Quote:
Originally Posted by C.W.Richeson
Good first review, Jonathan! You do a good job of conveying the group's problems in actual play, which is something a lot of AP reviews gloss over. Thanks!
In your actual play what powers other than Super Speed struck you as having some problems?
|
Hey C.W.-
Thanks! In some cases, it wasn't so much the power, as it was trying to emulate something we wanted to do and not being sure how to go about it.
To be honest, most of our issues came from 'tweaking' powers during creation- we found it difficult to design, say, a powerful but extremely limited defense (say Armor that works only against cold), or power that works well but infrequently (a la an activation roll). It wasn't clear to us how to emulate such things within T&J and still maintain balance. Stunts had the capacity to be quite unbalancing if we weren't careful. For instance, my super-genius mutant character had a spin-off stunt (from Super Intelligence) called Find Weakness... if I could beat a certain target number (designated by the GM) vs. an opponent, my character could ignore the defenses of that target for an attack next round. Since 'to hit' and 'attack' rolls are kind of rolled up into one, that made the next roll a fight-ender in most cases. We stopped the game, though, before we had a chance to amend said stunt (granted, as it was spin-off, it was at a Poor Quality- imagine if I had bought it as a signature stunt!).
My mentioning of super scale was not entirely clear- Powers normally do super scale damage against normal *objects*, not characters. To make it super against living targets requires a hero point.
Super Strength is naturally super scaled against living targets, making it a bit unbalanced in our game.
Likewise, the notion of super-scaling mental powers when most players don't think to include some kind of mental defense (a Quality such as willpower wouldn't help against super scale) can be fairly devastating in use.
Those are the two most immediate examples; they're easily remedied (with a bit of house ruling), but Super Speed? When coupled with, say, Super Strength, it became enormously useful to the point where the GM was pressured to cap Super Speed at a certain point.
To be clear, these kinds of things don't break the system to the point of uselessness, since they're easily modified. It just seemed to us that, 'out of the box', some powers can be more useful than others.