chapters in, and all I have to say is it's a good thing I have no illusions of originality. Kid Laura and Kid Charity are remarkably similar. Unusually bright, more than a passing interest in words, iconicly pretty, a close relationship with her father whom she loses at twelve? I swear I came up with that character a long time ago...


I have to kill off a character in my writing tonight, and I don't want to, and I'm totally procrastinating... <_<
 
I hope you enjoy Lightning ^_^ I'm not the biggest Koontz fan, but a lot of his work is really good. The one with the writer and his genius kid comes to mind, as does the one with the immortal serial killer... names escape me at the moment.
 
Nicky is up ^_^ I'm going to throw together a quick summary to speed up combat math later, but the mechanics are finished.


...and I only JUST realized that Nicky lost his morph in his small form. I guess I'm not QUITE finished, but I'm pretty close. Tweaks and such are all that's left. I'll probably drop his Super-strength in that mode (it's only good for carrying and grappling) to fix his morph/concealment being missing.


He now has a combat mode that is Medium size and can only look like his concept picture, the almost-demonic furry creature, which focuses on putting out large amounts of damage quickly. His smaller form is quick moving and grappling-specialized, so he can get in quickly and disable a foe giving Stefan a problem at range. He's been re-optimized for stealth and investigation, since I left that out the first time around T_T he's more dodge-reliant in his smaller form (relying on the Elusive target feat while he's grappling since he loses his dodge bonus) but can still take a beating. He still has his nanobot aura to repair himself and other objects, but it's not as effective as it once was.
 
I'm enjoying it for what I wanted it for--something wholly entertaining. I just needed to give my brain a break between writing my own novel, and editing others. It's been a while since I've read purely for entertainment. I've read two others by him. One is The Good Guy, and all I remember is that the villain was really, really creepy. He does have a way of getting into his characters' heads and making the reader understand them. But the plot was utterly forgettable. The other one was called Dragon Tears. I still haven't the faintest idea what the hell the title had to do with anything, but I do remember the villain had a small obsession with Elvis, something a supporting character shared. The only reason I remember this is because I read it shortly after Michael Jackson died, and the character's description of Elvis could have, in my mind, just as easily been of MJ. I'm trying to remember the plot, but all I remember is that somehow someone (I think it was the villain) could stop time. Beyond that, I'm pretty sure I'm mentally mixing it up with a Ted Dekker novel.


Ted Dekker's got a similar writing style, usually with the same kind of twist in what we think mankind is capable of. I wouldn't call it straight-up super powers, exactly, but his characters tend to be a bit beyond normal. His book Thr3e is a fantastic mind-bending thriller with a wholly unexpected plot twist that I won't give away; Blink is the story of a super intelligent college kid who spontaneously develops the ability to see multiple potential futures (the main character was actually an early inspiration for Sam, though she's gone through several changes since then), though fair warning for those that would find such things annoying, it does heavily contain religious themes; His Circle Trilogy is a straight-up allegory for the Biblical church, and possibly one of the most fantastic in-depth original fantasy worlds that he blends seamlessly with the 'real' world as we know it. A bit more similar to Koontz is The Bride Collector and Burn.


I really need to stop procrastinating and write...I've got 4k left to write today if I want to hit 60k. And I have an eight-hour shift to work.
 
Fixed Nicky's little snag ^_^ his grapple modifier will suffer for it a bit, but he should still manage a +7 I think, despite his small size.


He has an alternate power for his electrical Stun aura now, he can focus it into a burst EMP. While that doesn't harm him directly, he can't shield Stefan from it, so he uses it sparingly. He can swap back to the Aura as a power as a free action, but to actually activate the Aura takes him a full action, as well, so all the more reason to be careful when he switches off it.
 
Never underestimate the scrappy little kid hanging on for dear life in a skirmish xD Also, that would be all the more effective with a stun aura. Took a glance, everything seems to work. Now that he is actually a spy robot :P
 
feel free to have Drake interrupt their chat to find out what the hell happened ^_^ I'll have Stefan show up at the hospital after the scene advances a bit, to make sure we're not getting too wibbly-wobbly with the times those two scenes are taking place.
 
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