I want to run a Mutants and Masterminds game for my group over the holiday break, and I'm looking for creative concepts and subversions of Cape tropes to populate the world with. In particular, I want to include a large number of capes with low-level powers that use them in unconventional ways, especially synergizing with other powers.
I'll kick off the thread with a cape art dump.
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No takers? Why is it so hard to start up a capeshit thread on this board?
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I could keep going all night, but I guess there's no point if there's nobody around to enjoy it.
I'm loving the dump dude, can't say I have much to contribute though
I guess I'll keep going for a bit, see if anyone else shows up.
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Superpowers are energetically taxing, and superheroes must eat insane amounts of calories if they don't want to burn themselves out. Basically human shrews
This is actually a big part of the setting I've been working on. The twist I've put on it is that every super has a specific craving that they are compelled to eat. My favorite is a cab driver who has the ability to smell guilt, and is consulted by the police occasionally. He craves mustard, which he gets by eating dozens of street-cart hotdogs a day.
Okay, how about a guy with the ability to impart velocity on people and things he touches, but in such a way the they have no control of it, so if someone's annoying him he can send them flying across the room and through a wall. He could go by the super identity Repel.
Another character idea I've kinda wanted to do is a woman who appears the have super-strength, but what here power actually is negating the mass of any object she comes in contact with for herself including her own body. So she can lift heavy objects but doesn't actually punch that hard, she's reliant on hitting people with heavy objects. She's also pretty much immune to physical impacts as any object hitting her has it's mass nullified robbing it of it's force and momentum. Her weightlessness also allowed her to fly. I had intended for her to be somewhat chunky since mass her nullification makes basically all physical activity effortless, meaning burning calories is very hard for her, but you handwave that as super metabolism or some BS if you don't like that.
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The velocity guy is pretty much Ballistic, from Worm, but I like the mass-nullifier. Could maybe work in concert with the first guy to launch huge objects at higher speeds than he normally could manage.
I feel like Weaverdice or Worm might be a little up your alley, op. People get abilities based on an awful situation that happens to them, and those powers can be as OP as creating a mini sun to as mundane as creating functional equipment out of trash.
Capes have a natural tendency towards conflict, and their powers can go haywire, leading to Case 53's, which are monstrous beings whose powers took control of them instead of the other way around.
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I absolutely loved Worm, someone recommended it to me after I started working on my setting, and I pretty much devoured it.
Another Character I thought of for a M&M game was a drider butted character who made silk items as a way for our team to get power resistant super suits, I was going to add her as a side-kick but the game petered out.
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Spider Silk costumes are another great idea from Worm, that I would absolutely put in a game.
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The idea of certain supers who are born with 'combo powers' are neat. Like, say there's a low-scale pyrokinetic that can generate gouts of flame, but only about a yard out. And then there's another pyrokinetic of similar power, but rather than making flame they can only manipulate it, and doing so makes it slowly lose energy so they can't just make a forest fire from a spark.
So then they team up, unlimited supply of fire with the ability to send it around. Or maybe they end up as the nemesis of one another.
I convinced my GM to make something pretty similar to what you want a few years back.
The concept was called "the mastermind game".
Basically it was a supervillain campaign built around the concept that all the players were generals in the mastermind's evil army. Every game would start with a meeting where the players and other NPC generals would gather in front of the boss and all present the masterplan they devised since the last session. The one who came up with the best plan gets to be in charge of this week's mischief and order the others around while the one with the worst plan gets to test one of the mastermind's wacky deathtraps.
After that it's basically just go out, do the plan, get noticed by heroes, fight heroes, go home when fight is over
This is the kind of stuff I'm looking for. I had the idea of a limited range pyrokinetic who gathered a gang of other fire-based supers, including one who can teleport, but only by moving in and out of existing fires.
That sounds fantastic. How did you decide which plans to use, and who got the short end of the stick?
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>How did you decide which plans to use, and who got the short end of the stick?
