Designing Original Powersets for RP
Dec 15, 2014 19:15:07 GMT -6
Post by Empathy on Dec 15, 2014 19:15:07 GMT -6
On designing superpowers for original characters.
It's very easy to criticize someone else's original powerset, and staff members regularly spend (a lot of) their time doing that. This guide is here to do the opposite, and give some guidelines on how to create an original character with a solid set of powers. While this is not everything, it does help a character application and even some accepted characters could benefit from these guidelines. Accepted doesn't mean perfected!
We'll begin by giving an outline of what a good original power set looks like. This model for the 'ideal' original character will serve as our goal. Once we have something to aim for, we'll give an example of a procedure to design such a powerset is proposed. It's not the only way to design a new powerset!
And to close the guide, we will list some typical mistakes and clichés to avoid. Keep in mind though that sometimes a cliché can be turned on its head!
Your goals.
Coherence
This is a keyword that you often see and rarely gets explained. Different people have their own subjective views on what powers are coherent, making the topic rather difficult. How to deal with this? The ultimate objective of coherence is to allow staff and players to extrapolate the abilities of your powerset. Unless your power is extremely standard or simple (which can be at odds with originality), it is very hard to think of all possible uses of the powers or interactions with other people's abilities. Even if such an exhaustive listing of techniques were feasible, it wouldn't be easily readable. Therefore, the reason for making coherent powersets is to allow other players, from some guiding principles or easy examples, to understand and visualize what your character is able to do, even in situations you or them haven't foreseen yet. This also explains why coherence is so subjective: we all have different backgrounds, and therefore differing pools of knowledge that we use to extrapolate powers. I, for example, lean heavily on my science background to do so. Others use comic canon to mix and match powers according to Marvel or DC rules of physics. Making clear where your logic comes from helps other people understand the coherence of your powers. If they do not share the same knowledge pool however, expect them to ask you for changes. Not everyone has played the same games or watched the same shows as you have!
tl;dr: coherence = logic behind your powers. Used to extrapolate what your character can do.
Balance
Typically people understand by this a character who can't godmod or insta-dodge. Let's actually going to generalize this a little bit. To me, a balanced powerset is one that allows meaningful interactions with other player characters. A 'too powerful' character can be balanced if they are, for example, easily manipulable, as that provides a good way to interact with them. On the contrary, the relatively 'weak' combination of invisibility + intangibility often leads to characters that are impossible to RP with, especially if their personalities are overly cautious and resistant to manipulation. Of course, the most common way of interacting is through combat, so giving your character an exploitable weakness can help. Just make sure it's not just a personal kryptonite, or something too narrow or artificial! The weakness doesn't have to be obvious, and the goal is not to lose every fight, but make sure there are at least 2-3 other characters on the board who could deal with your power set. Also, make sure every character on the board has a way to at least interact with you in a fight, if you are going for a fight-oriented power. They may not beat you, but at least give them the satisfaction to deal some damage. Everybody likes throwing cars at you! If in doubt on whether your powers are balanced, just do the Robin-check: can the Boy Wonder, with his multitude of tricks and gagdets, hold your character off for at least ten minutes? The answer should be yes, and it's up to you to figure out how.
A very important section in the application are strengths and weaknesses. This will help you balance your character. Weaknesses with regards to powers are usually rather straightforward. Personality weaknesses however, are under or badly used. So I'll first stress those. Basically, a personality trait is just that, and should be left in the personality section unless it actually restricts your character's actions and means she or he requires outside help. A very strong example would be a robot that follows Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics: it's part of their personality, and it physically forces them to act a certain way. Phobias must actually be crippling to count as weaknesses: if your character lists 'afraid of heights', it's a personality trait. But if you actually explain that they really cannot jump from a building to another, or climb up a fire-ladder without help from a friend, then that would be an appropriate weakness. In general, any weakness relating to personality should list a concrete example of a common, crippling situation that can only be overcome with outside help. As for physical weaknesses:they must actually make your character be weaker than a average human. Listing 'human strength' is not an appropriate weakness. An interesting exception is if being 'only human' actually presents a danger in combination with the character's powers. For example, a cryokinetic who has no special resistance to cold, and who cannot deactivate their ice-field, would have a weakness. They would always be wearing warm clothes, probably move slowly and be in general more careful when using their powers.
tl;dr: balanced = other PCs can interact with you. If in doubt, try to come up with examples of threads that don't involve you dominating.
