I would definitely agree that a character's powers are important to their character, but I preferred to think of it in terms of the effect it has on them. Take my character, for example; what I find compelling and what I want to explore about Nick aren't the nitty gritty mechanics of his powers, but rather the kind of person they have led to him becoming, the things that have happened to him as a result of them, the way he lives because of them, and so on and so forth. That's the sort of thing the RP's about, I think.
Although, on the subject of actively exploitable power weaknesses, perhaps someone could help me come up with one for my other character, as I've hit something of a block. The power, in essence, allows her to turn off friction and slide around at high speeds - it does this by projecting a field close around her body (so it also works on skintight clothes), which doubles as a minor shock absorber so that she doesn't immediately die when she crashes into something (still hurts, though).
The obvious weakness is that it's difficult to control and not really as good as just flat-out super speed, but I'm not sure if that's enough, so. If anyone has any input, that would be appreciated.
If I may add my two cents on the subject, I think you might be better served by including a weakness beyond going 'over-the-limit', for two reasons - exploit-ability and reliability.
If your only weakness is something that happens when your character overuses his powers, then that's not something anyone can actually use against you. Take, for example, our dear lord GM's character Meifeng and her primary weakness - electricity. That's an active weakness, something another character, if they knew about it, could actually use against her - if some dude rolls up with a lightning gun, she's up shits creek without a paddle. That's clear, it's exploitable, it makes sense.
Which ties into the second reason I've never really liked 'overheating' weaknesses in this sort of RP, which is the fact that it's not a weakness in practice at all. Be honest with yourself - are you ever actually going to say "Oh, well, I guess that's too much heat, he turns into a pile of ash and dies" ? No, nobody ever actually overheats their characters, they just make DBZ-like declarations of 'tHe PoWEr iS bEcOMinG tOo MuCH! I aM SEConDs FrOm OVerHeATIng! WHaTEvEr wiLL I dO?', but they never actually cross that threshold, just teeter on the edge of it to highlight how rad and dangerous their character is. This isn't an indictment of you or me accusing you of attempting to cheat - I used to do it when I used that sort of weakness. Everyone does it.
My recommendation, just make it so that he can't reach absolute zero, can't drain heat quite as fast, and give him an active weakness like, I don't know, maybe he's extraordinarily vulnerable to cold temperatures. Then, in my opinion, he'd be good to go, but then again my opinion's not the one you need to fuss about.
Nick is a big, broad-shouldered guy, with a thick but muscular physique and hands like hams. He keeps his brown hair short in a military crew cut, and his face is completely clean shaven. His white skin is slightly tanned from an upbringing spent running around outside with the other kids, though the more internal life he has been leading lately has caused a good deal of paleness to return to him.
Nick’s face is mostly smooth and rounded, lending an almost dopey, doughy look to his otherwise intimidating physique. In the bridge of his nose there is a very slight bend, a remnant from his days getting his nose broken all the time. On the top of his scalp there’s a long, white scar that runs from the middle of his forehead all the way to one ear. His back, if one were to see it without a shirt, is likewise an absolute tapestry of scars and markings, holdovers from the abuse he suffered before coming to Baybridge.
Attire:
Nick usually wears some combination of t-shirt, hoodie, track pants and battered sneakers, fashion not really being a concern of his.
Personality
Innate & Outward Personality:
Outwardly, Nick is an incredibly drawn, reserved, and wary person. He doesn’t really rush to make close connections with anyone, Metahuman or not, and while he’s not exactly cold in intrapersonal conversation, a good deal of his friendliness has been overtaken by caution, given that he is very aware of the effect his ‘powers’ tend to have on people (screaming, running, oh-god-what-the-fuck-is-that). He’s very paranoid, not in the crazy, twitchy, ‘the government is out to get us’ way, but more in the sense that he’s hyper aware of the fact that any situation could go wrong at any moment, and acts accordingly.
Growing up, Nick had a reputation as being not the sharpest tool in the shed, and it’s not entirely unfounded. He doesn’t always think things through and has a lot of trouble getting ‘book smarts’ into his head, and as a result he used to be a fairly gullible person and still is to some extent, though it’s balanced by acquired habit of nervousness around people.
One exception to his general lack of warmth is his treatment of his ‘pets’ – he’s not repulsed by them at all, often picking a few favorites and doting on them like an old spinster with a house full of cats – though he’s not exactly beyond sending whole droves of the little guys to their deaths should an emergency require it.
Hobbies/Interests:
Nick is still a fitness nut – his local gym is one of the few places he goes regularly outside his home, and he’s even got a small hive located in the vents. He also regularly practices his boxing talent, though he hasn’t had a fight since he came to Baybridge.
Skills/Talents:
Nick was a very promising boxer before his abilities manifested, and he hasn’t lost his edge, making him very capable in a fist-fight. He’s also an excellent driver, as you pretty much have to be if you want to make a living driving a taxi in a big city.
