I appreciate all the feedback. I've been slowed down significantly by a trip home for Canadian Thanksgiving, and a nasty flu/cold/virus thing, and revisions for the 3rd printing.
You have heard a few of the things I've said about the text already, buuut...
I think the Life Points and Strain Points section needs some clarification. Basically, codifying how Talents can increase LP and SP. Specifically, is it a one-to-one increase?
I thought the text was pretty clear that a talent that increases Strainpoints or Lifepoints provides 1 more positive point and 1 more negative point (a -1). This makes it a 1 to 2 relationships of sorts.
So a character with
Toughness 2- extra life would have 7 Lifepoints rather then the usual 6, and get and have their -1 repeat twice.
The repeating negative ones are used because of how rolling to stay councious works. (Rather then extending the characters negative points down to -7, which wouldn't do them any good.)
I believe I have already clarified this section in the text a little more.
Can you use those Talents for other things? Can you take multiple Talents that stack such an effect?
Let's say we have a person in Power Armor (Power Armor [4]) and they have also been genetically augmented to be incredibly tough (Genetic Augmentation: Redundant Organs [3]). Would this character have 13 LP?
You
could use Talents that grant extra strainpoints or lifepoints for other things. This should be very rare though. In the right circumstance a talent like this could help protect someone from a degenerative type attack, or a talent wich grants bonus strainpoints might help in some sort of endurance task, or resisting drugs, or a very specific type of mental influence/control. The talent would need to have the right kind of flavour text (colour) to be used in this fashion.
The general rule is that Talents don't stack. So no, you can't stack talents in order to get more than the maximum possible of 10 Lifepoints and 5 negative 1's -- for someone who has a rank 5 talent such as
Genetic Augmentation: Redundant Organs.
A character could have a large number of talents that make them much harder to knock out/ cause serious damage such as the following:
Power Armor (toughness - 4): this is the number of dice the character rolls for his standard defence
Genetic Augmentation: Redundant Organs (toughness - 3): the character has 8 lifepoints and 3 negative 1's.
Experienced Brawler (toughness - 2): the character rolls 2 dice when trying to stay councious
Genetic Augmentation: Rapid regrowth (toughness - 4): the character regenerates - he can spend 1 Strainpoint to recover 3 Lifepoints, 3 times per day or set of injuries
Genetic Augmentation: steady healer (toughness - 2): the character heals two Lifepoints with rest, rather than the usual 1.
Superpower Finesse needs some more clarification. It is pretty easy for Well-Rounded characters to get a Finesse of 4 or more. The rules don't clarify how this number is used with the exception of SP expenditures... doing that can easily give a character really high ratings (these situations won't come up too often cuz 2 SP seems like a lot).
I've come up with a possible revision to this. Discussed after your suggestions.
The text seems to be implying that in order to use a Talent to perform a related action the Talent in question cannot exceed the character's Superpower Finesse. Is that correct?
This is incorrect. Your probably touching on "Superpower Finesse as a guide" here. When used in this fashion a characters Superpower Finesse is really meant to be a subjective measure for the GM to help decide if a character can use a particular talent for something when the talents' description doesn't really fit what the character is trying to do.
The higher a characters Superpower Finesse, the more lenient the GM should be.
Let's go back to Green Arrow... Wealthy [3], Nimble [2], Inhuman Archery [4], Net Arrow [2], Flashbang Arrow [3], Smoke Arrow [2], Grapple Arrow [2], Steel-Tipped Arrow [3].
GA has a Superpower Finesse -Trick Arrow- [4] because Steel-Tipped Arrow is just a simple Might Talent meant to hurt folks real bad, nothing tricky about that.
Green Arrow can use any of his four Trick Arrows in differing ways to achieve many types of effects because they are all lower than his Finesse. He can also improvise a Trick Arrow and roll an astounding 5 dice for whatever he comes up with. Is this right?
Yes and I see why your pointing this out as a problem. This is somewhat negated by the need to pay the hefty 2 strainpoints.
I'll also mention that in this particular case if I was the GM, I'd be inclined to not include the 'grapple arrow' in the trick arrows SuperPowerFinesse rating. The Grapple Arrow is really about the characters mobility and has a pretty different feel from the others.
I was thinking... what if Superpower Finesse worked a little differently? Say, each character has a Finesse rating based on their Array; Well-Rounded=4, Balanced=3, Focused=2. Characters can perform actions their powers could logically allow them to do, however if no Talent covers this use then the character rolls one less die unless a point of Finesse is spent. Finesse will probably get used a lot and thus would refill after each scene.
Just an idea.
An interesting idea. It may have a number of ramifications, that would be hard to assess without a fair bit of playtesting. Also incorporating something else characters can spend besides Strainpoints adds another level of complication to the game.
I think the easiest means of revising this, to avoid the issue we've been discussing, is to cap the rank of the characters Superpower Finesse(ses) at the same level as the highest ranked talent that makes up their Superpower Finesse rating.
In your example above, Green Arrow would have a Superpower Finesse of
3- trick arrow : he has 4 trick arrow talents, but the highest ranked of those is only a 3 (
flashbang arrow), so that is his limit.
Superpower Finessesses - there's a reason I don't refer to it like this in the text. Point is that yes a character can have more than one Superpower Finesse.