Connection to history and personality
Your application is one whole. The power set should mesh with the other sections of the app, such as appearance if the powers lead to physical changes and in particular history and personality. The reason I single out these two sections is that these allow your character to interact with the overall setting of the board: NPCs, public forces and society as a whole. Does your mutant have a deformed, monstrous appearance? Then chances are he's going to appear in the newspaper in some way or another. Your young hero has destructive powers? Have they thought about how to deal with that? Do they have a 'I don't care' attitude, or are they cautious about using their powers to avoid collateral damage? Your power, history and personality section should reference each other heavily. Think about how your powerset affected your character's personality, past actions and society's reaction.
tl;dr: connection to history and personality = NPCs can interact with you. What does society think about you, and how do you react to this?
Originality
Originality is the main reason to apply for an OC. Complication, and in particular listing multiple powers is often mistaken for originality. Keep things simple! Stick to one or two 'principles' and have the rest of your character's move set arise from those naturally. There are really a lot of reasons to avoid just piling up powers. First, it's a lot harder to be coherent with unrelated powers: there are more interactions to keep track of and there will usually be something you forgot to think about. Next, characters with large move sets are hard to balance, because a lot of powers cancel each other's weaknesses out. They make it difficult to interact with you: if your character can do everything, why does he need team mates for? Finally, connecting a large number of powers and abilities to history and personality, especially for teen heroes or villains, leads to unrealistic, bloated histories or 'flash-learning'.
tl;dr: originality = not bloating your application with abilities.
Example.
In this design example, let's start with a vague idea of a power. Say you've watched an anime where a character summons blades out of thin air, throws them and they occasionally explode. They also seem quite agile and just overall awesome. Time to design this for this board.
Now here is the snag, unless you get very lucky, the anime doesn't actually explain how the powers work, that is, how you would extrapolate their use in new situations. Even if they do, their explanation might rely on a different canon then ours and may not be adapted to this board. Let's try to find our own bottom-up explanation for the blade-summoner. As per usual with me, I shall use Science to guide my search!
So, summoning blades out of thin air. Make said blades explode. First, we need to figure out where the raw materials for the blade come from. We could have them teleport from a stash of blades, or summon them via magic. But I want to stress the 'thin air' part and instead look at the typical composition of air. Some characters for example crystallize the water in air to create ice blades! Air is made out of 75% of Nitrogen. So we probably want to use this as our raw material. Now nitrogen is only solid either at very low temperatures or very high pressure. Lets go for the latter. It'll come in handy when we want to make these explosions happen!
So, your character creates solid nitrogen blades. They do it via pressure, which somehow means the have the ability of compressing the nitrogen available in the air to incredibly dense blades of black awesomeness. It also means that, should the compression halt, the blades would turn into very powerful gusts of wind: explosions! Not thermal explosions, but packing enough power to throw people on the ground and such.
Now we need to figure out how the compression happens. Not the physics of it, because at some point we need to suspend disbelief. More asking ourselves question like: what prevents my character from just creating insane stuff repeatedly? We could put a limit on how much her or she creates, making him or her tire after that point. Instead, let me try giving the character a range limit: she (I've just decided the gender) will only be able to create that solid nitrogen at the exact location her hand touches. This touch-based power means that, to crate a 2 meter long pole, she'd have to actually slide her hand down a two meter long stretch of air. This not only makes for a cool summoning sequence, but also gives the character interesting limits on what she can create. She can't create complicated, multi-part objects for example, nor giant objects and she can't create objects too fast. All of this because of the range limit!
