Would it be kosher to have a Doomed who was able to stave off their doom temporarily? For example, in a show I’m watching, there’s a hero who has to regularly eat a certain kind of monster to survive. (Fortunately, the villains use those monsters as minions.) Other examples could be a mutant who takes medicine to avoid the harmful side-effects of their mutation, or a demon who has to regularly attend church or get dragged back to Hell. (Side note: a devoutly religious hero whose powers stem from an unholy source sounds really interesting to me.)
I’m unsure about this because on the one hand, they are still being killed by their powers, it’s just that they have a way to delay the inevitable. On the other hand, they could theoretically keep stalling forever and never confront their doom. What do y’all think?
That kind of seems like the player doesn’t want to deal with the downside of being a Doomed to me.
That sounds like the status quo that you ask a player about to me. “Are you doing anything to buy yourself time?” “Yeah, I’m going to church.” “Okay, cool,” and then the GM makes a note to put pressure there to threaten the doom track.
Little bit.
Sorry, but what you wrote is part of doomed drama. It should be part of roleplay and not a way to freeze the clock. What I sugest is use that “delays” to push more drama or trade a delay with a condition. An infernal doomed can go to the church to freeze the clock just to listen the sermon about the hellbounds and the doomed get out of the church angry because his solace place is saying there are a place for him at the hell
I agree with Alfred Rudzki. I think it’s perfectly copacetic and maybe even expected that the Doomed is making some effort to delay the inevitable. So long as everybody at the table knows that it’s not actually working in the long term, because hey that Doom track is still ticking along, I think it’s fine.
E.g., attending church might be the fictional reason that the demon hasn’t already been dragged to hell, but they’re still going there eventually because they become more demonic as they Injure Innocents or tap into their Hellish powers via their Doomsigns, or let their crusade against their demonic Nemesis slip.
It seems this might work better as a custom playbook. Something that is a merger between the Doomed and the Nova.
The more they use their powers, the stronger they are, but their powers get even more unstable and dangerous. As as they have doom rating they can actually get more burn than normal, but if they go to far they loose part of themselves.
But they can once a session, when appropriate take their ‘medication’ which potentially reduces their doom rating.
If you made a playbook like that they should probably have far less doom signs, so their is still a risk. Only make use of 1-2 actual doom signs.
Alternatively, the eating thing could just be their baseline, but the revelation that this is what they do and why is a form of “sharing a vulnerability or weakness” as a Team move?
It seems doing good deeds & going to church with buddies is a fictional trigger for “Share a Triumphant Celebration”, which lets you clear your track.
Good discussion so far, it looks like the community is about as divided on this as I am. To clarify, my intention was that going too long without food/medicine/prayer/etc. would be your way of “overexerting yourself,” not that the treatment would prevent your nemesis, Doomsigns and other doom-increasing-things from taking effect.
So one of the Dooms would “be using your powers without taking your medications?”
That could be feasible. But these dooms are all sort of the kind of mistakes that people make in life when they have power, so difficult to avoid. Taking meds are ‘easy to remember’ so you would need to make sure that remembering to take meds, go to church, ect becomes a task that the character has to fit into their already busy life (because the meds greatly debilitate them for a while, or events always seem to happen when they would go to church to pray, or that the food source is something they regret eating, and so they have a constant internal struggle on if they should and might deliberately avoid doing it).
It cant be something where a player passingly says “I take my meds,” or “I go to church.” and just gets it done. It needs to be difficult, angsty, interesting. Their needs to be something about doing it that complicates their life.
My Doomed did have since the beginning a way to delay her Doom – namely, to tap into other’s vital energy (which she could control to a degree, but couldn’t avoid completely).
We simply managed that as having no mechanical effects: yeah, in fiction my Doomed was aware she could delay her doom by doing that, she also discussed it with a teammate, and it was the source of interesting fictional bits, but we decided to not translate this into mechanical effects, also because delaying marks and Doomsigns (particularly while retaining your Doomed powers) could interfere with the playbook’s balance.
Fabio Succi Cimentini was the MC, Mario Bolzoni Stefano Cuoghi Nicola Urbinati my fellow players.
Doesn’t the Doomed kind of assume that you’re doing the stuff to stave off your inevitable demise? Like this is the Raven in Titans playbook, right? ‘Control your emotions; mediate meditate meditate’ is a pretty clear way of fighting that, it’s just it’s a losing rearguard action.