Yet another having-two-power-sets question

[adam]

Thanks to everyone. We'll see what suites best our group. I just realized that during the game Wolverine sneaked his claws in EVERY roll (but hey, he's Wolverine, he could well even eat with them), while Shadowcat was just a sidekick to Lockheed.

[Duck Call Lass]

Thanks to everyone. We'll see what suites best our group. I just realized that during the game Wolverine sneaked his claws in EVERY roll (but hey, he's Wolverine, he could well even eat with them), while Shadowcat was just a sidekick to Lockheed.

That's strange. Shadowcat was in my game last week, and she was used to great effect by her player to inflict emotional stress on villains and took them out quite nicely, with just one bit of Lockheed's help. (He breathed fire in an invulnerable dude's face.)

[Rick Danger]

Even if you just wanted to maximize your resources and forget about the fiction, you still need to make a choice between using your two powers sets all the time or applying the limit on one of them to get some PPs.

[Supplanter]

So what's the matter? What are we missing? It's just: "tell you're story as you want it and ignore the urge of having a bigger dice pool"?

Pretty much. People have proposed various fixes, but it comes down to taste and what works for your group. I kinda think that the Spider-Man present in Breakout should only have one power set (his webs were a part of his spider-powers at that point). Also, I think you could remove Durability and especially Weapon from the web powers (it's rare that Spider-Man actually attacks someone with his webbing), and only let Swingline be used for movement, complications, and assets.

To that end, my Silver Age writeup changes the web-shooter traits to SWINGLINE and WEB CONTROL, plus SFX.


Jim

[adam]

Even if you just wanted to maximize your resources and forget about the fiction

Why maximazing your resources should make you forget about the fiction? It should be the other way around: when you have a truly awesome fiction, then you get the highest number of dice to roll.

[Cam]

To that end, my Silver Age writeup changes the web-shooter traits to SWINGLINE and WEB CONTROL, plus SFX.

Civil War Spider-Man combines all of his spider powers into one Power Set and adds Iron Spider as his second Power Set. This is also the version of Spidey that has extendable stingers and organic webbing and so on. Making all of that one Power Set alters the play experience, I think, which was the idea.

Cheers,
Cam

[Supplanter]

Why maximazing your resources should make you forget about the fiction? It should be the other way around: when you have a truly awesome fiction, then you get the highest number of dice to roll.

adam, it's like this. MHRP is a game built around mechanical rewards for adding interesting stuff to the story. For the most part it works brilliantly. In one case, two-power-set heroes, the mechanical reward can run directly counter to that - it can encourage adding boring stuff to the story. As a fan community we sometimes try to paper this over by declaring that "the narrative determines the mechanics." Then we go back to advising Watchers how to get the biggest Doom Pools.


Jim

[adam]

adam, it's like this..

I totally agree! As I said, I love this game. I was just responding to Rick Danger, but I expressed myself the wrong way. What I meant was just what you said: there's no sense in forcing the players to choose between good fiction or big dice, and the game does not do that except in this situation.

However, coming up with a good house rule to fix this thing it's almost impossible without bringing in some other weirdness.

[Supplanter]

adam, it's like this..

I totally agree! As I said, I love this game. I was just responding to Rick Danger, but I expressed myself the wrong way. What I meant was just what you said: there's no sense in forcing the players to choose between good fiction or big dice, and the game does not do that except in this situation.

However, coming up with a good house rule to fix this thing it's almost impossible without bringing in some other weirdness.

Right. It depends what level of impact you're willing to incur. Such as, how much do you want to invalidate how many hero datafiles that ship with the game?

I'm coming around to the view that the lowest-impact ways to deal are either, 1) Make two-set heroes work like Multipower, so they can have a die from each set but have to step both of them down; or 2) Let two-set heroes take a free D6 in place of one of their power-set dice if they'd feel too cheap to narrate the Swingline or whatever into their action five times in a row.

I'm concentrating on the two-set heroes because in the release version of the game, Versatile and Multipower make it marginally easier to get your two dice as a one-set hero. Multipower can approach two-set heroes in difficulty sometimes, but usually a hero who has Multipower has a lot of powers in that set, so it's easier to cycle through a variety of actions while keeping the narration fresh.


Jim