Problems with the Protégé’s Powers
Alliteration aside, I’ll be the first to admit that v2’s Protégé’s abilities were far too broad and unfocused. In a game designed around guiding archetypes and letting people enjoy narrative niches, “Common Power” and “General Power” didn’t do much to inspire. However, I feel that v3 went too far in the opposite direction and closed off a lot of the Protégé’s narrative potential.
First, several of the available abilities are either too narrow or uninspiring. Hacking is a power more suited for the Beacon and can easily be covered by weapons and gadgets (ie, a hacking minitool). Detective skills is a nice subset, but not very versatile as a main power. Powerful armor is just dull sounding, even if it was meant to invoke the idea of Power Armor. A counter example is power mimicry, which is very cool and versatile and adds to the narrative potential (especially in the case of the Protégé mimicking their mentor’s power as part of training exercises). The current list mostly nudges Protégé’s towards one specific role and in the words of my own Protégé player, “Not every Protégé is Robin.”
Second, and this is admittedly a problem from v2 as well as v3, it’s unclear how to select the Protégé’s abilities. Everyone else is given a list with available checkboxes and told to check off a certain number. Even the Legacy is told to pick two to cross out. But there is no guideline for the protégé. Even now, I’m confused as to how you are supposed to pick them. My natural assumption is to pick one from each list, with the first two being yours, but I’m not entirely sure. I feel this should be made more explicit, at least on par with the other playbooks.
Thirdly, assuming my interpretation of how to pick character powers from above is correct, this new version cuts off one of the best narrative angles for the Protégé: the story of a mentor with an unusual ability finding a young person with the same and tutoring them on how to control it. The current shared abilities are all things you are trained in, not inherit gifts. With this ability set, you can’t play Jean Grey learning telepathy from Xavier or Sticks showing Daredevil how to use his super senses. You are only left with learned skills, like Robin or Speedy. Cutting off that narrative angle is rather disappointing.
My thought would be to have a list of narratively open powers, like Power Mimicry or Weapons and Gadgets, and have the player choose one of them to be Shared, one for Themselves, and one for the Mentor. That would make it easy to pick, remove the ambiguity, and allow the player to decide if they are being taught a skill or learning to master a shared gift. More clarity and more narrative freedom can only make the Protégé a more interesting playbook.