Goals/Motivation
As a person, Nick can be characterized almost by a staggering lack of ambition – if asked what he wanted from his life, he’d probably have trouble giving you a concrete answer besides ‘stay alive, make enough money to feed me and my pets and live quietly and undisturbed’.
History/Bio:
Nick was born in a small town in Iowa, a sleepy, rural place where very little ever happened. Growing up, he was athletic, handsome, and friendly, three things that were the key to becoming the most popular kid in school. From a young age, his parents encouraged his talent and his passion for fighting into the (sort of) healthy outlet of boxing, and the young man quickly proved to be very good at it. He was happy, he had friends, he had a dream he wanted to pursue. Life was good.
He was 17 when his powers manifested. At first, he didn’t even know it was him doing it – his parent’s house, almost overnight, become home to a swarm of huge, terrifying insects that menaced his family and threatened to overtake his neighborhood. It was only after he realized that he could command them that what he was became apparent. The Saviors held a lot of sway in his town, and immediately he was shunned – he was a metahuman, after all, and a downright terrifying one at that. His grades slumped even further and his prospects of higher education quickly disappeared, and that was before the Verthaven disaster.
Anti-meta sentiment, especially among the community that had raised him, was at an all-time high. Nick continued to live in a small shack in the town he’d grown up in for several years, protected by a horde of his pets but often a target of violence by PURE extremists. One day he decided he’d had enough and ran away, drawn inevitably to a faraway city where others of his kind were congregating; Baybridge.
Since arriving in Baybridge, Nick has managed to get a job driving a taxi around the city as well as a truly shitty apartment in Edmonton’s Springtown, where he lives quietly with only his pets for company. Due to his background and the high potential threat-level of his powers to the civilian populace, DOVE has taken a special interest in him, and generally send a caseworker to visit him once a week to ‘make sure he’s holding up’, a nice way of saying ‘check that he’s not about to become a terrorist’.
Relationships
Family:
Things are difficult between Nick and his parents, to say the least. Though they were a very loving family in his youth, a combination of meta-phobia and the stress of living with a horde of giant bugs ultimately resulted in their throwing him out of the house – they haven’t spoken since he came to Baybridge.
Dynamics: (None yet, so I'll just leave this open!)
The cells of Nick’s skin contain dozens of miniscule eggs that are undetectable to the normal eye. When shed as dead skin, these eggs rapidly grow in size before hatching into a member of a unique species of insect. These insects live in colonies, breed explosively, eat just about anything edible, and come in four distinct types.
The most numerous, making up roughly 70% of the eggs laid, are the ones that Nick refers to as the ‘workers’. They are quadrupeds about the size of mice, with dark brown exoskeletons and heads that resemble those of ants, with significantly larger eyes and small mouths comprised of four pincers. The workers are the ones responsible for gathering food for the colony, as well as producing the firm, greyish substance that their hives and structures are made of (Nick doesn’t know where it comes from, and prefers not to think about it). They’re not much good in a fight, but their pincers could do some damage if they managed to attack in a horde.
The second most numerous, at 20%, are the ‘soldiers’. These are a full foot long, with six spider-like legs all tipped in spikes. Their bodies are black and spiny, with a small head set in the front like a cockroach – their pincers, however, are about three inches long and easily capable of slicing flesh. They can also spray a weak acid up to two feet in front of them capable of burning exposed skin. These are the bugs that protect the hive and make up the bulk of Nick’s forces in case of conflict.
Roughly 9% of the eggs hatch into the monstrosities Nick refers to as ‘Drones’ – a full foot and a half-long, with lobster-like claws and enormous wings that let them buzz around like giant bees. Their tails possess a stinger that causes terrible pain to anyone stung, much like a bullet ant. They’re easily the fastest and most threatening of Nick’s pets, and, when left to their own devices, the most aggressive.
One in every 200 eggs will hatch into the fourth subspecies – a Queen. These large, bloated bugs exist solely to pump out more eggs and produce even more insects for the reinforcement of the colony. When the Queens get set up is generally the stage where a Nick-festation truly takes off – they’re capable of producing an absolute horde of servants, including more Queens to perpetuate the cycle.
The insects respond to verbal commands from Nick, and have a limited ability to understand his intentions – they can’t read his mind, but they do understand metaphor and don’t carry out his orders completely literally.
Limits:
He needs to be able to speak to the insects in order to command them – if they can’t hear him, they can’t do as he says. His powers also stop working within a range – once he leaves a five mile radius of a colony, the insects abandon all standing orders and become listless and idle, finally curling up and dying after 24 hours and quickly decomposing. They also need to eat, a lot – insects can only go one day without food, which, when there’s a lot of them, can be a real problem.
