Hello, I’m starting up a WiP campaign, and there’s one part of the rules that confuses me. You can add new powers to your Powers Profile by spending Achievements. 2 Achievements for a new simple power, 5 Achievements for a new Possible power (and a range in between). Why would a player make their new power Possible, when they could make it Simple for only 2 Achievements?
I have a feeling the answer is going to be something like “follow the fiction”, but have your players, or you as a player, actually bought a new power for 5 points instead of 2?
There seems to be an assumption here that Borderline and Possible powers are going to be bigger, more effective, but I don’t find any rule that says so.
If I decide to reverse the Achievement cost for new powers for my game (5 Achievements for a new Simple power, and 2 for a new Possible power), what problems will that cause? What is the intention behind this rule being written as is?
In general, the higher in difficulty you go, the bigger and more powerful the fictional positioning becomes. So if it’s Simple for the Flash to cross the city in the blink of an eye, and it’s Possible for him to travel through time, then you can see how making the bigger things easier to add to profiles might change the game and the fiction in much bigger ways.
If the heroes are street-level and their powers are more modest then I don’t see it being a big issue to make your proposed changes.
The player isn’t actually really choosing where to put whatever power they want either, right. Based on their Powers Summary and Profile, they should have an idea of where whatever new power or ability they want should go on their Powers Profile. Then they determine how many Achievements they’d need to do that. It’s not as though they can choose to put the power at any level, and so would rather just spend less and make it easier to do said thing, if that makes sense.
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Why would players ever spend achievements for new powers when they can get new powers added to their profile for free by successfully pushing?
because pushing isn’t free – because anytime the players roll the dice, there’s real risk involved.
So the difference would be spending to discover new uses of your power safely in a controlled environment vs risking consequences at a moment when you need to use your powers in a new way?
well techincally there’s nothing stopping you from pushing in a time where you are in a relatively safe and controlled envirnment. it’s just that pushing can fail, and spending exp cant – and failling should mean the GM introducing complications.
Yeah, when you spend Achievements to add powers, you and the GM should work together to see what that looks like in the fiction. Maybe Iron Fist goes to the mountains to meditate and get trained, and we just narrate a short montage or something. Maybe they just wake up one day to discover a secondary mutation, or even during a moment when they really need it (a bomb goes off) they develop their secondary mutation (diamond skin) because they don’t want to risk Pushing.
Thanks Kyle, your response helps to clarify the intent behind the rule, and it makes sense that players would be adding a new power where it seems appropriate given the rest of their powers summary.
It still seems that if “The player isn’t actually really choosing where to put whatever power they want”, then I as the EiC am put in position of having to say “No, that new power you described should be Borderline or Possible based on the rest of your power profile,” a position I would rather avoid. The rule as written seems to penalize the player for describing a new power as Possible, even when that is what would be most appropriate in the fiction (It penalizes them twice, because the new power is both more expensive, and harder to use). On the other hand, it rewards players for arguing that a new power should be Simple, even when that would be inappropriate in the fiction. I like to have rules that reduce the amount of arguing at the table.
If the Achievement costs were flipped (2 Achievements for a new Possible power, or 5 for a new Simple power), then the player has an interesting choice; Make the new power cheap but hard to use, or expensive but easy to use. And the player gets to make that choice without the EiC having to say “no”.
I usually prefer to play a new system rules-as-written first, before I start messing with them, but I am still tempted to flip the Achievement costs for my own campaign.
If you’ve got a group that’s going to try and min-max and argue with you rather than follow common sense and the fiction established you might have a bit of trouble with the game in general though, that’s my only concern there. If the arguing happens only about character advancement, and this will help with that, then by all means, I hope it works for you and your table 🙂
I’m not sure why it’s seen as penalizing – racing across the city is a lot easier than travelling through time or breaking into another universe via the speed force. That just makes sense to me. It’s both harder to learn, and more difficult to attempt – way more things could go wrong. By making it more difficult to put on a Profile for free, you’re saying hey, this is a difficult thing to do, this is why you’ve been saving up Achievements, this is what your character growth has been leading up to and it’s tied to your powers.