We still have a lot to add, but let's start writing things up. It's always good to start with a one-line summary of the move set, before going into the details of the principles underlying it. Oh, and lets give our female blade summoner the codename Breeze, because when her blades explode that's kinda what she does!
Breeze has the ability to summon blades by compressing the nitrogen in the air. These blades can explode when the nitrogen returns to its original form.
Nitrogen compression
Breeze's signature move. Touching the air with her hands, she can create solid nitrogen by compressing nearby nitrogen. This power is touch-based and therefore has limited range, but otherwise Breeze can use it in unlimited fashion.
Blade properties
Being made out of compressed (di)-nitrogen, Breeze's blades are extremely dense (think steel). It appears black and is pretty much chemically and electrically inert.
Decompression
Within seconds of leaving Breeze's touch, the compressed nitrogen decompresses. This leads to violent 'explosions', where the nitrogen just expulses every which way in very powerful gusts of winds. Note that there is no thermal or chemical component to the explosion: it's just wind.
Breeze's signature move. Touching the air with her hands, she can create solid nitrogen by compressing nearby nitrogen. This power is touch-based and therefore has limited range, but otherwise Breeze can use it in unlimited fashion.
Blade properties
Being made out of compressed (di)-nitrogen, Breeze's blades are extremely dense (think steel). It appears black and is pretty much chemically and electrically inert.
Decompression
Within seconds of leaving Breeze's touch, the compressed nitrogen decompresses. This leads to violent 'explosions', where the nitrogen just expulses every which way in very powerful gusts of winds. Note that there is no thermal or chemical component to the explosion: it's just wind.
Next, we try to shape the character around this power. If she makes blades, Breeze probably knows how to fence. She may even have some training in acrobatics, but certainly not Robin-level stuff. Gadgets wouldn't really make sense unless her family is rich or full of inventors. But we are going with a different route. We'd like to stress the fencing part, which means that someone must have trained Breeze beyond the basics she could teach herself. So maybe her whole family has this ability, and has been training from a very young age on. This means she'd have decent control over her ability. Now, once we write that, this begs the question of what the family has been up to. Indeed, this will dictate how many other people know of the ability, and how society thinks about our character.
A possibility is to have the family be rather low-key, leading an almost ascetic life away from society. But then how did our character leave and join the Titans in Jump city? What motivated her to become a hero? One possibility is for one of her family members -say her dad- to have left the family monastery to become a super-villain. This has revealed to the world the existence of the blade-summoners and cast a negative light on them. People have heard of Breeze's father, the blade-summoning villain and automatically assume she's a bad guy too. So she sets off in the wide world to whiten her name and prove herself a hero. Which better place for a young super to prover herself but Jump city, where the Teen Titans live? Now let's write a section in the personality to cover these points
Personality:
Breeze's family upholds a strong honor code. The fact that her father betrayed the family code has caused her great shame. This shows in all of Breeze's actions and she is very mindful of how other people perceive her role. Her brand of heroism is therefore very much linked to being respected for her good deeds. Avoiding the spotlight and just playing the good Samaritan in the shadows is therefore not her style. Because of her specialized family training, Breeze is also very confident in her abilities, to the point of taking maybe unwarranted risk. She isn't very much of a team-player, having not interacted much with supers outside of her family.
Breeze's family upholds a strong honor code. The fact that her father betrayed the family code has caused her great shame. This shows in all of Breeze's actions and she is very mindful of how other people perceive her role. Her brand of heroism is therefore very much linked to being respected for her good deeds. Avoiding the spotlight and just playing the good Samaritan in the shadows is therefore not her style. Because of her specialized family training, Breeze is also very confident in her abilities, to the point of taking maybe unwarranted risk. She isn't very much of a team-player, having not interacted much with supers outside of her family.
Finally, lets write up a quick list of strengths and weaknesses.