Quick vote among the players plus GM has the right to cheat the votes, accept bribes et cetera since he's the mastermind and he's evil
Makes sense. I've been thinking a lot about the different challenges between running heroic and villainous campaigns.
It's always really neat when you get those elemental or similar powerset based teamups. Villains or heroes.
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Well, running the mastermind campaign is kind a treat for a GM since it can allow you to be super lazy if you do it right.
Think about it, your players are making all the plots ans scheming. All you have to do is preside over a reunion in which they feed you plotline ideas and then ask you which one you think is best.
After that, all you have to do is pick randomly from a list of sidekick villains and enemy heroes you can make in advance, mix and match and let them struggle.
In a game I ran I had the twins Up & Down. Up had a light body and wings like a sugar glider, Down was a big fella who could pull Up back to him in a straight line. They did a string of minor robberies, Up being thrown through top windows and yanked out of danger afterwards.
Then there was the twist episode, when the PCs found out that Down didn't just pull Up to him. He pulled on both brothers with equal force, it was just that Up weighed a lot less so he was the one usually getting yanked around. When the smaller brother braced himself against something, though, Down would come hurtling into the scene
That's fantastic. I love powers that synergize like that to produce secondary or tertiary effects, especially movement powers.
I made a mistake- Down could push and pull Up in a straight line, telekinetically. So when he threw up it was more "a somewhat larger than average man throws a 80-pound man into the air, then psychically shoves him away at speed."
I don't believe I'd heard of worm at the time, but there is nothing new under the Sun
To be honest, part of the reason I got so hooked on the series was discovering that all these great ideas I'd had had already been thought of and implemented in a really well done story.
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Capes are the superior option.
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Glad you liked it. In a similar vein, the same campaign had a team of Chinese acrobats who could transfer momentum from one person to another - One guy jumps down from the top of the human pyramid, another goes rocketing forward to land a three-story punch. The problem of fighting them was solved, as all problems should be, by tearing open a maple syrup truck and gluing them all in place.
they were an indeterminate number, wore red with yellow stars, and all had joke Chinese names like Some Ting Wong invented on the spot
>Guy with "Superman's Hands": He can't punch any harder, can't run any faster, but he can flick people through walls and type fast enough to set keyboards on fire. Catching bullets is dependent on having his hand in the way at the time.
>Crazy flying brick powerset on a scarred-up old dockworker who absolutely refuses to put on spandex or hide his identity. Still puts in his hours at the yard, still watches the game at his local bar (though buying the beer is mostly out of politeness), etc. DO NOT fuck with his side of town.
>Abandoned alien supersoldier just trying to get by and avoid the less scrupulous black budget shenanigans.
>Bunch of molemen that moved into the sewers and, after a failed invasion in the fifties, wrote up a treaty where they maintain the water, gas, and sewer lines in the city in exchange for living space. Underville is a thriving suburb now, and even has a few weird non molemen immigrants.
>Local superteam headquarters protected by psychic dinosaur ghost bound to its fossilized bones. It's also a giant sarcastic jerk that calls everyone "mammal scum".
>Baron Von Båd is under discreet house arrest in three floors of a skyscraper downtown, and has been for forty years. He's actually pretty genial for a retired supervillain, and chats with anyone in the cape (or supervillain) community that comes by.
I love it. I could work that into another of mine; a contortionist called Apex with super flexible, but durable bones and muscles, which allow him to flip around gaining momentum and sustain huge amounts of abuse.
My group ran a game using Superhuman Beta which, while far from perfect, resulted in my character becoming a horrible, and ultimately ineffective, mish-mash of various Kamen Riders while fighting Nazis and just barely managing to survive a nuclear detonation at the heart of New York. We left off on a To Be Continued with the dawn of World War 3 because our GM decided that, maybe, things had gotten a little out of hand.
>Crazy flying brick powerset on a scarred-up old dockworker who absolutely refuses to put on spandex or hide his identity. Still puts in his hours at the yard, still watches the game at his local bar (though buying the beer is mostly out of politeness), etc. DO NOT fuck with his side of town.