Weaknesses/Drawbacks:
For starters, when left without orders the insects behave, essentially, like wild animals, protecting themselves and attacking anyone they perceive as a threat, and while they’ll never hurt him, the same can’t be said for anyone close to him. They’re also very fragile – a hard stomp will kill a worker or a soldier, while even a drone can be handled with a good swing from a tennis racket. Finally, they’re intensely vulnerable to fluctuations in temperature; intense cold makes them lethargic and slow, while they and all their structures are highly flammable. As a result, the insects are completely terrified of fire and refuse to go near it, a phobia that has somewhat rubbed off on Nick.
Other:
[*Currently, his apartment is an absolute mess of hives and colonies and insects that is pretty disturbing to look at. He has one hive in the air ducts of his local gym, and he keeps one soldier ant in the glove compartment of his taxi, ‘just in case’.]
Noted, I'll try and edit that in. I had to do an enormous amount of wrestling with the format to get the hider to work for some reason, so it's probably a bit ugly.
EDIT: I did it, and it didn't even explode a little! Look at that.
Nick is a big, broad-shouldered guy, with a thick but muscular physique and hands like hams. He keeps his brown hair short in a military crew cut, and his face is completely clean shaven. His white skin is slightly tanned from an upbringing spent running around outside with the other kids, though the more internal life he has been leading lately has caused a good deal of paleness to return to him.
Nick’s face is mostly smooth and rounded, lending an almost dopey, doughy look to his otherwise intimidating physique. In the bridge of his nose there is a very slight bend, a remnant from his days getting his nose broken all the time. On the top of his scalp there’s a long, white scar that runs from the middle of his forehead all the way to one ear. His back, if one were to see it without a shirt, is likewise an absolute tapestry of scars and markings, holdovers from the abuse he suffered before coming to Baybridge.
Attire:
Nick usually wears some combination of t-shirt, hoodie, track pants and battered sneakers, fashion not really being a concern of his.
Personality
Innate & Outward Personality:
Outwardly, Nick is an incredibly drawn, reserved, and wary person. He doesn’t really rush to make close connections with anyone, Metahuman or not, and while he’s not exactly cold in intrapersonal conversation, a good deal of his friendliness has been overtaken by caution, given that he is very aware of the effect his ‘powers’ tend to have on people (screaming, running, oh-god-what-the-fuck-is-that). He’s very paranoid, not in the crazy, twitchy, ‘the government is out to get us’ way, but more in the sense that he’s hyper aware of the fact that any situation could go wrong at any moment, and acts accordingly.
Growing up, Nick had a reputation as being not the sharpest tool in the shed, and it’s not entirely unfounded. He doesn’t always think things through and has a lot of trouble getting ‘book smarts’ into his head, and as a result he used to be a fairly gullible person and still is to some extent, though it’s balanced by acquired habit of nervousness around people.
One exception to his general lack of warmth is his treatment of his ‘pets’ – he’s not repulsed by them at all, often picking a few favorites and doting on them like an old spinster with a house full of cats – though he’s not exactly beyond sending whole droves of the little guys to their deaths should an emergency require it.
Hobbies/Interests:
Nick is still a fitness nut – his local gym is one of the few places he goes regularly outside his home, and he’s even got a small hive located in the vents. He also regularly practices his boxing talent, though he hasn’t had a fight since he came to Baybridge.
Skills/Talents:
Nick was a very promising boxer before his abilities manifested, and he hasn’t lost his edge, making him very capable in a fist-fight. He’s also an excellent driver, as you pretty much have to be if you want to make a living driving a taxi in a big city.
Goals/Motivation
As a person, Nick can be characterized almost by a staggering lack of ambition – if asked what he wanted from his life, he’d probably have trouble giving you a concrete answer besides ‘stay alive, make enough money to feed me and my pets and live quietly and undisturbed’.
History/Bio:
Nick was born in a small town in Iowa, a sleepy, rural place where very little ever happened. Growing up, he was athletic, handsome, and friendly, three things that were the key to becoming the most popular kid in school. From a young age, his parents encouraged his talent and his passion for fighting into the (sort of) healthy outlet of boxing, and the young man quickly proved to be very good at it. He was happy, he had friends, he had a dream he wanted to pursue. Life was good.
He was 17 when his powers manifested. At first, he didn’t even know it was him doing it – his parent’s house, almost overnight, become home to a swarm of huge, terrifying insects that menaced his family and threatened to overtake his neighborhood. It was only after he realized that he could command them that what he was became apparent. The Saviors held a lot of sway in his town, and immediately he was shunned – he was a metahuman, after all, and a downright terrifying one at that. His grades slumped even further and his prospects of higher education quickly disappeared, and that was before the Verthaven disaster.