Strengths:
Breeze is an expert fencer. Her family has been honing their code and powers for centuries, and the sword has always been an integral part of the clan's training.
Breeze follows a strong honor code, making her very reliable. She often speaks her mind and people know what they get into when she's part of the team! This makes her predictable and somewhat easier to trust.
Agility is one of Breeze's strong points. She is above-average, but not Olympic level like other titans.
Weaknesses:
First and foremost, Breeze will never break a promise. She would rather die than be caught dishonoring her family, even if that means doing distasteful or illegal things.
Having grown up in a secluded environment, Breeze knows very little about modern technology. Anything before the 50s is fine, but modern electronics like computers and robots freak her out. She will actively avoid Cyborg and refuses to communicate through anything but a T-communicator. It is easy to surprise her in a combat setting by using even simple modern devices such as lasers.
Finally, Breeze will not heed any advice when it comes to risk-taking. Unless you get her to promise something, she will completely disregard any commands aimed at hedging risks to herself or others. Her dislike of such orders may even prompt her to do the opposite, just to spite the leader, making her easy to predict and taunt.
Breeze is an expert fencer. Her family has been honing their code and powers for centuries, and the sword has always been an integral part of the clan's training.
Breeze follows a strong honor code, making her very reliable. She often speaks her mind and people know what they get into when she's part of the team! This makes her predictable and somewhat easier to trust.
Agility is one of Breeze's strong points. She is above-average, but not Olympic level like other titans.
Weaknesses:
First and foremost, Breeze will never break a promise. She would rather die than be caught dishonoring her family, even if that means doing distasteful or illegal things.
Having grown up in a secluded environment, Breeze knows very little about modern technology. Anything before the 50s is fine, but modern electronics like computers and robots freak her out. She will actively avoid Cyborg and refuses to communicate through anything but a T-communicator. It is easy to surprise her in a combat setting by using even simple modern devices such as lasers.
Finally, Breeze will not heed any advice when it comes to risk-taking. Unless you get her to promise something, she will completely disregard any commands aimed at hedging risks to herself or others. Her dislike of such orders may even prompt her to do the opposite, just to spite the leader, making her easy to predict and taunt.
Common pitfalls.
I promised to be mostly constructive, but for the sake of completeness, let me list some common mistakes people make when creating OCs.
Animal attributes
These can really backfire if you aren't careful. A well-designed zoomorph is amazing, but more often than not, the animal attributes are only there for show and do not relate to the rest of the power set, or are inconsistent with it. This is in particular true when you just add cat-ears to a perfectly fine power set. Think of the following questions when adding animal attributes to a character:
[*]Is there a common myth or association between the rest of your character's powers or history and the animal in question? The moon is linked to wolfs in Western culture and to rabbits in Japanese culture. When one thinks of a trickster, it's usually a fox. The expression firefox also exists. Platypuses are generally awesome.
[*]If you were to remove the animal characteristics, how much of the profile would you have to rewrite? If it's less than a paragraph, then it's probably cosmetic.
[/ul]
Martial arts
Your character only has a limited amount of free time to learn martial arts. The more your character has a troubled past, or complicated abilities to master, the less time they have to become Taekwendo experts.
Peak human abilities
Same for lifting, acrobatics and anything else that requires extensive training. If peak human ability is the result of some innate power, please explain why it is coherent with the rest of the power. If your character lives underwater, where water-pressure is immense, they are probably very strong. A character who slings around the city needs to be agile. Someone who uses a super-sophisticated armor probably isn't very fit.
Gadgets
Gadgets are either handed by somebody or invented yourself. The former means that you have to explain some connection to a rich person or an inventor. The latter requires a lot of free time to be invested in science. Gadgets are not a necessity. Also, there is such a thing as too many gadgets. The more numerous and versatile your gadgets, the less you need help from friends. And that makes your fellow RPers unlikely to RP with you, because there is really no reason for interaction in the first place.
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