>Bunch of molemen that moved into the sewers and, after a failed invasion in the fifties, wrote up a treaty where they maintain the water, gas, and sewer lines in the city in exchange for living space. Underville is a thriving suburb now, and even has a few weird non molemen immigrants.
>Baron Von Båd is under discreet house arrest in three floors of a skyscraper downtown, and has been for forty years. He's actually pretty genial for a retired supervillain, and chats with anyone in the cape (or supervillain) community that comes by.
Definitely stealing these.
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ANother concept I never used because it was a bit creepy and I thought of something better was the bondage mage, basically a pair of S&M freaks where the Dom has the offensive powers and the sub is the battery, (It was for a HERO system game the sub was going to be a follower who was mostly just a endurance battery that the dom had to maintain contact with or be powerless), but you could re-flavour it, the battery character could be charged with electricity and they need to bleed it off into their conductor who gains electrical blast powers or magnetic powers or even becomes a standard flying brick if for a limited while.
Lol, S&M supers is a great idea. Anyone who goes out and gets their faces beaten in for a living has to have at least a little bit of a masochistic streak.
My advice would be to not be afraid of stepping on an existing hero's schtick. Stealing heroes and villains from each other is a time-honored practice in the comic book industry. A lot of fun can be had by taking an existing powerset and slapping a new coat of paint on it.
Do you have a basic super-strength guy? You should. You'll get a lot of mileage out of him.
Do you have a speedster? Might as well. Classic character archetype.
How about a stretchy guy? What comic book universe doesn't have a stretchy guy?
Or a crazy inventor, power armor optional.
You might feel like you're copying, but that never stopped anybody else--and those guys are doing it professionally! A group of "basic" super heroes and villains provides a comfortable standard you can mold the rest of your world around, and saves you a lot of the mental mileage required to make every character in your setting an entirely original creation. Even if the intention of your setting is to subvert super hero tropes (a delicate thing to do, by the way), not *every* character has to be a subversion.
I mean, I guess. I'm not afraid to use commonly used powers, but I do think that just having a !notJustice League full of thinly veiled big 2 properties is way less fun than having a universe populated with somewhat novel powers, especially ones that wouldn't necessarily work in a medium like comics.
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I'm not sure if it would be better for my skeleton-themed supervillain character to be a man in a skeleton costume, or an actual reanimated skeleton. What say you?
Why didn't she just design capes that could be easily detached?
the rpg 'superhuman' has a good list of 'classic' superpowers
animal spirit
brilliant mind
combat master
elemental
flight
lightning reflexes
media icon
mind control
paranormal awareness
regeneration
rich
shapeshifting
super-strength
super-vehicle
telekinesis
teleport
tricks up my sleeve
unbreakable
unseen
just pick two and you're good to go
Mind control is really hard to balance, in my experience.
Is it just me or is M&M combat fucked?
The d20 scales so poorly for combat actions. Whiffs everywhere. It takes all of my +15 skill or ability bonuses just to offset die probability. Combat takes way longer than it should because of goddamn whiffs.
Any solutions? Suggestions?
>Any solutions? Suggestions?
I usually just have fights end as soon as one person is clearly going to win, for example one fight involved a PC with regenerative powers fighting a bunch of mooks with firearms, since there was no way for the PC to not eventually win we didn't bother rolling. The other way is to give players ways of ending fights other than the mechanics, for another example the players were fighting a nazi in powerarmour in a floating skyscraper and won by destroying all the floors under it, since they couldn't damage it normally
Is this not how it's supposed to work? My understanding was that M&M encouraged players to use their powers to neutralize threats, not just beat everything into submission. Straight up fights are always an option, but shit like freezing an opponent solid, or dropping a building on them seem like the intended ways to end encounters.
Probably because an easily detached cape will be lost almost immediately for most superhero powersets, so you might as well not have one at all.
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I'll see what I got that could make a passable super.
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