Friday Update #264

[Golden Girl]

This week, we’ve been doing some more design work on our NPC system, looking at more ways to expand it to allow for an even greater scope of characters to enhance our storytelling options and to give players to interact with both in and out of combat.

The main thing that we have to keep in mind with this is that no matter how obscure or situation-specific a power or ability that we come up with for an NPC might be, there will always be at least one player who will either want to make use of it in their own way for one of their character concepts, or just use it in exactly the same way as the NPC uses it, which can obviously places some limits on what we can do.

For example, a classic comic book power like mind control works fine for NPCs, as we have full control over when and where they can use it – such as controlling their minions or manipulating other NPCs to obey them – but if the same type of power is given to a player, then they would reasonably expect to be able to use it whenever and wherever they wanted to, even though it would break any game that wasn’t specifically design around - and focus on - the concept of mind control.


Have a heroic/villainous weekend!

The Heroes and Villains team

[American Gargoyle]

I thought CoH did pretty good with their use of Mind Control. It's debatable if it cost the players a bit of xp, but that xp was was made up for by the easier nature of the mission.