Anti-meta sentiment, especially among the community that had raised him, was at an all-time high. Nick continued to live in a small shack in the town he’d grown up in for several years, protected by a horde of his pets but often a target of violence by PURE extremists. One day he decided he’d had enough and ran away, drawn inevitably to a faraway city where others of his kind were congregating; Baybridge.
Since arriving in Baybridge, Nick has managed to get a job driving a taxi around the city as well as a truly shitty apartment in Edmonton’s Springtown, where he lives quietly with only his pets for company. Due to his background and the high potential threat-level of his powers to the civilian populace, DOVE has taken a special interest in him, and generally send a caseworker to visit him once a week to ‘make sure he’s holding up’, a nice way of saying ‘check that he’s not about to become a terrorist’.
Relationships
Family:
Things are difficult between Nick and his parents, to say the least. Though they were a very loving family in his youth, a combination of meta-phobia and the stress of living with a horde of giant bugs ultimately resulted in their throwing him out of the house – they haven’t spoken since he came to Baybridge.
Dynamics: (None yet, so I'll just leave this open!)
The cells of Nick’s skin contain dozens of miniscule eggs that are undetectable to the normal eye. When shed as dead skin, these eggs rapidly grow in size before hatching into a member of a unique species of insect. These insects live in colonies, breed explosively, eat just about anything edible, and come in four distinct types.
The most numerous, making up roughly 70% of the eggs laid, are the ones that Nick refers to as the ‘workers’. They are quadrupeds about the size of mice, with dark brown exoskeletons and heads that resemble those of ants, with significantly larger eyes and small mouths comprised of four pincers. The workers are the ones responsible for gathering food for the colony, as well as producing the firm, greyish substance that their hives and structures are made of (Nick doesn’t know where it comes from, and prefers not to think about it). They’re not much good in a fight, but their pincers could do some damage if they managed to attack in a horde.
The second most numerous, at 20%, are the ‘soldiers’. These are a full foot long, with six spider-like legs all tipped in spikes. Their bodies are black and spiny, with a small head set in the front like a cockroach – their pincers, however, are about three inches long and easily capable of slicing flesh. They can also spray a weak acid up to two feet in front of them capable of burning exposed skin. These are the bugs that protect the hive and make up the bulk of Nick’s forces in case of conflict.
Roughly 9% of the eggs hatch into the monstrosities Nick refers to as ‘Drones’ – a full foot and a half-long, with lobster-like claws and enormous wings that let them buzz around like giant bees. Their tails possess a stinger that causes terrible pain to anyone stung, much like a bullet ant. They’re easily the fastest and most threatening of Nick’s pets, and, when left to their own devices, the most aggressive.
One in every 200 eggs will hatch into the fourth subspecies – a Queen. These large, bloated bugs exist solely to pump out more eggs and produce even more insects for the reinforcement of the colony. When the Queens get set up is generally the stage where a Nick-festation truly takes off – they’re capable of producing an absolute horde of servants, including more Queens to perpetuate the cycle.
The insects respond to verbal commands from Nick, and have a limited ability to understand his intentions – they can’t read his mind, but they do understand metaphor and don’t carry out his orders completely literally.
Limits:
He needs to be able to speak to the insects in order to command them – if they can’t hear him, they can’t do as he says. His powers also stop working within a range – once he leaves a five mile radius of a colony, the insects abandon all standing orders and become listless and idle, finally curling up and dying after 24 hours and quickly decomposing. They also need to eat, a lot – insects can only go one day without food, which, when there’s a lot of them, can be a real problem.
Weaknesses/Drawbacks:
For starters, when left without orders the insects behave, essentially, like wild animals, protecting themselves and attacking anyone they perceive as a threat, and while they’ll never hurt him, the same can’t be said for anyone close to him. They’re also very fragile – a hard stomp will kill a worker or a soldier, while even a drone can be handled with a good swing from a tennis racket. Finally, they’re intensely vulnerable to fluctuations in temperature; intense cold makes them lethargic and slow, while they and all their structures are highly flammable. As a result, the insects are completely terrified of fire and refuse to go near it, a phobia that has somewhat rubbed off on Nick.
Other:
[*Currently, his apartment is an absolute mess of hives and colonies and insects that is pretty disturbing to look at. He has one hive in the air ducts of his local gym, and he keeps one soldier ant in the glove compartment of his taxi, ‘just in case’.]
Alright, here he is. Balancing the power was tricky, but I think I hit a pretty good balance of 'high ceiling, low floor'. I could be wrong, though.
Muh first sheet is coming along quite nicely. Just to be clear, do we need to post them in the OOC for approval first, or just go right to the characters tab and edit as necessary?
Nice. I'll start work on a sheet tomorrow, but a question on a slightly weird power concept - what would you say to a character who could create and control colonies of a species of, like, rat-sized insects?
(Also, I might try and bring in the frictionless girl from Malfunction, with some minor adjustments to suit the setting - please don't judge. :P )
